Windows 8, Oh How The Blunders Continue...

Just when you thought Microsoft couldn't make any more mistakes, the company has announced some new changes in its products that should make all its customers so much, happier. (Go on, feel the sarcasm!)

Microsoft has announced that effective immediately all products will feature a new End-User License Agreement (EULA) that denies plaintiffs the ability to file class action lawsuits against the company for any damages they might incur. Instead a person who has been wronged may sue in small-claims court, or seek arbitration in which Microsoft will make an offer to settle of $1,000, or pay whatever the arbitrator suggests, whichever amount is actually higher. The XBOX Live EULA has already seen this change made, but the first new product to feature the new EULA will be Windows 8.

It's kind of interesting to me that the first new product to feature this new EULA will be the product most people would likely want to file a class action lawsuit over. Seems like Microsoft is gearing for what they know to be a full on shitstorm after this piece of dogshit called "Windows 8" is released. Of course, Microsoft isn't the only company to feature such an agreement, as you may know AT&T have also included such agreements with their phone contracts. The purpose of class action lawsuits are so that average plaintiffs with a grievance against a corporation can stand a fighting chance. A corporation that is sure to have billions of dollars and hundreds of lawyers would be a daunting task for any average person to take on. Thus the class action lawsuit was designed to allow plaintiffs to pool resources together in order to bring claim against a corporation and stand a chance of winning in a court of law.


But these asswipes have found a way around this by forcing consumers into signing contracts if they want service. Normally this wouldn't be such a big issue, after all, competition should give someone plenty of choices right? Well monopolies like AT&T and Microsoft who dominate their markets are forcing consumers into contracts that stipulate just such agreements because they are monopolies and leave consumers little choice. In the case of AT&T, a consumer looking to purchase a mobile phone must decide if they can even use another phone in their area because of coverage restriction areas. In the case of Microsoft, they dominate 95% of the computer market, leaving consumers little to no choice, resulting in acceptance of such agreements. Furthermore, no one ever reads EULAs, no one, not a single person and these assholes know that. So folks when you buy that new device and it features Windows 8, and it doesn't do what you wanted it to do, or just plain sucks ass, you can complain all you want, but good luck in getting any kind of compensation.

I've actually blogged about Windows 8 at length before, and I suggest anyone interested in reading about it, check out my previous articles on it entitled, Why Windows 8 Will Fail, at Least in The Desktop Market... and The Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Just a Tad Shinier Than The Previous Turd. In those articles I described many of the issues I found with Windows 8, but one thing I didn't talk about was the fact that it's base code was extracted from Windows 7. When Microsoft develops a new operating system (OS), it builds onto the previous OS, Windows NT --> Windows 2000, Windows 2000 --> Windows XP, Windows XP --> Windows Vista, Windows Vista --> Windows 7, Windows 7 --> Windows 8.

Backwards compatibility has always been something that windows users have appreciated and for the most part it generally has worked. When Microsoft released its developer preview with the new Metro style interface it was with the promise that Windows 8 and Windows 7 would be virtually similar. Users would be able to run the same applications, use the same Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and rely on the same kind of experience.

We were told that Metro was merely a new style of application accessibility. In the developer preview the desktop was still there, and if you could actually get the thing to load, the start button and menu were there as well. You could move from the metro interface to the desktop and back again. With the release of the consumer preview things changed, however. Suddenly, the metro style interface, although still front and center, no longer yields to a user friendly desktop, in fact the desktop has been stripped of everything it has been since the days of Windows 95, 17 years ago.

Digging around in some Microsoft posts on the subject I found information that suggested that policies that would allow a person to boot directly to the desktop would not be included with Windows 8, a huge brain fart I assumed. Businesses rely on Active Directory Policies to lock into place a custom experience for it's users based on the policies a company would like to use. This has been around a long time, and for Microsoft to disregard such a thing seemed arrogant, or foolish, whichever seems worse to you.

New leaked information from the tech giant has suggested that not only has Microsoft arbitrarily decided to not allow "boot to desktop" to be a policy in Windows 8, but they have begun the process of removing key legacy code from Windows 8, that would have allowed users not wishing to experience the new style of Windows 8, and thus return to the Windows 7 style people really enjoy.

The API routines that would allow a programmer to access the Windows 7 style of OS, will find that information is now seemingly missing. In fact, third party applications, which have previously worked to restore the Windows 8 desktop to a more Windows 7 style desktop, featuring the Start button, and Start menu will find these programs no longer function when the Release Preview is released.

So not only has Microsoft lied by telling consumers that Windows 7 and Windows 8 will be very similar, they have deliberately disallowed any user from making a choice about the style of windows experience they want to have. Microsoft has taken a very Apple approach to computing, taking away consumer choice in favor of Digital Rights Management (DRM). You may wonder if this qualifies as DRM exactly, but I believe that any mechanism designed to lock a product down in favor of taking away consumer choice, is DRM by definition.

Windows 8 will surely fail as I have said in previous articles, but it may be too late to fix the problem. Knowing the existing code base comes from previous OS source code, any new OS, presumably Windows 9 will be built on the code provided in Windows 8. That means even if consumers skip Windows 8 like they did Vista, they may have no choice when it comes to Windows 9, because it will most likely be very similar to Windows 8.

What Microsoft has done in recent years has shown it no longer has the kind of innovation and interest that it once had, and much like when Apple brought Steve Jobs back to revitalize it's company after its major flops, I think Microsoft needs to kick Steve Ballmer to the curb and bring back Bill Gates. What this company needs now more than ever is someone who knows how to deliver a win, and like him or not, Bill Gates has always been a winner.

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Malware 101: My Own Experiences and Successful Endeavors in The Removal of Shitware

I first want to explain that some of this article may contain some technical jargon, and I will try to explain as much of it as possible, and include links when I feel it is necessary. I apologize ahead of time for anything technical that cannot be easily explained or for which I felt no explanation was necessary.



Although the term spyware didn't make an official appearance until the year 2000, accounts of possible reporting software seem to have occurred in the early 90's. In a ZoneAlarm press release, the term found its footing and became synonymous with technology that could be used to report information secretly back to the software publisher. Although many software publishers were in fact doing this as a matter of analysis, the use of such software became a tool of malicious agents soon enough. Later that year, Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation (GRC) found his own personal computer seemingly infected by two pieces of software that he didn't install himself, and could not be easily removed.

Gibson disassembled the software and was able to track it back to two companies Aureate and Conducent. Gibson alleges that these two companies had designed software that was capable of being installed in secret and able to report information about the user, his or her habits and the kinds of data that user kept on their computer, back to the companies. Although no proof of this could be ascertained, the allegations led security firms to begin looking into the problem, and the information world would never be the same.

Although there are many different types of malicious software out there and I will take some time to explain a few of them, none are more pervasive than spyware but for the purposes of simplifying things, I will refer to all of these kinds of software as malware, and only refer to them as their specific class when needed.


A study done in 2007 referred to the publishing of malware as a possibility of outnumbering the publishing of legitimate software, and as of 2011, Microsoft has asserted that 1 in every 14 downloads from the Internet is infected with some kind of malware. That is an alarming statistic and one everyone should pay attention to.

Computer viruses are nothing new, I have even been known to create a few myself, but make no mistake the malware of today is nothing like the malware of the past. When I was younger, before the Internet became a world-wide phenomenon and rooted its way into the homes of every citizen on this planet, there were the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In those days you had a dial-up modem, usually quite slow, and you would use it to call a BBS which would connect you to a console and you would logon and interact with the system.

My first BBS experience was an interesting one as it was then that I found out what porn really was. Of course in those days downloading a single image would take minutes and unless you wanted to run up a ridiculous phone bill, you tried not to spend too long on the system. In those days no one had a second phone line in their homes dedicated to the computer, such things were really unheard of at that time, so frequently you would find yourself browsing a board to find you were suddenly disconnected, someone in the house has picked up the phone. I can still hear my brother now screaming at me to get off the computer.

It was in that first BBS that I was introduced to some interesting software: compilers, listeners, phreaking tools, coding manuals, disassemblers, password crackers, etc. I was even able to find several posts by users who wanted to learn more about some of the software tools and like everyone else I left a post of my own. After days of waiting I received a reply with a number I could call to get to another BBS, and when I dialed the number I was introduced to the shady world of the hacker. There I found numbers for other boards as well as all the tools and information I needed to do a little hacking of my own.

At first I used the tools to create some interesting software that would do some meaningless thing like rewrite your start-up files. A person with this piece of software installed would be informed they had been hacked by jsauce. Of course, I hadn't really done anything at all, my intent was never to be malicious, but rather just be known. Like the rest of the users I met while frequenting these boards, we all had much the same intent, and it was never to actually cause harm.

My first experience with a virus was one called Tentacles or some variant of it. This was back around 1995, as I remember having upgraded my computer from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. I was still using dial-up to access the boards, and this was around the time I was also introduced to the word of warez. Warez is a term for software that is distributed freely and illegally, as it violates copyright laws. Of course I was 17 at the time, and I could give a shit about copyright laws, as much as I do today.

I remember that not long after installing Windows 95 I began working on a new program I called Registry Backup, which I wanted to use to backup the registry in case of corruption. On two previous occasions the registry had become corrupted and with a little ingenuity I was able to fix this, but it gave me an idea and I wanted to see if I could find a solution. So I created my first Registry Backup tool and I posted it all over the bulletin boards. Upon posting the tool I began to look for other utilities I might find useful now that I was using Windows 95. I don't remember the name of the tool or what it was supposed to do, but this was my first interaction with a virus and it left me flummoxed. Upon executing the program, I noticed it did not do as it was supposed to do, but instead one of my desktop icons changed into an octopus or something like it.

