Why Dont You Blog?

A quick comment for now. I have had the [mis]fortune to have spent a bit of time looking round some crackpot theist sites today and quite a few have had a cool little icon which shows the chance of the rapture taking place. There seem to be a few sources of these so all have different scores and methods of scoring.

One thing they seem to have in common, is the wording on the icons. It talks about the “Risk” of Rapture.

Now I may be being old fashioned, but doesn’t “Risk” seem to talk of a BADTHING happening? Shouldn’t these devout, church-going, anti-gay, anti-abortionist, anti-Rock and Roll theists be looking forward to the rapture?

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Popularity: 40% [?]

Well there is a rant brewing, but sadly here in the Ivory Why Dont You Towers we are short on spare time so I can not do justice to a video posted by what seems to be the single most objectionable person I have ever had the misfortune to see. PZ Myers has posted on Pharyngula about it and pretty much says everything which needs to be said. Check it out for the full details.

In a nutshell, this snotty, arrogant kid called Kelly Tripplehorn (snope entry for background) has posted a video in which he claims his “corporation” will offer US$1000 to anyone who can solve the philosophical problem of Induction. Yeah, that is correct. $1000. Wow. Alfred Nobel, eat your heart out. Barely enough to buy a low end laptop to solve one of the major philosophical problems.

To crown things off, the nutcase Tripplehorn goes on about how “he” solves the problem by invoking God. What absolute madness. He demands a reasonable, self consistent, internally logical argument from Atheists but not his own reasoning.

I would like to go on record, having noted his only requirement is “without invoking God” to say the problem is solved, and the universe is logical and ordered because it is the will of Freya. She is neither the Abrahamic God Tripplehorn talks about, nor a generic “God” (as she is a Goddess…).

I await the US$1000. Hopefully I can use it to buy a new SatNav…

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Popularity: 28% [?]

I know it is done to death in the past, and this is probably preaching to the converted but it constantly amazes me how many theists (and even some atheists) labour under the idea that “atheism” means believing there is not a God.

On YouTube there is a video from davidbpearson2 (calling himself FireFly515) about Atheists (which I strongly suspect is a joke anyway) which provides a good example of this thinking (I am not going to mention the rest of the nonsense in the video because he is either trolling or doing it as satire). (There are quite a few posts by FireFly515 in which he rants about destroying Atheism and the numerous responses but that is the subject for another post one day).

In a nutshell, lots and lots of the religious propaganda which mentions Atheism describes them as people who believe there is no God.

I don’t think I can agree with this.

I can only speak for myself (remember this is no Atheist Doctrine which tells all Atheists how they can think…), but I personally do not believe in any deities existing and to me this is an important difference. Saying I do not believe in God takes the prior assumption that God exists and makes it appear I am wilfully refusing to accept this.

Saying I believe there is no God is equally weak (again, please remember this is my personal opinion), belief is a characteristic of faith. Atheism is not a faith. I do not hold a belief in the face of evidence. I do not hold a belief on the basis of there being no evidence.

All I can say is, I do not believe in imaginary things, this includes deities, Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, Elves, Faeries, The Grinch, Goblins, Bogeymen, Little green martians, Witches, Ghosts, Hobbits, Treants, Orcs, Mordor, Harry Potter, Angels, Demons, The Devil, dragons and so on. To me a theist is some one who has cut this list a little bit shorter.

It would be interesting to see how others describe their Atheism.

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Popularity: 29% [?]

Well, backing technorati up with broader search terms produces even more goodness This time I came across some very entertaining sites - Why Wont God Heal Amputees and God Is Imaginary. Both seem to come from the same person / organisation and while they do not make comfortable reading for a Christian (or Moslem or Jew), they are entertaining for Atheists. Take a look and see what you think.

As you can probably imagine, the Christian Forums website did not like it very much when someone posted a link there

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Popularity: 17% [?]

A couple of days ago I made a post titled “Atheist Resurgance” which was written after I had been meandering around the results of some technorati tag searches.

One of these links took me to a blog titled “Sub Ratione Dei: A Balanced Victory” where I read some of the comments made about Richard Dawkins, and his book The God Delusion. In the post, I made the following comments:

A theology student who feels that, as a theology student he is more placed to talk about God than Dawkins. This is interesting as the God delusion is not about the Christian deity per se, but about the implications belief in a divine being have on humanity and the biological evidence which contradicts those beliefs. Maybe the author of Sub Ratione Dei feels that as a theology student they are more placed to discuss evolution and creationism than Dawkins.

Following my post here, the author of the Sub Ratione Dei blog has made the following response:

Update: This post has generated a little comment over on Why Don’t You … Blog? For one they are maybe taking me a bit too seriously (alway’s a mistake). However, I am perhaps more worried by the implicit message that I am a creationist!

Now, this isn’t the first time I have been challenged over an apparent mistake I made in a blog post, and it is unlikely to be the last, so I want to try and set the record straight here.

I didn’t think I had taken the Sub Ratione Dei post all that seriously and it was meant as humour then I apologise whole heartedly for my mistake. I never thought my post had made any implication about belief in creation, it was put in there with the evolution bit.

Critically, my comments about the Sub Ratione Dei blog post were quite minimal, I only pointed out that the Theologist felt he was better placed to discuss God than Richard Dawkins and that he was critiquing a book which he hadn’t read. The rest of the entry was a cut and paste from the original site. The God delusion book is not about a specific religion, although there are obvious Christian overtones, the principles made are equally sound if the religion in question was Zoroastrianism, Norse Gods, Roman Gods etc. Richard Dawkins may well be a “grumpy old man” but I am not so sure he has no idea what he is talking about.

Anyway, this post and the previous post, were not made with the intention of insulting anyone or starting a blog version of a flame war. I was simply aiming to highlight the disparate views which blogs with a certain tag can generate (in this instance it was Richard Dawkins). If I have caused any offence, then I do apologise.

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Popularity: 30% [?]