Here’s a nice video for you late risers that is part of a complete breakfast: Hitchens being asked if the prospect of death has caused him to “rethink” his position on the “afterlife”. His response is both eloquent, and satisfyingly vulgar. Enjoy!
Sam Harris vs William Lane Craig
William Lane Craig is perhaps one of the few powerful debaters left on the side of zombie Jesus, so I strongly recommend you listen to what he has to say and determine for yourself how wrong he is about the concept of God being the superior objective moral standard.
My 2 cents? Is something good only because God determines it to be good? If there is a definite moral objectivity, how is unquestioning authority a solution to this? If he admits morality changes over time, then how does this reflect the image of a never changing God?
The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 196
This week, to celebrate the return of Bonus Shows, we recorded another Bible Stories featuring that old Biblical patriarch, Abraham. It’s a great show you won’t want to miss
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The Evolution Handbook is a joke
Today’s creationist idiot is different from his forebears. For starters, he is far more cognizant of science, and often appropriates very select information that confirms his crackpot theories. He desperately wants the legitimacy of science without actually having to do any.
The latest loon is the author of a “book” entitled “The Evolution Handbook“, written by a young-earth creationist by the name of Vance Ferrell. The majority of it is available online, and you can get an idea from the introduction what he intends to “prove”:
The scientific facts presented here will help insulate you from the desolating effects of evolutionary theory.
Yes, please insulate me from knowledge!
Life evolution is founded on the twin theories of spontaneous generation and Lamarckism (the inheritance of acquired characteristics);—yet, although they remain the basis of biological evolution, both were debunked by scientists over a century ago.
Lamarkism? Is this guy stuck in the 19th century or something? For those of you unfamiliar with this long ago debunked evolutionary idea, it proposed that species would pass on traits that it had developed during its lifetime. In other words, if an animal lived somewhere cold, it would “evolve” a fur coat and pass on this trait to the following generation.*
As for spontaneous generation, I think this fool may have it confused with abiogenesis. Regardless, despite some few hundred pages of absolute drivel, Vance can’t get over the fact that the origins of the Universe are still very mysterious. He seems entirely focused on the fact the Cosmos may have originated from nothing, and then becomes incensed this must somehow mean the Big Bang is impossible. His solution is, of course, far more ludicrous: a bearded entity created everything the way it is less than 10,000 years ago. The proof? Science is wrong, that’s why!
He offers a brief overview of every creationist scientist who agrees with him, and as you might have guessed, most of them perished before your grandparents were even born! That’s when all the good science got done, right?
The most telling chapter of all is one entitled “Evolution, Morality, and Violence” which claims that evolutionary science is ruining modern civilization:
Evolution is nihilistic in regard to morals. First, the clear implication is that people are just animals, so there is no right or wrong. Second, it teaches that all evolutionary progress has been made by some at the expense of others.
Ah yes, I can still remember the good old days before people started to study evolution. Black people lived freely and without fear of lynching. Women were treated with respect and dignity. Minorities were celebrated for their diversity and unique contributions to society. Yes, in my deluded mind all of these wonderful things happened until the wickedness of science destroyed our peaceful utopia.
Enjoy yourself while this complete fuckwad tries to convince you all the best science in the world points to a 10,000 year old earth!
*Interestingly enough, Lamarkism has seen a kind of resurgence with the field of epigenetics (some genes can become dormant or expressed depending on certain environmental conditions, although this theory is still in its infancy). So perhaps there is something to the theory after all!
The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 195
This week, Carisa joins me as we talk about Christopher Hitchen’s autobiography, what freedom of speech entails, and 4 hilarious ‘proofs’ of God’s existence.
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Pharmacists in Illinois can refuse Morning-After Pill
Did you know that of all the states in the Union, none played a bigger role in the birth of the nuclear age than Illinois (the first sustained nuclear reaction took place at the University of Chicago)? I found that out when I was trying to do a little research about it. Needless to say, the above headline made me shake my head in disbelief.
