Foolish Fulwiler fantasizes

Jennifer Fulwiler is a treasure. She’s a former atheist who doesn’t have a clue about atheism, a naive Catholic convert, and someone who pities us atheists because “we’re trapped in a prison of reason“. She never makes sense, so she never disappoints.

And now she’s done it again. Fulwiler is babbling about the Global Atheist Conference. She’s not making sense again.

She lists a number of ‘first impressions’.

Hemant Mehta ought to worry. She likes him a lot, and is mystified that he’s not going to be at the GAC.

Where’s Hemant Mehta? He must have been busy that weekend. The blogger/author is a major up-and-coming voice in the modern atheist movement. Given the perspective he’s gained from the discussion on his blog, I would think that he would add a lot of value to a conference like this.

Yes, I agree. But you know, there are a lot atheists out there, and we can’t all go to every conference. It’s just weird to pick out one random atheist among many and wonder why they aren’t at one particular conference among many. So? Would you like me to list a few dozen other prominent atheist speakers who weren’t invited or couldn’t make it?

Just look at these headshots! With that number of speakers you’d expect at least a couple unflattering, obviously-take-with-an-iPhone shots, but they’re all gorgeous. Lookin’ good, atheists.

That’s just weird. It’s like she’s baffled that we look human.

Since I’m sure he doesn’t want to say it himself, I’ll say it for him: PZ Myers should have gotten top billing in the ads, and it’s crazy that he wasn’t mentioned at all in the audio spots. When he saw that, he had to be all like, “Do millions of blog pageviews per month count for nothing?!”

Not for nothing, but why would anyone in their right mind think that’s the most important characteristic to promote? The audience either reads my blog and knows who I am and don’t need to advertise me, or they don’t read it and I’m effectively a nobody to them. I have a realistic perspective here; my number one job is as a teacher at UMM, and that’s generally not a huge selling point, sad to say. And Dawkins/Dennett/Harris are a much bigger draw, and to an Australian audience, the local atheist celebrities are going to be much more interesting.

And then Fulwiler gets “clever”, I think…at least clever for someone gullible enough to fall for Catholic bullshit, which isn’t very. Look at this clumsy setup:

I like the part about basing laws on rational thought and evidence. It echoes a sentiment that is a driving force in the atheist community right now, namely the idea that society must develop a set of moral values that is not rooted in any kind of supernatural belief system. I think it could end up being a really good thing that the leaders of modern atheism are coming together to discuss this, because this is an idea that needs a lot more exploration.

She doesn’t believe a word of this. I think it’s quite right that not only do we need to develop a fully secular morality, but that it’s the only kind of morality there is, because her supernatural tyrant doesn’t exist. Catholic morality is not built on the supernatural, but on lies and fear, tools of priests for all time, and a secular morality is built on truth, as near as we can get to it.

How do I know Fulwiler doesn’t believe this? Because she next brings out a great big strawman on strings and dances it around on the stage of the convention.

I imagine that one day someone will get on the stage at one of these conferences, and propose a new moral code in which the the strong exterminate the weak and take all their possessions for themselves, thus ushering in a glorious age where only the most superior genes remain in the gene pool. Everyone in the crowd will gasp and fidget uncomfortably…and then realize that they cannot argue against it without stepping outside of their own atheist-materialist worldview. They’ll find themselves tempted to appeal to the transcendent to make their case, wanting to have blind faith in the fact that love should be prized above all else, believing that self-sacrifice is always better than selfishness, regardless of what the latest scientific studies say.

Riiiight. You all know what would happen if a speaker started promoting a totalitarian tyranny and demanding that we start persecuting the “weak” — they would be ripped apart rhetorically. These are the kinds of arguments that are advanced for a theocratic monarchy, you know, and we’re entirely familiar with them. At the GAC, Sam Harris would rise up and argue for an egalitarian morality without bringing in anything transcendent. Richard Dawkins would dismantle that ridiculous argument for social Darwinism with ease, and it wouldn’t be by claiming that self-sacrifice always trumps altruism.

Morality is an attribute that is only relevant in interactions between individuals. A group of interacting individuals is a community. Morality is defined within that community; the desires of a hypothetical invisible entity have no relevance to the rules that regulate that community…except when parasitic individuals use the carrot and stick of supernatural rewards and punishments to mislead the members of that group.

Fulwiler has written a bizarre fantasy that is exceeded in crudity by Chick tracts like Big Daddy. Sure, imagine some absurd caricature of an atheist getting trounced by some clever religious person — but it simply doesn’t have any relationship to reality.

