Why I am an atheist – Matthew Pocock

It is difficult to explain why I am an atheist without starting at the beginning. I was born in the mid-70s in rural Oxfordshire, England. My parents where Born Again Christians of the ‘burn your Beetles records’ variety, and believed with all the passion and transparency of youth that they where blessed and anointed to do the Lord’s work. They met at a Christian youth event and that has set the tenner for the rest of their lives together. Needless to say, my siblings and I where raised to treat Jesus as the other member of our family, albeit an invisible and all-powerful one. Jesus was firstly the saviour of our family, and only then the saviour of our church, country and the world. It was an intensely personal faith. Our parents believed in strict parenting. Child-rearing and the training of working dogs could be accomplished using essentially the same approach, although children seemed to have longer memories and where better at dissembling than hounds, and while the dog got a newspaper on the nose, we got the cane. It was enough to know that we had done wrong; there was little need to explain why. They loved us dearly (and still do), but I felt we always came a distant third behind Jesus and my parents to each other, in that order.

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Another level of Catholic corruption

Hypocrisy is apparently a sacrament in the Catholic church. A German bishop has been living an extravagant lifestyle — flying first class (at a cost of €7000) to tour Indian slums where poor children eke out a living breaking stones. He’s also been constructing a multi-million euro mansion while the churches in his diocese crumble.

Bishop Tebartz-van Elst, 52, doesn’t only embrace luxury when he travels to India to visit poor children and nuns. He also puts a premium on a pleasant standard of living back home in Limburg, one that befits his status. His new, multi-million-euro bishop’s residence right next to the city’s cathedral is about to be finished. But the complex has sparked a mix of amazement, rage and resignation among the 600,000 Catholics in the diocese. Many cannot comprehend how they are supposed to live in want while their bishop splurges.

Tebartz-van Elst preaches to his flock to sate their thirst with water not wine. "Renewal begins where the efforts toward making due with less are made," he has instructed them. "The person of faith is dirt poor and rich in mercy," he once said in a Christmas sermon. And on the Assumption, he declared: "Whoever experiences poverty in person will discover the true greatness of God."

Meanwhile, funds are tight or insufficient across the diocese. There isn’t enough money for the upkeep of churches, parishes are being consolidated and funding for Catholic day care centers is being slashed. All of this is part of the bishop’s tough cost-cutting measures.

I don’t get it. Do Catholic bishops have no accountability to anyone?

At least there are no stories about this guy raping children.

Nice article on Atheism+ in the New Statesman

Most of it’s really good and gets it right.

On one level, this is just the logical culmination of the huge upsurge in interest prompted by the so-called "New Atheists" and the growth over the last few years of a recognisable community or movement based around ideas of atheism, scientific scepticism and a progressive political agenda. While atheism is, by definition, no more or less than a non-belief in God, in practice it clusters with a variety of other positions, from pro-choice to campaigns against homeopathy. People who espouse "liberal atheism" as it might be called, oppose religion for political as well as philosophical reasons, just as the forces of religion seem to line up – though of course not exclusively – behind seemingly unconnected issues such as opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage and, in the US, gun-control.

Atheism+ is, at its most basic, an attempt wrap things together more formally, to create a movement that prioritises issues of equality and does so from an explicitly non-religious perspective. Some would say that such a philosophy already exists in the form of humanism. Others prefer the label Skeptic. Atheism+, however, seeks to capitalise on the sense of identity that has grown up around the word "atheism" during the past few years. One supporter of the idea, Greta Christina, celebrates the term as "a slap in the face that wakes people up."

The only problem? The figure caption.

Atheism+ is a reaction against the “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins.

Nope. The body text had it right: it’s “the logical culmination”, not an opposition to the New Atheism. I’m actually doing a talk on just that next week in Denver — as the New Atheism was the incorporation of science into atheism, Atheism+ is a synthesis of social justice into the New Atheism.

Playing with the Drake Equation

The BBC has put up an interactive web page with the parameters of the Drake equation that lets you tweak numbers and estimate how many alien civilizations might exist. It’s informative because you should quickly realize you can make up any old numbers you want for most of them — we simply don’t have data for most of them, so you have to reach up into your colon to pluck something random out.

