Carnival of the Godless #2
info
Format for printing
Pirate mode
Godlessness is more popular than I expected out there in the wide, wide blogosphere. We have 23 excellent entries this week, with authors ranging in philosophy from hardcore anti-theism to deism (which, strictly speaking, isn't godlessness, but are still long term members in good standing of the freethought community, so I'm willing to stretch the boundaries that much.) There were so many and I spent so much time just reading them that I was floundering when trying to summarize them all, so I took a shortcut: I've plucked out a representative quote from each article. Go read, and go think!
| Weblog | Article | Sample Quote | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hank Fox | Deadline Pressure | "It’s why most of us humans have some kind of religion. Even knowing about the billions of years in each direction from our lives, and even knowing about the vast and limitless space in all directions, some part of us has to think the whole universe is all about US. We want to be noticed. We want it all to mean something. More than that, we want it to mean something WE can understand. And we want it to go on meaning something." | |
| No More Mr Nice Guy! | Life After God | "Moving beyond religion is about growing up, and living by a code of ethics which requires us to see things from the other fellow's point of view, at least to the extent that we refrain from gratuitously causing him harm because we would not wish him to suffer." | |
| UTI Annex | Just Suppose | "Asserting a claim is sufficient for some people who see angels, fairies, demons, and other intangible usually invisible entities, and they have started many a religion by simple assertion and sticking to their claims." | |
| Raving Atheist | Revisionism | "In the interest of truth, we’re going to give copies of that [Alabama Governor George Wallace’s inaugural address] to all the kiddies too, right? And teach them about how the Southern Baptist Convention stood side by side with Govs. Wallace and Faubus in opposing the integration of the very schools in which they sit?" | |
| A House of God | A letter to Walter E. Williams, Department of Economics George Mason University | "You should try to follow the teachings of Jesus and be more tolerant, loving and forgiving. Quit trying to force your beliefs on others." | |
| Thoughts from Kansas | Belief in things not seen | "To get back to the election, and 'values,' I'll just say that not being Christian doesn't mean you don't have faith. It takes spectacular amounts of faith to believe that humans are capable of making themselves more perfect, but that's the foundation of liberal democracy, and some strains of Christianity, too." | |
| Unscrewing the Inscrutable | Our doors are always open (unless you're a wino) | "My point is that it strikes me that religion of any flavor, or a club of any sort, is simply an excuse to get together and be with people who think and act the way that you do. An accepted way to indulge our petty discrimination and superiority complexes. All of the mumbo-jumbo, magic tricks, and woo-woo fluff is nothing more than an elaborate rationalization so that we can be comfortable with ourselves. It is selfishness, pure and simple. But it is selfishness that dishonestly tells itself that it is really altruism." | |
| God is for Suckers! | Religious nihilism and compassionate atheism in the face of disaster | "We don’t have to implicitly deny its terrible reality as part of our human realm to fit it into our world view. Terrible shit happens to innocent people; our place is to try to make sure it isn’t by our doing, and to respond in the best, most humane and compassionate way we can to its victims." | |
| Smijer | "Paul Harvey": Christians Have Rights, Too! | "And the government, by the way, is secular. The founding fathers - that mix of people religious and irreligious who framed the constitution and gave us this great country - saw that both freedom and religion suffered when church and state were mixed. They wrote a constituion founded on a lot of principles, including separation of church and state." | |
| Smijer | Scalia (Does Religion Make You Dumb?) | "Now, Scalia could have just as well said 'religion doesn't make you dumb, and there is nothing wrong with believing in things because of religious traditions.' Instead he effectively said— 'look, religion made me—an otherwise very smart man—dumb.'" | |
| The Two Percent Company | Believe What You Want To Believe | "It is important to understand that we fully support your right to believe whatever you want to believe, regardless of the supporting facts, or lack thereof. We firmly support your right to your own personal beliefs, and we would gladly argue for you to maintain that right. That said, it is equally important to understand that we maintain the right to not believe what you believe, and to think that what you believe is silly." | |
