As I’ve mentioned before, one annoying property of Christians is that they keep lecturing us on what atheists believe…and they’re always wrong. Here’s a suggestion next time they do this to you: tell them to go look at these two lists written by atheists and get their stories straight.
10 Myths Many Religious People Hold About Atheists, Debunked.
I Am An Atheist: 16 Things Atheists Need Christians to Know.
I just had to share. Look at this sample: at least 5 different fonts, 6 different colors, shadowed text, and all superimposed on an irrelevant and elaborate background.
And then there’s the content: It’s a creation museum! It’s a taxidermy collection! And it’s run by some antique tools!
Savor the Creation Museum and Taxidermy Hall of Fame of North Carolina; I don’t think it will change any time in the near future, so there’s no hurry. It’s so nice of creationists to erect these monuments to stupidity and tastelessness on the web.
(Also on Sb)
The Worldwide Atheist Conspiracy is dispatching JT Eberhard to tour Tennessee next week. It will no longer be a Christian state after he’s done with it; might as well shut down all the churches now.
Another addition to the lineup appearing at The Reason Rally: Bad Religion. I’ll be there, too, although I won’t be singing.
Here I am saying why I’m going:
You should also be following the Reason Rally site — if for nothing else, they’re letting you know about discounts on travel and hotel rooms.
A professor at the University of Minnesota, Steven Miles, is offering a $1000 reward for the name and release of the medical records of the person Michele Bachmann says became mentally retarded after getting the HPV vaccine. I’d like to see that, too.
One unexpected consequence of Bachmann’s accusation: Rick Perry is now defending science.
Perry himself has weighed in. “You heard the same arguments about giving our children protections from some of the childhood diseases, and they were, autism was part of that,” he told NBC News. “Now we’ve subsequently found out that was generated and not true.”
I guess Rick Perry just lost Jenny McCarthy’s vote.
Next debate, I’d like to see Bachmann promote creationism and pooh-pooh global climate change, just for the unusual spectacle of seeing Republicans rushing to puncture her claims by citing real science.
There was another Republican debate (I skipped it; there are limits to the horrors I can endure), and apparently, many people think Michele Bachmann trumped Rick Perry by jumping on his ‘liberal’ endorsement of using the HPV vaccine to prevent cancers in women. Bachmann ranted about the federal government forcing innocent little girls to get mental retardation injections, and the teabaggers loved it. They loved it almost as much as they loved Rick Perry’s record of executions.
Orac rips her apart. It’s great fun, and informative, too.
As I’ve pointed out time and time again, Gardasil is incredibly safe by any measure. Also by any measure, it’s been very heavily tested and monitored. Of course, there is no evidence at all that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation. I’ve also pointed out how the vast majority of the reports of adverse reactions after the HPV vaccine made to the VAERS database were almost certainly not due to Gardasil and have castigated Medscape, of all publications, for buying into anti-vaccine myths about Gardasil. Meanwhile the American Academy of Pediatrics immediately issued a press release to correct Michelle Bachmann’s false statements about Gardasil. What Bachmann is peddling is pure pseudoscience. I suppose I shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised, given how gullible she is when it comes to science in general and how much she allows ideology to trump science.
Once again, the Republicans step forward as the anti-human, anti-science, anti-health party.
(Also on Sb)
I get so tired of Christians sanctimoniously declaring what atheists really believe, and going on to tell us how we get it all wrong. They always seem to hector us over stuff we don’t believe and tell us that if we only stopped doing things we don’t do we’d see the value of Jeeesus. And we roll our eyes, and tally up another data point that says that religion turns you into a moron.
The latest exercise in firing 180° away from the target comes from Paul Wallace, who sends an open letter to atheists about believing in Johnny Cash. He really, really likes Johnny Cash, as he explains to us at length; I like Cash too, and I’ve got a few of his songs coming up frequently on my iPod list. His point is that Cash’s songs tell stories, and those stories shed light on the human condition, and that somehow this is something only a Christian can understand while atheists are blind to it.
The 2011 World Humanist Congress in Oslo, reduced to a 4-minute highlight clip:
My opinion of the rabbinical mind is plummeting downwards, thanks to the determined efforts of one man, Moshe Averick. We’ve encountered him before, and he was most unimpressive. Now he’s got a new line of criticism of atheists: we’re on a slippery slope. You know what comes next? What horrible abominable practice we’ll be endorsing?
Pedophilia!
Yeah, because without god’s laws to guide us, we will start running around raping little children willy-nilly. Never mind that atheists haven’t shown, as a whole, any such pattern or predilection, it’s just inevitable that we’ll want to abuse children. I think it’s a bizarre case of projection, again: really, I have no desire to have sex with small children, to rob banks, to rape dogs, or even to set churches on fire. You might as well suggest that without god I’ll become a NASCAR fan, start chewing tobacco, or vote Republican, all things I have no desire to do and which are not a product of theism or atheism.
I’m always baffled by this argument. What, there’s something about church or synagogue that suppresses your natural urge to rape, murder, and rob? But I feel no such urge without church!
And then, of course, he’s picked the very worst example. Nowadays, mention the word “pedophilia”, and nobody thinks of atheists — you know, even though pedophiles are a minority in their ranks, everyone considers “Catholic priest” virtually synonymous with “child-raper”. So much for religion suppressing those urges — it’s more like it attracts and enables monsters.
And then, having gnawed on one foot, Averick sticks the other one in.
A wise man once observed that while belief in God after the Holocaust may be difficult, belief in man after the Holocaust is impossible. The choices before us are clear: we will either seek a transcendent moral law to which we will all submit, or we will seek our own personal and societal indulgence. If we turn to God in our quest to create a moral and just world, we have a fighting chance; if not, we are doomed to spiral into the man-made hell of the human jungle.
Germany at the time of the Holocaust was a predominantly Catholic and Lutheran country. Hitler claimed to have a transcendant moral law, as well — that his people were the Chosen People, the best and greatest Volk, who by their intrinsic physical and moral and intellectual superiority were compelled to maintain their purity and exterminate the lesser races. That’s where you end up when you decree a source of absolute morality, a morality that isn’t based on equality and empathy and fairness, but on authority, especially the intangible untestable authority of an invisible magic ghost.
All moral laws are manmade. Do we recognize that reality and struggle to make them better as a community of reasonable human beings, or do we pretend that a few of us have special privileges and insight into the desires of a cosmic tyrant, and let them tell us how to live? Given that anyone claiming such authority is mad and delusional, I say no.
Look: Greta is going to be in Minneapolis and St. Cloud this weekend, and she’ll also be on Atheist Talk radio on Sunday morning.
I’m hoping to make it to her Sunday talk, but I have a conflict: on Sunday, 18 September, before her talk, I have to appear on a panel over the internet to speak at the Tech Museum in San Jose, California. Thanks to the wonders of science, I don’t have to be in San Jose…I just have to have a quiet place with a stable internet connection. If I can arrange that, I’ll drive in to the Twin Cities.
The topic of the panel is “Religion and Science: Beliefs and the Brain,” and it’s associated with the opening of an exhibit on Islamic science. I get to be the poopyhead arguing that science and religion are incompatible, in case you couldn’t guess.
