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The Turkish government has forbidden its residents from accessing richarddawkins.net, thanks to complaints by Islamic creationist author and convicted felon Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Harun Yahya (a.k.a. Adnan Hoca)). Goddamn, pick a name, already.

From here:

“Faith is not based on science,” Mr. Campbell said. “And science is not based on faith. I don’t expect you to ‘believe’ the scientific explanation of evolution that we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks.”

“But I do,” he added, “expect you to understand it.”

I applaud Mr. Campbell and Florida’s Department of Education for embracing evolution as a fundamental part of science education. And I understand Mr. Campbell’s strategy behind his presentation. However, I cannot agree with his reasoning.

Faith is always based on something and that something is always a product of our experience, even if it does not exist. Faith, like any mental construct, is experiential. And because it is experiential, it is, like any mental construct, amenable to scientific exploration.

So, while faith might not be based on science, it is misleading to imply, as Mr. Campbell seems to be doing, that faith is not open to scientific scrutiny.

As an aside, I noticed from this graphic that Florida stands out as a progressive Southern state, while Iowa unfortunately stands out for the opposite reasons (i.e., northern and regressive).

In a recent radio interview with David Mills (mp3), a 70-year-old man called in and argued, in part, that he was not trying to convert David to Christianity. A following caller supported this position while criticizing David for calling certain biblical beliefs, like the belief in a 6,000-year-old Earth, ridiculous. Let me ask you something. Is it possible for someone with a given belief to argue for that belief without also implicitly trying to convince the opposition to accept that belief as true?

If I am arguing for a belief and I admit that I accept that belief as true, then how can I possibly truthfully claim not to be defending that belief? I don’t see how I could possibly remain neutral in this case. If I believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years young and you believe that it’s millions of years old, then I cannot argue that it is so young without, at the same time, trying to convince you of that belief. Just can’t happen.

Gunman critically wounds 7 in Tennessee church

George Carlin explains:

“Do you believe in god?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in my god?”

“No.”

BAM! Dead!

I must share with you an admittedly kooky, but strangely reasonable, thought that struck me today. It is that evolution is proof of sin! Well, sin doesn’t exist. But if it did, then evolution would be proof of its existence.

Here is my reasoning. Because we and our environment are constantly coevolving, we are forced to constantly adapt to evolving environmental demands. It evolves. We evolve. It evolves. We evolve. And so on it goes, round and round, always changing and, sometimes, arguably progressing.

Enter sin. Sin is basically a genetic flaw or imperfection, right? And the need to constantly adapt means that we are genetically imperfect. (I would actually argue against the employment of imperfection as a valid concept here, but let’s pretend for now that it makes sense.) So the need to constantly evolve means that we are sinful by nature!

What good is this little revelation? (As an aside, I’m pretty sure without looking it up that some liberal Christian, somewhere, has argued this point before.) As a representative, if you will, of Atheism, you can tell theists that evolution must exist because sin exists (to them, anyway).

Argument

Your religious belief is based on faith.

If it made sense, you wouldn’t need faith.

So your religious belief doesn’t make sense.

But if it doesn’t make sense, then why have faith?

Faith has to be based on something.

And that something has to make sense.

Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to have faith in it.

Conclusion

You shouldn’t have faith in something that doesn’t make sense.

There used to be a thousand gods.
They ruled antiquity.
What are the odds?

The fear and hope of countless sods
Lay shrouded in mystery.
There used to be a thousand gods.

All but one were damned as frauds.
There were so many.
What are the odds?

From fires to floods,
They cursed iniquity.
There used to be a thousand gods.

Every race lauds
Its chosen divinity.
What are the odds?

A million synods
Voted what to believe.
There used to be a thousand gods.
What are the odds?

—

This form of poetry is called a villanelle. I learned about it last night and wanted to try my hand at it. It’s not that hard to make.

Polytheism used to be all the rage. Monotheism became popular because people were lazy and didn’t want to pray a thousand times to a thousand different gods. Oh, we need rain today? Let’s pray to Rain God. Oh, we need sunshine tomorrow? Let’s pray to Sun God. And so it goes. It gets old, I imagine. The only semi-reasonable solution is to consolidate your deities into one gigantic, all-powerful savior. Now you can pray for everything at once and your one awesome god will take care of it all with his infinite capacity and goodness.

Yet, even when you have decided to worship only one god, you can still find a thousand other gods. This absurdity of worshiping one out of a thousand gods is what inspired this poem. One of the silliest presumptions of any monotheist is that his or her chosen god is the only true or existing god.

How does anyone know that other gods don’t exist? Maybe they do. Maybe they sit up in Heaven together and play games with our minds. Can’t you see Zeus, Odin, and Jesus sitting around a cloud-filled roulette wheel, betting on when some poor sap will kick the bucket or lose his marbles from some preordained misfortune?

If anyone tries to tell you that only one god exists, ask that person how he or she came to know such privileged information and why the rest of the world is still so confused. It’s a good question. And faith is not the answer. It’s avoidance of it.

