Radical Atheist

This web site serves as an introduction and portal to four faithful ministries which are teaching that WE CAN KNOW from the Bible alone that the date of the rapture of believers will take place on May 21, 2011 and that God will destroy this world on October 21, 2011. Please take your time and browse through the teachings of Harold Camping, President of Family Radio. Visit EBible Fellowship, Bible Ministries International, and The-Latter-Rain to read and listen to many faithful teachers give scriptural insight on the doctrines that God is teaching His people. Learn about the Biblical Timeline of History, the correct method of Bible interpretation, the End of the Church Age and God’s command to believers that they must depart out of the churches. Study the proofs that God has so graciously given in His Word showing us that these dates are 100% accurate and beyond dispute.

http://www.wecanknow.com/ (Emphasis added)

There you have it. A 100% accurate and indisputable date for the departure of all Christians, or perhaps I should say all true Christians®, and the end of the world for the rest of us heathens, unbelievers and heretics, not to mention all those posers who call themselves Christian but aren’t really true Christians®.

I don’t see how anyone can doubt the accuracy of this prediction. Never before has anyone suggested a particular date for the end of times, except maybe the paltry few mentioned here. Besides, it has to be true, it’s in the Bible, and we all know the Bible is the inspired word of god and thus can contain no errors.

Leo XIII, Encyclical Providentissimus Deus, Nov. 18, 1893: For all the books which in their integrity the Church receives as sacred and canonical, with all their parts, were written by the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the Supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true.
This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, solemnly defined in the Councils of Florence and Trent, and finally confirmed and more expressly formulated by the Council of the Vatican, which made the positive statement that the Books of the Old and the New Testaments have God for their Author. Hence we cannot say that because the Holy Ghost employed men as His instruments, it was these inspired instruments who perchance have fallen into error, and not the primary author. For, by His supernatural power, He so moved and impelled them to write—He was so present to them as they wrote—that all the things which He ordered, and those only, they both rightly understood, then willed faithfully to write down, and finally expressed in apt words and with infallible truth. Otherwise it could not be said that God was the Author of the entire Scripture. . . . And so emphatically were all the Fathers and Doctors agreed that the divine writings, as left by the sacred writers, are free from all error, that they labored earnestly, with no less skill than reverence, to reconcile with each other those numerous passages which seem at variance—indeed in great measure those very passages which have been exploited by the `Higher Criticism’; for they were unanimous in laying it down that those writings in their entirety and all their parts were equally from the afflatus of Almighty God, and that God, speaking by the sacred writers, could not set down anything but what was true.” (Acta Leonis XIII, xiii, 357-9.)

This prediction has to be true because it is from the Bible. We know the Bible is inerrant, which means it is without error. We know this is true because the Bible tells us so. If the Bible says it is without error then it must be without error because it says so in the Bible, and the Bible is without error. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”.

So pack your bags, true Christians®, you’re heading home in less than a year. As for the rest of us, there’s still time to practice our wailing and gnashing of teeth so we can fit right in with all those billions of people left behind.

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One frequent, and flawed, argument Christians often employ in an attempt to make faith sound reasonable is Pascal’s Wager.

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is….
…”God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. “No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.”
Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
“That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.” Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.

I seriously doubt the majority of those who try to use this argument to counter atheism have ever read Pascal’s Pensées since they rarely if ever quote him properly not do they seem aware of the larger philosophical argument he was making.

It also presumes that faith can be engaged and disengaged at will and still be rewarded by god as genuine faith. Faith assumed simply as a choice and not embraced passionately, “with all your heart and mind”, is not acceptable to the majority of Christian religions. “I might as well believe” is not considered a true conversion and does not earn redemption according to most denominations, if not all. So in that context the faith that results from Pascal’s Wager would not be accepted by most Christians as “true faith” and would be a waste of time and effort.

For fun, the next time a Christian tries to pass Pascal’s Wager off as a credible argument for belief in god, respond with Richard Dawkin’s version of the wager…

Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc.”

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What’s the harm in religious belief?

It’s puts insane thoughts like this into your head.

A US cage fighter ripped out the heart of his training partner while he was still alive after becoming convinced he was possessed by the devil.

