false idol

 The universality of death is incontestable evidence that life is simply a perpetual process of evolutionary change, especially about our ideas and our "beliefs," while religion depicts death as a doorway through which the "gift" of eternal life is awarded to all those who not only deny this is true, but who worship a "belief" that the very opposite is the only "truth" there is. 

Religion, as such, is a way of crucifying the mind of humanity to the cross of the past through the worship of tradition, one which celebrates contempt for any evidence that challenges those traditions as the highest virtue of all, and embalms human understanding in the remains of a tree as dead as a cross called a Bible.

Like water, the spoken word becomes as rigid as ice when written done, which is reflected by the idea of "the living word" being nailed to a cross, a Roman instrument of torture and death that Christians worship as the tree of life and knowledge, and why human enlightenment has mostly been afflicted with the rigor-mortis of  one religious book or another over the last two thousand years.

This is like a teenager being promised they can remain a teenager for eternity by refusing to grow up or ever admit they could be wrong, about virtually anything, and simply because "it is written." The Catholic Church, in other words, is a 2000 year old teenage vampire, who insists she knows everything already, at least everything that matters anyway, because it's written in her yearbook. 

From this perspective, then, a computer would be superior to a human being to the same degree that the former is better than the latter at following rules written by its creator. Indeed, for many atheists, the rubrics of religion reduce humanity to mere automatons, not for "God," but for their "beliefs" about what they have been taught to believe that word means, even though such a word is simply an infinite abstraction. And because it is, every attempt by human beings to come up with a definition for the word "God," even with the aid of artificial intelligence, will always only be as equally as valid as it is invalid.

 

The truth of the Bible, however, is that reading it is like watching Game of Thrones and worshiping Jon Snow  as Jesus Christ. In fact, I half expect some future generation to do just that, half of whom will think Jon Snow was a real person who rose from the dead to save the seven kingdoms, and will even call for the execution of all heretics and blasphemers who dare to say or think otherwise, while the other half will understand that the most important truths of the story are all that matter, regardless of whether any of the characters or events are fact or fiction.

Truth itself, on the other hand, speaks for itself. And because it does, it needs no religion or professional priestly class to sell it like politicians selling their wars, used car salesmen selling a lemon, or a serpent selling apples. Birds do not need to believe in a religion or a god to avoid flying into a windmill, anymore than fish must be taught to worship water every Sunday to prevent them from drowning, lest they suffer the wrath of Poseidon by being cast into the hell of the fisherman's net. Yet this is exactly what the Christian proscribes as necessary for preventing every human being on the planet from tearing each other to pieces like rabid dogs, even though human beings never tear each other to pieces like rabid gods more fully and joyfully, as Pascal pointed out, as when they do it for their religions.  

And the Christian does this, because they worship the man they call Jesus as a God more than the purely human ideals he metaphorically represented, in the same way they worship the power they derive from the false idol of the former, more than truth of the latter he died trying to defend, and why their religions worship "beliefs" they claim come from heaven more than any desire to understand the truth of what it means to be human. Indeed, to defend the mythology of their Christianity, the Christian gladly crucifies their Christ a thousand times a day. 

The Christian worships their books and their religions as coming from God, even though the only "God" they come from is man, while every Christ understands that if nature comes from God, than all religion comes from the devil. And as only an atheist can understand that the story of Christ is a metaphor for how religious beliefs have always been the enemy of truth, the Christian is everywhere seduced by the apple of a "belief" that they had "become like God, knowing right from wrong," by a serpent they worship as their savior.