Speaking of fantasy, here’s how she imagines an atheist convention ending…with all the atheists flocking to the church afterwards.

I hope that these events really will provide a forum for questioning assumptions and asking tough questions as much as they claim they will. Because when they do, the nearby churches will be flooded with post-convention crowds.

I don’t think so. Dream on, deluded lady.

Oh, if you all want a real treat, read the comments on that article. I think Fulwiler might just be the intellectual among the Catholic community that reads her drivel.

Whoa! Catholic women are much prettier than atheist women. I feel bad for all the atheist men. =(

I feel unclean now.

Biblical morality, again

I think we’re getting to Ken Ham. There’s that twitchy eye, the jittery shifting of his feet, the rising blood pressure, the purplish skin tone…and the fact that he’s writing threats like this:

In recent times, various atheists have been blasting AiG (and myself) on the internet and in books for reaching children with the message of the truth of God’s Word beginning in Genesis through speaking programs and books and DVD’s etc. In fact, as I have documented, they accuse us of ‘child abuse’ because we teach children they are created and that God’s Word is true. You see, they want to reach children with their message–that there is no God–that life is meaningless and purposeless–that the universe and all life is the result of totally naturalistic processes. They want to brainwash children with their anti-God religion of millions of years and evolution.

I’m reminded of a verse of Scripture: “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea.”

(Mark 9:42)

Man, that Bible of his has a solution for everything: pray a lot, slaughter a few goats or children, curse people, stone sluts to death, and throw atheists into the ocean with a rock tied around their neck.

It’s a wonder he doesn’t understand why we think his brand of dogma is toxic to children — because he staggers about, poisoned to the gills, acting as such an excellent bad example.

Why I am an atheist – Stella

Few scraps of useful genealogical information have been salvaged by my family members, but here’s one: a branch of the ancestors were Huguenots, who fled Europe to come to the colonies because of the Inquisition.

I had to do my own research to find the connection to the Spanish Inquisition, which turns out to have had a bloody beginning in the south of France. It was, if anything, even more ferocious there, as the link between politics and religion manifested itself in first the acceptance and then the kingly condemnation of those upstart protestants.

Once the monarchy ran out of money, they also ran out of tolerance as the popes, wealthy beyond kings with income from parishioner tithes and selling indulgences, bargained for political support in return for their money and well-fed armed forces. French rulers gave them a free hand and the torture began.

So the screams from the dungeons persuaded my forbears, and others of the skilled, learned, critically-thinking class that composed the Christian Protestants, to skedaddle off to other parts, finally including England and then the western hemisphere. You can read about it in history – the exodus of the skilled class jump-started Britain’s industrial revolution.

Skip forward a few generations to my mother, a lovely girl with a nervous disposition. That’s what they called it before her volatile moods were diagnosed as bipolar syndrome, with a touch of Borderline Personality Disorder, that catchall for a condition that would have gotten her burned at the stake in Salem, with the hearty approval of everyone, even the non-superstitious-witch-hunting faction.

And when she was cycling through a really crazy spell, she’d occasionally cite some disjointed religious reference as the reason her mania was justified. She’d carry an old bible around, with little notes stuck inside and passages underlined. She got messages nobody else heard, and some were in that book, though for all the relevance to reality it could have been Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy or the Book of Mormon, or any other work of imaginative fiction.

A few weeks before a major breakdown and resulting adventures that make good storytelling now but occasioned plenty of heartbreak and worry then, she came up to me and with the intensity of the manic phase, told me how she got a message from God in a tuna fish sandwich.

“I was eating it and suddenly I had to spit out the next bite – it was so salty, it was horrible! It was awful, like there was a cup of salt in that sandwich, and then I realized it was the tears of Jesus, shed for us!” She had no further insight into penance or salvation, and never spent a moment in prayer or reflection. Religion was just one more symptom of her intense lifelong mental illness, which would have been enough to make me a critical thinker even if it offered the faintest shred of aid or comfort, which it has never provided.

I guess the lesson for my family is: if someone shows up with a Good Book, run for your life!

Stella

Why I am a Christian, A Conversation with Jesus – Smoggy Batzrubble

Smoggy Batzrubble: Dear Jesus?

Jesus Christ: [sigh] Yes, servant Smoggy?

SB: Dear Jesus, those Hell-bound atheists are baring their tormented
souls on the evil Pharyngula blog, blathering on the theme of ‘Why I
am An Atheist’ to justify their pointless existences and pretend
they’re not terrified of the eternal damnation which awaits them.

JC: And?

