Reasons for not killing people

The atheist says:

"You shouldn't kill people, because everybody has a right to life. They only get once chance at life, and if you kill them, that chance is over, forever. Their lives are just as important as yours, and they have the same rights as you do. It is counterproductive to our society to harm each other, as only cooperation can allow our species to survive. Also, you wouldn't want somebody killing you, would you? Then show the same respect to others."

The Christian says:

"If you kill people, they will go to a wonderful place to live in paradise. However, you will be seen by my god. It will get angry, and send you to a terrible place to be tortured forever. I cannot prove that this place exists, but you can trust me, because I know. There is a way out, however. If you kill people, you can save yourself by accepting Jesus as your lord and savior. That will make everything all better, and then you can go to the wonderful place to live in paradise, too."

(and just for fun) The Islamic fundamentalist says:

"Kill them all, and you will get virgins!"



Is it really any wonder that super-atheist Japan has a murder rate between one-sixth and one-ninth that of the super-Christian USA? (If you're a good Christian, you'll reject these statistics as meaningless, and continue to ignore the rest of the world when arguing that Christianity leads to low crime rates, while lack of Christianity leads to violent chaos.)

Happy birthday, Atheist Propaganda!

It's now been 1 year since I began this site. I started it just as a place for me to vent, and remember being pretty surprised when I first saw that I was actually getting visitors. I'm flattered that people are interested in what I write.

Anyway, I've collected some of my favourite posts from the first year of the site, and listed them here:

Prayers for Madeline McCann - the site's first post
What's with the quote at the top of the blog?
The most serious failure
For my next trick, I will pull a statistical probability out of my ass!
The Atheist Bible - Authoritative Book of Atheism, 1st Edition
Science is not a democracy, so shut up!
The pope doesn't like knowledge either
The Atheist's Riddle... Oh no, I'm so scared! - my most popular post
Scientific proof vs. 'religious proof'
My embarrassing fantasies
Is the problem merely lack of awareness of the world?
Believers are closed-minded and dumb
Questions biblical creationists can't answer without making me laugh
Isn't science great?
We came from rocks?
Your imaginary friend won't heal them, so we have to try!
Oh... that's just a bad translation
I don't respect your insanity
Don't respect people who think we're going to hell
The Atheist's Riddle revisited
How many of my atheist readers are rapists?

Thanks to everybody who has visited the site!

The biblical god stoned me!

I read an article today about the oldest known Christian Bible (that is, with New Testament included), being posted online. According to the article, the book is missing some passages found in today's Bible, which doesn't surprise me. This will hopefully aid in exposing the fraud that is the Bible. Anyway, this isn't the main reason for this post.

The manuscript was discovered in St. Catharine's Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, which is located at the foot of Mt. Sinai. I visited the monastery on New Year's Day a couple of years ago, after walking to the top of the mountain. They had this bush on the grounds that it is said to be a descendant of the burning bush from the Bible, which gave the 10 Commandments to Moses.

Any fan of the TV show, Arrested Development, should remember the scene in season 3 when Gob is in Iraq and starts a riot when he tries to do a magic trick involving a burning bush, but the Iraqis start chanting "Burn Bush! Burn Bush!", complete with flaming effigies of that dumbass. So I stared at this bush in the monastery and started chanting "Burn Bush! Burn Bush!" I also thought it was pretty silly to worship what is believed to be a descendant of the real (*cough*) burning bush, which is located at what is believed to be the Mt. Sinai from the Bible (my understanding is that the jury is out on whether or not it is the correct mountain). So I began mocking that, too.

Just then, a bunch of rocks and dirt came out of the sky and landed on my head! I looked up, and saw nothing. Was the biblical god punishing me for my disrespect? Had I angered this ogre, who hasn't appeared in public in thousands of years, causing it to attack? Believers would say so, and would stop their investigation there, citing their faith as sufficient for explanation. I however, decided to investigate further. I took the extraordinarily time-consuming step of looking up, again! What did I see? I saw the head of a bearded monk peering at me from on top of the wall next to me. What was the explanation? A believer would argue that the monk had heard rumours of his god throwing rocks and dirt at an infidel, and had come to watch the smiting-in-progress. Personally, I think the monk threw rocks and dirt at my head. It just seems like the simplest explanation. I wonder if he spoke English, and understood what I was saying. Perhaps he thought I was an adulterer, and was stoning me as the Bible commands. Or maybe he was just a jerk who liked to throw rocks and dirt at tourists.

What do YOU think?

Win a lifetime of stupidity and gullibility!

This is funny. A game show in Turkey is going to have representatives of different religions compete to convert atheists to their faith. Check it out here.

The article says that the show "aims to turn disbelievers on to god". That's pretty funny, considering that they have a Buddhist monk on the show. I guess they don't give him much respect or chance of success. Probably just like the token minority on western TV shows. It's also funny because exposure to different religions is exactly what turned me into an atheist. By watching the religions all simultaneously claim the truth, (I'd like to think) anybody with half a brain would realise that they're all bullshit. I'll bet this show does a fair amount of damage to people's beliefs, and ends up being counter-productive.

