Ladies, it’s time to celebrate! For decades, I’ve been reporting on the sad fact that more men were declaring themselves as atheists than women. For a while, there was tons of speculation as to why this was the case. The best hypothesis at the time was that women tend not to want to upset the “apple cart”, and that religions often carried a traditions and customs that many women were typically responsible for maintaining.

Well, it looks like this theory is complete bullshit, as a recent poll in the United States has shown that women are now on average less religious than men. This follows a recent trend of men and women becoming more and more separated in their political affiliation. Essentially, men are becoming more conservative as women become more liberal. The overall effect on couples is that we now live in a time with the lowest marriage and intimacy rates in the history of mankind. It’s a strange time to be alive, that’s for sure.

I think part of the reason for this discrepancy is the impact that religion has had on women’s lives recently. The repeal of Roe vs Wade, and the decision in Alabama to treat embryos as children has sent a pretty clear message to women: you are breeding stock, and your body is not your own. It seems as though the response from women has been simple: ditch the religion responsible for making your life miserable.

The good news for us atheist guys is that it should be getting easier to find a girl that won’t insist that you teach your kids about sky daddy. I can’t tell you how hard it was in the early days of atheism to actually find a non-religious girl. Now it seems they are everywhere! We just need the balls to actually ask them out. Hey, one thing at a time, and I right?

Religion has certainly lost its luster. Slowly but surely, people have been abandoning organized religion in droves in the western world. The combination of sex abuse scandals, and the ability to research the claims of the church has created an information was that religion is losing. It’s gotten to the point where those that profess no religion are now the majority of the population. In less than 2 decades, we went from being 16% of the population to 28%. That’s a few percentage more than the evangelical population. Let that sink in for a second.

There are a few consequences for not being affiliated with a church, and some of it is not ideal. For instance, the “Nones” say they have less of a connection to their community. That’s because there hasn’t yet been something to replace it. Eventually we might figure it out. For now, religious people can boast this one benefit we still lack.

The only sad news is that the movement is still predominantly white, and male. We’ve always known that this group was always prominent in the community. It had been hoped that there had been some improvement, but it still looks like there’s a lot of work to be done, especially in Black and Hispanic communities.

The other thing to note is that despite now being a majority, they have yet to exercise their political power, due mainly to the fact that they do not show up at the polls:

However, Smith points out that Nones are also less civically engaged than those who identify with a religion – they’re less likely to vote. So, while they identify as Democrats, getting them to the polls on election day may prove to be a challenge.

Now, part of the blame does lie in the apathy of voters. However, the other part of the blame goes to both parties who have been unable to find a way to reach this group, too frightened that doing so might alienate their base. Considering how massive this population is, it’s a mistake to ignore them, especially as this number is bound to keep growing.

Normally when you think of St. Patrick’s Day, images of green beer, girls in t-shirts that say “kiss me, I’m Irish”, and drunken revelers usually pop into your head. Over the decades since we’ve been ‘observing’ these liver destroying traditions, the religious elements of the holiday have generally fallen to the wayside, replaced instead with a party to celebrate the fact that Irish people exist. Hey, I’m part Irish, so I totally approve!

What I don’t approve of, however, is this recent story: an atheist group in Kansas City has been denied permission to participate in the parade for the simple reason that they aren’t religious. Here’s the statement they released to the press:

Kansas City’s parade celebrates the Feast Day of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, and the Christian teachings and beliefs that he lived and suffered for. The Atheist Coalition’s published mission is to advance godlessness through activism, and its stated intent regarding the 2013 parade was to carry banners with phrases such as “positively godless” and “morals without mythology.” It was with respect for the legacy of St. Patrick that the parade committee turned down the Atheist Coalition’s application to participate in this year’s procession. “

Is this the new excuse to prevent us from participating in public activities? Out of ‘respect’ for dead saints that have almost nothing to do with the modern, secular version of the holiday? If they somehow have a problem with the fact that St. Patrick was a Christian, why are those Christ-killing Jews allowed to come? I would think St. Patrick would have a pretty big problem with those guys. And what about Protestants? Do they count? Should Italians not be allowed in the parade because ancient Romans enslaved the poor guy?