Jarrod Wyatt also cut out his friend’s tongue and ripped off most of his face in a brutal assault that police said looked like a scene from a horror film.
They found the 26 year old standing naked over his friend’s body with body parts, including an eyeball, strewn around the blood splattered room.

Wyatt told police he had drunk a cup of tea spiked with hallucinogenic mushrooms and became convinced his close friend Taylor Powell was possessed.

According to an autopsy Powell,21, bled to death after his heart was ripped out.
The coroner said Powell had been alive when the organ was ripped out after his chest had been sliced open with a knife.
Wyatt told the police he thrown the heart into a fire along with other organs that he had removed from the body.
He told investigators he cooked the body parts because he was fearful Powell was still alive and he “needed to stop the Devil.”

Police had been called to the grisly scene after a third friend had witnessed a sudden mood change in Wyatt after they had all ingested wild mushroom tea.
Justin Davis told police he returned to the flat in Klamath, California, to find Wyatt naked and covered from head to toe in blood.
He noticed an eyeball lying in the middle of the floor and saw Powell’s mutilated body.

A lawyer representing Wyatt has claimed the wild mushrooms caused him to act in such a violent way and had not control over his actions “My client was trying to silence the devil,” said James Fallman.
“I think he was having a psychotic fit based on the mushrooms he had.”

Wyatt has been charged with first degree murder and torture.
Prosecutors added the torture charge as Powell was still alive when his heart was removed.

(Source-The Telegraph)

I agree he was psychotic, but not because of the mushrooms. I’ve taken mushrooms, and they didn’t make me want to do this. They only acted on the bizarre thoughts that religious belief had already placed in his mind.

And people still ask why so many of us object to religious belief.

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This post is not an invocation of Goodwin’s Law. The following is an excerpt from a Daily Kos reaction to Beck’s reference to Kos as a Nazi. The entire article is worth a read, unless you actually admire Glen Beck. If, like me, you see Beck as the video version of that other bombastic know-nothing, Rush Limbaugh, you’ll appreciate how much of their rhetoric mirrors the sentiments of the Nazi Party. You know, that socialist/fascist/communistic (they change their definition with their underwear, once a month) regime they both like to equate with the Obama administration.

Despite the mental anguish involved, you really should listen to a few of Glen’s classic moments on YouTube then check the lists below. See which list he most closely resembles.

Things The Nazi Were Against:
Trade unions
Communists
“Social justice”
“Liberals”
“The liberal press”
“Socialism”
“Socialists”
“Democrats”
“Social Democrats”
“Civil Rights”
Empathy
Homosexuals
Pacifists
Atheists
Secularists
Religious tolerance
Mixed marriages
Contraception
Sex education
Immigrants
Multiculturalism
Bilingual anything
Universal education
Art that does not glorify the state
Darwin and teaching evolution
Elementary teachers who don’t teach nationalism
University professors
People who don’t support the troops
…and of course Jews

Things The Nazi Were For:
Pre-emptive war
Underming people’s faith in elections and especially their faith in parliament
Reducing history education to broad populist themes to convice white people they are the eternal victims
A “spiritual” movement because only a spiritual movement can create ruthless, unwavering violence.
Values education in the schools
Censorship
Reducing science education
College students ratting out professors for lack of loyalty
Torture
Abstinence
Early marriage
High birth rate
State control of the media, arts, and science
Personality cults
Making nationalism part of the school curriculum
Worship of an idealized version of the past
Rebellion against “weak” authority
Blaming minorities and immigrants for everything
Invoking destiny and being judged by history
Claiming to do “God’s will”

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This appears to substantiate the possibility of blasphemy laws being enacted in the West as presented in my last posting.

An atheist who left leaflets mocking Jesus Christ, Islam and the Pope in an airport’s prayer room has been given an Asbo.

Harry Taylor, 59, from Higher Broughton, Salford, left the anti-religious posters in prayer rooms at Liverpool
John Lennon Airport in November and December 2008.

Taylor denied three counts of causing religiously aggravated harassment during his trial at Liverpool Crown Court.

But he was found guilty by a jury and given a suspended six-month sentence yesterday, as well as an Asbo forbidding him from carrying anti-religious leaflets in public.

