True Freethinkers™ also wouldn’t wear a baseball cap backwards.

We should all go! Registration is open, and of course it’s free!

I wonder if Atheists for Liberty will be there?

I’m trying to figure out if I can manage to make it myself — this is a busy working summer. Maybe if I take the train? There must be a train from Minneapolis to St Louis, right?

She said, the longer you wear a mask, the more unhealthy you get.

She thinks vaccines wreck chromosomes. For those of you who say you are Christians, what will your life review look like at the end of your life? Will the Lord say to you: ‘You coerced people into being injected with this gene-modification technology that irreversibly disrupts your chromosomes?

She claims that that there is “some sort of an interface, ‘yet to be defined’ interface, between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers, and that the vaccines have caused thousands of deaths in the U.S.

She also says I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who’ve had these shots, and now they’re magnetized. They can put a key on their forehead, it sticks. They can put spoons and forks all over them, and they can stick. Because now we think that there’s a metal piece to that.

She thinks cities are liquifying dead bodies and pouring them into the water supply.

She has a mission.

In one session, Tenpenny implores God to release the U.S. from the tyranny of the mask, argues America is founded on your word and expresses hope it will return to being one country under God. In another, she refers to vaccines as a bioweapon to damage your children created by satanists who allow Black Lives Matter and antifa activists to operate as a front to drive socialism through the heart of America, which turns into communism.

I’m sure you’ll all be relieved to know that the state medical board has restored Sherri Tenpenny’s license to practice medicine in the state of Ohio.

It’s fun to watch religious conservatives grapple with pop culture, because they really don’t get it. Today is the goofy pseudo-holiday called May the Fourth (it’s not a real holiday, ‘k? It’s a silly riff on the phrase “May the force be with you from Star Wars). The big dumb dorks at Answers in Genesis would like to get in on the fun in the worst possible way. Like a particularly clueless high schooler showing up at the prom to tell everyone dancing is stupid, their way of celebrating a fake holiday is to announce that Star Wars is fake.

We know, guy.

The AiG approach, though, is to “prove” that intelligent aliens don’t exist using theological “logic”. They imagine a group of fictitious aliens finding a Bible.

Let’s consider physical, intelligent beings like Wookies, Klingons, or other “humanlike” beings. Although they definitely make for good entertainment in sci-fi movies and shows, the concept of advanced alien races is theologically problematic. Let me explain using the following (imaginary) scenario, with Chewbacca, Superman, and Spock reading the Bible: can these intelligent aliens be redeemed from the curse? (See Genesis 3 and Romans 8.) In other words, does God’s plan of salvation apply to them?

These imaginary aliens would not think about that at all, any more than you would wonder whether you were going to be rewarded with some kind of paradise if you found some book of mythology. Are you wondering if you’ve been sufficiently “cleared” to earn Scientology’s afterlife? Probably not. Chewbacca is going to be similarly unconcerned about meeting weird-ass Christian criteria. However, AiG’s theology says poor Chewie is either “fallen” or irrelevant.

Romans 8 makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected all creation—not just mankind. So then we have to ask the question: are these high-level sentient aliens fallen? If not, then they’re redundant. God already has the angels (the cherubim, seraphim, etc.). And even if these aliens have never sinned, they would still suffer the effects of sin, suffering under the bondage of corruption—despite having never sinned!

So are they claiming that the Bible accuses the Wookies of Kashyyk of being slammed with the guilt of sin when Eve bit into the apple? Because it doesn’t say that. No human has any knowledge of aliens on other worlds, so it would be really weird if Moses, the putative author of certain books of the Bible, had enumerated all these unrelated alien creatures. So this is a rather stupid assertion. Also, sin is not an actual phenomenon — it’s invective used against certain behaviors, rather than something intrinsic to humans or aliens — so claiming it’s a property of people as well as Wookies is not demonstrable.

As for being irrelevant…that’s an ugly anthropocentric and often racist attitude.

Obviously, it makes no sense to have intelligent beings—who suffer because of Adam’s sin—but cannot be saved! Christ is able to redeem man because he represents man by taking upon himself a second nature—as being fully God and fully man. Christ is the God-man (i.e., he’s not the “God-Klingon” or the “God-Wookie”).

