It was a valiant effort, folks. I tried, hard as I might, to make a living spreading the “gospel’ of atheism, but in the end, I failed. It took me a little while to realize just how desperate the situation had become, but my failure to secure even the most modest of loans served as a cold reminder that outside of my tiny group of supporters, there is no recognizable value in what I do.

Part of me is honestly resentful of the scene. Were I some religious no-name douche-bag, my coffers would be overflowing with monies. Religious people might be gullible, but they are also aware of the importance of spreading their message, and the cost involved in doing so. For them, the idea of stretching their budget to accommodate their local pastor is just something they do. This dedication and generosity is in large part the reason why religions continue to spread and prosper. As atheists, we have no such dedication.

In many regards, my life is one of a “pastor”, in that the skills I have spent years crafting have no real importance in the 9-5 world. When a priest leaves his profession, he enters a world where his ability to sway the masses is essentially worthless. It’s why so many who have already lost their faith continue to preach the “good news” in order to pay their mortgage and put food on the table. In a way, my situation is similar. After spending years studying, researching and promoting my program, my isolation from the corporate world has lowered my stock. I’m at the bottom of the ladder, and that’s a terrifying prospect.

My eventual return to the working world spells the death of The Good Atheist. While I don’t doubt that the odd podcast may appear, I must now dedicate 100% of my effort to ensure my continued survival, leaving little time to contemplate matters of life, the universe, and the absurdity of existence. I stand defeated, and must now resolve myself to the fate that awaits me in the work-a-day world.

I would like to thank all the fans who have supported us over the years. The hard-core fans, in particular, helped to keep the show afloat for all these years. The tiny raft, set adrift in a sea of uncertainty, faced little chance of success. I’m grateful for all the wonderful messages I’ve received over the years from fans who expressed their love of the show. They were all touching, and I shall treasure them for as long as I live. I leave you in the capable hands of my fellow atheists, who will continue to fight the good fight.

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Krauss finds something in nothing from ASU News on Vimeo.

I love Laurence. He’s enthusiastic about his work, and his lectures have always been a lot of fun. He’s now making the rounds to promote his new book.
If anyone is feeling particularly generous, I’d love a copy of Laurence Krauss’ new book “A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing“.

I’m a Kindle whore, by the way.

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Religions are finally starting to understand that the scientific revolution, and the information Age is eroding the power of their institution. It turns out that material explanations for natural processes is much more satisfying than a bunch of outdated superstitious ideas and vague promises of life eternal. A formerly religious fan wrote to me recently put it better than I ever could:

I’ve always rebelled against those ideas [religion] but have never considered atheism nor have I ever done any kind of research on the origins of life, our planet, and the universe. Since becoming an atheist I’ve learned so much about these things. It’s really amazing how rejecting fairy tales really opens your mind to some really fucking amazing things.

Confused and afraid, the Church has only one “solution” for the problem: bringing it back to the love of Jesus, and making people understand that only their institution can properly hand out tickets to magical playland in the sky.They worry about an increasingly secularized world, combined with a weak-sauce form of spirituality that lacks the important tithing they cherish so much. As membership continues to slid, no doubt they see the writing on the wall.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York seems to understand that there’s a serious problem:

They [churchgoers] drift from her, get mad at the Church, grow lax, join another, or just give it all up,” he said, according to a text of his remarks posted on the Conference’s website (www.usccb.org).If this does not cause us pastors to shudder, I do not know what will. The reasons are multiple and well-rehearsed — and we need to take them seriously. The Church we passionately love is hardly some cumbersome, outmoded club of sticklers, with a medieval bureaucracy, silly human rules on fancy letterhead, one more movement rife with squabbles, opinions, and disagreement.

I totally agree. The Church is so much more than cumbersome, outmoded, silly and filled with squabbles and disagreement. It’s also a criminal organization that’s sheltered pedophiles and child rapists since its inception, been responsible for some of the most brutal genocides and massacres in our species history (Just ask the Cathari how they feel about the Church. Oh wait, you can’t, since they slaughtered them all), and still to this day continues to spread death and misery over their stupid objection to contraception.

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I still can’t tell whether or not Bill O’Reily actually believes that God himself created the moon. Considering he’s an opportunist trying to appeal to his geriatric base that thinks an invisible man in the sky made the whole Universe just for them to retire in, I give it a 50/50 chance he’s simply full of shit. Hey, it’s either that or he’s a gigantic moron. Which one is more desirable?

