1. Fleas on the Horizon: In Defense of God

Comment #138504 by willerror on March 4, 2008 at 12:58 pm

--You see, I just don't get why those effects, if they are true, need to involve terms like "supernatural".--

Precisely. There isn't any such thing as the supernatural. Ghosts, gods, ESP, Atlantis, whatever--if it passes the scientific test, it's entirely natural. The supernatural cannot exist. But people are too swept up by old TV shows like X-Files or In Search Of... and think there are two orders of reality, the natural and the supernatural. Ooh, scary! Sorry, that ain't how things work.

2. Fleas on the Horizon: In Defense of God

Comment #138434 by willerror on March 4, 2008 at 10:09 am

--Chris Hedges, a war correspondent and graduate of Harvard Divinity School, believes that evolution alone can't make us goodâ€"we need to believe in something. In I Don't Believe in Atheists (Free Press, Mar.), Hedges equates the new atheists to the fundamentalist believers they critique and suggests that they're just as dangerous.--

There it is again, the false dichotomy, the thought that both extremes are wrong and the answer is in the polite, reserved middle. Why, atheists, with all their reliance on reason, self-examination, critical thinking and skepticism are JUST AS BAD as priests who molest children, preachers who bilk their congregations out of their retirements funds, everyday Americans so blinded by faith that they see Jesus in grilled cheese sandwiches but can't identify the 10 commandments or the Sermon on the Mount--yeah, sure, whatever. You got your work cut out for you, Hedges. Thought you were smarter than that.

3. Moral thinking

Comment #131307 by willerror on February 22, 2008 at 8:10 am

Mark Hauser, of Harvard University, recently wrote Moral Minds, which I was excited to read. However, I was unimpressed--not with his ideas, necessarily, but the writing itself; found it difficult and even a little boring. I much preferred Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue and Michael Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil, as well as The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

I find this field of the biological basis for morality to be the most intriguing of scientific endeavors, and it certainly is the most damaging to theistic claims.

4. The Great Mutator

Comment #49768 by willerror on June 13, 2007 at 10:38 am

Wow. Besides Ken Miller's "Finding Darwin's God" (oh, and of course Judge Jones's ruling) this is the best smackdown of ID ever. Complete and easy to read for us non-scientist science geeks.

5. I Don't Believe in Atheists

Comment #44354 by willerror on May 24, 2007 at 12:08 pm

--I think Chris Hedges is one of those people who, like a lot on my friends, are really atheists but refuse to give up the terminology.--

I thought the same thing reading this. There is nothing particularly "religious" or "spiritual" in his descriptions of human behavior; it is just that, human behavior. No gods necessary, humans still behave the same way.

6. Christopher Hitchens to God: Drop Dead

Comment #42031 by willerror on May 17, 2007 at 1:34 pm

I wish these "liberal reformers" Tananbaum speaks of would simply get to the ultimate reformation, i.e., there is no god at all, and all the good things that are done "in the name of religion" can easily be done in the name of the secular golden rule. People, it really is that simple.

7. The Colbert Report: The Intolerant

Comment #41965 by willerror on May 17, 2007 at 11:23 am

There are so many levels of irony in this clip it's exhausting; I didn't laugh once, just nodded my head in complete and world-weary agreement. Imagine the people out there who see no irony in this whatsoever. I'm going back to bed.

8. Hitchens on Falwell

Comment #41824 by willerror on May 17, 2007 at 6:27 am

I'm of two minds about Hitchens' rant: one, it's fantastic that Falwell is being called out like this by someone so eloquent (although I don't think Falwell was a conscious fraud); but two, Falwell is such an easy target. As much as he was in the news with his outrageous pronouncements, he was mocked and reviled and laughed at for years. Hitchens isn't telling many people what they don't already know.

Then again, he has influenced millions with his school, his insane Zionism, his Moral Majority (and with it, Reagan and most later powerful Republicans) and I shudder to think of the people who agreed with him--and you know they're out there--on his pronouncement about the causes of 9/11.

As I said elsewhere: next up, Billy Graham.

9. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

Comment #41029 by willerror on May 15, 2007 at 11:18 am

I just found out Hitchens is appearing tonight in a debate in my town, 2 literal minutes from my house! Glad I didn't find out tomorrow morning, which is usually how those things work out for me.

