Well, the New Year is upon us, and that means it’s time to make a number of resolutions for 2011. As most of you know, we’re shaking things up a little at TGA headquarters; specifically I’m going to be on the road more, and I’ll be using that opportunity to meet up with fans and well-wishers alike as often as possible. I’m also going to be trying to make a variety of appearances at schools and hopefully some local conferences. We’ll also be continuing to tweak the site, and by mid year, we hope to have a new forum in play.

This will also hopefully be the year when I finish my damn book; that insurmountable project I routinely fail to deliver. A good kick in the ass this year should provide the necessary incentive to “git er done”.

Those of you wondering when regular blogging will resume, I’ll be posting sporadically until the second week of January, which is also when we start the new “season” of the TGA podcast. Yeah, I know it’s a long time to go without your crack, but I need to recharge my batteries a little bit. You guys know that whenever we take a little break, we always come back with some kick-ass shows.

Happy New Year, everyone, and thanks for everyone who listens to what I say or reads what I write. You’re all helping make my dreams come true.

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Is there nothing sweeter than a hot atheist chick with a crazy accent spanking some creationist idiot? If there is, I don’t want to know about it.

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It’s a big day, today people! I just received my first bit of pseudo-hate mail from someone who presumably perused the site and didn’t like what he saw:

no facts, just trash the other side with lies and half truths…. good job, you are a massive TOOL!

Well, if you’re going to be a tool, better be a massive one, eh? My feelings are so hurt! Who knows if I’ll ever recover…

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It’s funny that whenever a non-believer states plainly that no evidence exists that would satisfy the “God question”, we’re accused of being snobs, elitists, mean, or even fundamentalists. Have you noticed that no one seems to accuse us of of having the weaker argument or of being wrong. Instead, we’re vilified as being “spiritual buzzkills”.

I’ve long had doubts about S.E. Cupps atheism, if only because she seems to lack the kind of insight and critique one would expect of a true non-believers. She continues to hold that the religious are somehow morally superior in their unsubstantiated beliefs. It’s not entirely surprising: her audience tends to lean heavily to the right. What bothers me is that she tends to jump on the same weak arguments her theological colleagues rely on to slander us:

Which brings me to the problem with modern atheism, embodied by the likes of Harris and Hitchens, authors of “The End of Faith” and “God Is Not Great,” respectively. So often it seems like a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. And the loudest voices of today’s militant atheism, for all their talk of rational thought, don’t seem to want to do too much thinking at all.

I wonder exactly what she considers “thought” to mean. Apparently, thinking means having emotions and then using those emotions to justify your beliefs about the natural world:

I wonder what they’d say to someone like Immaculee Ilibagiza, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who says that her faith in Jesus Christ got her through 91 days of hiding in a 3×4 foot bathroom while her family was murdered outside. Would they tell her she was crazy? Delusional? To just deal with it? I would hope not – but I am not sure.

Actually, they would have simply pointed out that the Catholic priests who held the very machetes that cut down their fellow countrymen may have equally been comforted by their religious beliefs. The Catholic hierarchy is well known to have had close ties with the extremists who committed the genocide in the first place. Had Cupp bothered to do a little research, she might have chosen a different example altogether (or am I being arrogant pointing out how stupid that example was?).

It’s these snarky and condescending rejections, not of faith itself but of those who profess it, that reflect a total unwillingness to learn something new about human nature, the world around us and even of science itself. While the neoatheists pay only cursory attention to dismantling arguments for God, they spend most of their time painting his followers as uncultured rubes. The fact that religion has inexplicably persisted, even despite Copernicus, Darwin and the Enlightenment, doesn’t seem to have much sociological meaning for them.

Religion persists the same way ignorance does, and often for the same reasons. Simply because the majority of humans believe in absurdities certainly means nothing about how true it is, does it?

When the esteemed theologian David Martyn Lloyd-Jones asked C.S. Lewis when he would write another book, Lewis responded, “When I understand the meaning of prayer.” It was an acknowledgment that he – a thinker with a much sharper mind than, say, Maher’s – didn’t know everything. I implore my fellow atheists to take this humility to heart. There’s still a lot to learn, but only if you’re not too busy being a know-it-all.

Are we really the arrogant ones? It’s ironic that people convinced of the certainty of their impossible beliefs think that we’re the ones who could use some humility. How exactly is the dogmatic faith of religion anything but the most abrasive arrogance in the world?

**NOTE** One of the comments in the article hit the nail on the head better than I did:

The word “faith” means: acceptance without benefit of knowledge. By declaring that one has “faith”, one has already admitted that one is ignorant. There should be no shame in being ignorant. Ignorance is simply a lack of knowledge. But, stupidity is the willful rejection of knowledge that is available. If religion is the glorification of “faith”, then religion is the glorification of ignorance. And, since there is a preponderance of actual knowledge available to remedy one’s ignorance, and since religion instructs the “faithful” to willfully reject knowledge, one is forced to conclude that religion promotes stupidity. And this is the paradigm that “people of faith” wants the general public to accept as a standard for civil law and the electability of political candidates? Hmmmm….

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It takes guts to stand up to Muslims and tell them that their faith is hopelessly antiquated, backwards, barbaric, and a threat to our modern values. It takes even more guts to do so when you’re an Arab. That’s why I’m in total admiration of this woman. How brave is she? How many of you would be willing to say what she said, in light of the danger it presents? That’s courage, folks!

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If you haven’t yet signed up for our free membership (which we call simply: “The Freebie”), you should do so now. I’ve just added another free Bonus show (Bonus Show #51), and if you sign up now you can listen to it right away! Enjoy the show, and Happy Holidays!

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Protect children? Man, who else is fucking exhausted from this bullshit?

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