Tag: atheism

Sam Harris and The Moral Landscape

I suspect that some of you will be interested to hear that I picked up a copy of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris today. I’m planning to finish reading Cicero’s letters before I dive into it, but you can anticipate a review in about two weeks or so. I’ve also sent an email to his publicist requesting an interview; while Sam and I have exchanged email in the past, that’s on a different computer that is presently stowed away. But note that any interview I do will be a non-critical one; it will not be a debate. The point of a literary interview is to help the author accurately get the views expressed in his book out to the public, not to criticize them, and I’m not interested in limiting myself to interviewing authors with whom I more or less agree.

As you know, I refuse to pronounce judgment on a book, any book, without reading it, although I certainly don’t mind expressing my uninformed doubts should I have them prior to doing so. In this case, I have to applaud Sam for having the intellectual courage to seize the bull by the horns; unlike his fellow New Atheists (except Daniel Dennett), he has recognized the weak point of the lack of universal warrant and is attempting to do something about it. As to whether he has the intellectual firepower to successfully make his case, well, that may be another matter entirely. We shall presently see.

I couldn’t quite resist reading the first page or three… and all I’m going to say at the moment is that it is clear that unlike his fellow atheist Michael Shermer, Sam is unfamiliar with the core concepts of the Austrian School of Economics. Those who are familiar with how I operate and can put two and two together should be able to figure out why this seemingly unrelated field is relevant as well as where I’m going with this, in fact, I have even mentioned this specific issue in the past. I also found two major – at this point, I shall merely describe them as points of interest – in the first three pages.

As for that sound you hear, it is merely the blades being sharpened. Just in case they should turn out to be necessary, you understand.

Mailvox: an atheist on the religion survey

S contemplates the Pew quiz:

I read with considerable interest your post earlier today about the Pew religious knowledge quiz. I took the test and was surprised to discover that even though I’m an atheist (and am apparently rather unusual in professing that I don’t really hate religion and have no particular desire to destroy the concept of God), I scored 73%. So, not great, but not bad either. By way of background, I’ve got an undergraduate degree in Maths and Economics, and a Master’s in financial Mathematics. I seemed to do pretty well compared to both believers and non-believers from all backgrounds.

The reason I write today about this is that I just finished watching Bill Maher “debating” Bill O’Reilly on the Factor tonight after taking that quiz and was appalled by the immaturity and folly of a supposedly “enlightened” atheist. Now I’m not a big fan of O’Reilly’s, but I was stunned to see just how utterly ignorant a militant atheist like Bill Maher is about Christianity, which he apparently hates with a vengeance. He seems to think that the Bible is the literal word of God, when even an atheist like me understands that this is not the way the Bible is written, nor is it the way the Bible is canonically interpreted. He thinks that Christian scripture and law is derived from the Old Testament- he quoted from Deuteronomy stating the Mosaic law that he who breaks the Sabbath shall be killed, even though the actual quote is from Exodus, and Maher quoted it out of context. He seems to believe that Christianity and science are incompatible, but I’ve accepted for a long time now that the Enlightenment simply could not have happened without Judeo-Christian tradition, law, and science.

Vox, I doubt you and I will ever agree about the existence or nature of God. However, I find myself strongly agreeing with you about these pinheads (to coin a phrase) who call themselves atheists but who are little more than “social autists” with little understanding of what they criticise. And even where we inevitably disagree, I suspect that our disagreements will generally be far more genial and fair-minded than anything that atheists like Bill Maher are capable of. Thanks for the great writing; I certainly look forward to reading a lot more of it to come.

S understands, in a way that many do not, that I have absolutely no problem with atheists qua atheists. I was, after all, agnostic for a long time and I still find myself generally more comfortable in secular intellectual culture than in American evangelical culture. For example, if you peruse my reading list for 2010, you will look in vain for the religious self-help books and rehashed theological fiction that make up the vast majority of CBA publishing today. I’d much rather kick back in the Comfy Chair and read Balzac or Procopius than anything that is likely to appear in a Northwestern Bookstore.

