An Athiest rant

My Logical/Scientific Issues with religion:

1) The total lack of evidence. There are many things in life that we choose to believe in, without evidence or supporting facts. For instance, when was the last time we called the local news station to ask them to prove that today there is a 60% chance of showers followed by clear skies in the evening? But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to support them. For example, if our friend came in from outside and told us that it is raining, for the most part, we would believe this person, because we know that rain happens all the time. But if that same friend came inside and told us that it is raining cats and dogs outside, we would of course either tell him to prove it, or go see for ourself, because that is not a normal occurrence. Conversely, when someone is trying to tell me that women were created by some deity pulling a rib bone out of a man's body, I feel strongly inclined to tell them to prove it.
The Bible makes MANY extraordinary claims, and offers not a shred of evidence to support them. Granted, there is no physical evidence out there that proves that there is no such thing as God, per se (and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying), but there is also none to prove that he does exist either.
Simply put, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

2) Reality works fine without deities or magic. Simply put, evolution and most of our models for the emergence of the universe itself work just fine without needing to introduce any gods or magic into it-- they explain the phenomena we witness and they explain all of the evidence. Evolution and the big bang should not conflict with religion (even though it does contradict a literal interpretation of the Bible), as even the Pope himself accepts it as fact, and a good portion of the folks out there studying evolution and the big bang are religious themselves.

My Ethical Issues with religion:

1) God's omnipotence vs mankind's free will. Religious will often tell us that God gave mankind the free-will to choose between sinning and not-sinning, so that the guilt is on us. That sounds nice and all, but lets think about this. God is supposed to be omnipotent (which includes omniscient), so he knows every decision and action we will make before he even created us-- he knows the past, present, and future. So why would he go ahead and create a living, thinking, feeling being, knowing that he would end up sending that being to an eternal BBQ to suffer unimaginably for all eternity? He has knowingly created evil (unless you are one of those special people who has no problem with an infinite punishment for finite crimes), and there is really no such thing as free will be this thinking. Or, is God not omnipotent, so that our decisions really are our own?

2) The moral ambiguity of the Bible/ Gita/ Quran. While most religious that I have met in my travels are some of the best folk out there, I believe it is because they have chosen to not interpret the Bible literally. In the Bible, we find a god who repetitively claims to be all-loving and merciful, yet he has a strange habit of destroying everything that doesn't work out the way he planned. This particular loving deity routinely orders his followers to commit genocide (ask the Canaanites and Amelykites) down to "the last suckling", condones slavery (so long as you only beat your slaves to the point of losing consciousness for no more than three days, following a beating), created a race of beings knowing that he would end up sending two thirds of them to suffer unimaginably for all eternity, destroyed a whole city because they didn't just choose to participate in missionary-only sex (the notion that a mean, lean, universe-creating god, would care that a bunch of ants on a backwater planet in a backwater galaxy in a backwater corner of the universe, are doing sexually, and would be willing to punish them for not having missionary sex, is not only unlikely, it is preposterous), and for some reason made the rules so that to forgive sins requires the sacrifice of innocent blood. The deity I just described, sounds a lot more like a tyrant than an all-loving creator.
The only way to avoid the realities of such a contradiction, most Christians today agree that parts of the Bible were intended to teach a lesson, not to be scientifically or logically plausible, so one must interpret some parts of the Bible figuratively. I agree, but that thinking brings me to my next point....

3) The total lack of a baseline or system of checks and balances. There are a large number of
separate denominations of religion, all with their own interpretations of the same scripture, and these denominations are themselves made up of individuals who also believe in their own personal version of God, meaning that there are almost as many versions of religion as there are believers.
Why would a God who had a definite and specific plan for his people allow them to splinter into so many different groups, most of them mutually exclusive? Who is to say which interpretation is more accurate? By what baseline can we measure the accuracy or validity of one's personal interpretation against all the other interpretations?
Without any kind of quantifying evidence or data, there really is no way of knowing who is right and who is wrong, because there is nothing to compare it to. In science, we can easily tell which theory or explanation is wrong, based on the evidence and whether that interpretation fits all the evidence, but religion has no such measuring stick, so to be perfectly logical, since we know that the Bible makes at least some claims which are contrary to reality, how can we place any trust in any of what it says? So much of the Bible has to be interpreted "figuratively" to make it still relevant, that it begs one to ask the next question:
At what point do we take the next step and just say, "Since so much of this book can't be taken at face value, and there is no way to validate any of its claims at all, why not just do away with it, because as a source of knowledge, the Bible is inconsistent, contradicts itself almost constantly, and there is no baseline by which to measure the accuracy of any of its claims"?
The lack of an appearance by God to rectify the path of his own religion strongly suggests to me that there is no God to worry about whether his religion has gone astray or not, due to human errors. If there was a God, he definitely would have intervened during some of religion’s most heinous atrocities, like the Inquisitions, the Crusades, and slavery in the American South (all of which were done in the name of God and supposedly with his endorsement), to tell his followers, "NO, you are hurting many people, what you are doing is evil, and you have it all wrong. Here's what I want from you from now on..."

As society and humanity continued to grow, and our technology gained more and more power to accurately describe the natural world, more and more of the Bible became at odds with what science had been discovering, and believers continue to be forced to revise their religious beliefs to meet reality half-way, cherry-picking out wholesale sections that are not to be interpreted literally, lest one find oneself believing in absurdities that clearly contradict reality.

Even today, religious beliefs continue to lose ground at every step. So far, science has disproved the geocentric universe, the great flood, a flat earth with a tent-like canopy over it and Shoal underneath the dish, and that people didn't live to be 900 years old in the Dark Ages.

At what point do you stop backpedaling in your beliefs and just decide, that since this religion thing seems to be wrong at almost every turn, and is obviously a product of the Bronze-Aged culture that produced it, why not just get rid of it altogether instead of hanging on to it like a drowning swimmer groping for any handhold he can find? When do we decide that this arcane set of primitive superstitions has no relevance to today's issues and that it has outlived its usefulness?