And favorably!

Shermer thought I had offered an amusing blog post retort to Jerry Coyne’s charge that he (Shermer) had gone soft on theism and now deserved the label “faitheist”. See Shermer’s Huffington Post piece here, and my blog post that Shermer quotes from here.

[PureInsight.org] Atheists believe, “A man dies just like the way a lamp goes out.” This view, I think, is wrong. One’s true life will not vanish when one’s body dies. Our forefathers believed that reincarnation and retribution really exist. One gets retribution if one does an evil deed. I want to tell you a true story, according to a book written in the Qing Dynasty about a person who went through many reincarnations. In the Qing Dynasty, there was an official in Shanxi named Gu who remembered several of his reincarnations. He recalled he was a poor teacher living in a temple in the first life he remembered. Once, he happened to see the monks storing money they received from begging under ashes from a stove. Like the old saying goes, “Hunger and cold induce stealing.” He thus stole the money from the monks. He died several days later before he was able to spend the money. His spirit came out of his body when he died. An old woman came to get him. As they passed by a fire pit, the old woman suddenly pushed him into the fire pit.

When he woke up, he found he was in a donkey shack. When he looked at himself he found that he had become a new-born donkey, and he was in the temple from where he had once stolen the money. He knew he was receiving due retribution for stealing the money. When the donkey grew up a little, it started to do laborious work in the temple. It was very tiring and arduous work. Several times he thought of committing suicide by jumping into a ravine to end his suffering, but he knew that evil had to meet with retribution. If he didn’t pay back his debt and died, he would continue to suffer in his next life and the suffering would continue. On top of that, god might punish him for committing suicide and he would suffer even greater pain. He thus continued to work in the temple and hoped one day he would pay back his debt. After eight years, the donkey died from the tiring work. His spirit came out of the donkey. He again met the same old woman.

This time, the old woman took him to the side of a large pond and pushed him into the pond. He felt refreshed all over his body this time. He then realized he had become a baby. Out of excitement, he started to talk, “I have finally become a human again.” People were so dumbfounded to hear the new-born baby talking and thought he was a demon and drowned him.

He was again reborn to be a human and born into the Gu family. He was afraid he might be drowned again, so he did not talk. People thus thought he was a dumb baby. When he was several years old, he saw a child from the same village coming back from a private school. He took a book from the child to read, as he was a teacher in his first life. He told the child, “You are too old to read this elementary book.” The child was so surprised and thus told others that the mute kid from the Gu family could read and talk. His parents began to ask him many detailed questions. He told them about all of his previous lives. His parents thus hired a tutor to teach him. He succeeded in the imperial civil service exam in his youth and became an official.

From this historical record, I thought, in the end, good is rewarded with good, and evil with evil. As with officer Gu who was made to suffer retribution for stealing the money by becoming a donkey, people should not do bad things. This reminds me of our current historical period, as Falun Dafa is spread around the world by Dafa disciples to save people, and the Chinese Communist Party is persecuting these innocent people. Many of them have been persecuted to death. Those who participated in the persecution have already committed an enormous crime. If they don’t stop the persecution, their fate will be worse than being a donkey.

Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2009/8/28/61326.html

I simply do not understand… how a thinking adult… one capable of understanding that socks go on before your shoes… can believe in a guiding force that plans and shapes the universe.  And then… to not only believe that… but to believe that this guiding force actually has a stake in what happens to us mortals.  So much of a stake, in fact, that this guiding force would think get angry with us for being imperfect… and feel the need to send down a standin who could save us.  Could this “god” have gone about this in a more complicated non-sensical way?  No… “he” couldn’t. 

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Remember kids, frontal hugs are sinful. Only hug from the side from now on.

On a serious note this is the worst rap I have ever heard. These rough riders make Soulja Boy sound like a lyrical genius.

And what is with Christians and always making things go back to sex. If you think a hug is sexual you have some serious problems.

I’d rather go watch some Phelps family sing-alongs than watch these fake gangsters act all tough with their police sirens, gunshots and baggy clothes.

“Jesus never hugged nobody like that”

I beg to differ.

I consider myself a very open minded person. If someone is able to present me with enough evidence in favor of their position I will believe them, even if it means I must admit the position I previously held was wrong. I get the feeling very few people are actually willing to do this.