They have various presets, including a modern “skeptical estimate”. I just looked at the section on life, and found it weirdly inconsistent. Apparently, the % chance a habitable planet develops life is guessed at 13% (I don’t buy it; that life arose so quickly on Earth after its formation suggests that it may be relatively easy — I’d jack that up to something high), while the % chance that life develops intelligence is pegged at an absurd 50%. We’ve got one planet with tens of millions of species for a data point, and our kind of intelligence popped up once in 4 billion years. It makes no sense to argue for that degree of inevitability for a weird and unlikely adaptation like intelligence…why didn’t it arise in the Mesozoic, then?

Their worst estimate (which looks ridiculously optimistic to me) ends up with only about one civilization per galaxy. That’s also with a conservative estimate that a civilization only spends about 400 years trying to send signals outwards…which would mean that a brief effort to talk to some other civilization within a disc 100,000 light years in diameter is almost certainly doomed to failure. Even in their most optimistic model, with tens of thousands of technological civilizations in a galaxy, stars populated by intelligent life are still about 600 light years apart.

At least the web page makes it obvious that the Drake Equation is like a Ouija board, with the tinkerers just pushing the numbers around until they get the answer they want.

I am not a presidential candidate, but…

Some rag called Cathedral Age interviewed Obama and Romney about faith. The two responded by ladling out dollops of pious porridge, all of which was nonsensical and fact-free, but did occasionally serve up scraps of information that were mainly horrifying (did you know Obama has a “faith advisor” who sends him bible quotes and CS Lewis quotes and that sort of thing? That’s not the daily briefing I imagined). Read it if you really want to be bored or aggravated.

It did make me wonder, though — if a bunch of Episcopalians can get the attention of the presidential candidates during the election season, could atheists do likewise? Get on it, Dave Silverman: send the two a set of questions that actually drill down to some secular substance. I suspect they’d both ignore them, unfortunately.

And then I thought, well, what if I were asked these same questions in an interview? How would an atheist answer them? Especially, an atheist who wasn’t trying to pander his way into political office? So I took a vicious, bloody-minded stab at it. These are the same questions Cathedral Age aimed at our two candidates, and I’ll just pretend I’m the nominee of the Atheist Party.

How does faith play a role in your life?

It doesn’t. Faith is a poison, a shortcut to answers that avoids reason and evidence and cultivates an undisciplined and lazy mind. I abjure it and think all political candidates should do likewise.

Do you have favorite scriptural passages, prayers, or other words of wisdom to which you often turn?

No.

Scripture is a morass of inconsistency and lies. Even where it is gifted with poetry (which isn’t often), it is simply an accreted mass of dogma. I never consult the Bible, the Koran, or any other holy book for advice, since they are never applicable, and are usually informed by a barbaric morality.

I don’t do prayers. Entreaties to a nonexistent superman seem singularly pointless.

“Words of wisdom” is a stock phrase that usually means “reassuring cliches”. Nope, I avoid those as well.

How do you view the role of faith in public life?

Faith is the great leveler, the delusion that allows any ignorant asshole prancing in self-serving fantasies of being the center of the universe to claim divine, cosmic authority behind his words. It has corrupted American discourse, because it privileges medieval nonsense about how the world actually works and allows antique bigotry to persist, allows people to make claims without concern for evidence, and gives every idiot with a dog-collar a pedestal to stand on.

Faith ought to be mocked and derided. That we give it special authority in public discourse is a disaster.

As a country of great religious diversity and divisiveness, how can faith play a role in unifying america?

It can’t. Faith is unmoored from reality — it gives every blithering child of god a special place free of responsibility, where their beliefs are stamped with divine approval by the voices in their head. Every one of those religions touts itself as the one great truth about the universe, and they can’t all be right, and most likely none of them are right. We’re looking out on a circus arena populated with clowns, and you’re trying to ask me which one’s shoulders I should stand on to bring order out of chaos. And I say none of them.

Some people have questioned the sincerity of your faith and your christianity. how do you respond to those questions?

Well, that’s kind of inappropriate question for me, since I’m not pretending to be a Christian. I’m not and never will be.

What does a political leader’s faith tell you about him/her as a person?

Oh, it hints at many things.

They could be a gullible fool. It could tell me that they don’t think very deeply at all, and have never put much thought into these bizarre claims that they may say are important forces in their lives.

They could be a dishonest opportunist. The media is always touting faith as a marker for morality, despite the fact that it is actually a very cheap signal — anyone can mouth pieties, and even the most corrupt child-raping priest can say they believe in a god — and in the US, it’s virtually impossible to get elected as an atheist because of the raging bigotry against rational intellectuals.

