Carnival of the Godless 71

Posted by Martin R on July 22, 2007
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i-f331cfb9ff3672e4a57e9f92627f1c8a-damnyegods.jpg

“Damn ye, Gods!” Photo by Pär Svensson / Kurtz.

Welcome everyone to Aardvarchaeology and the 71st Carnival of the Godless! The carnival is a bi-weekly roundup of godless blogging from around the net. Aardvarchaeology is mainly about Scandinavian archaeology and various skeptical issues, but I rarely discuss religion much. You see, in my native Sweden, it’s not such a big deal. Few people here give much thought to faith issues. Our churches are empty and our political discourse godless. Come visit some time! But now, on to the reality-based blogging.

That’s all for this time. The next CotG will coalesce out of the quantum froth at Atheist Revolution on 5 August. (Submit goodies here). Until then, hang on to your ego!

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Comments

  1. #1 The Ridger
    July 22, 2007

    Very nice job – great Carnival to wake up to on a Sunday morning.

    ps – I tried to trackback, but for some reason SciBlogs always gives me an error (url doesn’t appear to be a valid trackback url)

  2. #2 Emanuel Goldstein
    July 22, 2007

    Good job!

    As the atheist mentor Nietzsche the Syphillitic tells us: “Elimination of the weak and defective, the first principle of our philosophy! And we should help them to do it.” From The AntiChrist, sec 2.

  3. #3 vjack
    July 22, 2007

    Great job with the carnival. You make Sweden sound wonderful. I hope I can visit someday. It would be wonderful to spend some time in an enlightened country.

  4. #4 Prup aka Jim Benton
    July 22, 2007

    Martin: Great job, as expected. I have three comments — so far — here — one because I can’t find a way to comment on the linked article.

    First, the ‘scientific sermon’ is so great it should be required reading — and I’m sending it to one of my favorite Christians to see her comments. The second is Chickie’s piece on the student demied entry into a Catholic school because his last name is Hell. Somebody should tell them that there is a crater on the Moon called “Hell Crater.” It is not named for the mythical place, but for Maximillian Hell, Father Maximilliam Hell, S.J., a Catholic priest.

    Finally, good to see Manny G. here, since his persistent use of one of the more obvious fallacies is always good for a laugh. His schtick is to argue — usually using Nietzsche or Stalin — that “A is X; A believes Y; therefore all X believe Y.”

    Ironically, given his name — I am not sure if he is Christian or Jewish in belief, merely that he is ‘anti-atheist’ — this argument is not merely fallacious twaddle (imagine arguing about Christian beliefs by using Fred Phelps or a “Kludd” of the KKK as an example) but is one of the prime weapons of bigots, particularly anti-Semitic bigots. Look at the French use of the Stavisky scandal pre-War, for a less than obvious example.

    No, Manny, few atheists would consider Nietzsche a ‘mentor,’ (Ingersoll, Voltaire, Asimov, Paine, perhaps). All your examples demonstrate is what I’ve called “Prup’s first law,” that “if you take any position in any religious, political, social, or sexual controversy, you’ll have some idiots agreeing with you.”

  5. #5 Martin R
    July 22, 2007

    I like the way Emanuel mentions syphilis to underline what a bad person Nietzsche was. As we all know, bacteria only infect evil people.

  6. #6 Mary E
    July 22, 2007

    Dude, I live surrounded by Bible Thumpers of the highly and willfully ignorant sort. Evidently part of my govenment Wants to provoke Armageideon so they can all go straight to heaven. I darest not open my mouth around these folk. Recently, I read a history of Sweden from 1970 (I’m broke and make do with used books)and there was not much indication of what you write about, sounding like they are still Lutheran/Calvinist at that point. I would appreciate some comment on how you country freed itself from this weight. Would you say it was socialism, democracy, reaction against backwards clergy, good schools+sucessful science, great and widespread wealth, social/ethnic homogeneity, long peace?

  7. #7 Martin R
    July 22, 2007

    All the factors you mention have been important, though I believe two are particularly important: a) a quietly anti-Church Labour party has governed the country for most of the past century, b) Swedes have suffered no oppression or wars in the past two centuries and thus have not felt the need to call out to imaginary friends in the sky.

    Many people are still nominally Lutheran here, but numbers have dropped sharply since the Church was separated from the State a few years ago.

  8. #8 Aerik
    July 22, 2007

    Hey, I just installed HaloScan onto my Blogger blog and I’m getting an error trying to trackback to you. HaloScan says the trackback URL is invalid, and a bunch of other stuff.

    HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
    Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 19:51:44 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
    Last-Modified: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 03:40:17 GMT
    ETag: “12d4122-3c2-ba048a40″
    Accept-Ranges: bytes
    Content-Length: 962
    Connection: close
    Content-Type: text/html
    X-Pad: avoid browser bug



    404 Not Found

    Not Found

    The requested document was not found on this server.

    Web Server at scienceblogs.com


    scienceblogs.com
    /mt/pings/46022

  9. #9 Martin R
    July 22, 2007

    Yeah, sorry, can’t help you. Trackback at ScienceBlogs has been broken for ages and nobody with the necessary skills cares enough to fix it.

  10. #10 KimBoo York
    July 24, 2007

    Martin, thank you so much for your kind comment about my blog’s mission statement! However, thank you even more-better for this great list of links! Looks like my daily reading needs have been met.

    Your efforts are appreciated!

    ::::KBS