Guest Post #2 - In His Image, by Tate

There are few things I like to hear from a Christian more than the claim that humans were created in God’s image. I love hearing this because it’s a signal to stop debating and start ridiculing. You can’t argue against it any more than you can argue about the number of limbs Shiva has. What you can do though, is point out how completely devoid of any thought such a claim is.

First of all, when you ask why there is absolutely no evidence to suggest their God’s existence, many Christians will wriggle and squirm as much as possible to express the idea that their God is somehow beyond the realm of science; that he is a non-physical being despite the many physical interactions he allegedly has with the observable world. Which of course, prompts that ultimate question they never seem to understand: How then can you determine such a being exists? We’re going to skip past that for now though, because it usually just leads to that endless circle of “the Bible says He exists, and He wrote the Bible so therefore He exists.” Instead let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that that He really does exist in the physical universe as we know it, and has some sort of preferred physical form in which image He made us.

Now that we’ve got Him trapped in our otherwise orderly universe, let’s make Him play by the very same rules that everything else must abide by. Assuming God is actually guiding everything in the universe so it works properly and not just sitting on His divine ass watching us struggle, how much energy would he need to run everything and where would said energy come from? Does He eat, shit, and breathe like the miserable creatures he inexplicably created in His image? Since our respiratory and digestive systems are modeled after His own, it would seem that He does! Furthermore, based on the way our bodies process food, it would seem that the Christian God is an omnivore.

But here’s where things get really tricky. Our digestive system really only works optimally with the help of other organisms. That’s right, microscopic bacteria live inside of you and help you get the most out of your food, which is why people often experience stomach problems while on antibiotics. But what of God? Does He have a symbiotic relationship with some sort of divine bacteria? Of course not! The very idea that God needs any sort of assistance for anything is blasphemous, which is why the best possible claim any Christian can make about the nature of their God is that He is and always will be completely and totally unknowable.

I love when they make the claim that we’re created in His image because it forces them to question what would otherwise be just another mindless mantra they repeat to feel better about their silly limited worldview. But unfortunately, their pondering is often corrupted by apologist pandering, which tells them that this is one of those convenient sections of the Bible that’s not meant to be taken literally. God is a non-physical being (just a concept, and not even a good one) and this passage simply means that He made us different and better than animals. This world and everything in it (except that one forbidden tree for some reason) is just a pit stop for Christians to ravage on their way to Heaven, another thing God made exclusively for humans of the “One True Faith.”

Return of Jesus Returns - The Sequel

October 21st is the new date predicted for the return of Jesus by a crackpot Christian radio tycoon in the United States.  He first predicted the end would be many years ago, and was wrong.  He then claimed he made a mathematical error and that the real return of Jesus would be on May 21st of this year.  When that date passed and nothing happened, he claimed it was merely a "spiritual" judgement day, and that the real end would be on October 21st, 2011.  The self-proclaimed "true Christians" are jumping all over him, saying that their scripture says people can't predict the end, and calling on him to stop.

That's right.  A true Christian would never make a prediction that can be proven false, even if it is false.  And if they do slip up and make such a prediction, standard operating procedure is to not attach a date to it.  Predictions proven false would be embarrassing, so they seem content to have the fundamentals of their faith indistinguishable from the case in which their faith is completely incorrect.  These people are morons!

Will the "true Christians" please complete the following sentence.  For the sake of argument, imagine that you will live a very long time and could see any date you choose:

"If Jesus does not return by (insert time here), I'll have to admit that he's not coming at all and that Christianity is not true."

You don't know, so don't laugh at the religious!

This is a special thread for a reader who goes by the handle, 'GM'.  Over the last couple of weeks, he/she (we'll be using 'he' until I know otherwise) has come to this blog and made several off-topic posts in threads, so I thought I'd make one just for him so that his posts at least won't be off-topic anymore.  The focus of his argument seems to be along the lines of, "You don't know how X, so you shouldn't laugh at the religious for making god-claim Y".

Well GM, here's the thing.  I AM going to laugh at the religious.  It is an argument from ignorance to assume that because we don't know something conclusively, that any dumbass supernatural explanation should not be ridiculed or should be given consideration.  If you don't know how your pencil got into the other room, that is not a licence to claim aliens did it.  The evidence in no way points to the supernatural, and all evidence we have for EVERYTHING and everything that has ever been proven, has turned out to be natural in the end.  The world has dealt with supernatural claims for who knows how many thousands of years, they have had billions of supporters throughout history, and not one of these billions of people has even managed to demonstrate that there is such a thing as the supernatural!  500 years ago you'd be telling me that we don't know how lightning is caused, therefore a god claim could be valid and I shouldn't laugh.  Disease used to be supernatural too, until somebody came along with evidence.