It was kind of interesting so I did nothing at that point, but it would only take a few days before most of my desktop icons were now baring tentacles. I realized I must be dealing with a sophisticated piece of software here and it was then that I discovered the world of viruses. I knew that it must be attaching information to the executable, each time it were executed which would explain why its icon would only be changed after it were run. I was a programmer but by no means capable of writing any kind of disinfection software so I looked back to the boards and was pointed to something called McAfee.

Sure enough after running McAfee in DOS, and booting back to Windows, everything was normal again. I was fascinated by this virus, and so I began to study different kinds and look for software that I could use to write my own. Over the next few years I had several successful attempts at writing a virus, but nothing quite as cool as tentacles. The best I could ever do was write a virus that would cause a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), upon a reboot you would find all of your desktop icons had been deleted and in its place you would find a picture of a dog taking a crap. Obviously not a true virus in the sense, after all, it didn't write propagating code to executables but it was annoying enough, much like the tentacles, later I would come to know this as the trojan horse type of virus.

Besides my own attempt, I was first introduced to a nasty bit of software back in 1998 called Back Orifice. Back Orifice was created by a hacker group called Cult of the Dead Cow and it made its debut at DEF CON 6, August 1, 1998. The group declared that Back Orifice was only created to show Microsoft its lack of security in Windows 98. By that time I had a computer with Windows 98 and Internet in the form of CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy. With the introduction of the World-Wide-Web (WWW), I saw no need for the BBS anymore and stopped using them almost immediately.

I can tell you that my days as a Windows 98 user were some of the most fun I ever had with a computer. I spent most of my time, port scanning users and compromising their systems. My friends and I even shared some of the information we got, though we never used it maliciously and on one occasion having gotten the bank information for a person, which contained thousands of dollars we called the person immediately. Even in those days hacking was fun, but never malicious. It never occurred to me that you might want to steal from someone else, and this may have been one of the first occasions when I realized that something needed to be done to stop this kind of thing.

At that time Back Orifice had been installed on thousands of computers from what I could tell with just a small port scan of the computers on my subnet. You see in those days, security was quite lax and computers advertised themselves to everyone else on the same network. So a person with a port scanner could easily find computers with an open port, and if you knew the port you were looking for, it made it that much more efficient.

So this friend and I, having full access to the computer in question, searched it thoroughly looking for anything that would indicate a phone number. I'm not sure if we were able to find one through this method but we found one nonetheless. We called the phone number and a kid answered the phone, someone around our age. So we asked him if he were, and we recited the name found on the account in question, and he said that it was his father. We asked if we could speak to his father, and he said that he was at work.

So at that point we informed the kid that his computer was infected with a trojan horse called Back Orifice. He had no clue what the hell we were talking about, so we took a minute to explain. The kid got his father on the phone who apparently worked for some financial institution and we explained the situation. I asked him if this was his account number and his name and he said that it was. I told him that not only did I have access to his accounts but I had access to any and all information contained on that computer. I could hear the anxiety in his voice, and I reassured him we had no intention of being malicious but merely wanted to inform him of this problem and to give him a solution. So we spent probably 15 minutes explaining how to remove the trojan horse and change the passwords on his accounts, as well as try to explain how he likely got infected in the first place.

Neither of them seemed to grasp the severity of the situation until I explained that I was in full control of that computer, not only could I steal all his information, but I could if I choose delete key system files and restart the computer, resulting in startup failure. In those days unless you were a savvy person, doing this resulted in a complete reinstall of the operating system. In fact, and I hate to say I've done this, with a 3 ½ inch floppy and a few keystrokes I could render a computer inoperable in a matter of seconds, as I did on any occasion in which I was able to access one.

A trip to the local Walmart, Kmart, or RadioShack, and those computers were my bitches. Reinstalling a system in those days was no trivial thing like it is today, it took many hours to just get the OS installed and many hours after that to get all the devices of the system working. Although plug&play was a concept worth including in Windows 98, it worked successfully far less often than it does today. A computer-illiterate person as we called them would likely be unable to reinstall a system even if they had all the disks. It is my believe that companies began including restore disks with simple 1-2-3 interfaces based entirely on the fact that Windows was too difficult for most users to install themselves. Of course when I think now, this kind of act was malicious, but I didn't consider it malicious at the time, I wasn't stealing anything, or hurting anyone and with a little knowledge a person could fix the problem within a few minutes.

It was around that time that I switched gears and began helping people with their computer problems. I never asked for anything as compensation though I never turned down a soft-drink or if I were lucky enough a beer. It wasn't until around the time that Windows XP was released when I began to see some nasty stuff in the way of software. While working on a computer, I noticed that it was using a lot of resources. You have to remember back in 2001 a computer would normally come equipped with 256MB of ram if you were lucky, and it was easy to see when a computer was under-performing.

I would get calls and emails from people asking me why their computer was so slow, so I would head over and take a look. It became immediately apparent that the computer was infected with something, and the task manager was a great place to start. Bringing up the task manager you could easily see that there would be 50 or 60 processes running on the machine, something unheard of with so little ram. The slowness was caused not by the malware itself, but rather it was merely an indication that there was too much going on at one time. With so little ram available, a program that required more memory to run would have to get it from the pagefile, a file generated on the disk that can be used by the system as a source of virtual memory.

Storing and Retrieving data in ram is a whole lot faster than on a disk, and so when something was paging memory from the disk, it automatically meant it would naturally be slower. There are a few solutions to this problem, you could add more memory. In all cases adding additional memory to a system will make it more stable and run faster if the problem it has is a lack of memory. You could also reduce the number of programs that run on the system in parallel. Each program takes up a specific amount of memory and anytime you exceed the amount of physical memory available, the system automatically pulls it from virtual memory slowing it down. Since ram was still expensive for the average person, most people would ask me to clean the system up, removing unnecessary programs.

I had started to see this software called Kazaa all over the place, on many machines I worked on though I had not used it myself. I knew that it was being used to get warez, and music for free but I liked more private means for getting my stuff, frequenting the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels of the undernet and efnet for shit. One thing I noticed about the software was that it was always running in the background and taking up quite a lot of resources. I also noticed that it was loaded with advertisements when it was opened.

I would advise the user that this program was whoring their computer and if they wanted it back, they would need to part with the software. I'd of course advise them of alternative ways to get the stuff they needed without needing to use Kazaa, and they would agree and ask me to remove it. The problem was it could not easily be removed. First I would try removing it through the standard add or remove programs, and although this appeared to remove the contents of the folder in which it was installed, many programs were continuing to run in the background. I would attempt to kill the process using the task manager only to find it would restart itself, with no other means to solve the slowness on the system I would advise them it would need to be reinstalled. A horrible measure indeed but with no other recourse, necessary nonetheless.

I began to notice other pieces of software that displayed similar problems and it was at that point I began looking for solutions. One of the first solutions was developed by Steve Gibson, he dubbed it Opt-Out and it removed some of this crap but not all of it. Not long after, Ad-Aware and Spybot search and destroy hit the scene and were quite effective in removing this stuff for sometime. At some point, however these assholes began to get the memo that people didn't want this stuff installed on their system and there were tools out there that could remove it.

People often ask what the point of malware is, and like all things it comes down to money. A compromised system can be used for so many things but earning money is by far the biggest reason. In the old days people compromised systems just to do it, now its all about the capital. In the old days it was a couple of kids in a basement hacking away at a machine, now its a corporation rooting a machine with an exploit that allows them to gain complete control in a matter of seconds.

Over the last decade I have seen the progression of this spyware into more and more malicious code, and shortly I will explain a few reasons why this has happened and how it can be stopped. I have seen the software evolve from a simple trojan to a seemingly innocuous piece of software with hidden code to web exploits and even into tools that are advertised as able to remove malware, so called Rogue software. I will attempt to explain the different types of infection vectors as well as some ways to protect yourself, and ways to clean a clearly infected machine.

In the end some systems may be too compromised to be saved and must be reinstalled. I reserve such an action for only the most heavily infected machines and only those where the time that must be dedicated in cleaning the machine out values the contents of the machine itself. I understand wiping a computer and reinstalling everything is a horrible thing for most people. Today most people have thousands of programs installed on their computers that take up hundreds of gigabytes of space, and the prospect of reinstalling everything is never a good thing.

PART ONE: INDICATIONS

There are a few indications that might point you to a believe that you have an infected machine. So first let's look at a few of them:

Slowness

Everyone knows what it was like when you first purchased your computer, and everyone knows what its like now. Having a slow computer by itself is not a true indicator of a malware infection. Like people, as computers age, they get slower usually as a result of updates, application installations, and over all bit rot. Years ago it was customary to reinstall a system at least once a year to make it faster, though on modern systems such practices are not necessary.

A person who has a slow computer should consider the computer's age, how much memory it has, and how fast its processor is. Is the processor a modern processor? Does it have multiple cores? These are things to consider when asking yourself why your computer is slow. Modern applications require modern processors. Anyone who has ever run an old program on a modern processor will notice how fast it is and anyone who has run a modern program on an older processor will notice how slow it is. This is merely a result of the instructions available to the program at the time it was written. Older programs do not require the same kind of resources, after all, when they were written such resources were not available.

Pop-ups

Pop-up windows like system slowness are not by themselves indications of a malware infection. Most websites that advertise their services do so through pop-ups and banners found all over the web. A website wanting to monetize its content usually does so by placing these banners and pop-up ads through script included in their page. When a person visits a site, the script is executed through an interpreter built into the browser and the pop-up ad appears.