The fact is that I neither despise nor pity those who don’t believe in God. My opinion about them is similar to what it would be of those who don’t believe in gravity because they cannot see it. (See the actual force, not its effects.) Because the effects of rejecting God are both clearly delineated and observable, I simply find it a little strange that some people cannot see those effects and on that basis deny the existence of the causal factor. But that doesn’t bother or upset me, it merely causes me to mentally shrug my shoulders and think, “well, good luck with that”.

On the other hand, having a very small degree of orange-green color blindness, I can completely understand the bewildered feeling of an individual who simply does not see the big orange letter on the green background to which another individual is pointing, wondering what on Earth he could possibly be seeing.

The atheists with whom I do have a problem, and for whom I regularly demonstrate a great deal of contempt, are the liars, the cheats, the deceivers, and the malicious. If one genuinely believes that religion is a crutch for the weak and psychologically needed, what does it say about those who are so eager to kick that crutch out from under those who clearly need its support? And, as an armchair intellectual, I find their willful ignorance of history, religion, and philosophy to be as astonishing as it is irksome. Intelligent? I don’t even consider them to be educated. To claim that religion either causes war or is an important strategic element of war is to be every bit as ignorant as the apocryphal Flat Earth proponents so often cited; the significant difference being that the Religion Causes War Society not only exists but is even willing to expound their ludicrous and historically illiterate arguments in public.

Anyhow, I very much welcome atheists of S’s stripe here. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me all the time about anything; my best and oldest friend has made a habit of playing Devil’s Advocate in our conversations for more than three decades. The reason I value the questions and the doubts of intelligent atheists who are more interested in rational debate than in exhibiting their psychological issues is because they help keep the Christians and other theists from lapsing into intellectual sloth and thereby prevent this blog from devolving into the sort of circle jerk that has rendered the New Atheism so toothless.

But speaking of the quiz, it is worth pointing out, as Bethyada noted yesterday, that the Pew Forum ignored its own definitions of “atheist” and “agnostic” in reporting the results. Whereas self-identified atheists and agnostics scored 20.9, the Pew Forum defined an atheist as “someone who does not believe in God” and an agnostic as “someone who is unsure that God exists”. Therefore, the “nothing in particular” crowd should have been included in the “atheists and agnostics” group – supporting the case made in TIA, these Low Church Atheists outnumber the self-identified High Church ones by a factor of 4.5 – which reduces the atheist and agnostic score to 17.4, below that of white evangelicals at 17.6.

The amoral essence of atheism

You can lead an atheist to logic, but on the evidence of this professor of philosophy, it’s going to take him at least a decade to follow it:

In a word, this philosopher has long been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t.

How I arrived at this conclusion is the subject of a book I have written during this recent period (tentatively titled Bad Faith: A Personal Memoir on Atheism, Amorality, and Animals). The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument ‘hard atheism’ because it is analogous to a thesis in philosophy known as ‘hard determinism.’ The latter holds that if metaphysical determinism is true, then there is no such thing as free will. Thus, a ‘soft determinist’ believes that, even if your reading of this column right now has followed by causal necessity from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, you can still meaningfully be said to have freely chosen to read it. Analogously, a ‘soft atheist’ would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ (see Issue 78) are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Why do I now accept hard atheism? I was struck by salient parallels between religion and morality, especially that both avail themselves of imperatives or commands, which are intended to apply universally. In the case of religion, and most obviously theism, these commands emanate from a Commander; “and this all people call God,” as Aquinas might have put it. The problem with theism is of course the shaky grounds for believing in God. But the problem with morality, I now maintain, is that it is in even worse shape than religion in this regard; for if there were a God, His issuing commands would make some kind of sense. But if there is no God, as of course atheists assert, then what sense could be made of there being commands of this sort? In sum, while theists take the obvious existence of moral commands to be a kind of proof of the existence of a Commander, i.e., God, I now take the non-existence of a Commander as a kind of proof that there are no Commands, i.e., morality.

Now that Marc “Moral Minds” Hauser has been exposed as a scientific fraud and Sam Harris has spiraled off into weird neuro-Buddhist utilitarian psychophilosophy, it is well past time for atheists to stop avoiding the rational consequences of their godless belief systems and admit what was always obvious to everyone from the start. As I have repeatedly explained to the sort of maleducated overestimator of his own intelligence that actually believes that there is a genuine dilemma to be found in Euthyphro, the essence of morality is, and has always been, God’s Game, God’s Rules. Therefore, no God = no Rules. It takes some serious education to sufficiently confuse an otherwise intelligent individual to the point that it takes him more than a decade to recognize this basic and patently obvious logic.

