It must be hard to be an atheist in Alabama

But there is a group, Alabama Atheists and Agnostics, which they can join, and I’m sure there are others around. Unfortunately, they seem to be limited in how they can advertise. When they tried to do the common campus practice of chalking — putting messages on the sidewalks to let students know what they were up to — they got an unfortunate response.

“While we were chalking somebody dumped water on what we were chalking, somebody spat at us,” Sloan said. “But really, overall, most people were polite.”

At approximately 6 p.m., AAA finished their chalking, Sloan said. By midnight, all the chalking had been erased and scrubbed clean by what appeared to be an organization’s effort.

Note that there were other groups, Christian groups, that were chalking at the same time, and that the atheists were writing inoffensive messages like “You can be good without god” and suggestions to look them up on facebook.

I guess they’ll have to settle for advertising on the internet.

So, all you University of Alabama students, join Alabama Atheists and Agnostics. Heck, all Alabamians should join. It’s accessible to the whole of the internet, so people all around the world can sign up.

Any other atheist groups in Alabama want a plug? Send me a note, and I’ll add them here.

Whoa. There are lots of atheists in Alabama. Try these organizations out:

The Birmingham Athiests Meetup Group
North Alabama Freethought Association
Alabama Freethought Association
West Alabama Freethought Association
Etowah County Rational Alliance
Southeast Alabama Freethought Association
Montgomery Area Freethought Association

I do love to see the trembling of the faithful

The number of godless Americans rises a few percentage points, and O Woe Is Us among the apologists. They are so weak and easily discomfited that it makes me chortle.

This one is pretty funny, too — he urges all the religious people to drop their differences (hah!), “Or risk becoming Europe, where religion is fast becoming an afterthought.” What is it with these guys? Europe is a fine, successful place, the thriving heartland of Western thought, and they do very well with a diminished religious influence. I think we’d do well to steal the best parts of European culture, and use them to replace the creaky embarrassing bits of ours…and that means religion should go.

I get email

Man, those visits to Fargo and Maine sure stirred up a lot of people. I’ve just been getting an unusually large volume of mail lately, and it’s about evenly split: half are saying “Yay, I’m going to read your blog every day!” and the other half are “You’re going to burn in hell!” It seems appropriate, then, to at least acknowledge this flood by posting one of them.

Nate is trying to pull a Ray Comfort on me. There’s a reason why people call Comfort “Raytard”, so he really isn’t the right person to emulate.

You

Hi Paul,

The ten commandments:

1. No other God’s…. even yourself.
2. No idols… none!
3. Take God’s name in vain…. Never.
4. Keep the Sabbath day… every week!
5. Honor you father/mother…?
6. You shall not murder… Jesus said to hate your brother is to murder…. Ever hate anyone?
7. You shall not commit adultery… Jesus said to lust after a woman is the same… Lust?
8. No stealing… ever stole anything.. even minor?
9. Bear false witness?
10. No coveting… ever!

How did you do? If you are like everyone else you probably failed to keep 8-10 of these. Not a good sign for anyone that believes in God. I guess for now the easier thing to do would be to put him out of our lives. Of course in the end we will have to face the music no matter what we believe… or maybe Jesus faced the music for those who do believe. He can change your life as he has many. God is calling you.

How did you do with the ten commandments?

With love,

Nate Stead

Whoa. Slapped down with the Ten Commandments. No one has ever tried to do that to me before.

  1. Not only do I have no other gods, I have no gods, period. I ace this one and deserve extra credit. Score: 1½.
  2. Idols, are you kidding me? Of course not. No idols, no fetishes, no funny costumes or hats, no rituals, no hymns, no saints. I’m completely free of that nonsense. Score: 2½.
  3. There is no god, so no name to take in vain. And what does that mean, anyway? When I say, “Jesus was a deluded kook whose suffering does not excuse anyone’s sins”, I’m not taking his name in vain at all. Score: 3½.
  4. “Keeping the sabbath” is another nonsensical idea. Sure, I keep it; it’s a day on the calendar, it’s awfully hard to lose. But if you mean I have to be like those crazy fundamentalist Jews who don’t even flip a light switch on Sunday, no. I hope this guy isn’t serious about wanting to establish that kind of principle for everyone. I’m gonna give this one to myself. “Keeping” a day is so vaguely defined and even Christianist kooks differ in what it means. Score: 4½.
  5. Of course I honor Mom and Dad. I love ’em to pieces. Easy. Score: 5½.
  6. I have never murdered anyone. Never even killed anyone. And the commandments specifically say “murder”, not “hate”, so I reject your redefinition. Score: 6½.
  7. Likewise, I’ve never committed adultery. And once again, you don’t get to redefine the commandment to mean, “Think Raquel Welch looked hot in that wetsuit”. Score: 7½.
  8. No, I haven’t stolen anything, either. I make a reasonable wage, have relatively few material requirements, and haven’t needed to steal. I know, this wanker is probably going to redefine stealing to mean “Watched Indiana Jones snatch away a jeweled idol in a movie and thought it was cool” to mean I broke both #2 and #8, but I reject that fatuous word game, too. Score: 8½.
  9. No, I don’t lie, either. It’s so much easier to tell the truth. Oh, there were probably a few negligible childish fibs once upon a time, but I’ve never harmed people with a lie, or tried to use a lie to get away with something. Score: 9½.
  10. Uh-oh, caught me. Yes, I covet stuff all the time. I walk into bookstores and lust after so much stuff; I’ve got a long Amazon wish list, and I like my computer gadgets. So?

