Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    All God Worshippers Are Mad: a little book of sanity
    All God Worshippers Are Mad: a little book of sanity
    All God Worshippers Are Mad: a little book of sanity
    Ebook119 pages2 hours

    All God Worshippers Are Mad: a little book of sanity

    By JP Tate

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "All God Worshippers Are Mad: a little book of sanity" seeks to demonstrate in a logical common sense manner that the fundamental beliefs held by all monotheists are incomprehensible and lunatic. It attempts to show that god worshippers themselves do not understand the things they claim to believe, and by which they live their lives. Then it goes on to draw attention to why this matters so urgently in our own era, with the global rise of religious fascism.

    What is said in this little book will no doubt be found impolite and overly-provocative by those authoritarian people within the politically correct establishment who conflate morality with niceness. They will probably utter the familiar refrain that we ought not to denigrate other people’s deeply and sincerely held beliefs. Instead we should live in a permanent state of apology for the crime of having minds of our own.

    But religions are not above criticism and they have no right to a special status. Just because they claim a special status doesn’t mean that they’re entitled to it. Religions can and should be challenged like any other political ideologies. Besides which, large numbers of god worshippers feel free to denigrate and insult everyone else’s deeply held beliefs and values, so why should they have special permission to be hypocrites?

    Topics covered:

    01. God
    02. Prayer
    03. Worship
    04. God the Infinite
    05. Immortality and Heaven
    06. Soul / Spirit
    07. Salvation
    08. Faith
    09. Spreading The Word
    10. Theocracy
    11. Theocracy and Nuclear Armageddon
    12. God, Guilty of Genocide
    13. Religion and Morality are Mutually Exclusive
    14. God worship is Immoral
    15. God worship is Obscene
    16. Everything is God’s Fault
    17. If it’s in The Book, then it Must be True
    18. Claiming Incomprehensible Beliefs
    19. Is Islamism the New Fascism?
    20. The Moderates

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJP Tate
    Release dateJan 1, 2015
    ISBN9781507028803
    All God Worshippers Are Mad: a little book of sanity
    Author

    JP Tate

    JP Tate was born into a working class family way back in the winter of 1961 and has spent the last fifty-five years coping with being alive in the world. It wasn't his idea. He spent the first decade of his adult life in unskilled labouring jobs before escaping to become a philosophy student and tutor. Over the next ten years he earned four university degrees including a PhD and became even more alienated from the society in which he lived. These days he is pursuing his desire to write, it being the most effective and satisfying way he has yet found to handle that same old pesky business of coping with being alive in the world. All his writing, whether in fiction or non-fiction, takes a consistently anti-establishment attitude and is therefore certain to provoke the illiberal reactionaries of political correctness. The amusement derived from this is merely a bonus to the serious business of exercising freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Take The Red Pill.

    Read more from Jp Tate

    Related to All God Worshippers Are Mad

    Related ebooks

    Atheism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Evidence That Christians Are Being Greatly Influenced By The LAWLESSNESS Around Them

      Aug 19, 2019

      According to a recent state of dating report from ChristianMingle.com, the largest Christian online dating site, only 13 percent of respondents said that they would not have sex before marriage. And, only 13 percent said that they would move in toget

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Southern Baptist Horror

      May 23, 2022

      The Southern Baptist Horror
      7 min read

    • Article

      Preaching a Conspiracy Theory

      Dec 8, 2019

      Preaching a Conspiracy Theory
      5 min read

    • Article

      In Search of Moral Authority

      Oct 22, 2018

      In Search of Moral Authority
      2 min read

    • Article

      Letter From The Founder

      Oct 12, 2018

      Letter From The Founder
      4 min read

    • Article

      What If Man Is a Killer Ape Beset by Original Sin?

      Jun 21, 2019

      TODAY, SELF-HELP BOOKS and relationship gurus invoke evolution to explain everything from marital infidelity to the paleo diet. Our early ancestors’ survival needs echo through our ideas today. But this is not the first time our hominid ancestry’s ro

      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘For Your Guidance!’