So, despite assurances from organizers that this isn’t a state sponsored religious event, they seem intent on not allowing any ‘godless’ messages to be seen or heard, and that should tell you all you need to know about whether or not it is a religious celebration to these people.

Here’s hoping the kind of national attention they receive teaches them a lesson about messing with atheists. We own the Internet, bitches!

As much as we Canadians make fun of Americans (yes, I am a Canuck, people), the truth is that our own country isn’t really that much better when it comes to religious interference in government. With the Conservative party in power, it seems as though they are intent on copying the American model: in other words, they wish to turn this country into a mini-sectarian state in order to please their highly religious base. They’ve tried (rather unsuccessfully I might add) to re-open the abortion debate, until most Canadians flipped out and it was quietly dropped.

Still, it doesn’t mean the government is done trying to spend our valuable tax dollars spinning their wheels for the sake of religion. Enter the newly created “Office of Religious Freedom”, a kind of Orwellian sounding institution with a mandate so foggy, no one is actually sure what the fuck it’s actually supposed to do. Everyone seems to agree, however, that atheists are not invited to the freedom party:

A particularly bizarre media preoccupation was what the ORF would do for atheists. It is an interesting intellectual exercise — like how the minister of sport might serve the aggressively sedentary — but rather beside the point when actual mosques are bombed, or when Christians have to hold midnight Mass in the daytime where it is too dangerous to go to Mass after dark. People are being killed for their faith, Canada’s government is sounding the alarm, and the national media is preoccupied with questions only relevant in the highly secular circles that consider religious liberty akin to the freedom to choose one hobby over another.

In other words, he says if you aren’t into God, you can’t be part of his little reindeer games. Never mind that there are at least 7 countries in the world where being an atheist is a crime punishable by death: Mosques are being bombed, so obviously, non-believers don’t matter! It’s this kind of false dichotomy that makes my blood boil. It’s not as though any non-believers are denying the fact sectarian conflicts occur. In fact, we anticipate they will, given that religions are inherently incompatible with one another and tend to violently disagree about which imaginary friend is the real one.

There’s a pretty strange irony here, to say the least. While the ORF claims its aims are to help protect people who are being persecuted for their religious beliefs, no one seems to be motioning the fact that the persecution is being done primarily by OTHER BELIEVERS! It’s kind of an important point when the purpose of your organization is apparently so focused on religion. Hey, you know what helps people have their own beliefs? Not having the fucking state promoting one particular faith over another!

Religion is playing an increasingly important role in foreign affairs, and the defense of religious liberty will be a critical means for Canada to promote both pluralism and democracy abroad.

Even if that statement were true (which it isn’t), that’s not encouraging. Religion and politics are a dangerous mix, which is why we tend to push so hard to have them separated at all costs. You’ll notice countries where this has occurred have happier, safer citizens than in countries with state sanctioned religions.

Congratulations, Conservative Government, on showing us again why you’re so poorly suited to run this country. Now, if only we could convince all the old farts in this country to stop voting for these assholes, then we’d finally get somewhere.

I know many of you out there think making holiday displays and fighting to have them displayed is a waste of time, but with the recent strings of vandalism against our property, not to mention the ridiculous reasons given by city officials for rejecting these banners helps highlight the fact that atheists are still a vilified and abused minority.

This echos a report by the International Humanist and Ethical Union which confirmed what many of us have been saying for years: atheists worldwide are being persecuted and discriminated against. While Islamic countries were the worst offenders – beating, jailing and even killing non-believers – it also showed that in Europe and the United States, atheists are treated as outsiders (apparently Arkansas has a law that forbids an atheist from being a witness at a trial, supposedly because we “can’t be trusted”), while religious people are given preferential treatment, or even government positions based on their faith (like the house of Lords in England). Imagine if these kinds of laws existed for other minorities. There would be public outrage over such open discrimination.

