Radical Atheist

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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 despair when I encounter people like this in RL and on the net. They should be the punchlines of jokes, they ought to be caricatures. But they’re real, they really exist, really vote, really have kids and most likely an active sex life. THAT RIGHT THERE PROVES THERE’S NO JUSTICE IN THIS LIFE!!

I feel so sad for humanity knowing people who “think” like this are still around. These are the guys who fly planes into buildings, or would if they could and if Christian fanatics had as big a pair of balls as the Muslims. Instead they kill doctors and innocents, justifying it by blaming it on god, using an idea to excuse their inhumanity.

Beliefs like these stifle human progress, they retard our evolution. Religious belief is essentially retarded (note: I’m not calling believers retarded, not explicitly anyway). It can never advance in understanding past its origin 2000 years ago (or less depending on the religion). At the time Christianity was invented, for example, it proclaimed itself to be the ultimate truth, the zenith of knowledge. Implicit in that belief is the sad fact that nothing more could be added to the “wisdom” in the Bible. Access to further knowledge and understanding of our universe was closed. Everything you needed to know, would ever need to know, was in the Bible. Of course not just anyone could read and interpret the holy writings. We needed a priest class to act as intermediaries between just the words claimed to be god’s and humanity. Others claimed to be intermediaries between the god itself and humanity. Lay people, ministers and theologians have been at each other’s throats ever since.

Humanists and atheists don’t accept limitations on knowledge. We confess our ignorance of so much. But we, like everyone else, have a standard that has to be met when it comes to what we’ll accept as truth. Not absolute truth, conditional truth is as good as it gets. Our standards are high, our tolerance for bullshit low. If we’ve listened to what you have to say (and I don’t know an American who hasn’t heard what Christians have to say), and we’ve dismissed it as inadequate, don’t be obnoxious and try to imply there’s any aspect to your religion we haven’t already considered and discarded. It’s a done deal. Unlike Christians, we don’t want to answer 21st century questions with 2000 year old answers. Humans have developed tools and techniques unknown to ancient goat herders that allow us to answer questions we didn’t even have 5 years ago.

Yet humanity, by and large, prefers to embrace superstitions rather than face realities.

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People contend that science and religion can coexist. Science itself is not anti-religion but much of what we’ve learned about reality from science exposes the errors in theology.

The Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon were written by people of a certain time and a particular social setting. Holy books reflect the society that gave birth to them. None of them clearly and without requiring convoluted interpretation state anything that was not already known in that time and part of the world.

Why wouldn’t the gods mention something in their books (using “their” loosely, as we know that the books were written by human scribes who only claimed to be inspired by the subject of the book) that was going to be common knowledge only much later. Think of the stunning effect that would have on future generations. A specific and detailed prediction of the internet, for instance. Something that would have made no sense at all to the scribes but would only be understood 1000 years later. The gods in the holy books give no indication of knowing anything about the rest of the world, present or future, that isn’t also common knowledge of the time and people from whence it comes. I’ve heard tons of excuses for that but no rational example of any god showing an awareness of something completely unknown and foreign to the authors of those books.

The Bible, because it’s the one I’m most familiar with, clearly indicates “truths” that are not correct according to the current evidence. For example, the Earth did not come into being in seven days or seven thousand years (There are two places in scripture that say a day with the Lord is as a thousand years, which either means that his time scale is different than ours or that he’s a really boring person) but over millions of years. Science is clearly at odds with the Biblical creation story. Conclusions drawn from available evidence also lend no validity to American Indian creation stories, Egyptian creation stories or any of the thousands of other fantastic and supernatural creation stories.

Creation stories persist because humans have only recently begun to have the means to examine nature on the scale we can today. We’ve been ignorantly superstitious for thousands of years. We’ve only been able to look at the universe the way we can today in the last hundred. There’s a lot of ingrained ignorance, yes, in even the most brilliant mind, to eradicate. We really only just begun.

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This is why the separation clause needs to be strictly enforced, and why Shimkus needs to be replaced.

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