The Atheist Blogger

…but at least Thunderf00t will get his discussion.

Yes, it’s (kinda) official now. Ray Comfort phoned up Thunderf00t and accepted his proposal for a discussion. This can only be good news, as it means we actually get to see Ray try to make up some arguments without appealing to emotion. It will be one room, with only a camera and the two men.

Of course, what Comfort did originally (attempting to get Thunderf00t to pay the fee for Richard Dawkins) is utterly reprehensible; it was a cowardly attempt to use Thunderf00t (who was the person offering the discussion in the first place) to get a debate with Richard Dawkins.

So maybe Ray is slightly less cowardly now, but to be honest, knowing Ray, I have my doubts. I predict he will still try to pull someone on this one. Whether it involves having an actual audience (so he can use appeals to emotion) or just being dishonest concerning the actual discussion plan. I hope he doesn’t, but over a year of reading Ray Comfort’s blog has left me with a distinct level of distrust surrounding the man; everything he does seems to have an ulterior motive.

The John Lewis Partnership has a very clear policy on who to not give donations to:

The Partnership does not give money to individuals, religious, ethnic or political groups or third-party fundraising.^[1]

Yet when atheist Richard Green was shopping in the Salisbury branch of a Waitrose store (which is owned by the partnership), he noticed that local charity The Bridge was part of the “green token” scheme, where the customer is given a green token at the checkout to deposit in one of three charity boxes near the exit. At the end of the month, Waitrose donate an amount of money to these three charities based on the percentages of tokens they get.

The description of The Bridge that appeared on the box was as follows.

The Bridge is an organisation working in schools and the community of South Wiltshire. It offers a service to schools in providing lessons, small group work, clubs and help with children experiencing problems. The oasis programme helps those students who are finding it difficult to fit into school life and need a programme and mentoring back into school life.

The Bridge is run by a dedicated team of volunteers and paid staff who are chosen for their commitment and their ability to relate to young people. The Bridge is a registered charity and it takes around £12,000 per month to keep it running.

Unfortunately, this is not the whole truth, as The Bridge is a Christian charity. On their website they list their main aims:

We provide a service to all schools with input of an explicit Christian nature. We want to give students of all ages an opportunity to hear and respond to the Good News of Jesus Christ. Finally we want to follow up the student interest by finding appropriate Church groups and easing the transition into church life.

Of course, none of this was made clear on the donation box, and it is obvious that such a charity shouldn’t be able to even enter the scheme under the current donation policy. Richard Green felt that someone had been dishonest, so he wrote a letter to the manager of the store voicing his concerns. The charity was withdrawn from the scheme immediately.

I contacted The Bridge to get a response statement and received this from Director Andy Lund:

We have been entirely open in our submission to Waitrose and in the very first paragraph of our documentation described ourselves as a Christian Organisation.

It seems the blame lies on both sides. The Bridge seemed to have been dishonest by omitting the word Christian from the paragraphs they submitted for the description. On the other hand, if what Andy Lund says is true and they mentioned that they were a Christian organisation in the first paragraph of their submission, the people at Waitrose are guilty of either not reading the submission properly, or ignoring their own donation policy by allowing this to get further than a simple submission.

This is a question posed by the blog “the BEattitude“, which has recently gained over 1,000 well deserved comments on a post concerning losing religion. The author’s personal answer, he says, is very simple:

I expect God to do for me what he did for virtually every Bible character.

In other words, he wants God to show himself, which shouldn’t be a difficult task to fulfill for such a being. He also shows how the Apostle Paul is being hypocritical about telling believers that faith is all you need, as Paul only became a believer after Jesus appeared to him as a blinding light. Are we really expected to have faith in Jesus Christ, when the founder of the Christian church itself could not do the same?

Faith is the most important requirement of any religion, because with faith you cannot distinguish between what cannot be seen and what does not exist. Without faith, your eyes are finally opened to all possibilities, and reason ultimately prevails.

For me, the question has an equally simple answer. I would expect the Bible to be filled with unambiguous, literal, truth.

Any God that is worth worshiping should be able to make sure that their holy book was completely accurate, doesn’t contain contradictions (or ambiguity), and can be read and understood by anyone. It doesn’t take much effort (for an omnipotent being) to correct the scribe who makes a copying error, or to protect the books from damage as believers are persecuted, or to write everything as literal fact that cannot be observed in nature.

This is what any rational person would demand of any other claim, so why can’t it be done for religion? The pseudoscience of homeopathy is less ambiguous than current interpretations of the Bible, yet more people reject the former. It is clear to anyone that the Bible is not true, and yet instead of giving up on Christianity, the believers can do nothing but lie and make excuses about the mistakes.

In the scientific community, when you are reduced to this level of dishonesty, your reputation is destroyed. In the religious community, you are held as a warrior for faith. I don’t know about yourself, but my mother taught me to never trust people who lied or made excuses for their mistakes. It seems only the scientific community has taken this to heart.

How about you? What would it take for YOU to believe in God?