So what about god(s)? Well, yes, if you present to me enough evidence to prove that you’re particular god is true, and not just a fairy tale like you claim everybody else’s god to be, then I will believe you and convert. The problem is, no religion is able to do this. You see, for every “proof” put forth, there is a much simpler natural explanation. Occam’s razor.

The idea of an all powerful being that magically existed before everything and created everything out of nothing is infinitely less probable than all other natural explanations.

For example, the “Devil’s Bible” or Codex Gigas has a famous page with a drawing of the devil. The drawing stands out in that the pages upon which it is drawn are much  darker than all the other pages, almost like they were burnt.

Believers were convinced for ages that the mysterious darkness on this page was a sign of demonic possession, proof of the existence of the devil, and by extension, god.  It was only discovered recently, though scientific means, that the reason for the darkness on these 2 pages was no demonic possession, but excess exposure to UV rays, sunlight.

You see, the pages are made of animal skin, parchment, and parchment darkens naturally over time. UV rays speed up this process. People have always been fascinated with the drawing of the devil, and so they kept turning to those two pages more than others. Over time the extra UV light that those exposed pages were subjected to darkened them more than others. Simple and natural. No demons, no gods, nothing out of the ordinary.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

~ Arthur C. Clarke

Here is another problem. Say you tried to prove the existence of your particular god by some demonstration. It could be anything, lets say you manage to get your god to show their face to the entire world, say projected on the moon. This would truly be amazing and hard to explain. However, what is more likely: A) your god does exist some how, magically and outside the bounds of logic and everything else in the universe to show their face on the moon, or B) there is some technology at play that the rest of us are not privy to, but none the less has a natural explanation?

Obviously B. One of my favorite TV shows plays with this idea a lot. Stargate SG-1 in the show an evil race of aliens, the Goa’uld, use their advance technology level to trick less advanced civilizations into believing that they are gods, and should worship them as such.

The example of the projection of your god’s face on the moon is no different than any other parlor trick played by the Goa’uld. It’s infinitely more likely that there are unseen, but ultimately understandable, natural forces at work.

So in the end, it is possible that your god exists and all the others are fakes as you claim, but it is infinitely more probable that natural explanations exist, even if we do not know them at the moment, there is no reason that we will never know them.

I love Bryan Appleyard’s eloquent retorts to the blistering rhetoric coming out of New Atheistland. Here’s Appleyard today on PZ Myers’s scientism:

[M]ention intelligent design and the likes of Myers will be hurling abuse. But I gather from reading John Gribbin’s superb exposition In Search of the Multiverse that ID is, in fact, a perfectly respectable hypothesis among some physicists – the designer would not be a deity but a more technically advanced civilisation. So the world is ‘designed’ then? ‘No!‘ howls Myers; ‘Maybe,’ murmur the physicists. But there’s a bigger reason than that. Treating science as an ideology, an occasion for polemic and abuse, and anathematising those who dissent is profoundly unscientific. It is an attitude that will, in the end, damage not just science itself but science as a public institution. Science is, as Thomas Nagel put it, a ‘view from nowhere‘, it is a method, not a posture towards the world. It assumes – and, indeed, attains – the possibility of a superhuman perspective. As such, it is a profoundly admirable and magnificent achievement of the human intellect. But it is only one such achievement. When science aspires to be anything else – ideology, for example – it is prone to delusion, fantasy and intolerance. That is where we now are, a dangerous place where people set up web sites that abandon mere explanation and promote science as an ideology, as, in effect, an opinion held with such ferocity that all dissent must be crushed. This phase, I hope, will pass. But I am beginning to have my doubts.

For those who have been writing and asking for more Gay Groom blogs, thanks so much for taking the time to write and comment!

No, I was not left at the alter.  Neither did I run off with the caterer nor was I run over by our wedding limo.

Over the last month your humble blogger has been enjoying the life of a (very) married man.

Yes, the Gay Groom is MARRIED!

Legally absolutely totally you-bet-yer-ass married!

I do apologize for my lapse in blogging.  My lack of writing as the ceremony approached was twofold:  1) I just didn’t have the time and 2) your humble blogger’s nerves were shot!   There was weather to worry about (would it rain?)… flowers that may have been destroyed if there was a frost before the big day (would they freeze?)… family that became ill (would they come?)…

But looking back on it now, it was lovely.

