Pope, you’re a dope, and your mama three

Yeah, your mama is twice as fat as you are. Get it! That makes three. Oh, forget it…

Catholic Pope Francis reckons that there are limits to free speech and that you cannot insult or mock religion. He went on to pontificate that if someone speaks badly of his mother, they can expect to get punched in the face.

The Pope was off course referring to the Charlie Hebdo massacre by religious extremists, and unbelievably excusing it. Insulting a person, even to their face and getting punched in the bargain, is in no way, shape or form equivalent to the response of the religious fundamentalists to the cartoonist’s who lampooned a questionable holy figure.

In any case, any violent response to a verbal or written insult, is unforgivable and just not on. And for a person of the status of the Pope to even think it is, is just plain inexcusable.

I am an atheist. Quite frequently on this blog, my critics label me as the epitome of evil, amongst other things. None of them know me personally, and yet they can assassinate my character and make this value judgement just from reading what I write. Calling me evil is an insult; make no bones about that. But do I go out to find these detractors and brutally shoot them, or blow their houses up? Or do I tie them up and whip them senseless and throw them into confinement? No, prefer to reason it out.

The Saudi Arabian authorities does the latter, while the former is perpetrated by fundamentalist religious bigots. Worse, under a new Saudi Arabian law, atheists are now classified as terrorists. Imagine that. My secular beliefs and values just got declared a highly dangerous weapon, and my keyboard the instrument of mass destruction.

Any God, real or imagined who expects his earthly followers to protect his dignity by killing and maiming the transgressor, is not worth worshipping, and is nothing but a celestial dictator. Any representative on Earth of said Gods, who preach this doctrine, and demand enforcement are just vile scum. It’s that simple.

An aside to Pope Francis: The next time you head my way, I will gladly submit my face to a punching. I will even take one on the other cheek. I surely deserve it for calling your mama fat. But you’re still a dope.

Non Belief or Unbelief? Does it really matter?

I stumbled across this YouTube video earlier today of Stephen Fry being interviewed on Big Think. The title “The Importance of Unbelief” left me pondering whether there is a difference or distinction between Unbelief and Non Belief, and whether it really matters in the larger scheme of things.

On the surface it appears that any distinction between Unbelief and Non Belief is merely semantic, but the antagonism towards New Age Atheism in recent years made very public by the Internets, seems to indicate that the difference is worth investigating, or acknowledging at the very least.

Now, I’m no philosopher or epistemologist or linguist even, but I have unwittingly placed myself in the centre of this apparent wrangle simply because I have chosen to label myself as an Atheist these many years. It used to be that being an atheist was pretty straightforward, but like with so many other things, the modern world contrives to complicate everything. Where once it was grudgingly accepted that there were shades of grey, it seems there is now shaded shades of grey.

In the quest for answers, I tried to follow this debate Does “Atheism” mean “unbelief or lack of belief in God” or “there is no God” ?, and I confess to being more bewildered than ever.

From what I can gather, Unbelief is closely associated with agnosticism, which is harshly regarded as the fence-sitter position. Non belief on the other hand seems to indicate a positive position which is more assertive and based on either certain knowledge, or rejection of asserted knowledge. I do admit that this I have adopted the latter position, not on the basis of certain knowledge, but on the rejection of positions asserted by those who do claim to have such.

But is the rejection of asserted knowledge enough to formulate a belief? Do I now also have to assume the burden of proof? But proof of what since the whole God concept is not clearly defined?

See, here I was thinking that atheism had simplified my life immeasurably, but actually thinking more deeply has opened up a whole new complication. But I guess such is the bane of introspection.

Does this mean that I will go back to believing because it is much easier? Hell no!

Where religions come to die…

This…

Or this…

But from all appearances, it’s not gonna go easily. Perhaps religion is dead and buried already; what we’re still experiencing is that god-awful stink.

Meanwhile, Nigel Barber over at the Huff & Puff Post thinks religion will only be defeated by 2038, mostly through the rise of living standards.

Using the average global growth rate of GDP for the past 30 years of 3.33 percent (based on International Monetary Fund data from their website), the atheist transition would occur in 2035….

If national wealth drives secularization, the global population will cross an atheist threshold where the majority see religion as unimportant by 2041….

Averaging across the two measures of atheism, the entire world population would cross the atheist threshold by about 2038 (average of 2035 for disbelief and 2041 for religiosity). Although 2038 may seem improbably fast, this requires only a shift of approximately 1 percent per year whether in religiosity or belief in God. Using the Human Development Index as a clock suggests an even earlier arrival for the atheist transition.

I’m still skeptical however. 2035 seems way too optimistic. What’s the point of defeating religious belief if other forms of credulous belief persist?

But then again, one victory at a time.

The only mystery here is why this guy isn’t behind bars already

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This may sound a trifle conceited, but my regular followers will have noticed that I don’t post blogs that attacks religion directly, as often as I used to. You see, I’ve found over time that religion (aided and abetted by its adherents of course) does a bang-up job of trashing itself, all on its own.

