This week has been a bit of a busy one as far as godlessness goes! Here’s a quick round-up of the best stuff on the blogosphere and of what people have tweeted about over the week.

But first, as always, your Cool Atheist of the Week: Sir Ian McKellan, Shakespearean thespian probably best known for the awesomest incarnations of both Gandalf and Magneto ever.

“I was brought up a Christian, low church, and I like the community of churchgoing. That’s rather been replaced for me by the community of people I work with. I like a sense of family, of people working together. But I’m an atheist. So God, if She exists, isn’t really a part of my life.”
— from a January 19, 1996 profile by Tim Appelo found in Mr. Showbiz.

Links below the fold, as usual. What are you, new here?

Ever see crazy preachers with crazy sandwich board signs like this guy?

Well, Hemant Mehta over at Friendly Atheist covers the counter-protest at his local university and it is EPIC.

Meanwhile, Vatican Cardinals fundamentally misunderstand that thing they think is sinful, thinking it leads directly to one of those practices in which they themselves happen to partake at disproportionally high rates.

In Philadelphia, the Atheist Tree of Knowledge is being pushed out of the same public venue that the Christmas tree is in — legislated to be of lesser height than the Christmas tree, and legislated to be hidden in a less populous area. And even still, while being marginalized, the Christians are crying out that the very concept of a tree with book covers adorning it is evil and should be eliminated altogether as an affront to them. Like THEY’RE the ones being marginalized by the very existence of something irreverent of their imaginary friend.

I only just discovered this amazing resource this week via someone on Twitter: a list of 400+ Theism vs Atheism debates. Most of them are available as either direct or streaming downloads, so your iPod will never be wanting for intellectual stimulation.

Most of the theists in the previous link would really benefit from this one: Christian tips for doing battle with evil atheists. In fact, everyone would benefit from reading it.

The Rationalists Blog voices what I’ve suspected — that 2010 will be the Year of the Atheist if trends continue. This year has been a grand one thus far, with respect to making inroads in the theocracies our countries have been trending toward lately.

Tired of people seeing the Virgin Mary every time there’s a vaguely person-shaped stain or discoloration? Well too bad, because A Wild Virgin Mary Appears… I wonder what her Pokédex number is.

Atheist Revolution wrestles with the timely and common problem of being told your atheism is “just a phase”. I guess the theists in question mean “just a second phase”, since people generally start out life as atheists until they’re told to believe in God.

Another pastor, this one from BC, has been jailed for making a fake rape video of an underage girl. And for once, the news reporters did not neglect to mention the numerous recent and absurdly similar events that have been raining down on the religious lately. These egregious acts must absolutely not fall into the memory hole. As long as we have religious folks claiming to have a monopoly on morals and simultaneously making natural sexual behaviour a sin, we’ll have religious folks that suppress their natural behaviours and ultimately expressing that sexuality in deviant and immoral ways, taking advantage of their underage charges and generally wrecking the fabric of society.

And finally, a follow-up to previous studies showing the less religious a country, the happier it is overall, running completely contrary to theists’ frequent claims that godless countries are bleak and grey, and rife with abortion, murder, and theft. Rather, the less irrationally based the belief systems, the more education the populace has, and the better equipped they are to avoid those situations to begin with.

Update: Whoops, I left off a whole slew of links I had in my tabs! Sorry folks!

A ten-year-old girl was tortured and branded as a witch by her psychotic evangelical father. Another fine example of evangelical morals and dedication to the scientific method. Someone says your daughter can cause people to fall asleep, and without any sort of empirical verification, you’re totally justified in dripping burning plastic on her and beating her half to death.

Chambersburg, PA has declared that it would be better to remove all religious iconography from a war memorial, than to let atheists put up a memorial alongside the nativity scene that was already there. While I agree that religious iconography has no business on a memorial for war veterans, many of whom were of different religions or no religion at all, I can’t believe the mentality behind the change — made as it was to prevent atheists from honoring atheist war veterans in a manner befitting their memories.

Anecdotes don’t make data, but they do make for funny stories — especially when Christians claim atheists are unfit parents while said complainants have far more moral failings to boast of themselves.

While agnosticism is not the same as indecisiveness between being a theist or an atheist, the argument presented here, regarding the patent office’s a priori rejection of all purported perpetual motion machines, makes some sense. As an argument against gnosticism or true-agnosticism, anyway. It mostly works as an argument for agnostic atheism (especially further up on the Dawkins seven-point scale).

And, finally, for real this time, Mike Haubrich presents an argument for asking clarifying questions before presenting one-size-fits-all arguments for spreading knowledge about science in general, and evolution specifically, with the side effect of countering evangelism for religion as a happy coincidence. It ties into the ongoing “framing wars” and “new atheists v accomodationists” retardery, and as with all of Mike’s pieces, is extraordinarily polished and well-argued.

Have a good week, folks! It’s almost Christmas time, so enjoy your friends and family and the festive decorations that help fend off the winter blahs, because that’s what the season’s really about.