This is why holiday signs are so important: they provide an opportunity to directly display Christian privilege and overt atheist discrimination. So far, atheist billboards have been vandalized or defaced in Virginia, Pennsylvania (where the vandals’ identity is known, but no action has been taken), New Jersey (where a city councilman encouraged its theft, promising to turn the other cheek), and Michigan. These actions, and the subsequent inaction of government officials, is exactly the kind of proof we need to illustrate just how pervasive this discrimination is. So while you may not like an “in yo face” style of activism, we find ourselves living in a world where silence and complacency are just as evil as the persecution we so often face.

That reminds me: I never showcased my own contribution to the atheism billboard effort this holiday season. Thank you Rimon Bar (who helped color my book cover) for helping out. Enjoy!

What do you do when your copy of Penn Jillette’s “Every Day is an Atheist Holiday” gets defaced by a religious prick co-worker? Well, you write them a letter letting them know how shitty a person they are!

An open letter to the passive-aggressive, sanctimonious jerk who defaced my private property:

To begin, the mere assumption that I am an atheist because I read a book with the same word in the title is a dangerous prospect. With that reasoning, I am also a zombie superhero demi-god. Which I am not. However, you did guess correctly, I am an atheist, so, bully for you.

Now, more to the point of what and why you did that which you did. Your beliefs seems to be that my lack of religion is based on a simple lack of exposure. Allow me to squash this notion quickly. I was raised in a Christian household, went to Sunday School and church services every week, and even would read the Bible for fun.

And the cornerstone of that upbringing was my mother. Through DECADES of abuse and neglect, she turned to God. Her strength, poise, and quiet dignity would serve to inspire anyone, even boorish zealots like you.

My decision was based on distilling my life experiences, reading scores of books, quiet reflection and boisterous debate. It was not easy or cavalier. Yet in the end, I was called to follow my nature. So, if you’re still reading. Fuck off.

Nice.

For some odd reason, I love the idea that there are religious believers out there who try to convert atheists back to religion. I can’t imagine a more pointless exercise. They really think there must be some magical argument to ‘win us’ back to the fold. They can’t understand our decision not to believe in God is the result of years of slow and gradual change, ultimately leading to the conclusion that the provincialism of supernatural entities is a guarantee of their falsehood.

The most hopeless of these bunch of jokers has to be the Answers in Genesis folks. As the name implies, these deluded morons think everything in the Bible must be believed, despite the gargantuan effort it takes to reconcile reality with fantasy (they usually just end up ignoring most of the former). If you really want to know just how profoundly ignorant they are about non belief, take a gander at this open letter to atheists they recently wrote:

Are you tired of all the evil associated with the philosophy of atheism—Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and so on? After all, most murderers, tyrants, and rapists are not biblical Christians, and most have rejected the God of the Bible. Even if they claim to believe in the God of the Bible, they are not really living like a true Christ follower (who strives to follow God’s Word), are they?

Ah, the No True Scotsman fallacy  Never gets old, right? If someone does something you don’t agree with, it’s easy just to claim they aren’t true believers. I could try this same tactic to try and ‘defend’ atheism, but there’s really no point. People do all sorts of nasty things to one another, even when they don’t have the extra justification of thinking their actions are sanctioned by their private gods. As Stalin and Mao have shown, one does not need religion to start a cult: you just need the same uncritical thinking religious people are so fond of.

In fact, why would an atheist care to live one moment longer in a broken universe where one is merely rearranged pond scum and all you have to look forward to is . . . death, which can be around any corner? And in 467 trillion years, no one will care one iota about what you did or who you were or how and when you died—because death is the ultimate “hero” in an atheistic, evolutionary worldview. Of course, as a Christian I disagree, and I have a basis to see you as having value.

