Okay, yes I know I posted this video last Christmas, but it’s just so damn funny that I had to post it again! Besides, I thought some of my newer readers may have missed it when I posted it last time. A word of warning though: this video may be highly offensive to Christians of delicate sensibilities.

Speaking of Christians, I’ve been starting to receive emails letting me know that not all Christians are extremists who want to force their beliefs on other people. Well of course I do know that: if all Christians practised the sort of modern, progressive and—above all—peaceful and tolerant outlook advocated by such people as Bishop John Shelby Spong, then I wouldn’t feel any need to write about Christianity at all. But sadly, we know that isn’t the case, especially in the US, where fundamentalist Christianity is on the rise. And many moderate Christians make apologies for such people, instead of attacking them head on as the threat to the future of humanity (and indeed Christianity) they are.

So having said that, I would like to wish a merry Christmas to all my more progressive and tolerant Christian readers and fans, and a happy holidays to all!

After looking as though no deal might be struck at all, a last minute agreement has been reached at the Copenhagen summit on global change. Although the deal is disappointing, as Obama says, it is only the beginning, not the end, and in my opinion far better than no deal at all. At least now we have something to build on—as Australia’s leading campaigner on climate change Tim Flannery has said, I think we have to accept the political realities, and accept this deal as a positive outcome overall.

And boy, have their been a lot of political hurdles to overcome! Of course we’ve had the predictable acts of self interest from many of the countries involved. Most depressing of all, however—just when I thought we’d finally reached agreement on the reality of climate change (if not its cause or what to do about it)—has been the massive resurgence of climate change denial. Even here in Australia, we have had a change of leadership of the political opposition over this issue (the so-called ‘Liberal’ party, who are in fact anything but liberal, especially now). They have now staked out an election platform opposing an Emissions Trading Scheme as “nothing but a great big, fat tax”, even though (under their previous far more liberal leader) they had already agreed to support the scheme, and when they were previously in government, they ended up settling on a similar scheme themselves. This is blatant political opportunism, although this is nothing new for the Australian Liberal party, who don’t seem to have any principles at all, except for their desire to win elections at any cost.

The fact that climate change denial has become a political opportunity in the first place is the most depressing thing of all though. It seems that since the global economic crisis, people have become so obsessed with the almighty dollar that they want to ignore climate change, even to the point of wanting to convince themselves that it isn’t actually happening at all. People have become willing to accept the most improbable of conspiracy theories—a green conspiracy to deindustrialise the world, a United Nations conspiracy to impose world government etc.—while the reasons for climate change denial are very simple, clear and obvious: the desire of powerful, polluting big business to maintain as much short term profit as possible, and the desire of individuals to avoid paying extra taxes. It has gotten to the point now that whenever you do a search for political news videos on YouTube, you are greeted instead with endless conspiracy theory videos—it seems that the combination of human greed and insecurity makes us willing to accept the highly improbable over the blindingly obvious.

I will be the first to admit that human induced climate change is far from certain—there are just far too many uncertainties and variables involved, particularly as we are dealing with two of the most unpredictable things of all: the weather and the future. Climate change deniers love to pick up on every little uncertainty in the scientific data, and given the nature of this issue, there’ll be plenty of it. Yet at the same time, the climate change deniers are certain that climate change isn’t happening—this exposes their insincerity, as they can’t have it both ways. Furthermore, the contention that the world has been warming since the start of the industrial revolution is backed by a wealth of data, and quite frankly, it just doesn’t seem reasonable to me that all the crap we pump into the environment wouldn’t have any effect on it at all. Indeed, we know for a fact that it leads to pollution, which surely is in itself a good reason to reduce our emissions anyway. Even more importantly, we’re going to run out of fossil fuels eventually in any case, and as we do, their cost will become ever greater, and they will cause ever more wars. The cost of switching to renewable energy resources is relatively small, and will lead to huge cost savings in the long term. If human induced climate change is real however, the cost of inaction could be catastrophic—and likely will be anyway even if it isn’t real, as we fight over the last of the world’s fossil fuel resources, and the pollution of our environment increases. For goodness sake, let’s give the planet the benefit of the doubt here—this really should be a no brainer.

