The Good Atheist

When the Daily Show did a segment on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s quest to stop a Mother Teresa stamp from being issued by the US Post Office, I figured that us atheists would end up looking not so hot as a result. After all, talking shit about MT nowadays is the equivalent of ripping up a picture of the pope on TV in the early 90s … no one really knows the nasty details about her, so we end up looking like a bunch of dickheads.

And yep, that’s basically what happened, but that’s okay … what’s a little bit of ribbing from a great TV show when you’ve got reality on your side? Still, it was fascinating to read FFRF co-president Dan Barker’s account of the experience – great reading if you want to know more about how the Daily Show does it’s thang or just want a little bit of info on why Mother Teresa isn’t the saint everyone makes her out to be:

The staff seemed genuinely interested in the factual claims about Mother Teresa. I held up Christopher Hitchens’ book The Missionary Position as one example that documents the inferior quality of her clinics, her lack of financial accountability and her cozy association with corrupt politicians such as Haiti’s “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

I mentioned how she pleaded with the court for leniency in the sentencing of convicted financier Charles Keating because he was a good man who had given her $1.25 million, and how when the court asked her to return that stolen money, she declined to reply. We don’t know where that money went, but we do know that she spent millions to build new convents named in her honor and increase her religious order while she spent considerably less on real charity.

“Mother Teresa did some good,” I agreed, “but her real genius was as a powerful PR machine for the population policies of the Roman Catholic Church.” In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she was more concerned about condemning legal abortion than feeding the hungry. What did she actually do for world peace? Soon after that speech she went to Ireland to tell them that their best hope for peace was for everyone to return to the Catholic Church.

“The Daily Show” staff seemed surprised and sincerely interested when I spoke about the documentation of shoddy “medical” practices at her clinics. They asked me to repeat the story about how the nuns at her hospital for the dying (which has posted the words “Today I am going to heaven” on the wall — some hospital!) were secretly baptizing all patients, including Hindus and Muslims, pretending to be cooling their foreheads with a wet cloth while performing the religious ritual.

When Jason held up the stamp of Martin Luther King Jr., I countered that he was honored for leading the civil rights movement, not for religion, and besides, he was an American. With Mother Teresa, it was the other way around: Her charity work was secondary to her religious mission, and she said so many times. Her small Calcutta orphanage, she said, was a front line in the fight against abortion and birth control.

For more less than complimentary info on Mother Teresa, I give you Mr Christopher Hitchins.

A quick video detailing how evil lesbians spread their ways. But what everyone in Africa really wants to know … do they eat da poo poo?

Another day, another case where people are trying to use their religious beliefs as a legal shield for their bigotry:

The owners of a B.C. bed and breakfast will argue at a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal hearing in Kelowna on Wednesday that their right to freedom of religion permitted them to turn away a homosexual couple.

According to the complaint filed with the tribunal, the gay couple, Shaun Eadie and Brian Thomas, booked a room in June 2009 at the Riverbend Bed and Breakfast in Grand Forks.Owner Susan Molnar received the call and immediately told her husband and co-owner, Les Molnar, that the man making the booking had asked for just one bed, the complaint said. Moments later, Les Molnar called Eadie back and asked if he and Thomas were a gay couple. Eadie said they were. The complaint said that Molnar then cancelled the booking.

Eadie and Thomas later filed their complaint with the tribunal.

In an application to have the complaint dismissed, Les Molnar said “to allow a gay couple to share a bed in my Christian home would violate my Christian beliefs and would cause me and my wife great distress.” He said that to have allowed the booking would be “encouraging something which I believe to be wrong according to my religious beliefs and my understanding of scripture.”

The Molnars also argued in their response that their charter rights to freedom of religion and association protected their decision not to do business with the gay couple.

Just to prove that America and the middle east don’t corner the market on anti-gay sentiment, this story is from my country of Canada. And while we’re lucky enough to have a Human Rights commission that will deal with this issue properly, that doesn’t mean our citizenry is very enlightened … if you want to lose faith in humanity, the comments sections of articles like this are always great for that.

Ayaan Hirshi Ali has written a new book out called Nomad, which picks up where Infidel left off and covers Hirshi Ali’s move to the United States from Europe. She’s been on a book tour for the past few weeks, and I recently caught her on Real Time with Bill Maher and the Colbert Report. She didn’t get to say much on Real Time but she did mention something on Colbert about offering up other more moderate religions as a cure for Islamic fundamentalism.

Obviously when you’re dealing with Stephen Colbert you don’t get many opportunities to explain ideas past their surface, but the above video goes into her argument again that many people are going to believe in a higher power regardless of what the evidence says, and it’s important to have options for these people that don’t skew heavily towards the psychopathic. She says Christianity is a good alternative because basically most Christians are pretty lax about their religion’s specifics and just believe in that nebulous lovey dovey God / Jesus entity that just wants us to be good. I don’t know if I agree with that, but I figure after spending half your life getting subjugated and the other half terrorized by Islam, Christianity would indeed seem lightyears more moderate and less problematic.

