The Atheist Blogger

Earthman’s Notebook is hosting the 94th Carnival of the Godless and it is jam-packed full of interesting articles. It proves that the carnival is still popular for content, but not so much for hosts.

After a plea for more hosting blogs to come forward, a few emerged (including myself in two weeks time!), but yet again the Carnival is facing extinction. After this blog hosts the carnival it will be over at Letters from a broad, but unless anyone else steps up it will stop before it reaches issue 100.

The current Carnival of the Godless had 40 articles in it, and I suspect many more were sent and rejected for various reasons. It is sad to see such great enthusiasm to get your work seen and yet hardly any to help the work of others. The atheist blogging community stands at at least 708 by The Atheist Blogroll’s count, so I urge any new bloggers to accept the challenge and put your blog up as a host. Even if you have hosted the carnival once before, I’m sure nobody will mind!

The Carnival of the Godless is a great way to read new blogs, share opinions, and get your site noticed in the blogging community. There is literally no reason you shouldn’t do it.

If you are interested, contact Brent Rasmussen immediately!

According to a recent poll organised by a Jewish organisation, Christianity could die out within a century. Only a third of those asked thought that religions like Christianity and Judaism would be practiced in 100 years time, whilst over 50% of people think the religions would have died out in the UK.

4 in 10 people say they would choose to be Christian which is countered by roughly the same amount saying they would choose to practice no religion at all. Surprisingly, 9% of people preferred to be Buddhist over Islam and Judaism.

Although the poll doesn’t mention atheism directly, it is safe to assume that a fair proportion of those people who choose to practice no religion are atheist, as well as those who subscribe to Buddhism. Apparently the drop in church attendance in both Church of England and Catholic denominations means that soon both will become financially unviable.

Whilst this is good news for rationalism and freethinking in Britain, the fall of Christianity is having a completely opposite effect on Islam. It is expected that the active Muslim population will double within the next 27 years, proving that Islam really is the more controlling and persuasive religion in the world today.

The Jewish organisation behind this survey commented:

…we know that Judaism provides real meaning and enrichment to one’s life. Whilst we have attracted many disinterested Jews back to Jewish identity it is clear there is much work to be done.

Which begs the question, if Judaism provided such real meaning to someone’s life, why are there so may abandoning it?

Regular visitors will notice that the theme has changed quite a bit in the last few hours or so. I’ve been working on streamlining the website for a few weeks now, starting with reducing the number of articles on the homepage to 5 instead of the default 10. Today I firstly removed the second sidebar (on the left) and merged it with the original single sidebar, then noticed that the theme I was using (which admittedly I just saw on a whim) was very out of date. The current version is faster and in my opinion looks much better.

I’ve tried to cut down on as much content as possible, which included a load of JavaScript cuts. I’ve also changed the default font to Verdana (backup fonts: Arial, sans-serif) because Georgia was getting annoying. Hopefully the blog now looks better and loads faster.

The forums theme will remain the same until I upgrade the actual forum version to MyBB 1.4 which is on the verge of release. There are a load of style changes within the MyBB package so I don’t see any point in changing the theme twice in quick succession.

One final thing. If you notice anything I have missed or something that looks odd please contact me as I probably made a few errors when altering the upgraded theme myself. I’ve gone through the basic pages so everything *should* be ok, but as they say, pobody’s nerfect.

It seems that the Creationist organisation Discovery Institute is attacking Richard Dawkins over his involvement in the Louisiana “academic freedom bill” which allows teachers to discuss theories that oppose Evolution. Simply put, it is allowing Intelligent Design into the classrooms.

The Discovery Institute reported that Barbara Forrest, leader of LA Coalition for Science has written an article on the Richard Dawkins website, pleading people to contact the Louisiana Governor and stop this bill being passed. The Institute rather snobbishly remarked:

Newsflash for Richard, we’re not a British colony anymore.

Well pointed out, but of course they forget that Richard Dawkins runs The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, a charity registered in both the UK and the USA. They also seemed to overlook the fact that his website isn’t tied to any specific country and as such has a large majority of American visitors. Forgetting as well that the article in question wasn’t even written by Dawkins but by a citizen of the United States, and their accusation that Richard Dawkins is somehow trying to “dictate education policy” to the U.S falls completely apart.

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Just less than 3 months ago I reported on the arrest and presecution of the parents of Ava Worthington, a 15 month old girl who died because instead of taking their daughter to a doctor, they left her healing up to faith. Quite unsurprisingly, she died from a combination of bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection, which were both perfectly treatable by modern medicine.

The family were members of a large fundamentalist church know as “Followers of Christ”, and they have a dark history of child abuse, neglect, and manslaughter. Now Ava Worthington’s own cousin, 16 year old Neil Beagley has died from a heart failure caused by urinary tract blockage. Members of the same church, Beagley’s parents believed that the power of prayer would heal their son, and called on fellow churchgoers to a prayer session last Sunday when Neil’s condition worsened. He died two days later.

A 1999 Oregon state law prevented parents from using a religious based defense in court, and this law was first used to prosecute the parents of Ava Worthington. However, since by Oregon law people over 14 years old are allowed to choose the method of medication they receive, it is doubtful anything will happen to the parents.

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