Hard Atheism isn’t a bad name for the concept, but there is already a more accurate one. It’s called Rational Atheism.

RAW on the New Atheists

This excerpt from Prometheus Rising is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of the Dawkinsian rational materialist, in light of how it was written by a non-theistic scientific mystic 27 years ago:

Rationalist robots, like the other robots, may be totally mechanized or may have some slight flexibility, or “freedom” built into their circuitry. The totally robotized make up the vast horde of the Fundamentalist wing of the Materialist church and the other True Believers in the scientific paradigm of 1968, 1958, 1948 or whenever their nervous systems stopped taking new imprints.

These are the people who are perpetually frightened and dismayed by the large portion of human behavior mediated through Circuit II mammalian politics. They think that because this territorial-emotional (“patriotic”) behavior is not Rational, it should not exist. They accept Darwin as dogma, but are nervous about “Darwinism” (because it accepts mammalian politics as an Evolutionary Strategy that has worked thus far) and are repulsed by the data of ethology, genetics, and sociobiology. They don’t like the rest of the human race much, because it is not guided by their favorite circuit, and they are uneasily aware that the rest of the human race does not like them much….

The totally robotized Rationalist, the one whose nervous system has stopped growing entirely, can be recognized by two signs: He or she is constantly trying to prove that much of the daily experience of the rest of humanity is “delusion”, “hallucination”, “group hallucination”, “mass hallucination”, “mere coincidence”, or “sloppy research”. And he or she never thinks that any of his or her own experience would fit into any of those categories.

Substitute “religious” for “patriotic” and “religions” for “politics” and he could have written that today.

Scientific hypocrisy

I always enjoy the way atheist science fetishists who believe firmly in the scientific method as the sole arbiter of Truth simultaneously insist that they don’t have to read a book in order to reach conclusions about it. So much for their supposed preference of observation to logic. Catkiller challenged an atheist named Maxpower to read The Irrational Atheist and this was the unsurprising ad hominem response:

I have not read the book (I prefer books like “The Science of Good and Evil” by Michael Shermer), but I did peruse the blog of the man who wrote The Irrational Atheist and read through some arguments he’s put forth. Since you’ve previously referred me to such nonsense as Jonah Goldberg, I should have expected some pretty poor arguments and old, tired fallacies that often turn up in theism-vs-atheism discussions, but I was particularly disappointed by the nutcase you’ve held up as your trump card this time. Here is what I have learned based on what I have read about and by Vox Day:

– He is a writer for World Net Daily, a fringe extremist website one step above Prison Planet or StormFront
– He appears to be a birther, an anti-feminist, and even opposes womens’ suffrage
– Oh, he also seems to be a white supremacist
– He has argued that Sam Harris is more immoral than Jeffrey Dahmer, which is a mind-boggling statement
– He appears to dispute the theory of evolution and the age of the earth
– He has stated that maybe “some” people don’t need God or the threat of punishment to be good, but he “certainly” does
– He has stated that, if commanded to do so by God, he would kill every 2-year-old on earth.

This last part makes Vox Day a particularly dangerous brand of psychopath, since people often commit horrific acts when they mistakenly believe to have been ordered to do so by God. Parents who withhold medicine from dying children or who violently kill “possessed” children are prime examples. No atheist would have a reason for doing such a breathtakingly cruel thing.

Well, this atheist certainly would have if given the opportunity. Consider his manifesto: “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human
infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed…. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!! The humans? The planet does not need humans. You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world, and YET you encourage the exact opposite instead of discouraging human growth and procreation.”

Atheists usually claim religion is behind all the problems in the world, but since they also believe religion is human-created, they are eventually forced to end up advocating mass murder of one form or another. It would appear that Maxpower has forgotten the extraordinarily lethal behavior of a number of powerful, well-known atheists in dozens of countries during the 20th century. The late James Lee may be unusual, but he is unfortunately no unique aberration. The seed for mass slaughter is sown when atheists who share Lee’s faith in Malthus rather than the Apostle Paul and Darwin rather than the Gospels take positions of power.

