One of the benefits of religion, if you want to think of it that way, is that it enables one to shift responsibility to god if things go wrong. A new study by my friend and colleague Julie Exline and her graduate student Joshua Grubbs, who are in the department of religious studies at my university, finds that “people are likelier to blame God for their bad moral behavior when they believe they were born to act that way.”
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I have long felt that the appeal of religion lies more with the promise of life after death, the idea that people will live on forever, than on having a belief in god. The idea that we will never be forgotten and that our lives matter and that one day be reunited with those we love is a much more appealing prospect than hanging out with a god whom one does not know. The appeal of a belief in god seems more like a fear-driven negative one, whose purpose is to stave off the chance of being in hell for eternity.
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There has grown up a stereotype that atheists are angry people. Is this true? Via reader Jeff, I came across this article that discusses the results of a study titled The Myth of the Angry Atheist that examined the angry atheist hypothesis and found it to be false. Here’s the conclusion of the paper:
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The murder of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by an outspoken atheist has raised the issue of whether they were killed because of their religion by someone who seemed to hate religion.

It is taken for granted that when a member of the majority (whether it be ethnic or race or religion or any other defining characteristic) does something heinous, the perpetrator is not taken as representing the entire community and no one calls upon its members to explicitly denounce the acts. But when such an action is committed by a member of a minority community, then it is expected that all members of the minority, and especially its ‘leaders’ and celebrities, must explicitly denounce the acts or otherwise be suspected of condoning it.
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Stephen Fry’s recent lambasting in a widely-viewed televised interview of god as an “evil, capricious, monstrous, maniac” because of the fact that the world he supposedly created has all manner of evils (as one example he mentioned an insect that makes children blind by burrowing in their eyes) was bound to elicit responses from god-apologists.
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This video of Stephen Fry has been making the rounds. He was being interviewed by Gay Byrne as part of an ongoing series for an Irish TV program called The Meaning of Life, with this episode to be aired on Sunday 1st February at 10.30 pm. Fry is asked that old chestnut about what he would say to god if, upon his death, he discovered that god existed and he was in his presence.
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One rule of thumb that I have is that you have to be wary of people who say that they have changed and have stopped doing the bad things they once did. It is not that people cannot change. They can, but the most convincing testimony to that effect is that coming from other people, especially those who were the victims of that past behavior, not themselves.
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