Atheist group uses NJ billboard for protest
Beaumont Enterprise
PITMAN, N.J. (AP) — An atheist group that has been protested a southern New Jersey community's "Keep Christ in Christmas" banner has taken a new tactic this year. The Madison, Wisc.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation has rented a billboard in ...
Group: Pitman's holiday message isn't so merryVineland Daily Journal

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Yeah, I’m still neck-deep in grading. My cell biology course is pretty well in hand — I’m all caught up there, I’ve posted preliminary grades so students know about where they are, and I’m fielding questions from them all day long — but I also give them a final tomorrow, which I aim to have graded by the next day. I’m still wading through my backlog of essays in cancer biology, and they turned in more yesterday, but once I’m done with those, I’m done. So my goal is to wrap up the whole semester by Friday. Then early Saturday morning, before the dawn, I get on a plane and zip off to Christmas in Boulder, Colorado for a few days. I am going to turn my brain off during that flight, so I want recommendations for a good book to download into my iPad — the kind of thing a science fiction and fantasy fan would enjoy. Or whatever; the last novel I read, oh these many days long gone, was one of Lindsey Davis’s Falco books. So I’m not entirely bounded by one genre. Also to discuss: people say that you should judge a book by its contents, and not the author’s political views. But I’ve found so often that the author’s views bleed into the pages — an author so pure in their craft that their personal ideals do not inform their writing is probably an author who treats writing as an abstract exercise, and isn’t particularly interesting to read — that I cannot enjoy as much books by people who are less than humanist and progressive. Mark Twain, for instance, is one of the greatest American authors because his personality suffuses his work and the author is inseparable from the stories he tells. So maybe you can also tell me about writers who you know to be good human beings. Or maybe you know of an author of worth who completely contradicts my general principle.

Should an Atheist Recite the Pledge of Allegiance?
thebolditalic
Why not poll the children beforehand to see who among them is an atheist. Those who do believe in God can include him in their pledge, and those who don't are welcome to substitute his name with whatever they worship. Ice cream or Miley Cyrus or ...

OK, readers, you torture me. Yesterday I’m sent Joe Rogan, today I wake up to a horrific video of cattle being slaughtered. I have no illusions that slaughterhouses in the prosperous West are not horrible — but at least there are laws that if, for instance, if a cow falls down, you don’t get to have “fun” stabbing it in the eyes with a knife.

That’s a hint. Don’t watch the video if you’re at all squeamish.

Rejected atheist ads find home in Metro Vancouver
CTV News
An atheist ad campaign that was rejected by Canada's biggest billboard company has been resurrected in Metro Vancouver. The Centre for Inquiry Canada announced Monday that CBS Outdoor had agreed to run its ads on a Burnaby billboard and two ...

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TheBlaze.com
'You Poor Atheist!': Fiery Hannity on 'War on Christmas' Panel
TheBlaze.com
Hannity accused Silverman's atheist activist group, which recently erected a billboard in New York City's Times Square that asked “Who needs Christ during Christmas?” of wanting “to poke people in the eye.” “No, the intention is to raise awareness of ...

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Photograph by James Rice. Ice stalagmite in lava tube, Arizona. Mr. Rice evidently sent us this picture in retaliation for our posting last week.... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

Raw Story
Elisabeth Hasselbeck Agrees With Creationist Guest: Atheists Imposing 'Anti ...
News Hounds
But when those who aren't down with Jesus publicly express their beliefs, it becomes a big f**king deal that is made into an even bigger deal on Fox & Friends, the home for those Christians who think that there is a vast atheist conspiracy against them ...
Fox News host Elisabeth Hasselbeck thanks creationist for 'standing up' to the ...Raw Story
Elisabeth Hasselbeck Cheers on Creationist Attack Against Atheists (Video)Opposing Views

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Wis. Church Files Motion Against Atheist Group Suing IRS Over Church Politicking
Christian Post
A church in Wisconsin has filed a motion against an atheist group suing the Internal Revenue Service over its alleged refusal to enforce a ban on church politicking. Holy Cross Anglican Church of Wauwatosa, headed by Benedictine Abbot Father Patrick ...