A person who finds their computer is frequently getting pop-up ads even when their browser is closed, may have an infection, though I should point out that legitimate software that uses these kinds of ads to monetize their software may also be installed. Advertising something does not indicated malicious intent by itself, so although you may see some of these pop-up ads more investigation is warranted.

Toolbars

Toolbars are one of the most irritating pieces of software ever devised and by themselves though annoying for certain, are not always malicious. Many companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have used the toolbar over the years to add some function to the browser, however useless this function may be. Over the years toolbars have also been a great source of infection or at least a good indication of one.

A good explanation of why toolbars are so frequently used in malware is that it is an easy vector for gaining information about browsing habits. A user with a toolbar installed would typically visit a dozen sites a day, and all of the information that user typed in that browser could be tracked by the toolbar and uploaded back to the company as the browser was closed. A slightly more malicious toolbar could be used to intercept and redirect queries, resulting in a user getting information they did not want or need.

Shortcuts

Quite often malware will install shortcuts on the desktop that link to software that has been dubiously installed. Though almost every piece of software installed on a machine today also installs a shortcut, you should pay attention to shortcuts that indicate software you did not install yourself, or software that you have no knowledge about.

Suspicious processes

The Windows Task Manager queries the NT Kernel for a list of active processes, and can help to indicate a malware infection. Although for the not so savvy user this is a little more difficult technique for identifying malware as it requires a knowledge of existing benign processes and a knowledge of what kind of processes might be malicious just by their name alone, or by the resources they consume while running, or by the function they have on the system.

Rogue software

Rogue anti-malware programs are a dime a dozen now, and having one of these installed is a sure indicator of a malware infection. Though as the name implies unless you are familiar with these kinds of programs you may assume that its a useful program designed with the intention of helping you. Later I will explain an easy way to tell when you have a rogue piece of software installed as opposed to something that actually cleans malware.

Any one of these things by itself, with the exception of the rogue software, isn't always an indication of infection though educating yourself as to what to look for will greatly help find and remove this kind of software.

PART TWO: REMOVAL

Removing malware can be a daunting task. Ask anyone who has spent anytime doing it and you will find someone who has at one time or another pulled some hair from their head or screamed. It can often be so challenging a task that most people simply format a system and start from scratch. Most malware compromises a system through one of the many 0-day exploits currently in the wild or installed as part of another innocuous program, the very definition of a Trojan horse.

Malware can carry with it viruses that attach themselves to your favorite programs, hook into vital system processes and bind themselves to networking components all in an attempt to make it more painful to remove than to just leave it. Again there is an incentive to keep this stuff on your system as long as possible and the designers of this stuff are going to make it as hard as they possibly can for you to remove it. Not doing this would be detrimental to their business.

If you have the right tools and enough time you can remove any infection. Let me say this, there is no infection of malware that cannot be removed if you know what you are doing, at least none that I have ever encountered.

It’s a good point here to remind you that before you begin the process of removal you should remember this will not be something you can do in five minutes. If you are cleaning a machine for someone, never accept a deadline. There is no way you can give them any real idea of how long this will take and its pointless and worse disappointing when you are not able to get it cleaned by a specific deadline. The time it takes to remove malware depends entirely on the kind of infection and the amount of infected files on the system. It also can depend heavily on how rooted it is on your system, but I’ll talk about that later.

Now for most users they are going to want automated tools and for those users such tools exist. I now find that I myself use more automated tools for removal than I once did, however to give you a better understanding of this stuff I want to be as thorough as possible and explain as much in detail as I can. Because of this I will first explain how malware can be removed manually with a few well designed and simple to use tools and then explain how it can be done with a more automated set of tools.

For manual removal of this crap I recommend a set of tools available from Microsoft called the Sysinternals Suite created by Mark Russinovich. Once you have downloaded the Sysinternals Suite of software, I recommend keeping them on a usb thumb drive or other form of removable media making them portable.

It should also be noted that having these tools available on portable media or downloading them from a machine that is not infected is the best option because malware has a tendancy to redirect URL queries. A person who is trying to download software that may be used to remove malware may find the link no longer works or is redirected to more malicious software or advertising instead.

So the first tool I want to talk about is a tool I like called Process Explorer. At first glance Process Explorer looks very much like the built in windows task manager, however they are very much different.

Process Explorer

Process Explorer displays processes in a process tree list. This has the advantage of showing you which processes are forked from other processes. Since malware relies heavily on background processes, ending these processes could cause them to not function. For this reason malware uses a technique called process forking. A single process upon executing also executes several other processes.

A process that is forked from and depends on a parent process is called a child process and exists within the process tree. When terminating a process, one of the forked processes will very often respawn the terminated process. Because of this you cannot end this kind of malware using the task manager While the Windows XP task manager has the ability to end a process tree it cannot show you the child processes of a parent or show you any process that was forked from another.

Process Explorer also has the ability to suspend processes by making the process inactive preventing the ability of the process to send or receive resources such as network, CPU, or disk. In effect, the suspended process has been killed but remains as a pointer to prevent another process from detecting it’s not there. Processes are not able to tell a process has been suspended and this allows you to suspend all suspicious processes before killing them each one at a time.

Process explorer also includes a function that allows you to search for any dll or handle that is currently active on the system, a function that the task manager does not include.

*** It should be noted that although the resource monitor that is included with the Windows Vista and Windows 7 task manager can see child processes, it still lacks the capability of suspending any active process, leaving it incapable of being a useful way to kill malware infections.

Autoruns

Autoruns is another fantastic program included in the Sysinternals Suite that allows you to see a complete list of programs that are installed and configured to start when the system boots. It also has the ability to disable processes you do not want to have started when the system boots.

It also has the function of allowing you to hide entries in your startup that are signed by Microsoft, thus allowing you to eliminate from the list all entries you know to be safe. This is highly effective in reducing the list of stuff to something a lot more manageable.

Autoruns also features the ability to open a startup entry in process explorer to see if its active and show you what child processes are also running

Process Monitor

The third tool in the suite of tools I recommend is one called Process Monitor. Process Monitor is not for the faint of heart, it is a highly complex tool and requires a little understanding of windows processes to be able to use it correctly. Process Monitor works by observing in real-time the process and thread activities of the system as it runs.

One of the features of Process Monitor is the ability to filter those things you know are not a problem or you do not want in the list. This allows you to quickly get a real-time view of the things you know are causing you a problem by removing those that you know are not.

Rootkit Revealer

The last tool in the suite I recommend is one called Rootkit Revealer. Although many more powerful tools exist for discovering rootkits this one isn't terrible and does what it advertises.

Rootkit Revealer is an advanced rootkit detection utility. It runs on any Windows NT based kernel and its output lists Registry and file system API discrepancies that may indicate the presence of a user-mode or kernel-mode rootkit.

Since persistent rootkits work by changing API results so that a system view using APIs differs from the actual view in storage, Rootkit Revealer compares the results of a system scan at the highest level with that at the lowest level. The highest level is the Windows API and the lowest level is the raw contents of a file system volume or Registry hive (a hive file is the Registry's on-disk storage format).

Thus, rootkits, whether user mode or kernel mode, that manipulate the Windows API or native API to remove their presence from a directory listing, for example, will be seen by Rootkit Revealer as a discrepancy between the information returned by the Windows API and that seen in the raw scan of a FAT or NTFS volume's file system structures.

Process of Removal

*** I have used a virtual machine that has Windows XP installed on it as an example, although I could have used Windows Vista or Windows 7 as well, I used what was available to me and what was a more prevalent OS for infection at the time I took these screenshots. The steps are identical between operating systems.

The only differences that might pose a problem are the use of the UAC in Windows Vista and Windows 7 and the difference in location of system shortcuts between Windows XP and Windows Vista/7. A person competent enough to attempt this kind of malware removal should be able to figure out these differences and adjust for them. Also it should be noted that the UAC should be disabled if it interferes with the execution of any of this software.

As you can see this virtual machine has pop-ups, shortcuts, browser-redirects, toolbars, and its resources are being consistently consumed. If this were a real machine it would be almost unusable.

The first step to removing this junk is locating the running processes and stopping them in their tracks. The way to do this is with process explorer’s suspend function.

Identify those processes that are not legitimate applications

The easiest way to do this is by suspending those applications you know are not Microsoft core applications or legitimate applications you want running on your system. Microsoft applications will be identified as coming from Microsoft Corporation. You can access the context menu by selecting the application and right-clicking on it. Select Suspend from the list.

Continue this process until all applications that are suspect have been suspended. Not doing this may result in a single leftover application restarting the bunch when they are killed.

Suspended applications appear in gray. Make sure you go over this list a few times to make sure you have suspended everything you suspect to be malware.

Once you are sure you have suspended all suspicious applications it’s time to kill them one at a time.

Continue this process until all suspended applications have been killed.

You are able to see that the process tree above looks pretty clean. There are no unusual applications running with the exception of Unlocker that is not malware, and which I’ll talk about later. In the process tree you can see there are no bad programs running but like task manager the application list is generated by the kernel and can be fooled very easily. So the next step is verifying our initial results with a more thorough list.

Open Process Monitor and let it run for a few seconds. Any residual active malware is surely going to create something in the list.

The first step is to remove those applications we know are not infections. Below you will find a list of standard applications you would find on a running Windows XP machine.

*** This list will contain many more entries for a Windows Vista or Windows 7 machine. I suggest familiarizing yourself with those processes on a known clean machine before going further.

Explorer.exe
Lsass.exe
Csrss.exe
Services.exe
Smss.exe
Winlogon.exe
Wscntfy.exe
Wuauclt.exe
Svchost.exe
Spoolsv.exe
Alg.exe
Wmiprvse.exe

Pay particularly close attention to how these processes are spelled and whether they are signed by Microsoft Corporation. Bogus applications are often spelled very similarly to real Microsoft applications, usually only off by a single letter, or replaced with a number.

