Our belief is not a belief.  Our principles are not a faith.  We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.  We may differ on many things but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.  We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe.  We have music and art and literature.  Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and (for lack of another metaphor) soul.
 

We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room.
We accept that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse.

We believe that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true – that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

 
There is no need for atheists to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness.  We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine.  Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects.  To us no spot on earth is or could be “holier” than another.  To the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library to another.

Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago.  Either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism.  We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.

How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?
How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own “sin”?
How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities?

How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then – after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty – to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas?

God did not create man in his own image! Evidently it was the other way around, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.
If you read Hawking on the “event horizon”, that theoretical lip of the black hole over which one could in theory plunge and see the past and the future, I shall be surprised if you can still go on gaping at Moses and his unimpressive “burning bush”.  
As I write these words people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that have been achieved.  Religion poisons everything.

Why does the prospect of eternal life and happiness not make adherents happy?  Superficially it does sometimes seem to be the case.  Services in both black and white communities appear as if the entire event was only long whoop of exaltation at being saved, loved and so forth.  Many services in all denominations and among almost all pagans, are exactly designed to evoke celebration and communal fiesta, which is precisely why they are suspect.

The level of intensity fluctuates according to time and place but it can be stated as a truth that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances.  It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics.  It may speak about the bliss of the next world but it wants power and control in this world.  It is after all man-made and lacks confidence in its own preachings even to allow coexistence between different faiths.

The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile.  The awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion’s monopoly and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason.  What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs and surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications?

Plaques of antiquity were held to be punishment from the gods, which did much to strengthen the hold of the priesthood and much to encourage the burning of infidels and heretics who were thought to be spreading disease by witchcraft or else poisoning the wells.
We may make allowances for the orgies of stupidity and cruelty that were indulged in before humanity had a clear concept of the germ theory of disease.  Most of the “miracles” of the New Testament have to do with healing, which was of great importance in a time when even minor illness was often the end.

Several bishops made the fatuous point that homosexuality is “unnatural” because it does not occur in other species.  Such clerics have shown themselves to be quite unable to interpret nature:

 

• Humans are part of nature and homosexuality exists
   

• Numberless kinds or birds and mammals and primates do engage in homosexual play

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Homosexuality is present in all societies and its incidence appears to be part of human design, and as humans are created in god’s image, is god gay?
Religion continues to pose an urgent threat to public health.  We now know that the bubonic plague was spread not by sin or moral backsliding but by rats and fleas.  Archbishop Andrewes, during the celebrated “Black Death” in London in 1665, noticed uneasily that the horror fell upon those who prayed and kept the faith as well as upon those who did not.  

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to open inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children – organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.  
One more charge should be levied to the bill of indictment – with a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world.  Religion openly or covertly wishes the end to occur.  Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.  This has been true since the first witch doctors and shamans learned to predict eclipses and to use their half-baked celestial knowledge to terrify the ignorant.  

As in all cases, the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.  The history of the cosmos begins about 12 billion years ago.  

The death wish, or something like it, may be secretly present in all of us.  Even at the turn of 1999 into the year 2000 many educated people talked and published infinite nonsense about a series of possible calamities.  This was no better than primitive numerology.  The year 2000 is only a number on Christian calendars.  The occasion of Jesus birth was nothing more than an odometer for idiots, who sought the cheap thrill of impending doom.