The Atheist Blogger

I’ve just got back from America; the flight was long, and I’ve been awake for most of the past 30 hours. I’m about to try and get some sleep but I thought I’d share with you some interesting sutff on Nate Phelps, the estranged atheist son of fundamentalist “God Hates Fags” pastor Fred Phelps. Nate was “discovered” by a journalist late last year, and was invited to speak at the American Atheists Convention a few weeks ago.

A full transcript of his speech is available online at Atheist Nexus, and Brother Richard has an article written by Nate about his experiences before and after the convention. Brother Richard and Nate have also set up a support group at Atheist Nexus called “Life After Christian Fundamentalism“, aimed at helping people who have escaped from Christian fundamentalism.

Check it out, I’m off to sleep :D

Just over one week ago, a fellow atheist friend named Dan and I were in the student bar, drinking vodka-laced beverages and reading long pages of notes. In less than an hour, we would be debating two members of the Christian Union; a fundamentalist student society that believes the Bible is accurate, it just needs to read the correct way. The debate was entitled “Is God a Delusion?” , and team atheism had sorted out our lines of attack; Dan would be handling the fine-tuned universe fallacy, as well as the vicious nature of nature itself. I would be talking about the Theory of Evolution, illusions in nature, and our predisposition for seeing patterns that aren’t really there. We had conquered the writing of the speeches, we had even conquered the timing, getting everything into a 5 minute presentation each. The final thing we had to conquer were our nerves, hence the copious amounts of vodka.

This was the first time either of us had done something like this, and it didn’t help that only one other atheist had so far turned up to support us. Luckily, as the debate was about to start, 6 of our secular student group turned up to sit in the front row, which gave us that boost of morale to get us into the spirit. First up was a Christian who was reading Physics, so I expected him to go on about how the universe was such a wonderful place, fine-tuned to perfection. What I didn’t expect was for him to waffle for 4 of his 5 minutes, trying to explain what he considered “God” to be. As the chair banged her gavel to signify 1 minute remaining, my first opponent stumbled and quickly said something about how the presence of evil was proof of God. Whatever he said, I didn’t understand it at all, and I think my stomach gave a huge sigh of relief.

I was up next, and I managed to get my speech within the time limit, covering all the points I wanted to raise. The full transcript of both mine and Dan’s speeches are included below the fold on this blog post if you want to read them in full. Next up was the second Christian, who rejected a few of my reasons for why people believe in the supernatural, saying he didn’t believe for those reasons. This of course is a fallacy, as it can only be true on a personal level, and there are many people who believe in the supernatural for precisely the reasons I stated. His speech concerned Jesus and the power of prayer (which when I last checked was powerless). Not suprisingly, he criticised the scientific “prayer tests” and held them as an inaccurate way to determine whether prayer works (probably because the results determined prayer didn’t). Dan concluded the speeches with an attack of the fine-tuned universe view, quoting David Attenborough on his recent criticism of Christians, and pointed to the destructive force of nature as evidence against a loving caring God.

So then the floor was open to questions, and boy did we get them. I had to explain why Protazoa were still around “even though we evolved from them” as an American girl put, and how fish could develop arms when a mutation is required to create useless stumps first (clue: fish already have stumps…they are called fins). I also explained a rudimentry version of how we think the eye evolved, although on most of these questions I encouraged people to not take what I was saying without question, but to read up on it themselves (the last part of my speech was an appeal for people to start thinking freely). Luckily, my atheist friends asked the Christians a few questions about their beliefs, including a nice one about whether the discovery of multiple universes with different “tuning” would alter their belief in God.

An interesting couple of questions came from some Islamic students, one of whom asked me if I would mind if he came at me with a knife and killed me. I was expecting at least one question like this, and luckily I have a great response to it:

Let me get this straight. You are asking an atheist, someone who doesn’t believe in gods, the afterlife, or any kind of supernatural events, whether he would mind giving up what he believes is his only life? Of course I would mind! I happen to like life, and I’m not suddenly going to throw it all away because it is the one shot I have.