William Lane Craig has a piece on the Fox News website in which he claims to cut through all the slogans and refute all of the arguments of atheists to conclusively demonstrate the existence of his god. These must be real humdingers to wrap up the whole debate, so I read them…and now I have a few questions.

1.  God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe.  Given the scientific evidence we have about our universe and its origins, and bolstered by arguments presented by philosophers for centuries, it is highly probable that the universe had an absolute beginning. Since the universe, like everything else, could not have merely popped into being without a cause, there must exist a transcendent reality beyond time and space that brought the universe into existence. This entity must therefore be enormously powerful. Only a transcendent, unembodied mind suitably fits that description.

But Mr Craig! Where’s the math? I know you don’t like any kind of evidence and are a being operating on pure logic, but you could at least provide the mathematical foundation for your assertion. You know your holy book just baldly states that a god did it, with no backing rationale, right? It makes for a very unsatisfactory explanation. There’s no meat to it.

And don’t you think it’s a bit of a leap to jump from a necessary first cause (which I don’t necessarily grant you) to the conclusion that it required an “unembodied mind”? Maybe it required an unembodied anus to poop out the universe, no brain needed.

2.  God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe. Contemporary physics has established that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent, interactive life.  That is to say, in order for intelligent, interactive life to exist, the fundamental constants and quantities of nature must fall into an incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range.  There are three competing explanations of this remarkable fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design. The first two are highly implausible, given the independence of the fundamental constants and quantities from nature’s laws and the desperate maneuvers needed to save the hypothesis of chance. That leaves design as the best explanation.

But Mr Craig! The universe isn’t finely tuned. The overwhelming bulk of it is inaccessible to us, and even on this one planet we inhabit, 70% is underwater, vast swathes are icy wastes or deserts, and those toasty warm damp tropics, which are otherwise paradisial, are heaven for parasites and diseases. You even admit this yourself when you say our nature requires an environment that falls within an “incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range”. Do think that range is everywhere?

Also, without other universes to compare, you can’t claim that ours has optimal parameters. Don’t you also claim the existence of a heaven which is perfect? Therefore, we can obviously see that the Earth is a much inferior place.

3.  God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties. Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective moral values and duties, but they do nothing to provide a basis for them. If human evolution had taken a different path, a very different set of moral feelings might have evolved. By contrast, God Himself serves as the paradigm of goodness, and His commandments constitute our moral duties. Thus, theism provides a better explanation of objective moral values and duties.

But Mr Craig! Atheists do have an objective source for morality: ourselves. I can strive to create a society which provides a good moral framework that makes me happy, keeps my family safe and productive, builds communities and nations that work cooperatively, and just generally makes life better for my species over the long run. I don’t need a god to do that. And besides, your god doesn’t provide moral guidance to anyone.

And yes, people can have different objective moral values. For instance, a person could decide that the well-being of a broader spectrum of organisms than just one species is an important value, and dedicate themselves to maintaining life everywhere it exists. I can respect that. It doesn’t take a god to acquire that moral code, just an appreciation of beauty and a greater empathy.

4.  God provides the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  Historians have reached something of consensus that the historical Jesus thought that in himself God’s Kingdom had broken into human history, and he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms as evidence of that fact.  Moreover, most historical scholars agree that after his crucifixion Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty by a group of female disciples, that various individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death, and that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe in Jesus’ resurrection despite their every predisposition to the contrary. I can think of no better explanation of these facts than the one the original disciples gave:  God raised Jesus from the dead.

But Mr Craig! Does your god also provide the best explanation for how Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse, or how Odin lost his eye, the divinity embodied in every noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, how Breatharians can live without eating, or how the Amazing Randi did that really amazing card trick?