“Obviously” and “it makes no sense” are phrases no fundamentalist/evangelical Christian should ever use. The whole premise of their religion, that a god turned into a man who died and thereby allowed everyone to go to heaven, “obviously” “makes no sense.”

AiG somehow turns this strange twisted logic into proof that aliens don’t exist, because “it makes no sense.”

Simply put, the work of Jesus cannot atone for the sins of advanced alien beings. And so, the idea of intelligent life existing on other planets is completely unbiblical! Actually, these kinds of issues highlight the problem of trying to mix unbiblical ideas into a biblical worldview. I mean, can you imagine a gospel message that begins with: “Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” No, that would obviously trivialize the gospel!

And speaking of the gospel, I should also quickly mention that it’s unbiblical to believe Jesus somehow visited multiple alien worlds, lived there, died for them, rose again . . . and repeated this process on each world. In other words, Jesus dying multiple times is NOT biblical! The Bible makes it very clear that Jesus died once (e.g., Romans 6:10; Hebrews 9:28; 1 Peter 3:18).

There’s an awful lot of bullshit excused as “biblical”, so “unbiblical” is not the condemnation they think it is.

They then leap to rebut an argument no one has made. What about unintelligent life? The argument from sin and salvation wouldn’t apply, so maybe tauntauns could exist? Nope. Any planets orbiting those 10²³ stars in the universe must be completely sterile.

…recall from Genesis 1 that God created everything for man’s benefit and enjoyment. In other words, we have dominion over God’s creation (Genesis 1:28), which is also stated in Psalm 8. So the question would be: do we have dominion over those plants and animals on alien worlds? What purpose would they serve for us? So, for this reason alone, I believe it’s unlikely that there’s any non-intelligent life out in the cosmos.

So trillions of dead planets many light years away must have been put there for “man’s benefit and enjoyment.” How does that work, anyway? What benefit do I get from an unreachably distant scorched cinder orbiting Betelgeuse, pray tell? Doesn’t the fact that I don’t, and that I don’t have dominion over distant planets, show that their interpretation of the Bible is already wrong?

Brian Cox (not the astronomer) is an actor who often plays brusque, rude, loud characters, and he’s usually, at least superficially, a bad guy. So of course he turns out to be an atheist in real life.

Now, he’s got some spicy words for the Bible and religion, which he ultimately calls “stupid”—mostly because of the “patriarchal” lens it puts on the world.

“We created that idea of God and we created it as a control issue,” he continued on the podcast. “It’s also a patriarchal issue. That’s how it started and it’s essentially patriarchal. We haven’t given enough scope to the matriarchy and I think we need to move matriarchically.”

“We have to go more towards a matriarchy because the mothering thing is the thing which is the real conditioning of our lives,” he explained. “Our fathers don’t condition us ‘cause they’re too bloody selfish, but our mothers have to because they have an umbilical [cord],” he said, adding that women’s “umbilical relationship” to the their children contrasts a father’s: “Men do not have that, they’re just sperm banks—moveable sperm banks that walk around and come and go.”

A “matriarchal” society makes a lot more sense, Cox said, but the “propaganda” in the Bible gets in society’s way of this world view. “It’s Adam and Eve,” he continued, “The propaganda goes right the way back—The Bible is one of the worst books ever, for me, from my point of view because it starts with the idea that Adam’s rib—that out of Adam’s rib, this woman was created. I don’t believe it… ‘cause they’re stupid.”

Instead of this patriarchal worldview taken from the bible, Cox said, society should “honor” women and “give them their place.”

He ultimately concludes that people “need” religion because “they need some kind of truth,” but “they don’t need to be told lies.” And The Bible is “not the truth,” he stressed.

That’s all a bit overly simplistic, but he was on a roll.

Maybe the other one, Professor Brian Cox, will get crankier as he gets older and less pretty and grows into his name?

Villains love dichotomies.

I am reminded of the way Answers in Genesis builds up this phony definition of Real Science™ so they can declare that conclusions they don’t like are Fake Science🤡.

I knew my recent criticisms or Richard Dawkins would enrage the usual crowd. I’m used to it and I knew it was coming. Also unsurprisingly, the noise is coming from Jerry Coyne, who is always willing to praise the hierarchy of atheism.

