Christianity has this two-pronged system to try to keep you within the fold. There is the reward of heaven but also the threat of hell if heaven is not sufficient. There is god as the good cop who cares about you and wants to save but also the devil as the bad cop who just wants the chance to fry you for eternity.
But according to a Gallup poll, Americans are ‘the glass is half full’ kind of people, believing slightly more in god than in the devil, and in heaven more than hell.
As religious beliefs come under siege from science and reason, and believers increasingly realize that they have no effective counter to these critiques that are resulting in nonbelievers becoming the fastest growing group in the world, there will be increasing attempts to stifle any speech that criticizes religion. These will come under different guises such as [Read more…]
BBC1 TV brought together two groups of people to debate the above question. It covers ground that I think readers here will be familiar with but it is fun to watch and the non-religionists are pretty good at making their case. The show consists of four parts of about 15 minutes each. Part 1 is below and the [Read more…]
The feelings of religious people are so sensitive I wonder how they manage to get through the day without having a breakdown. Now it is the Sikhs who are objecting to comedian Jay Leno who made fun of Mitt Romney’s wealth by showing a picture [Read more…]
There has been some ghastly religious violence going on in Nigeria.
A Muslim group known as Boko Haram has committed massacres of Christians, sometimes with bombings and at other times with automatic weapons, in order to drive them out of the Muslim-dominated north of the country to the Christian-dominated south. One attack on a Catholic church on Christmas day killed 37 people. An explosives attack on a Muslim school is suspected of being a retaliation.
Boko Haram is one of those groups that takes their religious texts seriously.
Its followers are said to be influenced by the Koranic phrase which says: “Anyone who is not governed by what Allah has revealed is among the transgressors”.
Boko Haram promotes a version of Islam which makes it “haram”, or forbidden, for Muslims to take part in any political or social activity associated with Western society.
This includes voting in elections, wearing shirts and trousers or receiving a secular education.
I am sure that these murderous thugs fervently believe that they are good people doing god’s will, as can be seen by the group’s official name which is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, which means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad”.
In response to my post titled More fun with the Jesus people, a commenter mentioned how hard it is not to get annoyed with religious people who refuse to see reason.
Now I greatly value reason and logic. They are, after all, the basic tools of science, which has [Read more…]
My office in the university is in a central location, at the intersection of two main streets that cut through the campus. If I look outside my window, I have a good chance of seeing most of the university community passing by during any given day. As a result, the street corner outside my office is a popular place for people who want to hand out religious tracts.
In days gone by, when approached by such people I would politely decline their offers and walk away. But now, if I am not in a hurry to go somewhere, I take the opportunity to question them about their beliefs. I take the Socratic approach of asking questions and then build on their responses by asking more questions, which I find leads to far more interesting discussions than trying to simply prove to them that they are wrong. (For my previous encounters with Jesus people, see here, here, and here. It’s all good clean fun.)
This happened again a few weeks ago, when a genial man about my age approached me at the intersection and asked me [Read more…]
Dave Barry, columnist for the Miami Herald, is one of the funniest writers and for years he got a lot of mileage out of documenting the things that the people of Florida and Miami did that convinced him that it was the craziest state in the nation. He is fortunate to have retired from his weekly column because recent events suggest that my state of Ohio may well take that particular crown.
Consider the following recent stories that have garnered national attention for our state.
I am not claiming that Ohio has definitely become the craziest state in the nation. But we may at last have a shot at a national championship that has long been denied us in the sports arena.
Some time ago, P. Z. Myers made an important point. Atheists tend to find the beliefs of religions so incredible that we cannot believe that the people we know well personally, who seem to be perfectly rational in other areas of their lives, take those beliefs at face value. So we tend to delude ourselves that they consciously pay only lip service to the tenets of their religions and belong to religious institutions purely for the social benefits they get from belonging to the group. Hence we are surprised when we discover that we could not be more wrong. He says,
Many of us find it really hard to believe that Christians actually believe that nonsense about Jesus rising from the dead and insisting that faith is required to pass through the gates of a magical place in the sky after we’re dead; we struggle to find a rational reason why friends and family are clinging to these bizarre ideas, and we say to ourselves, “oh, all of her friends are at church” or “he uses church to make business contacts” or “it’s a comforting tradition from their childhood”, but no, it’s deeper than that: we have to take them at their word, and recognize that most people who go to church actually do so because they genuinely believe in all that stuff laid out in the Nicene Creed.
It makes the phenomenon of religion even scarier, doesn’t it?
Yes, it does, because [Read more…]
This is quite extraordinary. A talk at a UK University on “Sharia Law and Human Rights” was cancelled because of threats by some people of violence if anyone said anything that they considered offensive to Islam or prophet Mohammed.
This comes on the heels of a two other cases of intimidation in the UK, this time over the display of Jesus and Mo cartoons. Blag Hag has been covering those stories.
People who try to force others to be silent are people who know that their beliefs cannot stand up to scrutiny. It is as simple as that. And who better than Jesus and Mo to make that case?