Dare I say that it went off without a hitch?

It even made the New York Gay City News:

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2009/10/23/gay_city_news/arts/doc4ad751372d485768389292.txt

I could go on (and I will on my next blog post – I do have a few more things to say before signing off) but, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  So please allow me share my wedding album with you.

By the way, I’m the groom with the PINK tie…

This is from Lewis Thomas, the American physician. He does not write as a Christian, but his writings are intriguing. One of his books is Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. It is a long title, but it is an interesting book. He has a chapter on the lie detector. He says,

“As I understand it, a human being cannot tell a lie, even a small one, without setting off a kind of smoke alarm somewhere deep in a dark lobe of the brain resulting in the sudden discharge of nerve impulses or the sudden outpouring of neuro-hormones of some sort or both. Lying, then, is stressful, even when we do it for protection or relief, escape or profit, or just for the pure pleasure of lying and getting away with it. It is a strain, distressing enough to cause the emission of signals to and from the nervous system that something has gone wrong. In a pure physiological sense, it is an unnatural act.”

Once again we have an illustration of the fact that people are born with a sense of God and with some sense of right and wrong. This is instinctive. It is ineradicable. That seed remains and can in no way be uprooted. For Calvin, this meant that there cannot be any atheists.

At first glance, one thing that atheism clearly seems to have going for it is this: it doesn’t have any holy books with violence advocating passages in it. Indeed, it doesn’t have any holy books at all.

So score one for atheism?

Not so fast. It is true that under stress or times of war, atheists don’t have a sacred book to pull from the shelf that might justify violent actions. And it is also true that there are obscene passages in the religious books well adapted to times of war (and for a multitude of other situations as well). Religions are, in general, highly adaptive. No doubt. But I’d like you to consider this: Atheism is highly adaptive too. Atheists also have a tradition—the secular tradition—and in times of stress, atheists also reach for ideas, and my question is, “What ideas do they reach for?”

I would suggest that, in times of power struggles or war, an atheist might well turn to Nietzsche, or pull Machiavelli’s The Prince  from the shelf, not as sacred texts, but as guides for action, and the intellectual justifying of actions. An atheist soldier in Afghanistan, for example, might well get quite cynical and start reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (with Kurtz’s dark admonition near the end of the novella to “Kill them all”). Atheism, in other words, may not treat Nietzsche or Machiavelli or Conrad as holy writ, but atheism does not exist in a vacuum. Like religious ideas, secular ideas are sought out in different contexts. Like any religionist, an atheist turns to different secular texts for different life occasions (from marriage to war).

I’m suggesting that atheism is no more or less prone to violence than religion—and that violence advocating secular books, in stressful situations, are just as easily brought from the shelf and used for violent justifications as religious ones. You don’t need holy books to find justifications for violence, you just need to pull down Sam Harris, Hegel, Marx, or Darwin from the shelf and read them in a certain way. My thesis is that a world without religion wouldn’t be any less violent or ethically horrifying than a world with religion. It would be about the same.

I get some weird traffic. Don’t ask me how, but every month, I get a ton of strange searches in my stats. Here are some of the best every month

‘images of how to spank your young son’

Easily the creepiest thing I’ve read all week.

‘careers suitable for someone who is not’

I think google is insulting me. I’m suitable!

‘atheists need more faith’

I couldn’t agree more, random internet searcher. You’ve come to the right place.

‘theology what a waste of time’

Less of a search, and more of a statement.

‘the catholic church isn’t very pragmatic’

You don’t say?

‘a good spanking’

I think we’re all a fan of a good spanking every once in a while, AMIRITE?

‘denail of god in modern society’

You’re denailing my god? How DARE you.

With so many Christian denominations, how can they all be right about what The Bible says? Logically speaking, there can only be one truth regarding the word of such an all-powerful god. Or is it possible that there are actually multiple truths regarding the words in The Bible? I contend that anyone who claims authoritative knowledge of The Bible is just another in a long line of those who make the exact same claim, and holds no more authority, or knowledge, than anyone else. So, is The Bible ambiguous?

