Ramblings of an Armchair Skeptic

There’s one question that every non-religious person has been asked by a religious person at least once. “What if you’re wrong?” They are of course referring to the horrible implications for your afterlife and the dreaded fate that will await you there due to your lack of belief in their sky daddy. First of all I like to have some fun with them and say “what if you’re wrong?” They will usually answer with, “well, then nothing will happen if there is nothing there, so it’s no big deal if I’m wrong.” I’ll say, “no, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean what if you die and you find yourself face to face with Zeus? Boy will he ever be pissed!” I mean that tongue in cheek of course. I believe in Zeus just as much as I believe in God or the tooth fairy. It’s fun to throw a wrench in their system though. But seriously, If there is a heaven and an all-loving god like I’m told then I would like to think that being a kind, moral, helpful, all around decent person would be enough to get a

Not that it's anything new but the whole end of the world thing seems to be popping up a lot more lately. I have already been given invitations to two conferences where the lucky attendees will receive the secrets to surviving the end of the world. Now when they say "survive", I'm quite sure they don't mean in a physical way. I guess they are referring to your soul and which way it will ultimately end up after the death and destruction our all-loving creator will visit upon us. Why I would want to nuzzle myself up in the arms of the mass exterminator, I have no idea, but I'm guessing it's better than the alternative. Although, given the winters around here, I'm not altogether put out by the prospect of an eternity of heat. There are tons of end of the world scenarios and way too numerous to go into all of them here. I will mention the biggest one, the biblical prophecy which is affectionately known as the end-time. A gentleman by the name of Ronald Wei

Ah, the bible, that bastion of faith and holiness that the religious cling to and glean comfort from. Bible believing Christians regard both the New and Old Testament as the undiluted word of god, spoken by god and written down in its perfect form by humans. If you type bible into wikipedia you see that it’s pretty complicated. Different religions have different bibles called by different names and each one has numerous translations and versions. I doubt that most folks who believe in god have even read the whole bible. They learn snippets in church and read the lovely cartoon children’s version (mercifully free of cartoon infanticide and other such atrocities) to their offspring. But some people take every word of the bible as truth and claim that it all happened in real life. The earth was created by god in six days along with Adam and Eve. There really was a flood and the animals (including dinosaurs) were saved by Noah on a giant ark. Etc, etc. Even many of the religious people I