Lovely. The “atheists don’t believe in the afterlife and therefore don’t take it as seriously as we do” nonsense. It’s actually shocking how much they don’t understand what not believing in Disneyland in the clouds is really all about. While many former believers do express the initial grief and sorrow they feel from losing a love one, no one can claim atheists don’t have a full appreciation for this life. Unlike Christians, who think this life is merely a pit-stop in an otherwise lengthy vacation to magical Wally World in the sky where all your deceased loved ones are breathlessly anticipating your return. Why should one even bother with the hardships of this world if the next one, supposedly lasting an eternity, is so wonderful?

For professing atheists, these questions can be overwhelming to make sense of within their worldview. And further, within an atheistic worldview, atheists must view themselves as God. Essentially, atheists are claiming to be God. Instead of saying there may not be a God, they say there is no God. To make such a statement, they must claim to be omniscient

While there might be a few nonbelievers who make the positive claim that there can be no God, most of us instead chose to merely reject a claim made with no evidence whatsoever. In a sense, all religious people use this same method to reject the gods of other religions. No one would accuse them of omniscience for refusing to believe in Thor, Zeus, or Mithras. Atheism is merely the lack of belief in these and all other forms of religious superstition. It does not take omniscience to reject a bad premise.

Are you weary of looking for evidence that contradicts the Bible’s account of creation and finding none? Do the assumptions and inconsistencies of dating methods weigh on your conscience when they are misrepresented as fact? Where do you suppose those missing links have gone into hiding? Surely the atheist sees the folly and hopelessness of believing that everything came from nothing.

Yeah, it’s so hard to find examples of contradictions in the Bible…It must be easy not to see them when you’ve chosen to ignore the real world, right?

Where atheists have no basis for logic and reason (or even for truth, since truth is immaterial), Bible believers can understand that mankind is made in the image of a logical and reasoning God who is the truth…Christians also have a basis to explain why people sometimes don’t think logically due to the Fall of mankind in Genesis

I guess the reason we can’t think logically is because Eve ate a magical fruit and the first humans were cast out of Adventureland, only to have a bunch of inbred, fratricidal children. See, it has nothing to do with our evolved mammalian brain! God is a gigantic, omniscient Ape who made you in his image, and in return, you need to give him all your money. Wow, sure sounds like I should eliminate the foundation of my beliefs and just go for the nonsense. I couldn’t possibly believe in anything logical if I didn’t!

If you’ve never heard of The Blaze (like probably 99% of the population), it’s a creation of Glenn Beck and his conservative production company, Mercury Radio Arts (the irony of naming your production company after a metal that makes one insane is probably lost on these people). If the site isn’t regularly scaring people into buying gold, it feeds them pseudo information that plays into people’s fears and prejudices. Their latest fear mongering article is about the American Humanist Association’s new website, KidswithoutGod.com, which they think aims at “converting kids over to the secular religion of atheism“

The atheist activist community in America has taken an increasingly-active role in trying to convince citizens with doubts about their faith to fully evolve into non-believers and to “come out,” publicly proclaiming their anti-theism. Think of it as a form of secular evangelism. Already, non-believers have attempted to reach clergy who are in doubt through The Clergy Project. Additionally, there’s a humanist church service each week in Tulsa, Oklahoma (and these are only two examples). Now, in addition to reaching adults, atheist activists have their eyes set on converting kids and teens.

The website, which dares to encourage kids to be nice to other people, eat well, tell the truth, take responsibility for one’s actions, to take care of the environment, and to think for themselves, probably seems to ignorant theists as some kind of effort to ‘indoctrinate’ kids (funny how they don’t seem to mind at all when it’s their shit they are trying to inculcate). In reality, it’s merely a place for kids who weren’t brainwashed at an early age to realize they aren’t the only disbelievers out there. One article is even entitled “No Name Calling” when referring to believers. You can’t get more milk-toast than that, folks.

Their over-reaction is kind of hilarious, don’t you think?