How does science work?  It takes careful consideration of the available evidence to make the best conclusion we can at the time.  Sure it's wrong sometimes, which we discover when new evidence becomes available.  Do you not see the difference between this method and the religious one?  I'm sticking with the scientific method, as it is the best way we have ever come up with to determine what the truth is.  I'll put science's track record of success up against religion's any day of the week.  Religion has ZERO track record of ever demonstrating any of its core claims to be true.  Science, through consideration of the evidence and adjustment when needed, has produced damn near everything we have in the world that has made our lives better.  If you know a better method than science to determine truth, we'd love to hear about it.

So no, I will not stop laughing at the religious with their woo claims.  Until they produce a shred of evidence, their explanations are off of the table.  Once they have proven that the supernatural is even real, which I stress again never seems to happen for some reason, then their future claims will have to be given some consideration.  But for now, religion has a track record of ZERO.  If you keep trying things one way and keep failing, repeatedly, without any successes EVER, you have to abandon that method for something that at least works some of the time.  In fact, even if science had worked only once in history, it would still be more reliable than religion.

My first question I have for you, which you can answer in the comments, is what exactly is your religious persuasion, or lack of?  My second question is, have you ever been to a Christian website and told them to stop telling atheists that they're going to hell, because they (Christians) don't know for sure?

The UN-amazing deity

A reader wrote this comment on my last post.  I like it, so I want to post it on the main blog.

"I think that the fact of existence is an amazing achievement of nature. The incredible progress that has been made bit-by-tiny-bit, gradually over billions of years, as the universe struggled to become what it is, is humbling and awe-inspiring.

But if a god created all this, then it becomes UN-amazing, it's a PATHETIC WASTE of "omnipotence". If you're magical and all-powerful, why should your creations rely on circulatory systems, nervous systems, DNA, be dependent on messy sexual reproduction, surviving by violently consuming one another? Why are we bound onto the surface of planets, while the vast majority of space is uninhabitable, radiation-soaked vacuum?

A god who could truly do ANYTHING should've done MORE. FAR more. Reproduction could be asexual. With fireworks! More creatures could regrow lost limbs. Or fly! The universe could be FULL of life instead of empty. Instead of stars and planets surrounded by hostile emptiness, it could be an infinitely tiered latticework of livable, explorable space, with no constrictions like gravity or pressure.

I can come up with better, more fantastic, more successful, more peaceful, more MORAL universes with simply my imagination, certainly better than creationists seem happy to give their god credit for. If there is a god responsible for all of creation, then he is a remarkably unimaginative god, creating a world shackled by the laws of nature, which is exactly what you would expect if it really WAS nature that was responsible for the universe."

The simplest life?

A religious reader recently suggested I watch an intelligent-design propaganda video starring Michael Behe.  If you're not familiar, Behe is a biochemistry professor at a respected university, but is also affiliated with the Discovery Institute, the creationist intelligent-design advocacy group.  I can't be bothered to dig up the video again, but the gist of it was as follows.  Behe argues that life is too complex to be formed by Darwinian evolution.  He says that scientists once thought single-celled organisms would be extremely simple, but then found things such as (his perpetual favourite) the bacterial flagellum, which is a complex structure.  He argues that even the simplest life is "hopelessly complex", therefore gods.

What Behe surely knows, but is not telling in the video (no wonder his side got called liars by a Christian judge in the Dover trial), is that today's single-celled organisms are far from the simplest life.  These are highly-evolved lifeforms, having the same billions of years to evolve that we have.  Most people are not aware of this, but (if I remember my biology properly, somebody correct me otherwise) there is far more genetic diversity in the microscopic world than there is in the macroscopic.  All of the plants and animals are more closely related to us genetically than many bacteria and archaea are to each other.  The earliest single-celled lifeforms most certainly would not have had complex structures like flagella, and Behe knows this.  Why didn't he say so?

Confession about my true de-conversion story

I've been writing this site for a couple of years now, and I think it's time for me to come clean about the true reason why I became a non-believer.  I wrote about it before with this post, but I now confess that it wasn't true.

It's true that I was a Roman Catholic.  When I was a teenager, the boys in the congregation used to take turns going on outdoor sports excursions with the parish priest.  When my turn came up, we chose to go rock-climbing.  So the two of us drove to the site in his convertible and started to gear up.

We always did the outdoor activities naked.  The priest said that's how God truly intended for His children to be.  If He wanted us to wear clothes, He would have made us born in a 3-piece suit, the priest used to tell us.  So we stripped down and put on our climbing harnesses.

