Just to be clear....

I just want to start this blog off by offering a little bit of history about my journey to where I am now. Although it has been aptly expressed that we are all born atheists, it is just as true that few of us make it long in that blessed state.

I was raised in a household that was deeply entrenched in the world of Reform Judaism. My parents were both involved in the synagogue my entire life. As I grew up I often questioned the things that were being taught to me in synagogue, but in general I accepted the existence of God as axiomatic, despite my disbelief in such things as burning bushes that could speak or the ability to fit every species on earth on one boat.

After graduating from high school I decided to move to Israel to more deeply explore Judaism. I started off on a Kibbutz, but eventually ended up in a Yeshiva in the Old City. I had come to the tentative concussion that my dissatisfaction with Judaism stemmed from coming from a background that didn't take Judaism and the Torah as seriously as the Torah itself commanded it to. I spent several months completely absorbed in the world of the Torah. My entire life consisted of prayer and study. Ironically, it was this study that led to my ultimate rejection of Judaism. There are things in the Torah that science has shown us to be untrue, and I refuse to ignore reason for religious dogma.

Religion is a vestigial belief system, as outdated and useless as the appendix. What we have today are the surviving legends of people who were trying to find answers in a world filled with mystery. While I understand the driving human desire to find truth in the world, latching on to the mythology of people who would have been astonished by the technological prowess of a wheelbarrow (let alone a partical accelerator or a scanning electron microscope) is not a path to truth, it is a blindfold.

This blog will be used primarily as a public sounding board for my evolving beliefs on the nature of reality, the human condition, and what we can do to ensure the world we leave behind is better than the one we were born in to. My deepest hope is that I will live to see a world where all irrational belief systems (from numerology to Christianity and everything in between) are ostracized and marginalized, and where science and reason reign supreme.

Thanks,

That Guy