One of the most aneurysm-inducing quotes of 2012 had to be faux-atheist S.E. Cupp’s comment that she would never vote for an atheist president. Believing she had a point by saying she couldn’t trust anyone who didn’t have God as a moral compass, what Cupp and her similarly minded ilk fail to realize, however, is that beliefs predicated on violent nonsense have the tendency to reflect Bronze Age barbarism. Man, I wish I had some kind of super sweet example to illustrate exactly what I’m trying to say…like a the Republican candidate for Arkansas who believes rebellious kids should be put to death.

The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius[sic] children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21:

I always laugh whenever people act shocked that some of their fellow human beings can believe in such dangerous absurdities, since so many of them have based so much of their own lives on similar idiocies. It’s only when the true stakes of belief are in play that they realize, often too late, that religious faith tends to mask serious social dysfunctions and psychopathic behavior. With the Republican party so desperate for votes, they’re too chicken shit to call this guy out on his crazy ideas, and that’s the really terrifying part.

If you’re like me, you get a kick out of reading articles by religious people who claim to have the perfectly crafted argument which will finally win us over to the side of superstitious nonsense. Barring the serious amount of head trauma needed for such a conversion, I read these articles because they’re a small window into the tortured logic of believers. Perhaps there’s a part of me still waiting for someone to actually come up with a compelling argument, just for the fun of having to think about it for a few days. So far, it’s nothing but disappointment.

One place where you won’t find any serious arguments whatsoever is News24, a South African online news resource that appears to have a resident Christian troll on the site named Charles Dumbwin. His latest genius musing is called The Deathblow to Atheism, a kind of ‘science can’t explain everything therefore God did it’ argument so poorly crated, it’s hilarious watching this train wreck:

Atheists believe that an unknown mass of approximately 10kg of floating nothing/something, suddenly exploded/expanded rapidly, and that same 10kg of nothing miraculously became the organized universe that we have today. Of course, they have to factor in a guesstimated 13 to 20 billion years in order for this absurd notion to sound plausible.

If you’re wondering where he got this ’10kg’ number from, you aren’t the only one. It would seem our friend here thinks the universe, when still only a singularity, had a mass of 3 human brains and was ‘floating around’ in space. There’s so much wrong here, it’s difficult where to start. The universe weighed 10kg? It was floating around? And this is what this clown thinks we believe. Yeah, I’d hit the science books a little harder if you’re trying to craft an argument, buddy. Of course, you could always try to argue from ignorance:

So okay then, let’s assume the latter, and let’s agree that the laws of science only applied to our universe instantly AFTER the Big Bang occurred. Would it be fair to say then, that no laws of science could ever be used to understand/measure what happened before the Big Bang? That’s fair right? Because we also know that scientists, cosmologists and astrophysicists the world over agree on this point; that trying to understand what happened prior to the Big Bang would just be mere speculation. We all accept that.

The laws of science? Science is a process, not a ‘thing’, man. Scientific ‘laws’ are simplifications of observed phenomenon that apply to specific relationships (like thermodynamics), and not divinely crafted rules for the universe. And while it’s true our current model of the Cosmos breaks down a few nanoseconds after the Big Bang, it certainly doesn’t mean that magic man is the fucking answer.

So if the laws of science cannot be used to measure/test/prove anything prior to the Big Bang, then it’s accurate to say that whatever/Whoever existed before the Big Bang, cannot be measured/found by using manmade physical instrumentation or through any scientific method.

Science isn’t only about making measurements, although that is an aspect of it. This guy seems to think  because our instrumentation is physical that it cannot possible ‘measure’ (whatever that means) the Origin of the Universe. His conclusion, therefore, is to suggest his supernatural entity fits this particular description quite well. God in the gaps, anyone?

So what we are left with? Only more questions about our origins.

The only true moment of insight comes right near the end, although I doubt the author actually has any real questions about our origins. His religious stance informs me that he’s already chosen an answer despite the fact there is no compelling reason, outside of his own shocking ignorance, to believe what he does. Sad.