      Jun 30, 2020

      ‘For Your Guidance!’
      8 min read

    • Article

      Jamie Wheal Meaning 3.0

      Jul 17, 2022

      Jamie Wheal Meaning 3.0
      18 min read

    • Article

      Test Your Beliefs By Seeking Out Other Viewpoints

      Jul 23, 2019

      The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard famously observed that if everyone is a Lutheran then no one is a Lutheran. What he meant is that if you're born into a culture in which everybody has a similar worldview, you don't have an opportunity to deve

      2 min read

    • Article

      Changing Minds

      Oct 28, 2019

      Changing Minds
      5 min read

    • Article

      Are We Living In A Post-truth Era?

      Sep 28, 2021

      Sometimes it can seem as if facts take a back seat to opinion or emotion. But getting to know God as infinite, pure Truth itself is a powerful basis for finding clarity, harmony, and mental as well as physical healing.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Getting to Know God

      Mar 16, 2020

      Getting to Know God
      3 min read

    • Article

      Are Suicide Bombings Really Driven by Ideology?

      May 24, 2018

      Harvey Whitehouse doesn’t like how New Atheists like Richard Dawkins make religion out to be a mere “set of propositions” amounting to a “failed science.” In a 2013 YouTube video, Whitehouse—the director of the Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary A

      8 min read

    • Article

      Man On Fire

      Nov 19, 2020

      Man On Fire
      4 min read

    • Article

      Making the CULT

      Nov 21, 2022

      Making the CULT
      12 min read

    • Article

      Duty And Loyalty

      Mar 28, 2019

      Duty And Loyalty
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Dark Side of Awe

      Jan 29, 2024

      The Dark Side of Awe
      10 min read

    • Article

      Remaking Morality

      Aug 31, 2021

      Remaking Morality
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for All God Worshippers Are Mad

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      All God Worshippers Are Mad - JP Tate

      Contents

      Preface – the method employed in this book

      01. God

      02. Prayer

      03. Worship

      04. God the Infinite

      05. Immortality and Heaven

      06. Soul / Spirit

      07. Salvation

      08. Faith

      09. Spreading The Word

      10. Theocracy

      11. Theocracy and Nuclear Armageddon

      12. God, Guilty of Genocide

      13. Religion and Morality are Mutually Exclusive

      14. God worship is Immoral

      15. God worship is Obscene

      16. Everything is God’s Fault

      17. If it’s in The Book, then it Must be True

      18. Claiming Incomprehensible Beliefs

      19. Is Islamism the New Fascism?

      20. The Moderates

      Afterword – stop believing and start thinking

      Preface

      Do let’s be polite about people’s deeply held beliefs. How often have you heard it said?

      What is said in the pages that follow will undoubtedly be found overly-provocative by some and appallingly impolite by others. Those authoritarian people within the reactionary ‘politically correct’ establishment who conflate morality with niceness, along with people who are imperishably middle-class (who have confused morality with niceness for generations) will probably utter the familiar words that we ought not to denigrate other people’s deeply and sincerely held beliefs. Instead we should live in a permanent state of apology for the crime of having minds of our own.

      But religions are no more above criticism than any other political ideologies and have no right to any special status. Claiming special status doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to it. Besides which, large numbers of god worshippers feel free to denigrate and insult everyone else’s deeply held beliefs and values, so why should they have special permission to be hypocrites?

      ––––––––

      The method employed in this book

      We hear a lot about the secularist resistance to the privileged treatment bestowed upon  monotheism because of it’s alleged specialness; a privilege that allows god worship to persist and even thrive despite its rejection of logic and evidence-based thought. A great many books have been written which seek to promote human dignity by opposing monotheism’s pronounced tendency to dumb down our species. This little book might be assumed to be one freedom fighter in that army of resistance. But it attempts to take a slightly different approach from the usual type of debate about whether god exists, about conflicts between creationism and science, about the argument from intelligent design, and so on.

      Given that there is not very much point in trying to convince the unreasonable by means of the tool of reason, let us approach the issue of god worship at its most basic level; the real fundamentals. We need to address the meaning of the words that monotheists use to express their beliefs, so that we might better understand what it is that god worshippers are actually saying. For example, rather than arguing futilely about whether god exists or not, we should ask ourselves what these words god and exist actually mean in order to thereby understand the question before attempting to answer it. This is a useful thing to do because secularists and theists speak two different languages. What emerges from trying to define the vocabulary of religion is that we can, to some extent at least, translate the language of the theist into the language of the secularist. In doing so, we discover that, not only do secularists not know what god worshippers are talking about, the god worshippers don’t know either.

