A bit of soap boxing

I got a little swept up when writing my response post and decided some of my thoughts should go in a seperate posting as more of a "why are you an atheist?" bit. I'm putting this up because whenever I move into a question of morality I tend to get rather passionate, and I felt it was best to do clearly delineate between what will probably become a bit of a rant, and what was simply a response to your questions.

/rant on

I'm going to start with an explanition as to why I get passionate about my beliefs. There is a wonderful world out there, filled with life, with complexity, with a myriad of beautiful and wonderful things to be seen, enjoyed, loved and expierenced. And understood. That last one is very important to me. Ever since I was young the most important thing underlying any new toy, any new concept was the how, the why. That pursuit is still with me and it is one of the nobelist things I can think of. Truth will always be of paramount import to me, truth in spite of comfort, truth in spite of tradition. Yet, fortunantly, truth brings it's on comfort and traditions along with the joy of real understanding.
A religious person who simply wants to live a good life and by the way, praise Jesus, only bothers me in the abstract. It bothers me in the same way that a child thanking the stoplight for the new bike they got for christmas would bother me. Give credit where credit is due, not where you were told it was.
Santa didn't give me my first bike, despite what I was led to believe at the time, and I do remember thanking mom and dad for all the christmas presents they had ever given me when I finally did learn the truth on that one. I lost a little magic, but gained appreciation for something that was real.
The same point applys to reality, I don't worship anything because there isn't anything TO worship. I marvel at the complexity of the interplay of matter, at the diversity of life by such simple and elegant construction of billions upon billions of assembled mutations, at the inherent structer of mathmatics and how so many things can be so simply calculated. Yet in all of that there is no god. There is no reason to suspect the existance of one, and we wouldn't save tradition.
Many people claim a personal expierence, or many, to explain their belief. Well I can't tell you what it was, it may very well have been a god talking to you, but here is what I can say about it. It most certianly was not any of the various Jesus figures I have been told exist over the years. We are not designed. We are not some pinnacle of creation placed here to say "holy crap you are so freaking awesome" to someone who wanted a bunch of pinnacles of creation going "holy crap you are so freaking awesome" for the entire span of their lives and then let them come hang out with him if they did so. The logic of it is all wrong.
You may say my theology is incorrect but...frankly how do you know?! How can you prove it! You have told me before, "God cannot exist with sin, so he had his son (really him) come down and die for us to take on the sin (he said it was sin in the first place) and therefore we were forgiven." Two problems, 1. God died to forgive something that he had decided was wrong but didn't really offer an explaination other than, "no seriously, don't do it." and 2. How did his death forgive it?
If I make a rule, say no sitting in my chair, and find out someone is sitting in my chair, I am not duty bound to punish them for eternity. I can simply say "please get out of my chair, I don't like you sitting in it" or I could just let the matter go. At no point do I have to die to make sitting in my chair ok. The same goes for morality drawn from the principal of the bible. It's almost sadomasochistic if it were taken literally, I mean god died to impress himself enough to forgive something. It doesn't make sense, yet I know (we have had this discussion and I can remember your explanations) that by some convoluted explanation of hebrew law at the time, it makes sense, but THAT GOES WITH WHAT I'M SAYING. Of COURSE it makes sense under hebrew law, they were the ones making it up! What kind of divine creator is subject to contract law for pete's sake? The whole idea of "divinity" sorta rules that out. If he decides something is forgiven then it damn well is and if you have a problem with that well...make your own universe. And that's just the christian god. We move into hindu text and things get really wierd...move into older myth and then it gets laughable that people belived this tripe.
We make up our gods, or we follow the ones that have been made up for us. Humans have an innate desire to understand our world and we will keep looking for answers untill there aren't any more of us around to look, but that doesn't mean the answers we've found are legitimate. Religion belittles that search by pretending to put payed to the spaces and margins between our understanding by writing over them in all capital bold text GOD DID THIS, but that is worse than misleading. Those gaps shouldn't be written over by fiat, but by knowledge. They should sit blank and invitingly empty, as a peice of canvas to a painter, waiting for the art of scientific discovery to paint us a new masterpeice. To me...religion is just so much graffiti.