Carnival of the Godless 32

Welcome all to the Carnival of the Godless, the best (if not only) carnival from a godless perspective on the blogosphere.
In eight days, CotG will be one year old. That makes this the last official carnival of the first year. Happy birthday all! It couldn’t be done without you. And now… the posts.

Over on his blog, Limerick Savant has a wonderful bit he calls “Origin of the Specious.”

And father of the carnival Brent Rasmussen of Unscrewing the Inscrutable has written “It’s the Ignorance, Stupid!” Trying to get the Kenowa Hills Public School Board of Education to understand that they get to be a private citizens on their own time, not on ours.

The Kenowa Hills Board Of Education’s ignorant letter probably wasn’t meant to hurt anyone’s feelings, and their protestations of gentle intentions support that. That’s not the problem. The sad problem is that a 7-member Board Of Education in a small town, all ostensibly adult American citizens, incredibly, didn’t have a clue that what they were doing was both wrong, and unconstitutional. They aren’t bad people, just poorly educated and ignorant. [more…]

Coralius of Revolvo Inritus has “Religious Intransigence” for us about an encounter he had with a coworker who sent him a religious chain-letter.

With any of these “pass-it-on” things, you’re eventually going to have multiple copies of the same chunk of names floating around, and that’s pretty much going to invalidate any real attempt to submit a petition. White House staffers, or any staffers really, have more important things to do than sort through emails with hundreds of duplicate names on them. The idea is just silly.

The Sharpener has “Faith, Dawkins and silliness” by John B in which he comments on Richard Dawkin’s new show

Worse, by conflating the issues of is-science-roughly-right (clue: yes) and are-people-with-faith-all-awful (clue: no), Mr Dawkins happily perpetuates the same “having religious faith entails believing every word of drivel written by some drugged up goat molester 3000 years ago” nonsense that the rednecks want everyone to believe. Intellectual masturbation has its price…

Ilkka Kokkarinen of Sixteen Volts Per Minute submitted two entries this time, “A Few Ponderings of a Religious Nature”

A major reason why I am not a Christian is that I can’t bring myself to believe that the ancient Israelites were the history’s foremost experts of cosmology and ontology, considering the many other goofy beliefs that they had, just like all other nations of the ancient world. This just doesn’t sound very plausible to me. Too bad that God didn’t arrange all his miracles and revelations in the modern era, where we have computers, video cameras and other useful tools for maintaining accuracy and separating fact from fiction. After all, if God could choose any small nation and era to reveal himself, why did this lot fall to ancient Israelites? Why not, say, the 21th century Belgians? [more…]

and “Uncaused Causes”

The assumption that everything has a cause makes the physical events to be perfectly deterministic. But how about our mental events that perhaps take place in a nonphysical plane, and the choices that we make and the actions that we physically do as result of these mental events? For example, consider my recent choice to eat Korean food for lunch earlier today instead of Chinese or Indian. Since this mental event and choice was something, by the assumptions of FCA it was caused by some other cause or a set of causes. So even on the nonmaterial plane that is independent of the physical universe, there can be no real free will, since all our actions and choices are determined by earlier causes. [more…]

Jarndyce from the Jarndyce Blog wrote “The Glascow model: a great idea for sectarian education,” in response to this post which talked about a Catholic school with 90% Muslim students and their parent’s petition to change the school’s official religion.

I can’t think of a much worse way to divide us than by religion. And when sectarian schooling is endorsed — heh, encouraged and funded all over the UK –by a supposedly liberal state, that’s worse. It’s the establishment nod of approval for neighbours living lives apart from the age of four. As ye sow. [more…]

Jerry Monaco from monacojerry has “The War for Intelligent Design” in which he concludes through statements made by the Governor of Kentucky, that the war in Iraq was a war for Intelligent Design.

Here, all along I thought that the official line was that we had to stop Saddam Hussein from disobeying the orders from his masters in Washington. Saddam must build Weapons of Mass Destruction only when his Washington masters want him to use them against Iran. No, maybe I’m mistaken! The official line is that we have to stop Saddam Hussein from accepting U.S. support when committing terrorist acts against his own people. Or was the official line something about fighting a war for “democracy”? Yes, that must have been the official line all along.

Excellent! I was wondering if we’d see Dante this issue. And we have. Here is his analysis on Agnosticism from Superlicious:

What do people mean when they say they are “Agnostic”? Is it a bona fide philosophical position, or just a term used to describe atheism without all the negative connotations of that word?

According to dictionary.com, an agnostic is…

1. One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God.
2. One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism. [more…]

For this next post, I had to find out what Unitarian Universalism was. It turns out I still don’t know. But as I still feel it fits the guidelines, here is Early Riser‘s “Religion & Politics.” It’s about a disagreement with a position taken up by his church:

I struggle with those people using the Church (the church that I consider a second home for me and my family) as their communication vehicle. I think the family analogy is a good one. How you you feel if you disagreed with 90+% of your family on a given issue and your family made a public statement that said, “Our family believes x”. Would you feel welcome in your own family? [more…]

Frank, the F.S.A., has reanalyzed Bruce Almighty and come back with a completely different view than that which he had when he first saw it, as a theist.

This raises some serious questions of consistency in the movie. The movie makes it clear that God cannot alter our free-will, but at the same time, he is omnipotent. As such, he was able to grant everyone’s prayer and several thousand people choose the same lottery numbers. How is that not changing their free-will? Wouldn’t you have to alter their wills in order to get so many people to pick the same numbers? [more…]

Francois Tremblay of Goosing the Antithesis has written “Applying induction to ‘holey’ writ” which analyzes ultimate trust in holy texts through an outsider’s perspective.

