God Wants You Dead

This book is about the past, present, and future evolution of human ideas. Its primary emphasis is on parasitic collectivist ideologies. It examines where such ideas come from, how they harm us, and how we can remove them from our own minds and from the culture around us. Finally, it tells us the amazing things that will become possible for humanity when they are gone. Not only religions, but also nation states, racial groups, corporations and other collectives are targeted for observation and criticism.
This book will probably offend you, if you hold any icons to be sacred or are a
believer in any ideology that encourages group loyalty and action. When you get
to a part criticizing your favorite ideology, please just try to remember that we are
actually trying to be helpful.
We are absolutely sure that many of your ideas are
very good and can create more value in the world. However, we are equally sure
that when you allow your good ideas to be bound up into an icon and used as a
source of social approval, that it becomes difficult to evaluate them properly and
you create a home in your mind for many bad ideas to also take up residence.
This book may also bother you if you have any strong ideas about the genres
that books should fit into. It has a lot of academic knowledge in it, but it is not an
academic book with footnotes or endnotes. It contains some very serious and
unsettling ideas, but it also contains some stupid jokes and amusing cartoons.
Its chapters and sections are numbered quite oddly and written in many different
styles. The primary goal of this book is to encourage readers to step outside the
patterns of thought that have been impressed upon them by their social groups;
to do this we have deliberately avoided conforming to any of the patterns
deemed normal or acceptable for publication in any given genre. In fact, the very
idea of “genre” is somewhat of an anathema to the ideas contained in this book.
This book offers a way to look at the world that explains why even well meaning
group-think so often produces bad results, and shows how better results can be
achieved when people identify themselves and others as free thinking individuals
rather than devotees to any icon or members of any group.
6
0.1 Faith
A young girl gets onto a bus. She has layers of dynamite and nails taped below
her breasts. She wears a bulky coat to hide their shape. She tries to remain calm
until the bus is full and reaches the center of town. She is having second
thoughts. But as the bus arrives at its most crowded stop, she begins reciting the
words of a Higher Power, assuring herself one last time that this is the right thing
to do. Then she pulls a cord… and flies apart in a blast that instantly ends the
lives of almost everyone else on the bus and even several people on the curb,
along with her own.
In your language, her name translates as “Faith.”
It may be almost impossible for you to understand what is going through this girl's
mind when she commits this act of murder/suicide. How can she end her own
young life? How can she kill strangers she has never met – people who have
never done anything to harm her directly?
As incomprehensible as her actions may seem, they are just an extreme case of
a type of behavior that is common to almost everyone. You probably do things
that, while not nearly as extreme, are just as incomprehensible from a viewpoint
of rational self-interest. Just like this girl, and just like almost every other human
being on the planet, at some time you will almost certainly allow your actions to
be directed by a collective ideology that has little care for individual human lives.
Two of the questions that we will explore with you in this book are:
1. How are you different from a suicide bomber?
2. How can you become even more different from a suicide bomber?
The simple answer to the first question is not particularly comforting:
The only real difference between you and the suicide bomber is the extent
to which you allow yourself to make the same kind of mental errors.
More specifically, it is a question of how willing you are to accept a large number
of ideas, represented by a single name or flashy icon. Can you question the
individual ideas separately, once they are grouped together into an ideology, or
do you feel that any given philosophy must be either all good or all bad?
This makes the simple answer to the second question a more useful one:
The less you deny your own mind, the less you believe in voices of
authority without question, the less you substitute faith for reason; the less
of yourself you will sacrifice to any Higher Power.
The suicide bomber is probably the most extreme example of sacrifice to a
Higher Power, and as such it may be an example that does not strike home as
having any lesson to teach you personally. After all, your own behavior is almost
certainly not this extreme, and the Higher Powers to whom you feel loyalty may
never ask for such a sacrifice. But consider that the smaller sacrifices you do
make may be just as unnecessary and ill-considered, even if less overtly harmful.
It is even possible that you do not acknowledge loyalty to any Higher Powers, but
before you become confident of that, please explore with us the many things that
can qualify as such.

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