Procrastic Fantastic

“I’ve never yet met an atheist with a sense of joie-de-vivre… most of them seem to be miserable buggers… I am convinced that (atheism) … is directly responsible for the increase in drug abuse, in crime, and most specifically, in the five-fold increase in suicide that we have seen in these islands over the last 25 years.”

The Irish Independent, usually a fairly sane publication with pretty good economic analysis (and more importantly for my Monday mornings, an awareness of Irish football), saw fit to give two-thirds of a page to a focused attack by ‘journalist’ Mary Kenny on ‘atheism’. While she seems partially inclined to bore readers with some jabs at the UK’s Guardian newspaper (she writes for a rival paper in England), the majority of the piece is a scathing attack on what she sees as the root of all our problems.

I am an atheist - I don’t believe there is a God. I usually borrow an analogy and say that “I’m an atheist like you - I don’t believe in Vishnu, in Allah, in Yahweh, in Zeus nor in Thor; I just believe in one less God than you”. Unfortunately this is not always tolerated. (more…)

I stumbled upon an interesting, if flawed, test on Quizfarm about what stance on religion suits you. Predictably, atheism and Buddhism scored highest for me (after all, Buddhism is atheistic) since I’m atheist and find Buddha’s teachings to be more helpful than “thou shalt not take the Lords’ name in vain”. If I’m atheist, and Buddhists are atheist, and I agree with Buddha, does that make me Buddhist? Any excuse to wear a toga!

Be warned, including atheism in this is a bit silly since the scores for individual religions are based on moral or ethical dilemmas, whereas your atheism score is calculated from painfully obvious “Do you believe in God” questions. As such, my rejection of church authority and opinions on free will seem to have pushed Paganism and Satanism into 3rd and 4th places respectively. Still, it beats your average bebo quiz! Anyone bored enough to be reading this, feel free to leave your scores in the comments section.

Recently I’ve been doing that most pointless of things - arguing on the internet. It is a fault of mine that I cannot abide sitting idly by while someone lies or misinforms. And so, I entered one particularly long debate on everything from Yahwehs existence to evolution. I even had to sit through some ridiculous Youtube videos of muslim clerics asking “if monkeys turned into humans, why are there still monkeys?” This type of foggy, ignorant thinking abhors me enough to continue an argument. Finally, after monotonously explaining all of these laws, processes and theories, we came to the point where the Creationist had become a Pantheist - believing in nothing specific, but rather in some all powerful force. This is the denouement of that argument. (more…)