Sunday, November 29, 2009

About.Com: Be better informed with these beginners' courses

There is a great resource for atheists and agnostics over at atheism.about.com from the famous About.Com services.
For example: Atheism 101 (Email Course) (E-Course); Logic 101 (Email Course) (E-Course); Humanism 101; Papacy 101; Philosophy 101; etc, etc.
 
 The best part - - - it's all FREE

I have tried some of the material and found it appropriate and pertinent, so go feast and educate yourself.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Atheists quotations

There's a quotations conversation going on in Atheist Nexus by Stevie Hunter, ably joined by Hal Prentice, Trace Gemini and others.
Some of the quotations bear repeating here, for your edification:

Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov

I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. — Andrew Carnegie

All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway

Lighthouses are more helpful then churches. — Benjamin Franklin

Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. — George Bernard Shaw

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. — Kurt Vonnegut

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. — Denis Diderot

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. — Samuel Clemens

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. — Sigmund Freud

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. — Edward Gibbon

The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. — Ferdinand Magellan

Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. — Woody Allen

It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous. — Gloria Steinem

I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” - Stephen F. Roberts (my favorite)


THE RIDDLE OF EPICURUS
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?
 
If you are not following Atheist Nexus, you are missing out on this great collection of blogs of all natures.

The Taliban in the US

Angie the Anti-Theist carried a revealing piece of video from the MSNBC's Rachael Maddow's news show regarding christian threats made against President Obama.

She remarks on the most recent, thinly-veiled threat in which they quote Psalm 109: 8  9.
In short, they are calling for his death.

Rachael speaks to christian Frank Shaeffer who likens the threat to those heard coming from the Taliban and from the Iranian ayatollahs where they quote 'scriptures calling for the death of people.

AND HE IS QUITE RIGHT.

Here is the video, and I encourage you to go visit her blog for more opinion on this matter.
Here is the link to her blog.



We need to think about becoming more vocal about this, at the very least.