So, I score 9½ out of 10, and most Christians, by Nate’s admission, score 0-2. That has to sting; here he’s dreaming of someday watching the heathen burn in torment from a ringside seat in heaven, but I do better at following the commandments than he does!

But wait, I know Ray Comfort’s schtick, so I know what comes next. God has given us these ‘laws’ that are virtually impossible to keep, so everyone breaks them at some time, but it’s OK, because if you accept Jesus in your heart, it gives you license to break all these laws, and still get into heaven. If you’re a Christian, you can lie, steal, commit adultery, and even murder, and still get divine approval. And if you follow every single one of the ten commandments, but don’t love Jesus, you still get sent to hell.

So what good are these commandments? The people who think the source is credible also get carte blanche to break them, and the only people who are expected to stick to them are the ones who reject the Bible…and they are damned anyway!

So, Nate, I suggest you take your ten commandments and stuff them up your nether orifice. Sideways. No lube. And look! There’s no commandment against it!

Faith and Flagella

If you’ve ever read William Dembski, you know he has an infuriating ego and is aggravatingly pompous. If you’ve ever read Dan Brown, you know that he simply can’t write, churning out canned syntax and ridiculous plots. What would you get if someone made an unholy fusion of the two?

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I’m pretty sure that this is one of those chimerae the religious right gets so incensed about, and for once, I agree with them. Kill it. Kill it now. Kill it with fire.

Texas has state-sanctioned murder

The story of Cameron Todd Willingham (via Digby) ought to be read by everyone. Willingham seems to have been a kind of Texan dumbass, an uneducated, wife-beating piece of work, but he was also the father of three children, who he, by all accounts, loved. Those kids died in a house fire. Forensic ‘experts’ declared the fire an arson, Willingham was arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, and was executed.

Only problem: he didn’t do it. The fire experts were good ol’ boys who were operating on folklore and fairy tales about how fires propagated; real experts have looked at the scene and since declared that it was an accidental fire. Nobody killed those little girls, but their father was killed for their deaths.

That’s not the most disturbing part of the story to me. You have to watch these videos of Judge John Jackson (he was prosecutor in the case, and is now a judge). He openly admits that the evidence for arson was weak, and that he looked at the circumstances to determine Willingham’s guilt. Those circumstances? Willingham was a low-class ruffian with tattoos of skulls who like heavy metal music. Therefore, he was probably a satanist. Therefore, he probably killed his children.

I’m not joking. That was the basis for this smug cracker’s determination of guilt, that led directly to his execution. Why not just criminalize tattoos and Metallica? It would make it easy to round up the riff-raff and exterminate them.

The state of Texas murdered an innocent man, and we can see the whole chain of incompetence, bigotry, and cowardice that led to the tragedy, from this ass of a prosecutor to Governor Perry, who refused to heed the evidence of malfeasance. Why aren’t all of them being impeached or fired, and facing criminal charges in a court of law? Is it because they don’t have any tattoos and listen to patriotic tripe from Lee Greenwood, Brooks & Dunn, and Tim McGraw?

End the death penalty everywhere. Drum the red-necked blundering boobs out of office, at the very least.

I didn’t even know there was a reporter there!

My appearance at Bates made it to the Lewiston Sun Journal.

They did get a little piece of one point I tried to make. I don’t think religion makes people do wicked things, and that’s not my gripe with it. What it does is cut an intellectual brake line, making them incapable of dealing with certain situations rationally — they may do what is right, or they may do something that’s just nuts, but you just can’t rely on them doing what is reasonable.