Election Day is like the Super Bowl to me. I love them and now that my term as Minority Election Inspector is up, I thought I would be able to relax this Election Day. Nope, I am now a Democratic Party Committee Person for district and so I will be out there pushing a few of candidates and making sure the Republicans aren’t up to no-good. Despite my heavy involvement here in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I am more interested in what is going on in Arizona on Election Day.
One of the things I love about being a person of reason is that embracing reason over faith often encourages people to admit their mistakes and to change their position on various issues. For starters, most atheists once believed in a deity and have changed their position based on new information. All of science is based on the principle that we don’t have all the answers and that some of the answers we do have might not be completely correct or maybe totally wrong.
Halloween is such an awesome holiday. People get dressed up in all kinds of scary, sexy, and creative costumes and then give and receive delicious candy and treats. Plus, fundamentalists hate it. All this fun makes fundamentalists go nuts. So while pretty much doing anything on Halloween becomes an attack on Jesus to many believers, I want to know what atheist, humanist, and blasphemous costumes people wear or plan to wear on Halloween.
Republicans are freaking out and fundamentalist Christians are declaring that the Ebola “outbreak” in America is the start of the End Times. The media is in full court press mode. The only thing that can knock Ebola out of the news now is a missing plane or a political sex scandal and even they might not be able to take down this scary sounding virus that almost no one in America actually has.
Last night, I went to the Church to give my presentation. To start with, I asked the Pastor if I could tape a letter to the Church door as part of my presentation. He allowed it. My letter was a list of 10 things that all atheists agree about. Each numbered item was a particular deity that atheists lack a belief in. I tried to pick a mix of deities what were mostly pretty well known. Of course the last deity on the list was Yahweh.
Recently, my 5-year-old son was running around the house and knocked over my glass. It broke and while no one was hurt, it was a glass I really liked. My son immediately apologized, but I told him that I could not forgive him until he went out and mercilessly slaughtered an innocent lamb. I explained to him that I love him and that I want to forgive him, but until he sacrifices the innocent blood of a lamb, I just could not forgive him. Those are the rules. I didn’t make them up; God did.
In a recent interview on CNN, Muslim apologist Reza Aslan made it clear that barbaric practices like female genital mutilation and the treatment of women in a few Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran has no place in the 21st century. However, he doesn’t think this has anything to do with Islam. The fact that so many countries ruled by Muslim theocracies also just so happen to treat women as horribly must be a coincidence.
About a year ago, I read a news story about a proposal to give every citizen in Switzerland $2800 as a basic income. I remember talking about this with my progressive friends and to my surprise I was the only one who really thought this was a great idea. Sure, critics could easily point out that idea would obviously sound great to me because I am a stay-at-home dad who works a part-time retail job making slightly above minimum wage, but that isn’t why I actually liked the idea.
I’m not really a fan of Michael Bay because most of his films are basically disaster porn. But that’s okay because this blog post has nothing really to do with him. It has to do with a comment someone left on my Facebook page in relation the video of Leonardo DiCaprio’s speech to the United Nations about Climate Change.
Religious believers often claim that atheists choose to not believe in God for various reasons. Some will even say that our choice not to believe is just a phase. Obviously I disagree with that point of view, but more than that I disagree with the premise that atheism or even belief is a choice at all.