As the fifth largest state, it’s often considered a microcosm for the rest of America, and if that’s the case, I have some pretty grim news. Turns out a circuit judge recently ruled that pharmacists can refuse to sell women the “morning-after” pill based on their religious objections.
“The judge’s decision makes clear that religious people don’t have to give up their religion, don’t have to check their conscience at the door, to enter the health care profession,” Rienzi said.
Actually, you do need to check your nonsensical beliefs when you’re part of the medical profession, buddy. What’s next; someone refusing to perform surgery because the patient is gay? Religious faith has no fucking business in medicine, and access to contraception is a vital health service that has nothing to do with people’s religious convictions. Let’s hope the state attorney has some success fighting this bullshit, otherwise I might advise every young woman from that state to pack your bags and get ready to move somewhere that isn’t still living in the 19th century.
Interview with Jessica Ahlquist
Yesterday I posted a video of Jessica and her fight with Cranston West High School in Rhode Island over a prayer banner she sued to have removed. I thought she was so brave for doing this she deserved to have her interview posted, especially after I noticed that it only received 30 views so far. Surely we can do better, people!
Conservative Christians are hypocrites
When it comes to the right to practice their religion the way they see fit – which includes complaining whenever they aren’t allowed to openly discriminate against gays – Conservative Christians take that shit pretty seriously. Unfortunately, they’re also a bunch of annoying hypocrites who think every other religion is dangerous idolatry, even when it’s a bunch of innocent people dressing up like characters from Star Wars or Lord of the Rings:
Fans dressed as Wookies and vampires will be among the throng to hear passages from those bibles of fantasy The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter at a “Sci-Fi and Fantasy Friendly Church Service”.
But traditionalists have slammed the service’s irreverence and lack of emphasis on scripture…”I don’t have a problem with people enjoying sci-fi, but church isn’t the place to encourage escapism and fancy dress,” Mentone Baptist minister Murray Campbell said.
Wow. So your average church service, complete with a dude in a dress waving around burning incense and encouraging his flock to pray to an imaginary being, doesn’t encourage escapism and fancy dress, huh? Take a look in the mirror, morons. If you weren’t so used to all the weird stuff you do to please your vengeful God, you’d think it was just as ridiculous as the rest.
While the service is meant to introduce more people to Christianity, I think at the end of the day everyone coming out of this kind of service will realize it’s all just a bunch of fairytale nonsense. What better way to erode faith than to show how common and utterly played-out these stories are. If you think the story of Jesus is original, you’re just lucky modern copyright law wasn’t around at the time, otherwise the early Church fathers would have been sued by the Egyptians, Babylonians, and every other culture they blatantly plagiarized.
Moron thinks atheists would believe in God given enough “stress”
Have you ever felt as though everyone who isn’t a non-believer has absolutely no idea what it means to be an atheist? It seems like every other day some idiot starts pretending to know how we think, or why we’ve rejected the fanciful notions of madmen. The latest “guy who thinks he knows what the fuck he’s talking about” is Raj Raghunathan, who argues (in his pathetic article entitled “When the going gets tough, the atheist goes praying”) that all atheists are essentially pampered intellectuals who would run crying back to the fold of religion if the shit ever hits the fan:
Put differently, everyone–even the most hardcore atheists, I think–will start believing in God if put under a high amount of stress. Think of the last time you prayed to God, and I will bet that, for many of you (whether you generally classify yourself as an atheist or not), it would have been when you were under stress. For most of us so-called atheists, when things go horribly wrong, we think of God.
What the fuck is this moron talking about? When I feel “stressed”, the last thing that pops into my mind is “gee, I better pray to some kind of anthropomorphic God rather than try and solve my own problems”. It’s just another version of the argument there are “no atheists in foxholes”, something that’s been proven time and time again to just be baseless religious propaganda.
What this theory suggests, then, is that whether you believe in God is not as much a matter of how smart or educated you are, but rather, a matter of whether life has worked out in a way that makes you feel comfortable enough to be an atheist.