This is where things break down from the very start. The Bible cannot settle anything regarding Christianity, world history, knowledge of our origins, or our universe. There are simply too many interpretations from too many “authorities” to take any single one, or even a collection of them seriously. Sure, we can all read the various Bible translations in our native languages, but we can never agree on the meaning. Some people will literally laugh when I attempt to understand a verse, or a passage. They laugh at my apparent inability to understand the full context, or that I have not really looked at the original meanings, perhaps in Hebrew, or Aramaic. They laugh because I do not believe, therefore, I cannot possibly understand. Is it ambiguous? Proof of this fact is in the sheer number of interpretations currently being followed.

And so it goes with Biblical knowledge, apparently. Must one believe before they can understand? Does that even make sense? Knowledge of a thing is not something one must believe in, but rather, they should attempt to understand it. So how exactly does a non-believer come to understand The Bible if they do no read it? And if they read it, but they don’t have the proper “authority” to interpret things for them, will they get it right? Exactly how does one choose the proper authority? Which denomination, or which group of Christians should one follow? Biblical authority is fleeting.

I have said before that there is literally no way to objectively understand The Bible. At some point, a believer must choose a denomination, or a non-denominational group to hang with. Either that, or they must read The Bible, make their conclusions on their own, and forget joining a group all together (this sounds most appealing to me if I were going to believe.) Why bother putting anyone elses knowledge in between you and your god? Is there something in The Bible that say’s you must (don’t answer that!)

Whatever path one chooses when deciding to adhere to a Christian belief, The Bible offers little in the way of objective knowledge. If a book so important gets to be interpreted in whatever way makes the reader the most satisfied, then it is not a book that needs to be taken as literally as many seem to. If there is something in The Bible that moves a person to be good, then good for them. If there are passages in The Bible that motivates a person, or a group to harm others, then we have a problem. It is this subjective authority within a book that many claim as the word of their actual god that can and does cause great pain in the world. This is precisely why I do not believe any gods are real. The Bible itself is one of the main reasons people stop believing – believe it or not!

There is no such thing as biblical authority.

Show 65: Parenting

Emery’s bar exam is over, and Scott has a new baby! Join us as we catch up from our brief hiatus and talk about God, parenting, faith healing, and how a Christian parent deals with the possibility of a child in hell.

Pat Condell once again lays it on the line in this very poignant rant about religion and it’s only savior from criticism…blasphemy laws. Like it or not, Pat Condell speaks for many of us who are tired of religious oppression and the idea that false doctrine should be respected.
He has many other videos in his youtube channel.

This was such a good top ten list that I just had to promote it with a link. While I am at it, I would like to add number an additional number. 11. Atheists have more time on their hands to enjoy life and to do real good for the world. Remember that one set of hands put to use working can do more good that a million clasped in prayer. Now make with the clicky below.

http://rationalists.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/top-10-benefits-of-atheism/

There is something that most religious parents who indoctrinate their children into their own religion have in common. These parents usually teach their children that fictional characters such as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are real. This kind of parenting can only be characterized as sub-standard.

If parents should teach their children anything it should be critical thinking. Children need to learn how to properly evaluate the things they encounter in life. They need to know how to ask the right questions and be able to analyze information to come to rational conclusions. Teaching them that imaginary characters are real will only make them more susceptible to unfounded claims in the future.

There is also the problem of lying to children. Teaching them something which you personally know isn’t true is morally wrong. And for you Christians, it violates the 9th commandment. There is also an element of idol worship involved (violation of the 2nd commandment), especially for Santa Claus whom children basically pray to for presents.

The Santa Claus myth also promotes doing good for the sake of reward and avoid doing wrong out of fear for punishment (i.e. coal) because you are being watched by an omniscient supernatural being (sounds familiar). This teaches children an unjust system of morality. Children should learn that good has intrinsic value and should be done for its own sake.

Moreover, for many of these myths the child’s belief of the supernatural entity involved is required in order for them to receive the reward. This teaches children that it is okay to believe in something without proper evidence. And even when children begin to ask questions parents will continue to lie to them in order to keep them believing in the myths as long as possible (to not spoil their fun). The result is the discouragement of healthy skepticism.