One of the posters Taylor left at the airport depicted a smiling crucified Christ next to an advert for a brand of “no nails” glue. In another, a cartoon depicted two Muslims holding a placard demanding equality with the caption: “Not for women or gays, obviously.” A third poster showed Islamic suicide bombers at the gates of paradise being told: “Stop, stop, we’ve run out of virgins”. (Source-The Independent)

The National Secular Society expresses an opinion on this ruling that reflects my own thoughts.

One of the "offensive" images

The sentencing of Harry Taylor has been condemned by the National Secular Society as “creating a new blasphemy law that will open the way for every religious extremist to persecute and prosecute their critics.”

Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society said: “Regardless of the fact that this six month sentence has been suspended, it is still totally out of proportion for what Mr Taylor did. Nobody can deny that he was being deliberately provocative in leaving these rather mild cartoons, cut from Private Eye, in the prayer room, but in the end he didn’t harm anybody and was simply making a point about the existence of such a facility. The chaplain could quite easily have simply thrown the papers in the bin.

“Instead, she claims to have been hurt and offended by this material, which makes her ultra sensitivity a dangerous thing indeed. The professional ‘offence takers’ in religious communities will now feel that they have a strong new weapon to use against anyone who is critical or disapproving of them. It is, in effect, a blasphemy law that covers all religions and is much more powerful than the one that was abolished only two years ago.”

“Religiously aggravated offences represent a new kind of blasphemy law, and the professional offence takers in religious communities won’t be slow to exploit this new avenue of restricting criticism and comment about their beliefs. It is time for parliament to reconsider these provisions and remove them from the statute books.”

Mr Sanderson said that Mr Taylor describes himself as a “militant atheists” who wanted to challenge the existence of the “prayer room” particularly as it was situated on John Lennon Airport in Liverpool – he maintained that John Lennon was an atheist and would not have approved of the presence of the prayer room. (Source-National Secular Society)

I can’t imagine any rational free-thinker accepting this ruling without protest.

The Pope has repeatedly expressed his displeasure with the media coverage of the multitude of molestation claims being presented around the globe. Will he be the next person to make a legal challenge to this coverage and manage to silence criticism of the Church’s efforts to ignore and bury those claims? Isn’t it a form of blasphemy to question the actions of the Holy See?

How will Christians in the West react if Muslims are able to gain legal protection against any defamatory statement about Islam being made by those who don’t follow that religion, including those who believe in other gods?

When did life offer us a guarantee to never be offended by those who don’t share our opinions? By what universal right do the religious claim exemption from criticism and skepticism. It seems to me that the last refuge of any shallow philosophy that cannot defend itself with logic and reason is the court. When beliefs are indefensible make any offense a criminal action.

Finally, what about my beliefs as a non-religious believer? Shouldn’t I be equally protected by law from offensive remarks made by religious believers who think nothing of calling me immoral and condemning me to an eternity of pain and suffering?

The whole “anti-blasphemy” concept is a joke and antithetical in any nation that repects freedom of thought, speech and the press. Sadly it appears the list of nations that respect those freedoms is shrinking.

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Anti-blasphemy laws are coming, I have little doubt. And they won’t be used to only protect Muslims from offense. Defenders of religious belief seem to think they are exempt from satire and criticism. One day soon they’ll have international law on their side and freedom of speech (where protected) will have to step aside to permit imprisonment or death for those who dare disagree with the church.

Am I over-stating the situation? I don’t think so. Consider the following:

A German cartoon mocking the Catholic Church has sparked holy outrage among believers here who say it incites hatred against the Pope and the Catholic faith.

The caricature, published in the Good Friday edition of satire magazine Titanic, shows a priest apparently having oral sex with a crucifix of Jesus on the cross.
The crucifix cartoon is a barbed commentary on recent revelations that 250 people in Germany were sexual abused at Church-run schools in the past decades. The scandal has shaken the German Church. A recent poll said Germans’ trust in the Catholic Church had fallen to 17% from 29% in late January and approval ratings for Pope Benedict have dropped from 38% to 24%.

The German Press Council reported that some 100 formal complaints have been filed since the magazine came out, a level of protest not seen since 2006, when German newspaper Die Welt reprinted the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons.