They could be a brilliant rationalizer, who has built up an elaborate set of excuses for their ridiculous beliefs. I would worry that they’d do likewise for any conclusion they wanted to reach in office.

At the very best, they could be a person who’s never put much thought into their inherited religious tradition; maybe it’s because they’ve put more effort into studying economics or political science or sociology, I don’t know. In this case it would be a misleading indicator.

A leader’s faith basically tells me nothing good about them at all.

How can our government and faith communities work together as a positive force for the nation while also respecting the boundaries between the two?

They can’t. Read the Constitution. This country was founded partially on an understanding that bringing god and state together corrupts both. Some thought that because they wanted a secular government free of superstitious influence; others loved their peculiar religions and did not want the state to endorse some other faith. Either way, they were in agreement: government and faith should not work together. So why, Cathedral Age, are you trying to blur the boundaries? Do you think that having a big expensive elaborate building in Washington DC means that when the government decrees a state religion, it will be Christianity or Episcopalianism?

Washington National Cathedral is called to be the spiritual home for the nation. from your perspective, how can the cathedral live out that mission?

This is a secular nation, or it should be. We are not going to have a spiritual home, and we shouldn’t want one.

The best way that the National Cathedral can serve the country is by ending this pretext that it represents faith in America. Gut it completely of its superstitious trappings, fire the god-soaked leadership, and turn it into something secular and useful. Turning it into a bowling alley or a movie theater would be an improvement, but you could also aim higher and make it into a library or a secular meeting hall. Find something better to do with your time and money.

I think you should be embarrassed that you’re maintaining this expensive, opulent building to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year, all for the purpose of babbling at a nonexistent space ghost.

Well, what do you think? Would those answers help me get elected to high political office?

How do you greet the day?

How many fucks does America give? I don’t know, but a lot of them come out of LA and New York. This is a ‘heat map’ produced by an analysis of tweets for how often somebody says “fuck you” on twitter. In it’s current state, it’s not very useful — this is raw data, not per capita data, so all you’re really seeing is flares of general activity in the US and Canadian population centers.

If it helps, they’ve also done an analysis of how often people say “good morning”, and the distribution is different. There’s more activity in the Midwest. It still may not be meaningful, though, because here in the center of passive-aggressive niceness we say “good morning” when we mean “fuck you.”

I knew it!

You can’t have missed all the new Republican ‘science’ about secretions and juices and fluids that women produce when they are legitimately raped.

Unless you’ve been in a soundproof booth for the past three days (lucky you), you’ve probably heard a lot about this mysterious chemical that women can produce on demand to prevent them from becoming pregnant. For centuries, women have, according to anti-choicers, been able to ward off becoming impregnated by their rapists by emitting this substance during their rape. Despite being a miracle of science and biology, we’ve never known its name.

But now we do: it’s called magic vagina death venom, and you ladies can now buy a bottle to collect it.

I’ve long wondered why I often got dizzy and light-headed and confused around women, but now I understand — it’s because you’re all oozing poisons. I think it’s an excellent first step to be collecting these toxins from your bodies to minimize accidental exposure, but I’ve got to wonder…what are you all planning to do with those little bottles of concentrated vaginal evil?

Everyone should have a daily dose of angry Irishman

I put this clip of Michael D. Higgins, president of Ireland, on my speakers this morning to have it blaring out while I puttered about in the kitchen fixing a bit of tea and yogurt for breakfast. He’s chewing out some Tea Party sympathizer in that way only the Irish can, and I swear, it was better than a big cup of coffee for waking me up. He’s a little too generous to those salt-of-the-earth American midwesterners, who certainly will treat you with kindness and hospitality personally before going off to vote for torture, bombing, God, more tax cuts for the rich, and against gays, atheists, and non-white people, but otherwise…bracingly good.

Why I am an atheist – NigeltheBold

There are questions religion cannot answer.

When I was very young, I’d occasionally attend Sunday school. This is not a proper school at all, in spite of the devious label. Instead, it’s a place for inculcating vague doctrines and incoherent models of reality, faint echoes of the thunderous fears of ancient superstitions. The pastors and senior pastors and youth pastors practiced their miseducation through sermons and rituals and the threat of hell and the promise of heaven and the singing of songs, songs accompanied by an amateur organist and consisting of ridiculous lyrics like, “God’s love is like a circle.” Whatever that means.

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