Atheist Threatens To Sue Town For Putting Up Nativity Scene, But Not Festivus ...
Huffington Post
Chaz Stevens, the atheist responsible for erecting a Festivus pole made of beer cans in the Florida capitol, is now threatening to sue the town of Deerfield Beach for displaying a nativity scene, according to a video he posted to YouTube. "People don't ...

Pope says atheists are OK with Jesus, so long as they "do good"
Boing Boing
Yesterday's Papal homily, delivered by the Pope without notes after conducting Mass in his residence, included a story about a priest who told an atheist that he was redeemed by Jesus just as a Catholic would be, so long as the atheist "did good ...
Pope Francis Condemns Racism And Declares That “All Religions Are True” At ...Iranian

all 1,104 news articles »

Atheist says, 'Boo!' Navy jumps to attention
OneNewsNow
The Navy Times reports that the commander of the Guantanamo Bay naval base has decided to move Nativity scenes from two dining halls, following complaints from atheist Mikey Weinstein and his Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The atheist group ...

 

 

 

Written by Johnny O’Coileain 

Editor, Crackpot Chronicle/One Nation Under Nothing 

Add him on Facebook

“Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.”    – Frances Wright

I’d like to begin by saying: you’re an inspiration by your very existence. Throughout our meager time on earth, persecution has riddled human existence like a ghostly virus.  They call you faggot, deviant, queer, godless wretch, and unnatural; and here you stand, naturally being who you are. Isn’t it strange how those who brandish the divine mantle of persecution, are those demonizing your existence? Struggling to be yourself in a society hostile to sexual differences is like hoisting a mountain, but to exemplify disbelief as well; you truly are carrying the world on a fragile back.

What you represent is the timeless idea of progress itself. It’s an idea that echoes through the ages, vigorously shouting that humankind can never  traverse a new future divided. In all areas of great change: technological, scientific, philosophical, and political, this theme is resounding. Your essence is the torchbearer for life’s biggest tradition: change.

If, indeed, life’s biggest tradition is change, take this as your consolation: that those who resist it, those who slander your right to exist, are on the wrong side of history. The direction of time is on your side. Progress is invariably slow, but it’s happening; and we will fight to see that your seat at the table is of equal height to us all. For all you face, I thank you. For all you endure, I am beside you. For the future ahead, I refuse to let you be alone.

On a vibrant planet teaming with differences, your differences are perfectly natural because differences create this beautiful world. Only those who can’t acknowledge the diversity around them; they embody all that is unnatural about this reality. Unnatural is universal homogeny; unnatural is un-diversity; unnatural is life not changing; and unnatural is rejecting the existence of those who clearly exist. It is the abolition of reason; and reasonable, like you, is a natural thing to be. We are all one and equal, and by your side, we’ll keep reminding a bigoted world until they recede to where they rightfully belong: the superstitious infancy of our species.

Once again, thank you for being an inspiration by your very existence.

–Johnny O’Coileain

At Christmas, it's tough out there for an atheist
Hot Air
This is apparently such a pressing problem that one author at The New Republic felt compelled to publish an Atheist's Guide to Christmas: How to Talk to Kids About Santa and Jesus. Insofar as the December holiday has become a culture-war touchstone, ...

Library Rejects $3000 Donation From Atheist Blogger, Saying He Belongs To ...
Huffington Post
Updated: Dec. 20 5:50 p.m. EST. An Illinois library has returned a $3,000 check donated by an atheist blogger, citing that he belongs to a “hate group.” Hemant Mehta, a Naperville math teacher and author of the Friendly Atheist blog, decided to launch ...
In season of giving, atheist groups' charity rebuffedWashington Post

all 12 news articles »

I see it’s time for Ross Douthat’s Christmas folly. Once again, we get that casual assumption that his personal freaky weird favorite religious myth is utterly true and significant, while reality is a fringe occupation. I wish I knew how that guy got to be a NYT columnist. I suspect we all wonder at the parade of wackaloons who get prime real estate on the esteemed Times’ opinion page.