You might point out to a Christian sometime that some things just don’t add up in the Bible. “There are contradictions everywhere,” you might argue. But you would be wasting your time, because logic rarely ever applies to a Christian. To a Christian, the Bible is infallible, plain and simple. It never makes a mistake. It can’t, because it was written by God and God never makes a mistake. And it never lies, because God would never tell one of his creations only part of the truth (even though, by definition, he always knows more than we can comprehend).

So it makes sense that the Bible has to be perfect, right? Wrong, and here’s why. The Bible was written by imperfect people. The Bible was, according to it, dictated to imperfect people by a perfect God, either directly or indirectly through the medium of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is a tiny little invisibile translation device that gets implanted into the base of a person’s skull the moment he or she converts to Christianity. Convert and get a free upgrade!

And because the Bible was written by imperfect people, it has to have some imperfections of its own, either injected into it by a poor speller with a fifth-grade education, which was all-too-common in the days before No Child Left Behind, or about it as it got communicated to millions and millions of people around the world in many different languages. Somewhere along the way, you know, without a doubt, that some idiot fucked up somewhere and made a mistake when interpreting a story that came to be included in the Bible. Or, worse, it’s probably the case that the star of a story in the Bible embellished that story to ensure future fame.

For instance, suppose that Jonah never actually lived inside of a whale. Suppose the truth of the matter is that Jonah got his leg bitten off by a shark and lived to tell about it. Only, to tell about it and prove to his friends and family that his manhood remained intact, he had to transform his story into, shall we say, a tall tale and boast that it wasn’t only his leg that got swallowed up inside the mouth of a gigantic sea creature. It was his entire body! And that gigantic sea creature wasn’t a shark the size of his camel. No! It was a gigantic killer whale the size of his house!

But it really doesn’t matter what happened, because something, somewhere in the Bible is bound to be wrong, even if just a little bit. You know it and I know it. And if you really press a Christian to admit it, he or she will tell you that he or she knows it. Because it’s common sense that people make mistakes and nothing God says or does can cure that. Obviously.

Like I’m sure a lot of atheists out there, ever since George Carlin’s death, I’ve been asking myself over and over, “Why do you restrain yourself?” The last version of this site overflowed with sarcasm and frank expositions on religious nonsense, even if they were at times silly and ultimately futile. At the time I thought to myself, “You’re being too hard on theists. They’ll never deconvert if you act disdainful or belligerent towards them. Act nice and they’ll repent of their otherworldly inhumanness.”

Yeah, well, in the spirit of George Carlin’s beautiful rotting corpse, fuck acting nice. I’ve decided that deconversion is not even remotely the point of an atheistic blog or website. Why? Because theists, generally speaking, don’t give a fuck about what we atheists think or feel. They don’t listen to reason. They don’t care about truth. All they care about is their precious Teddy Bear of Hope in the Sky.

So what is the point, pray tell, of shouting my lungs out if it falls on deaf ears? It’s just preaching to the choir, in a manner of speaking. And, truth be told, neither I nor any of you atheist bloggers out there have a single solitary chance in Hell of deconverting these lost nonexistent souls until they are ready and willing themselves to listen to what reason and reality have to offer.

So, I say, screw this serious atheological or philosophical bullshit that I’ve been struggling to write for months now. This isn’t a thesis paper. No one is grading my grammar or spelling. Who cares if I plagiarize from Benny Hinn and command demons to flee in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? This is a goddamn atheistic blog, for Christ’s sake. And my audience, being the only ones who really give a shit about life, are all atheists just like me, looking for a sense of community and a few choice words about the shitty religious world in which they are forced to live until Jesus and Muhammad return and admit to being a homo and a nympho, respectively.

Screw seriousness and screw religion. I’m ready to resume having fun.

(Now watch. I won’t post anything for weeks.)

Atheists often complain that theists will not listen to reason and deconvert because emotion gets in the way. So, this complaint goes, there isn’t any hope of deconverting a theist until s/he feels like it.

Well, earlier today I read a few pages from D’Holbach’s The System of Nature. And I began to lose interest after only a few paragraphs. Part of the problem is that D’Holbach took a while to get to his point. He could probably expostulate for hours, deconverting his friends out of sheer exhaustion.

Yet, another part of the problem is that, put bluntly, I have shit to do. Life calls, in other words, constantly. It’s relenting in its request for attention. “You forgot to turn off the light.” “You need to wash clothes.” “Your lawn isn’t going to mow itself.” It’s so annoying!

So, if I put myself in the shoes of your average theist with lots of shit to do, it becomes abundantly clear that I will almost certainly never get around to reading critical commentaries on religion, much less thinking about religion critically, which takes more effort. No, instead, I will most likely spend my entire life struggling in a constant tug-of-war with reality to just get shit done. It’s not emotion. It’s not retardation. It’s just life. Life is the culprit.