Why Discourage Belief in God

 
People think they want to believe in God. That is because they don’t know what the belief implies about discrimination, prayer, lying, murder and capital punishment. The implications are far from wholesome. The belief tries to loosen the seams of mental well-being.
 
Error is a bad thing. People may get upset at their errors exposed but they shouldn’t and should be willing to believe whatever the evidence states is fact. Error is never good. It is not the cause of any good that seems to accompany it. The good happens for other reasons. To want to live safe in your errors is a refusal to mature and to respect other people and what is real. It also is refusing to acknowledge what is real and you can’t respect others if you don’t care about what is real. There is no fatherly god like the Christian one. To say that a good God exists is a very serious error for it means being wrong that a being of infinite goodness and purity and knowledge who demands our obedience is out there. IN FACT THERE CAN BE NO BIGGER ERROR! It's a big chance to take!
 
Religion replies that if God is worshipped and does not exist that is not as big of an error as thinking he does not exist when he does! But if we are wrong and as long as we are sincere then who cares? It makes more sense to sincerely have no faith in God. There is less at stake.
 
Humanism does not militate against the doctrine of God just because it is untrue but also because it is a lethal time bomb. The doctrine has sinister implications some of which anybody could see. The discomfort many feel about religion though they are members of religion is a symptom of that. The doctrine can lead to harmful manifestations of religion and breed and justify fanaticism. Fanaticism is whatever conflicts with the rule: “Do what you believe in but not if harm will be done should the belief be wrong that would not happen if you believed something nicer”. Belief in God is hazardous in every possible way. As long as religion likes God it cannot be permitted to take back the power it had before the nations began to disentangle the Church from the state. Complete separation is a must.

When God cannot be proved and the evidence for him is dubious, it follows that when people base their morality on a revelation from him and start to doubt or disbelieve that they will behave badly as well. For example, if your Bible tells you that eating pigs is a sin and so is stealing and you start to see that eating pigs is not wrong you might end up questioning the stealing rule as well. And indeed you should. Do you see what harm it all does? When God goes any moral restraint or reluctance to harm others will go with him unless Atheism is there to give guidance. Atheists try to find a solid standard of good behaviour that is independent of religion and so despite their failures at least they are trying to help the world more than religion ever could.

If a man can make great sacrifices to become wealthy even though he knows he will not live long enough to get any enjoyment out of it and is now ready to burst open with stress, then a man can sacrifice foolishly for God. Both men devote themselves to something that is good but they devote themselves in a perverted way. The whole point of devotion to God is claimed to be down to the fact that it is good to do so. A man then can be a fool for good and whether that good is God or money is irrelevant. People do great harm willingly in the name of good. The avaricious monster does it so that his family may have material security. He's still a believer in good. The point is, belief in God makes no difference to a person's behaviour. It cannot. The person changes themselves if they turn from harming others to helping them. The emphasis put on God by religion is just superstition.

If God exists then it follows that God makes laws we may not understand because he alone has all knowledge and can see the benefits of these laws. Both religious liberals and fundamentalists believe that God knows best and that thinking is to blame for much of the harm done in the name of God. Here is an example. It is an excuse for banning abortion even if it is needed to save the life of the mother.
 
When not one of the solutions to the problem of a good God allowing evil work and all of them are bad and condone evil it follows that belief in God is bad and can lead to malice and that when it doesn’t it is in spite of the belief and not because of it. The belief would still need to be discouraged for the safety’s sake.