He’s writing about the Jesus story, of course. The theme of his little essay is that there are three worldviews used to interpret Christmas. There’s the Biblical view, that’s all about the complete picture: gods, angels, people, the whole shebang.

Because that’s what the Christmas story really is — an entire worldview in a compact narrative, a depiction of how human beings relate to the universe and to one another. It’s about the vertical link between God and man — the angels, the star, the creator stooping to enter his creation. But it’s also about the horizontal relationships of society, because it locates transcendence in the ordinary, the commonplace, the low.

And then there’s the waffly vague non-Catholic spiritual picture, which doesn’t try to claim that the details are real.

This is the world picture that red-staters get from Joel Osteen, blue-staters from Oprah, and everybody gets from our “God bless America” civic religion. It’s Christian-ish but syncretistic; adaptable, easygoing and egalitarian. It doesn’t care whether the angel really appeared to Mary: the important thing is that a spiritual version of that visitation could happen to anyone — including you.

And then there are those damned atheists.

Then, finally, there’s the secular world picture, relatively rare among the general public but dominant within the intelligentsia. This worldview keeps the horizontal message of the Christmas story but eliminates the vertical entirely. The stars and angels disappear: There is no God, no miracles, no incarnation. But the egalitarian message — the common person as the center of creation’s drama — remains intact, and with it the doctrines of liberty, fraternity and human rights.

Guess which one he’s going to argue is the right and proper one?

Oh, he tries to put up the illusion of even-handedness. The spiritual view is more flexible, he says, and notice that he acknowledges that atheists can be egalitarian; he also notes that the Biblical view has the problem of “how to remain loyal to biblical ethics in a commercial, sexually liberated society” (Really? That’s the Bible’s big problem? How about why we should believe in its nonsensical stories at all?)

But ultimately, his goal is to snipe at non-Catholic interpretations of the Christmas story. The spiritual New Age version lacks the Bible’s “resources and rigor”, at which point I just about fell off my chair laughing. Rigor? In biblical theology? That word does not mean what you think it means. Both are just arcane rationalizations for whatever they want their religion to mean.

But here’s what you want to see: how does Ross Douthat dismiss godlessness?

The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals, because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss.

I can be fair-minded too. Part of that is actually accurate: atheism does propose “a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory.” That’s our reality. That’s what science tells us about our history and the nature of our existence. We are contingent products of chance events, shaped by necessity, alone (so far) in our universe, with no supernatural agents telling us what to do with our lives. We have had millennia of evidence, of people crying out for help to their imagined heavenly saviors, and they never answer, they never give aid, they never ever do anything that isn’t better explained by natural causes. The concepts of gods and angels fail to harmonize with the reality of human experience, and therefore cannot support any rationale for moral behavior.

The desperate rope-flinging is all done by believers. When confronted with pain and suffering, with our limitations, with our mortality, they’re the ones who conjure up ridiculous rationalizations to try and reconcile reality with their fantasy of a purposeful and benign universe. They look up to a sky where a thin film of atmosphere separates us from a vast, cold, and barren void and invent a grandfatherly puppetmaster to fill the terrifying emptiness.

Atheists turn to one another — our hope lies in substance and reality, not wishful thinking and delusion, and what we know exists are our fellow human beings, our world, and that ultimately we must rely on our interactions with what is, rather than what isn’t, to find happiness and survival. We don’t have absolute answers on how to do that, and we do have to continue to struggle to work out principles to promote that essential cooperation, but it’s absurd for someone to accuse us of absolutism (comparing us to religious advocates, no less, with no sense of irony) while arguing for a literal interpretation of an Iron Age god-myth. And further, to argue that our reliance on human values rather than theological ones is tantamount to trying to bridge a chasm with failed hopes.

