Advocatus Atheist

Click to enlarge To preface this: It's my response to an absurd meme that shows a bunch of animals on the endangered animal watch list and then, next to these majestic animals, shows a pregnant woman with text that reads something like "It is legal to kill the babies of only one of these animals."  Of course, I am in a bad mood today and so I just couldn't bite my tongue. I normally just keep scrolling. But today I had to point out the fallaciousness of the meme and that it's a false equivalency. The offspring of the animals depicted are protected by law, sure, but so are all human born babies. Human babies are not being murdered en mass after birth (only in the imaginations of whacked out pro-lifers completely detached from reality). Needless to say, pointing out that this wasn't a valid argument of any kind ruffled the feathers of at least one super duper concerned citizen. I love the paranoia of these zealot Christians masqu...

I'm  Imagine a world with no religion. I'm not talking about zero religious belief, spirituality, or superstition. I am talking about organized religion that reinforces all of these things and bottles them up in one convenient to access package of ideologies ready made to believe without any effort. What if this influence faded into, well, nothing? What would that look like exactly? Now, hear me out. I realize it's not likely, nor at all that realistic.  The psychologist Bruce M. Hood's books Supersense and The Science of Superstition do a great job at illustrating why we have superstitious beliefs in the first place. Apparently, our brains are hard wired to experience certain types of errors that lead to superstitious reasoning more often than not. Jesse Bering's book The Belief Instinct applies this well known fact and asks how much do our superstitious beliefs feed into our everyday beliefs systems, including religion. It's no ...

In a bit of strange... The Friendly Atheist over at the Patheos blog has  posted a very strange article about an altercation between a Fake Jesus and an anti-abortion protest crowd. Apparently, Fake Jesus counter-protested anti-abortion protesters. The protesters didn't like being counter-protested, so confronted Jesus and created a scene.  Tempers flared and one of the anti-abortion protester spat on Jesus.  Apparently Jesus didn't appreciate that and JUDO kicked the motherfucker who spat on him.  Now, in the aftermath of it all, the good ole Christian community -- who is in support of the rude and degenerate anti-abortion protesters (no surprises there) -- find out Fake Jesus's REAL identity and got him fired then ran him out of town in the name of -- Jesus? WTF?! Needless to say, I don't condone violence of any kinds. But the Christian dude spat on his own lord and savior! Albeit, just an impostor. But still. Bad form. I ...

I just thought I'd share another short snippet of the  Swedish Fish, Deflating the Scuba Diver and Working the Rabbit's Foot  by opening up the book at random and sharing with you all wherever my finger so happened to land. This time it's from Chapter 18, pages 175 to 178: In chapter eighteen, “From Personal Cause to Most Perfect Being,” we find out that the vague and nebulous hypothetical personal agent who spawned the universe is, low and behold, the one and only Perfect being as described by Christian theology! Coincidence? I think not. Although Randal admits that a ‘personal cause’ is not a satisfactory definition for God, he explains that I’m certainly not claiming that the statement ‘personal cause of the universe’ is a religiously satisfactory definition of God. But even if that description doesn’t say all a Christian wants to say about God, it certainly says something important. Christians believe that God is the creator of all thing...

I just thought I'd share a short snippet of the Swedish Fish, Deflating the Scuba Diver and Working the Rabbit's Foot  by opening up the book at random and sharing with you all wherever my finger so happened to land. This is it (from page 213) here: Raising the question of Yahweh’s imperfect character in the Bible, such as jealousy and homicidal tendencies, Sheridan challenges Randal to provide reasons for his continued belief that Yahweh is still a perfect being despite such failings. Since I believe that Yahweh is the greatest possible being, I must conclude that he did not actually command these actions. That’s right, true believer—God’s behavior in the Bible is just so shocking, so utterly detestable, so terrifyingly dreadful, so God-damned awful, that Randal simply saves God by affirming it wasn’t God that commanded such acts, but the Israelites acting on the false assumption that God commanded them to enact such atrocities. Well, so much fo...

It seems there is a mass shooting in America at least once a week now. I really don't know of any other form of societal psychosis with such ill side effects that is as frequent except for, perhaps, bullying. Now I'm not talking about mental illness here per se, although this does seem to be a factor we always need to keep in mind. But as I was thinking about some of the reasons for why mass shootings are on the uptick, aside from the number of guns anybody can get their hands on, it dawned on me... what if mass shootings were an expression of one form of serial bullying. Now what do I mean by serial bullying? Well, Tim Field , founder of The Field Foundation and Bully OnLine , coined the term to describe the character of a certain type of individual with very specific behavior traits that he cataloged while documenting over 10,000 cases of workplace bullying when he was manager of the UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line. Serial...

It could be said that skepticism, atheism, and freethought go hand in hand. But they also can stand on their own. When I was a believer I still upheld the values of skepticism, of questioning the world, of having doubts. Of course, I was always told to have faith, and to walk the good path, and to listen for God's calling... but the more I learned, the more doubts I had. Eventually my skepticism overrode my credulity. I could no longer maintain a standard on incredulity based on my desire to uphold faith above all else -- even if it meant maintain the faith when I knew it wasn't truth. I just valued Truth more than Faith. And, no, they are not one and the same thing as so many religious friends have tried to tell me. That's just a religious semantic trick to try and stronghold the truth and make it "God's truth" and then say if you don't believe in that then you don't have the truth. It's an empty shell game, because anyone ...

So you think abortion is murder do you?  If so, then this post is for you!  And I have some serious questions that I need to ask you regarding abortion. You say abortion is the deliberate taking of a helpless life, and that it equates to murder. This suggests to me that you take "life" to be sacred, correct? (Sanctity of life and all that jazz.) If so, let me ask you some questions that we must resolve before I take your claim serious. 1. Do you eat meat? Or isn't animal life sacred? If not, why not? Aren't animals part of God's creation just as humans are? 2. For that matter, how does one go about determining what is and isn't sacred? 3. You say abortion equates to murder. This is a legal term. I am curious, at what point do you consider a collection of living cells to become a "life" unto itself?  4. Do you think it's at conception?  5. If so, would it still be murder ...