So according to this clown, if you’re an atheist it’s because your life has been too easy, and you haven’t had the need for the comfort of a deity. This would suggest that non-belief has nothing to do with intellectual integrity. Instead, your own thoughts about the existence, or non-existence of God is based mostly on how miserable your life is.
This means that no one is a complete atheist or, for that matter, a complete believer in God. Each of us has a propensity to be somewhere on that continuum. And even a hardcore atheist may exhibit belief in God if he feels his life is sufficiently broken.
So, if your life turned to shit, you would abandon your ideals and proceed immediately to believe in the immaculate conception of Jesus, or the many arms of Vishnu. Seriously? This reminds me of just how poorly we atheists are understood by outsiders.
I could argue, fact-free in the same manner that Raj does, that stress and misery would actually make someone cease to believe in God. After all, how could the death of a loved one, or some other cruel tragedy that befalls them, not convince a believer that his loving God was merely the figment of an overactive imagination?
I also find it interesting that for someone with a PhD in Marketing who fancies himself an expert in psychology (he says he took some classes in it while studying for his degree), he seems completely unaware of the notion he’s presented no facts to support his conclusion. He confuses correlation with causation (in his confused attempt to link life comfort with atheism), and he offers only his personal experience as evidence atheists are simply one tragedy away from coming back into the fold of religion. He seems completely unaware of people who have tried, in vain, to believe in a personal God. That would probably require a little research on his side, but it’s obvious from his content-free article he’s already made up his mind ahead of time, and any evidence to the contrary be damned.
Might I suggest you stick with trying to sell people shit they don’t need, buddy? You can also check out another great rebuke here.
Mike Huckabee is a nutjob
Behind his easy smile and non-threatening demeanor, Mike Huckabee is the worst kind of politician: he believes the Constitution should be amended to better “reflect” his own Biblical values. He sees religion as a primary source of both law and morality, and he even believes only those with a “Biblical world-view” should be governing:
He said that the kind of “Biblical worldview” taught at SCS [Statesville Christian School] was in the direction of unmitigated equality.
“I’d love the world to be lead by people who have a Biblical worldview,” he said.
“Wouldn’t it be an exciting thing to have leaders who believe all of us are equal?” he later asked.
Would this be the same “equality” that justified slavery for so many centuries? I wonder. In any case, his notion that leaders who have faith in the Bible would somehow hold hands and sing “kumbaya” is a joke: how many countries have gone to war over their own interpretations of the “good book”?
Huckabee also said when he grew up (in the town of Hope, Ark., in the late 1950s and 1960s), folks were more open about their faith
During the 1950′s and 60′s, his Baptist brethren were still lynching black people and making them drink from separate water fountains. If anyone should have been ashamed of their beliefs, it should have been them.
Huckabee said part of such a worldview as is taught at Statesville Christian is the idea of absolutism that rejects moral objectivism and stipulates that some things “are always right” and others “are always wrong”.
Well, here’s a simple test of morality: if there is always an absolute right and an absolute wrong, then how would his great-grandparents feel about slavery being abolished? Why did our collective attitude about this “time honored” practice change if morality is absolute?
Catholic Church fights against statute of limitation for sex abuse
Is anyone really surprised by this headline? Considering the fact that the Catholic Church has always exploited the fact there exists a statute of limitation for child rape, it’s really no surprise they are fighting a number of bills that would eliminate this convenient legal loophole. What worried them the most is the fact that victims could now sue offending priests retroactively, and this has the Church shitting bricks.
Michael C. Culhane, spokesman for the Connecticut Catholic Conference, testified last year that changing the rules retroactively was not fair. “We therefore request that any changes be prospective and not have any retrospective effect,” Culhane said in 2010.
So not fair! Think about all those molesters that could be brought to justice after they were so careful not to get caught in the time allotted. It’s almost like giving someone a cookie and then taking it away before they get to take a bite. Oh the humanity!
