I don't know if Sumner's an asshole or not (I ran across him at a trade show for a split second a few years ago and he seemed nice enough), but I will say that the particular quote he made is pretty stupid. I'm not so much anti religion as I am anti-people that let their faith override common sense and reason. I'm also anti-people projecting their mystical world view onto everyone else (i.g.: "Who is truly to say Hitler was evil?")
I'm an atheist, that doesn't mean I don't have a general world view or general philosophy. As an atheist, I think this life is the one I have, so I'm going to do my best to enjoy the shit out of it. I'm also a humanist, so I'm going to do my best to make my trip through mortality a good one, and I'm going to try to help make my friends and family have a productive and positive journey as well, in whatever little way I can do that. Not because a god is telling me to, but because treating people with respect and in a positive way eventually comes back to my benefit or the benefit of my community. It's a proactive, selfish and selfless move to evolve the social network I live in so that it benefits me and mine. Nothing cosmic about it, and no need for a deep meaningful "purpose" other than to exist and make my temporary existence an awesome experience.
Anyway:
"In the following months I put my time into trying to disprove there was any GOD at all.
It's impossible to prove a negative, which is what Sumner clumsily describes himself doing. By attempting to disprove, he presumes that there's a god in the first place, so he's already skipping reason and starting off with an irrational premise.
This way I felt I could know we were just evolved monkeys and no one really should be complaining about the way we behave half the time.
Fuck willful ignorance! We didn't evolve from monkeys, we evolved from an ape-like common ancestor, which would make sense seeing as how we
are apes... and even the great (and some lesser) apes have social constructs that keep them organized.
Anyway, what I'm saying is you have all the rights in the world to complain about the way people behave if that's what you want to do. You damn sure don't need a god to tell you when someone's being an asshole.
Also that if we came from time, plus chance, plus matter then everything really is permissible.
No, everything is not permissible, nor has it been historically. The laws we live under now were once unwritten common laws that ancient pagans lived under because they knew that some shit was harmful to society, and some shit wasn't. Murder was illegal in plenty of places thousands of years before the Bible was selectively assembled by the powers-that-be at the time.
Who is truly to say Hitler was evil?
Any person with two or more brain cells that have the ability to perform chemical synapses. I'd even include parrots, even though they don't understand what they're saying.
In the end we don’t truly matter,
To this, I agree and disagree. Right now, I know I matter to my wife, family, and my friends, but in 4 to 6 billion years, when the sun is a red giant and the earth is a disintegrating piece of coal inside of it, whatever dust is left of me really won't matter a helluva lot in any instance.
there is no real good or bad; there is no after life and quite frankly why are you worrying about anything?
Sorry, but I don't recall ever hearing that Sumner was a mass murderer, bank robber, smack dealer or baby raper before he converted to his current religion. If he wasn't religious, he'd be the exact same person he is now, just without the supernatural godstuff.
Also I was so over my life I was looking for a way out. Instead, by trying to disprove many different faiths and beliefs I was faced with the reality of drawing closer to GOD. Not any GOD, the GOD. The GOD of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The GOD who sent His only Son Jesus Christ to die for the sins of the world. By the time this site was ready to go I had done everything but meet GOD.
Sumner sat down and "disproved" how many thousands of gods and religions, exactly?
On top of that, he settled on a religion that pretty much adopted and consumed every pagan practice, story, and ritual at the time it gained it's first real bout of mainstream popularity.
Noah's flood? It's in Gilgamesh, written 2000 years before the Bible. Christmas and Easter... pagan holidays adopted by Christianity through the will of the Roman emperor Constantine.
One night after hearing the right sermon and after life hadn’t changed I called out GOD to reveal Himself just as His Word claims in Revelation 3:20. That night He showed up and changed my life forever. Now a website makes all the sense!"
...on the part I bolded... why is it that this kind of speak is socially acceptable? If someone came into my office right now and told me that God told them to come into my office and take a dump, I'd know they were crazy and I'd make them poo in someone else's office.
Another thing... if "god" tells people all these important things that they need to do in life "god told me to do this or that," then what about simple shit? If a god can tell you something so important that'll it'll change your life, and part of your faith is having a "relationship" with god and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, then what's god's favorite color? What t-shirt do you own that god likes the most? In the old testament, god was pretty famous for playing favorites, so he's got to have some opinions on some petty shit, right? I mean, if the creator of the universe is truly concerned with where you put your penis, then surely he has an opinion on who had the best part in Fully Flared.
Sorry, but the idea that a cosmic entity is sitting somewhere out in a metaphysical realm worrying about whether or not I eat shellfish is just stupid and arrogant. Meh.
PS
According to the Bible, it's a sin to pray in public, or to make a spectacle of yourself while praying. Just wanted to throw that out there so I could prevent some otherwise fine folks from burning in hell and all.