Every so often, you read a story about someone in desperate need of a blood transfusion refusing the life giving procedure because of their religious beliefs. The latest story comes from Smethwick, England where a 15 year old boy died after succumbing to his injuries following a tragic car crash in a store (yeah, you heard right). Joshua McAuley is dead now because his beliefs (or more accurately, the beliefs his parents indoctrinated him with).

It seems hospital officials are on the defensive, tripping over themselves claiming that the issue of overriding the wishes of parents and minors in similar cases has to be handled delicately in on an individual basis (as in, there’s no official policy). No one seems to quite know what to do about situations like there;  the Friendly Atheist seems a little confused about what the right move is, and Unreasonable Faith just asks his sizable audience to discuss the matter.

I have a solution I thing would work out quite nicely: if a minor wants to forgo receiving a blood transfusion due to his religious convictions, he should be able to explain exactly WHY he believes such a thing is wrong ( try to avoid pointing out the flaws with the idea of a person with severe blood loss trying to explain anything at all and just humor me, alright?). You see, the real problem is that kids like Joshua may think they have acquired their beliefs through their own personal research and introspection, but like every other religious convert, he was conditioned into believing things that were quite obviously untrue. The reason Witnesses refuse blood is because their interpretation of the Bible specifies that blood is only to be used in the atonement of sin, and that’s it. The fact that it actually does something much more useful in your body (oh, like carrying oxygen to your cells for instance) is just an inconvenient detail that they can’t be bothered to learn. Because Joshua was too ignorant of reality to see the benefit in actually bothering to learn real facts about the natural world, he thought his eternal soul would be in jeopardy if he tried to save his own life with the blood of others. Now he’s just another sad statistic about the dangers of faith.

Fans of the site will know that I absolutely abhor the pathetic and anemic argument that is “Pascal’s Wager”. Here Hitchens compares it to a pathetic used car salesman trying to get you to buy his junker. Who wants a God who can so easily be fooled by the gambler?

It still surprises me how some people still think that Arizona’s draconian Anti-Immigration laws aren’t racist. I hear the same cavalcade of pathetic explanation trying to justify the blatantly immoral actions of the state to essentially criminalize being a darker skin color. If you still don’t believe me, then allow me to show you exhibit A, a school in Prescott, Arizona that is at the center of another race related controversy. The principle at Miller Valley Elementary School wants a mural depicting children taking environmentally friendly transportation to be “lightened”, since the most prominent children in the picture are not in fact white.

[Principle] Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. “We asked them to fix the shading on the children’s faces,” he said. “We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race.”

City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.

In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: “To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?”

The children in the mural were actually selected from real students who go to the school, and the parents and children all loved it. Unfortunately for them, racism and bigotry are alive and well in Arizona. The artists who made the mural report that during its creation, they were subject to hecklers who screamed racial slurs at them. It looks like most people aren’t even bothering to cover up their obvious hatred of anyone who doesn’t have white skin. Congratulations Arizona state on once again making me want to vomit with rage!

Hey guys, Jeff and I just finished putting the finishing touches on the first Episode of our new side project, A Winner is Me. and it’s up now! If you love video games like we do and you’ve ever spent an evening shit-talking to your friends while playing together, this show is for you. Remember to sign up to our youtube channel while we work on developing a kick ass website for it in the near future. Enjoy!

The UNCG Atheists/Agnostics/Skeptics are still fighting the good fight and trying to get the city council of Greensboro to remove their official prayer curing meetings. These are the same guys that flew me down to do my first lecture entitled “Holy Shit I’m an Ape“. Nice job fighting the power Phil! Keep it up.

In possibly one of the most ironic cases of life imitating art ever, Christians are now saying that because Mohammad can’t be made fun of on Comedy Central, Jesus should be off limits too.

A coalition of religious and conservative leaders is trying to stop a proposed Comedy Central cartoon that puts Jesus Christ in a modern-day context – before it even gets started.

The newly formed Citizens Against Religious Bigotry said Thursday that it believes the “JC” series would be offensive. They accuse Comedy Central of a double standard in mocking Christian figures and beliefs while recently refusing to let “South Park” depict the Prophet Muhammad for fear of offending Muslims.

“You don’t have to be a Christian to be offended by this,” said Brent Bozell, head of the watchdog Media Research Center.

Yeah, you really do. Newsflash, retards: every day, people are doing stuff that you may not approve of or personally agree with. But they’re still allowed to do it because we live in a free society. Here’s a novel concept for you douchebags: if you don’t like a TV show, then don’t fucking watch it.