The Atheist Blogger

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.

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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I came across the site MeetUp again through random clicking of links earlier this week. I randomly did a search to see if there were any atheist groups near to where I live (Egham), but nothing showed up. However, I did find a few groups operating within London, which is only 30 minutes on the train for me.

One of them, called the “London Atheists Meetup” is having a meeting later today (Saturday) to discuss Britain’s response to Islam. I’ve decided to go along and see what it’s like…if I can find the place of course. I may have to call upon my GPS enabled phone to get me some of the way.

I’ve also signed up to the showing of the film “The God Who Wasn’t There” with the Humanist Group of Central London on the 17th December. Whether I can actually attend that one will be a toss up on the day, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to make it down.

So I’ll be writing about how the discussion goes later today, and hopefully I’ll meet some nice people whilst doing it. If any of you can make it down to the 17th December showing, I’m sure it’ll be a great event.

I’ve been invited by some of my Hindu friends to a event on facebook, asking people to “wear a white shirt on monday” to show respect to the 150+ people who died in the Mumbai terrorist attacks that happened earlier this week. When perusing the event details, I came across an interesting section on t-shirt ideas.

Front: 150+ Dead in Mumbai…
Back: Why?

I guess the “Why?” is more a metaphysical question concerning why so many people could have died, but to me, the actual answer to the question seems quite obvious. Islam. The terrorists who slaughtered over 150 people did so because they were deluded by the idea that it was somehow the will of Allah. Reports have already confirmed that the terrorists went after American and British passport holders, letting a British man who claimed to be Italian live.

The event coordinators have already made it very clear they don’t want to answer the question themselves, even though deep down they know the answer.

****ANYTHING HATEFUL TARGETING ANY SPECIFIC PERSON, GROUP, RELIGION, ETCETERA WILL BE DELETED AND REPORTED.
this event is to not target and attack certain people/etc but to create UNITY & SUPPORT.

So you can create “unity and support” groups, keeping people happy by blaming the governments and police for the mistakes they made, without caring at all about the real problem. Groups like these simply push the problem under the rug, and instead of trying to stop the problem at the root, they work on the premise that these things are going to happen and that we should work on preventing them from ever reaching a climax.

That is a ridiculous view to take. Police do not work on the premise that racial attacks are bound to happen, they go around actively trying to promote harmony between people of different races. Instead of going after the terrorists before they strike, we should be working to stop people from joining terrorist organizations in the first place. Unfortunately, for as long as we have religious doctrine, we will have people who resort to killing in its name.

Here is a better idea for a t-shirt:

Front: 150+ Dead in Mumbai.

Back: Why? Islam. Religion Kills.

People will probably call it hate speech, but I don’t care. It’s the truth, and that should be all that matters.

The original government petition had a very short deadline, but it still managed to get 5,543 signatures in the short run it had. A new petition has been made, and Pat Condell tells us why we should sign it (if you need more reasons).

The new deadline is 1st January 2009, so get signing!

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/shariastop/