For example Explorer.exe may be Exp1orer.exe where the letter L is replaced with the number 1. In a process view you may not notice this kind of thing and that’s exactly what they are counting on. Pay particularly close attention to those Microsoft applications because it is those applications that are most often targeted.

Right-click on the process you wish to exclude, i.e. the good process and select Process Name. This will allow you to filter out the processes you do not want in the view. Be careful, some malware can attach themselves to system processes. Look at what the process is doing before excluding it.

Continue doing this until you are only left with things you’re not sure about. Google is your friend. Use it to search for process names. Doing this may be one of the better ways to get familiar with names used for malware infections.

If you’ve done it correctly you should not have anything left. This means that you have excluded all the processes you know to be safe and there is nothing left in the list that is suspect. It’s now time to stop this stuff from starting back up when you reboot.

Start up Autoruns

When Autoruns is first started it creates a very large list of boot entries. The first thing you’ll want to do cut this list down. Click on Options, and then Verify Code Signatures. Autoruns will connect to crl.microsoft.com to validate the digital signatures. A Microsoft entry not being verified does not mean it’s infected; it just means Microsoft hasn’t digitally signed it yet.

Next Click on options, and then Hide Signed Microsoft Entries. This will allow Autoruns to hide all the entries which are known to be verified by digital signature. This will clear out a significant portion of the list.

Finally you can either hit F5 or click File then Refresh to refresh the list.

It’s time to begin removing startup entries. To do this, uncheck the boxes next to any entry that you know to be malware or find suspicious. Be very careful not to uncheck anything that is a system file. Doing this may prevent Windows from loading properly.

Continue down the list until you have unchecked all suspicious entries. If you have done everything correctly hit F5 again and none of the boxes you’ve unchecked have reappeared or checked themselves again. If everything looks good you can Exit Autoruns.

It’s now time to reboot your computer to see if the bad stuff comes back.

After you have restarted your computer you should run Process Explorer again to verify its all gone.
If everything is clean your process list will look similar to mine.

Remember that in my test computer I have not loaded any other applications than the tools I use and the malware itself. You could have some of your own applications running. As you can see in the process list all of the malware is no longer loading with Windows. Now you can remove it like any other application.

Now we will head to the Add or Remove Programs

Click Start, then Run, then put Control in the box and Hit OK.

Once the Control Panel loads, click Add or Remove Programs

After the list loads, click on the first suspect entry and click Remove.

Continue down the list removing everything that could be malicious. Be careful not to remove something that is needed or that isn’t really malware. Again use Google to help you determine the good from the bad.
When you are left you should see something very similar to what I have below.

You will probably have a lot more programs on your computer than I have on this test computer. So your list is likely to be quite a bit longer than this one.

Finally let’s get rid of those shortcuts that these programs sometimes leave behind.

Close out the Add or Remove Programs.

Begin removing the desktop shortcuts by clicking on them once to highlight and then clicking the delete button your keyboard. Windows will ask you if you are sure and you choose Yes.

Sometimes malware changes your default internet settings so the last thing you will want to do is restore the default settings. Click Start, right-click on Internet and choose Internet Properties.

Click on the Programs tab and then click the Reset Web Settings button.

It will ask you to confirm you actually want to reset your web settings. Click Yes.

Click Ok when prompted, and Click Ok again to close the Settings dialog.

You can now open Internet Explorer and confirm everything is back to normal.

For a more automated removal there a couple of tools I use exclusively and find them very effective in removing malware of all kinds.

Bleeping Computer's Combofix
MalwareBytes Anti-Malware

*** You should only download these tools from the sites I have linked to, as these tools are often exploited by malware developers and put up on the web to fool people. Such versions will certainly not clean a system and only help to infect it further.

Both of these tools are available with varying degrees of automation. I find Combofix is a tool I most often run first, as I have found it to be more effective in getting rid of the really nasty stuff like Rogue Anti-Malware applications that have just infested the machine.

The advantage of Combofix is that if for any reason applications will no longer run in Normal mode, Combofix can be run from safe mode and safe mode with command line, making it a very powerful tool in the arsenal. Combofix comes with plenty of warnings and I should give them to you as well. It has been known to cause damage not because the software is malicious but because it removes malicious software so effectively that the normal action of doing so can cause malware that has perniciously invaded your system, by rooting itself into important system components, to break things when removed.

I recommend only someone who is experienced in malware removal or tech savvy use this utility. Otherwise use it at your own risk, if you don't care either way, it works and usually between 15-30 minutes.

For the rest of you who don't want to tempt fate, or just want to run something after running Combofix just to be sure, you can also run MalwareBytes Anti-Malware. This has been another tool in my arsenal for many years and it is also one of the most effective means at removing malware. There is almost nothing that Malwarebytes Anti-Malware cannot remove.

You will need install this program, and although licensing is available for commercial use, it is free for personal use. During the install it will ask you if you want to run an update, and then it will run when its done installing, doesn't get any easier. Once it runs, I recommend a Full scan, it will take longer, but its worth the wait. If it finds anything it will present you with it and an option to remove it.

Both of these tools may require reboots after removing stuff, just let them reboot to finish the process.

Both of these tools are capable of removing a ton of malware even some rootkits, and that brings me to the next part.

Part Three: Rootkits

No matter how good a job you do removing this stuff sometimes it just doesn’t want to be removed.  Following all the steps above you can clean 99% of all the infections that are likely to infect a machine. Sometimes there are infections that are simply too hard to remove, infections that take advantage of rootkit technology and those that hook into system processes preventing their easy removal. I’m going to talk about some of these technologies and an effective means for removal. In the end any infection can be removed given dedication and time.

Rootkits are very powerful tools that are used to stealth something from the OS. Root is a UNIX term that we give to the highest privileged account on a machine. It is literally the one account that has direct access to all aspects on the system without restriction. Any command coming from a root account is considered trusted. This is important as you will find out. And although this is a UNIX term it also applies to windows as windows has adopted user permissions as well in its NT environment suite of Operating System software. (Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, etc)

To understand what a rootkit does we must first understand a little about operating systems. In every operating system there exists something called the kernel; it is essentially the brain of the OS. All things must go through the kernel before they are run on a system. Think of your system as having a house with different levels, and at the very bottom, the first floor is the kernel. The kernel is mom or dad. Applications do not run on the first floor they run on the levels above.

In this house there is no front door, the only doors come from the above floors. If the kids want to run around screaming and jumping above, they will have to get permission from mom or dad below. When you run an application like Internet Explorer that application is a client, which accesses the kernel asking permission to run. Now the kernel is somewhat smart, it won’t run any program that it doesn’t understand. You may have encountered an error once or twice that said something to the effect of “this application is not a valid 32-bit application.” When you see this error, it is an error that has been generated in response to an application that the kernel objects to running, simply because it doesn’t understand what language it’s speaking. In this case it’s not a Windows application. Some of you may have encountered the BSoD. The BSoD is nothing to be feared but many times this occurs as a direct result of an improper call to the kernel. Many badly written programs can cause kernel born BSoD errors.

In the early days of spyware intrusion, there was no need for software makers to hide their software as no one even knew that this software existed. However, soon people started to discover the software lingering on their systems, associated with the reception of irritating ads on their desktop. With no explanation as to how this happened most users assumed it was just some function of windows. 

Removal tools started to spring up and people started to take notice. And now when you think of spyware you think, no problem I use Ad-Aware, Spybot search and destroy, Spyware Doctor, Microsoft Security Essentials, etc, I’m protected, nothing can get me. If you think that, you are wrong.

The fact is the stronger anti-malware companies fight, the stronger the malware developers fight back. To say that Windows is inherently flawed, is true but this is true of all operating systems including those that are UNIX based. All operating systems to date have been written with the idea that at the very core of the system, things can be trusted. The assumption being the highest possible permissible user data should and must be trusted without exception. This is a huge flaw, even in UNIX.

If we think of the OS as a bank, we think of the root permissions as the Bank President. He has all the keys to the doors, all the codes to the alarms and the combination to the safe. Are we to believe that the Bank President simply because he is the Bank President, would not steal from his own bank? We assume trust where we shouldn’t assume it. And it is the same in any operating system. At the core of the operating system there is the ability, with proper permissions, to access all the functions of the system and thereby if desired, the ability to compromise the system’s security. Hackers have been using rootkits on UNIX systems for quite a longtime and only because of savvy UNIX administrators were they discovered.

So how does a rootkit actually work? A rootkit is a tool which attaches itself to the kernel in such a way as to intercept information coming in and going out from the kernel. Let’s say you want to get a list of the contents of a directory. The system performs this with two operations, FindFirstFile and FindNextFile. As an example if you wanted to search for all files (*.*) the system would perform the FindFirstFile function and list the first matching file. The system would then perform the FindNextFile function listing the next and then perform the FindNextFile again listing files until no more files matched the terms of your search. Rootkits intercept those file finding functions so that each time a file that the rootkit is hiding would be listed, the rootkit simply sends back a FindNextFile function therefore skipping over the rootkit hidden file.

Windows is a really efficient operating system, it is written to be powerful and yet very compatible. It does this with the use of the Application Programming Interface (API). When an application is executed, it goes through one of three windows sub-systems, the Win32 subsystem, the POSIX subsystem or Interix, or the OS/2 subsystem. These subsystems provide an interface to system services that reside in kernel memory.

