Jerks!

Now, I realise I used more profanity than usual in my last post. After reading it over, I probably could have used other words to describe how I felt - but I didn't. The stuff got me a little mad while I was writing it out, and I swear when I'm mad. If profanity offends you, navigate away from the page now, please, because I'm really, really pissed off.

Now I've received a couple fucked up emails at religiotsblog@live.ca from random people who stumble upon this blog like a drunk tripping over a fire hydrant, but none of them have actually gotten to me. When I say "couple," I literally mean two. Two emails from religiots telling me I'm going to hell, blah blah blah, all that kind of predictable bullshit. Do I give a fuck about those two? No! Why? Because they're fucking stupid!

WEHN YUO TYPE LEIK YOU HAEV PARKINSNONS DISAESE I DNONT GIEV A FUCK WHAT YUORE SAYING

THIS one, though... The third installment of doucheisms, actually annoyed me. For the most part, it was intelligently written, with a couple glaring exceptions. First of all, this man, we'll call him.... Darwin, for hilarity, assumed I was American. They only have the internet in the USA, after all.

I'm not going to post the email itself, nor will I post the address it was sent from. I'm assuming that it's a shit eating troll, and that the addy was made up for the sole purpose of trolling, or eating shit. (Yeah, I know that doesn't make sense. I don't care.)

Douchey Darwin did, however, bring up a valid point. So, until I've finished checking up on what I can and can't post, I've removed all the pictures and a couple of the links from my previous posts.

Oh, but I'm putting this picture in. I have permission from the artist, the artist is me.




Click the pic to enlarge.

Earthquake! Quick! Grab the SuperBible!

Unless you've been in a coma for the past couple weeks, you've heard about the devastation in Haiti. The haitians are dying, starving, living outdoors, struggling from day to day. Oh, and there was an earthquake that made all of that shit even worse. Over a hundred thousand people have died, people are missing, the country is in ruins. Haiti was already the poorest country in the western hemisphere, so seeing them hit with a natural disaster of this magnitude is frustratingly heartbreaking.

The aid they're receiving, however, is incredible. Money and manpower are flowing in from quite literally all over the globe, it's looking like people have really come together in the wake of this disaster to lend a helping hand. Through something as simple as a text message it's possible to donate money to the cause, and the reaction to this system from the public is phenomenal.

There are, of course, these types of people.

Oh, so... the earthquake... was punishment? Did I understand him correctly? I mean, he's saying that the Haitian people "made a deal with the devil," so they've been cursed.

I don't think I need to explain why Robertson is a douche.

The moronic radical rants of a senile psychopath aside, (say that ten times, fast) I also read about this, and it had my teeth grinding. A group of Religiots in Albuquerque have decided that it'd be a good idea to send Solar-powered Super-bibles to the Haitians. They're saying that these Holy Gadgets will bring "hope and comfort that comes from knowing God has not forgotten them through this tragedy." I know I'm not the only one thinking it, but I'll write it out anyway.

So, if there's a god, and he's watching out for us because he loves us, cares for us, and wants us to be happy - why did he decide to grab haiti and shake the shit out of it, murdering 100,000 people?

Now, as for this religious group "Faith Comes by Hearing," if you want to help Haiti out, that's cool. I've got an idea - I just thought of it right now, actually, it's kinda neat. You can take my idea if you want. It's alright, I don't mind. I mean, it might not even be my idea, someone else may have had it before me.

SEND THEM SOME FUCKING MONEY!

Solar powered bibles aren't going to pull their families out from underneath the rubble. Prayer isn't going to feed them. Faith isn't going to bring them clean water, and hope doesn't build new homes. Take the money you spent on those Brain-Wash-O-Matics and give that to them instead.

Thanks for your time.







Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?
-Epicurus

A lawyer, a Priest, and an Irishman go into a bar...

If you haven't read about it yet, It's now illegal to speak in Ireland. There really isn't anything, anything, that it's legal to say - without facing a £25,000 fine. January 1st, 2010 brought more than the clinking of glasses and cries of "Happy New Year!" to the people of Ireland - it also brought the inception of a new law; The Blasphemy Law. The law defines blasphemy as saying or publishing anything that is abusive, or insulting to any religion.

Saying anything contradictory to any religion? Well, shit. I guess aside from the basic "Hello, how are you?" they just won't be able to speak in Ireland. There really isn't much you could say that wouldn't be contradictory to at least one religion. If I lived in Ireland, and people actually read this shit, then I could be fined. I don't live in Ireland, however, and barely anybody reads this; so here we go - a short tribute to the Irish Blashphemy Law.

There is no God, and in my opinion belief in such an idea is both dangerous and childish; clinging on to the idea of "life after death" in order to make the notion of death more tolerable. An excuse and a shield for extremists and violent psychopaths to use while they cause terror and distress. An easy way out in the attempt to understand the philosophical questions that have been present for millennia. A way for manipulative cunning con-artists to take money from those who would believe their lies and false promises. An oil slick on the road to both scientific and social progression.
The law put in place by the Irish government is a massive step in the wrong direction. Medieval ideals such as this have no place in the 21st century, and I am personally scared to death for any people in Ireland who will face punishment under it. It's an affront to the very idea of freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, and an open condemnation of free thinking people all over their country. It opens the door, or at the very least a metaphorical window, for like-minded people in other countries to think that such a law could be possible where they live, too.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, now that the holiday season is over I should be posting again regularily. I'm sure all six people who read this are thrilled.

