Your Religion Is False, by candid. Atheism has never been so hilarious!

via candid's hilarious Your Religion Is False (yrif_rss) blog, comes the info that the new head of the NIH is the guy who founded BioLogos, a bullshit attempt to combine religion and science. Dawkins is not a fan.

Bush administration, Obama administration, whatever. We still get science run by people whose brains are poisoned by religion.

An odd cartoon about what happens when you live life by a book, which is a parable for the obvious.



While I am sympathetic to some elements of its message, it seems their diversity doesn't include me. The montage at the end includes a bewildering variety of boxes - but no one who rejects the insanity of carrying a stupid box around everywhere. I can't help but being sorry for the pathetically limited vision of the protagonist (and thus, the video's creators). They see the foolishness of a tradition...and rebel against a tiny portion of it, leaving the rest as foolish as before.

Generally, I subscribe to the belief that most people are able to compartmentalize religion. Even though it is weird, irrational, mystical crap, it doesn't affect their decisions much during life. Hence, science and religion don't conflict, and religion is nothing to get up in arms about.

But every now and then, isomething happens. Like, say, my ipod is packed for our trip, so I am listening to the radio in the car, and I tune to KRTY and my mind is blown by a song in which a young woman driving (child in the back seat) spins out of control on a patch of ice, and decides that her best strategy for protecting her and her baby's lives is to take her hands off the wheel and pray to Jesus to steer for her. Instead of dying in flames and wreckage, as she deserves, she lives and takes this as a message to place more faith in the lord.

This is not church as social club, god as answer to the otherwise unanswereable, religion as a cheaply held belief that we don't actually base decisions on. This is lunacy, reckless endangerment, attempted manslaughter by negligence of her own child. In a sane society, you'd lose your parenting license for this.

This isn't some obscure Jesus rock - this fucking song won a Grammy. It topped the charts for weeks. It crossed over from the country charts to the pop charts. It had over a million paid digital downloads.

There are good things about religion. They have their compassion and brotherly love and shit like that. But the faith that leads people to make awful decisions when the stakes are highest is one that I see no need to be respectful to. My beliefs are strictly superior. I'm a better guy to have driving your car, flying your plane, running your business. Unless there is manslaughter to be done, you want to stay clear of these lunatics.

Fortunately, I think few theists have that level of faith.

Unfortunately, the mindset of trustung in an active, higher power is deeply ingrained in theism. (This is subtly but importantly different from mindfulness practices of not worrying constantly about the future).

UPDATE: For those who don't know what the song is, it is "Jesus, Take The Wheel" by Carrie Underwood. So it's not like this incident was a brief thing in the course of the song, the entire song is built around the concept of letting Jesus guide your life instead of doing it yourself, even when the situation is "a car out of control" which anyone but a complete mush-head would see calls for secular handling.

Last week's Colbert Report: The Word was on atheism. Good stuff. I hadn't realized that atheism was undergoing an old-fashioned revival in Europe as part of anti-Muslim sentiment. Excellent. From an AP story:

Passive indifference to faith has left Europe’s churches mostly empty. But debate over religion is more intense and strident than it has been in many decades. Religion is re-emerging as a big issue in part because of anxiety over Europe’s growing and restive Muslim populations and a fear that faith is reasserting itself in politics and public policy. That is all adding up to a growing momentum for a combative brand of atheism, one that confronts rather than merely ignores religion.

Heather MacDonald strikes back against the assumption that conservativism and religion go hand in hand, prompting a lot of bickering, summarized here, and this excellent GNXP interview.

A filmmaker gets annoyed by Mormons knocking on his door before noon, and flies to Salt Lake City, UT to go door-to-door proseltyzing at Mormons. Video via evwhore.

I love this show. The main character is an atheist, who says he'd rather believe this world is all we have than that it's merely a test. He is obsessed with solving puzzles and blunt to the point of being abusive. He is a sympathetically portrayed drug addict. This is a medical show where one episode features a doctor who raises donations to fight TB in Africa - and gets mocked for his self-righteous smugness.

A recurring theme is that you should make your own decisions, regardless of the rules, and how important it is to do what you think is right. A nice antidote to the idea that atheism and the lack of a moral compass must go hand in hand.

In reality, I'm sure the misanthropic depression would get on my nerves. But in 40min segments, and portrayed by Hugh Laurie, I find it lovably sweet. For Hugh fans, here is part of Hugh Laurie's audition for the role, a MadTV spoof, Hugh on the Late Late Show, Letterman, Presenting at the Emmys, rapping, rocking, country singin, describing his first kiss. Not that I'm obsessed or anything.

Thanks as usual to pmb for augmenting NetFlix to get us our fix.

Cool stuff. If you invert this map of general adherence, you get something like an atheism map. Just like good dieting means sticking to the edges of the grocery store, in the US, the coasts are much less religious than the central areas. The largest religious deserts/atheist oasises are in Maine, southern Ohio, and on the west coast from north of SF all the way to Canada.

The Mormon outbreak seems mostly confined to Utah, although it has apparently spread into Idaho. I can see why the southern border would have lots of Catholics, but why the northern border? Unitarianism, while low in density, is of course correlated with atheism, appearing mostly in the NE. And here is your guide to finding an Amish paradise.

This is an interesting piece on what it's like to be an atheist:

"Imagine that you live in a world where 90% of the people around you sincerely believe in something that appears to you to be downright whacky, if perhaps relatively pleasant on the surface in many respects. Say they believe in Santa Claus; beard, the big red suit, the flying reindeer, the sled loaded with a billion gifts, the North Pole Workshop, Mrs. Claus and the elves; all of it.

But in this fantasy world, they're not content merely to believe in Santa Claus, they want you to publicly agree all the time that you also believe in Santa, in their specific version of same, and they pressure everyone else in numerous ways to pretend that they're not strange or childish for believing in this."

Although it gives into the temptation for hyperbole, ie "Imagine that large sections of the country, the majority in fact, reject modern geography and want to teach that Santa lives at the North Pole in a giant Dickinsian factory manned by elves as part of that curricula." I mean, yeah, I think the whole ID/Creationism thing is pretty dumb, but is it really true that the majority of Americans reject evolution? I don't think so.

I agree with the poster's perspective of complete befuddlement with religion. To me, grownups believing in God seems just as weird as grownups believing, truly believing, in an actual Santa Claus who checks every year whether they are naughty or nice.

On the other hand, I disagree with his judgement of the impact of religion on politics, ie the number of religious activists and their effects. When our politicians give God as a reason, it gets a lot of press, but most of the things they say most of the time are not about God. Those few things that do touch on religion (abortion, euthanasia) are contentious and get a lot of press, but most politics is shaped by selfishness and special interests, not by theism.

I also disagree with his comments about constant proselytization. Even in school, where my atheism was much more unusual than in my college and post-college circles, people reacted with befuddlement, not by trying to convert me. I've experienced very little proselytization. Maybe I just avoid the right states and towns?

It's hard to tell how much is the poster overreacting/exaggerating, and how much is just that we move in different circles. I expect there are places where being an atheist gets you a lot more flack than wacky coastal California.