The Atheist Blogger

When I die, I won’t know that I’d been correct all these years. :P

Ray Comfort was feeling particularly lazy today, and so instead of making up a new branches of science or claiming he looks like Einstein, he just wrote a title and said “bugger it” to the actual article. The title is a quote, so it’s not even his own work. I think that’s a little too lazy.

Anyway, to make Ray look more of an idiot, I’ll write an article for him. The quote was from Plato, and simply said:

No one ever dies an atheist

This is an obvious attempt to provoke the old “there are no atheists in foxholes” argument, something that has been thoroughly debunked by the number of atheists in the military. Such a preposterous quote as the one above can be debunked quite easily though.

Seeing as the last thoughts going though a dying person’s head are their own, and nobody else can even imagine what they are thinking, this argument is already pretty weak. Even if an atheist says “I believe in God” at the end of his/her life, that doesn’t mean they truly believe it. Since the person is completely dead after their “last thought”, there is no way for them to verify their final belief, so not only is Plato’s argument weak, it is both scientifically and factually invalid.

Perhaps the most humorous thing about this argument is that it is easily reversible, and because of the above properties, nobody can argue against me when I claim:

No one ever dies a theist

Go on, prove that every single person who has ever died has not converted to atheism at the last possible chance. What’s that? You can’t? Don’t use pathetic arguments then.

Here endeth the lesson.

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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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’m split on how to react to this story. A woman last January was spotted “driving on the wrong side of the road and through red lights at speeds of up to 70mph”.

Unfortunately, her car veered off the road and onto the pavement, killing a mother and her daughter. At the scene, the driver told investigators:

Somebody had their foot on my foot and their hand on my hand - it wasn’t me driving, it was Satan

The work of the devil?

Today she got cleared of causing death by dangerous driving.

However, she only got off the charge by entering a plea of insanity, and the jury decided to accept the plea within 15 minutes.

This whole event raises questions about how to handle religious nutcases like this woman. Should we really play along with their “insanity” when two women are dead? On the other hand, at least the courts recognised that claiming the devil did it is pretty stupid.

Hopefully she’ll be locked up for a long time in a mental institution. It’s one thing to suffer the delusion of God, but blaming your insanity on Satan and killing two innocent people is just too far.