Two criminal complaints have also been filed against the cartoonist and the editors of Titanic, claiming the picture slanders their religion. The state prosecutors office in Frankfurt, where Titanic is based, said it would decide next week whether to begin an investigation against the magazine.

“We were shocked — shocked! — By the reaction to the cartoon,” Titanic editor-in-chief Leo Fischer told THR, his tongue firmly in cheek. “It shows a priest cleaning the crucifix. … I find it strange that Catholics immediately think of sex when they see it.”

I wasn’t surprised when Muslim nations attempted to outlaw blasphemy by establishing an international law exempting religious belief from criticism. After all, Islam isn’t a religion noted for its tolerance of opposing views. I confess I wasn’t expecting the next nation to enact anti-blasphemy laws to be Ireland. I fully expect Vatican City to soon pass its own anti-blasphemy law. Perhaps the Catholic Church will follow the Scientology method of eliminating criticism.

I submit there are two primary motivations behind the efforts of religious sects to have their beliefs protected by law against criticism. The first is the unprecedented exposure of the less than savory aspects and activities of these groups on the internet. Never before have critics had a vehicle like the internet with which to publish and document religion’s dark side. Even those trapped in militant theocracies can speak out in anonymity to the rest of the world. Since the defenders of the faith cannot deny the allegations they attempt to criminalize the exposures.

The second primary factor is the increasing irrelevance of religion among the world’s citizens. As more natural explanations are found for those phenomena once attributed to the gods, the less all-powerful the gods become. As we enter the 21st century, 1st century explanations are unsatisfactory and easily dismissed. In our modern world there is little reason to believe in the gods. They serve no useful purpose and offer scant comfort. As the masses cease to allow the god’s representatives here on Earth total freedom to behave as they wish, the priests and imams begin to panic. Their hold on the people who once blindly followed them and excused them for their excessive and immoral lifestyles is lessening. They are no longer able to keep their sheep in line with threats of godly displeasure and eternal damnation. So they do what, in the end, all dictators and despots do. They attempt to use the force of law to enforce their beliefs. Not satisfied to demonize their detractors, they try to criminalize them. Non-believers might not be impressed with being consigned to a non-existent hell, but they can’t deny the living hell of being imprisoned.

Religious belief does not always simply fade away without a whimper. Too many times in history we’ve seen that just before a fanatical regime disappears it fights the hardest to survive. It has no regard for the damage it inflicts on humanity in its efforts to remain powerful and relevant.

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There are those people who fall asleep as soon as the plane is in the air and sleep through the entire flight.

These are believers. They ignore the process in favor of the results. They propose a conclusion, even proclaim it to be the only conclusion that’s acceptable, before submitting that conclusion to the same critical thought process most people apply to other aspects of their lives.

Then there are those of us who stay awake the entire flight, staring out the windows and watching the other passengers.

We are those to whom the process is the most fascinating part of reality. The end game, being inevitable, is uninteresting. It will unfold in its own way and time. No one knows for certain which philosophy will win out after we die. So we see little value on placing too much importance on that. Since we are alive now, in this time and place, in the body we inhabit, we might as well focus on the here-and-now. The present moment is the ultimate reality. We are only truly alive at the point in space-time when the future becomes the past. We can’t even measure that period of time it’s so short. We can only experience it. That’s what non-believers can enjoy, the experience of the moment. We find it because we are looking for it. When your focus is 500 feet down the trail you miss the universe under your feet.

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Did we need religion to get to where we are today? Was religious belief a primary factor in humanity being what it is today, the world being in the condition it’s in today? Wouldn’t humanity have been worse off without religion?

Humans have evolved a brain that is capable of abstract thought. Being thinking animals, we ask questions that often have no absolute answer in nature. We also evolved a need to be sure of things. We dislike uncertainty. When we have a question for which there appears to be no explanation we impatiently invent one.

Thousands of years ago people questioned their existence. They invented answers to their questions that both satisfied their curiosity and managed to avoid debunking by being posed as outside our everyday reality. In the years since the industrial revolution we’ve had more and more “free time” during which to ponder our existence. We still don’t have any absolutely sure answers for some of our thorniest questions, so there’s still room for fantastic thinking. Some people become so comfortable with their superstitious beliefs they’ll hold onto them even after a reasonably natural explanation can be provided for some “miraculous” or “foreseen” event. Hope and wishful thinking are more comforting than a seemingly sterile, materialistic, atheistic view of life.