Suppose we walk into a library – thousands of thousands of books all arranged in tidy rows and ordered by our good friend the Dewey Decimal Classification System. We walk around and look at all the different kinds of books there are – philosophy, religion (we walk fast around that one, only stopping to laugh at the Raelian books), social sciences, language, and so on and so forth. Suddenly I stop at one specific spot in the library, point to a book and shout “AHA ! I found it ! This book is infallible !”, and start reading it and regurgitating it as absolute truth. [more…]

The Two Percent Company has two good posts this time, “No, We Won’t Someday Turn to God” which, predictably, is about how atheists don’t secretly believe in a god or won’t eventually believe in him.

In brief, various members of the Two Percent Company have, since reaching adulthood, experienced medical emergencies both concerning ourselves and our families, been subject to serious illnesses again to ourselves and our families, suffered through the untimely deaths of close friends and family members, and endured an attack at gunpoint, just to name a few events. We aren’t trying to measure our tragedies against anyone else’s — we can certainly imagine worse events than those that we’ve listed — in fact, it’s just the opposite. What we’re saying is that everyone goes through tough times in their lives, and we’re no different. But through all the tough times we’ve experienced as adults, we have not turned to God for help. Not once. Not even for a moment. [more…]

and this one “Will the Real Slim Christians Please Stand Up? (Please stand up, please stand up…)” about how some Christians denounce extremist Christians as not being ‘real’ Christians.

Us? We’re just getting quite fed up with this whole “They’re not the real Christians!” claim which is somehow meant to excuse an entire belief system for the words and actions to which it inspires a great number of its adherents. They’re not real Christians? Guess what, folks — they are. [more…]

Still reeling at this one. Just to make the experience better, I won’t use the part that should affect you. Still, read it. It’s Alonzo Fyfe‘s “Perspective on the Pledge” and its his first submission. What have we been missing out on?

“Shawn. I would understand if you do not want to say the Pledge of Allegiance. However, I would like it if you would at least stand while the rest of the class said it, just to show a little respect to the flag.”

The boy sat silently for a second, then shook his head and said, “I don’t think I can do that, ma’am.”

Ron at God is For Suckers has “Do the Limbo” which casts a snarky eye at Catholicism’s concept of Limbo.

So, original sin plus babies and nice but ignorant heathens bring to the surface the moral horror of the script according to Jehovah: Nice people who’ve done nothing wrong and have not turned their backs on God in any way being send to eternal torture and damnation. And that’s, to most people with a shred of the moral law within them, really bad, and make God look like a horrible, immoral, and arbitrary dictator. [more…]

Modem Butterfly of Neural Gourmet has written “The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend” which is best summed up here:

These people aren’t on our side. Religion doesn’t belong in politics, whether liberal or fundamentalist. It’s too personal, too powerful for those who believe in it, and too exclusionary to those who don’t believe share your beliefs. Besides that, it‘s downright unAmerican, and regardless of how well-intentioned the injection of religion into politics might be, its track record is stunningly bad.

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. And mixing religion and politics is about as wise as mixing water and battery acid. [more…]

Over at The Venerable Infidel, harveyg has written “Rapture and Tribulation: How very clever!!” His position is one which I’m sure many people share: that the apocalypse is simply a scare tactic, used for dramatic purposes.

Some day, no doubt about it (at least in my mind) human life will be wiped out by some natural or man-made catastrophe — perhaps all at once or perhaps over a long period; but excuse me for finding it extremely hard to believe that an all-powerful God, will start the mass removal from the Earth of all those who believe in Him and then do a seven-year tribulation tap dance to sort out the rest. Sorry but I’ve read comic books with more believable plots.

Hey hey! Mark Rayner’s the skwib has some Alternate History that reminds me of some of my own Necroautobiographical Microfiction… sans the Necroautobiographical Micro part. This humorous tale is that of “Dr. Tundra Forsakes the Flying Spaghetti Monster.” Oh, the Huge Manatee!

A lot of these counselors were virginal young women; unfortunately these nubile believers also toted genital clamps for the wayward souls who showed any interest whatsoever in their chaste bodies. (Dr. Tundra had experienced this first hand, so to speak, after an inadvertent glance at Sister Brittany’s not-to-be-ogled ta-tas. It had taken a month for his tackle to work properly again.) [more…]

Finally, a post submitted not by the author, but by a reader. Not that people write bad things, but to be recognized by others and submitted into something like this is a true compliment. Would that we could all find similar posts and draw attention to them. This is Andy’s Last God posted on the Charlotte Capitalist (TM).

Here are some real human experiences which people attribute to God, but are in fact the proper functioning of the subconscious.1. Prayer: Have you ever gone to bed at night thinking about a problem and the next morning you have the answer? It was your subconscious — The Last God.

The next Carnival of the Godless will be held on February 6th over at Superlicious.

The next will be held over at the Uncredible Hallq in eight days. The topic is “Definition of God.” Check out the homepage for more details.

The next Carnival of Satire shall be up the 26th, as usual, on The Sqwib. The deadline, as usual, is Wednesday at 4 p.m.
The next Wow, that’s Funny! Carnival will be held at Kingdom of Heathen at the turn of the month. Submissions might still be accepted for another two or three days.

Welcome all to the Carnival of the Godless, the best (if not only) carnival from a godless perspective on the blogosphere. In eight days, CotG will be one year old. That makes this the last official carnival of the first year. Happy birthday all! It couldn’t be done without you. And now… the posts. Over…