However, I do make a point of posting about religious incidents that are so outrageous, as to make one seethe in anger at its imprudence. This is one such incident…

Pope Benedict XVI, has been under the cosh of late, and for good reason. His un-thoughtful utterances have not only further damaged (if that’s at all still possible) the Catholic faith, but his own credibility too. Over the weekend he told Irish Catholics that it is a mystery why priests and other church officials abused children. While the many years of denial has finally been exposed beyond any doubt, the Catholic Church is now dealing with the fallout, but instead of trying to make things right (is that possible?), or amends (what could possibly compensate?), they continue to act like the reasons for the abuse were beyond their human ability to control. Take this statement for example:

How are we to explain the fact that people who regularly received the Lord’s body and confessed their sins in the sacrament of Penance have offended in this way?

The attempt to make out that the rampant child abuse was a “mystery” is not only laughable, but outrageously mendacious. It is also an insult to the many that were hurt as a result of this dastardly behaviour.

His Unholiness should be told in no uncertain terms that there is no mystery here. The answer or part of it, is right there in that ridiculous statement he made. The repulsive ideology of the Eucharist, that man can “eat” of the body of Christ and “drink” of his blood, may not be the full answer, but it certainly points to it.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

If this book isn’t already a cult classic, it most certainly should be. Subtitled The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch and released around 1990, Good Omens is a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett [although Pratchett did more of the writing and editing], both well-known fantasy authors in their own right.

Having not read either author’s work previously, this introduction to their comic genius has prompted me to purchase a few of their individual books which I’m eagerly looking forward to reading very soon.

The main plot revolves around the impending end of the world as we know it – Armageddon, and the efforts of the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, to prevent the Antichrist in the guise of Adam Young, an eleven-year old boy from bringing it about, having taken a liking (in their own ways) to humans and becoming inured to the comfortable life on earth over the millenia. Aziraphale we are told is the angel originally from the biblical Garden of Eden, while Crowley is better known as the talking snake who tempted Eve.

Being the respective representatives of God and Satan on earth, both form an unlikely friendship and conspire to ensure that the baby from Hell that Crowley is tasked to integrate into human society, does not actually grow up learning to differentiate between Good and Evil. Needless to say, in a comic mix-up at the hospital the future Antichrist winds up with the wrong family and grows up to be a relatively normal eleven-year boy who begins to utilize his unearthly powers without knowing it.

As the fateful day of the Rapture approaches, the race is on by both demon and angel to find the Antichrist a.k.a. Adam Young, to prevent him from initiating it. But there are also a host of other characters after him, some to help him end the world such as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding motorcycles, and others such as Anathema Device, the descendent of the witch Agnes Nutter, and Newton Pulsifer the witch hunter  descended from the man responsible for burning Agnes at the stake. The latter pair team up to find Adam and help save the world.

The rather neat ending in which the world is saved from annihilation was a bit of a let-down, but overall the many laughs and perceptive commentary about the state of the world up to that point, more than make up for it. I found the final thought from Adam [listed further below] is something everyone should aspire to.

Perceptive Commentary About the State of the World, or My Favorite Quotes

1. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
2. It happened to them at a certain age, wives. Twenty-five blameless years, then suddenly they were going off and doing these robotic exercises in pink socks with the feet cut out and they started blaming you for never having had ti work for a living. It was hormones or something.
3. They’d been brought up to it and weren’t, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren’t. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.
4. It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
5. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.
6. People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
7. There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that , despite thousands of years of manmade evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf.
8. “Churches? What good did they ever do? They’m just as bad. Same line o’ business nearly. You can’t trust them to stamp out the Evil One, ‘cos if they did, they’d be out o’ that line of business…”
9. He’d have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he’d have preferred a half-hour’s chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He’d sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn’t come. And he’d tried to become an official Atheist and hadn’t got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.
10. It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing people’s doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money.
11. “I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and the gettin’ upset ‘cos they act like people,” said Adam severely. “Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.”
12. There never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

A sikh joke you say?

The Indian population of India and abroad really have to get over this ridiculous insecurity about their many religions.

Hot on the heels of India’s pathetic dispute with Facebook and Google over content that they myopically view as hostile to local religions, comes the Jay Leno affair. And only recently, celebrated author Salman Rushdie was forced to cancel a planned appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival after threats and protests from Islamist groups, while the Indian authorities apparently turned a blind eye.

Back to the Jay Leno affair: Jay Leno, host of the Tonight Show is in hot water following a quip he made about the Golden Temple in Amritsar being the holiday home of Republican, Mitt Romney. While some sensible Indians (Sikhs included) appreciated the joke and accepted it as quite normal,  it has apparently angered the Sikh community in the USA and in India. They believe that the joke is a deliberate affront to their religion.

However if you watch the clip below, you’ll find that Leno made no reference to Sikhs or the temple itself. So you have to wonder what all the fuss is about.

The obvious answer is that like the adherents of all other religions in the world, the Sikhs have this obtuse notion that their god or gods require constant defending against perceived attacks, both from adherents of competing religions, heathens and non-believers alike.

How utterly pathetic?