Therefore, unprivileged applications must go through these subsystems to access privileged kernel memory. When a Windows binary is loaded into memory, the loader must parse a section of the file called the Import Address Table (IAT). The IAT lists the Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) and the corresponding functions in the DLL that the binary will use. The loader will locate each of these DLLs on disk and map them into memory. Then, the loader puts the address of the function in the IAT of the binary that calls the function. By modifying the entries in a binary’s IAT, a rootkit can alter the execution flow of the program and influence what the original function would have returned to the caller.

All a piece of software has to do is alter the location of the IAT to point to another location like the rootkit, instead of the kernel and now you have the ability to hide any file you like. Rootkits do not access the kernel as a normal application which must run unprivileged but instead access it as something called a filter driver. The filter driver virtually sits at the same level as the kernel hooking itself into the FindNextFile calls any application makes.

Part Four: Random Problems

CoolWebSearch

If you find that no matter what you do the machine is still infected, you may have a coolwebsearch infection. Coolwebsearch employs very low level kernel filter drivers and rootkit technologies to hide and protect its files. It is by far the hardest piece of malware I have had to remove. Even most anti-malware software applications have trouble removing it. If the steps already shown in this document don’t prove effective in removing this, using anti-rootkit technology may help. Both Combofix and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware can remove some rootkits so it's possible running either or both of these tools may clean this kind of malware.

Access Denied Errors

I have found that some malware cannot be easily removed because of locking mechanisms in windows the malware has hooked itself into that prevent a file from being removed. For this type of problem I recommend a piece of software called Unlocker. You can find both 32bit and 64bit versions of the software. The site is kind of a mess and if you are not careful you may click on something you didn't want to click on, so I recommend going straight toward the bottom of the page until you reach something that says:

Download for Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / Windows 7 - Unlocker is Freeware

Under there you should find the links to download Unlocker for 32bit and 64bit windows.

Final Notes

There are a ton of anti-malware programs out there, some cost money and some are free. I believe that the best software isn't always the software you pay for and in my experience this tends to be true. I find a lot of people who have Norton or McAfee installed on their system only to find that after their subscription ends it no longer updates.

Any kind of anti-virus or anti-malware software that does not update is essentially useless and should be removed. Replace it with a free alternative that is not only free but is highly effective in protecting a system from infection. The tool I recommend the most is Microsoft Security Essentials, free and it works. A great tool that you can also pick up from Microsoft that can be highly effective in removing specific kinds of malware and especially rootkits is the Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Other companies offer free rootkit removal tools and they should also be considered if you believe you have a rootkit. Sophos, and Kaspersky offer free tools and AVG has incorporated it into its free and pay antivirus solutions. Again, I do not believe one should pay for an anti-malware solution when there are many free available for download. However, people often fooled into believing they are downloading reputable AV software often download malicious rogue software instead.

A couple of things to remember, if the software is highly intrusive and insists that you pay for it before it will clean anything, it is probably malware. There are literally thousands of malicious rogue software programs out there that are designed to look like legitimate software programs and you must be very careful when downloading and installing them. Make sure they are trusted, google them to find out, and don't trust just the first site you visit.

If you are using Internet Explorer as your main browser, you should consider moving to something a little more security oriented like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Either of these is considered a much better alternative to Internet Explorer, although I prefer Chrome myself.

There is a simple mantra everyone should follow when browsing the Internet, Trust No One. If you follow this you will already be ahead of the game. And a little common sense, don't click random links in chat, on websites, and in email. Don't think a link is safe simply because you trust its host.

Many sites are compromised every single day, and the host never even knows about it. Be wary of strangers offering you free software, or free products, and never give out your credit card information to anyone unless you are absolutely sure that the site you are using has a valid SSL certificate. All browsers can verify a valid SSL HTTPS connection, so don't be fooled. And now I will leave you with a short video that documents the cold call of a Fake AV Scammer who tried to pull the wool over the eyes of a random person, the only problem was this random person was a security consultant. He immediately began recording the session and this is the video he posted:

This should be important for everyone to watch, so they may see how this kind of thing is done. You may think someone foolish if this happens to them, however it happens all the time. If it didn't, then there would be no business reason for these scammers to try this.

Read More

Why I am an Atheist (part five)

This is part five of this article, here you can find parts one, two, three and four.



Throughout this article I have tried to show justification for my thought process, through some of the events of my life as well as through some of the conclusions I have reached over the span of that life. I will now continue to show some of the causes for my way of thinking as well as try to sum up the rationale behind them.

Part V: The Perceptive Brain

I can't go about daily life without being bombarded by advertising, someone trying to sell cars, soft-drinks, or medication. We live in a world where someone is always trying to convince someone else to buy into the product they are selling. I understand the rationale behind it, but I fail to see how it is useful in changing a person's mind. I don't often see an advertisement for Pepsi and think to myself, "I'd love a Pepsi right now," or "I do prefer drinking coke, but this commercial makes me want Pepsi instead." I fail to see the reason in advertising products that we all know exist and have an already-established opinion on.

For example, if a person drives a four-door Honda Accord, I fail to see how a commercial advertising a GM truck is likely to make that person consider selling their Honda, and buying that GM. It makes little sense that a person who has driven such a car and enjoys the car they drive, evident by the fact they purchased the car in the first place, would be swayed by an advertisement offering them a different choice. It is certainly possible that a person could become disenfranchised with their purchase and seek an alternate choice, but its not likely that advertising a new car is more likely to sway their decision than simply seeing a vehicle at a dealership or driven by someone about town.

The same is true of many products. For example, I have been drinking coke for a long time and enjoy it, and I prefer it to Pepsi. It is unlikely that any kind of adverting would make me switch from a brand I have enjoyed my whole life to another based entirely on the opinions of someone else, and I believe this to be true of anyone. So it seems to me that any kind of advertising that involves an established product is seemingly useless.


The only reason I bring this issue up is because I see this same sort of thing in religions. I am constantly bombarded by religious opinions that try to sell me their product, convince me to think they way they do, or more sinisterly try to change policies which ultimately have an affect on me. This is no different than any other business mind you, after all, cigarette companies spent millions of dollars advertising their products trying to convince everyone to smoke, the same way religions spend millions of dollars advertising their religion, trying to bring followers into their flock.

The problem as I see it, is that by the time someone is an adult they know smoking is bad for them and will choose not to smoke, and I believe the same is true for an adult faced with religion. Now remember, although I am using cigarettes as an example, this really applies to all established products sold by businesses. It is unlikely, a person who has spent his whole life as a Christian will see a mosque and think to himself that its now time to become a Muslim. I'm not saying that it's impossible, only that its unlikely. So it seems to me that advertising isn't meant for adults at all, but rather children, because it is children that are most susceptible to the power of suggestion.

I have spent some time in this article talking about indoctrination and how it is used to convince others into believing something that is completely unreasonable and nonsensical. The business of religion is designed to achieve maximum followers through the indoctrination of children by way of adults who have been indoctrinated as children, themselves. You may take particular offense to my insinuation of religion as a business, however I maintain this is a fact nonetheless. All of the organized religions around the world are funded by the patrons who flock into their buildings looking to buy the product that particular religion is offering.

Without the support of the people who have become indoctrinated into this faith, the religion would vanish, much like television shows that not enough viewers tune into each week to watch. The same is true of any product produced by any business throughout the world. If a business is unable to sell that product, it vanishes, or the business vanishes if that product is the only one being sold.

I recently shared an article on my Facebook that tells the story of a town in Missouri called Branson who has decided to spend five million dollars of public funds to build a two hundred foot cross for all to see, fitted with elevators of course, to allow its visitors to get closer to God. I must admit when I read this article, I thought it was a fake. It didn't make sense to me that anyone would spend five million dollars of government money on something that was religious based as it violates the principle of the constitutional separation of church and state.

Not only is this story true, but it seems everyone in Branson is okay with this colossal waste of funds. If the people of Branson, Missouri want to show a symbol of their Christian values, wouldn't five million dollars be better spent in trying to relieve some of the poverty there? Would it not be more useful to feed the poor, than to build a giant cross with elevators? If the people of Missouri feel so strongly about their faith that they want to show it, why not show it in a way that Jesus himself would respect? Christians are always asking what would Jesus do? So I ask you, what would Jesus actually do with five million dollars?

Would he build a giant cross, the symbol of his execution at the hands of the Romans, or would he take that money and feed the starving poor, help the disabled, sick or dying, and make many charitable contributions. Now I maintain that Jesus was not the son of any deity, and he probably wasn't any kind of saint, but if you believe the people who are suppose to follow his teachings and demonstrated by the words of a book they put so much faith in, Jesus' message was very clear. I maintain, that people who call themselves Christians would not truly wish to see the return of Jesus. If just such an event were to happen, I wonder what would Jesus think about the people who profess to follow his values, so much so, that they based an entire religion off of it and yet are unable to follow even the most basic of tenets.

Recently, a lot has been made of the issues of gay marriage in this country. I'd like to address a few things about how I feel about it in general. Let me first say that growing up I was led to believe that everyone was equal, this was both instilled in me by a moral upbringing and by the information I extracted from such documents as the Bill of rights and our U.S. Constitution, as well as examples of historical values offered by important people like Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. It is inconceivable that the issue of civil rights is still an issue at all, in the year 2012. The 14th amendment of the constitution of the United States says:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

This amendment is important because it guarantees any citizen of this country equal protection under the law. That means any laws that grant or prohibit a person's rights under the law, also grant and prohibit those same rights to everyone. Although many people associate civil rights with the plight of blacks during the 1960's, civil rights are defined as rights belonging to a person by reason of citizenship including especially the fundamental freedoms and privileges guaranteed by the 13th and 14th amendments and subsequent acts of Congress including the right to legal, social, and economic equality. For reference, the 13th amendment of the Constitution deals with the abolishment of slavery. So now that I have established that any person born in this country is guaranteed certain inalienable rights, it seems that if I can prove that marriage is governmentally recognizable by law, than marriage is already protected under the 14th amendment of our Constitution.

