Religion creates another atrocity, god is great, eh?  Listen Muslims and Christians... stop the fighting.  You're both wrong, it's time to act like rational grown-ups and throw off your archaic belief system, you are destroying civilization, and will continue to do so until we're gone.  Abandon your superstitous nonsense, and evolve already!  Ask yourself, what solid proof do you have to believe in your God.  If what you have is a holy book, remind yourself that hundreds of holy books exist for hundreds of gods, and you don't believe in any of them, so obviously a holy book is not sufficient proof.  Throw off your superstitious nonsense, and embrace things you know exist like humans for example.  Make no mistake, today millions of folks around the world who have no belief in a god are sad for the people who were affected by this needless loss of life, just as we've been sad about all the other atrocities committed in the name of religion throughout the ages.  Our thoughts are with the billions who have been negatively affected by religion since the dawn of time, and always are.  In fact my life is dedicated to ensuring these sorts of things don't continue to happen, you can start by breaking the cycle... throw religion off today!  

Today is the day, on the Don Imus show Bill Maher referred to himself as an atheist very explicitly for the first time that I am aware of.  

Here is his page on Celebrity Atheists with the update: http://www.celebatheists.com/wiki/Bill_Maher

NOVEMBER 2009 ON IMUS - MAHER REFERS TO HIMSELF AS AN ATHEIST

November 1, 2009 on Imus, Bill Maher finally accepts that the term atheism describes him best when relating to Richard Dawkins and his atheism lacking absolute certainty:

I feel the need to highlight the recent trials and tribulations of Sunsara Taylor with the Ethical Society of Chicago as she is a friend of mine, and this issue is of obvious importance to her.  Sunsara has given me the fuel to give brief mention to a past issue I feel that the Ethical Society of Philadelphia helped hinder the advancement of non-believer unity in Philadelphia.  If you can believe it Sunsara is even more of a rabble rouser than I am, while she staged a scene, I quietly backed away and just pretended it never happened.  Today I speak up, because of Sunsara.

About two years ago a group was formed called PhillyCor, I'm close with quite a few people involved in the forming of the group.  The group was formed to connect local freethought and humanist groups, and RRS is based out of Philadelphia. Being that we had the largest global presence of any of the groups in Philadelphia it made sense for us to be involved, and we would've embraced the role.  We would've adapted to fit within the groups model, we would've helped raise money, and most importantly spread the word on a much larger scale than the group was capable of.  In fact this is the first time I ever link to the group, because when the opportunity arose for RRS to be in the group, the Ethical Society essentially stated it's us or them.  

Lori Stephens author of Alpha Omega recently asked me if I wouldn't mind sharing her book with the users of the Rational Response Squad website.  As always purchases made on this site via Amazon, help support this site.

We've restored the content on both the old Way of the Master watchdog site, and Ask The Atheist.  

I'm currently looking for people that are writing articles, have written articles, or are willing to write articles exposing Kirk Cameron, Ray Comfort, Todd Friehl and any of the other loons that work with the Way of the Master organization.  That site had been taken down quite some time ago, and is now available here: Way of the Master Watchdog

The OLD Ask The Atheist site is now in archive format only attached to our site as a subdomain: http://asktheatheist.rationalresponders.com 

You can log in to both of the above sites to post a comment with your RRS login and password.  

Check tonights World Series for a live performance of my current favorite song...

Over the last few weeks just about the only song I listen to when in the car is the new Jay-Z song Empire State of Mind from the Blueprint 3 Album. I do love New York, think it's a great city, and really love both the vibe and message of the song.  Songs that inspire are my thing.  Not to mention that I think Alicia Keys is one of the five most musically talented women alive, and honestly the overwhelming reason I like the song is because of her chorus, and this live performance...

My son just had his current grades sent home, and he's doing amazing as always.  He's got straight A's with the exception of one B.  The B is in science.  When I heard the grades, I smiled, told him how proud I was, and how he was doing great.  But then I told him how it's a bit ironic that science was my favorite subject, it's my best subject, and if he were to excel in one specific course I'd love it if it were science. 

As I was sitting there contemplating how I could convey to him how science is used in essentially everything we do, and in almost every action we make, he says "I don't think I'm gonna use science when I grow up."  Aside from my heart sinking, I realized his lack of fundamental understanding as to how science is applied and it's common use.   So I spent the last 30 minutes giving him fun examples of how he constantly uses science.  For example he presses the power button on a computer to turn it on, rather than tap the sides of the computer with a stick.  When he plays his Lord of the Rings game he uses weapons on certain enemies he deems appropriate based on past experiences.  He doesn't use weapons that he has knowledge will fail and expect a positive result.  We went through a ton of fun examples on practical usage of science, and he gets it, but I'd like to build some interest as opposed to just "getting it." 

As you may already be aware, recently the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites were the target of a significant DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which began on Monday 19 October.

This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God (in this context, the Christian god, God, as distinct from the Greek god, Zeus, the Egyptian god, Ra etc etc) with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as result of our own DDOS ('Divine' Denial of Service).

The prayer minute will be at exactly 8pm (Eastern Standard Time) and 9am (Greenwich Mean Time) on Sunday 8 November 2009.

The prayer can be about anything you want (but say it as frequently as possible in the minute we have assigned to ensure DDOS is achieved) or to whomever god you want. Its mostly directed at the Christian god so as to ensure we don't get too many return to senders from other gods.

Join the facebook group here.

I must've heard the words "an atheist can do no good" hundreds of times in the last few years.  It must be so hard to imagine how atheists can do good without the upstanding moral code imparted to us in the Bible or the Quran.  Sure I wouldn't sell my daughter into slavery, or kill a man simply for being gay, but I can do other good things instead. 

I'm proud to donate clothes to Goodwill and give money to charity.  But I take a bigger sense of pride in atheist volunteers which was created to unite and showcase acts of goodness by the men in black who apparently can do no good.  Well the door to that argument is being shut more and more everyday as atheists aren't as scared as they once were to show their face (we have religion to thank for our original fear).  We used to do acts of kindness simply because we liked doing acts of kindness.  But after being accused so often of being no-do-gooders some of us decided to show off what we've been doing all our lives while letting others know we don't believe in a god.  We believe good deeds are the work of men.  If good deeds are the works of god, well certainly bad deeds are as well.

http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/0,1518,656308,00.html

Translation:

The "witchchildren" of Nigeria

More and more children in Africa are accused of sorcery by clerics - and agonized or killed. According to UNICEF tens of thousands are affected. 13 churches are known to authorities, some of them are splinter groups of international congregations of faith.

Eket - Nwanaoko lays emaciated on his hospital bed, the blind eyes turned away. A pastor had accused the 9 year old of witchcraft, his father had wanted to instilled him acid for exorcism and cauterized his face and eyes thereby. Totally exhausted the boy could just tell the name of the church whisperingly, that stigmatized him as a warlock. One month later he was dead.

As Nwanaoko more and more children in Africa are accused of witchcraft and then - often by their own relatives - agonized or killed. In half of the 200 cases of "witchchildren", that the AP followed, pastors took their hands within.