God definitely does not exist. Humans have a tendency to attribute humanlike agency to natural forces, and have been doing so for thousands of year. As we have come to understand more of the world, we have realized that so many things that appeared to us to be the result of deliberate action by unseen non-human intelligences were actually better explained otherwise, and that the logic that the universe really worked on was very different from the narratives and models our brains like to construct to explain our surroundings. Nevertheless, the idea of god has persisted, although over the centuries he has been banished from the material world entirely, and now only exists outside of it, having invisible effects which produce no evidence and do not affect anything in any predictable or noticeable way. He can turn wine into blood, but only the kind of blood that looks and tastes exactly like wine, and is chemically identical. Usually god is kept quite separate from anything in reality whatsoever, but he is occasionally trotted out to explain the origin of the universe, since that's a fact which still eludes modern understanding. But it's a terrible explanation. It's odd that a singularity of a bunch of matter came into existence, but it seems infinitely odder to imagine that a superintelligent mind made out of... something, popped into existence with the ability to create universes, and then decided to create this universe in particular, which does not in any way resemble the handiwork of a benevolent agent. Minds are extremely complex. They are not a natural, simplistic, easily-modeled thing like a line or a wave or a point, or the quite simple laws that make up our reality. They require explanation. Minds only exist on Earth because of the process of evolution, and the process of gradient descent in training LLM's. So what evidence is there that something as extraordinary as a mind (and some kind of embodied one at that! Since god doesn't just think, he can also act on his thoughts) exists outside of our universe and is responsible for somehow making it using processes unknown to us? There is no evidence, and there's a lot of evidence against it.
I've already argued why you should consider it unlikely, on priors, for god to exist, but a theist may argue that the existence of life should cause one to update more towards believing we're in one of those unlikely universes that were made by a god, since those would be more likely to contain life. But our universe is filled with unjust suffering, and the vast majority of sentient beings that have ever existed have had shit lives. This is exactly what you would expect from a randomly selected godless universe that contains life, but would be quite shocking to discover in a randomly selected god-made universe that contains life. God is supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, yet he filled the universe with uninhabited worlds, plus one planet filled with cluster headaches and parasitic wasps, the latter of which led Charles Darwin to question god's existence. The problem of evil is a slam dunk against theism, not that one is even needed. In thousands of years not one theist has been able to refute it. The bible's answer is that humans are responsible for evil because of free will, but we now know that suffering predates humans by millions of years. Did the anomalocaris have free will? Is that why parasitic wasps exist? That's a ridiculous notion. And hey, that reminds me of two more opinions of mine.
Every religion consists of a lot of obvious falsehoods. There is no better example than the falsehood of hell. The two biggest religions in the world, Christianity and Islam, are very clear about hell. More than half of humans believe (or are supposed to believe) that most humans, after they die, continue to remain conscious, and are tortured for eternity. If this were true, it would be the biggest deal in the whole world. Even one person being infinitely tortured would be infinitely bad. It's wildly implausible that an omnibenevolent being would torture anyone at all, but every earthly evil could be justified in theory, if there were some justification that outweighed its own magnitude. Even a trillion years of torture could theoretically be justified. But for a perfectly benevolent all-knowing being to commit an act of INIFNITE evil? It's a logical impossibility. And why should anyone believe in this outrageous, obviously impossible claim? Because of a few remarks that one of two schizophrenics made in the first millennium. How could they know? I've heard the defenses of infernalism, but I won't respond to them here. They are beneath refutation. No supposed believer in hell ever actually acts like it's real. On a deeper level, they know it's false.
Free will is a confused concept. This goes back to what I said in my opinion about god where people tend to think the world operates on the same concepts as their instinctual world model. It doesn't. What would it even mean for an agent to have free will? Every process is either deterministic or random. There is no possible third option, in any universe. I mean come on. By now we've literally BUILT artificial minds that act in the same ways that make us say that humans have free will, yet we can run them again with a fixed seed and temperature and watch them produce the same response to the same stimulus. We know you can make minds out of a deterministic process. All evidence suggests that our minds are also made out of a deterministic process. Whence comes the need to introduce the incoherent concept of free will? Nowhere.
Every developed country has felt the need to create a welfare state. The flagship institutions of the welfare states of developed countries are sources of national pride, and are well-regarded by the public. The happiest nations in the world are those with the largest welfare states. This is all to be expected, because in markets, income accrues to those who have something to sell. In capitalist economies that means that people derive their income from selling their labor or capital. However, at any given time many people can't sell their labor for whatever reason, so they must receive income from elsewhere. The optimal solution is to tax the owners of labor and capital and use it to provide an income to those outside the labor force, principally the retired, the disabled, the unemployed, and children. I defend the welfare state more in "Tale of Two Pegasi", which you can find in the "Stuff I've Made" section of this website.
