Don’t pollute. (via Too Many Tribbles and Astrazoic)

The October 14th edition of Carnival of the Godless is up over at The Skeptical Alchemist.

The carnival has several good articles on the subject of morality. That’s one of my minor interests/pet peeves (depending on how you look at it). The theists have managed to sell their version of events to most people, which is that modern morality derives mostly from religion. Since they’ve managed to convince most people of that premise, that makes their secondary point easier to sell: That atheists have no morals and/or a society without religion would be immoral.

That’s absurd, of course. I maintain the opposite. Religion was developed by early societies as a way of enforcing the morality that they developed. Threatening transgressors with the wrath of an angry god, from whom they cannot hide, is an excellent method of enforcing moral conduct.

In other words, the theists are not going back far enough. While it is true that many societies codified religious morality into their legal systems, it is those religions in turn that codified earlier legal systems into their morality!

One aspect of morality is altruism. Altruism has been documented in numerous animal species, so there is clearly an evolutionary advantage. That means at least part of our morality is coded into our genes. God had nothing to do with it.

Dorid, over at The Radula, has an excellent article about primitive altruism in fundies and other species, specifically the slime mold. This article is my favorite of all the articles participating in this week’s carnival. After you’ve read that, then head on over to The Skeptical Alchemist to check out some of the others.

Thanks to Bad Astronomy for alerting me to the cartoons of Cectic (I still haven’t figured out how to pronounce that). Here’s one of my favorites:

They’ve pretty much run out of any other arguments.

Go over to Cectic’s site and read the rest.

I thought it would be interesting to set up “atheist” as a keyword on my Tivo to see what it catches. Not long after throwing that line into the water, the Tivo reeled in an episode of All in the Family. I never really understood why that show was so popular. I guess it was a product of its time.

This episode is called “The Little Atheist”. Gloria is eight months pregnant. Interestingly, they show her drinking wine. (Actually, the characters never really drink it. They show the wine. They talk about the wine. They pour the wine. Then they just stare at it for the rest of the episode. The program could have Archie spouting off all sorts of inflammatory racist hogwash, but they can’t drink wine. Strange.) I do find it ironic that this program portrayed itself as so progressive, yet it showed a pregnant being served booze. Odd how the perspective of 30 years can change things.

The premise of this episode is that Gloria and Mike are not going to abuse the baby with a god delusion. This upsets Archie, who thinks that this form of child abuse is necessary. Then there’s the standard All in the Family arguments pro and con, and Archie is shown as being on the wrong side again.

The particular angle they took with this show is that it should be the parents, not anyone else (e.g., grandparents), who should have the final decision in all matters of child rearing. Although it’s hard to argue with that attitude, I was disappointed that the producers copped out of the atheism issue by using this approach.

The episode appears to be about atheism, but it’s really about who decides how to raise a child. So this program, which is famous for tackling controversial issues, doesn’t really tackle it at all. They raise the issue, but settle it by other means.

The episode ends with Archie agreeing to let Mike and Gloria do things their way, but he secretly conspires with Edith to sneak the child off to church every Sunday morning. I’m not sure how this was intended. Are the producers saying that Archie is such a selfish jerk that he will do anything to get his way? Or are they saying that, yes, the parents have all of the rights, except when it comes to God?

Here’s an audio excerpt from the show. (If you’re reading this via RSS, you’ll need to visit my web site to see the Flash player.)

You’ll notice a link to the Atheist Blogroll in the sidebar. Most sites that have this will list at least some of the blogs from that blogroll in their sidebar. I don’t, because that forces your browser to run off to a different server to fetch stuff. That slows down page loading times. The code for that also uses javascript. I try to use as little javascript on this site as possible.

A bunch of blogs are listing the entire Atheist Blogroll in a post. This helps the listed sites with their search engine rankings and Technorati authority. I thought I would help out here as well. Herewith is the entire list. Scan through it and see if any of the titles sound interesting and give them a look.

If you go take a look at Why Creationists Say There’s No Proof, which is a cartoon I found elsewhere, there is a comment from someone calling himself Genius835. He is apparently a moderate Christian, and he somehow thinks that this anti-creationist cartoon is an attack on all Christians.

