Just a few random things I’ve collected recently:
Again and again, the artist who calls himself “QualiaSoup” does a splendid job of using the power of logic in a visual and comprehensible way to undo the specious arguments made by believers that is utterly unassailable and yet neither off-putting nor inflammatory. Here’s the latest one making the rounds, wherein he addresses the notion of “faith” and simply dismembers it with Vulcan-like logic and reason:
Then there’s this thought from Penn Jillette, which makes a more emotional pitch:
“If you believe the Pope really is infallible in giving us the word of God, and you believe the God he speaks for does not approve of gay sex, does not want condoms used to help control the spread of AIDS or to stop women from giving birth to unwanted babies . . . maybe if you have humanity and compassion, if you have morality and a conscience, if you still believe that there really is a God really pulling the Pope’s strings, that God might not be the kind of God you want to worship.”
He brings up a couple of touchstone terms — “morality” and “conscience”. Religious believers like to insist that atheists can’t be moral or have a conscience because we don’t subscribe to their faith-based world-view. This is, of course, utter bullshit, and Jillette does a nice job of turning that particular canard back on them. So does “Ebonmusings” in this recent post at Daylight Atheism. My online buddy Jack Cluth makes his point a little more archly:
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
