Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Blind Faith

Happy Blasphemy Day!

Yup.  It appears that today is International Blasphemy Day- so blaspheme for all you're worth!

Penn Jillette explains:


Join the Facebook group!

News articles here

Also: Richard Dawkins will be on The Colbert Report tonight.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Friday, September 25, 2009

The Bible

Thursday, September 24, 2009

My New Hero

You probably heard about this nonsense.

This response is good and very entertaining:

Magic Beard Man

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Atheism

Monday, September 21, 2009

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Pot o' Gold

At Least We Were Warned




What's the point of going to college if you're not going to be any of these things?

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Friday, September 18, 2009

BRB LOL!

Jesus Isn't on Facebook, is he?



I mean...I would totally be friends with the guy.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

If You Encounter a Mountain Lion...

How Should Scientists Relate with Mainstream Religions?

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Laureate in physics, speaks at Beyond Belief '06:



Want more Weinberg? Read this article in which he critiques "Intelligent Design," and in which he writes:

"In an e-mail message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science I learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment."

Thanks, Amy!

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Defining Christianity



"Christianity: The bbelief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you ccept him as your mster, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree....yeah, makes perfect sense."

Monday, September 14, 2009

Except Atheists Would Never go Door-to-Door

Bad Religion: The Official Punk Band of GTMTTY

Richard Dawkins: "Root of All Evil?"

I love Richard Dawkins. For those who have never heard or read him, here's an appearance he made on Bill Maher's Real Time:



Or here's Dawkins on Bill O'Reilly


Or here's Dawkins answering questions on the CBC:


The only thing I don't like about his two-part documentary by is the title, "Root of All Evil?"

I was glad to read that Dawkins wasn't happy with it either.
Dawkins has said that the title The Root of All Evil? was not his preferred choice, but that Channel 4 had insisted on it to create controversy.

Some memorable quotes:
"I’m a scientist and I believe there is a profound contradiction between science and religious belief. There is no well demonstrated reason to believe in God, and I think the idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe. The 21st century should be an age of reason, yet irrational militant faith is back on the march. Religious extremism is implicated in the world’s most bitter and unending conflicts. In Britain, even as we live in the shadow of holy terror, our government wants to restrict our freedom to criticise religion. Science we are told should not tread on the toes of theology. But why should scientists tiptoe respectfully away? The time has come for people of reason to say, enough is enough. Religious faith discourages independent thought: it’s divisive and it’s dangerous. Isn’t this the beginning of that slippery slope that leads to young men with rucksack bombs on the tube?"

"People like to say that faith and science can live together side by side but I don’t think they can. Science is a discipline of investigation and constructive doubt, questing with logic, evidence and reason to draw conclusions. Faith by stark contrast demands a positive suspension of critical faculties. Science proceeds by setting up hypothesises, ideas, or models and then attempts to disprove them. Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time."

"The god of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic-cleanser urging his people on to acts of genocide."

Here's the show:




Sunday, September 13, 2009

Cosmotaliban

Godless Heathen
















Thanks, Liz!

Burn, baby, burn.

I've always had a hard time with the idea of a loving God who would sentence people to eternal suffering for failing to believe in him. Does that sound loving to you?


Saturday, September 12, 2009

The Dragon In My Garage

(See also: Russell's Teapot and the Flying Spaghetti Monster )

The Dragon In My Garage
by Carl Sagan

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you.  Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself.  There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say.  I lead you to my garage.  You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely.  "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."  And so on.  I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?  If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?  Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.  Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.  What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.  The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head.  You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me.  The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind.  But then, why am I taking it so seriously?  Maybe I need help.  At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility.  Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded.  So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage.  You merely put it on hold.  Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you.  Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise.  The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch.  Your infrared detector reads off-scale.  The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you.  No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me.  Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive.  All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence.  None of us is a lunatic.  We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on.  I'd rather it not be true, I tell you.  But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported.  But they're never made when a skeptic is looking.  An alternative explanation presents itself.  On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked.  Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath.  But again, other possibilities exist.  We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons.  Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling.  Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Atheist LOLcat

Thanks, Amy!

Friday, September 11, 2009

Imagine


To be clear: I don't think that there are good religions and bad religions.

I think they're all bad religions.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Monday, September 7, 2009

Pray Smarter: To God's Mom!

I don't think Jesus is into that....



I mean...these are actually men with a really unappealing drag act...right?

Then again, maybe Jesus would be into corny drag acts. I know a lot of awfully nice people who are.

Thursday, September 3, 2009