godlessness
pharyngula | March 18, 2012Oh, joy. Senator Tom Harkin will appear in a video message at the Reason Rally. While he may be a lifelong Catholic, as he declares in the announcement, and while he is one of the biggest supporters of acupuncture, chiropracty, herbal and homeopathic 'healing', and all the alt med bullshit he can fling millions of federal funds at, we're apparently supposed to grovel in gratitude that a sitting senator deigns to patronize us atheists.
Why?
This is a man who takes pride in being affiliated with a patriarchal, hierarchical, medieval institution that oppresses women, celebrates poverty, wallows…
pharyngula | August 1, 2011The new site went live sometime late last night, and our technical help slaved away to try and get everything working, if not beautiful. Check out Freethoughtblogs some time today, and say what you think. I've created a thread to collect suggestions and criticisms as we shake out the bugs, fine-tune everything, and eventually, make it pretty.
A new blog network is hitting the web on August 1. Led by two of the most prominent and widely read secular-minded blogs in the country - PZ Myers' Pharyngula and Ed Brayton's Dispatches from the Culture Wars - Freethoughtblogs.com will, we hope, quickly…
pharyngula | July 29, 2011Hedges has been totally nuts for the last few years: he's got this crazy irrational hysteria about atheists that makes him utterly unhinged whenever he writes about us. His latest is of a piece with his mania:
The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as…
pharyngula | July 28, 2011Who else but Christopher Hitchens?
This year, Richard Dawkins himself will present AAA's
Richard Dawkins Award to Christopher Hitchens, who may accept in person or in
absentia as his schedule permits.
Christopher Hitchens is one of the most prolific
modern writers and exponents of atheism; he has appeared on every major news
and political television show offering opinions on political and social
issues. He has contributed to Vanity Fair, The
Nation, Slate, the New York Times Book Review,
and Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications. His
books include Hitch 22: A Memoir, God is Not…
pharyngula | July 28, 2011That article I mentioned earlier about a collection of statements from atheists on why they don't believe is now available at the New Statesman. You can read all of them, not just mine!
pharyngula | July 28, 2011It takes real effort to purge yourself of parasites, and Australia's got 'em: rabbits, cane toads, and now…chaplains. In a nation that prides itself on its secular government, Australia has this bizarre and inappropriate relic, the National School Chaplaincy Program (NSCP), which somehow manages to suck large sums of money out of the government to pay to infest the schools with useless little leeches whose sole purpose seems to be the indoctrination of nonsense into the brains of children.
Being subject to individual State and Territory education policies, since its introduction, the NSCP…
pharyngula | July 27, 2011You should enjoy this: 50 academics talk about god. It's a half hour of nothing but reason and lucid statements of the obvious.
(via Dr JTP)
pharyngula | July 27, 2011Various godless/critical thinking organizations are doing a good thing: they are expanding their sphere of interest into the high schools, and there are now new resources available to students. If you're interested in learning more about what you can do to be a secular activist in your high school, you can contact JT Eberhard at the Secular Student Alliance, and now a new person, Jessica Ahlquist at the Center for Inquiry.
Which clearly sets up a necessary future event: we must have a steel cage match between JT and Jessica. JT keeps bragging that he's more eviler than me, so I'm rooting for…
pharyngula | July 25, 2011Maybe the military isn't so full of fundies as I feared. Justin Griffith managed to get dog tags with his religious preference — "ATHEIST/FSM" — which is good to hear. It wasn't easy, since his recruiter lied and listed him as a Baptist. The story of his drill sergeant's reaction to discovering his holy book, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is well worth reading, too.
pharyngula | July 25, 2011Australia has a census coming up, and you know us atheists: we don't take religion seriously, so we're likely to write down any old mocking riposte to questions about our beliefs. Try not to do it: it gets the godless under-reported. Just answer "no religion" if you're an atheist. If it helps, imagine that the humorless bureaucrats who will tally up the answers are completely incapable of recognizing snark.
pharyngula | July 23, 2011The New Statesman has an article that asked a lot of atheist luminaries and some lesser glowworms like yours truly to explain why they don't believe in gods. I don't think it's available online (I have a copy, though, and posted it outside my office door, so stop on by if you want to read it), but there is a discussion on the New Statesman blog. There are a whole bunch of entertaining short entries in the full article, but I'll just post mine — I gave them two reasons that I don't believe in gods.