Marriage is something that has evolved over thousands of years. The first recorded evidence we have of marriage was around 2350 B.C. in Mesopotamia. Over the next several hundred years, the idea of marriage spread through cultures throughout the world, but not as an act of religion but rather as a display of property. You see in those days, a man might marry a woman as a sign that she was his property and that he could be assured that any children his spouse bared were, in fact, his children. I must also point out that during this time, the notion of one man and one woman did not exist at all, but rather men would be allowed to possess many wives, thus allowing him to father more children. Also daughters for instance, had value to a father, as they could be traded into marriage in exchange for goods. The notion of romance as a motivation for marriage would not even be considered for hundreds of years.

As Roman Catholicism spread throughout Europe, it became a necessity to gain the blessing of a priest in order to get married, and by the 8th century it was a widely accepted sacrament of the Catholic church. At the Council of Trent in 1563, the sacramental nature of marriage was written into canon law. Although marriage was still used as a way to bind a woman to a man, because the approval of the church was required to legally recognize such a marriage, women became a more valuable asset and church approval helped to improve the treatment of women in someways. Under church law, a man and woman could not be divorced, so it benefited a man to make his wife happy, in order to live and produce children with her. Marriage would remain much the same thing for hundreds of years.

Early settlers to America found that under a legal doctrine observed at the time called coverture, a woman could be granted certain protections by marrying a man, and the man would be granted stature by absorbing the identity of the woman's name into his, a practice that is still observed today by women who take their husband's last name. Now at some point in our history, marriages began to be recognized by our government as a way to bestow certain benefits and responsibilities on the interested participants.

These benefits include special tax rates, survivor benefits, next of kin benefits during emergency situations, inheritance rights, custodial rights to children, etc. The establishment of benefits for married couples means that the government recognizes them as a specific group of society granting them specific rights. As such, under the 14th amendment of the Constitution of the United States, anytime the government grants rights to a specific group of individuals, they must also grant them to everyone. That means under the 14th amendment homosexuals are already granted the right to marry legally in this country.

A government that recognizes the marriage of heterosexual couples must also recognize the marriage of homosexual couples, as a matter of law. Furthermore, the only way an argument for denying such rights could be made, is if the US government stopped recognizing the institution of marriage as a matter of law, disallowing all the benefits and responsibilities granted by the government, and disallowing state authorized marriage and only allowing the recognition of marriage by the church. As any such legislation would interfere in existing marriages both recognized by the state and by the church, such legislation is unlikely. I surmise that religious people everywhere faced with the loss of benefits granted to them by the government would suddenly change their view on gay marriage, affirming it to be a right that should be granted equally to everyone.

I must make special mention of a particular image I have seen that was shared to me on Facebook. It depicts two photographs in juxtaposition, one of some older people standing on court house steps holding signs in opposition of gay marriage, and another of an older image clearly taken during the 1960's of older people standing on court house steps holding signs in opposition of interracial marriage. The caption of the two photographs read: Imagine how stupid you are going to look in 40 years.

One of the comments of particular amusement to me, sighted that in 40 years, most of the people in that photograph will have died off. I realized looking at the photograph the commentary left was valid, most of those people would certainly be dead, and it got me thinking about what that really means. I wonder if we really change as a people over time, or is it more probable that bigots don't change but merely die off, leaving less and less of them to carry the cause. I wonder is progress not a matter of changing the minds of people, but rather just a matter of changing the people themselves? Do we as a society become less indifferent to change, as those around us with differing views simply pass on? This brings me to another thought, is the destruction of religion a foregone conclusion in a society that benefits from the technologies afforded to it by the science so many religious people currently rebuke? I believe it is. Although it is unlikely to be a change that happens anytime soon, I believe it is only a matter of time before just such a change happens.

The art of indoctrination relies on a few variables that must be met in order to properly subjugate someone into that religion. A person must be young enough that reason can be discarded in favor of irrationality, and older adults that such a young person might seek for guidance be already indoctrinated into that religion, reenforcing those irrational beliefs. Time is all that is needed at this point to force out critical thinking in favor of subjugation. However, although indoctrination was more easily achieved on children in a less technological world, the invention of advanced communications have allowed people to be linked together like never before.

This poses a serious risk to an indoctrinated subject like nothing before, because it allows that subject to be introduced to opposing thoughts, something that religion cannot allow, if it must maintain a grip on it's followers. We saw through the advancement of sciences like evolutionary biology, cosmology, physics and astronomy that we could teach our children in classrooms a more factual account of how we came to exist in this universe, an account that directly contradicts the teachings of the Christian bible so many have come to assume as fact. This of course has resulted in a protest of the teaching of the theory of evolution with a suggested replacement of creationism as an alternate theory of how we came to be.

As I have previously stated in this article, although the theory of evolution is generally accepted as a factual account of how life evolved over time, creationism lacks the foundation of scientific experimentation and observation that would allow it to be considered a theory that could ever be generally accepted, let alone even a hypothesis that requires a subject can be thoroughly tested. Charles Darwin spent many years painstakingly experimenting with many species looking for the biological changes that would point to evolution as a reason for those changes. It was through science that we have a deeper understanding of the origin of our species and not religion, which explains our existence in this world as a matter of supernatural hocus-pocus.

I find it disturbing that seemingly reasonable people put so much faith in the teachings of a book that is over 2,000 years old. I challenge anyone to find any book other than a religious one, where the information contained in that book, has not been dismissed or changed with the progression of society. What I find even more disturbing than the idea that people would take the information contained in the bible as fact, is the idea that most of these people can pick and choose what they want to accept as fact, and discard much of the rest of it as conjecture.

As I have pointed out before the bible is full of terribly violent and bigoted views. Views that include slavery, animal sacrifice, mass murder, violence toward women, including rape and of course hatred of homosexuality. Why is it that the religious have no problem discarding the passages that include such things as stoning to death women who marry without being virgins, stoning to death children who disobey their parents, declaring that a woman during her time of menstruation must be looked upon with disgust and hatred, a married woman who is raped must be stoned to death, and not only is slavery acceptable all through the old testament, but passages in the new testament show not only was Jesus aware of it, but accepting of it as well, as was customary at the time.

These passages can be discarded but the passages that mention homosexuality as a sin, those must be taken literally. How can we expect to be taken seriously as a nation of reasonable people when we discard all the passages where the bible clearly got it wrong and hold on to such a bigoted view of homosexuality based on a few passages in a book we have already determined is full of stuff we know to be wrong. Sam Harris describes so eloquently in his Letter to a Christian Nation:

"The Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong, the question of slavery. What chance is there that on an issue that is so complicated as human sexuality that it would get it wrong as well?"

I wonder, knowing all this what is a more reasonable conclusion, that homosexuality must treated with such hatred because it says so in the bible, or that we as humans are just easily swayed by the voice of hateful speech and bigotry that has pervasively made its way through the southern states where intolerance just seems to be second nature. Although, some might conclude the seeming alignment of Christianity and bigotry that runs throughout the south a mere coincidence, I point to over two hundred years of history in this country to show it is a pattern and not mere coincidence. Of course I am not so inclined to believe all southern people are religious, hateful, racist, bigots, with a predisposition to violence against groups, I am merely suggesting that there does seem to be some correlation between people in the south, Christianity, and hatred toward others. I am also not suggesting that inequality and racism are not found anywhere else in this country, only that it is found predominantly in the southern states.

I thought I would talk a little bit about morality because it seems to be somewhat of a hot topic for debate sometimes when talking with theists. I've had many discussions with the religious over the years and on many occasions morality is often referenced as something that would not exist if not for God. Now before I get into this on a more scientific level, I first want to say that morality has little to do with God, or Christianity in general. The idea that our morality can be dictated by a couple of stone tablets that an old man delivered to his people, as the rules that God set forth for all man kind to live by, is ludicrous.

If morality is so easily explained by a set of rules created over 2000 years ago, how can it be explained that perfectly happy people go about their lives with no need of God or religion and at the same time, harm no one? After all, if these rules are truly enforced by God and are only meaningful because people are afraid not to follow them, then by that rationale, Christians would all be good people and atheists would all be bad people. If the threat of eternal damnation has no meaning to me because I'm an atheist, then what keeps me from randomly killing people I see on the street? What stops me from dragging a child behind a dumpster, raping, torturing and murdering that child? One could argue that the government stops that, however, if that were true there would be no need for jails, since no crimes would be committed, fearing punishment from such a government.

The punishment from a government would certainly be more expedient than any such punishment you could receive from God, so why if the threat of government punishment is enough, are children raped and murdered everyday? This question would certainly have posed a problem for the leaders of any religion who's deity had rules against crime, and yet criminal activity continued. After all, how effective a religion can it be if your followers cannot even follow the rules set forth by the God they have sworn to follow? Many religions have solved this problem by declaring that all humans have free will.

Free will is defined as the power to act without the constraint of necessity or fate. The freedom to choose one's own actions, to self-determine. I don't want to spend too much time on the idea of free will, I recommend people read a book by Sam Harris called Free Will. The idea that humans have free will is illusory, our choices are dictated by brain chemistry. When faced with a fork in the road and the choice of going left or right, it would seem that such a choice would be a free one, after all, things being equal we have no idea what will happen if we choose one over the other, so nothing is truly influencing one choice over the other. It would make sense, that since either choice is a valid one, our choice to go right instead of left, is our choice.