Bye asked Culhane why no other institution, beyond the church, had any problem with the bill. Culhane said he did not know why.
I think I can venture a guess: the systematic cover-up on every level of the church would make many high ranking officials also culpable of these crimes. It’s more than just the abuse going on: it’s also the effort of the Church to shield these evil men from prosecution, and this is what the Church fears.
United Nation fail
When I was a younger ideologue, I used to think the the United Nation was a force for good in the world, providing aid and protection to citizens of countries ravaged by war, famine, and instability. I have since realized this institution is a bloated corpse, capable only of furthering the interests of the few countries who have a permanent seat on the security council. If anyone else in the UN decides to do anything at all to try and improve the world, they usually allow racist, bigoted countries the right to reduce the protection of sexual minorities, or even defend religious violence by declaring no one is allowed to speak out against them. That’s according to Staffan di Mistura, Special Representative and Chief of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of offending culture, religion, traditions, especially when there are so many of us, both civilians and frankly military, in many parts of the world and particularly in Afghanistan. So I think the main blame we have is about the irresponsible gesture that was made on that case. The proof is that those who entered our building were actually furiously angry about the issue about the Koran. There was nothing political there.”
So Staffan, what the fuck is left? If freedom of speech doesn’t include “offending” religious traditions, am I left with only the ability to criticize politics? What am I supposed to do when the two are invariably intertwined, especially when it comes to Islam??
Freedom of speech means people are allowed to offend others. That’s kind of the point. Without the ability to offend, free speech has no teeth and it’s completely ineffectual. Whether it’s burning a Koran or a Bible, people should be able to say what they want when they want. Without this ability, how can we even be sure we live in a just society?
20 year old bigot thinks he speaks for God
Don’t you just love how Christians, convinced they are humble and meek, claim to speak for God? Even if such an entity did exist, why does this 20 year old dummy think he’s qualified to speak on “his” behalf? How is that not the height of arrogance?
“God makes Kings, and the rules by which they govern”. Hey kid, we actually rejected the notion of kings for the stifling, freedom killing bastards they were. Of course, if it was up to you and your buddies, we’d still be living under the yoke of dictators, albeit celestial ones.
Penn: Agnostics suck!
I agree that agnosticism is annoying as hell, especially those that start accusing non-believers of being dogmatic. Yeah, because rejecting a poorly constructed cosmogony means that you have a closed mind…How about showing me some fucking proof? That’s all we want. Until then, my own agnosticism will remain open to the possibility of someone showing evidence of an all powerful entity, and that’s about it.
Only criticism: the back and forth camera shit makes me dizzy, honestly.
An Atheist Bible?
In general, I find atheists need a unifying tome about as much as men need nipples. I’m of the opinion that to properly educate yourself on morality, ethics and philosophy, you need more than what a single book can provide; you need a lifetime of education, thought and what some would call “soul searching”; the act of reflecting on one’s actions.
Our general dislike of sacred tomes hasn’t bothered Professor AC Grayling, the president of the British Humanist Association. He’s recently written an “atheist bible” in the hopes of providing a useful, overarching guide for non-believers:
Without any reference to gods, souls or afterlives, it [the book] aims to give atheists a book of inspiration and guidance as they make their way in the world.
I’ll reserve my judgement until after I’ve read it, but I generally dislike this sort of publicity. It lends credence to the idea people need “manuals” for living their lives. Some of the most contemptible people in history have lived according to such doctrine, and I like atheism specifically BECAUSE we don’t bother with that nonsense. Still, I did like the comment of one religious commentator:
You might think that Christians would find such a book an insult to their own Good Book, but not Rev Dr. Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral.
If anything, however, Rev Dr. Fraser believes that The Good Book is a bit tame, a little “cheesy”, in comparison with the “full-blooded version”.
Yeah, it’s cheesy when you don’t have stories about rape, incest, murder and genocide, right? Now that’s the “full-blooded” shit we should all be reading!