The Atheist Blogger

The Interfaith Alliance has released a video on the top 10 faith-based moments in the race for President of the United States. The video shows the “top ten” worst uses of religion in the primaries, and just goes to prove that America is not going to vote in a non-Christian any time soon…

Hopefully with the growing number of “out of the closet” atheists in America, there will be a change, but I doubt it will happen within the next 20 years. We’ll just have to see how things go.

The new leader of the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg, is an open atheist and nobody even batted an eyelid. I think many countries could learn a lot from the increasing secularism in the UK.

Thanks to Friendly Atheist for the link.

Back in 2005, a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad in some controversial poses, including the most famous image of him wearing a bomb as a turban. This led to a load of riots and protests in the Muslim world, and more than 100 people died as a result.

Of course, the images were on the internet within hours, and so they were never going to disappear completely. The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia was unsure whether to allow them on their article covering the controversy. The subsequent debate went on for almost two years (officially starting on 11th April after Wikipedia removed the images).

However, two days ago the debate ended and the decision was made to reinstate the images in the article, but to tag them with an id so people can remove the images from their view of the page.

Important notice: Prior discussion has determined that pictures of Muhammad will not be removed from this article

It’s a long deserved victory for those who support freedom of speech and expression, and another blow for people who think that religious rules should be followed by everyone. We live in a secular society, and freedom of speech should be respected, especially on the World Wide Web.

Thanks to Spread Rationality for the link!

A friend of mine showed me this video of a George Carlin gig on YouTube. It was added back in March 2007, so apologies if you’ve seen it before, however I do think he raises some interesting (and comical) points about the absurdity of religion.

I have to admit, as an Englishman I have never watched George Carlin as a stand-up comedian, nor did I know that he was an atheist. I do like his approach to religion as a comedic device though, as he isn’t overly offensive, yet he manages to make a great mockery of Christian beliefs. It’s also nice to see an open-minded audience for once, who aren’t afraid to take it all as humour and not get offended (although there were probably people who were).

An article written by The Atheist Jew (sourced from a Reuters article) reveals that 44% of American adults have changed their religion from the one they were raised up with.

The majority of those people converted from a religion to some form of non-religion (whether it be atheism or a form of theism), and the Jehovah’s Witnesses saw the lowest retention rate, with only 37% of followers staying with the religion in adulthood.

Not surprisingly, the Protestant churches are gaining in numbers due to the relaxed approach, and the Hindu religion (which is also pretty relaxed) is retaining 84% of it’s members.

Some pretty interesting facts and figures.

This week at my university, the Christian Union are holding a “Jesus Awareness Week” (J.A.W) and although I am only involved in one of the events (a debate on Thursday), I am trying to attend as many as I can. Last night’s talk was on the Bible (as the title of this article suggests), and the speaker was the son of Michael Howard. He came up with a list of reasons why people should trust the Bible:

The Bible proves itself to be trustworthy. It’s so obviously true that we don’t need to question it’s trustworthiness.

Yes, he actually opened his argument with that one. The standard circular argument that goes against all common sense and justification. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if he hadn’t stated that that reason alone should convert you to Christianity. If it were so “obviously” true then rational people wouldn’t reject it, or go and worship other Gods.

The Gospels are based off eyewitness accounts from people who were alive at the time of Christ.

John was written around 90A.D, and he used this as an example. Given that the average life expectancy of people back then was much lower than it is today, the chances of someone actually seeing Jesus perform a miracle, and then living to be over 70 (if we take it as read that they would have to have been around 10 years old at the time of Jesus’ death) are remote at best. Even if this did happen, the eyewitness accounts of a child are rarely 100% accurate, and so we would have to find an eyewitness who lived to be around 76 at least, which 2000 years ago would have been even more miraculous than walking on water.

Not one of the gospels mentions the destruction of Jerusalem in 70A.D, so they must have been written before 70A.D.

This point was filled with pure inaccuracies, as I have already mentioned that the Gospel of John was written around 90A.D, and the Gospel of Mark was written after 70A.D since it does contain references to the fall of Jerusalem.
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