Genius835’s first problem is that he doesn’t know what a creationist is. Aside from that, he says “I can’t understand why atheists are so quick in insulting religion without any understanding of the religion.” This is followed by my comment educating Genius835 on creationism.

What I want to call your attention to is the comment after that, by Brian. It is brilliant. It answers Genius835’s charge that atheists “are so quick in insulting religion”. In just 334 words, he sums up the situation beautifully. I’m reprinting that comment here:

More than half of this country, 150 million people, living in 21st century America, think the universe is only 6,000 years old. They think that people rode dinosaurs in saddles. They think that the light we see from distant stars was created en route so as to only give the appearance of the universe being billions of years old. It took the Vatican how many centuries to acknowledge that Galileo was right?

I hope what I am about to say will help you to understand atheists better: I insult religion because it insults my intelligence. I insult and ridicule religion because that seems to be the only language believers recognize. Rational discourse is not something creationists are skilled at. Critical thinking is beyond their capacity. Polite, courteous discourse is impossible. These people refuse to open their eyes, and if they harmed only themselves, I could live with it.

These people are actively attempting to undermine my children’s education with their Bronze Age nonsense. They want their mythology codified and enshrined in all our schools, and as an added bonus, they also want to run our personal sex lives for us. They want women to stop being so gosh-darned uppity. They want gays to go away. They want every single one of us to live in a state of fear and anger, all in the service of their imaginary god.

Perhaps you don’t believe that I understand religion, that perhaps not all believers behave this way. Surely a few bad apples can’t ruin the whole basket, can they? But it is people, perhaps like yourself, warm and fuzzy in the thick blanket of religious moderation, that excuse people like Falwell, Dobson, and any other extremist you can mention. I understand the claims made by these religions. I understand the arguments. I reject them wholly and completely.

Atheists don’t attack religion for the hell of it. We do it because religious belief has infested human society, and caused too much misery, for long enough.

Do they hand out Pulitzers for blog comments?

One of the best things to do on a lazy Saturday afternoon is to curl up with a good pulp magazine. Here’s a story from the August 1936 issue of Thrilling Mystery (See this recent post for the cover scan to this issue):

The story is called “The Grave Gives Up”, by Jack D’Arcy. Check out that character on the far right in the illustration above. He looks like Freddie Kruger!

Anyway, the story starts out quite promising. Protagonist Gordon Lane is feeling sorry for himself one night, because his girlfriend, Janice, died two weeks earlier in a minor traffic accident. Then suddenly, the phone rings! It’s his girlfriend calling from beyond the grave! She says “Gordon! Come to me! I need you!” Then the line goes dead!

Sweet! A weird menace story! I don’t know what’s going on, but the story is fun so far, so I continue reading.

Gordon jumps in his car to visit Dr. Ramos, who signed Janice’s death certificate. When he gets to Dr. Ramos’ house, here is how the author introduces the doctor:

He was a complete atheist, a crass materialist…

WTF?! An atheist? We’re only two pages into this story, and it’s pretty obvious who the bad guy is going to be. Need someone who is willing to reanimate the dead? Use an atheist! They have no morals!

Anyway, Dr. Ramos (physician, scientist, atheist) tells Gordon that Janice was really dead. Gordon vows to find out what is going on, so he hops back in his car and screeches off to the cemetery.

Wandering through the graveyard (remember, it’s nighttime), he hears a noise coming from a crypt, so he drops in for a visit. He discovers that a bunch of the coffins are opening up and corpses are coming out! He runs out of there and over to the crypt that Janice is in. He opens her coffin, and it’s empty!

Let’s stop and think about this for a minute. Earlier, the author introduced an atheist character, which we know that we will later discover is the evil culprit behind the walking dead. Gordon, the protagonist, is not an atheist. He must be right and proper and moral! So why the hell is this “moral” character breaking open coffins?!

Back to the story. Gordon runs over to the caretaker’s cottage and pounds on the door. The caretaker comes to the door, and it’s that guy in the illustration above! It’s Freddie Kruger! Of course, Gordon doesn’t know this, because it’s almost 50 years before those movies will come out. Gordon turns his back on the caretaker and gets whomped on the head with a blackjack.