The problem with that, is we assume there no delay in our choice to go right, and the time we consciously determine our course. We now know that this is simply not true at all. Neuroscientific research studies over the past few years have found that there is some delay between our actions and the time we become conscious of them. We seem to live in a world that is even crazier than one would imagine. The world you perceive is not happening in real-time as you might logically think, but everything is happening in a delay. Because of this delay, the brain is allowed to process thoughts and actions before choices are made, and it is because of this that free will is not really possible. By the time you consciously make a choice to touch the tip of your nose with your finger, the choice would have already been made by your brain, as to allow you the seamless transition between thought and action.

Because of this, it would seem that free will exists, but knowing that the action was decided before you even knew about it, then free will is merely an illusion. A simple test by researchers was done to disrupt the actions of a person, using magnets. When a powerful magnet is used on the brains of test subjects and they are asked to make a choice, the test subjects seemed unable to make this choice, or very often make the wrong one. What this shows is that our thought process, and our choices are merely a matter of biology and can be affected by environmental changes. Because of this, the idea of morality becomes less about some magic set of rules, and more about brain chemistry. Scientists studying the ventromedial prefrontal cortex have discovered the part of the brain that handles moral reasoning.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) done on patients who have suffered aneurisms in this region of the brain have shown defective reasoning skills when faced with moral dilemmas, again pointing to the idea of morality being chemical in nature, and not just some construct devised by man. The biggest problem with such findings are that this would seem to indicate that humans have no true moral responsibility at all, because if someone suffers brain damage or simply has a defect in that part of the brain, they are unable to make moral decisions, and are not responsible for their actions.

This could have serious consequences in how we treat criminals who have committed serious crimes against others, after all, if a person through no fault of their own has a defect in that region of the brain that causes poor moral reasoning, resulting in the harm of another person, how can we punish them as if the choice they made was really a choice at all? As Sam Harris points out, this does not mean sociopaths should not be segregated from society as a matter of common good. No one would conclude that even if an insane person was not responsible for committing a murder, by virtue of his insanity, that person should be set free upon the world, able to commit such a crime again.

I'd like to go over a few things from previous parts of my article merely as a matter of reiteration and a way to introduce a few other things as well.

In part one, I discuss some of the events of my childhood to show possible causal links to my choice as an atheist, but certainly not one that was made of free will of course. As I have pointed out the notion of free will as a reason to include or exclude choices is a completely illusory one. On this subject I will only say a few more words. Although our choices are our own, they are anything but freely made choices, and are determined by the same things that determine all aspects of our being. We are products of the chemistry that created our DNA and shaped by the events that have played out over the course of our lives. People who have read part one of my article seem horrified by some of its content, others religious in nature, seem to take the stance that religious loving homes are needed to produce religious loving humans.

I do not believe that it is necessarily true that religious homes, homes populated purely by religious families, are needed to produce religious children. Although it is certainly true that religious families tend to indoctrinate the children into their religion at a young age, and this certainly can determine the kind of belief system a person maintains throughout their life, I do not believe it is the only determining factor. I point out clearly in part one that I was introduced to religion at a young age. Both my parents maintained a religious view on things, both my grandparents maintained a religious view on things, my siblings and I were brought to a church to pray every week, and yet it is clear to me, none of that had any affect on my ability to make rational, reasonable decisions about my beliefs.

As I have pointed out, choices are all about brain chemistry, and surmise that had my brain had some kind of defect, a tumor, aneurism, malady, quite possibly it could have affected my ability to make a clear, rational choice about religion, and made it seem like a clear, rational choice. This statement will likely anger religious people who read this, so let me clarify, it is clear to me that decision making is a function of the brain and certainly one we have little true discretion in making, so while our choices again are our own, there is some component that is illusive to us, something that we cannot yet fully understand that determines why we choose the things we do, and why we don't choose the things we don't. And it is also clear to me that the scientific research we have done on this area of the brain shows environmental changes certainly affect the brain.

These changes can be things we can see like tumors, aneurisms, hematomas, medications, etc. but it is also likely true they are caused by things we cannot see, and as of yet cannot fully comprehend. I feel at this point that it is only fair to mention that some people do not find religion, until they feel the presence of God. And although I mention that we do not fully understand why the brain does the things it does, it seems slightly embarrassing to me, to believe that someone would choose to believe God made them religious, even if that choice was not consciously their own. I cannot even draw correlation to the suggestion in real world observations because it requires an act of supernatural magic to happen. The closest thing I can come to making sense of it is knowing wind is real completely based on feeling it hit you on a windy day.

And although this would seem to bolster religious belief, I must point out, wind exists whether we feel it or not, because we can test for it. We can make observations about it affects on the world. The existence of God is merely an assertion, not a hypothesis, and certainly not a theory.

I have received some criticism about the second part of my article because some religious people claim that a message of criticism is more easily swallowed if you are less critical. This to me is both contradictory and disingenuous. True criticism must be taken as much as it is given. If a religious person feels satisfactory in his criticism of atheism, he should also feel equally satisfactory with criticism of his religion. This of course doe not accurately depict reality. I challenge anyone to find too many atheists who strongly rebuff criticism about their disbelief of religion as much as any religious person does about their belief in religion.

Although I am certainly critical of the bible as I have expressed in detail in this article, I believe the criticisms are valid ones. Science should be equally criticized as religion and I am certainly one who does this when I see reason to do so. Not all science is right, nor should it be. Science is about exposing possibilities through how we observe our universe, it is not about making assumptions and asserting them to be true. When science makes mistakes, even if it appears to have been true based on the knowledge that was used to determine it at the time, it changes. Religion has remained the same because it does not have to play by the same rules. Religion relies entirely on a belief in an assertion that God exists, he made rules everyone must follow, he wrote a book that everyone must read, and to contradict this means eternal punishment.

Nothing about that allows for interpretation, and nothing about it can be refuted if you are a believer, because refuting any of it certainly means eternal punishment. Now as I have pointed out before, only the true fundamentalists belief in sticking to the doctrine as it is in written and taught to them. It is my belief most religious people today are progressive, sticking to the belief in God, but also believing that where the bible contradicts something about how they live, they ignore it. This I believe is how Christian homosexuals who still believe in God are able to keep that belief intact even in the face of a religion that seems bent on destroying them. The bible does truly state that homosexuality is an abomination, and although I dismiss such things as nonsense, being an atheist, I imagine a Christian who has come to realize he or she is homosexual, has some difficulty with it at first.

In some of part two I spent time talking about the games I played as a youth. I talked about how I played Dungeons and Dragons and a game called Magic the Gathering, both of which feature imaginary worlds filled with magic and magical creatures. As I explained, it made little sense to me that anyone who believed in the imaginary things already, would find it so offensive to enjoy entertainment that involved the imaginary. I realized of course that to the religious, their beliefs are not imaginary, and of course any depiction of imaginary things juxtaposed against the imaginary world of religious beliefs would show nonsensical correlation.

Now to be fair I must point out that many religious people allow their children to believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, and are able to separate them from religion without too much trouble. And although the belief in Santa Claus and God are clearly both delusional, it must also be made clear that although children outgrow their belief in Santa Claus, a belief in God lingers. The reason for this is clearly one of parental and societal affirmation. A parent who finds their child losing faith in Santa Claus is less inclined to stop it, than a parent who finds their child losing faith in God. As a child, I was one of the deluded who believed in Santa Claus until I found my mother asleep on the couch in our living room on Christmas morning, wrapping paper scattered about, and covered by the scooters that my younger brother and I had asked Santa Claus for Christmas.

It made little sense to me that my mother would be covered by wrapping paper that Santa Claus had used to wrap all of our presents, after all, wouldn't Santa Claus have had to have all the presents wrapped ahead of time in order to be able to deliver them on time. Having wrapped a few presents myself at that age I knew that the process could be somewhat lengthy and this made me very suspect of the whole situation. My mother was nice and tried to assert that Santa Claus had left her wrapping paper so she could wrap the presents she wanted to give us. I imagine that had my mother been more convincing, I might have believed in Santa Claus at least another year, but alas that was the end of that delusion.

The bible is full of contradictory information, contradictions about the world and the universe around us that are based on the beliefs of a culture who made observations about the world they lived in without the ability to test them at the time the book was written. A little over a hundred years ago, our belief about the universe was that we lived in the center of the universe surrounded by a galaxy of stars and nothing beyond it existed, based entirely on what we were able to observe.

But innovations in telescopic technologies along with advanced mathematics and a new understanding of gravity, allowed us to see farther than we had before, and contrary to our original observation of the universe, it was full of galaxies and full of stars. Our cultural beliefs are also dictated by observational changes, trends that change how we feel about things. At one time in our history we believed that blacks were worth 3/5 a person, and women were inferior to men in every way, but observations proved that such contentions were dubious at best, and ultimately changes in our social attitudes allowed us to recognize our fallible intentions and rectify them. Reasoning and rational thought are culturally pervasive, if they were not, we still might be living in the dark ages, or staring up at the sky wondering what those shiny things are above us.  It is clear to me that fundamentalist followers are a minority and that gives me hope that one day reason will win out over ignorance, but I do not believe this will happen in my lifetime, and that fills me with sadness as well.

My intention with part two of this article was show how contrary information about what I was told and what I could observe ultimately helped lead me to atheism, but I still have doubts as to whether we are truly steering the ship that is our mind, or if it's truly steering us. There is certainly consciousness, Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. The idea of the “I” being the one thinking, therefore “I” must exist to have the thought. There has been much debate about this and I do not really want to go into it in great detail, whether we know what “I” really means or not, it matters not to the question of whether we exist in this conscious construct within our minds.