Let’s begin with their most often cited ‘evidence’ for this idea, the great tyrants of the 20th century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Il etc. These people were supposed to have been atheists, yet they are responsible for the greatest acts of genocide in the last 100 years. Surely this must prove that—whatever problems religion might have—atheism is actually far worse? As a matter of fact, it doesn’t prove that at all—indeed, when we look at the evidence more closely, it actually leads us to the opposite conclusion. For a start (unlike the countless examples of people killed in the name of God), none of these people committed any of their atrocities in the name of atheism. They committed them in the name of Nazism, Communism etc., which tells us what is actually going on here. These were in fact new religions—the only reason these tyrants denounced other religions is so that they could become Gods themselves. It is noteworthy that communism spread far more effectively in the east than it did in the west, and I think there are two key reasons for this. One is that the oriental countries have basically always accepted the idea of their king, emperor etc. being an earthly God, so it wasn’t really anything new to accept their communist leader as one. The other reason of course is that full democracy was already well established in the west, which naturally leads the people of those countries to question their leaders, and not blindly follow them. Which leads to my next point.

If the majority of the population were naturally inclined to always question what their leaders tell them, then how would the dogma of Nazism, communism etc. have ever become established in the first place? That, in essence, is what atheism actually is: it is not accepting what we are told on the basis of faith, but rather—and only—on the basis of hard evidence. This is why we have jokes like “organising atheists is like herding cats”—it is very difficult to get atheists to believe in something, unless you make a very strong, rational case for it, with very strong supporting evidence. While it is true that many atheists support socialism, this is definitely not the same thing as the communism practised by Stalin, Mao, Kim Jog-il etc. Indeed, democratic socialism has been shown to work very well in the countries which have practised it (most notably the Scandinavian countries). Theists often like to say that atheism is a religion in itself, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the word atheism probably shouldn’t really exist at all; we don’t define anybody else by their lack of belief in something, which is all atheism actually is (the word atheism literally means lack of belief in God)—it doesn’t say anything about what atheists believe in, only what they don’t believe in.

If we replace the word atheism with something like rationalism, we get a clearer idea of what most atheists actually do believe in—and we can see these tyrants do not follow this belief system at all. Indeed, it was blind faith—of the sort used and promoted by religion—which allowed these tyrants to gain the huge following they needed to do their dirty work in the first place. When our most cherished beliefs (our religions) are based on faith rather than hard evidence, it leaves us completely open to manipulation by unscrupulous political leaders. Indeed, none other than Hitler himself was perfectly happy to use the existing apparatus of religion when it suited him—he quoted the Bible extensively in support of his campaign against Jews, for example (indeed, it seems very likely that Hitler was in fact a Christian, and not really an atheist at all). Perhaps even worse, established religion was very happy to support these tyrants themselves when it suited them—the Vatican actively aided and abetted the Nazis’ genocide and victimisation of Jews, for example, and even assisted several high level members of the Nazi regime to escape prosecution for war crimes after they lost World War II.

This leads to perhaps the most damning indictment of religion as an arbiter of morality: the fact that so much of what religion says—and what its followers do—is so immoral. The religiously justified genocide I mention above is just one of countless examples of people doing the most horrible things in the name of God; in fact, there’s so many of them, I won’t even start to list them here, or this post will go on forever. Instead, I’ll just focus on a little of what the Bible has to say regarding morality, to see if it really is likely to make us more moral. Let’s start with the example of God himself—if God is the enforcer of our morality, then surely he must set the highest moral standards of all. Actually, the complete opposite is true: the God of the Old Testament is in fact the cruelest genocidal maniac we know of! The tyrants I mentioned at the start of this article all pale in comparison to God—the Bible documents him as having killed literally millions of people, often in the most painful and tortuous way possible. He advocated and enacted death and destruction on a scale unimaginable to even the most cruel of human beings. Even the ten commandments—where he is supposed to have laid out the moral standards we are supposed to follow—document extraordinary cruelty. Disobeying any of them (even something as innocent as working on a Sunday, as all priests and housewives do in any case) is punishable by death. He literally says he is a jealous God (hence violating one of the seven deadly sins), so the punishment for worshipping other Gods is particularly monstrous: not only must the perpetrator be killed, but also their family—for four generations! Given what both the Bible and Koran say about non-believers, is it any wonder we have endless war and killing in the name of God?