I consider religious belief to be a form of superstition. I see no practical, core difference between believing in a god, believing a rabbit’s foot can bring luck, lucky numbers or crystal power. They are just a few of the personally significant superstitions that are accepted as valid and real despite having no credible evidence of their efficacy. We employ them to explain the unexplained. We use them as filler for the gaps in our understanding. They have, no doubt, contributed to our success as a species in some manner. But we shouldn’t get too egotistical about our place in the history of the planet. Our species hasn’t even been around as long as the dinosaurs were. Still, we can relieve our feelings of insignificance by inventing gods and fates that favor us, guide us, even love us.

I suspect it’s our ability to construct superstitions, being abstract thinkers, to explain the mysteries we encounter that has an evolutionary advantage. We aren’t stressed out by doubt. Superstitions gave us a way to avoid asking questions for which we knew there were no answers. Unfortunately it turned out that superstitious people were easy to manipulate. Many priests and con-men have lived lives of luxury and influence thanks to the human propensity to need an absolute answer for every question, the human willingness to suspend all skepticism and incredulity in the quest for assurance and certainty.

Atheists truly are ignorant. We are willing to admit that to many of the really big questions in life we have no answers. We are too young a species, we have only had the tools to examine reality at ever smaller and smaller scales for the last hundred years or so. We are at the point where most of what we’re discovering is showing us how poorly we understand reality at its core, how much there is yet to learn. We accept our ignorance, it’s what motivates us to always be pushing the limits of knowledge and always willing to learn. As we learn more and understand better, we incorporate new knowledge into our world view. Nothing is certain, nothing can yet be said to be absolutely this or that. There’s too much we just don’t know yet.

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It’s the belief of the religious that we should all live by their rules, open opposition is not allowed.

Their dogma allows for illogical censorship, book burnings, prohibitions. They see nothing wrong with denying everyone the chance to make their own decisions and reach their own conclusions.

They avoid being exposed to anything that challenges their beliefs. And since they’re in the majority in many countries, they have weight to throw around. Bullies always bully others out of fear.

The NZ Atheist Bus Campaign, which late last year raised in excess of $20,000 from public donations, has met a set back in their plans. Nationwide bus company NZ Bus, who had tentatively approved the campaign’s ads on buses in major city centres, have now rejected them.

NZ Bus stated that they have received a number of complaints from the public about the proposed ads, which read “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Advertisements with identical wording ran in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Spain. Similar campaigns also ran successfully in Croatia, Finland, Holland, Italy, America and across the Tasman in Australia.

“We are gravely concerned that in New Zealand we’re unable to present an atheistic message, showing that we do not have the same practical freedom of expression as in other first world countries. It highlights why this campaign is so necessary.” said spokesperson Simon Fisher.
http://www.nogod.org.nz/2010/02/atheist-bus-campaign-determined-to-roll-on-despite-set-back/ (Emphasis added)

Let’s break the message down and see if we can find what’s so objectionable.

There’s probably no god.
An opinion rather mildly offered. Nothing like the presumption of absolute knowledge claimed in religiously influenced public postings. There’s no condemnation of believers or of any particular religion. It’s perhaps the mildest expression of disagreement with religious belief I’ve ever encountered. Yet it seems to make religious people apoplectic.

Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
Oh, well, yeah, there it is. The complete antithesis of religious belief. A direct challenge to the faith. Now I see why theists have raised such a stink over these banners.

OK, no, I really don’t. Does god want us to worry? (Actually he does. The Bible, for example, encourages believers to live in fear and trembling of their god. If I thought for a moment that their god was real, I’d fear their god, too. He’s portrayed as one mean sum-bitch. )

Is it anti-theistic to suggest that everyone should be able to enjoy their lives? Are those values which somehow conflict with religious belief?

If anyone thinks they can clearly present an intellectually satisfying explanation for why these signs should be opposed I’d love to hear it.

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“I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything’s going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil what they all have in common it’s a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‘oh my god, its all going down the tubes’, like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It’s also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They’re to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious.”
Brian Eno in an interview with The Guardian

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