You know, we’re not the ones even trying to bridge a chasm separating us from an invisible fantasy-land on the other side at all. We’re here on our side, with each other, trying to build a society that fosters equality right here.

Telegraph.co.uk
LSE Apologises To Atheist Students Over Mohammed Jesus T-Shirt Row
Huffington Post UK
The incident, which took place in October, attracted nationwide attention, with famous atheist Richard Dawkins weighing in to criticise the institution. SEE ALSO: Reading University's Atheist Society 'Thrown Out Of Fair Over Blasphemous Mohammed ...
LSE apologises over satirical T-shirt rowTimes Higher Education

all 25 news articles »

'Church' Expecting Festive Flock Of Atheists
Sky News
It aims to be "part atheist church, part foot-stomping show and 100% celebration of life". The Sunday Assembly Co-founders of the Sunday Assembly: Pippa Evans and Sanderson Jones. British comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans came up with the ...

and more »

Christian Post
The Atheist's Guide to Christmas
The New Republic
Insofar as the December holiday has become a culture-war touchstone, I suspect it has something to do with increased pominence of atheism in American life. Religiously neutral seasonal greetings were one thing when they were about being respectful to ...
NY State Senator Wants Atheist 'Nobody Needs Christ' Christmas Ad Removed ...Christian Post
Why atheists should quit the 'War on Christmas'CNN (blog)
This Christmas, Atheists Should Opt for Peace Rather Than AngerHuffington Post
Village Voice (blog)
all 98 news articles »

Atheist groups get cold shoulder when offering holiday charity
SILive.com
As the holiday season peaks, atheist and humanist groups around the country have seen their charitable impulses rebuffed by both Christian and secular organizations. Recent incidents of "thanks, but no thanks," include: *A group of Kansas City, Mo., ...

Coexist: Nativity scene and atheist sign share space in public park
Patheos (blog)
A year after controversy in Arlington Heights about whether to allow a Nativity scene on public property, both the Nativity and a sign with views against religion are coexisting — mainly peacefully — in North School Park this holiday season. The ...

and more »

Radfems. Just as freakishly twisted, I’m afraid. I somehow stumbled across a radfem site that is arguing that penis-in-vagina sex is always rape, and that men are always rapists. It’s the weirdest perspective, and uses the sloppiest logic. One way she makes her case is the loaded characterization, like this:

If we look at the act in more detail (skip this parag if you can’t take it), PIV is a man mounting on a woman to thrust a large member of himself into her most intimate parts, often forcing her to be entirely naked, banging himself against her with the whole weight of his body and hips, shaking her like he would stuff a corpse, then using her insides as a receptacle for his penile dejection. How is this a normal civilised, respectful way to treat anyone? Sorry for the explicit picture, but this is what it is and it’s absolutely revolting and violating.

That’s a description of rape, all right. The key words there are “forcing” her, treating her like a corpse, using her as a receptacle. And I would say that she’s exactly right, that if you see intercourse as “absolutely revolting”, you’d never willingly engage in it, and therefore the only way you would find yourself in such a situation would be if you were being raped.

And, of course, sex is really a silly looking activity anyway, and it’s easy to write a slanted description of it. She has every right to find it personally unpleasant and to avoid ever having a sexual relationship with a man.

But she goes too far in assuming her perception is universal. Sex can be entirely consensual, no “forcing” involved. And then she goes further: she makes the naturalistic fallacy.

The fact intercourse causes so many infections and tears and warts attests to the unnaturalness of intercourse, that it’s not meant to be. The vagina’s primary function isn’t to be penetrated by a penis but to eject a baby for birth. They are two muscle tissues / sphincters pressed against each other to help the baby be pushed out. Penetration of the penis into the vagina is completely unnecessary for conception.

