Theist's free pass:

Atheists are accused of hate speech if they say there probably is no god but theists are allowed to say that an unchristianed child will burn in hell for eternity because the parents were atheists.

Which one of these statements sounds more hatefull?

Right wing GLBT hate

Those wacky US right wingers are at it again with their anti GLBT rants.

Religion is worming its way into Australian politics.

SMH Article:

One thing that I didn't want Australia to follow the US lead on was religion in politics. Anna Crabb has done some research on the topic.

Accusation: Atheism is a Religion

I've wondered why the dumb fundies say that atheism is a religion. A reply posted on this blog gives me an idea of what they are up to.

atheistliberty said,"However, Atheists have ethics, morals, and principals (sic) that guide their lives."
This proves it. Straight from an atheist's mouth. Atheism IS a religion. Let's ban the religion of atheism from influencing our government. Separation of church and state issues apply to the religion of atheism as well. So if the religion of atheism is banned from government, that means the government has to acknowledge a god, otherwise government is practicing the religion of atheism. This would default us back to the way things used to be. We wouldn't have a state or national church, but government would acknowledge again that we are a Christian nation.

Fundies are trying to get the USA separation of church and state to work against atheism as it works against theism. They confuse secularism, which is required only to not make laws for or against any stance on religion, with atheism. Generally, atheists are not calling for religion to be banned. Theists are calling for Jesus to be legislated into being. Secularism just wants the laws kept neutral.

What is a religion? Some say it is a 'way of life' or a 'life stance'. For me, this definition lacks clarity and doesn't tell the whole story.

As outlined in this wikipedia entry:

A religion is an organized approach to human spirituality which usually encompasses a set of narratives, symbols, beliefs and practices, often with a supernatural or transcendent quality, that give meaning to the practitioner's experiences of life through reference to a higher power, God or gods, or ultimate truth. It may be expressed through prayer, ritual, meditation, music and art, among other things. It may focus on specific supernatural, metaphysical, and moral claims about reality (the cosmos and human nature) which may yield a set of religious laws, ethics, and a particular lifestyle. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and religious experience.

This is different to the soft "way of life" description. There is a lot of baggage in the name religion. Baggage that atheism doesn't carry.

Atheism is not a way of life. Atheism is nothing. On top of atheism you need to define a moral system. Humanism is a good system as a starting point. But humanism doesn't really tell us how the world works so then we look to science to describe the world around us. There is nothing dogmatic about science, when it is wrong it just accepts it and moves on. When it is right it can seem dogmatic. The difference is that a scientific theory is supported by so much evidence that many arguments against it have already failed. Science then goes on to make accurate predictions. Religion doesn't tell us how to build a plane, only fly it into a building.


I've lost direction on this post and it's late so I'm gonna put it up and fix it later. No-one reads this blog anyway so it wont make any difference. This is a topic I'm working through.

More things theists should know:

Proud Atheist's list of things theists should know about atheists.

Mr Deity

If religion seems a little odd, imagine having a fly on the wall view of god deciding on all the little details in the bible.

Child witches in the Niger Delta

Niger Delta Children being denounced and punished as witches. ABC Australia's 4 Corners report:



This is just sickening. Frightened children are accused of witchcraft because of some misfortune encountered by their family or village. The solution is to kill or maim them. Travelling religious... people offer to tourture the children for a substantial cost equivalent to a month's pay. All of this is based on folk lore of witches combined with evangelical christianity's paranoia about evil being all around them.

This is a video which promotes this nonsense:

And another one - keep kids away from religious schools

Antoher teacher charged...

SMH Article

A ninth man has been charged by police investigating child sex offences at two colleges in Bathurst.

Police investigating allegations of assault at St Stanislaus' College and Bathurst Anglican School today charged a 79-year-old Sydney man with five counts of indecent assault.

Hitler Quotes

Fundies are always trying to link Hitler to atheists. Here are some quotes that don't support that idea.

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited. "

Adolf Hitler, in a speech made on 12 April 1922


No, it is not we that have deserted Christianity, it is those who came before us who deserted Christianity. We have only carried through a clear division between politics which have to do with terrestrial things, and religion, which must concern itself with the celestial sphere. There has been no interference with the doctrine (Lehre ) of the Confessions or with their religious freedom (Bekenntnisfreiheit ), nor will there be any such interference.
On the contrary the State protects religion, though always on the one condition that religion will not be used as a cover for political ends….National Socialism neither
opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity…. For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life… These are not antiChristian, these are Christian principles! And I believe that if we should fail to follow these principles then we should to be able to point to our successes, for the result of our political battle is surely not unblest by God.

