The Atheist Blogger

Well known atheist author Christopher Hitchens agreed to be waterboarded by the U.S Military in an effort to see if it constituted as torture or not. Waterboarding is used in interrogation and is effective because it “simulates” drowning and forces a gag reflex on the victim. It involves having layers of towel placed over the head, and the entire body restrained. The towel is held down firmly and water poured over it, which seeps through and enters the nasal passages of the victim.

Christopher Hitchens described the entire experience in his article for Vanity Fair:

The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

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Many theists argue that atheism has caused only death and destruction, whilst their respective religions preach only peace and love. So what does the evidence look like? The Teapot Atheist did a load of research and counting and has reported his results.

His findings don’t bear well for theism, even with his extremely generous methodology in its favour:

Where deaths from theism are concerned, I have normally low-balled the estimates as a favor because the differential is so staggering and theism needs all the bones it can have tossed in its direction. For atheism, I go with the highest possible estimates.

To add insult to injury, The Teapot Atheist included in the atheism section, deaths caused by Pol Pots regime even though there is no evidence that he was an atheist (his regime was harshly anti-religious though), as well as Stalin, who has recently been considered a deist / closet-theist by historians.

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A the title suggests, I would like to know which state (or area) of the USA is considered the most secular / non-believing. Since I live in the UK I am putting this question out to all my American readers in hope that they can throw back some figures for me.

Why do I want to know? Well, I’m currently going into my second year of university studying Computer Science with Information Security (which is way more interesting to me that it sounds to you). It’s a three year course, and at the end I will weigh up my options before deciding whether to do a PhD in it. Whenever I actually leave university, I have always had plans to emigrate to America. Truth be told, there are far more jobs in the computer industry over there, especially in the areas I want to go into (Gaming and/or Web Technology).

I don’t want to end up in a Bible Belt area for obvious reasons, so I’d like a place where I could feel at ease with my beliefs, and find other secular people to hang out with. California’s “Silicon Valley” is a good place to start, since it has the technology and I know of at least one secular/atheist group for workers there. Amiable Atheist recently made me aware of Arizona which has an increasing number of non-believers.

So, which state do you consider the most secular / atheist? Do you have any figures to show this result? What other aspects of this area would make it desirable for a liberal atheist technology geek like myself?

I await your answers!

The Amiable Atheist commented on an article in the English newspaper The Sunday Times entitled “Alzheimer’s leads atheist Terry Pratchett to appreciate God” where the 60 year old author claims that he may have found god after years of atheism.

He is quoted as saying:

I’m certainly not a man of faith, but as I was rushing down the stairs one day . . . it was very strange. And I say this reluctantly, because I am trying to deal with this situation in as hardheaded a way as I can. I suddenly knew that everything was okay, that what I was doing was right, and I didn’t know why.

…

It was a thought that all the right things are happening in the circumstances; and I thought, ‘Well, that’s all right then.’

Brushing everything aside, what exactly is he saying? That one day he was doing a perfectly ordinary thing, and realised that everything was fine? Is that god? Really? If so, I’ve been a believer pretty much my entire life then. Not a day goes by where I don’t think “Is this really what I want to do with my life?”, and the answer I always come to is “yes”. Whether I am considering my career, education, social life, and even the “atheist community”, I work something out through rational thought.

I fail to see how a sudden feeling that everything was okay defines god? When I donate to charity, I get the feeling I am doing something right, not because I believe I am pleasing a god, but because I am helping my fellow man. It seems Mr. Pratchett has discovered the wonders of humanism, not any form of “god”.

As for the right things happening in the circumstances, is he talking on a personal level here, because I fail to see how this applies to the rest of the world, where decisions are currently electing an evil dictator in Zimbabwe, and many more people are killed on the streets of Iraq. Even if it is on a personal level, how can he reason that out? He is suffering from a mental illness that will slowly destroy his memory. Hardly the “right” thing to happen to an author of all people.

In a slightly more rational moment, Pratchett said:

It is just possible that once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and many human traits, just beyond all that, on the other side of physics, there just may be the ordered structure from which everything flows.

That is both a kind of philosophy and totally useless – it doesn’t take you anywhere. But it fills a hole.

So at least he is admitting that the “god” he might have found is completely ridiculous. It isn’t a theist god but a deist god, something completely outside our universe and undetectable. Yes it fills a hole, but that doesn’t make it any more truthful. For many years people believed the Sun orbits the Earth because that’s the logical explanation from basic observations and it fitted the hole, but it’s completely false.

I’m not saying Pratchett is wrong for thinking there might be a deist god out there, and if he likes the fact that it fills certain gaps in our knowledge then that’s fine as well. I just don’t think there is any reason to believe in something like that without evidence for it. If anything, he’s stuck halfway between atheism and deism, wanting to believe that there is something beyond our universe, but reasoning that such belief is borderline absurd given the circumstances.

It’s a tricky one to call in his situation, but at least he hasn’t started claiming he is the Messiah or anything like a few people would in his situation…

Update: It appears as though the media might be at fault here. According to the Daily Mail (eurgh), Terry Pratchett has denied he has “found God”. Of course the Daily Mail being who they are ignored what he said and the title is “I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist” which bares no resemblence to anything he says in the article…ah well.

As an atheist I get told “You are going to Hell” quite often, whether it be from a person I know or in an anonymous email through this blog. I get quite offended by this which many might consider odd seeing as I believe that “Hell” doesn’t exist. My reasoning for my offense is quite simple though, and I suspect many atheists feel the same way about things like this.

If we go by most religious beliefs, Hell is a place where sinners are sent if they do not repent. A lot of religions believe that a murderer can get into Heaven if they repent their sins before they die, or sacrifice themselves to save another. In short, there are quite a few “get out clauses” that one can consider. My “crime” though, isn’t murder, nor is it rape or thieving. An atheist’s crime is simply thinking, or reasoning. So by this definition, I am offended that someone would believe that a murderer, rapist, or thief who has said they are sorry for their crimes would get into Heaven, whilst a person who has done nothing but think would go to Hell.

Conversely, if we take the religious belief that Hell is a place that all sinners go to regardless of whether they repent or not, I am still offended. It seems that whilst a god may or may not have given us free will (depending on what you believe), we do have it. Therefore it seems ever so slightly unfair that a person should be sent to Hell for using a mental ability that doesn’t cause harm to anyone else. By this definition, I am offended that anyone (gods included) would consider murder an equal crime to using free will.

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