Apatheism

It came to Jonathan Rauch recently in a blinding vision that he is an apatheist.

"Can you imagine anything so utterly patronising?"

Terry Sanderson on Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor's recent speech in Westminster Cathedral, here. Excellent stuff.

Reports on the speech here and here.

Interview with Dan Barker

One of the "most prominent and politically active atheists in America today." The interview can be found here.

And here is a biography, at the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

Barker is also a member of the Prometheus Society.

Atheism key to songwriter's success

Swedish songwriter (and biochemist) Jose Gonzalez cites The God Delusion as a major influence.

Atheists protest National Day of Prayer by donating blood

Reported here:

The Center for Atheism, a national group of atheists based in New York City, will be holding its annual Gift to Life Day as an alternative to the National Day of Prayer on May 1. Atheists - as well as anyone else wishing to participate - will visit their local blood banks to donate blood and sign up for organ donation programs, said Ken Bronstein, president of both the CFA and New York City Atheists.

"Atheist ass pirate"

Tolerance, the Christian way, in God's army. Here's a CBS News report on the case of atheist soldier Jeremy Hall.

Related posts

• Atheist soldier sues army

The Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism

Was given to Bad Religion's Greg Graffin yesterday.

Atheist soldier sues army

Apparently, the U.S. Army is God's army:

Last month, Specialist Hall and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group, filed suit in federal court in Kansas, alleging that Specialist Hall’s right to be free from state endorsement of religion under the First Amendment had been violated and that he had faced retaliation for his views. In November, he was sent home early from Iraq because of threats from fellow soldiers."

Source

Neela Banerjee, "Soldier Sues Army, Saying His Atheism Led to Threats," The New York Times, April 26, 2008

The Flying Spaghetti Monster gets its own statue

Outside the Cumberland County Courthouse.

More here.

All religions are fairy tales

Why aren't there more billboards like this one around?

It didn't take long for it to come down, of course.

Spiritual perestroika: Gorbachev a closet Christian?

People with nothing more important to worry about are again asking stupid questions about Mikhail Gorbachev's "faith," after his visit to the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi in Italy earlier this month. The Daily Telegraph even went so far as to proclaim that old Gorba had "acknowledged his Christian faith for the first time." Maybe they should have actually asked him first:

"Over the last few days some media have been disseminating fantasies—I can't use any other word—about my secret Catholicism, citing my visit to the Sacro Convento friary, where the remains of St. Francis of Assisi lie," Gorbachev told the Russian news agency Interfax. "To sum up and avoid any misunderstandings, let me say that I have been and remain an atheist."

Sensible fellow.

Source

Alex Rodriguez, "Gorbachev a closet Christian?" Chicago Tribune, March 23, 2008

Indian tantrik fails to kill rationalist

And on national TV, too.

Half the population in the UK no longer believes in God

Some good news for a change, courtesy of "public theology think tank" Theos in Britain:

The survey found that 23 per cent of Britons, and 19 per cent of Scots, considered themselves atheists. And 25 per cent of Britons and 32 per cent of Scots are not sure if they believe in God.

...

Professor Larry Hurtado, of Glasgow University's school of divinity, said religion had gone through phases of popularity, with atheism common in the 17th century, followed by a major resurgence of faith in the 19th century.

"Now we seem to be heading back into another trough period," he said.

Another peak period is fervently to be hoped for. Then the trick will be how to prevent future resurgences of faith. Humanity dropped the ball after the last enlightenment, making it all the more important that the same thing doesn't happen again.

Alan Holmes, of the Scottish Atheist Council, said it was positive that so many respondents admitted having doubts. "It's saying it's OK to not subscribe to previous beliefs of the culture," he said. "Looking at the news, traditionally, the religious minorities have had absolutely disproportionate influence.

The vocal majority in religious groups tends to be the extreme element."

A spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland said: "In reality twice as many Scots go to Church each weekend as go to the cinema, and five times as many as attend a football match."

He said that each week an average of 600,000 attended church, of whom 200,000 were Catholic.

