Mark it on your calendar: 30 September is going to be Blasphemy Day. Join the Facebook group, if that is your kind of thing.

Blasphemy Day International is an international campaign seeking to establish September 30th as a national day to promote free speech and stand up in a show of solidarity for the freedom to mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal. It is the obligation of the world’s nations to safeguard dissent and the dissenters, not to side with the brutal interests of thugs who demand “respect” for their beliefs (i.e., immunity to being criticized or mocked or they threaten violence).

So if you support free speech, and the rights of those who disagree with religious views to voice their opinions peacefully, support our group and join the cause!

I like this take on the matter:

Blasphemy is a joyous, funny, socially progressive, and profoundly moral act. It deserves its own day. Join the group. Spread the word.

I only have one reservation. Every day should be Blasphemy Day.

(via The Freethinker)

Sunday morning at 9am, tune in to Atheist Talk radio to listen to Massimo Pigliucci. This should be very good — Massimo is an evolutionary biologist and an atheist, and is also full of interesting ideas.

All you Minnesotans should know by now that Richard Dawkins will be speaking at UMTC, in Northrup Auditorium, at 7pm on Wednesday, 4 March…next week! If you haven’t got your tickets yet, you can join Minnesota Atheists and get one for free — so act fast.

As an additional inducement, guess who is going to introduce Dawkins at the lecture? Me! Now you might be saying, “Bleh, who wants to listen to Myers babble?”, but you’d be missing the important point: I’m only going to talk for 30 seconds to a minute, and then get out of the way. More Dawkins, less annoying functionary!

In fact, if we can get a full house at the Northrup, I’ll go one better — I’ll just say “Heeeeeeere’s Richard Dawkins!” and get off the stage. So buy more tickets, and shut me up (watch for the rush on the Northrup box office now).

Oh, and there will be a semi-secret pub night afterwards. I’m not advertising it too widely, to keep the riff-raff away…but you can email me and ask for directions.

I might as well recommend this excellent rebuttal to Weiss and Nisbet. Weiss wrote an op-ed which was basically a baseless argument that these uppity New Atheists should sit down and shut up because Charles Darwin “knew there is plenty of room for God at the top”. It’s a stupid argument on many levels, and not just because we are none of us worshippers of Darwinian infallibility…but also because it misrepresents Darwin’s ideas about religion.

Weiss and Nisbet are trying to use Darwin as a positive example to contrast with their presumed negative example of the New Atheists. If they did this with regard to the public expression and aggressive style of the New Atheists, especially in their intolerance of all religions, they would have a good argument. Darwin and most atheists today are much more circumspect than the New Atheists and not so intolerant of all religions and religious philosophies. But instead, they criticized the New Atheists with the actual philosophical atheistic beliefs themselves, and here their argument fails, since Darwin was no different in this regard than Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, et al. By the end of his life, Darwin was a total agnostic, nontheist, and–concerning the Christian God–antitheist. When Darwin wrote, “The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject [the existence of an ineffable god] is beyond the scope of man’s intellect,” he was correct about generic gods in general, and I don’t think the New Atheists would disagree. Both they and Darwin would be nontheistic about generic gods. “Every man,” Darwin wrote, “must judge for himself, between conflicting vague probabilities.” For the most part this is obvious, and Darwin had judged for himself and chosen agnosticism and atheism–nontheism for god and antitheism for the Christian God (whose existence he thought had been disproved by the problem of evil).

I don’t know how he can abide them, but August Berkshire of Minnesota Atheists will be appearing on KKMS talk radio, the Twin Cities refuge for fundagelical reality-deniers. Listen in at 5pm Central (in about two hours), if you can bear it. I can’t.

9am Central. Sunday morning. The evil atheists of the upper midwest will continue their nefarious plan to disseminate propaganda internationally by means of the radio waves, which will vibrate even within the walls of Minneapolis’s churches, synagogues, and temples, and also via the godless intertubes. This week, they will once again spread the infidel lie that atheists can “lead rich, ethical and fulfilling lives without appealing to gods or religious authority”, when every Christian knows deep in their heart that they want to murder, maim, rape, and steal, and only God’s holy extortion can keep them in line.

Go ahead, tune in if you want to lead hedonistic lives of ungodly self-indulgence. Click on that link if you want to make Jesus cry. Destroy all of Western civilization by letting the heathen weaken the shackles of your sacred servitude.

(Just don’t tune in before 9 or after 10, because Air America runs some awesomely stupid informercials before and after the hour of reason.)