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…

Also, with just a month to go until Christmas, I thought I should update my Amazon wish list, seeing as everything I put up initially has already been purchased—thank you again to everyone who sent me gifts (especially John, who was very generous indeed!). Even though I am a Godless heathen (and I suspect the vast majority of my readers are too), it seems that most secular people still like to celebrate Christmas in a non-religious way, and still enjoy purchasing gifts for their friends and loved ones. As I’ve stated previously, I think this is okay, as long as it is what people actually want to do, rather than what they feel obliged to do. So if you want to buy something for me for Christmas, please feel free to do so. But if you don’t want to, please do not feel any obligation to do so either.

First of all, there is the very obvious point that God is supposed to have created the universe and everything in it. This obviously means that God not only created the free will that compels us to do evil, but also evil itself. The Bible basically says as much in the creation story: God put the “tree of knowledge”* in the garden of Eden to tempt man to sin, complete with a talking snake** to tempt him even more. When man inevitably fell victim to God’s temptation, it is called the “original sin”—prior to that, man is supposed to have been perfectly innocent and completely free of sin. However, this is clearly impossible: if man was indeed originally free of sin, he would never have been able to commit the original sin the first place, as he wouldn’t have had the capacity to commit any sin at all. And it gets even worse than that: God is supposed to have created man in his image. As such, God didn’t only create man with the capacity to do evil, but God himself must also have that capacity. In fact, the most logical conclusion we can draw from the Biblical creation story is that God is a sadist, who created us so that he could tempt us into pain and suffering for his own personal amusement.

And believe it or not, it gets even worse than that! For much of the sin that is attributed to “free will” actually cannot even be called free will in the first place. By definition, free will is individuals making intellectual decisions of their own volition about something. However, when it comes to the sin that I lead people into—the most common sin of all, the desire for sexual pleasure—free will actually has nothing to do with it. The desire for sexual pleasure clearly isn’t an individual decision, because we all have a desire for it, and we all derive pleasure from it. The desire for sexual pleasure is not the result of an individual’s free will, but of a universal instinct we all share, not only as human beings, but as animals in general. Whether you think God made us or not, clearly we are made with a strong and fundamental desire for sexual pleasure. From a scientist’s point of view, this all makes perfect sense, as it drives us to reproduce and perpetuate life. But for a theist who thinks sexual desire and pleasure are sins, this is a huge problem: it means that God not only created us with the free will to commit sin, but he created us as sinful creatures by nature. Once again, this leads to the conclusion that God is a sadist who wants us to be wracked with guilt over the sins he has forced us to commit.

Ultimately, this all leaves us with only two logical possibilities: an evil, sadistic God, or none at all.

*Am I the only person who finds the name “tree of knowledge” both disturbing and very appropriate? The clear implication is that knowledge is evil, and that ignorance (in this case, blind faith) is good.

**So how did God punish the snake for tempting man into sin? By making him crawl on his belly for the rest of his life! How can any sane, educated person possibly take this ridiculous story literally?

UPDATE: I’ve just found out about a very clear-cut quote where God says he is the creator of evil:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. (Isaiah 45:7)

So there you go: as God himself says, evil didn’t originate through free will, but through God himself.

Image courtesy of Reuters: Johannes Eisele

November 9 marks the 20th anniversary what must be one of the most joyous and important events in modern history—the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is amazing to think that only 20 years ago the world was still clearly divided into east and west, communism and democracy. I think the Berlin Wall is the ultimate example of how absurd this conflict became—a wall dividing an historic city into two sections at a seemingly arbitrary point, which people could not cross lest they be killed. I heard a story of one young man whose parents lived in east Berlin, but who had just moved all of his things into an apartment in west Berlin the day before construction of the wall began. He spent the night at his parents’ place, and then could no longer get back to his apartment the next day! Well actually, he did try to, and became one of the first people to be killed attempting to cross from east to west.

We must never forget that only in the last 50 years, political ideology allowed such an absurdity to not only happen, but be accepted as commonplace. It is a reminder of how susceptible we are to simple ideologies that give us a sense of certainty and identity. Today, the “red terror” has been replaced with Islamic terrorism, and an extremist response to it—i.e. a resurrection of the centuries old conflict between Muslims and Christians—may lead us into a real war this time, and not just a “cold war” (indeed, to a large extent it already has). We must never allow extremist religious and political ideologies to take us into WWIII; we must use reason to fight the forces of fundamentalism.

