Category: Atheism

David Attenborough

I don’t know [why we’re here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the bird of paradice… are proof of the wonderful things produced by creation?’
And I always say, well when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river ban, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The creator god that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…”

Hitchens – his blistering anti-theist tongue is much missed.

A fundamentalist is someone who believes in the literal truth of certain text, you’re not free not to believe it. But there’s not one position that any of us atheists hold that’s remotely like that. Everything we believe in depends on everything being open to doubt and experiment. Hitchens, Hitch

Fortunately words are immortal.

Extremes?

People like to frame a lot of our views as if they’re the exact opposite of their own views.

One Extreme: Endorse religion on money, in the pledge, etc. eg. One Nation Under God
The other extreme: Don’t use the government to promote any religious view

One Extreme: Only straight people can get married
The other extreme: Everyone can get married

This gives them a certain advantage. It lets them say things like:
. You’re just as fundamentalist as I am.
. You’re trying to force your views on everyone else, just like me.

However, our views aren’t the other extreme. They’re the neutral stance.
One Extreme: Endorse religion on money, in the pledge, etc. eg. One Nation Under God
Neutral: Don’t use the government to promote any religious view
The other extreme: Endorse atheism on the money and in the pledge, etc. EG: One Nation Without God/s

One Extreme: Only straight people can get married
Neutral: Everyone can get married
The other extreme:Only gay people can get married

“Only gay people can get married.”
But almost nobody is arguing for these, because we’re not bigots trying to force our views on other people. They are.

*There are spelling errors in this, like in your Bible/Qoran/Torah/Book of Morman… there are hundreds of holy books.
If you want a book relatively free of spelling errors read a dictionary (the zebra did it).

 

The Dawk

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life.
Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble and enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?
This is how I answer when I am asked – as I am surprisingly often – why I bother to get up in the mornings.
Dawkins

 

Madalyn Murray O’Hair

I’ll tell you what you did with atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from universities, or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanized them with beatings and exquisite torture, gougd out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed or broke their limbs, tore of their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowled them, hung them, burnt them alive. And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair

“Good” book

If atheists agree to follow a book that advocates murder, guilt, fear, intolerance, rape, child abuse, slavery and suffering…
Would you them accept that we have morals?

I avoid the word “moral” in favour of the word “ethical”.  “Moral” has become such loaded language.

I think (and am happy to stand corrected) that ethics says that this outcome is good so the action was good whereas morality says that an action is good if it complies with the moral code regardless of whether the outcome is good or not.  For example: fundamentalist Muslims believe that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were morally good because it was the will of Allah for non-Muslims to die.  A bad action for morally good reasons.  Moderate Muslims disagree because of the suffering that occurred but don’t want to criticise their fellow Muslims so they give them cover (another bad action compliant with moral codes so seen as good).

Ethically speaking, the bad outcome is the only thing that matters so the attack has no redeeming features.