Religious fundamentalists often claim that we would not have (could not have) morality if it were not something that already existed and was supplied by an outside agency, an ultimate arbiter that created divinely inspired moral laws. The claim is often backed by a question that asks if fixed moral laws are not supplied divinely or externally, then how did they come to be, implying that humans are incapable of defining morality alone.
It is claimed that Noah's Ark was able to sail through a 40-day storm more intense than any ever previously seen, indeed hundreds of times stronger, on this planet yet human ingenuity has been unable to reproduce anything similar with the kinds of building materials available to people at that time. This article, by an unknown author, compares the ark to the USS Wyoming, a steel braced, wood-gulled schooner half again smaller than the supposed ark.
The claim is often made that atheism is immoral and that religion is essential for any moral life to be lived yet the evidence suggests nothing could be further from the truth.
A few days ago, I learned that March 23rd is Atheist Day. That means I ought to write something about it and, naturally, it ought to be about atheism. I plumped for, "What do I think atheism is (on a personal level)?", "What does atheism mean to me?" and "What do I think an atheist should be?" Sadly, that's more than a little complicated.
From ministers preaching funeral sermons for suicide victims and recounting stories of their despair while praising their god for its intervention to those who believe their god wants them to crash airliners into buildings even as others thank their god for helping some of them escape from the same, there's always going to be that someone at the back of the crowd saying, "Huh?"
Creationists are quick to claim that micro-evolution happens, allowing them to accept small changes whilst simultaneously denying macro-evolution, the larger ones required to evolve new "kinds" of life. It requires little more than casual investigation to expose the underbelly of this claim and realise that such a distinction is entirely artificial.
The following (hysterically funny) message was posted to an atheist newsgroup. It "takes the rise" out of Christians who, for whatever mentally imbalanced reason, have decided that atheists are heathens and it is their god-given task to convert them.
I have been debating creationists and fundamentalists for the best part of thirty years (since the early nineties) and in my online life, I have been asked some really daft questions as well as been subject to some equally daft accusations. This article deals with some of them and gives reasonably concise answers to them.
I'm a geek, an atheist and [somewhat] pro-science but I still love Christmas so is it any surprise that I love humorous pieces like this one? It's arguably one of my all-time favourite pieces of Christmas fun. Bear in mind this was first published way back before the millennium so some of the figures are a little dated; for example, there are probably around two and half billion children in the world today compared to a mere two billion back then.
There exists precious little verifiable evidence for the existence of the Christian messiah, Jesus Christ, and that which does exist is at best anecdotal with much of it flawed and presumed fake. My assumption is that Jesus Christ never existed because there is no specific need for a real messiah to form the root of the Christian myth since common traits with pre-existing religions suggest aspects of the character, if not the whole, to be based on earlier myth rather than a real person. This article explains my current reason for taking the stance I do.