Does your god blind you to the possibility that there are better explanations? Say, that the entire story of the empty tomb was a legend invented well after the fact, or that if there were a tomb, a Roman surgeon had the body stolen for the purposes of his anatomical studies, or that a bear dragged the corpse away for a little snack? There are many simpler and explanations, and it seems to me to be a bit of a deficiency on your part that you can’t think of them.

5.  God can be personally known and experienced.  The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Down through history Christians have found through Jesus a personal acquaintance with God that has transformed their lives.

But Mr Craig! Every god-believer claims that about their god, not just yours. Atheists do not deny that believers experience subjective psychological phenomena that can affect how they see the world. What we deny is that there is an objective, external super-being that is diddling their brains or making the moon orbit the Earth or making people healthy if they beg hard enough. You’re avoiding addressing the nature of the phenomenon that is “experienced”, which is ultimately the whole question, so your little essay completely misses the mark.

I guess I’m still an atheist.

I get up this morning to discover the first thing in my inbox is a link to Joe Rogan. You would think I’d know better by now, but I…clicked…on it, and now…

I can’t get it out of my head. Joe Rogan’s penis — it’s just there, everywhere he goes, separated from our eyes and our hands by nothing but a few thin layers of fabric, and a zipper. A zipper! Easy access, just a little gentle tug, and it comes down — it’s as if he’s begging everyone to expose his penis. He may try to tell you with his mouth that he doesn’t want to be cock-punched, but his pants say otherwise. If he really didn’t, he wouldn’t be walking around in that thin t-shirt, those jeans that don’t obscure the delicate bulge of his genitalia, his legs that scissor back and forth as he walks, highlighting his crotch.

How weird is it that he wears those pants that fit snugly and have an instant access door to his most private parts? Maybe if he wore a kilt it would drape and obscure his area, rather than emphasizing it.

I was recently invited to comment on an Anthropology Network discussion on LinkedIn, where someone asked, “I’m wondering what this community’s thoughts are about the theory that humans are a hybrid?” and linked to the blog post by Eugene McCarthy supposing that humans resulted from a hybridization event between chimpanzees and pigs. Because it is a private network, I’d like to repost, with some expansions, what I added to that discussion. But, let’s just start off by clearing the... M. Wilson Sayres http://mathbionerd.blogspot.com

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The Christian Underground In 'Atheist' China
Sky News
Officially, the People's Republic of China is an atheist country but only because the Chinese Communist Government is an atheist institution. Chairman Mao, whose revolution brought the Communists to power in 1949, described religion as "poison ...

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News from North Korea: Traitor Jang Song Thaek Executed. Read the whole thing — it’s a classic example of long-winded Communist pomposity, which ends, sadly, with the announcement of the immediate execution of the corrupt fellow who clapped half-heartedly at a conference.

Jang committed such an unpardonable thrice-cursed treason as overtly and covertly standing in the way of settling the issue of succession to the leadership with an axe to grind when a very important issue was under discussion to hold respected Kim Jong Un in high esteem as the only successor to Kim Jong Il in reflection of the unanimous desire and will of the entire party and army and all people.

When his cunning move proved futile and the decision that Kim Jong Un was elected vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Workers’ Party of Korea at the Third Conference of the WPK in reflection of the unanimous will of all party members, service personnel and people was proclaimed, making all participants break into enthusiastic cheers that shook the conference hall, he behaved so arrogantly and insolently as unwillingly standing up from his seat and half-heartedly clapping, touching off towering resentment of our service personnel and people.

Jang confessed that he behaved so at that time as a knee-jerk reaction as he thought that if Kim Jong Un’s base and system for leading the army were consolidated, this would lay a stumbling block in the way of grabbing the power of the party and state.

I hope this North Korean denunciation doesn’t end the same way.

This is a bit of privileged peevishness. There is this absolutely horrible piece of CSS that is widely used on many big name sites — it is used for portable devices like iPads and iPhones, and what it does is completely change the displayed formatting of the site. Suddenly, pages aren’t scrollable, but are broken up into screen-sized chunks, and you no longer change views by scrolling up and down, but by swiping side to side. And it throws a couple of cryptic icons on the bottom of the screen (do I want to know what the rocketship does? No, I do not.) It is classic too-clever-by-half web design, and I hate it.