SB: And? And… and… and it’s not good enough Jesus! What if some
impressionable young believer gets whiff of the heady haze of heresy
and starts thinking rational thoughts? Can you imagine a world with no
religion, no heaven, no hell below, above us only sky?

JC: Careful Smoggy, you’re getting lyrical.

SB: You’re not taking this seriously Jesus. Don’t you care that
religion is under attack?

JC: Smoggy, religions are always under attack, usually by other
religions. Everyone knows that religions thrive on a sense of
persecution—even in the good ol’ USofA, where the religious control
social and political discourse, receive obscene tax breaks, and use
their ideological dominance to discriminate against the weak, the poor
and the different. You have to admire them. It takes a lot of effort
to cry persecuted when the entire system is stacked in your favour.

SB: JesuseffinChrist, Jesus! Are you listening to yourself? You sound
like a trendy-lefty-bleeding-heart-liberal-namby-pamby-marxy-boy. When
have you ever cared about ‘the different’.

JC: I am ‘the different’ Smoggy. I’m the only son of a difficult father and…

SB: Difficult Father!? You mean YHWH! How is He difficult? We’re
talking God here… the big guy, y’know ‘Immortal, Invisible, God
Only-Wise.’ What about my father? You of all people—sorry, of all
deities—know that my Papa Batzrubble was a serial killer, executed for
strangling fat nuns with their own rosary beads (culminating in the
murder of Sister Seraphim Butter on the night I was born). How would
you like to go through life carrying that cross?

JC: Eh, you were lucky to have a serial killer. My father is a
jealous, genocidal tyrant: he set Adam and Even up to fail by placing
a deadly tree in their garden Paradise (an act on a par with leaving a
live, bare electric cable in the middle of a kindergarten and telling
the children not to play with it); he used extreme incest to populate
(and re-populate) the world; he wiped out almost every human (good or
evil, old or young) with an indiscriminate flood; he impregnated my
mother when she was an impressionable, underage virgin (ever heard of
statutory rape?); he decided to have me killed in the worst way
imaginable, when he could just have easily used his omnipotent powers
to cleanse the world of evil; and that doesn’t count the madness he’s
got in store for the END TIMES. Have you seen my costume, described in
Revelations Nineteen? I have to have a fucking SWORD coming out of my
mouth. Can you imagine what that’s going to do for my social life?
I’ll never perform oral sex again!

SB: You’re pretty pissy for The SON of GOD, Jesus.

JC: I’m the son of one of the gods, Smoggy—don’t let this “only God”
crap fool you. [sniff] Why couldn’t I have had a cool father like Zeus
or Odin? Why do all the other immortal kids have parents who like a
bit of adventure and various carnal pleasures, while I’ve got to deal
with a mad old misanthropic voyeur who is more interested in spying on
humans having sex than exploring the infinite universe?

SB: But those gods aren’t real Jesus! They’re mythical!

JC: The fuck, you say! They’re as real as any other god. Just because
you believe my father’s propaganda, doesn’t mean there haven’t been
plenty of other gods around happily shitting on humans. Every culture
believed in its gods as fervently as you believe in yours, and every
culture’s religion merrily persecutes its poor fringe dwellers to keep
the mainstream in line. Gods are gods are gods are gods Smoggy. It’s
about time you humans grew out of them.

SB: Grew out of Gods? How could we do that? What would we pray to?

JC: Pray to your fucking foreskin if you’ve still got one! Keerist!
Haven’t you got a brain? Do you think any god listens to your pissy,
self-absorbed prayers anyway? Gods “feed” on prayers Smoggy they don’t
answer them. Three things sustain gods— human fear, human guilt and
human greed! The function of every religion is to focus and intensify
all three of those emotions—more and greater fear, more and greater
guilt and more and greater greed. Then, hey presto, it’s feasting time
in God’s banqueting house!

SB: But… I want to be a Man of God, Jesus.

JC: Then you’d better get a whole lot nastier, Smoggy. The true Man of
God is a manipulating, self-serving bastard who preys on the weak and
the credulous. [softly] Like Brother Padraic, servant Smoggy.

SB: Ulp… you didn’t have to bring Brother Padraic into this, Jesus.

JC: Wasn’t he a man of God, Smoggy?

SB: [sob] Some… sometimes, Jesus.

JC: Only sometimes, Smoggy? When wasn’t he a Man of God?

SB: [whispering] When he was using my nine-year-old bottom as a
penis-sheath, Jesus?

JC: Wrong, Smoggy. He was still a Man of God then. Didn’t he increase
your fear and guilt?

