The Atheist Blogger

This is a great idea for a quiz. Both South Park and Christopher Hitchens are often highly controversial and anti-religious, so can you sort the South Park quotes from the Hitchens quotes? Some of them are obvious, whilst for others you will have had to either watch the South Park episode or listen to Hitchens on television.

I managed to score 18 out of 25, can you do better?

H/T to Friendly Atheist

Most of my readers will probably remember my “101 Atheist Quotes” article, which despite being one of the first articles I wrote, is also the most popular (although to be honest I think being featured on the front page of Digg might have helped). If you are a Christian reader, or you just want a theist take on the article, then head over to “101 Christian Quotes on Faith, Reason, Unbelief, and Atheism“.

My personal favourites:

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” – So true, and an argument frequently used by atheists to approximate their view with not having words for “not believing in fairies”.

“The atheist can’t find God for the same reason that a thief can’t find a police officer” – Perhaps, but you really think God would have the common decency to show up anyway…

“If God does not exist, everything is permissible” – Precisely why the evolution of human morality is such a great tool for the human race. We don’t need Gods to show us what is wrong and what is right…we can work it our for ourselves over time.

“The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century” – Lucky that facts surrounding Evolution stayed eh? Oh, and of course the facts that we discovered in the 20th century kinda made up for the ones we lost in the 19th…

“No man ever repented of being a Christian on his death bed.” – I like this one; it’s a sort of Christian version of the “There are no atheists in foxholes argument”, and it fails for all the same reasons. How exactly does the author know the final thoughts of a dying person? Puzzling.

“Faith is a sounder guide than reason. Reason can only go so far, but faith has no limits.” – Evil Lord Zenu, Transubstantiation…yup, this quote is dead accurate in the latter part. Unfortunately reason is by far the better guide…it explains things that actually exist in reality.

The last 4 hours have seen me go through several emotions, excitement, shock, despair, frustration, to name but a few. After submitting one of my most popular articles (101 Atheist Quotes) to the atheism subreddit, it managed to climb its way to the top link. It also made it onto the reddit homepage if “atheism” was a category selected. This was exciting.

In the short space of an hour, 7000 people managed to connect to the site. Due to a badly configured file in the apache config, the entire server overloaded and crashed. After fixing the file, the server continued to run very slowly. A look at the logs showed a large amount of incoming traffic from Digg. With hesitation, I loaded up the Digg homepage, and saw the 101 Atheist Quotes article, with 487 votes. This was a combination of shock, excitement, terror, and despair.

The server was undergoing what is commonly referred to as “The Digg Effect”. Essentially a massive influx of visitors caused by an article being featured on Digg. The server promptly crashed again under the pressure, with PHP and Apache complaining about everything. This was frustrating, but we managed to get rid of the plugins that were causing the problem. At the same time we hastily installed the WP-Super-Cache plugin to help with the load.

Some hours later, the article had reached 850 votes, and it finally got pushed off the home page of Digg. This slowed down the traffic by a lot, but the votes were still going up, and only time will tell where it goes from here. Currently it has 976 votes, and is on the second page of the top last 24 hours section.

Of course, the kicker about this is that I didn’t even submit this to Digg (at least not this time). My original submission, made back in Febrary, managed to get around 36 diggs. This new submission was made by brown3218, who also put it in the category of “Science” which might explain why it got all the attention. I don’t disagree with the people who responded saying “this is in the wrong category”, but there is not much I can do about it. Science is a popular category on Digg, and this only proves that a load of atheists frequent it.

Hopefully I got some new subscribers out of it, but I’m at least proud to say that other than a few errors, I survived the Digg effect in one piece!

Regular visitors to the blog will have noticed that a few weeks ago I added a random quote generator to the top of the site, which serves an atheist quote every time the page is loaded. The quotes were originally from one of my first blog posts “101 Atheist Quotes“, with the occasional one added in when I find it.

I’ve also recently purchased the book “The Quotable Atheist” which is full of quotes about atheism / religion from popular people, so a few more should be added when I flick through it and find great ones.

The thing is, anyone can make atheist quotes. The popular ones are made by well-known people since they have a massive advantage of getting the quote out in the public domain. Some other popular ones are marked as “anonymous” but logic confirms they must have had some kind of origin. Why should atheist quotes be confined to anonymous people or popular philosophers / thinkers?

Back in May, I asked my forum members to come up with their own atheist quotes, which would be added to the random quote generator on the forums. Now that we’ve got a few I can fulfill my promise, but I’m also going to put them on the main site, and make the thread known to anyone who reads this post. So if anyone can think up any atheist quotes that are original (or witty modifications) please either join the forums and post, or post them in the comments to this article. They will *eventually* be added to the random quote generator with your name (if you give it) or your alias you use here. If you want your name linked to your website, please make it known!

Read more…

I found about the “Carnival of the Godless” a few weeks ago through various atheist blogs. For those who don’t know, every 2 weeks an atheist blog is chosen to host the carnival. Links are sent to the carnival and the best ones are chosen to feature. On the day of the carnival, the hosting blog posts all the links with descriptions. It’s a nice way to get good blog posts recognised, and for the hosting blog to get a bit of attention.

2 weeks ago, I thought it would be a good idea to submit a blog post of my own. I thought about submitting something controversial (like the one about Muhammad or Jesus), but instead I chose the post that really started the site off; “101 Atheist Quotes“. This post alone accounts for a small percentage of my daily traffic. It has the most comments of any of my posts, the most views (over 65,000 so far), and probably the most trackbacks.

To cut a long story short, it got featured in the carnival: Carnival of the Godless #89