We have finally found a couple of billing options we can use for our new project—we now just have to integrate them with our systems. We have also found a third party site we can work with should this prove too difficult, although for the best possible user experience at the lowest possible price, we still want to do it ourselves if we can. We are aiming to get this underway by next month (I hope!).

For now, enjoy this hilarious video from DarkMatter2525, the person who brought us the creation story cartoon I posted previously. I also highly recommend his Let God Sort Them Out video—it is along similar lines to the An Atheist Meets God video I posted a while back, and once again shows the sheer absurdity of the Bible’s statements on who goes to heaven and who doesn’t. I also really like his Epic God Fail video, which lists many of God’s outrageous atrocities, with a great punch line!

As social animals, human beings are biologically programmed to co-operate with and care for each other, as it enhances our chances of survival, both as individuals and as a species. This is actually the origin of the moral sense that religious people have such a hard time understanding without God, but which is in reality a very simple and logical consequence of our evolutionary history. But like all animals, however, we also have a selfish survival instinct, particularly when resources are limited. This naturally leads to tribalism—we tend to form groups that are large enough to give us what we need to survive, but not so large that we run out of resources. Of course, just how big that group can be depends on how efficiently we are able to use the resources available to us, hence technology has led to an increasingly globalised society. But at the time the holy books of most of the world’s major religions were written, tribalism was rife, as our ability to utilise resources was indeed limited.

It is very clear that religion is both a cause and effect of tribalism—religion serves to reinforce the social cohesion within a particular tribe, as well as reinforcing the separation from other tribes with a different religion. This idea is nothing new. However, what may be a new idea (as far as I am aware) is that religion helps to resolve the conflict between our selfish and co-operative survival instincts. Even when we kill somebody from another tribe, we still experience natural feelings of guilt, as our co-operative instinct comes into play. Religion, however, provides us with a moral justification to kill anyone from another tribe, which allows us to overcome the guilt that our biological instincts would make us feel otherwise. In other words, religion is not only a leading cause of war, it actually helps us to wage war in the first place (even if that war isn’t strictly for religious reasons), by providing us with a moral justification for it. Hence, not only is religion completely unnecessary to explain human morality, it is actually one of the best explanations for human immorality, especially at a group level.

This is yet another reason why I cannot accept the religious moderate view that we would still have all these wars and do all these awful things without religion anyway. Once again, religion gives these things both credibility and moral justification, and that has got to make a huge difference to how we can get into a situation where large groups of people are willing to kill and/or harm others. On top of all that, we have the problem that the suspension of rationality and morality that religion allows can also lead us to harm those who are close to us, or even ourselves. And that is to say nothing of the fact that most of our holy books actually directly and clearly advocate murder and violence as well.

It is a mark of the progress of civilisation that the tribalism that religion facilitated—as well as all the other purposes religion once served—are now obsolete in the face of science and technological advancement. But the psychological power of religion remains as strong as ever, which means it is now not only obsolete, but actually a direct threat to the continued existence of modern civilisation.

EKET, Nigeria—The 9-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.

His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.

A month later, he died.

Can you imagine the excruciating pain this poor boy must have suffered over that month? This must be some kind of crazy, whacko religious cult, right? It is in reality Christianity, as brought to Africa by American evangelicals. And as shown by this article, this boy’s case is not an isolated incident.

So why on earth are preachers condemning innocent children to this fate? That’s the most shocking part of all: it’s good for business. The preachers and churches who identify the most “witches” are seen as being the most powerful, and parents actually pay them willingly to exorcise their children.

This is a great example of why atheists like myself can no longer accept religion as a benign belief that gives people comfort. Because when a person’s most cherished belief is something for which there is no physical evidence, they are susceptible to believing anything—including that their own children are witches and must be tortured, or that blowing themselves up to kill “infidels” will give them 72 virgins in the afterlife. Religious moderates and liberals will argue that these people are extremists, but their actions are a logical consequences of their belief systems, and are very often actually directly supported by their own holy books. Yes, these people are often poor and desperate, but certainly not always (most of the September 11 terrorists were actually fairly wealthy and well educated), and only religion could twist their minds so much as to do something like this. Indeed, the more poor and desperate people are, the more powerful the false certainty of religion becomes. This then allows business interests to prey on their desperation, as is so tragically the case here.

I also find it absurd that we condemn new religions as cults, while allowing larger, more established religions to do the same sorts of things, or worse. They are both equally delusional—and dangerous.