Altruism vs The Ten Suggestions

I'd been planning on writing about this for a while, as it's a pretty common argument for God's existance. My friend Quinn is not the only one to have posed the question "how does an atheist perceive right and wrong," or "without God, what reason would we have to be good?"

The first thing I usually point out when asked this question is that in the US and Canada, atheists average about 13.75% of the population (11% in the US, 16.5% in Canada) In our prisons, however, the atheist population is less than one percent. (.25% in the US, .4% in Canada.) While this doesn't nessecarily prove that atheists are "more morally concious," it definately sheds a little light on just how morally concious our religious counterparts are. These statistics are occasionally met with another suggestion, "those people committed crimes, and then 'found God' once they were in prison to repent." When you consider that in Canada alone, over 50% of released prisoners will become repeat offenders, it would appear that "finding God" did little to help their morals.

Biblical morality indisputably stems from The Ten Commandments, a collection of suggestions handed down by Zeus to Minos of Crete to... wait, no, I've already done that one. Handed down by God to Moses as the ten most important rules for how to live our lives. These, in my opinion, can be summed up in 4 commandments.

1: God Angry
2: Don't kill
3: Don't steal
4: Sex Bad

These Ten Commandments, these rules from god, are these really the ten most important rules to live our lives by today? They don't include things like rape, discrimination, animal cruelty - "thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal," and "thou shalt not bear false witness" are pretty vague when compared to all of the subjects that could be tied into those, like genocide, fraud, embezzlement, the list goes on.

Not only that, but the bible actually encourages some of those things. In the story of Job, when he was met by angels, in order to prevent a mob from raping them, he offered them his own daughters to rape. What a stand-up guy. Everything from discrimination against non-believers (If a man doesn't abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers, and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned) to animal sacrifice, to "holy wars" is contained in the bible, often ordered by God, or at the very least by his favourite prophets. (And I'm not even going to get into genocide.)

So how are we "good," anyway? If we don't get our sense of morality from God, where do we get it? First off, we aren't the only creatures on the planet with a built in desire to help those we perceive to be in distress. Nature is abundant with examples of animals willing to put themselves at risk, not only to help members of their own species, but even other animals. This can't be attributed to God or the Bible, because after all - according to God, none of these animals have souls. There's no heaven for them, no risk of hell if they turn a blind eye. There was no Doggy Moses that came down with the Ten More Commandments for all of the animal kingdom. They just do it, not all the time, not every time, but it happens. I'm not a biologist, and I won't claim to have a higher understanding of genetics than I do, but I will say that there is something within these animals that has given them the drive to lend a helping hand, or... paw, I guess.

The same could be said for human beings. We don't always strive to do what we perceive as the right thing to do, but we do it anyway. It happens all around the world; in places where nobody's ever even heard of the bible - yet they've survived anyway, and it's safe to assume that they're probably pretty nice people.

I'd like to conclude this little rant with, ironically, a bible quote. A bible quote with an atheist spin on it.

Romans 6:14
For Sin shall not have dominion over you; for ye lie not under law, but under Grace.

In religious terms this means, with a finger pointed in your direction, "GOD IS WATCHING, DON'T FUCK UP." I however, prefer to interpret it a different way;

You're going to do the right thing, not because you're afraid of punishment, but because you know it's the right thing to do.

All of the statistics and links provided in this short article were found with relative ease; and I encourage anyone who reads this to check up on them. Educate yourselves on the subject, read about altruism in nature, or even biblical morality (for all of it's faults :P )

Thanks for your time.

Child Abuse

Today I'd like to touch on a story I read out of New Jersey. It's a strong belief of mine that teaching children religious values is borderline child abuse, however this story steps beyond that line. Stories like this are emerging with ever increasing regularity, and it seems that each time the parents in question are almost striving to set the proverbial bar on "crazy" even higher. This woman, however, is apparently not crazy. After psychiatric testing, she was deemed competent to stand trial. Devout, yes - psychotic, no. I wonder parents in other cases like this would test.

For a brief recap of the story itself, a New Jersey woman named Estelle Walker moved into a church retreat cabin with her five children. Her reason for doing so at the time was to escape her estranged husband's alleged alcoholism. She was broke, and unemployed. They stayed there for about one year, and for the last three months that they were in the cabin she apparently made no attempt to feed the kids. They would go days at a time without eating - the longest streak being eleven straight days. Walker said that "God would provide" them with food. By the time the police were called in the kids "were so malnourished they had difficulty talking." This was three years ago, and Walker's trial is set to resume on Tuesday.

Most people who read this article will see it at face value; one crazy lady neglecting her kids because of her blind, irrational faith. The religious people I know would never do this, they're intelligent, (sometimes even rational :D ) human beings. In my opinion, however, this article cannot be taken at face value. This is one of many radical fundamentalists, people who take the idea of faith or religion entirely too far, and they do so while riding on the backs of the moderates. She'll use her faith as a shield, and "God as her defense," and I can guarantee you right now - there will be other fundamentalists who will stand up for her, other religious people who see her plight as admirable.

In my opinion, she should be locked away. Throw away the key and never look back. After all, God will provide her with all the food and company she needs, right?