In less than an hour, Atheists Talk radio will be on! This week, they’re discussing how to talk to a christian proselytizer, and are also having a segment on fundamentalism. It sounds very depressing, but I’m sure it will be good.

By the way, I am back home, and my laptop is still dead. I’m using an older, slower, smaller laptop while the other is out for repair, and I’m just now beginning the slow process of doing a complete restore to this little machine. I’m feeling sort of brain-damaged, but at least I’m getting some functionality back.

One thing that never restores very well, though, is all my old email. I have an abiding hatred for Apple’s Mail software, and it gets even with me by being a PITA, and compounding that with the fact that I’ve been unable to get to my mail for several days, meaning that there is probably a backlog of a few thousand messages awaiting my attention, I suspect my email is probably hosed. I hope nobody is expecting too prompt a reply from me today.

Fresh off the British Humanist Associations’s successful bus campaign, the American Humanist Association has fired up its own set of big signs on buses in the Washington DC area. Their message is “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake”.

Of course, CNN considers this another salvo in the War on Christmas. Silly news organization. Didn’t you get the word? The war on Christmas is over. We won. It’s a secular holiday, atheists can celebrate it any way they want, Christians can continue to pretend it’s baby Jesus’ birthday, and everyone has the freedom to interpret the meaning of the day in whatever way they choose. The freethinkers of America are victorious.

The only people left fighting it are desperate holdouts who look sad and comical when the emerge from the jungles of their own making. Like the American Patriarchy Association.

In mid-October, the American Family Association started selling buttons that say “It’s OK to say Merry Christmas.” The humanists’ entry into the marketplace of ideas did not impress AFA president Tim Wildmon.

“It’s a stupid ad,” he said. “How do we define ‘good’ if we don’t believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what’s good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what’s good, it’s going to be a crazy world.”

Guess what, Tim? It is OK to say “Merry Christmas”. Even I have been known to say it. Go ahead, have a good time with the greeting, although it does rather rip the spirit out of it if you say it through clenched teeth with furrowed brow, looking like you’re daring everyone to object so you can punch them in the throat. It’s also OK to say “Happy Solstice,” “Season’s Greetings,” “Happy Holidays,” and “Merry Cephalopodmas,” whatever feels right to you.

But I’m sorry, this Biblical god fellow is not a very good source for goodness. If we went by that definition, Christmas would be a time when we’d slaughter Amelekites, get drunk and have sex with daughters, stone gay people, and treat molluscs as abominations. None of those things sound very merry to me. Wouldn’t there be a better source for goodness that doesn’t rely on archaic xenophobia and delusion from bad old books? How about empathy and the general principle that we should do to others what we would like them to do for us? Atheists can follow that one, and they don’t believe in god at all.

This morning at 9am Central, tune in to Atheists Talk radio for a discussion of atheists in the military — it turns out there are atheists in foxholes.

Slate has an article by Paul Bloom on why religious people are nice and atheists are mean. As you might guess, I have some difficulty with the premise of the article — in my experience, atheists have been far friendlier, while the religious have been downright vicious — but it does make some interesting points (and, of course, it cites me as “prominent”, which is very flattering).

In particular, his main argument, which I entirely agree with, is that if religion has any virtue, it is not in the belief itself, but in the community that forms around it.

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I was interviewed by humanistischer pressedienst about the New Atheism and American politics and religion. I am amazingly erudite auf Deutsch, so much so that I can only read what I said with considerable effort.

OK, I confess—the interview was in English, and it’s the fluency of the interviewer we ought to praise. I’ve put the original text below the fold for those of us who’d rather not read slowly with the aid of a dictionary.

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On 13 November, at 7pm, Sunsara Taylor will be speaking at Blegen Hall 10 at the UMTC campus. This is part of a national college speaking tour that draws from and promotes Bob Avakian’s new book, “AWAY WITH ALL GODS! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World”, and here’s what she’ll be talking about:

Freethinking activist Sunsara Taylor will explore the questions:

• Is believing in gods actually harmful?
• How has Christianity for centuries served as an ideology of conquest and subjugation?
• Why is the “Bible Belt” in the U.S. also the “lynching belt”?
• In the intensifying conflict between U.S. imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism, is the only choice to take one side or the other?
• Why is patriarchy and the oppression of women foundational to so many religions?
• Can people be good without god?

Unfortunately, I’ll be in Nebraska, but you should go — it’ll be firebreathing fun!

The hateful Reverend Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church was a heck of a father. Some of his kids have escaped the hellish prison of WBC, and one, Nathan Phelps, has written about his upbringing. Religion was a tool of oppression, something to instill fear and allow an angry father to control his family, and to justify violence against them.

Nathan Phelps is now an atheist, and says that he “agrees with prominent atheist and scientist Richard Dawkins, who has said that religion can be ‘real child abuse.'”

(via erv)

Don’t forget to tune in to Atheists Talk radio for a discussion of state science standards sometime this morning. It’s nominally at 9am, but there’s a time change tonight, I’m in a different time zone right now, and I’ve got to be up at 4am to catch a plane home, so I have no idea what time it will actually be. You figure it out.

In case you’ve been feeling dumped upon because atheists seem to be the current target of contempt by so many, there is still one group that might be lower: Dungeons & Dragons players. At GenCon, D&D players raised $17,000 to donate to the late Gary Gygax’s favorite charity, The Christian Children’s fund…only to have it turned down because sales of the heathenish D&D contributed to the amount.

If you are a D&D player and an atheist, then I’m sorry, this won’t cheer you up, because obviously you are the lowest slime in the universe.