The site was a sheer rock face, about 30 metres high.  The priest suggested I start to go up first and he follow from below.  He said it was easier for him to keep an eye on things that way, but I never understood why he had to follow me so closely.  Anyway, that isn't relevant.

But then something went horribly wrong.  Part of the rock fell away, triggering a larger collapse, and we fell to the ground.  The priest was unresponsive and I suspected he was unconscious.  I tried to escape from under the fallen rocks, but my penis was caught under a large boulder.  I tried to lift it, but it was too heavy.

There I was for hours, caught with my penis under the rock.  I realised that nobody knew where we were, as the priest liked to keep the exact locations and activities a secret, for privacy reasons.  He could not help in his state, so if I didn't get myself free from these rocks, I thought we both might die out there.

Then I made the most difficult decision of my life.  I detached my pocket knife from my harness and started hacking away at my penis.  After a few slices, it came right off.  In pain, I ran back to the car and used my phone to call for help.  The ambulance showed up within an hour, taking the priest and I to the hospital, where we began to recover.  The doctors all said I did a very brave thing, hacking off my own penis to save my life and my priest.

My recovery was long and difficult.  I often turned to the Bible for a Ray of Comfort.  Then one day, I came across this passage, Deuteronomy 23, verse 1:

"If a man’s testicles are crushed or his penis is cut off, he may not be admitted to the assembly of the Lord."

I was absolutely devastated!  Was not what I had done noble?  Was it not courageous?  Did I not save my own life and the life of a decent, holy man?  How could this be?  How could God not want me anymore? But the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, so I had to admit that I was no longer welcome into His Kingdom.  My priest had already been transferred by his superiors to another church somewhere else, so it wasn't like I had anything remaining there at all.  I left the congregation.

From that moment on, I have been a bitter atheist, fighting against God in any way I can.

Guest Post #1 - Omni-incompetence, by Tate

A while back I tried an experiment with guest posts.  I had a guy who claimed to be an atheist living in a Muslim country express interest in writing some posts, and I thought it would be a good idea to get that perspective.  It fell apart when, after writing just one post, he asked me for money.  Not just money, but BIG money.  It was equivalent to about half of my annual salary from my job (this site makes exactly zero per year, minus the domain cost).  So I told him to "fuck off" (in those words exactly) and took down his post.

Now I'm ready to try again.  A reader who we're going to call 'Tate' has written a post.  Note that Tate was not invited by me to do this, but took it upon himself to write to me and expressed an interest.  If you'd like to write some posts for this site, feel free to contact me.

Also note that I will post these guest posts without editing, and while I probably agree with the opinions in them, it is not necessarily so.  If you wish to engage the author in conversation, please do it in the comments section, not by contacting me directly.

Now, I'll turn it over to Tate.



The Christian God is supposedly the epitome of all that is intelligent and good in the universe. He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, (which I'm not even going to touch upon for now because that one itself is such a complex assertion) and above all, all-good. I've always found it fascinating that Christians can attribute all things good to God, and all things bad to the Devil, and that they can do this all day every day without realizing that God created the endless source of evil they call the Devil. Being creations of God, all good things humans do are attributed to him, but since we are vile, tainted creatures, all bad things are the Devil's doing. But wait a minute! Lucifer was an angel, one of those creatures that God created prior to man for purposes no logic can fathom. Whatever terrible things the Devil has or probably has not done, God is ultimately to blame for His shortsightedness and general incompetence in creating the bastard in the first place.

Assuming that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, He would have known from the very beginning of the Universe that Lucifer would turn against Him. The very moment He was sitting in Heaven and thinking to Himself “I'm going to create a retinue of angels to carry out my work, even though being all-knowing and all-powerful I can manage my own affairs effortlessly, no matter how infinitely complex they become,” from the moment that thought occurred to Him, He should have known all possible outcomes and consequences. He would have known that creating Lucifer would lead to the corruption of mankind, causing Him to eventually send the flood, and later His only son to attempt to “redeem” us. Any God who actually cares about His creations might have examined those consequences using His infinite foresight, and decided that maybe that one angel, Lucifer, could be made just a little bit better, or maybe not made at all. But we all know what happened, God made Lucifer, who became the Devil, who continues to plague us all to this very day. But it's OK, He has some divine plan that no human can possibly comprehend, but which will make the whole thing work out better than if no evil had been created in the first place. Somehow.

Of course, there is an alternative; God really is all-good, but just not all-knowing and all-powerful. Maybe He's just some well-meaning guy who ended up with a job He really can't handle. I'm not sure who I would pray to if I had to chose, the benevolent but incompetent God, or the all-powerful God who just doesn't give a shit about humans. Fortunately there is a third option: simply reserve your prayers until you find a deity that actually deserves them, then thank him that there are so many to chose from.