By the way, the correct response to Maxpower’s question is that he hasn’t sufficiently understood what morality is to formulate a coherent question about it. The threat of punishment from a supernatural deity is not a source of morality, let alone “the only ultimate” one. Maxpower has done the metaphorical equivalent of confusing the possibility of a penalty flag for the NFL Competition Committee and the 32 NFL owners. The ultimate source of morality is God, whose authority over Creation rests upon the fact of His being its Creator. His game, His rules. The threat of punishment is merely an incentive to abide by those rules and should never be confused with either the rules or the Rulegiver.

Atheism does kill

So much for the No True Atheist arguments blaming all that 20th century atheist slaughter on communism. It is even peer-reviewed science:

Atheist doctors are almost twice as likely to take decisions that speed up death for very ill patients as those who are deeply religious, research has found…. The findings, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, showed that doctors who described themselves as non-religious were more likely than any other group to have given continuous deep sedation until death, having made a decision that they knew could or would end life.

The more important question, of course, is how much more likely atheist doctors were to strangle their patients with their bare hands or to perform horrific scientific experiments upon them. I expect that percentage would be rather more than double. Unfortunately, it would appear the study didn’t cover that one.

What I find amusing is that the same atheists who deny there is any historically demonstrated atheist predilection for killing will read that piece and find themselves thinking “yeah, what’s wrong with that?” Although considering the bureaucratic nationalized morass that is the NHS, I suppose it’s possible that most of the doctors in Britain are communists these days.

Demonstrating ignorance

Gary Gutting of Notre Dame upsets the league of the ignorant godless:

In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion. This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments.

A professional academic’s dismissal of Richard Dawkins hapless arguments? Make that the league of the indignant and ignorant godless. The comments are hilarious, as the immediate reaction from the usual sort of moderate-IQ atheist is demands for Gutting to “support” or “prove” his factual statement that Dawkins’s position is “entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments”. Of course, whenever someone does bother to demonstrate precisely how Dawkins’s arguments are factually and logically flawed, the reaction of most such atheists is to a) refuse to read it, b) lie about the substance and attack strawman substitutes, and c) fall into an abrupt silence and hope the criticism goes away on its own.

On a tangential note, Half-Sigma’s argument for superior atheist intelligence is almost Hitchensian in its self-refuting quality.

I want to address the controversy of “atheism” vs. “agnosticism.” In the comment section, some people said that agnostics are smarter than atheists. I find this unlikely. Rather, smarter people are more adept at fitting in and avoiding controversy.

That’s what passes for his argument. Note how this fits the classic pattern of atheist illogic, to say nothing of the bait-and-switch of turning to fundamentally philosophical arguments instead of making any use of the science upon which they claim to rely. Half-Sigma happens to personally “find” it unlikely, (as opposed to “believing” it), ergo it must not be. But who fits in better and avoids more controversy, agnostics or atheists? Agnostics, quite clearly. So, agnostics are smarter than atheists by Half-Sigma’s own metric, his real argument is that he doesn’t believe (find?) that they are truly agnostic, the Archbishop of Oxford’s statement that he himself is actually an agnostic who leans atheist, not a genuine strong atheist notwithstanding.

If I did not believe in the existence of God, I would be downright embarrassed to call myself an atheist these days. I don’t know if it is because they are all studying butterfly collecting and evolution by something that is vaguely related to natural selection rather than history, philosophy, and literature, but they are simply incapable of presenting coherent arguments, let alone valid ones.

As for the myth of high atheist intelligence, that is one of several myths that are addressed in the Against the New Atheism slide show. You don’t have to be of limited intelligence to be a militant atheist, but it most certainly helps. The ironic thing is that like Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy, Half-Sigma is neither as stupid nor as ignorant as his reflexive atheism makes him sound. Consider, for example, Steve Sailer’s citation of his correct take on the results of meritocratic testing: “For example, a few years, Mayor Bloomberg and NYC schools supremo Joel Klein decided to fix the ramshackle admissions process to the gifted schools by imposing a standardized test on all applicants. Blogger Half Sigma immediately predicted that the percentage of Asians and whites admitted would rise at the expense of blacks and Hispanics, which would cause a sizable unexpected political problem for Bloomberg and Klein. All that has come to pass.”