When I’m browsing on my iPad, and I run into a site with OnSwipe enabled, I just abandon it. Nope, not worth the hassle.

What I really want to know from sites that use it is a) what made you think your readers want to abandon all the comfortable conventions of the web experience when they read your site on a portable device, because that makes no sense at all, and b) did you pay money for this piece of shit?

Examiner.com
In memoriam: Peter O'Toole, actor, atheist, dead at 81
Examiner.com
An out of the closet atheist, O'Toole described himself as “a retired Christian.” In a 2007 interview with The New York Times O'Toole said he prefers “an education and reading and facts” to faith. An altar boy in his youth, O'Toole lost his faith as a ...

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Do's and Don'ts for Atheists at Christmas
Christian Post (blog)
Most atheists I know and have spoken to have absolutely no desire to thrust themselves into the midst of other people's celebration of Christmas. For them, the in-your-face ugliness exhibited by groups such as David Silverman's American Atheists during ...

Christopher Hitchens died two years ago today, so either obliviously (most likely) or with malice (not impossible), Salon has to run one of their New Atheist bashing pieces. It’s gotten ridiculously predictable. Their rule seems to be to find someone who simultaneously hates atheism, and doesn’t know a goddamn thing about it except for some fragmentary bits of third hand quotes they heard somewhere, and then let them babble.

This time, it’s Richard Rodriguez, illustrated with a photo of Richard Dawkins so that we might bother to read it. Come on, Salon, at least try: if the guy’s words are interesting enough to be worth an article, why are you splashing a photo of someone he dislikes front and center?

I could tell it was going to be awful from the first question.

So let’s start talking about “Darling” and we’ll get into some other things from there. You open and close this book with trips to the Middle Eastern desert taken after September 11. The social and physical aspects of the desert seem very important to you, for the origins of the three monotheistic religions. So I wonder if human history would have been different if the God of the Axial age had emerged not from theses parched deserts, but say, from a dark German forest or something.

Well, I think obviously we would have a different experience of nature. And maybe a different notion of what God expects from us; this is said as a believer, I should stress. It seems to me that a God who would reveal himself to Abraham in a place of such desolation is at least reminding us that our place on this Earth is temporary, and this is a place – a landscape – that reminds us of just how empty it is. The word desert comes from the notion of deserted; something was here and now it’s gone. What’s gone, of course, is the ocean; this was the bottom of the ocean. And this is a place of such rigor and difficulty that one stands in nature with an adversarial relationship.

So a softer, more sentimental God would have revealed himself on a lakeshore or in a forest. That would have been a very different experience. One of the things I’m asking of people, believers and unbelievers, is that we come to terms with place. The Semitic god has always been acknowledged to have broken through time. The eternal breakthrough of time at a specific moment. But we don’t talk about places much, partially because it is such a difficult thing to imagine that we are being called, by God, in a place of death.

Why do you assume that there is a god to appear? Maybe instead you should flip that around: this happens to be a myth conjured up by people who weren’t living in a lush tropical paradise. Rather than this nonsense about a desert god, talk about a desert people.

But even there, this guy is talking nonsense. Once upon a time, many millions of years ago, the Middle East was under water — before people existed. This fact has nothing to do with the origins of the term, nor did the people there historically have any awareness of their geological history (even now, there are many Christians and Jews and Muslims who would deny it).

I also have to wonder about this persistent myth of the parched desert, barren, empty, and desolate. The Abrahamic faiths rose out of a pastoral people; they raised sheep and goats. The land of the Tigris and Euphrates was a well-watered flood plain, and the Hebrews invaded Palestine, with its coastal plains where olives and fruit trees grew, with areas forested with cedars, and fertile valleys with lovely streams and cool shady forests. They were well aware of the bordering true deserts, but we’re taking about a place with a Mediterranean climate — where perhaps the desolate desert was a place with mythic resonance to them.