Welcome to the 8th century

A video has been posted to YouTube of a church in the U.S. performing an exorcism on a gay teenager. I'd like to comment as little as possible, except a few lines below.

People often say that humans are an intelligent species. I couldn't disagree more. Only SOME humans are intelligent. The rest are irrational psychos. I write the following with as much condescension and disgust as I possibly can; these people do not deserve to be called 'intelligent'.

The news article is here. Notice the line in the article that says this is not the first time that this particular church has done an exorcism. The video is below. In the name of Jeeza! In the name of Jeeza! In the name of Jeeza! The blood of Jeeza!

Intelligent Design and the Two Courts

I'm a big fan of You-Tube user, Thunderf00t's, video series, Why Do People Laugh At Creationists? There are currently 30 videos in the series, but it's the latest one that I think is a real gem. The videos often use scientific knowledge to contradict the teachings of biblical creationists, the problem being that any good, shit-for-brains, biblical creationist will merely reject any scientific knowledge presented as being flawed. But Episode 30 in the series is a bit different because it catches a member of the Discovery Institute in his own web of lies, in such an obvious way that even creationists, in their limited mental capacities, should see it.

The video focuses on one particular twit, Casey Luskin. Now to Casey's credit, he doesn't appear to be a young-Earth creationist, as he has published at least one paper on orthodox geology, according to the video. Yet it's in Casey's other role, arguing for the inclusion of intelligent design into school classrooms, that he earns his shame.

At the beginning of the video, Casey is shown accusing "Darwinists" of an unwarranted conspiracy to tie together creationism and intelligent design, in order for it to be rejected from schools as the teaching of religion. He says that intelligent design is "agnostic" on the topic of the source of this intelligence. Later on in the video, he is shown arguing, through his various writings, that the intelligent design movement does, in fact, believe that the Christian god is the creator, and encourages young people to start groups which believe just that. He even uses the terms 'intelligent design' and 'creationism' interchangeably.

The video is quite good, and leaves absolutely no reasonable way out for Luskin, who has been caught in his lies and two-faced strategy. On the one hand, when trying to court the religious to support his cause, he claims outright that the Christian god did it. But on the other hand, when it comes time to go to court to argue that intelligent design should be in classrooms, he turns around and argues that intelligent design makes no such claim, and that it is entirely different from biblical creationism.

Once again, the lies and lack of moral integrity of the Christian god's followers have been exposed. And once again, the religious fall flat on their face while nipping at the heels of science like the little bitches that they are.

The full video is below:

The Atheist's Riddle Revisited

My first post on the Atheist's Riddle has been my most popular post, bringing in roughly one-third of the traffic received by the entire site. A search for Atheist's Riddle on Google and Yahoo rank my post highly enough that it is arguably the most popular rebuttal to Perry's ridiculous garbage on the internet. Because of this, I thought it was time to revisit the post, but from a different angle.

A possible rebuttal to my first post, though not a very good one, is "Hey, you can't use DNA and RNA as the examples of codes created by nature! You have to give a DIFFERENT example!"

I'd like to examine this objection, which will demonstrate why the style of proof attempted in the Atheist's Riddle is just pathetic. Keep in mind that I am not going to do what so many others have done and try to argue that DNA is not a code. I'll just grant him that, because it honestly doesn't even matter.

I am not a clock-maker (get the reference?). I don't make clocks for a living or a hobby, and you can look at hundreds of millions of clocks in the world and I haven't made any of them. But if you look in my closet, you will find a single clock that I made as a project in elementary school shop class. It has the San Francisco Giants' logo on it, as I was a huge baseball fan at the time.

Now, one could take that clock and make the following argument, which parallels the Atheist's Riddle quite well:

1. This object is a clock. It has hands and numbers around a dial, it ticks, and it can be used to tell time.

2. The author of the Atheist Propaganda site is not a clock-maker. All clocks are created by somebody other than him. There is no known instance of him creating a clock.

3. Therefore, this clock was not created by the author of the Atheist Propaganda site.

If you can find an example of a clock that was created by the author of the Atheist Propaganda site, you've toppled my proof. All you need is one.

Now the most obvious objection to this absurd argument is that I've only ever made one clock, and you're holding it! But if we allow the counter-objection that I cited above, you could try to make me find a DIFFERENT clock that I made. No such clock exists. Does that prove that I didn't make the San Francisco Giants clock that you're holding?

So the objection to my counter to the Atheist's Riddle really collapses under its own absurdity. What if nature only made one of these codes, or in this case, two? By denying their use as examples to 'topple the proof', you've really just made an ass of yourself. I think you can see why this style of argument is not a good one to use in trying to prove the existence of gods, but I'm not surprised that there would be people dumb enough to try.

Once again Perry, get bent.