      This serves two purposes. For the theist, it may help them to understand why secularists get so frustrated and infuriated when in debate with god worshippers. For the secularist, it reminds us that not everyone is open to being convinced by reasoned argument.

      Consequently, this book presents two basic lines of argument that rely merely on common sense. (1) It seeks to demonstrate in a straightforward manner that what god worshippers say that they believe is meaningless because they employ a vocabulary which is incoherent. (2) It seeks to show that when translated into an approximation of coherent speech what god worshippers believe is, from any sensible adult point of view, the type of belief that we would normally describe as insane. This is not to suggest that they should all be locked up in a rubber room. I am not offering a diagnosis from clinical psychology. But at the same time, the title of this little book is more than just a commercial attention-grabbing rhetorical device. The assertion is that monotheism is intellectually dysfunctional, requiring the theist to endorse the incomprehensible in a way that is contrary to the intelligibly sane thought processes of the human mind. This incomprehensibility goes beyond the merely delusional. Monotheism causes the operations of the mind to malfunction and does so seriously enough that we can consider it pathological. This is what I mean when I say that all god worshippers are, for lack of a better word, mad.

      To pursue these two lines of argument there is no need to become embroiled in specific points of doctrine from the major world religions. Nor is it necessary to recount the grotesque history of the crimes against humanity committed by the faithful. It is similarly unnecessary to delve into the labyrinthine maze of quotes from sacred texts and holy books. All that we need do is to address the most fundamental beliefs held by all god worshippers; the primary and most essential beliefs without which monotheistic worship could not exist. If these absolutely basic religious beliefs are meaningless and lunatic, then the whole of monotheism collapses, having had its foundations removed.

      It is an uncomplicated method of enquiry which demands very little of god worshippers. It does not require them to prove the existence of the creature they worship. It does not require them to supply a definition of god that atheists would accept. It only requires them to say explicitly what they think they mean when they say words such as god and soul and salvation. All that is being asked of them is that they should have some idea of what they think they’re talking about. This is something that applies, perfectly fairly, to anyone making assertions about anything.

      Try this conversation:

      1st person: I believe that freedom is the most important thing in life.

      2nd person: What do you mean by ‘freedom’?

      1st person: I don’t know what I mean by ‘freedom’ but I believe that it is the most important thing in life.

      2nd person: "If you are talking about ‘freedom’ but you don’t know what that means, then you literally don’t know what you’re talking about."

      Or try this conversation:

      1st person: I believe that equality is a precondition of political justice.

      2nd person: What do you mean by ‘equality’?

      1st person: I don’t know what I mean by ‘equality’ but I believe that it is a precondition of political justice.

      2nd person: "If you are talking about ‘equality’ but you don’t know what that means, then you literally don’t know what you’re talking about."

      Or try this conversation:

      1st person: I believe that the soul is everlasting.

      2nd person: What do you mean by the ‘soul’?

      1st person: I don’t know what I mean by the ‘soul’ but I believe that it is everlasting.

      2nd person: "If you are talking about the ‘soul’ but you don’t know what that means, then you literally don’t know what you’re talking about."

      Or try this conversation:

      1st person: I believe that the divine spirit resides in all of us.

      2nd person: What do you mean by divine? What do you mean by the ‘spirit’? What do you mean when you say that it resides in all of us?

      1st person: I don’t know what I mean by any of those things but I believe it.

      2nd person: "If you are talking about things whilst being totally ignorant of what they are, then you literally don’t know what you’re talking about."

      If what any of us say is to make sense (never mind yet whether it is true or false, we haven’t reached far enough yet to address whether it is true or false, we’re just trying to utter sentences that actually have a coherent meaning) then one thing we must be able to do is to define our terms, at least to some extent. How can we attribute to ‘soul’ the predicate of being everlasting if we don’t actually know what ‘soul’ means? If we don’t have any notion of what it is, we can’t know anything about it. Before we can endorse an idea like freedom or equality or spirit or divinity we must first clarify the concept so that we understand what it means, or what we think it means. Perhaps we won’t have a fully worked out and comprehensive definition of what we’re talking about, but we must have some kind of understanding of what the words we’re speaking actually mean if we are to avoid the charge that we don’t know what we’re talking about. This applies to religion, just as it applies to everything

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1