(via theBEattitude)

Now that Cassie from Teen Skepchick has written about this subject, I ought to post something as well about the church I helped to form. It all started with a Jaffa Cake fixation, shared by skype friends including myself, Lucia, and Andrew Milne. Numerous times we phoned up the McVities Careline, trying to talk to someone about the awesomeness of McVities Jaffa Cakes, but each time they hung up on us. So we decided to turn to Twitter, only to discover that someone had already beaten us to it.

C. Margery Kempe, a writer of romantic erotica, had already posted using the #JaffaCakes hashtag, the first person on Twitter to do so:

dreams of Jaffa Cakes and convinces herself to get back to work and stop thinking about Jaffa Cakes #JaffaCakes

Immediately we named her our prophet, and the Church of the Smashing Orangey Bit was born. Ever since then, we have spread the word of the church through Twitter hashtags (#JaffaCakes), bringing more people under our fold, with promises of a revolutionary new church (the most progressive out there today). We also formed a facebook group, and started translating our holy book (the Jaffable) into English. All members of the church (Jaffalots) believe in the power of Jaffacakeology, which central tenets include:

• We believe in the one true McVities, accept no substitutes.
• We believe that @cmkempe is our prophet, delivered to us by McVities to provide romantic erotica.
• We believe that Jaffa Cakes are the most delicious snack.
• We believe that all people of every creed (except Norwegians), color, gender, and sexual orientation go to Heaven, but only those who accept Jaffa Cakes as their Lord and Saviour go to the Land of the Eternal Jaffa, a kind of super Heaven that has a water slide.
• We believe that in stark contradiction to the above, if you are a really naughty person you will suffer for all eternity in Norway.

So don’t be a fool! Accept Jaffa Cakes as your Lord and Saviour today! To join the church you only need to say our prayer of acceptance:

Lord McVities, I have sinned against You and Your smashing orangey creation. I repent my sins. I ask You to come into my mouth and wash me with Your smashing orangey bits. I make Jaffa Cakes my Lord and Savior.

Oh Lord McVities, You are now more than my God; You’re my smashing orangey Father and I’m going to serve You all the days of my life. Jaffa Cakes are Lord.

JaffAmen.

Once you have said this, your sins will be forgiven, and you will live forever in Jaffa Cake heaven. Both atheists and theists are welcome, as long as you accept McVities as Lord, and Jaffa Cakes as both Lord and Saviour. Norwegians are banned from the church, since they are an abomination in the eyes of McVities. Similarly, the church has decreed a Jafwa (holy war) upon the so-called “Pastafarians” for idol worship and the heretical belief that pasta is somehow tastier than Jaffa Cakes.

Over a year ago I wrote about how my “atheist union” posters were ripped down and vandalized by unknown religious students, but whilst I was annoyed and angry at the attacks, they simply do not scale in comparison with the actual death threats that some students have received. The Leeds University Atheist Society runs an annual “rationalist week” to promote freethinking, atheism, skepticism, etc. During the event, a member of the society was threatened by a suspected Muslim student. The death threat took place outside the main festival tent, and was a face to face encounter.

The society has received death threats before from a Muslim student group, and nobody has been harmed. The victim this time has decided not to go to the police, possibly because the last threats were not followed through. It seems like the Muslim society is using the scare tactics that religions have used for thousands of years, and such tactics tend not to work on the rationally minded. Nevertheless, this is completely unacceptable behaviour, and a sure sign that the Muslim groups are participating in a campaign to destroy freedom of speech.

Further evidence of this can be seen in the attempts made by the Southampton Atheist Society to hold a debate on freedom of speech that contained a viewing of the “controversial” movie Fitna. It took two months to organize after the Muslim society continually objected to it, and the debate was finally held under the condition that police were there, and every student was searched by security. What exactly are Muslims afraid of? That we will expose their religion for the fraud it is? If so, they needn’t be afraid; we’ve known that ever since it was formed. If Islam was really the most truthful religion, then what harm can some atheists do? Why not come along to the debate and refute the claims made by the atheists? My guess is that the atheist’s claims are completely accurate, and the Muslim is simply too indoctrinated to accept anything other than what the Qur’an tells them.

Chloë Clifford-Frith of the AHS (National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Groups) noted that there were an increasing number of examples of prejudice against atheists.

Leeds have experienced death threats, vandalism, theft and SU discrimination in the past. Warwick Atheists were also stripped of their ‘Best New Society’ award and prize money in 2008 after a complaint that a poster for one of their talks was offensive. The award, but not the prize money was returned some months later. Some societies have experienced problems with their SUs refusing to ratify their existence. Again, this is symptomatic of a wider suspicion of people who profess to be atheists – as if there is something threatening about not believing in a god or gods. Even Prof Richard Dawkins, when attempting to set up the charitable educational foundation ‘The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science’, had his forms returned to him with the suspicious question: ‘Please explain how “science” has benefited humanity’!

We shall have to see what lies ahead for my student group when we try to hold events this year. I’ve already emailed the Muslim society asking for a debate, but I doubt they will respond to my request.