When Gordon wakes up, he’s in some sort of chamber beneath the cemetery. A bunch of zombies are digging a hole. Freddie Kruger occasionally smacks them with a whip to keep them moving. Janice is there, a perfect little zombie. And of course, the evil atheist Dr. Ramos is there, holding both a knife and a gun. I guess Dr. Ramos is the belt-and-suspenders type.

Here’s how Dr. Ramos is reintroduced in this scene:

The doctor’s casual atheism, which the village had tolerated, suddenly became a fearful thing to Gordon Lane. It was a black unholiness—a defy to the very God who had created him.

At this point, everything is explained. The zombies aren’t really dead. They’re some of Dr. Ramos’ indigent patients. Nobody would miss them, so he told the authorities that they died. He then gave them Cannabis to “stupefy” them. Once they were stupefied, they were susceptible to his evil hypnotic mind control. He was then able to use them as zombies to dig up some sort of treasure that was supposed to be buried hereabouts.

This is absurd, of course. Everyone knows that pot saps your motivation. All that stoners want to do is sit on the couch, eating Cheetos and watching Brady Bunch reruns. Stoners do not make good workers.

How Janice got involved is when she had her minor car wreck and was taken to Dr. Ramos. He fell in love with her. So he told everyone that she died, then he “stupefied” her with Cannabis and hypnotized her.

Anyway, then there’s a big fight. Dr. Ramos gives the knife to Janice to have her kill Gordon. But because she loves Gordon, a tiny piece of her brain is still awake. This enables Gordon to overpower her long enough to seize the knife and throw it at Dr. Ramos (who shoots but misses). He goes down. His spell over Janice is broken. Oh, happy day!

After a suitable reunion scene between Gordon and Janice, they realize that Dr. Ramos might wake up and be pissed off about the knife that’s sticking out of him. Gordon tells Janice to call the cops while he immobilizes the doc. Janice runs off. Gordon decides that revenge is better than due process, so he takes the doctor’s gun and shoots him with it!

That’s how it ends, folks. I don’t know how Gordon is going to explain how Dr. Ramos ended up dead, since he was still alive and passed out when Janice left.

But look at that ending. The protagonist, who the author assures us throughout the story is a theist, murders the doctor in cold blood! It wasn’t even self defense! The doctor was still passed out on the ground! And they portrayed the atheist as the bad guy!

Sometimes you just luck into things. I have my Tivo set up to record anything with Groucho Marx in it. On Sunday I discovered that it had recorded CBS Sunday Morning, because it had a profile of the comedy legend. As I was fast forwarding to get there, I saw Julia Sweeney and Christopher Hitchens zip by. It turns out the show also had a story on atheism. That’s appropriate; both the Marx Brothers and atheism are about subverting authority.

I’ve been waiting for someone to post the segment to YouTube. The first copy was a crappy kinescope(!), but here’s a cleaner copy:

(YouTube page is here.)

In that video, Stephen Prothero made a common mistake. He claimed that atheism is just as guilty as religion for the world’s suffering. He claimed that “atheistic regimes” such as Stalin’s USSR are responsible for millions of deaths. Stalin murdered millions of people, but it had nothing to do with atheism.

Those millions of deaths were not done in the name of atheism. They were done in the names of paranoia, power-grabbing, and greed. When did Stalin ever say or imply that he was killing people because they believed in God?

Just because the USSR was officially atheistic doesn’t mean you get to blame all of their bad behavior on that. By that logic, religion comes off hundreds of times worse than it already does. After all, more than 90% of the population believes in God. That means we can blame religion for every murder, rape, and other atrocity committed by a theist. That’s millions per year.

That’s obviously a ridiculous claim. We only blame religion for the acts that are specifically committed in its name: Wars, murders, suicide bombings, fatwas, etc. It’s still a big list, and you religious people should be ashamed of it. All of those atrocities are the logical progression of your illogical beliefs.

Don’t try to squirm out of it, either. You label things with absolutes. “Right!” “Wrong!” You threaten people with extreme rewards (heaven, paradise) and punishments (eternal damnation in a lake of fire). It’s little wonder that some people get a little too wrapped up in this fantasy and start shooting abortion doctors or blowing up Israelis.

You religious people are responsible for creating an atmosphere in which this thinking can occur. Just because your particular flavor of fairy dust doesn’t do these things doesn’t get you off the hook. You created the mess. You’re responsible for it.