10. Christians and Atheists to Debate Existence of God in First-Ever 'NIGHTLINE FACE OFF'

Comment #37151 by willerror on May 3, 2007 at 1:32 pm

--"On the Day of Judgment," Comfort tells one man on the streets of New York, "God will see you as a lying, thieving, blasphemous, adulterer at heart. You have sinned against God. You need his forgiveness."--

I would punch him in the fucking face if he said this to me or someone I love. What a worthless, lying, hypocritical, deluded *psychopath.* And yet, I would be the one in legal trouble.

11. Richard Dawkins in the Time 100

Comment #37073 by willerror on May 3, 2007 at 10:35 am

Michael Behe? Michael Behe? That exposed little fraud, marginalized even by his own university? What is Time magazine thinking?

Oh, that's right--it's not.

And who is that blonde woman? Is it Cameron Diaz? Cate Blanchett? Who?

12. 'god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything' by Christopher Hitchens

Comment #36181 by willerror on April 30, 2007 at 12:32 pm

So the gist of reviews like this is... only atheists read books about atheism, so no one should bother to write books on atheism b/c it's just "preaching to the converted"? That's just what folks like this want. Pretty sneaky, that.

13. Fighting Words: A wartime lexicon

Comment #35097 by willerror on April 26, 2007 at 7:35 am

OMG! This writer is someone who is quite occasionally brilliant, is a drinker and might not be such a great guy to know personally? Heaven forfend! There's never been anyone like that before! Good grief, people.

I have to say, I think I like the above excerpt even more than Dawkins on the same topic. I'm awaiting the book from Amazon at this moment.

14. Study: Religion is Good for Kids

Comment #34866 by willerror on April 25, 2007 at 1:28 pm

Yes, because religion *is* for children. Put away childish things, etc.

15. The Age of Darwin

Comment #32204 by willerror on April 16, 2007 at 7:15 am

I was frightened when I saw that well-known rightist Brooks was taking on Darwin, expecting another "Darwin doesn't know everything!" kind of conservative blather, but was pleasantly surprised by this article. Well done. I like how he dismisses creationists as "like the Greeks who still worshiped Athena while Plato and Aristotle practiced philosophy." Nice.

16. Creationism debate continues to evolve

Comment #29727 by willerror on April 4, 2007 at 1:32 pm

I've never understood the big deal about "free will" when it comes to shit like children starving, dying, or the Holocaust, or cancer, or tsunamis, etc. We can live our lives perfectly fine without having to "learn" from any of that shit. All that "free will" stuff is after-the-fact rationalizing; precisely upside down and backwards theorizing, as all religions and superstitions are.

17. Creationism debate continues to evolve

Comment #29715 by willerror on April 4, 2007 at 11:54 am

SRWB, that's an excellent point. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that the very existence of life as we know it tells us there is no god of any kind. Any god surely could have created us, life, in its own ethereal spirit world without biological processes. If god as the theists understand him is "spirit" or "outside of nature," why then is life "inside" nature, or of nature? Why be separated from a god at all? No, for me, existence itself is enough proof of god's non-existence.

18. The God Debate

Comment #29289 by willerror on April 2, 2007 at 1:46 pm

I was shocked--or perhaps I wasn't--by Warren's shallow, cookie-cutter, clueless platitudes. Anti-evolution? Check. Atheists are "angry" and "arrogant"? Check. Humans are just "ooze"? Check. Lunatic, liar, Lord? Check. And last, but not least, the Grand Poobah of 'em all, Pascal's Wager. Check. Fucking hell. Well, what should we expect from the man that wrote the best-selling hardcover non-fiction book of all time? It's one big glorified Hallmark card. I know people have been stupid throughout all of history, but do we Americans have to put people on a pedestal for it and give them all our money?!

19. Hell is real and eternal: Pope

Comment #28635 by willerror on March 30, 2007 at 7:37 am

"Imagine you are standing in a lake of fire. The pain is so bad as to be worse than the worst pain you can possibly think of. Now imagine that there is a huge ball made of brass, as big as the sun. Every 1000 years a butterfly takes off and flies towards it. On reaching it, the butterfly's wing gently brushes the ball's surface... By the time that ball has been worn away to nothing, your suffering will have only just BEGUN!"

