Atheism

You hear many complaints nowadays about pesky, outspoken Christians.  Across the West, a fashionable attitude has emerged: Beyond the doing of charitable works, and perhaps the soothing of the bereaved at funerals, “religion” should be an entirely private affair. 

The so-called New Atheists are vocal advocates of this position.  One of them, Michel Onfray, has admitted that his atheism “leaps to life when private belief becomes a public matter”.  Onfray hates it “when in the name of a personal mental pathology we organise the world for others”. 

Here in Australia, there are many like him.  The talented journalist-author Peter FitzSimons is fond of ridiculing sportsmen, like golfer Aaron Baddeley, who publicly give thanks to God.  FitzSimons rarely misses a chance to snipe at all “delusional” believers, and, in a recent spray in the Sydney Morning Herald, asserted ludicrously that belief in God “is entirely inimical to educational principles”. (Read Brian Rosner’s spirited reply.)

Continue reading "Why God botherers bother" »

One of the ugliest aspects of the culture wars is dogmatism, the inability of either side to respect the other’s point of view. Nowhere is this vice more prevalent than among protagonists in the so-called God debate.

It’s fine to be passionate about your belief (or unbelief).  But it’s wrong to demonise dissenters. 

Far too often today Christians are dismissed by their critics as deluded fundamentalists, relics of a past era who have jettisoned reason and common sense.  Just as frequently, Christians disparage atheists and agnostics – even fellow Christians with whom they disagree on one point or another – as unprincipled or immoral. 

Continue reading "Dogmatism derails both sides of religious debate" »

Fanatical Christians and fundamentalist atheists are like a couple of kids bickering in the back seat during a long car drive.

“You’re a poo poo bum head,” yells one – applying a Mao-strength Chinese burn.

“I know you are but what am I,” the other retorts – striking back with an eye-watering nipple cripple. And so it goes.

Continue reading "With or without religion, we’re all desperately human" »

Modern-day defenders of orthodox Christianity – of any religion with a supernatural element – face a host of challenges. Chief among them is the widespread assumption that science and religion are hopelessly incompatible.

In his best-selling book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins asserts that “religion is now completely superseded by science”. It’s a familiar line.  Religion, we’re told, is shadowy and value-laden – an exercise in “blind faith”.

And the Bible says that the Earth was made 6,000 years ago in the course of seven days. Anyone who believes that is crazy! These notions are deeply ingrained, but they are fallacious. And they distort the true beliefs of most Christians in Australia.

Continue reading "The best arguments for God are purely scientific" »

Once again, the censorial hand of the advertising industry - this time in the form of an arm of government - has moved to protect the public from the evil Atheist Empire. 

Railcorp, a government agency, has refused the Atheist Foundation of Australia advertising space at a billboard location in Queanbeyan, NSW.

Apparently supplying the wording and graphic to be advertised to Billboards Australia on 10 December 2010 wasn’t quite enough time for RailCorp to take in the message.  A sign of government efficiency no doubt.

Continue reading "Censorship shows need for a Bill of Rights" »

Why, on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, are its praises being sung by so many prominent atheists? 

Richard Dawkins himself, best-selling author of The God Delusion, has led the charge.  In an article published in the Christmas issue of New Statesman, Dawkins hailed the KJV as an “astonishing piece of English literature”.  He hoped to “encourage our schools to bring this precious English heritage to all our children, whatever their background”. 

Here in Australia there have been similar calls.  A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Julia Gillard got into the act.  “It’s impossible to understand Western literature,” she opined, “without having that key of understanding [of] the Bible stories and how Western literature builds on them and reflects them”.

Continue reading "Atheists shouldn’t damn the Bible with faint praise" »

Brendan Brown writes “Hey God, reveal thyself!” and puts forward his case of “noisy atheism”. 

He candidly speaks about the lack of evidence with regard to the divine and light-heartedly takes religion to task for the holes in their belief systems.

It’s a given that no evidence is currently available that supports the existence (or non existence) of god. Yet both atheists and theists continue to taunt each other for evidence.

Continue reading "Is Atheism beyond belief?" »

Another day, another non-appearance by a religious prophet.

As this article goes to press, neither Jesus, the Hidden Imam or John Maynard Keynes has returned to earth, which is unfortunate as religion has never been in greater need of validation.

It’s irrelevant if religion has practical benefits in terms of charity, community building and teaching ethical behavior, if religion’s key claims are not rooted in reality. Either religion is factual or it is not and either there are good reasons to believe something or there are none.

Continue reading "Hey God, reveal thyself!" »

The floods have caused great devastation and have presented fundamental challenges to our society and lives.

This kind of crisis poses challenges to us on a number of levels – social, physical, emotional and existential.

Tory Shepherd’s article “Digging a hole while trying to find God” outlines the existential challenges provoked by the flood.

Continue reading "A response: Disasters do not negate the existence of God" »

Church leaders faced with a national disaster are struggling to find relevance and avoid hypocrisy. In the wake of the floods, people with religious convictions face an age-old question:

Where was God?

It’s a classic case of cognitive dissonance, where holding two conflicting thoughts causes the brain to implode. God is good, all-knowing and all-powerful and yet bad stuff happens.