Then there’s all the stuff that should be in the ten commandments but isn’t. A good example of this is how there is a commandment saying we should honour our parents, but there isn’t anything saying we shouldn’t commit child abuse, or even pedophilia. Then there’s the example of Lot, who offered up his daughters for gang rape (Genesis 19:8) and later impregnated them himself (Genesis 19:30-38)—yet he was spared from God’s genocide of Sodom and Gomorrah, because God considered him “just and righteous”! (Alas, his wife was not so lucky—God turned her into a pillar of salt for looking back at God’s destruction of her lifelong home, and all the rest of her family and friends.) There also isn’t anything forbidding slavery: in fact God gives very specific instructions on how we should buy, sell and even beat our slaves—including selling our own daughters into sex slavery (Exodus 21)! Then there’s all the hopelessly antiquated references, such as “thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s ass”. The ten commandments clearly are not the word of any God, but rather those of a particular group of people at a very specific time and place. Of course, many Christians conveniently choose to ignore the Old Testament, relying only on the words of Jesus. The problem with that is that Jesus himself believed in the Old Testament and saw nothing wrong with it; in fact, he specifically says that’s how things will be when he returns to earth to bring about end the world (Luke 17:27-32).

Then there is another even deeper problem with Christians choosing to only follow the teachings of Jesus, and ignore the Old Testament: this means they are choosing their own morality, rather than following that which is laid out in the Bible. This is perfectly understandable, given God’s outrageous immorality in the Old Testament, and how much our own standards of morality have moved on since Biblical times (such as the examples of slavery and child abuse/pedophilia I mention above). Yet it shows very clearly that for these Christians—and indeed the entire human race, given how our own current moral standards are so much greater than God’s—our morality does not come from God, but from ourselves. So how the does our morality actually come about? That’s a story for another post.

With Obama’s announcement of a 30,000 strong troop surge in Afghanistan, I thought it would be a good opportunity to look back on the so-called “war on terror”, and how well it has been prosecuted by both US administrations involved (Bush and Obama). Although I’ve always been of the opinion that the war in Afghanistan was probably a losing battle, given that the US and its allies are already there, I guess it makes sense to try and “finish the job” with a massive troop surge. It is different from the situation in Iraq, in as much as Afghanistan actually was a haven for terrorists, and likely will be again should the Taliban regain control of the country. Importantly though, there must be some kind of deadline for when the US and its allies pull out, regardless of whether the surge is successful or not. Obama’s timeline of a staged pull-out starting in 18 months seems reasonable.

Whether Obama’s decision ultimately proves to be correct or not, I think any reasonable person would agree that it is much better to focus military efforts on Afghanistan than to squander them in Iraq, as the Bush administration did. Indeed, a new report indicates that the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war in Afghanistan was always under-resourced, leading to the escape of Osama Bin Laden into Pakistan. The US military basically had him trapped in the Tora Bora mountains, but didn’t apply the force necessary to capture or kill him—instead he just slipped away into Pakistan. This once again leads me to wonder whether the Bush administration ever had any genuine intention of stopping Bin Laden. When September 11 happened, I was astonished that four large passenger aircraft could be hijacked within such a short period of time, and not only was nothing done to stop them, the government supposedly didn’t even know anything about it until the Twin Towers got hit by a second aircraft! Given the intelligence information warning of such an attack, this unbelievable lapse of security is even more astonishing—it really looks as though the Bush administration simply allowed it to happen. Please note that I am not saying the Bush administration actively assisted Al Qaeda (although this is of course possible), but they sure didn’t seem to try very hard to stop them.

So why would the Bush administration allow Al Qaeda to attack they US, and allow Osama Bin Laden to escape into Afghanistan? I think because they were desperate for an excuse to invade Iraq, and even more importantly, they needed an enemy to scare the American people into voting for them, and to allow them to take away Americans’ civil rights with the so-called “Patriot act”. Funny how republicans are always the ones who complain about their constitutional rights being taken away…