1. The process. I am accustomed to the idea that truth claims ought to be justified with some…
pharyngula | July 20, 2011Now I'm sad. Robin Marie asked people at #TAM9 what the best argument for god was, and she didn't get around to me.
My answer would be the argument from ignorance, because they all boil down to that, anyway, and because the only way I could ever be persuaded to believe in gods is if my brain gets scrambled by traumatic injury or Alzheimer's or something. Being the one argument that could convince me ought to earn it high marks, I think.
pharyngula | July 20, 2011As you may recall, I maneuvered a gang of atheists into offering forfeits if they could beat me in fundraising…and Matt Dillahunty agreed to appear in drag on his show. And he has come through! Watch the latest Atheist Experience TV Show — he's looking good.
Watch the show, though. He didn't just treat this as a joke: he actually took it very seriously as an opportunity to see what it's like to fit into unconventional boxes. It's always a good show, but the opening of this one is particularly informative and enlightening.
pharyngula | July 19, 2011I think the loony Christian apologist has got something right. He has identified the greatest threat to Christianity:
The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not.
Hooray for the internet!
Now here is the problem, going all the way back, when Al Gore invented the Internet [he said jokingly], I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to…
pharyngula | July 19, 2011The Canadian Centre for Inquiry has an ambitious goal of establishing a physical center in every major Canadian city, and they've got substantial matching funds to help them do just that. This is the time to donate, if you've got the inclination. I'm sure they'd also accept donations from foreigners, although I'm already jealous enough of Canada that I don't know why I'd want to make them even more awesome.
pharyngula | July 19, 2011Perhaps you've wondered about the true and factual foundations of fairy tales other than the biblical ones. It turns out that the reasoning of theologians is universally applicable!
It is time to set the record straight, and affirm the historical Truth of the Goldilocks narrative. I intend to show that it is overwhelmingly more likely that the Goldilocks story is literally true than not, and not only does it constitute Warranted True Belief, it is *necessarily* true in a deep ontological and cosmological sense, i.e. if the G3B model was any different, our universe would be deeply inimical to…
pharyngula | July 18, 2011I have a daughter. She's all smart and growed up, and she has moved away to the distant land of Wisconsin, where she has a real, full-time job and a car and an apartment and a cat and ferrets and a boyfriend, and she thinks for herself (like I told her to!) and she has opinions I mostly agree with — she's a freethinker and rationalist — and some I disagree with — she's not a fan of the atheist movement and she's had a bit more philosophy in her brain than I think is entirely good for her. She's appeared a few times in the comments here, with much clashiness, and she has her own blog, where…
pharyngula | July 18, 2011I know the flaming crazy emails are more fun, but here's one of the nice ones I also get. It's also a little bit unusual in that the writer isn't a Christian.
Hello professor,
I'm a long time reader first time writer. I've been following your blog for over 3 years now, and you have been one of the main influential characters that aided me in shedding my old Muslim beliefs and embrace rationality and skepticism. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for, well, being you really! I found your blog during the creationists hype back in 07/08, and was quite amused at your style of writing…
pharyngula | July 13, 2011Austria has a reasonable requirement that driving license photos show the person's face without cluttering adornment — which seems fair enough, given that it will be used as ID. Unfortunately, they have an exemption for "confessional reasons", whatever that means, which is apparently that having a superstition allows you to wear whatever the heck you want in your ID photo.
So Niko Alm tested that by donning special headgear — a colander — and insisting that it was a symbol of his religion, Pastafarianism. They conceded it, and now he's driving around with a wacky photo on his license.
The…
pharyngula | July 11, 2011Remember Be Scofield and his bad list of atheist errors? Now Greta Christina takes him on, rather thoroughly.