Atheism

Possibly my favourite article on this blog so far is the Religion and Morality post. I was originally intending to conclude that article with some statistics on how atheists and theists compare on the sorts of issues people normally use to judge morality, but as the article was very lengthy already, I thought I should save it for another post. So here it is.

Before theists trot out their usual arguments that the greatest mass murderers in history were atheists—or that the communism is an example of how atheism leads to unhealthy societies—please read my Religion and Morality article, which covers these misconceptions thoroughly. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, check out the results of Vision of Humanity’s Global Peace Index. As is graphically represented in this Epiphenom article, the most atheist countries are the most peaceful—and the most religious countries are the most violent. These results may not mean religion makes people more violent though—it could mean violence makes people more religious. So to make these comparisons as meaningful as possible, we have to eliminate socio-economic factors as much as possible. Hence, it is most instructive to compare the US—which is by far the most religious western country—with other western countries. As can be seen when we do this, the US rates alongside such countries as China, and is behind (often well behind) other western countries. Read the rest of this entry »

When I first heard that the Australian Labor party had ousted Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, I wasn’t happy. Labor wasn’t doing that badly in the polls, so I just felt they were panicking too much; indeed, I feel they’ve been doing this for some time now, which I think is the main reason why they ended up doing so badly in the polls in the first place. I think they’ve actually done a pretty god job of running the country under very difficult circumstances—for example, Australia survived the global financial crisis better than any other first world country. Yes, they’ve made some mistakes, but I feel their mistakes are vastly outweighed by their achievements. The problem is that their mistakes have all come in the last few months (with an election looming), and the electorate has a very short memory. Read the rest of this entry »

When I read about this story, I just had to do a post on it! The infamous 62-foot tall statue of Jesus outside Solid Rock Church (yes, that really is the name of the church!) in Monroe, Ohio has burned to the ground—after being struck by lightning! The statue is known by the amusing nicknames “big butter Jesus” (apparently a reference to its colour) or more commonly “touchdown Jesus” (referring to its rather absurd pose, which looks a lot like the touchdown signal given by referees in American football). Although it was destroyed—in the words of the insurance company—by an “act of God”, a giant Hustler Hollywood store across the road was untouched! Yes, the humour in this story may be endless, but this kind of incident really does pose some very serious questions for theists, such as: Read the rest of this entry »

That title may sound like bad news, but actually, I consider it to be a very good news—clearly, it means that atheists are really starting to make an impact in the media and on the population at large. With the recent passing of “Zombie Jesus Day” (thanks Joe!), we have of course had the annual Good Friday sermons from Christian leaders in Australia. Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen took it as an opportunity to spout two old chestnuts: that atheism is as much a religion as Christianity, and that it has resulted in mass murder at the hands of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. I have already responded thoroughly to these claims in my Religion and Morality article, so I won’t repeat myself here. Suffice it to say, I agree with the Australian Atheist Foundation president David Nicholls that this is an act of desperation by the church—here is what else he had to say. I’ve also always found the claim that atheism is a religion in itself to be rather curious anyway—it’s kind of like saying “well okay, we admit that that our belief system is crap, but hey, yours is crap too!”.

With the International Atheist Convention starting in Melbourne, Australia today (March 12), I felt I had to do something to mark the occasion, seeing as unfortunately I am unable to attend myself. So it seemed like an appropriate occasion to launch a new venture we’ve been planning for some time now: Sachiko’s sexy Bible readings! It does seem that when a lot of people first see me (or at least conservative types), they immediately think “when it comes to brains, she’s got great tits”, simply because I have big tits, and I am a nude model. So I thought it might be fun to really play up to this stereotype, and channel my inner bimbo, as I figured this would be a very funny and effective way to show up the absurdity of a lot of what is written in the Bible, as well as some of the utterly ludicrous contortions of logic people use to defend religious belief. I have to say: it’s really fun to play dumb!

Outspoken atheists like myself obviously spend a lot of time debunking the so-called ‘evidence’ for the existence of God, but it often seems to me that evidence is largely irrelevant to theists. Their beliefs are based on a need to believe in God for emotional reasons, and there are many. I’ve talked about some of these before (fear of death, fear of the unknown, the need for a “higher justice” etc.), but there’s one very big one that I haven’t tackled directly yet: morality. It seems that a big reason a lot of theists feel they have to believe in God is that without him, humans would have no morality.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

As an outspoken atheist who also happens to be a female nude model with big tits, the email I get from religious types is perhaps a little different to what most men who speak out about atheism get. Instead of simply cursing me as an evil sinner, they often want to “save my soul” (presumably in the hope that they can have a relationship with me in either this world or the next), and indeed often tell me about how I lead them into sin. My standard response to this is: “If God didn’t want you to look at my tits/naked body, then why did he make you enjoy it so much? Does he want to torture you or something?” Their standard response to this is that God gave them the free will to do evil things, and that they just can’t help themselves committing the sin of looking at my tits/naked body. Hence it seems to me that we should take a good, long, hard look at this “free will” concept, as it is crucial to the credibility of religion—without it, they cannot explain how a perfect, all-loving, all-seeing and all-knowing God can allow evil, sin, pain and suffering in the world he is supposed to have created. Quite frankly, the blatantly obvious logical flaws in this argument make it amazing to me that I even have to point them out, but given that millions of people depend on this concept to make sense of how the nature of their supposed creator conflicts with the nature of the world, clearly I must do so. Read the rest of this entry »

One thing that’s always amused me is how willing creationists are to use lies and deceit to support their beliefs. I mean, if what they believe really is true, then why would they need to? The fact that they do so often have to do this is clear evidence that the facts are not on their side. A really great example of this is Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort’s special 150th anniversary edition of The Origin of Species—complete with a 50 page preface full of lies and deceit to “represent the other side of the story”. As well as the stuff mentioned in ZOMGitsCriss‘s video above, I note they also repeat the lie that Einstein believed in a personal God (plus the other scientists they cite lived at a time when not believing in God was unthinkable, and would have resulted in their death if they said so). Personally, I find their accusations that Darwin was a racist particularly outrageous, given that he was a great humanist, and campaigner for freeing the slaves conservative Christians wanted to keep in chains.

Just before I launched this blog, another new atheist site was launched—Atheist Nexus. Basically, it is a social networking site exclusively for non-theists. As you can see I am on there, but sadly I haven’t had much time for it, as I devote all my free social networking time to this blog. But as my readership obviously has a lot of non-theists, I thought you might be interested in joining. They are aiming to reach 10,000 memberships on their anniversary, and as you can see, they’re very close!

Today is the National Day of Reason. To explain what it is about, here is a quote from their web site:

Many who value the separation of religion and government have sought an appropriate response to the federally-supported National Day of Prayer, an annual abuse of the constitution. Nontheistic Americans (including freethinkers, humanists, atheists, agnostics, and deists), along with many traditionally religious allies, view such government-sanctioned sectarianism as unduly exclusionary.

A consortium of leaders from within the community of reason endorsed the idea of a National Day of Reason. This observance is held in parallel with the National Day of Prayer, on the first Thursday in May each year (May 7th in 2009). The goal of this effort is to celebrate reason-a concept all Americans can support-and to raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty posed by government intrusion into the private sphere of worship.

Sounds like something worth supporting to me! This is a great opportunity for my American readers to show their support of the secular values that America was founded on—not Christian values is as commonly thought. I find it highly offensive and very misleading that the National Day of Prayer web site uses what looks like a characterisation of George Washington kneeling in prayer in their banner.