It was obvious, perhaps, but sound reasoning even so. The problem is that due to a combination of factors that tend to include familial relationships, social inadequacies, sexual obsessions, group dynamics, and intellectual pride, otherwise intelligent atheists insist on continuing to dumb themselves down by repeatedly staking out completely indefensible positions contra religion, especially Christianity. I don’t mind that they do so, since it only makes it that much easier to shoot them down, but for the sake of intellectual exercise if nothing else we theists would be better served by a higher class of atheist apologists.

More atheist ignorance

Ilya Somin demonstrates that ignorance of theology is no basis from which to pontificate about the nonexistence of God:

Atheism is not a complete theory of the nature of the universe. Rather, as I discussed here, atheism is simply a rejection of the existence of God, by which I mean a being that is omnipotent, omniscient and completely benevolent (the definition [traditionally] accepted by [the vast majority of adherents] of the major monotheistic religions). One can reject the existence of God without believing that we “can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence.”

There are numerous arguments against God’s existence that don’t depend on any particular theory of the origins of the universe. In my view, the “problem of evil” is one of the strongest. For a good and accessible summary of the major arguments for atheism that don’t require explanations for the nature of the universe, see David Ramsay Steele’s recent book Atheism Explained. The “new atheists” whom Rosenbaum attacks also don’t rely on any comprehensive theory of the universe in making their case against the existence of God. Writers like Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins have their flaws; but believing that they can explain the origins of the universe isn’t one of them.

If that’s your strongest argument, you had better give up on atheism now. The so-called problem of evil is one of the most ignorant arguments that can possibly be made against the Christian God’s existence, let alone various other conceptions of the Divine. The existence of evil is absolutely central to the Christian faith, so it requires a remarkable amount of theological cluelessness to claim that the existence of observable evil can possibly serve as any sort of evidence against the Christian God. Moreover, anyone with an even cursory familiarity with the Bible, or for that matter, CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy, knows that “the god of this world” is not the Creator God. And finally, Sunday School theology notwithstanding, there is no serious Biblical claim for Divine omniscience; the various claims to God’s knowledge tend to involve a complete knowledge of human nature.

But no doubt “the problem of evil” is a serious objection to a God in whom no one of any religion actually believes, let alone worships.

Mailvox: Uber Dawks strikes three

You can’t stop him, you can only hope to contain him!

I did not mean “objective scientific evidence”, I mean any objective evidence at all. The Bible is not an objective piece of evidence, scientific or otherwise. Wrong. Try again in our bonus round. Reading the comments on your blog this morning, it seems that none of your ilk can come up with anything either. The Courtier’s Reply is still looking mighty valid.

Finally, not that I need to justify any credentials, but since your ilk has been speculating, I am a Ph.D. candidate in Evolutionary Psychology at a prestigious major university. My views are not the minority among atheists, but the majority. Go to Pharyngula and you’ll see that I’m not alone. Read Dawkins more polemical work, read Sam Harris or Chris Hitchens, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t already been tackled at length by these great thinkers.

Also, for all the mocking of my celebrity atheist paragraph, I was not appealing to these men to validate atheism, but rather to show that the atheist in that comic is a grand caricature, representative of the kind of narrow thinking that you Christian fundies are known for.

evidence
–noun
1. that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.
2. something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign.
3. Data presented to a court or jury in proof of the facts in issue and which may include the testimony of witnesses, records, documents, or objects.

Evidence is any information so given, whether furnished by witnesses or derived from documents or from any other source.

I have to admit, I’m not exactly what one would call concerned about the opinion of anyone who believes that there is no evidence for the existence when God even after the difference between “evidence” and “scientific evidence” has been pointed out to him. I am probably the least likely man on the planet to be moved by the arguments of anyone who genuinely believes Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are, and I quote, “great thinkers”. This is surely the very worst site on the Internet to make an appeal to Pharyngula and as for The Courtier’s Reply, it requires the sort of innumeracy and complete philosophical ignorance we have come to expect of butterfly collectorsbiologists to take it seriously. But I have absolutely no doubt that his maleducated and irrational views are the majority among atheists; that is precisely why I titled my book on the subject “The Irrational Atheist”.

