The Atheist Blogger

Earlier this month, Ray Comfort agreed (well, the second time) to a discussion with Thunderf00t. The rules were simple: the two men, one room, and one camera. Any questions were on the floor for discussion, and each man would get a copy of the video to use as they wished. As it turned out, Ray Comfort had a separate cameraman (for higher quality video I guess) in the room, but overall the debate was as stipulated.

Thunderf00t has uploaded the entire discussion, uncut from start to finish, and if you have a spare 90 or so minutes, I advise you watch it all! Ray Comfort’s points are torn apart in front of him one by one, as Thunderf00t explores the deeper meaning of Ray’s arguments (evidently not done by Ray himself) such as the “how do you know it is creation?” rebuttal to any claim of the kind “creation needs a creator” in reference to the universe itself.

Here is the entire debate as a YouTube playlist, so sit back and watch the Bananaman get defeated by common sense and logic, as played by Thunderf00t.

Enjoy!

Last week I held a competition to find the best caption for a creationist photo.I got plenty of entries, which either means people loved the concept or they didn’t mind having no prize (unless a graffitied copy of Ray Comfort’s latest book counts as a prize). I’m still open to prize suggestions that can fit in with a student budget, and I want to continue this competition as it’s great fun watching people come up with captions for creationists and their silly antics.

Anyway, here are the top 5 best captions as selected by me:

5.

Losing… Grip… On reality!

- Bruce

4.

Just a theory, GRAVITY is just a THEORY!

- Edward

3.

*David Attenborough voice* And here we see the creationist in its natural environment, between a rock and a hard place. We can tell it is of the young earth breed due to the way it reaches, grasping for straws but only clasps thin air…

- BastardSheep

2.

All right, PZ, you win! I will give you that damn iPod Touch!

- James Tracy

1.

Things went from bad to worse when, as the bright light at the end of the tunnel cleared, Eric Hovind saw glorious Valhalla in all its splendor.

- Janus Graydon

So congratulations to Janus Graydon of extheist.net, you have won the first Creationism Caption Competition! Without further ado, here is the caption and photo put together at last:

Things went from bad to worse when, as the bright light at the end of the tunnel cleared, Eric Hovind saw glorious Valhalla in all its splendor.

Keep your eyes peeled for a new caption competition in a few weeks, and feel free to send in suggestions of captionless photos!

In my random stumbling around on the internet, I found a bunch of creationist websites that contained photos of various creationists as part of some kind of “about our team” page. Now some of these pictures are just plain and boring, but there are a few that simply cry out for a funny caption. So I’ve decided to create a caption competition in order to correct this massive lack of creationist captions, and here is the first picture.

So dear reader, what exactly is Eric Hovind reaching for? Why does he have a look of terror on his cute creationist face? Why is he clinging to that rock so desperately? The answer to those questions is up to you.

Now onto the issue of a prize. As a student I generally don’t have any money, which means I cannot promise a prize, although I do have an extra signed copy of Ray Comfort’s latest masterpiece “You can lead an atheist to evidence, but you can’t make him think”. To be quite honest, such a book would be better off as a booby prize instead, but it is all I can offer at the moment. Perhaps I could get some cheap badges made, I’m open to suggestions.

So really, it’s a double competition now: Whoever comes up with the best caption and a great idea for some cheap (but cool) prizes will win…er…one of the prizes (and a copy of Ray’s book that I will sign / doodle in). You have a week to do so; off you go!

Time again for another YouTube Thursday, and we start with 2 videos from YouTube user Thunderf00t; the first is a short but funny comparison of the old VenomFangX and the new VenomFangX (Shawn recently closed his channel due to “death threats” and gave it to another creationist). The tag-line is a kicker though: “Creationism: when being naturally stupid just isn’t good enough”.

The second video of his is part of the fantastic series “Why do people laugh at creationists?”, which involves the elegant destruction of popular creationist arguments. This is part 30, and if you want to see the other 29 (highly recommended) then check them out here. In this video, Thunderf00t points out the hypocritical nature of the Discovery Institute, and one of its prominent spokespeople, Casey Luskin.

Jesse Ventura (ex-Governor of Minnesota) has been on a campaign recently against waterboarding, and he should know all about it, given that he himself was waterboarded as part of SEREs (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training. He says it’s torture, but Elisabeth Hasselbeck of “The View” disagreed with him. Hilarity ensued as Ventura hit back with some great points, ending with the great line
“You give me a waterboard, one hour, and Dick Cheney and I’ll have him confessing to the Sharon Tate murders”. Jesse Ventura once said of religion “[it] is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people’s business.”

