I agree that agnosticism is annoying as hell, especially those that start accusing non-believers of being dogmatic. Yeah, because rejecting a poorly constructed cosmogony means that you have a closed mind…How about showing me some fucking proof? That’s all we want. Until then, my own agnosticism will remain open to the possibility of someone showing evidence of an all powerful entity, and that’s about it.

Only criticism: the back and forth camera shit makes me dizzy, honestly.

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Are you an idiot who wants desperately to continue to believe in a supernatural entity despite no evidence to do so? Are you intimidated by the sciences, and how it conflicts with your supernatural understanding of the world? Are you concerned that evolution makes your Cosmogony seem infantile and basic by comparison? Then head on over to Creationtips.com, where you can learn a whole slew of idiotic talking points, such as.

1. How did the Universe come about?
There is of course no scientific law or demonstrable process that would let something evolve from nothing. If there was nothing in the universe to begin with, obviously nothing could happen to cause anything to appear.[Jake's Note: You'll read this whole "there is no scientific law" rhetoric all the time on the site. Evidently these clowns have no real understanding of what scientific laws are all about.]

Translation: Something can’t come from nothing, therefore my creator god who willed himself into existence did it.

In any case, this question is supposed to confuse non-believers who aren’t super familiar with astrophysics. How can a Universe come from nothing? Well, Laurence Krauss has some good answers to this question, but it’s still an argument I find quickly paints religionists into a corner. If it’s true that you can’t get something from nothing, then why does this rule not apply to their creator God?

2. How could living creatures come from Non-Life?
There are no provable mechanisms for how molecules could increase in complexity without cells to produce and utilize them. For example, you cannot assume proteins before you have the DNA that codes for them.

Translation: There are no provable mechanisms for life, therefore my improvable diety did it!

Creationists are always a little confused as to how non-living materials create living entities. While we cannot yet fully explain how the necessary proteins arranged themselves to create DNA, it’s important to remember that this molecule is not “alive” in the same sense that we are. It’s simply a biological mechanism for replication, and there are other non-organic examples of this as well.

Any creationists using the word “DNA” is a fool; if they believe that humans are seperate from animals, they should choose a different molecule: this one suggests that humans share a common ancestor with all animals. It’s a far cry from their Adam and Eve bullshit.

3. How could new genetic information arise?
The theory of evolution teaches that complex life-forms evolved from simple life-forms. There is no natural law known that could allow this to happen. The best that evolutionists can come up with to try to explain how this might have happened is to propose that it happened by mutations and natural selection.

Translation: I’m confused about evolution, therefore god did it.

Creationists are always confused about how evolution works. They half to be, otherwise it kills their little delusion that Earth was spawned by an invisible deity. They always claim that you can’t see evolution in action, even though you can with something as mundane as using anti-bacterial soap. It’s even clearly spelled out for you on the label: if they kill 99.9% of all bacteria, the 0.1% that survived have developed a greater resiliency to this particular soap. Over time, these traits make their way into the population and your soap becomes increasingly ineffectual as we slowly train bacterium to resist us through our germaphobic habits. Tada!

More sophisticated creationists (Intelligent Design) admit that this kind of evolution exists, but that somehow these types of changes can’t possibly lead to different traits leading to separate species over long periods of time. Even if evolution were wrong, it would not make their magical-spontaneous-sky-man hypothesis any more correct.

…mutations and natural selection do not show gain in information, just rearrangement or loss of what is already there — therefore there may be beneficial mutations without an increase in genetic information.

There’s a wonderful video explaining how a kind of “loss of information” was responsible for humans branching off into a separate species, and you need to check it out.

4. Where is the proof that apes turned into humans?
Thousands of fossils and fossil fragments of apes and humans have now been found — and they don’t show a steady progression from apes to humans at all. Fossils have been found in the wrong time-frames, put into the wrong categories before all the evidence was in, and what was once thought to be the ape-human family tree now actually has no trunk — just unconnected branches.

Translation: I don’t even understand the notion that human beings ARE apes!

This one makes me the saddest, because it reminds me that we’re still a long ways away as a species from admitting what we are. You’d think the fabric of society would collapse like a balloon as soon as we all realized that we are animals like any other. The fact that we are offended by the notion of being apes goes to show that we have little appreciation for the truth, and even less appreciation for how extraordinarily fortunate we are to be alive.

As for debunking this claim that the “fossil record keeps changing”, keep in mind that the chance of actually finding human fossils is already a rarity (land species always leave less evidence of their existence, and we haven’t been around for that long). Our entire collection of ancient hominid bones could fit in the back of a pickup truck, for god’s sake! But to say that there’ no evidence that we share a common ancestor with apes is simply a pious lie. The evidence is overwhelming (one of the proofs is in the video I mentioned before), and keep in mind that so far, the best alternative explanation these creationists offer is the equivalent of magic. How are they so endlessly impressed with themselves?

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As a writer, the appeal of discussing atheism stems largely from the fact that although its definition may be simple, the philosophies that surround it are not. There are so many different responses to atheism that some have begun to call it a religion. But is this true? Is atheism a religion, and if not, does it emulate many of the elements of it? As I will show in this article, the answer to that question not only makes us curious about the future implications of the growing trend of atheism, it also demands our attention about what could potentially be the next major movement in Western society.

What is a Religion?

To answer that question, we must examine the long history of religion to reveal its purpose, which will in turn reveal its structure. Although no definite number exists as to the age of religion, anthropologists are convinced that crude animistic sects were a hallmark of life for our ancient ancestors as far back as the emergence of Homo sapiens (there is even evidence that our evolutionary cousins, Neanderthals, had their own form of religion as well). Our ancestors were not stupid; they possessed the same raw mental power we do, but they were ignorant of the natural laws that governed their environment. They faced the often brutal torment of nature, and life was certainly never easy. When confronted with the overwhelming power of nature, our ancestors turned to creative myths to explain why such things as droughts, famine, storms, and death occurred. As they were passed down orally from generation to generation, the stories became ever more complex, and these complexities led to elaborate cosmogonies, and of man’s place in the Universe.
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I remember Archie comics fondly as a kid. Although the storylines were always predictable and innocuous, I had a deep appreciation for such familiarity. Looking back, however, I couldn’t help but notice that the quaint vision of life in America was a product of the pining for the “simpler” times, when teenagers worried about who they would take to the big dance, and drug, violence and sex was never an issue. This picture, of course, is simply a fantasy. Still, it was a wholesome alternative to the sometimes overly violent and complicated works of other comic books, like Spiderman or X-Men.

What I never realized however, was that in the 1970’s and 80’s, the characters were featured in a number of Fundamentalist Christian books under the publication of Spire Christian Comics. The strict doctrine of Christianity was encouraged, with the troop involved in issues surrounding evolution, drug addiction, and even a little anti-establishmentarianism (they didn’t like hippies too much it would seem).
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