Thor bless the atheists.

An interview with atheist Sam Harris points out that all religion is sanctified intolerance.

What do you mean when you say that intolerance is intrinsic to every creed? And what are the implications of that?

The core claim of every creed is that it, alone, is true. The truth is, if you’re a Christian, Jesus really was the son of God, and was really resurrected, and he’s really coming back to judge the living and the dead. This is a fact. It is metaphysically true, it is physically true, it is historically true; if you’re standing on the right spot at the right time, you’re going to see Jesus come back with a host of angels.

This description of the world is either right or wrong. If it’s right, only the Christians are right, and only the Christians are going to heaven. So this doctrine, by definition, excludes the truth-claims of every other religion . Muslims claim that Jesus, while he was a prophet, was not divine, and that anyone who thinks he is divine is going to go to hell. This is explicitly spelled out in the Koran. These are mutually incompatible claims about the way the world works. They’re worse than that. They’re incompatible claims that are extremely motivating, because their adherents think that the difference between believing the right thing and the wrong thing is the difference between spending eternity in hell, or eternity in paradise. And that’s a very big difference.

This bit was good, too:

How do you define the differences between an atheist and an agnostic?

“Agnosticism” is a word that was brought into use by T.H. Huxley. I don’t think it’s a particularly useful word. It tends to be defined as the belief that one know whether or not there is a god. An agnostic is someone who thinks we don’t know and can’t know the truth of a position. So it’s a non-committal attitude.

But it’s not an intellectually honest position, because everyone is walking around presuming to know that there isn’t a Zeus, there isn’t a Poseidon, and there isn’t a Thor. Can you prove that Thor with his hammer isn’t sending down lightning bolts? No, you can’t prove it. But that’s not the right question. The right question is, “Is there any reason whatsoever to think there’s a god named Thor?” And of course there isn’t. There are many good reasons to think that he was a fictional character. The Batman of Scandinavia.

The problem for religious people is that the god of the Bible is on no firmer footing, epistemologically, than these dead gods. Which is to say that nobody ever discovered that Thor doesn’t exist, but that the biblical god really does. So we have learned to talk and use the word ‘god’ in a way so as not to notice that we’re using a very strange word and evoking a very vacuous concept, like the concept of Thor.

http://www.truthdig.com/interview/item/20060403_sam_harris_interview/
(Thanks, Erik!)

Fortunately, I live in a place where 90% of the people do not believe in "God", having a long Buddhist tradition, and Buddhism being unconcerned with ideas of gods. Shinto sometimes recognizes gods, but these are really more like spirits, and may be in a stone, a waterfall, a deceased great person, and so on.

Religion is like a spiritual pollution we inherited from our ancestors. It must have been very useful at one time, but they didn't consider what would happen in the future, when these aggressive universal religions collided. It's a lot like plastic or nuclear power in the 20^th century. They seemed miraculous and wonderful for solving problems but people didn't consider what effect they would have on people a thousand years down the road.