Continue reading "Digging a hole while trying to find God" »

I was once at a dinner party when a friend, who I think had read a Robert Fisk article that morning, began explaining an aspect of Middle Eastern politics. Unbeknown to her, one of the guests was something of an expert in the field, and was nodding politely at my friend’s newfound wisdom. I felt the need to jump in and save her from embarrassment.

I have something of a similar response to Brendan Brown’s appeals to rationality (Why an Atheist Prime Minister is better The Punch Nov 10). The article, picking up on the now familiar New Atheist shtick makes me want to point out some realities of history and philosophy that the writer seems unaware of. 

There are some bold claims here. We read for instance that, “even the most devout of Jesus’ disciples would admit that the Bible makes an underwhelming historical document.”

Continue reading "Ignorance is more concerning than religion" »

Julia Gillard’s atheism and Tony Abbott’s catholicism were virtually non-issues in the 2010 election, even though Gillard’s godlessness may have cost her votes amongst the religiously-minded.

Australians generally accept that religion should be an irrelevant consideration when choosing their Prime Minister, and whilst such an attitude sounds commendably tolerant, it is also wrong.

Australians who didn’t vote for Gillard because she is an atheist are right, religion matters, although they are right for entirely the wrong reason.

Continue reading "Why an atheist Prime Minister is better" »

I can see why the new atheist commentators Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins want to take on the Pope. Here is someone who fears what Gareth Evans called “relevance deprivation”. He fears it for himself as Pope, he fears it for the Church. To bolster the declining authority of the Church, he has set up the straw man of “aggressive secularism” and sets his adherents against it.

Religion, the Pope told Britons in his trip this month, is being “marginalised”, relegated to the “purely private sphere”. Believers holding public roles are being asked to act against their conscience, he claims. Secularism, Britains were warned, no longer values or tolerates their traditional values such as honesty, respect and fair-mindedness.

Your Holiness, this is rubbish – ideologically motivated rubbish.

Continue reading "God bless the secular state" »

My faith in atheism is being tested by born-agains. Not of the Christian variety, but the obnoxious, pushy, ram-it-down-your-throat, born-again atheist variety.

This new breed of Godless souls has adopted one of the most irritating features of religion. They have become belligerent evangelists for their non-cause.

The once gentle conviction that there is no God, and that in an ideal world, everyone would stop fighting over the supremacy of their imagined deity, is increasingly becoming the preserve of aggressive loudmouths who are every bit as annoying as those Jehovah’s Witnesses who used to knock on the door at 9am on a Sunday while you were sleeping off a big night.

Continue reading "Please God spare us the born-again atheists" »

When pastor Terry Jones called off his epically dumb plan to mark the anniversary of the September 11 attacks by burning a bunch of Korans, for a brief period it looked like western civilisation valued people with something between their ears. But then along comes Alex Stewart – an Australian, no less – to confirm democracies provide shelter for the hopelessly stupid.

It was on behalf of people with a brain everywhere that the US President went on television to plead against the pastor’s plan to burn holy books. He succeeded in stopping the Jones protest but then along comes Stewart on YouTube, ripping out pages from the Bible and the Koran and smoking them in a festival of smugness cloaked in a mantle of enlightenment.

Score one for the Taliban and the view that the West is intellectually bankrupt.

Continue reading "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of total stupidity" »

I love it when Richard Dawkins comes to town. It’s like Christmas for people who don’t believe in Christmas.

Even though he’s since departed our fair shores, Dawkins’ wake of influence still ripples like the aftermath of an intellectual tsunami, and if anything you have to give him credit for almost single-handedly putting religious debate back on the map.

The debate that follows Dawkins across the globe is largely confined to the mission of getting rid of this pesky notion of a creator once and for all, by using the atheist mantra “celebrate reason” to expose all who entertain the divine as delusional, idiotic disciples of fairies or flying spaghetti monsters or whatever convenient and patronising analogy fits best. Needless to say, there’s a lot of love in the room.

Continue reading "“Probably” isn’t enough in the argument against God" »

If there is a God, he’d be rubbing his hands with glee at the rise of radical atheism.

The pompous pronoucements of Professor Richard Dawkins reinforce the image of atheists as intellectual snobs who look down on those who believe.

Now – I, too, view the Bible as a fantastical fairy tale. But to denigrate those who gain succour from their faith is, at best, patronising and, at worst, counter productive.

Continue reading "Atheists can do better than saying believers are stupid" »

The 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put before people a choice: Dionysos or the Crucified?

He saw with clarity that there were two starkly opposed views of life being lived out around him. One followed Dionysos, or Dionysius, the Greco-Roman God of wine, who championed hedonism. The other was the Christian way, the way of the crucified saviour who gave his life for others. God taking on flesh to save the world — that’s crazy, said Nietzsche. Many today seem to agree with him.

A new book called The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (Ariane Sherine (Ed), The Friday Project, 2009) agrees with Nietzsche, but wants to tell even him to chill out a bit when it comes to Christmas.

Continue reading "Nietzsche and Simon Le Bon: Do they know it’s Christmas?" »