So here you have people talking amongst each other, playing up the frightful horrors of the desert, and bragging about how tough and mighty their ancestors were to have lived through it, and this myth is now perpetuated by every believer in the Abrahamic faiths on the planet. I think it’s like the idea of persecution in the Roman arena — mostly legend, with next to nothing to connect it to reality.

Furthermore, deserts are actually complex, interesting places. They may be inimical to us damp, squishy apes who like our swimming pools, but “empty” is the wrong word to use for them.

You want a desolation, look at the parking lot at a WalMart superstore. There’s hell on earth; I’d hate to meet the god conjured up by the people who dwell there.

But let’s cut to the chase: where’s this nugget of anti-atheism to justify Salon publishing this tripe?

You write about the “New Atheism” emerging from England, catching on here. How is it new and why does it seem like a dead end to you?

It seems to me that the New Atheism — particularly its recent gaudy English manifestations — has a distinctly neo-colonial aspect. (As Cary Grant remarked: Americans are suckers for the accent!) On the one hand, the New Atheist, with his plummy Oxbridge tones, tries to convince Americans that God is dead at a time when London is alive with Hinduism and Islam. (The empiric nightmare: The colonials have turned on their masters and transformed the imperial city with their prayers and their growing families, even while Europe disappears into materialistic sterility.) Christopher Hitchens, most notably, before his death titled his atheist handbook as a deliberate affront to Islam: “God Is Not Great.” At the same time, he traveled the airwaves of America urging us to war in Iraq — and to maintain borders that the Foreign Office had drawn in the sand. With his atheism, he became a darling of the left. With his advocacy of the Iraq misadventure, he became a darling of the right.

That’s it? Pathetic. And Salon, why are you taking the most shallow point in his interview and making the title all about it?

He’s heard of Dawkins and Hitchens…well, good for him. What about the other big proponents of the New Atheism, Dan Dennett and Sam Harris? No plummy accents there. Or Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Or as I try to remind everyone, Susan Jacoby or Annie Laurie Gaylor, who were talking up freethought years before Dawkins’ spectacular book, or David Silverman or David Niose or Hemant Mehta or me, even? You simply cannot define atheism by one live Brit and one dead one, even if your weird premise is that we’re atheists because we like their accents.

I’ve noticed often that anti-atheists look at us and try to define us by our leadership, which doesn’t exist…so they appoint one, containing whichever people are a convenient fit to whatever thesis they’re trying to advance. News to believers everywhere (and to some misguided atheists as well): there is no hierarchy, no atheist pope, no atheist bishops, and if someone tried to declare themselves head of all atheism, 90% of all atheists would immediately announce their rejection and tear them down. We have no holy book — there are atheists who dislike The God Delusion and God is Not Great, and even those of us who like them feel free to criticize bits and pieces, as well as the authors.

You can also knock individuals for their politics — I detest Hitchens’ and Harris’s conservative and militaristic ideas — but there aren’t any politics that define atheism as a whole. Most (but not all!) of us are politically progressive and looking to broaden the appeal of rational unbelief, so it’s very strange to see some outsider trying to pin membership in the New Atheism on Hitchens’ politics. Or his accent.

But then, consistency and reason aren’t things we should expect from someone described as “gay, deeply Catholic”. It seems to be a too frequent combination that leads only to muddled thinking.

OK, Salon, you are now on notice. The latest edition to the front page? An article praising the simple lifestyle of the nunnery, illustrated with that photo on the right. Yeah, because attractive young women with carefully applied makeup personify Catholic austerity so well.

Salon
Richard Rodriguez: “New Atheism has a distinctly neo-colonial aspect”
Salon
Rodriguez's new book, “Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography,” looks at the state of religion after 9/11 – the hatred of Islam, the revival of atheism, the disorientation of secularism. The 2001 attacks sent Rodriguez, literally and intellectually, to the ...