Patrick Bateman Versus God

Not long ago I had a thought so shocking I had to say it aloud and see if it still made sense: “What if Patrick Bateman was God for a day?” I immediately imagined the roof of a church collapsing on its hundreds of groveling parishioners, a tsunami killing thousands, catching many unawares, malaria and polio, the plague, the crusades. Childhood leukemia.

“Shit,” I thought. “What if he already is?”

And I found that question had just as much weight, so I posed a few more questions, this time typing them out onto my laptop.

“What kind of commandments would an all powerful Bateman issue his followers? How would he use an army? Would the Old Testament look any different if Patrick Bateman were in charge instead of God?”

Consider that American Psycho has been banned for its graphic depictions of violence and sexuality in many countries, including the US. This, despite the fact that no known group organizes their lives around its teachings, and not a single person has ever claimed Patrick Bateman told them to drown their children in a lake.

Continue reading…

Life as an Intelligently Designed House

A favorite metaphor with the Intelligent Design community is that of a house. They claim that looking at a house and knowing there must have been an architect can be similar to looking at nature and knowing there must have been a designer.

“Look at the fireplace, the living room, the kitchen, the windows, the carpet: all proof that someone put thought into the structure and purpose of each room.”

For the purposes of this brief essay, then, let’s assume a designer in nature and afterward apply some of his bright ideas to that of a house. Continue reading…

The only thing more fascinating than cryptozoology is cryptozoology.

It was a sad day when I admitted to myself that there was no dinosaur in Scotland’s Loch Ness. Partly this was due to the fact that a minimalist sketch of a plesiosaur was and remains the only thing I can even remotely decently draw. But mostly it was due to the little bit of wonder that went out of my life when reason persuaded me that even in a relatively large lake like Loch Ness, there would be no way for a huge, prehistoric animal to exist without leaving behind some tangible, indisputable bits of evidence – especially as the hunt for Nessie, as she is affectionately called, provides the basis for a local tourist industry and certain fame to whoever proves her existence. Indeed, Loch Ness has been searched, scanned, and scouted more thoroughly for Nessie than Afghanistan was for Bin Laden.

And yet no Nessie. And that makes sense. Just as it makes sense that there has been no body or bones found for Big Foot – despite a plethora of various sized and shaped footprints and even video of Bigfoot out for an afternoon walk – and no Ogopogo remains washing up on the shores of Okanagan Lake, either. And this is because very large animals that live in relatively constricted areas that do not leave behind verifiable evidence of their presence probably do not exist. Almost certainly do not exist, in fact.

Continue reading…

Heavy Metal Bible

This is a new series of short posts that will be based on little Atheist “factoids” that I’ve also posted on a new tumblr site called …you might be an Atheist. This is an experiment in memetics, among other things.

Some will be funny, some will be serious, but the goal is that all of these ought to be thought-provoking conversation starters for people of all stripes. This first one touches on a topic with which I’ve always been fascinated. If you wish to pass it along on tumblr, just click on the graphic itself. Otherwise, feel free to link this article to facebook, twitter, or your social networking portal of choice.

Let’s get the conversation going.

* * *

* * *

Did you know that Metallica’s song “Creeping Death” is a specifically about the Biblical tenth plague, when God killed the firstborn child of every household in Egypt?

Continue reading…

OMG Richard Dawkins!

Aren’t words funny? Really, they’re just symbols we’ve come up with to represent our ideas and communicate them with one another, yet they really can get us into trouble. Take Richard Dawkins, who has recently come under fire for fatally uttering those two words which prove any Atheist is really a closeted believer; “Oh God.”

Of course, were this logic to be broadly applied, that would mean Sir Mix A Lot’s Baby Got Back is a Christian song. After all, the opening line is, “Oh my God, Becky. Look at her butt. It is so big.”

I might be content to suggest that everyone with a brain and a pulse knows that merely saying the words, “Oh God” doesn’t prove one believes in God any more than saying, “Holy crap” proves one finds their bowel movements somehow divine.

And yet, the subtle nuance of language, of words and the ideas we attach to them, urges me onward.

Consider that a great many Catholics profess to believe that when a priest blesses a communion cracker, and they ingest it, the cracker becomes the literal body of Christ. This is the Doctrine of Transubstantiation, composed of mere words, and yet look at the consequences. Not only is this one step short of ritual cannibalism, such a stance tacitly acknowledges that after eight to ten hours of digestion, the believer then excretes the nutritionally useless parts of the body of Christ into the toilet.

Holy crap, indeed.

Further, this casts the Great White Throne Judgement in the book of Revelation in a new light. With this in mind it seems only fitting this is where we find Jesus seated at the end of the world, as his believers have been routinely depositing him in their tiny white thrones for centuries now.

All in all, this supports my argument that the best proof against religious belief is often the beliefs themselves.

So why don’t we make a deal? How about we agree to let Dawkins off the hook for mistakenly uttering those two fateful words, and we’ll just look the other way as believers (either literally or symbolically) cannibalize their lord and savior and then flush him down the toilet.

Slavoj Zizek hearts atheism.

So I don’t know how many philosophy buffs we have out there, but if you’re into theoretical speculations about the nature of things (or lack thereof) you’ve probably heard of Slavoj Zizek. Zizek is one of the most well-known and well-regarded of contemporary philosophers, in part due to his willingness to talk about things everyday people consume (movies, the media) and in part because he’s just a very entertaining guy. But he also says, as far as I can tell, a lot of smart things that I won’t even attempt to come to an understanding of so that I might summarize them for you. I’ve watched him speak twice on film and so far I’ve deduced that 1) Children of Men is a very, very good movie and 2) rather than fetishizing nature and “the natural” we should in fact strive to become more, not less, artificial. Hard core.

But for our purposes here, the important thing is that Zizek is an atheist and, furthermore, makes a good argument about why, at the end of the day, atheists love your religious freedom more than religious people do. On the topic of intolerance towards Muslims, he wrote this a few years ago for The New York Times:

These weird alliances confront Europe’s Muslims with a difficult choice: The only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity are the “godless” atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies.”

The entire article, titled “Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for,” is a succinct and clear refutation to perhaps the most common misconception about atheism – that without religion, we will all set about killing each other without restraint. If anything, Zizek points out, it is religion that makes such behavior possible, not atheism.

But my larger purpose in bringing this article to your attention is to provide you one possible alternative to the Four Horsemen when engaged in conversation about atheism with your left-leaning, New Agey or agnostic friends. Often, Dawkins and Hitchens are criticized for being not terribly well-educated in fields that intersect with their narrow interest in theology-as-a- hypothesis- about -reality, and consequently write books lacking nuance, historical knowledge, and philosophical sophistication. We can argue about whether or not that is true all day – I happen to feel the point about simplifying history is quite true in the case of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris – but if your acquaintances do not trust the intellectual rigor of these guys, Zizek is a great person to refer them to instead. I hardly see how anyone could go after Zizek for lacking nuance, although I’m sure someone has. But the point being, if your atheism-skeptical friends want someone who is deeply steeped in philosophy, history and politics to make the same arguments about atheism being good for society as do the infamous New Atheist horsemen, Zizek is your man.

And if they still disagree with you, you can just direct them to his wiki page and demand that they fully comprehend and explain his philosophy to you before claiming that his position is invalid. They will quickly give up and concede.