-Adolf Hitler, in his speech at Koblenz, to the Germans of the Saar, 26 Aug. 1934



We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls…. We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity… in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.

-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928, Bundesarchiv
Berlin-Zehlendorf, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]

We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933 [This statement clearly refutes modern Christians who claim Hitler as favoring atheism.]


Suck it up fundies!

From:

Here's an idea: what if the Government introduced voluntary gay marriage?

Here's an idea: what if the Government introduced voluntary gay marriage?

SMH opinion piece:

It's got humour and barbs, and best of all it's up moralizing dumb fundies. :)

The anti GLBTI league are at it again:

Story:

My post which probably wont go up cause it's too long and just rambles on with my reactions to other people's posts:

I'm 39, have been married for 15 years and am straight and I want gay people to be allowed to get married. We don't have children, so getting married isn't for that. I don't believe in any of the thousands of gods available for belief in, so it's not for that. People have a very narrow view of what marriage is for and what it does. My view is also narrow. It is for love. Why can't people get married if they are in love regardless of sexual orientation.

GBLTI people don't effect me. They are doing their own thing with their own lives. However, the moralising prudes who oppose gay marriage do have an effect on me. This minority of busy bodies sticking their nose in where it doesn't belong effects my life too. If you want to live your life by some set of rules made up by goat herders in a time when "the wheelbarrow was emergent technology" (Harris) then go and do that and leave the rest of us to get on with our information age lives. The Amish might have the lifestyle you're looking for.

Do people really imagine that coupling in permanent relationships is a thing that came to humanity via religion? The married state of two people looking after children together resulted in more children. This married state was been co-opted by religion because they knew that they needed to get control of the sex lives of people or they would have no social recognition. As soon as people gave this control to the church, the church knew it had us byt he short and curlies... literally.

Just read the Galaxy report. How would the people complaining about the quality of the survey like the questions to be surveyed? "Thinking about how you will burning in hell for all eternity for supporting gay rights, we're thinking about Sodom and Gomorrah here people, would you say that evil, dirty Gays should be allowed to destroy the world by getting married?" Would the phrasing of that question have made the religious right happy?

Really the GLBTI community is not asking for the right to be married, they are asking for the restriction on their marrying being removed. It is not self evident to me that GLBTI marriage should not be allowed.

Christianity (I'm assuming that this is the god that many people has sighted) has had just shy of 2000 years to make the perfect society. There is a special word for societies where religion has the absolute power that they think they deserve through divine right. That special word is a dark age. Islam is in a dark age at the moment where women can be beaten on the street for dressing in a manner unacceptable to someone holding the Koran and couples can be gaoled for having an affair. Before people want their holy books brought in as law they should have a close look at what they will be tortured and gaoled for. Poly-cotton, eye glasses and shell fish would be crimes carrying the same punishment as being gay.

I don't think that gay people are going to want to force churches to marry them. Why would anyone want to be married in a church where people hate them?

BBC/OU Annual Lecture 2009: Dawkins on Darwin

ReligionIsBullshit.net

Religion is bullshit has an excellent description of atheism.

I like what the writer is saying about "denying god". Dumb fundies always want to way that I am denying god. I've never been able to put my finger on why this bugs me so much.

Why do church steeples have lightning rods.

Lack of confidence?

Some Quotes

It is often imagined that atheists are, in principle, closed to spiritual experience. But the truth [… ] is that there is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing self transcending love, or ecstasy, or rapture, or awe. In fact, there's nothing that prevents an atheist from going into a cave for a year or a decade and practising meditation like the profit Misif (?). What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified and unjustifiable claims about the cosmos on the basis of those experiences.

Sam Harris

We're all connected. To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To rest of the universe, atomically. That's kinda cool. That makes me smile. And I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we are better than the universe, we're part of the universe. We're in the universe and the universe is in us.

Neill deGrasse Tyson

I don't want the religious person in the lab telling me that God is responsible for what it is they cannot discover. Cause look at the hubris of that. You're in the lab and he says "I don't know how this works and not only that but no one on earth knows how this works. And not only that no one that will ever be born will know how this works. That's kind of audacious when you think about it. Then you put it down and go onto the next problem. This problem is the cure for alzheimers, the cure for cancer, or what ever else. I don't want them in the science class room. So the issue is simply about progress and discovery.

Neill deGrasse Tyson

What constitutes a good christian marriage?

Brother Sam's 9 rules of engagement