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It ain’t easy being a Christian: sure, they might be the majority (for now), but every other day the faith is challenged by objective reality. While many Christians will scoff at the idea that their religion is in trouble, the truth is that countries like Canada, Sweden, and Australia are quickly shedding their religious coat in favor of a broader “spirituality” that doesn’t have to deal with the many inconsistencies or outright lies of organized religion. Over half of all Canadians, according to a recent survey, are convinced that religion does more harm than good.

Enter the Apologist. Their “job” is to try and defend their faith against the harshness of reality. Christian Apologetics have been around since the very forming of the religion; St. Paul was the first to begin the tradition when confronted by desert sheppards possessing some measure of skepticism. In the modern world, it’s much more difficult to defend the faith, and so a whole cottage industry has sprung up to meet the demands of increasingly skeptically-minded kids.

I spotted this article entitled “Top 10 Defences youth can give for their beliefs“, and I thought I might share with you the kind of “advice” they’re giving young Christians in a vain attempt to prevent them from leaving the religion in frustration. I think you’ll agree that any teenager attempting to use any of these arguments would be eaten alive by anyone with a moderate understanding of history or science:

1. How can you know for sure that anything is true?
Among your acquaintances are likely to be some people who don’t believe in truth. That is, they don’t believe truth can be known. However, that idea is easily refuted, as this fictional conversation in the 2011 novel, The Quest, illustrates:
It took a minute, but I finally realized what she was waiting for. “You’re saying that if I think that’s a true statement, then I’ve claimed to know something that is true….By saying truth can’t be known. I contradicted myself.”

Here the author tries to argue that if an agnostic claims that truth cannot be known, this itself is a truth-claim and the statement is therefore inconsistent. While it’s true that consistency is a desirable attribute of any philosophy, we have to examine what’s actually being argued instead of over-analysing the statement itself. What is truth? How do we determine what’s real and what isn’t? Humans create models to explain the natural world, and while they can be amazingly accurate, there is still much to discover. We must accept that our understanding of the Universe is limited, flawed, but constantly improving. To claim otherwise is only possible when one sees the world through the arrogant prism of religion.

2. Is God a human invention?
A popular view these days is the idea that humans invented God in order to meet their needs and fulfill their desires. But it is at least as reasonable to believe exactly the opposite: that the innate desire humans have for God exists because there is Someone who satisfies that desire.

“Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles.”- Voltaire. The fact that we have a tendency to see patternicity, agency and intentionality has more to do with our environment than some invisible man in the sky. For millions of years, our ancestors braved a cruel, violent world which placed survival above skepticism. As a result, we’ve inherited brains susceptible to superstition, and the persistence of religion in a world of scientific discovery is an excellent example of this.

3. Doesn’t the Big Bang disprove Creation?
There is a common misconception that the Big Bang has pretty much eliminated the idea that God created the heavens and the earth. But the opposite is true. Former atheist Antony Flew, in his book There Is a God, explained that the Big Bang model eventually led him to believe in a God who created the universe, because it pointed to a beginning point in the universe, and to something (or Someone) behind that beginning that was too big for science to explain.

So the Universe needs a beginning, but Super-Monkey doesn’t? The best science we have now tells us that a Universe can indeed come from nothing, so while the science we have today tells us that the Universe requires no supernatural “party-starter”, religionists can’t seem to abandon this lost “first” cause. I won’t pretend to know for certain that a God couldn’t have done this; however, our faithful opponents have still failed to provide a compelling explanation of their deity’s apparent ability to transcend the law of causality. Lastly, this idea that something can be “too big” for science is just an invitation to ignorance.

4. How can an intelligent person not believe in evolution?

Atheist Richard Dawkins has famously written, “Beyond doubt evolution is a fact,”4 adding that no reputable scientist disputes it. However, neither statement is true. First, it is necessary to understand what people mean when they use the world “evolution,” because it can refer to both micro-evolution (the observable process by which change happens over time within species) and macro-evolution (the arguable claim that starting with a common ancestor, over time simple organisms have changed into the species that exist today). Macro-evolution is not as widely accepted as some claim. In fact, more than eight hundred world-class scientists have signed a formal dissent from Darwinian evolution.