Christ, Catholic priests sound like the demonic Cenobites from Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" movies! Disgusting, immoral, and pathetic, priests frightening children like that...

20. Religious Conviction vs. Political Dogmatism

Comment #26945 by willerror on March 22, 2007 at 12:58 pm

So are we supposed to congratulate these people when they accept 21st century science and join the rest of the modern world, yet they still want to deny evolution and a woman's right to choose? All that infighting and recrimination for an even more confused worldview than before. Give me a nice honest rabid fundamentalist any day than this kind of muddled interpretation of reality.

21. Lonely Atheists of the Global Village

Comment #26433 by willerror on March 19, 2007 at 9:46 am

A well-written & thorough piece that just happens to be filled with cliche. There's the "religion is comforting" cliche, the "atheists are as bad as fundamentalists" cliche, the "atheists criticize the wrong kind of god" cliche, the "atheists don't understand theology" cliche, and the "religion is believed by many good people" cliche.

None of that stuff, not one drop of it, has anything to do with whether any of the claims made by religion are actually true. That is what no critic of atheism ever truly understands, no matter how well (or long-windedly) one writes.

22. 'God Is Not a Moderate'

Comment #25794 by willerror on March 15, 2007 at 6:53 am

"But even after you have been saved by reason, you will die, Sam. And what will save you then?"

Well, nothing. Why frame this question in such an alarmist manner? Any comfort religion affords people has nothing to do with its truth claims.

23. Atheists come in last

Comment #22824 by willerror on February 23, 2007 at 1:20 pm

No way is Obama a Muslim; he's only moderately Xian. After reading an excerpt of his autiobiography in Time, or Newsweek, and learning his parents were not religious, I suspect his embrace of Xianity is only b/c he decided to be a public figure. Religion was treated as any other mythology when he was growing up, he wrote. I too am a little turned off by his appeal to it now, but that's life in these United States. I have to be a realist about it. That said, I think he might be friendlier to non-believers of all stripes than anyone else, precisely because of his upbringing.

24. Interview with Alister McGrath, author of 'The Dawkins Delusion?'

Comment #21038 by willerror on February 7, 2007 at 11:13 am

--But it's obvious that people think a lot about their faith and this is grounds for evidence - but it's not the same as scientific proof. It belongs in a different category.—

And later:

--I would also argue that in terms of its own place in history the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is extremely well grounded.--

Well, which is it? If religious belief requires no scientific proof and only faith, what does it matter if the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is "well grounded"?

25. Believing In Things Unseen Is Not Delusion

Comment #20731 by willerror on February 6, 2007 at 7:00 am

--Believing In Things Unseen--

Isn't that one of the definitions of "delusion"? Hmm.

--upon a cross, a father committed the ultimate act of love, giving his son's life for all others--

What a load of rubbish. Human sacrifice is not love; it is *barbaric.*

26. God and gorillas

Comment #20283 by willerror on February 1, 2007 at 1:40 pm

"I think my stance is rather beautiful because it's about "agnosis"; that means not knowing."

Gee, thanks a fucking lot. Why should I care about your work then, if you think you don't know anything?

Fucking agnostics.

27. Randi and 800 Other Amazing Skeptics

Comment #19156 by willerror on January 25, 2007 at 8:49 am

The problem with South Park's handling of Dawkins and atheists was that they fell into the same trap most folks do: atheism is another religion, as full of shit as the rest of them. This is, of course, patently false, and quite intellectually lazy. South Park can be hilarious--let's face it, the movie musical was incredible--but as a force for skepticism, it's more cynical and dismissive than actually *thoughtful.*

I've cooled a bit on Penn & Teller's Bullshit show as well, alas.

28. A Mission to Convert

Comment #15019 by willerror on December 28, 2006 at 7:15 am

--Dawkins spends much time on what can only be described as intellectual banalities: "Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question."--

I like these kinds of "banal" questions, because they point up the absurdity of most religious beliefs. Why are we wrong to wonder about such questions? Is it just because the answer we atheists get is one the theists dislike?