In "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy", John Mearsheimer makes an exceedingly well-argued case that American policy regarding Israel is excessively deferential, and that this is the result of zionist lobbying organizations like AIPAC and CUFI. Not only does Israel not need all this aid (and international support, like vetoing every condemnation of shit they do at the UN), since they're a very wealthy country, and we should be giving aid to poor countries instead, but it's wrong to be giving aid and selling weapons to a country that is using those weapons to massacre innocent people. I'm writing this on August 24, 2025, in the midst of a famine in Gaza, caused by Israel's blockade of food aid. According to wikipedia, 100% of the population of Gaza is experiencing high levels of food insecurity, with a third of Gazans experiencing catastrophic levels. The United States and its pro-Israel politicians bear direct blame for much of this starvation, for the following reasons because the United States cut funding for UNRWA at Israel's bequest. UNRWA is the organization which was responsible for providing food aid to Gaza for decades, as Gaza relies on food aid to feed its population, having been essentially cut off from the rest of the world by Israel. And the US cut off funding after Israel declared a blockade on Gaza, which makes food aid more essential than before. The USA's attempted replacement for UNRWA, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has been an unmitigated disaster the likes of which the US hasn't been responsible for since the George W. Bush administration. While UNRWA consists of Palestinians who have relationships with the community they're providing for and decades of experience working in the area, the GHF consists of American contractors who have displayed alarming amounts of apathy towards the wellbeing of Palestinians. US contractors with the GHF have been caught on video shooting Palestinian civilians while they were fleeing. You can watch them do it. This was not a one-off event. It was one of a series of massacres committed against Palestinians at GHF aid sites. More than a thousand Palestinians have been shot to death, mostly by the IDF and GHF contractors, at GHF sites, and GHF has only been operating for two months. This is beyond unacceptable. The people responsible for this should be arrested and put on trial. Americans should be ashamed that their government is responsible for such crimes. American funding for UNRWA should be restored immediately, and the US should immediately halt all aid and weapons sales to Israel, which has blockaded and starved Gaza, destroyed more than 70% of all infrastructure in Gaza, including every university, 80% of healthcare facilities, and 90% of homes. The vast majority of the population has been driven into refugee camps, which have also been heavily bombed. More than 85,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war so far, and that number will continue to climb much higher. Nothing positive will result from this war, or has resulted from this war. American politicians and pundits and intellectuals who have supported it have blood on their hands and should never be permitted to live without shame ever again. The United States has incurred great costs to itself, damaging its international reputation, spending its money, and making unnecessary enemies (why did we support Israel's invasion of Al-Jolani's Syria, when Al-Jolani wanted Syria to become our ally?). What has the USA gained from this sacrifice? Absolutely nothing, apart from another black mark on its history.
When workers immigrate from poorer countries to richer countries, they gain access to more advanced means of production, so the same human produces more in America than in El Salvador. Therefore, the world is richer when someone immigrates to a richer country. Surprisingly few people grasp this very simple fact. Sometimes even in supposedly left-wing spaces, it seems "common knowledge" that immigration is bad for "workers", because if there are more workers then wages go down. This argument makes the same mistake a lot of anti-immigration arguments make. It seems to assume that if a worker doesn't move from Mexico to America, he doesn't even exist. Immigration does not decrease the number of workers in the world! It just gives them the opportunity to take on more productive jobs. Plausibly hundreds of millions of people live in poverty simply because they lack the freedom to just move somewhere else, where their labor will not only benefit themselves, but also the community they now live in. Not only does immigration increase the amount of wealth in the world, it distributes that wealth more equally. This is why restrictions on migration within a country, like the hukou system in China, or the checkpoint and permit system in the West Bank, increase inequality and drive poverty. Why should it work any differently when the restrictions on movement are between countries, rather than within one? Besides, all people should be treated equally, so why should someone not be allowed to move to my city just because they were born on the wrong side of a line? It's a violation of the basic principles of liberty and equality.
People really hate veganism and get very mad about it, but it seems kind of obvious. It's wrong to hurt animals that can feel pain, and the production of animal products involves hurting animals. Chickens in the wild live for ten years, but in factory farms, chickens raised for meat live for only six weeks; genetically bred to grow monstrously large extremely quickly. This causes something called tibial dyschondroplasia, where their muscles grow faster than their bones can grow to support them. Nearly all broiler chickens suffer from excruciating pain in their legs. They are cramped together by the thousands in dirty indoor spaces, never allowed to see the sun, killed in their infancy, and not permitted to engage in natural behaviors like dust-bathing and foraging that they need to not be constantly miserable. People would be calling for blood if someone treated one dog the way factory farms treat billions of animals. Animals in factory farms are mutilated, understimulated, and subject to all manners of horrific abuse. It is the moral crisis of our time. And we obviously shouldn't be supporting it by paying people to abuse animals for us. I recommend watching the documentary "Dominion", or reading many of the great articles on the subject by Ozy Brennan. I also recommend "Not a Meat Eater FAQ" by Erich Grunewald.
This one is also obvious. If you choose your charities wisely (I recommend resources like farmkind or givewell), you can make a monumentally positive impact on the world for the same price as you could very modestly improve your life by a small degree. There is a lot of suffering in this world, and if you live in the first world you could do a lot to reduce it. In fact, giving to effective charities is a more effective way of improving the world than pretty much anything else you could do. I'm a member of Giving What We Can and donate 10% of my pre-tax income to Farmkind, and I think others should do the same.