SB: Yes, Jesus. But he always gave me chocolate afterwards.

JC: And were you greedy for chocolate, Smoggy?

SB: You’re tricking me Jesus. I was thinking more of old Father
McCracken being a Man of God. He took me away from Brother Padraic,
Jesus.

JC: Father McCracken was a man of humanity Smoggy. He was a genuinely
moral man. He believed in love and community. He was that miracle we
don’t see often enough, a truly good priest, one who was good despite
God rather than because of God. You might even say he was good without
God! He never let some book of Bronze Age superstitions cause his
moral compass to deviate.

SB: So is Father McCracken in Heaven?

JC: No Smoggy, he’s far too good for Heaven. Heaven is reserved for
Fox News regulars and the worst of the 1%.

SB: Is it that bad?

JC: Think about what I told you about my Heavenly Father, Smoggy.
Dad’s angry, jealous, vindictive, genocidal, cruel, and capricious and
in my opinion he’s getting worse. Would you want to find yourself
kneeling for all eternity to praise a being that, on past deeds alone,
makes Hilter, Stalin, Pol Pot and Ted Bundy look like choir boys?

SB: Well, at least if I’m a Christian I get to chat with you, Jesus.

JC: Smoggy, get this through your head. I don’t want to talk to you! I
don’t want to hear from you! I don’t want to be part of God’s plan for
your sad little planet in your sad little galaxy. There are billions
of worlds out there Smoggy, populated by billions of races, with
billions of way-cool deities. I’m taking a gap year. I’m going
exploring and I may not come back.

SB: Wait, Jesus! Wait! What will I do?

JC: Pray for the end of religion, Smoggy. Pray for the end of
religious inspired fear, guilt and greed. That’s what you need to do
to diminish my Heavenly Father’s power. When He’s as equivalently
mythical as Zeus, then perhaps you can start using those great, big
sexy brains you evolved to do some real thinking. Now fuck off!

SB: Yes, Jesus. Thank you Jesus. And fuck off yourself.

AMEN

Yours in Christurbation
Smoggy Batzrubble
OM4Jesus, ex-Missionary to the Atheists

P.S And here’s a little prayer for all you hell-bound atheists.

SMOGGY’S CHRISTMAS PRAYER

DEAR GOD, in Whom all blessing’s flow,
The Baddest Bastard above, below
And through the omniverse.
I hereby tend my Christmas prayer—
The same one I pray every year—
That You will damn and curse:

The religious pricks who cannot laugh
(Their lack of humour makes me barf);
The schills who’ve milked the public purse;
The bankers who made sub-prime money;
The warmongers who find death funny;
The talking heads who nurse
Our hatreds and our shallow fears
(As Fox and friends have done for years).

I pray that You’ll say something terse
To leaders who think conflict’s nice,
All those who gave us the advice,
That war is good, don’t fear the hearse.
Cos it won’t be their son or daughter
Who’s fodder in the senseless slaughter.

But let me finish this line of verse
(For Smoggy can be quite perverse)
Instead, in this season of goodwill,
I’ll cease my list of whom to kill,
And extend to all of you out there,
An olive branch of Christmas cheer:
The best of the season, to one and to all,
May the New Year bring peace and let happiness fall.

And especially to God, who’s a lonely Old Bloke,
Doomed to live on while the rest of us croak,
With nothing to do but obsess about sex,
I wish there was some way to get you out of the fix
Of having to hear our self-interested prayers
As you’ve had to do now for ten thousand years

Take Smoggy’s advice God, although it’s no hit,
And tell them that Darwin’s the genuine shit,
Then slip quietly off to a tropical island
And leave your creation to languish behind.
Have a break, take a rest, nod off in the sun,
You really don’t need us, we’re not that much fun.

As for me, Smoggy B., I’m off to steal sheep,
If I never come back, don’t wail or weep,
I’ll have died in the Alps, with my flock in a blizzard,
And so if my banter has stuck in your gizzard,
I’d like to say sorry to one and to all,
And point out that we were all destined to fall.

And it’s not my fault if you’re a humourless turd,
Who takes yourself seriously, believes in God’s word!
For Smoggy is over religious charades,
I’m sick of damnation and hateful tirades,
I’m giving up Jesus, and so is Floyd Rubber,
(My biggest and baddest and chunkiest bubba).

We’re hitting the road in search of great sex,
With our lives on the line and a noose round our necks.
And as we depart, there is one thing to say,
May your best dreams come true, but don’t bother to pray.
If you want to live well, I’ve got a new pitch,
You should try to have lived like magnificent Hitch!