So, you’re willing to accept that species gradually change over time, but somehow still can’t grasp that over geological time-frames (millions of years), these incremental changes would form entirely new species? Also, if you want to put this whole “over 800 scientists express doubt about evolution” number into perspective, there are currently over a million scientists working in the US alone. 90% of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today. The fact that you have 800 dummies on your side only proves that education is no guarantee of intelligence.

5. How can you trust the Bible when it has been changed and corrupted so much through the centuries?
I aimed to show everyone that Christianity was nonsense. I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. In fact, I discovered that the Bible is far and away the most meticulously preserved and widely attested documents of the ancient world. No other book even comes close (we go into greater detail on this subject in our book, Don’t Check Your Brains at the Door). This reliability was confirmed by the 1948 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which showed that after a thousand years of copying, the text as it appears in modern Bibles was more than ninety-five percent the same, word-for-word and letter-for-letter, as it had been three thousand years earlier! And what differences did exist were mainly spelling variations.

The relative consistency of nonsense is of little interest to us. The fact remains that the Bible is little more than a book of fairy-tales. The ancient stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu have survived the ravages of time, and yet we do not believe that the ancient stories of Sumer are anything but poetic allegory. As a Christian, you’re far more likely to be asked “How can you trust the Bible to guide your morality when it advocates rape, incest, genocide, infanticide and cruelty?”. I’d try and work on the response for that one instead.

6. Hasn’t modern science pretty much disproved the Bible?
t’s hard to imagine anything that is farther from the truth than the idea that modern science has disproved the Bible. In fact, the science of archaeology, to name one field, has repeatedly confirmed the trustworthiness of the biblical accounts (we devote a chapter to this subject in our book, Don’t Check Your Brains at the Door). Archaeologist William F. Albright wrote,

The excessive skepticism shown toward the Bible by important historical schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain phases of which still appear periodically, has been progressively discredited. Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition to the value of the Bible as a source of history

We don’t need 18th century skepticism to tell us the Bible is full of holes. Where do we begin? The creation story perhaps, or Noah’s Flood? Shall we discuss what science has to say about the possibility of Jonah living inside a giant fish for three days, or Samson killing thousands of men with a donkey’s jaw-bone? As for the Bible’s take on history, modern archaeology has found little in the way of proof. Take the “City of David“. While Israeli archaeologists acknowledge that there is no evidence linking David to the site, they anticipate eventually finding this proof, and as far as they are concerned, there is no way to convince them otherwise. Proof has remained elusive for Israel’s archaeologists, but it hasn’t prevented anyone there from trying to use it as a political tool to bolster Israel’s claim to ancient Palestine. Does this sound like good science to you?

7. Who even knows if Jesus ever really existed?

The existence of a man named Jesus who lived in Galilee and Judea in the early part of the first century is utterly indisputable from a historical standpoint. In fact, if you ever encounter such a view from a friend or teacher, invite that person to travel with you to Israel. In the land where Jesus once lived, everyone—Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists—consider the idea that never existed to be laughable. Why? Because the evidence of his historicity is a daily reality there.

Is this guy for real? I don’t find the idea laughable at all, and I’m not the only one. Some of the very first Christians, the Gnostics, didn’t believe in a historical Jesus either. You don’t hear much about these early Christians since, like the Aryans, they were mostly wiped out. Questioning the historicity of Jesus isn’t new; we just weren’t allowed to voice contrary opinions for a long time. To claim that everyone agrees on his historical existence is a pretty big disservice to Christian teens desperately trying to defend their bullshit, trust me.

8. Don’t you think Jesus could have been just a good teacher who didn’t intend to be worshiped a god?

Though Christianity and Christians can be pretty unpopular these days, Jesus remains widely admired… even by many people who don’t profess to believe in him or worship him. He is revered as a “good teacher,” as a “philosopher,” but not as who he said he was, according to the historical record. C. S. Lewis famously wrote about this phenomenon:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic— on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg— or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse…let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Creating this kind of dichotomy can’t possibly work in your favor, guys. Any person with a logical mind not indoctrinated to your cult would immediately realize that, if given the choice between God or madman, Jesus certainly fits the description of the latter. When he curses a fig tree for failing to give him fruit, the choice seems fairly obvious. When he claims that diseases are the result of demonic possession, we recognize the words of a loon. Giving him the status of godhood only serves to prove how little Jesus knew about the real world. If he did exist, he is no more remarkable than Apollonius of Tyana, who was claimed to have performed the exact same miracles as Jesus (with the added bonus of being able to pass through walls like David Copperfield).

