Standing Tall for Atheism

I was struck by something this evening that I haven't thought a great deal about. I was struck by another sneaky lie by the theists (I like Hitchens' term for them). Picture the school child who has done something wrong and knows they've done something wrong. Quite often the guilty party will point a finger at another child and say, "But he did this awful thing..." it takes focus away from the guilty party and focuses it on a child that, perhaps, has done nothing. This is what the theists have been doing for quite some time and have done particularly well this week. This notion hit me as I was watching a video of Christopher Hitchens. He had been on a TV program with a particularly snotty host (Joe Scarborough - MSNBC of all places but he is Republican) who refused to let him answer the questions he'd been asked because Joe is clearly a Deluded-American. This in itself makes him a bad journalist (because journalism is never supposed to be about what the interviewer believes) but I digress. Hitchens was invited and Joe was rude to him. In any event, watching Christopher Hitchens throughout the years gave me a particular respect for him. He never backed down from a fight. He didn't allow anybody to get away with anything. His idea was that just because someone had "faith" didn't automatically entitle them to respect. He also wouldn't allow these people to disrespect him because he was rational (an atheist). He eventually made Joe look like an idiot and rightly so.

My "lightbulb" moment happened. All week (and for years actually) American theists have been falsely claiming a war on Christianity, when, in fact, there is no such war. It's like the school kid above. The war is on atheism! But they are pointing their fingers at us and whoosh... the attention is suddenly on atheists. We are supposedly the bad ones attacking religion when they are the ones attacking our constitutional right to NOT be bombarded with irrational nonsense 24/7.

Richard Dawkins is brilliant but he is soft spoken and is a target for religious bullies for this reason. He reads more before breakfast than the religious idiots, he argued with this week, read in a year. The study that was done by Dawkins was a questionnaire that clearly pointed out that most people who call themselves Christian on the census, know virtually nothing about Christianity. I'm an atheist and I know more about what is in the bible than most Christians. So the archbishop (or whoever the hell the bully was) asked him, totally off guard what the entire (lengthy) title was of Darwin's book. He stumbled with his words because it caught him off guard and after the 13 year old school girl giggles passed from the obviously biased room, some moron claimed Dawkins didn't know the title of his "bible".

Well, first of all, bullies at large, atheists don't have a bible. Educated people read lots of books (not just one that they base EVERYTHING on) and so it's very likely that one might momentarily forget a lengthy book title. One thing I am certain of, is that Dawkins has read the content of 'The Origin of Species' (and I can't remember the full title either) and knows what's in it and has studied plenty of other books on biology and has authored a few himself. I quite often have to look up the title of a book I've read or sometimes even an author's name because I read a lot! And NOTHING I read is my "bible" because I have no bible. The books in the bible have longer titles too but we all call them by their short names.

Then the moronic Janet Daley, author of the Telegraph article claimed Dawkins couldn't answer her about why it's wrong to hurt people. She's lying. Even I know the "evidence" for that "belief" is in ours brains, where there is a "survival of the species" mechanism which causes us to feel empathy for others. We have human emotions that come from the brain which evolved in us to protect our young and protect our tribe members from predators. Dawkins is much smarter than I am and would have given that answer had that actually been the question asked.

Furthermore, as Dailey said in her lame defense of her position, asking "why" is human nature. We're intelligent, curious animals. But just because we are curious and want to know "why" doesn't mean we should believe nonsense made up by other humans. It also doesn't mean there is actually an answer to that question. Why are lilies so beautiful? Because they are a happy accident of nature. I don't know why flowers are so pretty and neither does anyone else. It's been argued repeatedly that the universe is so magnificent and everything functions as if by design. There must be a designer. It can't all be accidental. My answer is "yes it can". There is no reason why it can't. It all just happened. Why is that so hard for humans to accept. It makes more sense than a magic space daddy that was made up by flat Earth desert dwellers.

So back off theists! The war is on those of us who use our brains for thinking and not for "blind faith". There is no war on Christianity. There is a war on atheism - rational thinkers!

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Oh, Religion!

Fist of all, let's deal with the religious person's (let's call them RP's for typing efficiency from here on out) first "argument" in their defense of religion. It's one word - "faith". The dictionary defines it as a "strong belief in god or the doctrines of religion based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof". I agree with that definition and that is why "faith" is also my number one argument against religion. Why would a species who have evolved so far in science and engineering, ever believe ancient myths that were taught thousands of years ago before there even was science? Why would we believe stories that were told by people to explain their environment (that which could not be explained at the time)? Why would we believe that a supernatural omnipotent being "spoke" to the men who wrote those texts rather than the fact that it was their own, personal moral values being pushed on others? The moral compass of these men was based on bigotry - bigotry of homosexuals, bigotry of women, bigotry or other races, etc. so these men decided that they would tell everyone that God spoke to them or they had a dream (which very well could have been the case) that God spoke to them, when, in fact, it was their own thoughts or a mental condition such as schizophrenia, that actually came to them. And so the tales were eventually written down. Neighbours, with the same fears of the unknown, were told the tales and so began religion. And may I point out that every religion started in this manner. The point is, we now have science. We now know that magic is illusion, we now know that chemical problems in the brain cause some poor people to see things that are not there and hear voices. So why is faith, that pesky word that absolves us from thinking about the things we know to be true, an argument? How can not taking responsibility for our own lives be considered a good thing?

Secondly, why would this http://t.co/COEk6nWM insanely stupid argument in support of misogyny, be thought by its writter to be a convincing argument in favour of religion (belief in "God"). If God was real, if god was good, if god was all knowing and all seeing and if god, did, indeed create all things, one would assume that god, who knows everything, would have realized that the "culture" of the time was wrong. That women are sentient beings with absolutely equal RIGHTS as their male counterparts and therefore teach "His" people that the way they treated the women at that time period was brutally wrong, and therefore shell out a whole different set of punishments for those who raped women, didn't allow women to be community leaders, didn't allow women to own their own property and didn't allow women to control their own sexuality. Just because lameassed jealous men didn't trust their wives and so didn't want to feed another man's child is no excuse. Perhaps if those men didn't cheat on their wives they wouldn't have assumed their wives were doing the same thing. And perhaps if the women were allowed to choose their own husband, they would never have dreamed of cheating on the man they loved. You see, if God was real, he would have taught people these things 2000 - 6000 years ago.

He could have said to Abraham instead of "if you love me kill your own kid to prove it" something like "I created men and women to be sentient beings and therefore if a man does not treat his wife as he would like to be treated, it's an assault on me and same thing goes for a woman to a man". Thus ending the misogyny of the times.

You see if God was real, he would not threaten his "children" to believe in him or you'll burn in hell because if he was that great, he'd never have to threaten anyone. And if every human is a "child" of God, why would he pick favourites and tell the Jews in the first five books of the bible to go to non-Jew lands and butcher the men, women and children (yes even babies who couldn't possibly have done anything wrong - unless crying is a crime). Weren't those "non-Jews" God's children too? He even made them kill the damned livestock. What the hell did the animals do to piss off God? And why wouldn't they keep the livestock to feed their own families. Which reminds me, in the one case I recall where the conquering army did keep the livestock to feed themselves, God got completely pissed off and made them suffer big time. WHAT AN ASS!

So, as you can see, these arguments we atheists use are not the "insanely stupid" arguments douchebag above makes... the arguments he makes are insanely stupid for all of the reasons I just mentioned.

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