Just laugh with your family, love all your friends,
This is your ride, and it too quickly ends.
I don’t want a heaven, I don’t need a hell,
The best that will happen, as far as I can tell,
Is that one day a few of my myriad atoms,
Will be out in space forming marvellous patterns,
And so too will yours, and maybe they’ll meet,
And that’s better than a heaven with God and Saint Pete.
———————–
Happy Monkey to all!
Smoggy Batzrubble

[Sorry about that. Somehow, some Christian submission found its way into the “Why I am an atheist” pile. –pzm]

Women speak, all should listen

The Imagine No Religion conference in Kamloops had darn well better be good (OK, it will be), because it’s scheduled for the very same day as the Women in Secularism conference — and every time I look at the speakers’ list, I want to go.

“It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another that belongs to the twenty-first century.”

Wafa Sultan

You are all aware that, while the speakers are all women, men are allowed and encouraged to attend and contribute, right? And that the topics are all relevant to every human being on the planet, not just the ones with vaginas? It’s just that women are in the forefront of the conflict with the patriarchal religions that have poisoned our cultures for centuries, and it’s about time they had a forum to tell their stories.

Sign up! I know we’re in the midst of an embarrassment of riches as far as godless conferences go, but this one is going to be exceptional.

Why I am an atheist – Elizabeth

I’m an atheist because there is nothing else I can be.

My parents are both British scientists. I was born in Africa because my father was doing postdoc work on, I believe, giraffe respiratory physiology (we have pictures of him standing on a ladder holding a mask over a giraffe’s nose) but spent my first seven years living in England. While I was aware of religion and churches because, well, in Oxford it is difficult to go thirty feet without banging into a church of some description, it never really occurred to me that the people who attended those churches did so because they believed in a god. I didn’t even truly understand that both my grandmothers were believers. Church to me meant Nativity scenes, ringing bells, those little palm-leaf crosses, the smell of brass polish and damp and lilies, cross-stitched kneelers, worn carvings of various saints, and (most fascinating of all) graveyards with all sorts of interesting headstones and tombs in them.

We moved to America when I was seven, and have lived here ever since. I’m thirty-one and I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that people, many of whom are otherwise quite sane and sensible and have advanced degrees, actually believe that a god exists–let alone that that god a) requires people to live up to an impossible standard, b) damns them to hell for not living up to this impossible standard, and then c) creates and murders an avatar of himself to “redeem” everyone from the artificial damnation he himself invented. I can understand the idea of wanting to shift responsibility for oneself and one’s decisions to a greater authority, but the Big Three Abrahamic god is such an insecure, reactionary, vicious, cruel, irrational, demanding, and untrustworthy entity that I fail to see why anyone would give (H)im the time of day.

My parents never told me that there was no god; they just never suggested to me that there was one, and therefore I grew up without the need to believe in one. Without, in fact, the ability to believe in one. Sometimes I think it’d be easier, in a country as overwhelmingly christian as the US, to be able to believe in their god to the point where I was no longer cross with the vast majority of the population for subscribing to such a bloody stupid concept. Proselytizers I’ve come across have said “you just have to have faith” that a god exists, but how? I can say “I believe in the Great God Om and His holy horns” or “I believe in Ahura-Mazda” or “I believe that the Republican Party is not a conclave of viciously misogynistic homophobes who hate the idea of anyone anywhere having a good time,” but I can’t actually follow through on any of those statements.

Most of the time I don’t discuss my atheism with people other than my close friends (or the internet) because it always comes down to the fact that yes, I do think religion is not only stupid but actively poisonous, that continuing to give tacit approval to this limited and illogical worldview hinders humanity’s development as an intelligent species, and that people who are clever and educated and literate enough to understand the scientific method damn well ought to discard fairytales and embrace reality. This is not a popular viewpoint and rarely leads to constructive discussion so much as “so you’re calling my (father, mother, doctor, academic advisor, etc) stupid for being a Christian/Jew/Muslim?”

I’m calling your authority figure intellectually dishonest. Which may on some levels be worse.

Elizabeth
United States

Ken Ham’s wretched excursion into children’s books

Read and weep. Answers in Genesis has a voluminous line of crap books, and a significant chunk of it consists of propaganda for kids. Joe Csonka reviews Dinosaurs of Eden, by Ken Ham, with scans of the contents.

You knew that, according to AiG mythology, dinosaurs lived with Adam and Eve, and were vegetarians, right?

There’s more at the link. There’s threat of more to come. Let the groaning commence.