Eideard

Doctor preparing transfusion for wounded rebel in Libya
REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra used by permission

Atheist bloggers have shown their charitable side by swarming to donate money to Doctors Without Borders, in what turned into the humanitarian agency’s biggest online fundraiser.

Doctors without Borders, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, gets about 4,000 hits on its U.S. website on an average Sunday. Last Sunday that number ballooned to 50,000 as a horde of redditors, subscribers to the social media site reddit.com, thundered across the DWB homepage.

Thousands more clicked through from the atheism sub-reddit, a site normally given over to finding holes in religions and picking fights with creationists, and headed for a dedicated site at firstgiving.com, where they have so far given $180,000…

Many donations were tagged with messages such as “Because god won’t,” “Good without god” or even “Good without Zeus…”

Reddit’s atheist page, www.reddit.com/r/atheism, boasts more than 300,000 subscribers while the Christianity page has 20,000…

Reddit is owned by Conde Nast, better known as the publisher of Wired, Vogue and GQ. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, it thrives on anonymity, fostering a creative chaos which is divided up into “subreddits” and largely self-policing thanks to guidelines known as “reddiquette” and the desire to collect “karma,” the points earned and lost from upvotes and downvotes…

Jennifer Tierney, who is in charge of fundraising at DWB, said the money from reddit was not earmarked for any particular project and could be used for any of DWB’s work, which this year included fighting cholera in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo and responding to emergencies in Libya and Ivory Coast…

DWB normally gets a few million dollars a year from about 250-300 third party fundraising events, anything from reddit to a child selling home-made lemonade on the street corner. Reddit has contributed about 10 percent of that total in a few days.

Bravo!

No need here to explain the difference between ethics and morality.

US atheists are to hold parties in response to an evangelical broadcaster’s prediction that Saturday will be “judgement day”.

The Rapture After Party in North Carolina – “the best damned party in NC” – is among the planned events.

Harold Camping, 89, predicts that Jesus Christ will return to earth on Saturday and true believers will be swept up, or “raptured”, to heaven…Mr Camping has predicted an apocalypse once before, in 1994, though followers now say that only referred to an intermediary stage…

The Rapture After Party in Fayetteville, North Carolina, is a two-day event organised by the Central North Carolina Atheists and Humanists.

“Though the absurdity of this claim is obvious to the majority of the world, it’s a great opportunity to highlight some of the most bizarre beliefs often put forth by religious fundamentalists and raise awareness of the need for reason,” said a posting about the party on the group’s website.

Atheists in Tacoma, Washington, have headed their celebration “countdown to back-pedalling”.

Events are also planned in Houston, Florida and California.

Invite a few politicians. You won’t have to spend any money on them because guaranteed they won’t show up to something irreligious – even if it’s just laughing at a noodnik like Harold Camping. Besides – he has the millions he’s scooped up from True Believers to keep him comfy.

Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons…“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

No surprise to me. I’ve been an atheist since I was 13 years old, a philosophical materialist since 18.

Still does.

Christian respect for freedom of speech
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Atheists in Oklahoma City have erected a billboard seeking fellow non-believers, and Satanists have scheduled a conference in a city-owned building, drawing criticism from ministers in a state where more than eight out of 10 people say they are Christians…

Nick Singer, the coordinator of a local atheists’ group called “Coalition of Reason,” recently received $5,250 from its national counterpart to erect the billboard along Interstate 44 near the Oklahoma State Fair, which opens Wednesday. Its message reads, “Don’t believe in God? Join the club…”

Legislators pray in their chambers, led by a “minister of the day,” usually Christian. The Oklahoma City Thunder is one of the few NBA teams to begin each contest after a non-denominational prayer delivered by a minister on the public address system…

Yes. I think we all can agree that Oklahoma is a bastion of bible belt True Believers. Superstition overrules just about everything but the sunrise.

The Satanists, calling themselves the Church of the IV Majesties, have reserved a room at the Oklahoma City Civic Center for a “blasphemy ritual,” said James Hale, a founding member.

“I guess you could say we’re poking a dog with a stick. That’s the point of Satanism — to question all things,” Hale said.

Singer, from the atheists’ group, said his group has no connection to the Satanists.

“As far as Satan goes, we don’t believe in him either,” he said.

If you ask who might present a danger to the public order, whose hatred and fear might surpass any understanding of constitutional freedoms, the answer is clear.

“It’s not the people who don’t believe in God that worry me,” said Robin Meyers, senior minister at Mayflower Congregational Church…”It’s some of the people who do.

“Fundamentalism is the enemy worldwide, no matter what the strain.”

Oklahoma already bears national witness to the death and destruction that reactionary True Believers can bring to the innocent. The question of dissent – even on the side of reason and science – means little to those who think they are the sword-carriers for a wrathful god.

Up until last summer, Jennifer Gray of Columbus, Ohio, considered herself “a weak Christian” whose baptism at age 11 in a Kentucky church came to mean less and less to her as she gradually lost faith in God.

Then the 32-year-old medical transcriptionist took a decisive step, one that previously hadn’t been available. She got “de-baptized.”

In a type of mock ceremony that’s now been performed in at least four states, a robed “priest” used a hairdryer marked “reason” in an apparent bid to blow away the waters of baptism once and for all. Several dozen participants then fed on a “de-sacrament” (crackers with peanut butter) and received certificates assuring they had “freely renounced a previous mistake, and accepted Reason over Superstition….”

Within the past year, “de-baptism” ceremonies have attracted as many as 250 participants at atheist conventions in Ohio, Texas, Florida and Georgia. More have taken place on college campuses in recent years, according to Hemant Mehta, chair of the board of directors for the Secular Student Alliance, a group that promotes atheism among high school and college students….

In Christian theology, baptism can’t be undone. If a Southern Baptist renounces his or her baptism, then that person is usually presumed to have never received an authentic baptism in the first place, according to Nathan Finn, assistant professor of Baptist studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

Personally I like the Southern Baptist aesopian response best: Your first baptism was sour anyway. Har!