The thing that is so ridiculous about the definitionally challenged “no evidence” argument is that even third-rate minds like Dawkins know that it is hopelessly incorrect. The existence of testimonial and documentary evidence for God is the very reason Richard Dawkins wrote an essay arguing for the superiority of scientific evidence over eyewitness evidence in The Devil’s Chaplain, although scientific evidence is less valid in a court of law than eyewitness evidence and is rightly considered much less reliable than documentary evidence of the sort that the Bible represents.

Anyhow, I’m sure we all wish the PhD-to-be great success in his future career in the gastronomical service industry.

Mailvox: the return of Uber Dawks

Apparently not content with demonstrating his complete ignorance of American history and PZ Myers’s confirmed cowardice, Uber Dawks has returned as part of his quixotic crusade to demonstrate that militant atheists are every bit as smart and educated as they are socially adept and sane.

After mockingly laughing my way through the two days worth of posts to your site that were inspired by my email, I’ve come to the conclusion that you and your “ilk” may be even more delusional than I could have ever imagined. When they discuss you at Pharyngula, I would think to myself that no one could be that obtuse, delusional and falsely magnanimous. Turns out that you are all that and more.

PZ afraid to debate you? Why should he debate delusional fundies like you? You wanna know why he doesn’t have to? Courtier’s reply. All you Christards have to contribute is philosophical flatulation about your phony baloney sky daddy. You have no objective proof of god’s existence at all. I challenge anyone on your site to give me one thing — one tiny piece of objective evidence for god that cannot be better and more fully explained by natural science.

Oh, and all your posters whining about the Christards label…sorry for being honest with you, but you are mentally handicapped if you actually believe that some bearded Jew (who probably didn’t even actually exist) came back from the dead 2000 years ago. So I called you a bad name, boo-hoo. You use negative labels for atheists all the time on your site.

Are you just not smart enough to see your hypocrisy? For all the self-promoting about your IQ, you could not on your best day come up with a universal neutralizer and falsifier for atheism the way Myers has done for theism with his Courtier’s Reply. That’s why conservative sky bully worshippers like you and philosophical liars like William Layne Craig aren’t fit to be in the same conversation with PZ Myers or Richard Dawkins.

In reading the responses from those two other atheists (assuming those emails were real, which I doubt) I have only one thing to say to them. Grow some balls. Stop bowing to the tyranny of the religious majority. You Christians and Muslims are destroying this world with your religious nonsense and killing everyone else in the process. Sam Harris wrote about conversational intolerance and possible retributive violence against dangerous religious groups, and what he says is true. Atheists need to speak out and show that we will no longer tolerate your fairy tales and your killing in the name of them. All atheists need to join together and drag all of you kicking and screaming from the Dark Ages into the modern secular age, whether you like it or not.

Fact is this: Atheists are winning. Look at Denmark or France or the UK. Your sky fairy is about to go bye-bye.

That idiotic cartoon you posted shows that you are as clueless about atheists as you are science. Atheists do not look like that at all. George Clooney, Bill Maher, Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters are all atheists. Brad Pitt is functionally atheist. Joss Whedon is a feminist and an atheist and has stated that knowing there is no god is “a very important thing for you to learn.”

These guys are famous, they get women and are nothing like that idiotic cartoon. What should I expect though, Mariano from TrueFreeThinker is nearly as bad as you are. He spends his time tossing philosophical chum into the water to be decimated by atheist piranha.

The problem is that you people with your god-goggles on can’t see reality. This is why Darwinian Evolution deniers, Global Warming deniers and Christian fundies go hand in hand. All of you are in the same boat and most of you are the same guy.

Best of luck. When you die, you pass into nonexistence. That’s it. Get over your fairy tales now and do something worthwhile like help save the environment.

Let’s count the most conventional signs of atheist cluelessness:

1. Thinks The Courtier’s Reply is meaningful – check!
2. Thinks the Dark Ages existed – check!
3. Doesn’t know what “evidence” is – check!
4. Science fetish – check!
5. Thinks religion is a serious global threat – check!
6. Thinks atheists are winning in Europe – check!

I have to say that the appeal to Brad Pitt and Joss Whedon is a new one on me. Wow! I will really have to rethink all of my most fundamental conclusions about life, the universe and everything. What use is Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas when you’ve got Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters!

And since he brought it up….