godlessness
pharyngula | November 12, 2009This is not too surprising: Cincinnati fanatics and kooks were so threatened by a billboard that said, "Don't believe in god? You are not alone" that they made violent threats that led to the billboard being taken down and relocated.
Cincinnati is Ken Ham country; you don't see atheists sending in threats to get his billboards taken down. We'd rather see new billboards go up in reply.
pharyngula | November 9, 2009Atheists are putting up a billboard in Lakeland, Florida that says, "Don't believe in god? You aren't alone." This is, apparently, controversial, and the newspaper article has an accompanying poll.
Does an atheist group have a right to display their own billboard?
Yes 77.7%
No 22.3%
I'd say that's a really stupid poll question, except that it reveals that 22% of the respondents don't think a number of their fellow citizens don't have the same privileges they do.
pharyngula | November 9, 2009Wake up, everyone: Iran is about to execute three men for the crime of atheism…well, specifically, apostasy, rejecting the Islamic faith. The news is not good.
Habibollah Latifi, Ehsan (Esma'il) Fattahian and Sherko Moarefi have all been sentenced to death for "enmity against God" in unconnected cases over the last two years. They are believed to be on death row in a prison in Sanandaj, the provincial capital of Kordestan.
They are also Kurds, so this is also all tangled up in regional politics. One thing you can do right now is fill in a petition to the Iranian government.
pharyngula | November 9, 2009I hereby declare this the official theme of the whimpering, pathetic, anti-atheist backlash of 2009: there are Deep Rifts in atheism. It's all over the place, and it's a little weird.
YOU would think, wouldn't you, that one of the principal attractions of atheism would be the complete absence of schisms. Where the devout always seem to be working themselves up into a frenzy over some obscure theological point, non-believers can glide through life, absolved, as they are, of the need to negotiate the terms of their disbelief. If there's no God, there is no message. And if there's no message,…
pharyngula | November 8, 2009You will enjoy yourself immensely watching Hitchens and Fry debating a pair of Catholic apologists. Click on the image below (you can see how the debate ended already)!
Oh. Unless you're a Catholic or other Christian — you won't enjoy that at all. You might want to go to church instead.
pharyngula | November 6, 2009The Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago revoked a speaking invitation to Sunsara Taylor, which led to much drama. I've already posted Taylor's version of events; now the society has sent me theirs, so here it is. It just confirms to me that they don't know what they're doing.
We don't know if you know all of what has happened since your letter of support for Ms. Taylor but we wanted to give you the history of all that has transpired. All of the signees of this letter contributed their shared experience to this account.
Our Sunday speakers are chosen by a committee of nine people. Â In…
pharyngula | November 5, 2009Frank Schaeffer really detests most of the New Atheists (except for Dan Dennett; he loves Dennett to pieces). He thinks they're just like the Christian fundamentalists, and he should know, since his father was one of the most fanatical evangelicals around, and he was part of that radical Christianity himself. He starts off with a damning assertion.
The most aggressive members of the "New Atheism" movement have quite a bit in common with religious extremists like Pat Robertson and Ted Haggard.
Whoa. That's a strong accusation. I wonder what these points of commonality are?
I read his whole…
pharyngula | November 5, 2009This is fast becoming the theme of news stories about atheists this year: that there are differences in tactics in the atheist community, with some people being more in-your-face about it (yours truly takes a bow), and others wanting to be more conciliatory towards religion. Well, how surprising that a movement of diverse freethinkers who value critical thinking, skepticism, and open argument, and which lacks either a charismatic central leader or a hierarchy of control, might have members with diverse views…
Here's another example of journalists jumping on the bandwagon: a story about the…
pharyngula | November 4, 2009It's for college students only, and first prize is $2000. Come on, students, you're used to churning out term papers, and that prize is substantial.
The topic of the essay is free expression.
The Campaign for Free Expression is a CFI initiative to focus efforts and attention on one of the most crucial components of freethought: the right of individuals to express their viewpoints, opinions, and beliefs about all subjects—especially religion. To encourage free expression and to emphasize the importance of this fundamental right, CFI and its sister organization, The Council for Secular…
pharyngula | November 3, 2009The Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago has done an incredibly stupid thing. They invited Sunsara Taylor to give a talk on "Morality Without God"…and then disinvited her. The reasons weren't clear, other than that some people in the society disliked her politics — she's a communist — and the group caved and cancelled her speaking engagement a short two weeks before it was to happen.
Basically, the ethical society was unethical. You just don't do that. But then they made it worse.
They've been stonewalling. No explanations, no apologies, nothing — they might as well admit that they're feeling…
pharyngula | November 3, 2009The Texas Freethought Convention will be taking place in San Antonio on 14 November. Y'all are going, right? A good turnout in Texas would be newsworthy, you know, and would shake up all those preconceptions about your state.
grrlscientist | November 1, 2009tags: religion, belief system, ethics, values, lifestyle
Here's my results from Belief-o-matic, an online questionnaire that uses a series of 20 questions to help identify your belief system;
What did this quiz tell you your belief system should be?
pharyngula | October 26, 2009Christopher Hitchens has been debating a Christian pastor named Douglas Wilson on the subject of whether Christianity has been a force for good in the world. These debates were recorded, and assembled into a film called Collision. I haven't seen it, and I doubt that it will be showing in my small town theater, but I'll be looking for it on DVD. This is obviously not a movie review, then…I just want to comment on one point Wilson throws out.
"It's not a question of whether we have faith, it's what we have faith in," says Wilson. "Christopher has faith in the role of scientific inquiry,…
pharyngula | October 25, 2009I was captured on the Good Atheist earlier today.
It's more of a conversation than an interview, so just sit back and listen to a couple of guys blather.
pharyngula | October 25, 2009As you've already heard, the Atheist Foundation of Australia was hit with a denial-of-service attack earlier this week (you can learn more about it in this interview of Jason Ball by Catherine Deveny).
I rather like their planned unofficial response.
This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God (in this context, the Christian god, God, as distinct from the Greek god, Zeus, the Egyptian god, Ra etc etc) with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as…
pharyngula | October 25, 2009As I mentioned before, the Coalition of Reason is putting some positive, pro-atheism ads in the NY subways. As expected, of course, some Christians are upset about this. Their reaction is no surprise. The inanity of their reaction is also no surprise. For a beautiful example of a truly stupid response, you can rely on Sean Hannity.
Can you imagine the outrage if a Christian group put pro-God ads in the New York City subways? What outrage.
I can imagine it, because as that link points out, there have been multitudes of pro-God ads there for years. I was also familiar with seeing them all over…
grrlscientist | October 25, 2009tags: atheism, African-Americans, christianity, muslims, JohnBeezy3, streaming video
This video discusses something that I've often wondered: Where are the Black Atheists?
pharyngula | October 23, 2009He must be the warm-up act for the global atheism convention this spring.
pharyngula | October 22, 2009It's disgraceful. During some football game, our mascot, Goldy the Gopher, mocked a player on the opposing team who thought it was appropriate to ostentatiously kneel down and publicly pray.
Now Goldy wasn't the disgrace (I have a new-found respect for our goofy guy in a costume), nor was the young lady who came out and gave him a fist-bump afterwards. Hooray for them! The guy making a show of his piety…yeah, he's a disgrace, but he's not on the UM team. No, the real disgrace is our craven PR flacks.
Minnesota spokesman Dan Wolter says the stunt was "plainly a mistake" and the mascot didn't…