The Atheist Blogger

Sean the Blogonaut posted an open-invitation book meme:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

The closest book to me was one just perched off the end of my bookcase: The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It was quite literally the closest piece of literature to me in my room, and it also just happened to be my favourite book (so I luckily avoid #5).

What happens next is strangely ironic given the content of this blog. I opened the book to page 56, and was greeted with the popular argument against God (the one about the Babel fish). The next 7 sentences read:

`”Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

`”Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

`Most leading theologians claim this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

`Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.`

Arthur let out a low groan. He was horrified to discover that the kick through hyperspace hadn’t killed him. He was now six light-years from the place that the Earth would have been if it still existed.

Now I realise I’ve already tagged some people this week in an earlier meme, so I’m going to tag absolutely everyone who reads this post. If you are reading this and you own a blog, it is now your internet duty to carry the meme torch that little bit further.

Comedy website Something Awful have a load of photoshopped reverse magazines that PZ Myers pointed out. A “reverse magazine” is the process of taking a well known magazine (New Scientist etc) and rewording the title / front cover so it covers exactly the opposite of what it should. There are quite a few religion / belief based ones which I found amusing.

1. New Scientist to Old Scientist, with the great science behind Flat Earth. Alas the last gathering of online Flat Earthers (or FE’rs as they liked to be called) have abandoned ship, but their website and forums can still be viewed in the Wayback Machine.

Read more…

Comedian, actor, writer, and atheist George Carlin died yesterday at 5:55 pm in Los Angeles. I unfortunately had to find this out via a deeply insensitive comment someone made a few hours ago on a video post I put up in February. I’ve deleted the comment out of respect but I’m sure you can guess what it contained.

In answer to that comment, I would say that George Carlin was an extremely courageous man. He was a vicious advocate of freedom of speech, and he was convinced that gods didn’t make the tiniest bit of sense. Although we’ll never sure, I’m positive this was his attitude upon death.

I’d ask anyone who reads this and agrees with me to respect such a great and brilliant man with a few moments of thought.

If you are interested, CNN has a nice obituary on the genius of George Carlin.

Popular cartoon blog indexed has a nice post that sums up his impact on us all.

I mentioned two weeks ago about Bill Maher’s new film “Religulous” which come out later this year. It seems that the studio went all out designing a website for the film.

A direct parody of Beliefnet, Disbeliefnet.com has the slogan “You won’t believe what people believe”, and at this current moment has a poll on Christian Morality. You can’t actually vote in the poll so I decided as a tribute to the genius of Bill Maher, I’d recreate it here:

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I highly recommend going over and checking out the “Blasphemy Box“, which contains links to website, videos, articles that are absolutely brilliant!

Thanks to Friendly Atheist!