My name is Nick and I'm an atheist.

My name is Nick and I'm an atheist. I want to call myself a humanist, but I find it difficult to reconcile the belief that humans are these wonderful, beautiful creatures with my belief that the majority of the world's population willingly, and gleefully, believes in impossibly stupid shit...like prayer.

Take airplanes for example. There's must be something so terribly unnatural about human beings existing 40,000 feet up in the air that moves people to invoke a supernatural being. The culmination of hundreds of years of scientific inquiry and technological progress, yet some people hop on board and proceed with the 21st century equivalent of virgin sacrifice by mumbling to themselves, trying to soften the immaterial heart of the wind god so that he doesn't blow our crazy flying machine out of the sky. Why not just bring livestock on board and ritually slaughter a goat before takeoff? The net effect is the same right? Same shit, different millennium I guess.

But God didn't build the airplane, we did. Pray that the engineer who designed this thing was sober, okay? That my luggage is on board, and that the Middle-Eastern guy praying two rows over isn't warming up for his 72 virgins.

Where's the headline that reads "God Tangibly Intervenes - Major Crisis Averted: Full Color Photos on A2"? The thing that would leave no question at all as to god's existence and his love for humanity, yet you never see that, outside of the Old Testament. Instead its always, "Thousands Dead in Natural Disaster", which we nonchalantly refer to as "Acts of God". Yet the survivors of these "Acts of God" always claim "it's a miracle! God saved me from the swirling pool of death he put there in the first place! What a swell deity!". You know that in the Old Testament God brings plagues in and out of existence at a whim right? He parts the sea and drowns the bad guy in order to save his chosen people. Hiding from a tornado in a bathtub seems like such am embarrassingly paltry miracle in the face of THAT god. Maybe god is just getting old, can't quite bring the A-game like he used to? Who knows.

After 9/11 we had hundreds of people coming out of the woodwork claiming that divine intervention led directly to their survival. Or, when the fires were finally put out, two iron girders out of hundreds of thousands remained perpendicular to each other to form what many people thought was a cross, a sign of god's presence in our time of tragedy. Newsflash, western architecture doesn't exist without right angles, the miracle would have been that once the dust settled, one of the beams had twisted itself into a perfectly symmetrical Star-of-David.

Better yet, the REAL miracle would have been if, seconds before the first impact, the towers bowed like a pair of legs and the plane passed through as harmlessly as a field goal. But that didn't happen, instead you know that when the people flying those planes that would find their targets, murder thousands of people in fire and crush them under rubble, turn our world upside down, and make us fear every other person on public transportation for the rest of our lives...you know what those people, those TERRORISTS, were doing at the moment of impact? PRAYING! The warriors of Islam can coordinate for months and carry out a precision attack in the name of Allah, and this "One Nation Under God" gets a freaking cross made out of the wreckage?

You would think that if the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving creator of the universe cared at all about humanity that he could take one second, one moment, out of an ETERNITY of moments to prove the TERRORISTS wrong. He could have knocked them out of the sky with a lazy wave of his hand or materialize a plague of rabid dick-biting dobermans to take out the hijackers and pee a cross onto their bleeding corpses. But he didn't. He said "Here, take this smoldering mass grave as a reminder of my indifference in the face of utmost evil".

-Nick