No one can say for sure where thought comes from, except that it certainly comes from our brain, but what process is in place that allows chemicals to become something more than chemistry alone? Sam Harris has suggested the idea that thoughts are merely constructed because if not, then for what reason does the mind exist at all? We have all experienced and continue to experience the thought process at work, suddenly without any reason at all, something will simply pop into your mind, seemingly out of no where. Now whether we understand it or not, something we may never really know, it happens, and it happens inside the brain and because of this it is certainly a product of biological and chemical nature at work.

Furthermore, it happens for a reason, even if we do not understand that reason, it happens nonetheless. Natural selection dictates that the things that exist in nature exist for a reason, and those with no purpose or having once served a purpose and no longer do, are discarded. So the notion of the self and the existence of consciousness exist for a reason, and the ubiquitous nature of thoughts also exist for a reason, and our innocence in this regard is merely a matter of ignorance to the inner workings of the brain.

I was surprised by the kind of response I received to part three, as it seemed to be mostly positive in nature, even from those who consider themselves religious. Surprised, because I depicted beliefs in the supernatural as nothing more than delusions, and even though they surely are, I was pleasantly surprised to learn so many were okay with that. I wanted to show that much of what makes us who we are is a matter of brain function. Our brains are truly amazing organs and although the religious might see this as an opportunity to point out how great God is he gave us such an amazing brain, I find it more amazing that a complex organ like the human brain can be useful as proof of the process of evolution.

People who ignore this, are also the people who don't really take the time to understand that the human brain is really three brains working harmoniously together expeditiously. The Cerebrum,  which spans much of the cerebral cortex is responsible for the all the things that make us human, all those traits which allow us to differ from much of the other animals on Earth. The Cerebrum surrounds the other parts of the brain, the Cerebellum and Brain Stem. The Cerebellum, a more basic mammalian part of the brain, controls the functions that allow us to voluntarily move about and maintain balance in our environment. The Brain Stem, located in the center part of the brain surrounded by the rest of the brain, controls our most basic of functions, those which keep us alive, this part is referred to the R-Complex or reptilian part of the brain.

Working backwards peeling away the layers of the brain, one can easily see how the human brain could have evolved over time from the most basic primitive organ to the most complex one used to not only control the functions of our lives, but give us meaning and reason to exist. The idea of human ego is an important one because it allows us to conceptualize our own existence, even if we don't yet comprehend it. It sets us apart from the other animals on this planet who go about their lives much like we do, never truly knowing they have a place in this universe.

My attempt was to show that much of what we are is packed into that skull located on top of our body, and although the world exists whether we are here to observe it or not, our observations of it and the universe around it are clearly dictated by how it is perceived by our brains. Perception is everything, without an ability to see, hear, touch, taste, or smell the world around us, would we even know it existed at all? If a baby boy were taken from its mother and put in a 12' x 12' x 12' dark room, and left with an inexhaustible supply of food and water, and somehow this child were able to survive, when he reached adulthood his perception of the world would be that its a small dark room. Even though the world is clearly a much larger place, from his perception, its a 12' x 12' x 12' room. The food and water he needs to survive simply exists as if by magic, and he believes he is the only person in the entire world. However, because he is human, he would know he exists, and wonder what purpose his existence serves in this world of his.

Delusions of course come from the mind, the same as our dreams, the difference being delusional people believe the imaginary things they perceive. Delusional people don't necessarily have to believe their dreams are real of course, only that whatever delusion they experience differs from everything else they know to be imaginary. Remember that delusions are merely imagined beliefs someone perceives to be true. What I find most fascinating is that we treat delusional people for mental illness when they believe they see and hear something as silly as an invisible man who speaks to them and tries to influence their decisions, but we look the other way if that invisible man just happens to be God? Knowing that the only difference between the delusions of a mentally ill person and your belief in God happen to be such a small thing, what is the likelihood that God is merely the product of your imagination much like the invisible man is to the mentally ill person?

Although it is impossible to survive as a brain alone without all the other functional organs that make up your body, if it were possible, you would still be you, because your brain is you and you are your brain.

Understanding that the same brain chemistry that allows mentally ill patients to see invisible people, or talk to space aliens using a clarinet, is the same brain chemistry that allows a person to hear the voice or feel the presence of God. It is the same brain chemistry that allows our thoughts to become words or actions and dictate our moral choices. Our brain chemistry is responsible for all the discoveries and inventions that have ever come to pass from fire to spacecraft. Knowing all this, I find difficulty understanding when people take issue with things like homosexuality, because the same chemistry responsible for giving a person sexual preference is the same brain chemistry that gives a person their imaginary God.

A homosexual has little to do with choosing who they are sexually attracted to, much like a religious person has little choice in being delusional. Now before homosexuals take particular indifference to my comparison of their sexual preference to delusions, understand that my comparison isn't in the things themselves, but rather the chemistry that is certainly responsible for the brain to function as it does.

In part four of this article I wanted to give creationists a reason to believe something other than creation as a source for the existence of everything. Creationists are stuck in a very real quandary, balancing their belief in the bible as the word of God, and what they know to be true based on observational evidence. Creationists have a lot of reasons why they believe evolution is incorrect, but they have very little evidence and that poses a problem to the human brain, which through evolutionary development, seems destined to question everything.

I can only imagine what it must be like to try and convince yourself that the things you observe cannot be true, and simultaneously convince yourself the things you cannot observe must me true. I decided to fore go discussing the continuing contradictions and issues I have with religion, to instead give a short lesson on how the universe and life might actually work. Again for the most part, my lesson was well received by the people who have read it and although some of it seems extraordinary, when we look at the universe and the world we live in, these are the things that we observe to be true.

Can science ever truly be sure about how things work, not really, because science is only there to give us the best possible answers based on experimentation and the observations we can make. A scientist who tells you he knows for sure how everything came to be, is a scientist who is not being truthful to science. That is precisely the difference between a scientist and a religious person, a scientist is unsure of how everything came to be, and a religious person is absolutely sure about how everything came to be. The mantra of science is “Question everything.” The mantra of religion is “Question nothing, believe only what you have been told.”

I began this part of the article talking about religion and advertising and moved into a discussion of equality. I left much of my thoughts on equality until this last part because I believe it is so divisive an issue that to bring up a serious discussion of it earlier meant less people might read what I have to say later, but hopefully the people who have stuck around until the end can put aside their divisive nature to allow me to actually get to the end.

I began my life as a Christian, at least the evidence I have suggests that this is accurate. I was raised by Christians who themselves were raised by Christians, but I am not a Christian. If I believe that my choices, however much they seem to be mine, are not truly my own, but rather the machinations of a mind that thinks for me, as must be true, if the thought must first be processed by the mind in order to become that thought I consciously have, then all of us are really riding a roller coaster with no knowledge about its destination.

I must admit the proposition of such a thing does seem to be scary, but when you consider the very nature of the universe, it seems perfectly aligned with everything else. Now you can choose to believe God magically pooped you into existence if you like, and none of this makes any difference to you, if you do. But if you take a moment and realize the universe is the way it is, because it is the way it is, then it makes sense that we too are simply the way we are, because we are the way we are. Once you realize this, the differences between us are meaningless and there are no differences, not really. We all came from the same place, we all exist for the same reasons and our brains are chemically all the same. The subtle stuff, that's the stuff people seem to get hung up on, and the stuff responsible for the hatred, bigotry, and violence throughout the world.

I know that I have spent most of my time discussing Christianity as a source of particular issue, but let me be clear, religion in general is the issue and my reason for choosing Christianity as a source for discussion has more to do with my knowledge in this area and an admitted ignorance of some other religions. Although the Islamic religion is certainly filled with nonsense as much as Christianity, I find that much of what I know of this religion comes not from personal experience, but from the perceptions of other people.

I have taken the time to read some passages of the Quaran, and from what I've read, much like the Bible it disturbs me. Of particular note, pedophilia seems rampant in the Quaran, something that is not really found in the Bible, and although the Bible is full of violence as is the Quaran, the message I took from the Quaran was one that was more accepting of violence toward non-believers, something Jesus was against. I confess I didn't read the Quaran back to front, nor would I want to, I can't imagine anyone wanting to read through that much nonsense. For all I know, the Quaran contains as many messages about love as it does about hate, but I am unable to speak on such things, as practically every passage I read involved violence.

I live my life like a scientist, I make observations about the world I live in, and everything I know tells me that God does not exist. And the best argument I can make for disbelief is that it would be simple for God to prove he exists. If God was able to to create the universe and the world and everything in it in a few days, than how hard is it to leave us some kind of evidence that points to his existence?

I can hear all the religious people right now, “What about trees? Only God can make a tree.” It's that kind of nonsense that pisses off most atheists more than anything. I want irrefutable proof of his existence, which should be easy, and yet when we look everywhere we find nothing that cannot be explained by scientific alternatives. I know that dinosaurs existed because we have a fossil record that dates back 540 million years, which is irrefutable proof that the Bible depiction of a world that is only 6,000 years old is false. If such evidence exists that disproves the accounts of religious doctrine, why does no such evidence exist as prove of it? Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one, and in this case the simplest explanation is no such evidence exists.

I have been told that one day God will appear to me and prove that I am wrong. If I am wrong, I invite God to disprove me. I must admit however, that seeing God will most likely make me believe I am simply delusional, and seek treatment to aid me. Perception is not always reality, but reality is perception. Just because I can see something or hear something no one else can, does not make it reality. And should God appear to me as I have been told by many religious people, he will still need to prove to me that he exists, and I am old and weary of magic tricks.


"I would challenge anyone here to think of a question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one." - Sam Harris

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