The same group of muslims asked us how we explained the revealed knowledge in the Koran, like the fact that salty water is separate from fresh water, and the Earth is shaped like an Ostrich egg. I didn’t correct his Earth shape hypothesis, because I wanted to attack the root of this question. I aked him plainly if he would read to me the passages of the Koran that said those things. He told me he didn’t have them on him, and so I told him I was sorry, but I couldn’t answer his question. I mentioned that these “revealed truths” are often simply very complex interpretations that are often extracted after the facts are known to science. The same logic can be applied to the Christian claim that the Bible talks about atoms, when all it says is “so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3).

All in all, I guess the theists reckon they won, and the atheists reckon we won. The debate was concluded and no vote was held (we agreed it would be good to just let people leave with their own opinions). A girl did come up and thank us for talking about what we believed, and that she would look into certain things more, and that’s always a good thing. Dan and I decided that we rather like debating, so we’re going to do some more in the future, and perhaps organise an “Ask an atheist” evening in March. Another friend wants to debate with me against the Islamic society, so I’m trying to get in touch with them. Stay tuned for more!

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So I’m back from the USA, have shaken off the jet-lag, and ready to delve back into the world of blogging once again. During my absence in America (which I plan to document in another blog post), the BHA successfully launched the range of atheist adverts on buses, trains, and billboards. I have yet to see one of the buses, but I’m bound to be in London one of these days.

One story that caught my attention was how a Christian bus driver, Ron Heather refused to drive his bus because it had an atheist advert on it. His words were:

I was just about to board and there it was staring me in the face, my first reaction was shock horror.

…

I think it was the starkness of this advert which implied there was no God.

Starkness. Really? So now saying something is more than 50% likely is considered a “stark” proposition? Wow. How stark are Christian adverts that proclaim God does exist then? Having a first reaction of “shock horror” shows that you are someone who has absolutely no understanding of anyone else’s view, and your actions confirm it. Mr Heather, you are a bigot. Thank you for being the reason these adverts need to be shown; the fewer people like you there are, the more healthy society will become. We aren’t asking for dominant views, or for you to succumb to our beliefs. We are asking for equal time to share our opinion.

The real problem I have with this issue though, is that Mr Heather was meant to be providing a service to the community, and he rejected that service in order to feel like he had won some ultimate battle against people who oppose his view. At my first London Atheists Meetup, I met an atheist who was a driver on the London Underground (the subway system). He didn’t mind the number of Christian adverts that are plastered all over the underground network, neither did he refuse to work because of them.

Of course, I think there are probably people behind this entire event. The atheist ads have been on the news for months, and talked about at length by fundamentalist Christians, including Christian Voice. It wouldn’t surprise me if Mr Heather was either asked, or planned to “rebel” against the system, simply to get air time on radio and TV.

The popular Christian blog Stuff Christians Like had an article containing some Christian emoticons”. For those who don’t know what emoticons are :O, you missed the internet era :P, please go back 10 or 15 years :D. Ok, so lets see what a few atheist emoticons would look like.

(?) = We’re not sure what created the universe, but it probably wasn’t a god.

*.oO = Having said that, the Big Bang is our best possible explanation at this point.

<<<O>>> = Aliens seeding Earth with life is a neat idea, but it doesn’t explain where the aliens came from.

>>>8 (E) = A meteor colliding with Earth and creating life makes a bit more logical sense.

\…V…W = In any case, the diversity of life is best explained by Evolution.

($#@^!&*) = Despite what you may think, I’m not a nihilist.

oo—[A] = I read atheist blogs regularly.

[:::::]~~[A] = I’m such a hardcore atheist, I even write an atheist blog.

OO—(( RC )) = I read Ray Comforts blog and have an irrational fear of bananas.

(( < X## = All things being equal, the pineapple pwns the banana.

oo—[PZ] ~00~ .:| (/) = I go to Phyrangula for my daily fix of octopi, poll boosting, and occasional cracker desecration.

Any others you think should be added to the list? The floor is open…

The title of this blogpost comes from a popular quote by Robert A Heinlein.

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

I personally think this is shown quite well in Edward Current’s latest video on YouTube entitled “An Atheist Meets God”.

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