Richard Dawkins & Bill O’Reilly, Again

Richard Dawkins made another appearance on the Fox News program The O’Reilly Factor to discuss his new children’s book, The Magic of Reality.

As expected, O’Reilly’s ideas were superficial and incorrect, conflating religion with morality and violent political philosophy with atheistic philosophy.

It is, nevertheless, enjoyable to see the two personalities spar:

Acceptance of evolution

While we’ve reported on this before, this is still pretty depressing:

via Reddit

The history of religion in five (funny!) minutes.

I’m finally reaching the end of a very long research trip, during which copious amounts of Monty Python consumption has helped me maintain my sanity. The best Monty Python movie is, of course, Life of Brian, and perhaps the best part of Life of Brian is the following portion, which captures in just five minutes what religion is all about.

But how can you choose just one segment? I might as well vote for this single joke, right at the start of the film when a crowd is trying to listen to Jesus’ sermon on the mount:

Man 1: I think it was blessed are the cheese-makers.

Woman: What’s so special about the cheese-makers?

Man 2: Well obviously it’s not meant to be taken literately, it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

This has always been hilarious to me — but the other day, I tried to unpack why this is so funny. And then it was pretty obvious - what’s funny about this is that “Man 2″ is trying to make something patently absurd less absurd, but the original proposition is so ridiculous that his reinterpretation completely fails to reduce its absurdity. And the exact same thing happens with religion — when liberal believers insist that Bible stories are not meant to be taken literately but, can still be considered true in some fundamental sense, they do nothing to ameliorate the absurdity at the soul of the original claim.

Example: Adam and Eve and the snake in the Garden of Eden.The liberal theologian or believer might say, of course this is not true; it is just an allegory speaking to the sin inside of us all. But wait, what’s that? Yes, the idea of a talking snake and an idyllic garden and the first man and woman materializing out of dust are all ridiculous - but so is the idea that we are all cursed with soul-crushing sin which we inherit, not by any bad deeds of our own, but by our own human condition and that in fact, no matter how we live our lives, this inherited sin will drag us down to hell (however defined) lest we should - oh well, I’ll just stop there, you get the idea.

I posit that this is not too drastically different from dismissing the concept of blessed cheese-makers only to replace it with the smugly presented, but no more compelling, explanation of blessed manufacturers of dairy-products.

You have to love The Onion

Man Somehow Overcomes Alcoholism Without Jesus

In case Jon Stewart hurt your feelings

If you’re still miffed about Jon’s segment the other week on the American Atheists suit, this should put him back in your good graces.

Religious People are Nerds

Explains a lot, doesn’t it? Do enjoy.

Display Case 1: Militant Atheist

This made me happy.

The other day I was sniffing around the internets to educate myself on what the humanist logo looks like (which happens to be very awesome) when I stumbled across this site from Objective Ministries about “Confronting Militant Atheism.” It is typical fundie literature - atheists are miserable people who hate God, etc - but it includes this picture of Christopher Hitchens with the caption I’ve reproduced below:

Fig. 2 — Militant Atheist engaged in typical behavior

So typical militant atheist behavior, apparently, is book signing and liquor consumption, while sweating very heavily. Yo ho, yo ho, it’s a pirate’s life for me. Huzzah!