9. Do you really believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead?
Many theories have been put forth to try to cast doubt on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. All of  them are inadequate; some are even ludicrous (we devote three chapters to these theories in our book, Don’t Check Your Brains at the Door). In fact, the historical evidence for the resurrection is so overwhelming, historians have to become “anti-historical” in their efforts to build a case against it. As Lord Darling, a prominent English judge, once said, “No intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in a verdict that the resurrection story is true.

Lord Darling, for any of you who gives a shit, was a minor historical figure of little importance, and little relevancy. Authority here, in any case, is not needed to contest the Resurrection of a Palestinian Jew 2000 years ago. Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence, and what little there is consist of “witness” accounts written decades after his supposed death by people who never even met the guy. If our standards for evidence are so low, than should we also believe that Perseus really did kill the Medusa, and Orpheus braved the underworld to rescue his beloved?

10. How can you believe in that stuff?

The most convincing evidence for the Christian faith is not historical, textual, or archaeological; it is the testimony of a changed life. When I (Josh) set out to disprove the Christian faith, my mind met unassailable facts… but my heart met irresistible love. I met a group of Christians at Kellogg College in Battle Creek, Michigan, who exposed me for the first time to the love of God. Oh, how they loved each other. And I wanted what they had. That love paved the road of faith for me, and thus began my journey of faith. All the evidence in the world—the most powerful arguments and most convincing proofs—probably wouldn’t have gotten through to me if the transforming power of God’s love had not reached my heart through that student group and others.

Always keep in mind that the same will be true of anyone who challenges or questions your faith. Your answers can help open their hearts, but the vibrant evidence of a changed life will always be the most convincing apologetic you can offer.

This is usually where arguments with Christians end: this idea that “a changed life” is somehow proof that their faith is real. While I don’t deny that their beliefs may be genuine, it has no bearing on reality whatsoever. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second regardless of how I feel about it, or whether my life is transformed with such information. If relying on emotion is your idea of a strong defense in face of legitimate criticism, than there’s very little I can do to convince you otherwise. Of course, I can offer you this little piece of advice: don’t expect to blow anyone away with these kinds of pathetic arguments, boys and girls.

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Ever since Conservapedia put up a link to TGA declaring that there was “no such thing as a Good Atheist”, we’ve been getting a lot of great comments in a number of articles. The best one so far has to be from “Bob”, who is convinced that not only do we not exist, but that life on earth wouldn’t be worth living if it wasn’t for his imaginary buddy:

I want to know just one thing, if there is NO God, NO Afterlife, No nothing, no point to anything what so ever, why do you continue to even exist? I mean if you could prove to me that there wasn’t a God, which you can’t because there is, I would be the first in line for suicide, NOTHING or NO ONE on this earth is worth putting up with the total bullshit that we put up with on a daily basis.

With a personality like yours, it’s a total mystery why your friends and family don’t offer you enough support and love to justify you “putting” up with existence for more than a minute. You sound like such a positive guy! Surely it must be your love of God that makes you this cheery.

I don’t believe true atheists even exist, just a bunch of snot nosed adults throwing temper tantrums because they can’t get their way and do what they want without repercussion for their actions.

He is aware that we have a justice system, right?

I think I’ve identified where you fucked up in your reasoning, Bobby. You think atheism leads to nihilism which then leads to violent anarchy. If that were the case, prisons would be filled with non-believers. So why are they disproportionately represented in correctional institutions?

The simple answer (the one you can’t seem to grasp) is that belief in god doesn’t actually make a person moral. In fact, it can often do the exact opposite. Just think of how many times someone has murdered their fellow human being because their god commanded them to do so. These psychopaths were the ones who did what they want without caring what the repercussions were.

science is so full of shit, takes alot of faith to believe what you can’t see, right? when was the last time you could 100% prove science, all the way down to its truest form? you can’t you never will, most of what science says is all made up bullshit.

It’s impossible to prove science 100%. The whole process demands uncertainty, in a way. It invites change, because the people who do science realize that our picture of the Universe is incomplete. That isn’t a weakness, Bobby. That’s a strength. I know it’s hard to grasp when you’ve been humping the Bible for so long, but certainty is not at all desirable. We used to be certain that the world was flat, that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and that diseases were caused by demons. All of these “facts” were written with total certitude in the Bible and all of them are dead wrong.