The current number of communicant members of the Church of Scotland is 504,000 – down from more than 1 million in 1976.

UPDATE: Here's an editorial by Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society.

Source

Lindsay McIntosh, "Britons losing religious beliefs," The Scotsman, March 15, 2008

Less than half of Norwegians believe in God

I just read in a paper that only 44% of all Norwegians proclaim a belief in God, according to a recent poll.

So far, all I've been able to find on the net concerning that report is this.

Arthur C. Clarke to have secular funeral

Clarke is to be buried in a private funeral this weekend. He left written instructions on how it should be carried out:

"Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral," he wrote.

He was great to the very end. It will be hard for evangelical religionists to twist this around to the usual "deathbed conversion," but I'm sure some of them will still try.

Terry Pratchett pays tribute to Clarke here, and many more tributes by other luminaries can be found here.

Taslima Nasrin has fled to Europe

She left New Delhi a few days ago, where she had lived in "virtual house arrest" because of Muslim death threats, and has now arrived in Europe (possibly in Sweden) where she is also to get medical treatment for her eyes. In 1994 she had to flee from Bangladesh after Muslims accused her of "blasphemy" on the publication of Shame, and in November last year she fled from Calcutta after renewed death threats.

Her website can be found here, although I couldn't access it when I tried.

Scouts and Girl Guides are open to pre-marital sex, drugs and gay experiences

More than 2,500 Scouts (aged between 16 and 22) from across Europe were questioned by researchers when they attended a convention in Italy recently. Here are the results:

One quarter of the girls and 12 per cent of the boys said they would consider a same-sex experience. Some Scout associations around the world bar homosexuals from their ranks although this is not the case in Britain.

More than 80 per cent of those questioned said they were happy to get drunk and almost half said they would smoke marijuana if offered.

Nine out of 10 Scouts and Guides said they expected to have sex before they got married, and almost half said they would be happy to commit adultery.

All this seems very suitable, for a bigoted organization founded by a repressed homosexual. And there are more good news: Only half of the kids said they believe in God, although that is still way too high a number, to my mind.

Source

Malcolm Moore, "Nine in 10 Scouts favour sex before marriage," The Daily Telegraph, March 18, 2008

Happy believers

Religious believers are "happier" than non-believers, according to a recent study presented at the Royal Economic Society's annual conference.

It's like George Bernard Shaw once said (as I'm sure many have already pointed out): "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."

And I'm just wondering, if religion is supposed to make people so happy, why are Muslims and Christian fundamentalists always so angry...?

Studies of this kind are nothing new. Religionists of the happy-clappy Christian variety, to take an obvious example, do seem to be happy all the time (in their empty-headed, vapid kind of way) because they are literally "high on religion." But it never lasts. And it's just another example of the well-known placebo effect. See, for example, this.

And the question is by no means settled yet. In the words of Richard Dawkins: "Is religion a medical placebo, which prolongs life by reducing stress? Perhaps, although the theory is going to have to run the gauntlet of skeptics who point out the many circumstances in which religion increases stress rather than decreases it."

Indeed.

Will someone please explain atheism to the Grand Duchess?

The "Grand Duchess" Maria Vladimirovna of Russia, self-appointed heir to Russia's "imperial throne," is yet another one of all these people who seem pathologically unable to tell the difference between a descriptive term and a political ideology (but what can you expect from some crazy old bat who insists on being referred to as "Her Imperial Highness"?). This is what she had to say in a congratulatory telegram to Dmitry Medvedev, soon to be co-despot of Russia, on his recent election win:

"You take up the rule of the Russian state at an historical stage when it has overcome atheism and inhuman totalitarianism, then withstood the inevitable shocks after the collapse of the old system and way of living."

...

"May God shed on you the wisdom, strength and will to preserve, consolidate and multiply all the good that was achieved with the great nationwide effort over the past years."

Source

Guy Faulconbridge, "Romanovs bless Medvedev after Russian vote win," Reuters, March 13, 2008

Essential readings for the nonbeliever

A brief but good review of The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever can be found here, in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Couldn't they have found a better picture of Hitchens to go with the review, though?