It’s a terrible shame when your only opportunity to know someone is on the day of their death. Derek Miller, an atheist blogger not unlike myself, died of cancer recently. His last post, from “beyond the grave” is a reminder of the fragility of life. Derek had been fighting a losing battle to colon cancer, and passed away a few days ago. Reading his archive, it also reminded me there are still tons of great atheist bloggers out there that haven’t been discovered. If you know of any we haven’t talked about in the past, and you would like others to know about it before these people expire, be sure to let me know!

*(Update: His site exists only in the web archives now)

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.

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!

While America didn’t make it into the 9 countries that are slowly losing their religion, you can rejoice at the knowledge church foreclosures are on the rise. Times have been hard for everyone, and when push came to shove, people chose to keep their money rather than to give it to purveyors of nonsense:

Religious denominations of all kinds have suffered in recent years as donations have declined, with many Catholic parishes closing and synagogues merging their congregations. But the property-financing problems have been concentrated among independent churches, which while seeking to expand lack a governing body to serve as a backstop to financial hardship.

Am I cruel for rejoicing in the failures of others? Yes, a little, but I’ve never claimed to be a nice man. I want a society free of superstitious ignorance, and I won’t apologize for seeing the decline of religion as one of the greatest signs of progress since the Enlightenment.

Since numerous studies have found a number of industrialized nations have a steadily declining rate of religious affiliation, a team at the University of Arizona made a model predicting the rate in which 9 countries will effectively have no more religion.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

If you happen to live in one of these Oasis of reason, you’re in luck. If not, then I suggest you find a way to get the fuck out of your backwards, moronic country as soon as you possibly can.

Hilariously enough, it seems as though the Canadian government doesn’t want anyone to know just how irreligious the nation is. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, himself a religious idiot, has changed the census form to no longer include the question of religiosity. The idea is to skew the data in favor of religion, since the “long form” will only be sent to a disproportionately small proportion of the population. If you happen to be one of those who receives it, it becomes even more important for you to fill it out correctly!

Oh Conservapedia, you’re the gift that keeps on giving. We recently donated some money to Wikipedia, the reality-based crowd sourced encyclopedia, so I suppose it’s only ‘fair and balanced’ we give its right wing la-la land equivalent some love too in the form of a post. On its front page next to such fine articles as “Is Barack Hussein Obama a president, or is he a dictator?” and “More than a thousand scientists have issued a report calling man-made global warming what it actually is: a fraud” sits the Article of the Month: “Atheism and obesity”

Amongst other things, this article says:

• non-religious are more prone to being obese than very religious individuals (sounds like someone needs a lesson on causality)
• gluttony is a sin, hence why very religious people are skinnier (and poorer, right?)
• look at how fat the American Atheists board of directors, PZ Myers, Christopher Hitchens, and lesbians are (for more on that last one, check out conservapedia’s helpful ‘Lesbians and Obesity’ article)
• atheists get married less often, probably because they’re fat fucks
• atheists are more likely to kill themselves, again, because a life with gut instead of God is too horrible to bear

The article really is great for lols, but just in case you’re sitting there worried your non-belief is making you fatter, here’s the crux of why this whole thing is dumb: according to the Gallup poll this is all based on, the ‘fat unbeliever’ group makes up 29.7% of the population. You may be surprised atheism has grown so much recently, considering official numbers put the atheist population in the US at somewhere around 6%.

The reason for this sudden quadruple growth in our numbers? Gallup considers anyone where “Religion is not an important part of daily life and church/synagogue/mosque attendance occurs seldom or never.” as part of the 29.7%. Seems to me that definition allows a pretty huge number of fat / lazy believers to get lumped in with us atheists.

Oh wounded Christians, when will you stop your belly-aching and stop acting like you are the victims of atheist aggression? It seems like every other day I have to read some theist’s article about how atheists are either 1) way too mean, 2) clueless about religion, and 3) completely dogmatic about their non-belief. While I could accept the first (in my case, although I’m one of the few very vitriolic ones), the second and third seems to completely ignore the fact that a significant number of non-believers were, at one time or another, believers.

A fan of the site sent me a link to this article, entitled “atheists: can we get along or whatever”, a follow-up to another article he had written called “Dear Atheists: most of us don’t care what you think”. As you might have guessed, after writing the latter (a long diatribe about how faith is unshakable and immutable), he was inundated by comments from non-believers, and decided that more clarification was needed. He was, apparently, unaware that the internet is made up mostly of malcontents like you and me, and felt that we didn’t really understand his religion enough to critique it.

The thesis of my story was this: that debates between the religious and atheists are useless because most atheists do not understand religion, particularly the idea of religious faith.

I’m getting a little tired of the accusation that atheists simple don’t understand religion. It’s obvious from most surveys that we are, in fact, on average much more educated about faith than our religious counterparts. This is usually ignored. We may understand the minutia of faith, but to religionists, our lack of belief must mean that we don’t actually “get it”. Why else would we refuse to accept God into our lives?

But faith is different. It is private. It touches on a different reality that either you get or you do not. Faith is like love and how do you debate love? Faith has driven untold millions, billions, of people through history and cannot be dismissed so easily.

I’ve always hated this line of argument. You might as well just say that millions of people used to believe that the earth was flat as a debate tactic. Simply because tons of human beings choose to believe in absurd things, and feel motivated to do things because of such absurdities does not in fact condon these ideas. If anything, it shows the profound vulnerability of ignorant humans to invent answers and explination when there are no certainties. This is not something we should be especially proud of.

I have no doubt that “faith” is a lot more difficult to hold on to than I can imagine. Objective reality does not conform with religious instructions, which is why faith is so important to guys like Charles Lewis. And while religionists want to pat themselves on the back for believing in the absurd, the rest of us just shake our heads in disbelief, saying simply: it would be a lot easier on you if you just stopped trusting in the nonsense you’ve been fed your whole life, pal.

Faith is not up for debate. I do not care whether Christopher Hitchens or the guy who sits three rows away thinks I am living in a fantasy. Why would I care? If faith could be broken by mindless criticism then it would not be faith.

I agree, which is why we find faith so troubling. If you cannot debate something, than what value does it have? It’s further proof that those with faith are secretly afraid of revealing even their inner-most doubts, out of fear that they may inadvertantly stop believing once they finally begin to question their deeply held assumptions. Any individual who refuses to question even his/her most cherished beliefs is not only weak minded; they are also cowards. If you think it takes more bravery to believe in the absurd, then I honestly feel sorry for you.