It’s time you life-sucking god-botherers grew up and started attending to the real problems in the world, not the imaginary ones that seem to make up all these pointless religions we have.

Christopher Hitchens (1949 – 2011)

 

Christopher Hitchens would have had no trouble whatsoever to write eloquently about the death of someone both greatly admired and despised, as he himself was. While I count myself in the former category, on the contrary, am finding it not so easy to express with the same degree of articulacy, what a great loss to humanity his death is.

The measure of integrity of the man shone brightly as he maintained his steadfast stance on anti-theism, right through a harrowing fight with cancer, and despite predictions from hate-filled religionists that he would eventually turn to their gods.

Hitchens had the sort of life that most people can only dream off; hard and fast religionists off course denying themselves that simple pleasure. He may be no more but his memory will live as long as man still cherishes true freedom.

Questions for Believers From Piet in Rotterdam

Piet from Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked me very politely to post a link to some thought-provoking questions he has compiled for believers.

Since I’ve asked some of these questions myself over the years, I am quite happy to oblige in providing the links to his compilation. I quite enjoyed reading through them although they’re targeted at believers mostly.

The English version [a work in progress]:

Questions for the Believer

The Dutch version:

95 stellingen / vragen aan een christen

The awful reality that must be faced should a God exist

I know a women who believes that her God has been testing her, for most of her life. She also believes that despite everything she goes through, her faith is still strong and true.

She has a son who is in his mid-twenties now, but has been mentally challenged since shortly after birth. The women believes that the condition of her son is one of the biggest tests her God has set for her.

Perhaps you think that I’m insensitive by writing about this? The truth is I feel sad for her son, but I have mixed feelings of pity and loathing for her.

Here we encounter the first horrific reality of a world with a god in it: the women is apparently eminent enough to warrant a God making another human being become the guinea pig in a test of her faith. The obvious conclusion is that this god does not value all human life equally. The obvious question is, by what criteria?

If anyone knows the answer to that question, I’m sure people everywhere who are afflicted by one form or other of physical or mental disability, are waiting to hear it. Yes, I’m talking about God’s pawns, or the world’s human guinea pigs.

Image via Wikipedia

But let us continue. The women lives a reasonably good life, but not everything goes the way she would like. She’s self-employed, has a roof over her head, a decent enough husband, reasonably good food to eat, takes the odd holiday away. By most standards, she’s in a better position than the majority of the world’s population.

However, she has shitty relatives who are constantly fighting each other, business is mostly not that good, she has to skip paying some bills from month to month, she’s frequently sick (her husband too), close friends and family members have died from or are slowly succumbing to cancer, and she just can’t seem to win that Lottery. Worse, her immediate neighbor has just got that new 57 inch flat screen TV and imported Italian tiles in the kitchen, and the idiot across the road drives a super hot top-of-the-range Mercedes, while her husband makes do with that lousy Mazda that forever breaks down.

At these times she complains to anyone that will listen that her god is testing her, but she is confident that she has the strength to abide, and will be rewarded some day.

What she has failed to contemplate is the fact that somewhere in Africa, there is a child who has not eaten for days, using the hot sun and twinkling stars for his roof. This child is not thinking about TV’s and tiles, not even about that unmarked shallow grave that is his destiny. This child is even unaware he is the object of a cruel game in which a God has gone beyond testing, to torturing.

This my friends is the astounding reality of a world with a God in it.

10 Popular Myths About Atheists and Atheism by Amanda Marcotte

Image via Wikipedia

I’m frequently accosted by readers that respond to my blog posts, who use one or more of several common myths about atheists and atheism in their arguments with me.

It’s therefore quite obliging of Amanda Marcotte, author of It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, to collate 10 of the most popular myths for us all.

In an article on AlterNet she writes as follows:

In a regular poll conducted by political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell on American political attitudes, atheists recently lost their spot as as the most disliked group in America to the Tea Party. Still, number two is simply way too high in the unpopularity rankings for a group of people who just happen to spend Sunday mornings in bed instead of in church. Polling data shows that nearly half of Americans would disapprove if their child married an atheist and nearly 40 percent of Americans don’t see atheists as sharing their vision of American society, numbers that outstripped similar prejudices toward Muslims and African Americans.

Of course, the real reason atheists are so hated has little to do with jealousy for all their free time, but largely because most Americans are better acquainted with myths than with the realities of atheists’ lives. Unfortunately, atheists often have these myths tossed in their faces, usually by believers who would rather talk about what they heard atheists are like rather than uncomfortable subjects such as the lack of proof for any gods.

And here’s one of my all-time favorites; never fails to amuse me every time it’s used against me:

Atheists are just angry with God. Atheists often point out the logical inconsistencies of many religious beliefs—such as the belief both that God is all-good and all-powerful, but he somehow also allows evil to exist—and believers use that to conclude that atheists are angry with God. We aren’t. You can’t be angry with a being that you don’t believe exists. I’m no angrier with God than I am angry with Zeus or the aliens that keep kidnapping drunks sleeping in their cars. Anger with religions for promoting false beliefs isn’t the same thing as being angry at the being that believers invented.

Catch the other 9 here on AlterNet.