But the main error of both her [Rachel Johnson, Dawkins’ interviewer] queries as well as Myers’s article is to claim that because there are bad behaviors inspired by both Christianity and Islam, they must be equally bad. And if you say that, you’re a bigot. The error, of course, is the neglect of the real issue: how often do bad behavior promoted by the two faiths occur? Further, says Myers, both the Bible and Qur’an promote some bad behaviors, so the two faiths again must be pretty much equally bad. Here I’d disagree, maintaining that the Qu’ran is full of more hatred, animus, and oppressive dictates than is the Bible. (Yes, I’ve read both.) But that’s really irrelevant to the question at hand, as most modern Christians don’t follow the bad parts of the Bible, while the Qur’an hasn’t been equally defanged.

The problem with that complaint is that I haven’t claimed that Christianity and Islam are equally bad. To the contrary, I think that Christianity and Islam are equally complicated; there are people in each faith who use their beliefs to motivate good social behavior, and others who use it to justify horrors, and that the bigotry lies in treating all members of a religion as the same. Here, Coyne is giving Xians the benefit of the doubt, and claiming that most have denied the “bad parts of the Bible,” while implying that most Muslims are accepting every jot and tittle of the Qur’an. Christianity has been defanged! Except, presumably, the ones in the Republican party that want to institute an American theocracy. We’ll just close our eyes and pretend they don’t exist.

Is he even aware that the US is on the edge of a precipice? That our next election could be our last, if a certain madman and his delusional, evangelical followers get their way? I’m not claiming that they are worse than Jihadi terrorists, but that they’re pretty awful, and that the majority of Muslims have no desire to perpetrate the terrors that bigots like to smear all followers of Allah with.

He also conveniently forgets that Dawkins said this:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

I haven’t. I agree with that, actually. I’m not the ones making excuses for Christianity: the god of the Bible has not been re-written, but suddenly some former New Atheists would have us think Jehovah has reformed, and now Christianity is just pretty Christmas bells and cathedrals and lovely parish churches, and they’re making that argument entirely because they want to make sure we don’t compromise in our hatred of those evil Muslim terrorists, who know nothing of beauty and peace and art and science. The bigotry lies in the insane polarization that is being promoted. If only Islam could be defanged, so they could have beautiful cathedrals, too!

Here Myers makes the two mistakes I mentioned above. First, he sees no difference between the proportion of bad stuff in the Bible and the bad stuff in the Qur’an. I do see a difference (I presume Myers has read both, as I have), but, as I said this is really irrelevant.

Except, of course, that I don’t make that claim (which is irrelevant anyway, he says, despite making that the bulk of his argument.) Both religions contain archaic horrors and bad ideas. The reason he and Coyne are bigots are that they pretend that the cherished traditions of their familiar religions are better and more important than the comfortable happy traditions of Muslims, and that Christianity has been “defanged” while Islam is a nest of evil. Remember, Dawkins’ first complaint was that he didn’t want to hear that Ramadan was promoted instead of Easter. What’s wrong with Ramadan? I don’t care. I celebrate neither Easter nor Ramadan, and I don’t worry that Christianity or Islam are using their holidays to cloak heinous, barbaric practices.

He has one final gotcha for me.

The main question is where one wants to live: in a Christian or a Muslim country, and whether Islam has more pernicious effects on the modern world than does Christianity. Which religion promotes behaviors that lead to a better, more desirable society?

Oh, that is easy. I’d rather live in a secular country, but since he’s made it a binary choice, I’ll pick the country where my native language, English, is spoken, and where nobody is trying to bomb me into a bloody paste. That narrows my options down to primarily Western countries, which are mostly Christian. I think it would be wise to avoid living in countries that have been wrecked by colonialism, like, say, anything in the Middle East, or that have been crippled by sanctions or brutal, American-led wars.

If we want to identify religions that have had the most pernicious effects on the modern world, we really ought to focus on evangelical Christianity, which dominates in the most powerful nations, and which is now endorsing genocide of Palestinians, and which has dispatched missionaries to various countries in Africa to legislate for death penalties against gay people, or which is striving to demolish American democracy, or which is actively trying to inject anti-scientific nonsense into educational curricula. A Christian sneezing in America has a greater influence in the world than a Muslim preaching jihad in the ruins of Iraq.

Oh, but I forget — I’m supposed to reduce the history and culture and humanity of entire peoples to just their religion, where Christianity gets a pass on any flaws while Islam is a monolithic univocal monster. Sorry, only bigots do that. QED.