Heaving Dead Cats » Must Read

islam: Religion of Misogynists, Pedophiles and Barbarians

Neece — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:08:31 +0000

As if I needed any more proof that islam is barbaric, insane and disgusting, I found this video last night at AtheistNation. muslims have the gall to call themselves a religion of peace? Could you be any more hypocritical than that? Insane. Completely insane.

Please watch this 3 minute video:

I’ve been wanting to talk about this ever since I found out about it, but finding the video brought this issue to the forefront and gave me a clear venue for expressing my thoughts. A few months ago, my husband told me that muhammad was a pedophile. I admit I’d never read the quran so I didn’t know that. What could be more reprehensible than for a 52 year old man to fuck a 9 year old girl? There is no nice way to say it. It’s rape, it’s barbaric, it’s sick and evil, and beyond comprehension.

Here is a picture of a 9 year old girl. She certainly looks emotionally, physically and psychologically ready to be raped by her husband, doesn’t she? NO! Of course not! That’s horrific!

Ok, so muhammad raped his 9 year old wife. That disgusted me to find out. But to watch the above video and see that these horrid hateful men still follow this practice today, just because some asshole pedophile did it long ago is beyond disgusting. It’s not that it shocked me, considering their backward bronze age thinking on just about everything, but it made everything so clear in a simple 3 minute video.

Here are 9 year old girls ready to take on their “muslim duties” of being raped by their husbands.

Most 9 year olds are years away from puberty. They are children. They are not fully developed. According to Massachusetts General, puberty begins on average in the developed world around age 11. The first wisps of pubic hair appear on girls around 11 or so. The average age for onset of menstruation is about 13. Skeletal growth is not completed till about age 14 1/2. But when does a girl emotionally mature? Do you think a child of 9 is emotionally ready to handle sex? No. Of course not. Her body isn’t ready and neither is her mind.

Just because muhammad was a pedophile doesn’t mean that sickness needs to be perpetrated in the 21st century!? Unless of course you are a backwards culture still living in the bronze age.

I don’t know what else to say on this. I guess I’ll leave it here for now because it’s so repugnant to me that I am probably too furious about it to get my thoughts straight. Your thoughts are encouraged, as usual.

The God Delusion

sheisgod — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:04:17 +0000

I finally picked up the book Saturday night. I’m on Chapter 5. So far it’s amazing. Then again what did I expect from a genius.

Here are three of my favorite quotes from the book.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Main Features of Pseudo-Science

Neece — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 12:52:43 +0000

Yesterday I confessed my addictions to woo and how I realized it was all a pack of lies and nonsense. It’s been hard to learn to think more critically and skeptically about pseudo-science (the fancy grownup term for woo). Unless someone teaches you how to think critically, there’s really no way to easily pick out the slick pack of lies and shiny bullshit for what it is.

For instance, I just found out last month that Airborne is not only pseudo-scientific and completely useless, but can also be harmful. And here I was, just the day before, trying to get my husband to take it for an oncoming cold. Sigh…. The battle never ends.

For me, my bullshit radar with religion is very sensitive. Then again, if it’s about an invisible man in the sky, it’s complete nonsense, so that’s pretty easy. But when it comes to products on the market, any kind of scientific sounding news or claim, I am less sure about what to accept or what to reject.

A couple of days ago, I was listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast and they took the time to talk about how to spot pseudo-science for what it is. Since the list is so important and helpful, I took the time to write it down for all of us. Hopefully this will make it much easier:

Some Main Features of Pseudo-Science by Dr. Steven Novella on the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. Episode 164, September 10, 2008.

Hostility towards scientific criticism. So if you make a scientific claim and the scientific community calls you out on it, you complain that you’re being picked on, or that there’s a conspiracy against you. In fact, that’s just how good science is done, under scrutiny and criticism.
Making a virtue out of ignorance. Someone with no background in science says that’s a good thing. In fact, the best science is the most creative, and the way to get creative is to be well educated and knowledgeable about what you’re investigating.
Heavy reliance on testimony and anecdotal evidence rather than specifically referenced research. Very applicable in the medical realm.
Fundamental principles are often based on a single case. For example the founder of chiropractic thought he healed someone of deafness by manipulating a man’s neck, when in fact the hearing pathway never goes anywhere near the neck.
Claims often promise simplistic solutions to often complex problems or questions. The ”theory of everything” is a huge red flag here. There is no one simple scheme or answer to explain all that there is. So the more someone tries to explain with less, the more skeptical you should be of it.
Starting with the conclusion and working backwards. So if you have a fixed conclusion already, then you can just retrofit the information to suit your conclusion. So then you can cherry-pick all the information that supports your conclusion while ignoring all the information that refutes it. This is the heart and soul of pseudo-science. The key to science is that you have to move forward. You start with a hypothesis and you revise your predictions based on observations of your testing and experiments. If you start with the answer, you are not doing science.
Having a fixed belief. Never changing a hypothesis. So for example, straight chiropractic is saying the same thing they were saying a hundred years ago. Homeopathy has never changed what it says, never takes in new information and modifies how it works. Creationism is a fixed belief. Fixed beliefs are not science.
Techno-Babble. Using scientific language but ultimately meaningless jargon. Language is used properly when it increases the precision and makes things less ambiguous. If you listen to a pseudo-scientist, they use big words to add complexity without increasing precision is a red flag. Or using words that are made to confuse or impress.
Using bold or absolute statements rather than conservative qualifying statements that a careful scientist uses.
You can’t prove me wrong. Attempting to shift the burden of proof away from the claimant. This is backwards. If it’s your theory the burden of proof is on you to prove it correct.
Overturning established science left and right for your one theory. This is just incredibly implausible.
Making vague references to data. Scientists have shown, there is data etc, but nothing people can check up on or look at themselves.
Failure to consider all hypotheses. Cherry-picking the information again. Limiting the hypotheses to the one they want and a few token supporting ones, so that it looks like it’s well received. But when the list is prematurely or falsely limited, they’ve rigged the game.

