Russel Brand apparently has an autobiography out; I haven’t seen it, nor am I at all interested in reading it, but Nick Cohen has. It’s titled Revolution, and this sort of says it all about that.

His book tells us much about him and little about the rest of humanity. Brand says that he is qualified to lead a global transformation, not because of the quality of his thought, but because he has transformed his private life. “I may not have overthrown a government. But [I have] navigated myself from one set of feelings where drinking and drugs were my only solution to a state where I never drink or take drugs.” It is perhaps too easy to reply: “Well, bully for you.” I accept that freeing yourself from addiction and finding inner peace can have more beneficial effect than any political programme the powerful can implement. But Brand is offering his Beverly Hills Buddhism as a political programme, not a self-help guide. Everything is corrupt, his theory runs. All politicians are the same. Reforms won’t do, and no one can expect him to relinquish his fortune until there has been “systemic change on a global scale” (a useful condition that last one).

The systemic change that means the most to Brand is an embrace of meditation and pantheism. The greatest villain of Revolution is not a super-rich financier but Richard Dawkins. Brand denounces him as a “menopausal” proponent of “atheistic tyranny” because Dawkins denies the existence of the supernatural. He pulls a succession of shabby tricks to bolster his claim that religion does not authorise oppression. Anyone who claims that Jesus, Allah, Krishna or the fountainhead of any other religion endorses homophobia instead of the “union of all mankind” is “on a massive blag”, he says. Brand has to ignore Leviticus’s edict that the punishment for men who sleep with other men is death, St Paul’s hysterics about lesbianism and the hadiths that have Muhammad saying that the punishment for sodomy is death by stoning. In other words, he has to ignore several millennia of real and continuing religious repression, so he can make his spiritualism sound emancipatory rather than cranky.

[Read more…]

Do you know what it means to be an AtheistVoter?

[Read more…]

My wife the psychologist struggled a lot with her survey, which was part of her thesis on parenting attitudes. It took months to get it together, and it was reviewed multiple times by multiple people who were evaluating her experimental design, and it was also reviewed for ethics by the human studies review board. I acquired a healthy respect for the skills required!

[Read more…]

Gosh, I guess Eric Hovind issued a challenge to all atheists. I didn’t even notice! The only reason I know about it now is that Rebecca Watson answered it:

[Read more…]

Y’all remember the Freedom from Atheism Foundation, right? Hokey copycat organization that parrots the Freedom from Religion Foundation badly, trying to shut down atheism in the public sphere? I wrote a post with a tepid endorsement of their right to exist, while also pointing out that they were stupid and silly.

Well, now they’re selectively citing that post to claim that atheists support their group. I don’t “support” them — I think they’re a gang of idiots. The True Pooka has been digging into their organization and has found a lot of examples of their fudging the amount of support they get.

[Read more…]

Ken Ham makes a morality argument. He’s perturbed by a study that showed religious people are no more moral than non-religious people.

It’s important to understand that even though atheists and agnostics can be “moral,” they have no ultimate authoritative basis for their morality. When an atheist or agnostic calls something “right”or “wrong”or “good”or “evil,” they are borrowing from a biblical worldview in order to make that statement. Think about it: If we are simply the by-product of evolution and no better than animals, then why should anyone behave morally? In that case, what or who defines right from wrong? Ultimately, this kind of thinking leads to “everyone doing what is right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25), which is exactly where our culture is rapidly sliding.

[Read more…]

She’s an author with a book almost ready to go. He’s an editor who can bring her book to completion. It’s a match made in…errm, not heaven, but some place real, like the internet. Anyway, it would be nice if editors could get paid for their work, so there’s a fundraiser to pay an English major what he is worth. I approve of this goal.

It’s where Ken Ham comes from, you know, and apparently the region has a bit of a reputation. Not everyone from Queensland can be bog-ignorant, of course, so it’s perfectly reasonable that someone from Queensland would be appointed head of the Australian national science organization, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). So good on their latest head.

[Read more…]

And it’s really unfortunate — politically, we’re probably more alike than different, and we need more outspoken liberal voices in atheism. But he has done the unforgivable: serial plagiarism, and when caught out, has apologized, but simultaneously belittled the seriousness of the offense and blamed it on a campaign by our little neo-conservative atheist cabal of Harris and Boghossian.

I agree that they are wrong about so much else, but when they’re right, they’re right, galling as it is. This is a situation that requires much more reflection and far greater amends than Werleman has given it. He has also effectively written himself out of any of the debates, internal or external, about atheism.