Finally, I end with some wise words of wisdom from the legendary Steven Fry. His advice on being happy? Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Well, after almost a month of inactivity on the blog, I’m back! I firstly want to apologise for not making even small posts during my absence, but I honestly had so much to do I either forgot or couldn’t get the time to write anything. I have been reading and following my favourite blogs though, so I haven’t missed any of the things that have happened recently. The reason for my absence was a large number of exams that I always try to prepare for, but tend to ignore right up until they are actually upon me. Thus for the last 3 weeks I was studying like crazy, only stopping to send the occasional message on Twitter. I think that during that period, Twitter replaced my blog almost completely, and I know that large number of my readers follow me on Twitter as well (and if you don’t yet, please follow!).

So, now that exams were over, I went to stay with my mother for the weekend, and was cut off from the internet (apart from my mobile phone’s internet) for 3 days. To top it off, when I arrived back from a 3 hour train journey yesterday, I was whisked away by my friends to a Godfather film marathon. It was the first time I’d seen any of the movies (please forgive me), and I thoroughly enjoyed them all. With the help of two bloggers and Skype friends of mine, Splendid Elles (@elles) and Andrew Milne (@footbullet), we successfully created a new religion using Twitter, based on a truly awesome British snack: JaffaCakeology. If you want to join, simply hashtag all your tweets with #JAFFACAKES, and pledge devotion to our prophet, @cmkempe.

Back to business then, and I have 4 months off doing practically nothing other than some programming and various projects. This leaves plenty of time for writing blog posts, both short and long. Today I’m going to write about a presentation I saw over the weekend. It was the start of Salisbury Festival, which is an event spanning several months in which numerous activities are run in the city where I grew up. One of the events this weekend was a talk given by Charles Foster, a lawyer who has written a book called “The Selfless Gene”. His talk was entitled “Living with God and Darwin” and promised to

[demonstrate] that orthodox Christianity is not incompatible with what evolutionary biology says about our world.

The real problem, he said,

centres around the ethical implications of natural selection, and what such a system – based on selfishness, waste and death – might say about the loving creator God of the Christian faith.

I thought such claims were interesting, so I went along to hear his argument. However the talk was not what was promised. Instead of showing how Christianity wasn’t incompatible, he simply spent his time laughing at creationist claims (along with the rest of the non-creationist audience). He talked at length about how Young Earth Creationists were foolish, how the evidence contradicts their claims, how nobody can possibly claim such things without being ignorant. This was all very well, but he didn’t cover how this was wrong in a Biblical sense, which would have actually supported his argument. I highly doubt there were any Young Earth Creationists in the audience; this is England we’re talking about! I highly doubt there were any Old Earth Creationists there either! He spent a good 20 minutes talking about creationism in it’s various forms, spending a few extra on Intelligent Design, and ending his case against creationism with a passionate argument against a “god of the gaps”.

The rest of the talk was a haphazard presentation on the evidence for evolution, and I wasn’t impressed. He didn’t go into any detail, and his slides were all extremely bad quality, as if they had been photographed from some other talk. He never mentioned the mechanisms that make evolution tick, and he kept on blaming the “neo-darwinists” and “disciples of Dawkins” on most of the confusion over evolution. Overall though, there was nothing there that could convince anyone of either position. At the beginning he told people he would make creationists in the audience “very angry”, and atheists (well, “disciples of Dawkins”) very angry too. Neither of his prophecies held true.

At the end of the talk, an atheist at the back stood up and asked him to give the evidence for God, since his talk was about showing how God was compatible with Darwin. Mr Foster explained that the way he saw it, the lack of explanation for civilisation and morality is an indicator that a God exists. In other words, because science cannot explain everything about us, God must still have some hold. What a strange conclusion for the man to make, given his argument against a “god of the gaps” that he made clear earlier on. I started to raise my hand, but another atheist across the room from me got there first, pointing out his contradiction.

So poor Mr Foster lost out to the regular thorn in the side of theists: self contradiction. Such a pity. His book was on sale in the lobby afterwards, but there was no way I was paying £11.99 for it. I suspect it will include all the same repeated arguments against creationism, which in this country aren’t really needed. Nobody apart from the fringe churches accept creationism as a legitimate claim anymore. I further suspect that the arguments for evolution will be equally bad, thus misleading the people who read it into thinking that science knows very little about the subject.