| Unscrewing the Inscrutable | A Rational Perspective On The Origins And Shortcomings Of Neoconservative Ideology | " Trickster politicians and ideological shysters using religion to feather their own nest at the expense of the sincerely faithful are nothing new to Christians." | |
| nanovirus | Dethrone the fundies to protect the environment | "Because humanists have no belief in a god or supernatural force that will solve our problems for us, they know humans must take sole responsibility for sorting out environmental problems." | |
| The Shanmonster | Jesus Was Gother Than You | "All I'm trying to say is, with the powers of persuasion, induction, and deduction that I've developed, I can prove to you that Jesus Christ was as goth as fuck." | |
| yeah whatever | The Zen of humanism | "Sometimes a Christian might say, yes, but why be good if you do not fear punishment for doing bad? Ah, I say, good point. I must truly deserve merit because I am good for its own sake and not because I fear chastisement. I'd have thought your God will reward me double for not needing to be forced into it." | |
| UTI Annex | Religion is Totalitarian | "If indeed large swaths of the world slip to religious totalitarianism, this will be worse than when communism seemed invulnerable in two ways: one, theocracy plays on people’s tradition and culture, to which communism has never really connected, and two, religious revival is in progress in several areas of the world, so there will not be a great power opposing fundamentalism the way the USA opposed communism." | |
| Science and Politics | Evolution: Worship for a Changing World | "On the other hand, some churches keep watering down and hiding their religion until almost nothing remains but the bare-bones of ceremony. They are hoping to survive by evolving but do not really know what to evolve into, as they feel they are going to be irrelevant in a completely secular society." | |
| Philosophy, et cetera | Religious Experiences | "So, although theists often cite 'personal experience' as evidence for their belief in God, I'm not actually convinced that such experiences (at least, of the sort discussed in this post) provide independent epistemic warrant at all. If theistic beliefs are presupposed then such experiences will no doubt reinforce them; much as a coincidental link between an event and a horoscope reading will reinforce the New-Ager's belief in astrology. But given the alternative explanations provided by science, it would be a mistake to take the apparent 'evidence' at face value. " | |
| Respectful Insolence | An unexpected discomfort | "There is something about strongly held religious beliefs that I find difficult to deal with, and always have, even when I was religious. I think it has something to do with the utter certainty that they have some sort of inside track on The Truth." | |
| Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium | We Learn | "It's colder when the heavens clear at night, But not so cruel as it clearly seemed In the grip of gods two thousand years ago — For blessedly, they're gone, and now we know That stars are suns far older than he dreamed, Though still too young to flood the sky with light." |
|
| Becalmed | The bandwagon effect, and Christianity | "It seems, in fact, that one semester of religious studies has ruined Mike for mindless religion. This is about what I would expect; it's amazing the effect a little knowledge of the history of a set of religious beliefs can have." | |
| Good God Bad God | Good God, Bad God | "I was fairly pleased with inventing two separate entities, and wondered if that was sufficient for me to be the founder of a new religion. But then some wise-ass blogger told me, 'It’s been done already.'" | |
| Preposterous Universe | Hallucinatory neurophysics | "So, the next time you have a near-death experience, and see a tunnel stretching before you leading to a beckoning light, it's not Jesus calling you into the afterlife. It's just some characteristic jiggling of the neurons in your weakened brain. Which, to my mind, is much more interesting." |
The next Carnival of the Godless will be held on 13 February, at Science and Politics, so send links to your articles to <Coturnix1 AT aol DOT com> soon.
Trackback url: http://pharyngula.org/index/trackback/1888/uzbdUZdd/
GREAT Carnival, PZ. There's so much interesting stuff here that I'm sure I won't get any real work done the rest of the afternoon. Of course, I'm going to blame you for my lack of productivity.