The Atheist Blogger

I got some negative feedback after I jokingly filled in the atheist thirteen meme as if written by a fundamentalist Christian. People said I was taking the easy way out, and that it wouldn’t have cost me anything to ask a fundie to do the thing for me. I took the criticism, responding only that I had once been a Christian and so I knew what it was like to believe etc. However, I’ve recently been reading the blog “Debunking Atheists” for amusement, and decided to ask the main contributor “Dan” if he would answer the meme for me. I modified a few questions to better suit a theist answering them.

Here is his response.

Q1. How would you define “atheism”? A branch or another name of the religion, Secular Humanism.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition? I was raised in an atheist’s/atheistic home.

Q3. How would you describe “Intelligent Design”, using only one word? “vague”, I prefer ‘Biblical Creation’

Q4. What scientific [endeavor] really excites you? Discovery of any kind, without the subjectivity of scientists that are atheists.

Q5. If you could change one thing about the “atheist community”, what would it be and why? Their belief of no God. Why, because of the end result on Judgment Day.

Q6. If your child came up to you and said “I’m joining the clergy”, what would be your first response? I would ask to be more specific. A bishop or minister? If his soul couldn’t live without anything else then he would have my blessings. If he means priesthood in the RCC (Roman Catholic), I would ask why he would want to be a part of the largest pedophilia group/society in the world. I would ask why does he wants to help people into hell. I would rather him be an atheist.

Q7. What’s your favorite theistic argument? Anything Jesus said, like the sermon on the mount. He is the pro!

Q8. What’s your most “controversial” viewpoint? That a building or Church isn’t necessary for Salvation and/or denominations are man made.

Q9. Of the “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favorite, and why? Dawkins, putting his foot in his mouth in Expelled. The Movie was hilarious. Why, because Dick makes me laugh.

Q10. If you could convince just one atheistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be? My Dad

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So The Atheist Jew reckons he can tag me eh? Fair play, fair play. Here are my answers to the 10 questions:

Q1. How would you define “atheism”?

Atheism is the philosophical view that there are no gods. Whether you class this view as a belief or disbelief is up to semantics. I personally refer to it as both.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?

I was brought up in a Christian family with my father, mother, sister, and grandmother. I went to two Church of England primary schools as a child, although I don’t remember visiting church much at all. One humourous story is that when I was 3 my grandfather died, and I asked my mother why he wasn’t coming back from hospital. She told me “he’s gone up to heaven”. I apparently remarked “Well can’t we just get a really long ladder and visit?”. The first stages of rationalism or a cute response? You decide.

At age 11 I went to a grammar school that is situated outside the tallest cathedral in the country. It was there that I shook free the chains of religion.

Out of the remaining family (my gran died 3 years ago), my mother is still theist and she works at the cathedral in the education centre. My sister could be described as agnostic / apatheist, and my father has only just revealed to me that he is also an atheist / agnostic.

That was a rather long answer wasn’t it.

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A man by the name of Gerry Rzeppa has issued a challenge to Richard Dawkins. If Dawkins will stand with him in front of a live audience whilst Rzeppa reads aloud his new childrens book, and asks Dawkins a single question (to which Dawkins must respond), he will be given $64,000.

Seems fair enough, so why the title? Well go take a look at the chosen font used on the “author’s” website, and the one used in the very same book he wants to read to Dawkins. Honestly, it’s enough to give anyone with even bad vision a headache. The horrible scrawl makes every word a pain to decipher, but I’ve given it my best shot (to save you from straining your eyes). I’ve marked all words I’m unsure about with a (?) and given them my best shot based on the context they are in.

Hello,

My name is Gerry Rzeppa and I’ve written a short children’s book in answer to the works of Richard Dawkins. Unlike his ponderous(?) tomes, however, mine has lots of pictures, rhymes, and can be read, cover to cover, in ten minutes.

The $64,000 Question

I’m offering the doctor $64,000 of my very own money if he will join me before a live audience to answer a single question about my little poem. I’ll read the story aloud and pose the mystery query. He’ll answer and walk away with the loot. Simple as that.

Curious?

Me too. I’ll let you know if and when the challenge is accepted. In the meantime, you can read my story, for free, by clicking right here.

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After reading Friendly Atheist’s blog post about the “Questions for God” proposed over at Ethical Atheist, I went to go have a read of them. Quite a few of the questions I thought were a bit harsh, and were either presented in a very sarcastic manner, or were extremely stupid. For example:

Do you know how to use email?  Surely you do, right?  Why haven’t you written us yet with all the answers?

and

Why do men and women have the same number of ribs if you stole one from Adam to make Eve?

The first question is just plainly meant as a joke, and the second ignores the biological fact that if a parent loses a limb or bone, the child won’t be affected. In fact, a believer actually pointed this out the the author of the question in their answer.

I think that although the idea of asking questions to God, and allowing his followers to answer is a great idea, because it allows understanding of theist thinking in ways atheists cannot understand. Some of the answers produced are actually quite rational, and only rely on partial support from the supernatural to work. However, whilst the idea itself is good, the Ethical Atheist version of the questions has taken the entire thing as a joke, which lessens the importance of the whole project, and probably accounts for the reason why most of the questions have been unanswered.

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In the comments section to my article “Atheism is not a religion“, a reader named “ed” asked me to answer three questions surrounding atheism:

Who is the quintessential atheist, in your opinion? Who has (if anyone) fully represented Atheism both in beliefs and actions?

Well, as “The Atheist Jew” pointed out already, an atheist is simply someone who has no belief in God. There are no “beliefs” in atheism, and I had already explained how atheism is not a religion since it has no belief system. Yesterday I was watching the “Atheist Experience” show on the internet, and they had a caller who talked for about 10 minutes on the subject of belief, before insulting the hosts and being cut off. He did however, start a discussion on whether it takes the same amount of faith the disbelieve in a God than it does to believe in him. Of course, the atheist hosts answered the question with a well explained “no”. They mentioned believing in “pixies”, and the fact that nobody would seriously argue that you need to take a leap of faith to say you didn’t believe in pixies. The evidence is overwhelming that these creatures only exist in legends and stories, and that no accurate sighting have ever been made or verified. Nobody can know for sure whether God exists of course, and so there is a leap of “faith” in the same way that there is with any scientific theory, but the leap only comes through supporting evidence (or lack thereof). If anything, it requires less of a leap to disbelieve in God than it does to believe, certainly not more.

Now to the whole concept of “acting atheist” which I can’t really wrap my head around. If we have already come to the obvious conclusion that there are no beliefs structures in atheism, and therefore the only thing lumping atheists together in a group is the fact that they say “I don’t believe in God”, how can that define any possible actions? Christians and Muslims pray because their belief system supports it as an action, but the only actions supported by atheism are the ones that come naturally to humans anyway. So to answer the second part of your question rather simply, every single living (and indeed non-living) human “acts” like an atheist. Now, if you are talking about whether atheists should act in a different way then you are covering an entirely different subject, and one I would possibly like to save for an entire blog post. I personally don’t support the way Richard Dawkins is going about waging a war with theists, but that is his decision, not the decision of atheists in general.

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