Sam Harris Speaks Up About Palin

Neece — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 05:23:28 +0000

I got an email from Sam Harris this morning requesting that I let people know about his latest essay in Newsweek. I wasn’t sure exactly how to give it to you, so that I don’t just copy his whole essay here. So here’s the first paragraph, then several quotes from the rest of it that I thought were incredibly important. You can read the essay in its entirety at Newsweek here.

Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin’s performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin’s speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones “God and country.” If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.

…The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation.

…The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.

…I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn’t: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with millions of Americans—but we shouldn’t be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn’t ready for? He wouldn’t. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.

In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray “that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that’s what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan.” … Every detail that has emerged about Palin’s life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the “end times.” Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing—as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that “God’s going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you”?

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. … Palin’s spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of “the final generation,” engaged in “spiritual warfare” to purge the earth of “demonic strongholds.” Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: “All options remain on the table”?

But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin’s impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin’s daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who “intends” to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of “the dysfunction in the black community”?

We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush’s claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a “higher Father” before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush’s religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to “talk the talk” between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to “walk the walk” until the Day of Judgment.

There you go, several of the highlights. But the final two pages of the article are quite excellent as well. Whether you like her or not, please read the article. The McCain side wants to charm the sense out of people with her down-to-earth christian mom appeal. But this woman is dangerous. The chance of her being president if this country votes McCain/Palin is too risky.

If you value democracy, as opposed to a theocratic police state, now is the time to pay attention and encourage people to talk about the real issues and not the gloss and drama they are spoon feeding the public.

Inside The Evangelical Mind

Neece — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 06:54:53 +0000

It can be easy to feel superior to theists who blindly follow around like docile then alternately hostile sheep, parroting whatever bullshit is fed to them by their minister or media of choice. They seem stupid but they’re smart enough in some respects to be unnerving and to keep most of us supposedly intelligent freethinking atheists hiding in our closets. Although any mob is dangerous, and sheep are no exception.

What causes the sheep mentality? Does it only happen to dumb people? These are questions I am curious about especially after reading an excerpt from Matt Taibbi’s new book, The Great Derangement. I’ve never heard of Taibbi before, but he has his own Wikipedia page. He works for Rolling Stone, oh, and it seems that he is a regular contributor to Real Time with Bill Maher. Interesting.

So my friend linked me to freethoughtpedia to an excerpt of this book. It’s kind of long, but I found this to be an exceptionally compelling must-read.

Taibbi infiltrates a christian zionist church in Texas. He’s an atheist but he goes undercover to an “Encounter Weekend” to get a look “inside the evangelical mind-set that gave this country eight years of George Bush”.

I found it to be very insightful, frightening and downright hilarious reading. I would highly recommend it. If you’re going to read it and want the full experience, click here. Otherwise if you need more tempting, here are a few really compelling quotes from the excerpt:

There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. …

…those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that “inner you” begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest….

At any given moment, which one is the real you?

You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your “sinful” self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really?

…By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to “be rational” or “set aside your religion” about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you’ve made a journey like this — once you’ve gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It’s not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that’s the issue. It’s that once you’ve gotten to this place, you’ve left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you’re thinking with muscles, not neurons.

By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you’ve gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no “anything else.” All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this “our thing,” a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that’s all.

Here’s another link to the excerpt at freethoughtpedia.

Here’s a link to the book that it’s from: The Great Derangement

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

The Truth About Atheism

Neece — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:30:11 +0000

On December 24, 2006, Sam Harris wrote a piece for The Los Angeles Times called 10 Myths – And 10 Truths – About Atheism. I found it just the other day and wanted to share it with you in its entirety:

SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term “atheism” has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.

Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.

Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was “not at all to be tolerated” because, he said, “promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist.”