Life causes infections and tears and warts and pain and death. So? That’s not an argument that it is unnatural. It’s also ridiculous to argue for a “primary function” for the vagina — especially when it’s a function that is only going to be carried out a handful of times during a woman’s lifetime, at best. How about arguing that its primary function is as an outlet for menstrual fluids? For some women its primary function might be for giving and receiving sexual pleasure. How about if we let individuals decide what they like to use their body parts for?

Biologically, I’d say that sexual intercourse is a perfectly “natural” use for a vagina — which does not impose on anyone an obligation to use it that way. It’s also perfectly natural that the vagina functions as a birth canal, and I’d remind our angry radfem that if she were to use it solely that way, she might just pass a son through it — who would have the potential to be just as good a person as a daughter.

This is a splendid book, though frankly it does not entirely live up to its subtitle, “The scientific method in action.” What I learned most from it is that there is no scientific method, at least as it applies to startling new discoveries, and that those new discoveries are often made by people who are utterly single-minded in their dedication to their subject.... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

Christian Post
State Senator, Atheist Group Spar Over Times Square Sign
CBS Local
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A New York State senator has called for the removal of a billboard that an atheist group has mounted in Times Square, which, in the group's words, argues that Christmas is “better without Christ.” But the atheist group ...
The Atheist's Guide to ChristmasThe New Republic
Andrew Lanza: Atheist Billboard Makes 'Small Evil Baby Steps' Towards Another ...Huffington Post
Why atheists should quit the 'War on Christmas'CNN (blog)
Christian Post -SILive.com -Gothamist
all 56 news articles »

Via Ally Fogg, the BMJ has published their annual satirical science story, as they do, and as usual, various slackish and hackish news sites have republished it as true (Hello, HuffPo!), and in addition, this time they’ve sucked in the MRAs! In this case, it’s because they published a stereotyped scenario of men trying so hard to make women happy and making them miserable in the process. You’d think they’d have noticed the second sentence of the abstract:

Mathieu encourages her psychotherapy clients “to try to live in the gray. There are a million shades of gray” (although a recent erotic novel suggests there are only 50) “on the spectrum of white to black, and each provides a much richer telling of a story that is hardly ever as clear as this or that. So, when we looked a bit more closely, we saw that ‘right versus happy’ was not so much about getting crowned the winner or loser, a genius or fool; it was more about flawed thinking and a desire to want to feel being in control.”

No clues there? OK, maybe they could have read the discussion:

The study has some limitations. There was no trial registration, no ethics committee approval, no informed consent, no proper randomisation, no validated test instrument, and questionable statistical assessment. We used the eyeball technique for single patient trials which, as Sackett says, “more closely matches the way we think as clinicians.

Yeah, clever bunch in the media and the ranks of the MRAs.

I have fled the state of Minnesota and am now in Boulder, Colorado…and look! My daughter has one of those unbiblical pagan decorated trees! The war on Christmas continues.

I didn’t finish my grading. I brought a bunch of it with me, sad to say.

Why atheists should quit the 'War on Christmas'
CNN (blog)
In recent years, one organization, American Atheists, has claimed the mantle of prime atheist promoter of the tired “War on Christmas” narrative. This year, they ushered in the season with an electronic billboard in New York City's Times Square ...
Few lawmakers openly nonreligiousMonterey County Herald
Tolerance grows, but number of nonreligious lawmakers doesn'tThe Seattle Times
Fox News host Elisabeth Hasselbeck thanks creationist for 'standing up' to the ...Pandagon

all 11 news articles »

A reader asks weather anyone knows what book this page comes from or not: I say, wind, shmind, the whether on the moon was stormy that day or not. Anyway, how do they know weather there is wind on the moon – were they there (or not)? Read and understand.… Submitted by the Whether Underground.... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

Military backs off threat to pull atheist from ceremony
CNN (blog)
Washington (CNN) - Fort Jackson officials said Friday that an atheist soldier was asked to lower their head during a prayer portion of a graduation ceremony rehearsal, but then decided it was ok for the soldier to stand at Attention. The 20-year old ...