If you enjoy certainty at the cost of learning anything real about objective reality, that’s your choice. I might suggest, however, that you try and improve your relationships with people that actually exist. They are the ones that make life worth living, not some failed messiah living in “the clouds”.

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The difference between science and other supposed “types” of knowledge that make similar claims about the Universe can be illustrated with this cool new discovery: a team of archaeologists working in South Africa have found a fossil of a possible ancestor. The physical attributes of Australopithecus sediba suggests that it may be a direct ancestor rather than an unsuccessful offshoot. This discovery could (and this is the important part here) change our understanding of our own past as a species.

This offers yet another opportunity for science to correct itself, to refine our understanding of the history of life on earth. That’s fucking exciting. That makes my day. It should make all of our days, but it doesn’t. For a significant portion of the American population, this discovery is either irrelevant, unimportant, or a threat. The need for people to feel important and relevant in an uncaring Universe has blinded them from a deeper and much more interesting possibility: that our existence, while impressive to ourselves, is the result of the same laws of physics that are Universal. If we exist long enough to contemplate the Cosmos, then we cannot be the only ones who have, are, or ever will. How more exciting is this than “Super Ape-in-the-Sky did it”?

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Remember that hilarious “15 questions Evolutionists can’t answer” pamphlet? The people behind this mongrel document have decided to expand their effort and launched a campaign called “question evolution“. Their goal is simple: to make children question one of the best theories in all of science because it conflicts with their limited world view.

The video tries to make people believe that this campaign is really meant to help kids “question everything”, although it’s quite clear from their own mandate that certain specific questions, such as “does God really exist”, are not really encouraged. What they want is the illusion of skepticism, applied improperly and for the sole purpose of undermining science education.

They want you to buy their swag, with is basically the ghost-busters logo but with Darwin instead. They also have a gigantic url pasted right on the front so anyone similarly stupid can visit their website and learn all about how science isn’t as important as scripture:

By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.

Yeah, you wouldn’t want to trust the words of fallible human beings. You’re better off trusting a book that says diseases are caused by demons and that the Universe was created in 6 days.

I’ll give these guys credit: unlike their moderate religious counterparts, they realize that their concept of a creator God conflicts with evolution. The idea that “God guided the process” would reveal the creator as an incompetent fool who kills off the vast majority of the species for no reason. So, given the choice between abandoning their Bronze Age beliefs or continuing to live in a delusional bubble, guess which one they pick?

I love the comment from this guy in South Africa:

I am a lecturer in the Physics department of … University. Last year I put a few copies of the Creation magazine in our tearoom. The next day I found it lying in the rubbish bin! I removed it, dusted it off and put it on the table again. The next day it was in the rubbish bin again!

I dusted it off, and put it on the table, etc …

This happened three days in a row!

Then I got a better idea. Every week I paste copies of the articles in Creation mag on my door, and since my office is next to the tea room, everyone who goes there has to walk past the office door! Now everyone will get to see the articles whether they want to or not! Since it is on my door, no one (so far) has dared to remove it! Thanks so much for this list of 15 questions. It will be on my door very soon! God bless!

I guess he really doesn’t have a fucking clue, does he?

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While I’m starting to agree that religion was less of a motivating factor in the attack on Oslo, Norway than pure racist xenophobia and fascism, it’s hilarious how Billy-Boy refuses to believe that any mass murderer could be a Christian. You can’t really blame him for his ignorance; this is the same man who is convinced that the tides prove the existence of God. Still you hear this “No True Scotsman” fallacy all the time in regards to who is, and isn’t a “real” Christian. Here’s a working definition: any person who believes that a historically dubious Palestinian Jew who lived 2000 years ago was in fact the creator of the Universe.

It’s tragic to think people like Bill actually believe that devoted religious people are incapable of murder, since faith itself often motivates people to commit the most atrocious acts. The Crusaders who slaughtered man, woman and child indiscriminately did so precisely BECAUSE of their religious convictions. While I agree that Anders probably does not fit in that category, there’s nothing about his behavior that would suggest that he was a “bad Christian”.

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Due to popular demand, God has been invited as a special guest for our next Bonus Show. Yes, the Creator of the Universe took time off his busy schedule to answer your pitiful, unworthy questions, so try and make them count!

The Bonus Show will be a freebie, so that means even if you don’t have any money, you can still tune in if you sign up.

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