That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims “never to doubt” the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

3) Atheism is dogmatic.

Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity’s needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn’t have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.

No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the “beginning” or “creation” of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.

The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, “The God Delusion,” this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don’t know precisely how the Earth’s early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase “natural selection” by analogy to the “artificial selection” performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.

5) Atheism has no connection to science.

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

6) Atheists are arrogant.

When scientists don’t know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn’t know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn’t arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

8. Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature’s laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world’s religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn’t have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.

Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as “wishful thinking” and “self-deception.” There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.

If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

Atheism, Politics and Friends

Neece — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 22:51:29 +0000

I’m reading a book that is so good, so interesting, that I’ve highlighted almost every sentence. It’s a gold mine of ideas and information, a real treat to read.

If you looked at my book list, you’ll notice that I haven’t read all the “traditional” books that all other atheists seem to love. That’s not to say that I won’t, but I became an atheist when most of those books didn’t exist. Once I reached the point where I was ready to shed the oppressive mantle of religion, I was so relieved and felt so free, I didn’t have a need to read anything else on the subject for a long time.
Since I let go of god – all gods actually – a lot of books have finally come out about atheism. At the time, I didn’t even notice them. It was nice that it was being talked about, but I was happily god-free and in no need of conversion anymore.

Unfortunately in the last 8 years, the country has become increasingly polarized and fundamentalism has become very prominent. I blame the media. Needless to say, as an atheist, I now feel more isolated than I did when I originally realized that I was without a god. I now feel increasingly threatened by governmental, political and religious forces regarding my basic rights as a person and a citizen.

Perhaps the country has always been this religious and polarized and the media has just focused the spotlight on the ugly reality. I don’t know. But it was a personal thing for me when I lost all faith in the supernatural, and now it’s not personal at all. Maybe I was just ignorant.

Needless to say, I’ve increasingly realized that if I want to keep my basic constitutional rights, I can no longer sit back and rest on my laurels. I’ve got to stand up for myself and my rights.

It sounds like I’m mixing issues, I know. What do atheism and constitutional rights have to do with each other? Well, if you ask a christian, just about everything. If you ask an atheist/freethinker, nothing at all. And therein lies the issue. Being atheist is no longer a simple personal belief in no god. It’s become political, because conservatives and fundamentalists make it that way.

Most atheists keep their lack of faith to themselves. Why? Because they would be ostracized and attacked by people. The old saying “If you want to keep your friends, then you should never discuss politics or religion” is painfully true. I always keep politics and religion to myself in mixed company. I never openly tell others that I’m godless or what my political leanings are because I don’t want to deal with their bigotry and I’m not good at arguing. I also have come to understand that people who are fundamentalist christians, or even just “true believers” as well as left or right leaning in their politics are frightfully close-minded. No matter what I say, they will never listen, so it seems pointless to argue.

On the other hand, a dear friend of mine who was staunchly democratic told me, “I will never sleep with a republican.” What she meant was, she never wanted to get involved with anyone who was a republican because if she fell in love with him, it would be painful in the end when their belief systems inevitably clashed. It was better to get that out in the open right off the bat.

This is something I understand very well. I’ve met people that I think are just wonderful on the surface. After I get to know them, I realize I have nothing in common beyond that surface stuff, because they are religious and extremist in their political beliefs. Vastly different than my own.

In that sense, I think it would almost be better to wear an armband that states my beliefs loud and clear. I’m a godless heathen! I’m a moderate something or other. (I have no idea what exactly I am politically, sorry. There are too many damned labels and I’m not sure which is what. I know I’m a moderate though. That’s about it.) I have to admit that I’m afraid to stand up and tell people I’m god-free though. I’m afraid of being attacked and hated. Yes, I know, it’s something I’m going to have to deal with soon.

Well, many tangents later, I come back full circle to the book I’m reading. Atheist Universe – The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism by David Mills. I’m only through the forward and preface and into chapter one and have already killed one highlighter. I highly recommend it and will share bits and pieces of it with you over the next few posts, I’m sure. I’ll start simply by sharing his dedication. It sums this all up rather poignantly:

To all freethinkers, past and present, whose independence of mind isolates them from the sympathy and understanding of their community, but whose courageous and unwavering devotion to the scientific method has liberated their community from the Dark Ages.

I’ll wrap up for now by admitting one of my fears to you. I am afraid that this country, this society, is entering a New Dark Ages. I hope I’m wrong. I hope that reason wins, that light and science and logical thought prevails, but at the moment it seems very bleak with ignorance and god being America’s favorite choice.

Heaving Dead Cats » Must Read

islam: Religion of Misogynists, Pedophiles and Barbarians

Related posts

The God Delusion

Related posts

Main Features of Pseudo-Science

Related posts

Sam Harris Speaks Up About Palin

Related posts

Inside The Evangelical Mind

Related posts

The Truth About Atheism

Related posts

Atheism, Politics and Friends

Related posts