Nevertheless, it seems like teaching kids about these more softer versions of religion makes it easier to push the hardcore religion down their throats. The step from Santa Claus to Jesus is not that far. I guess it is all just part of the religious program of indoctrination.

The evangelists are shouting… you’re flawed… you’re imperfect… you’re weak… you’re damaged… a sinner… you’re bad… fouled up… messed up… mucked up and marred… faulty… incomplete… inferior… insufficient and lacking…  broken… blemished… bruised and most of all… you’re unworthy.

You’re not good enough… you will never measure up… you are a real loser.

Welcome to JesusLand

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Why Christianity is Wrong and Destroying America and the World

by Lucky the Liberal

Hello, I’m Lucky the Liberal.

I’m succesfful and have my own house and have many friends and parties in it all the time with educated people from universities and also buddhists come over and its all paid off its big im rich and I went to college, also im neutral because im an atheist therefore you should listen to me.

Today we’ll be learning why Christians are bad people

One, Christians r bad bcuz they read teh bibLe alot and they keep saying God ovr n over.

number 2 also they did you notice they have way more websites and books then athiests? and so therefore they are lazy.

Three: they dont use theyre churches for homeless people and they should. If I were in charge of America I would convert all churches to homeless shelters.

Also Christians fundmentalists -  THATS the worst kind of christians – they deny evolution, big bang and spotaneuos life generation from soups puddles therefore they are stupid. They ahve no education and theyre hypocrites since they teach science but say theres no evolution big bang or sponteuos generations from soup puddles. Ok. So, do you see why liberals are way more smart and useful than Christians, specually the fundsementalist ones? See we don’t wastes time we speak the truth, we have facts and refrences, like this watch, look:

Richard Dawkins, who wrote Origins of Species,  bones in museums, and also a dinsaour creationist museam got shut down bcuz the owners didnt want to pay taxes which is clear proof they are wrong,

We are better at spelling and we had a survey that showed we’re smarter than religious people. Well some liberals are religious but its not much so that’s why I said we’re smarter than religious people. Oh and also we get along with the rest of the world better, so also yes therefore that’s proof we are right and the peaceful ones. More references: Multiple studies by scientists (and all scientists are libearls), so we have all the research and facts on your side.

So as you can see it’s liberals, who, advance the, world, make great technologies, are not the ranting ones, and we dont need to hear about Hell to do good and dont have sky daddies in the clouds. Oh yeah notice how Christians always right big paragraphs and say sooo much stuff and so YOU CANT READ IT!!!???

oH ALSO another huge refrence is wikipedia and it’s clearly the truth. Its better than all other encycleopdias because its got references for everything it says and none of the people in charge of it are bad they are all good because they are in charge. if they werent good why would they be in charge of it?

Also christians burned alexandrias library, bcuz they hate knowledge and they are primitive and simply like bacteria. Atheists didnt want to burn the library instead they wanted to make great civilizations and save lives. Atheists are perfect and never say or do anything wrong.

See I’m logical. Now stop wasting peoples money and time you stupid Christians and making global warming and melting icebergs with your Bibles and God talk!!!! BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!!! OH YEAH: GO OBAMA!!! HE’S FOR CHANGE AND CHANGE IS ALWAYS GOOD AND BEST!!!!

P.S. my name is really Smile Amani and I love to help peolpe on Yahoo Answers. My bests friends is Novangelis, Footprints in the Sand, Gorgeoustxwoman, Grim Jack, Tash, Batgirl2good, Pangel, Great Gazoo, Green Witch, Spike (I love you Spike what happened to you? Did you ever lose all that fat?),  Babbling Blue, Psuedodododia, Justin His Royal Highness and we all think its funny to put babies in microwaves. Oh speaking of babies, stop preventing kids from aborting their babies you mean Christians! We need to teach rapists a lesson by killing their babies instead of letting them turn kids and women into baby machines which is why rapists rape! Also we can use their stem cells for science and we need to them to save real lives, not protolplasms festuses which arent even human! And one day maybe we can get so advanced that i can get stem cells put in my brain so that Im finally good at math and science and can help the world better and keep more babies from being born who will just be poor and pollute the world!

Copyright Lucky the Liberal 2009-infinity.

Source:

atheist, no god no guilt

They are crazy in the Nanny state… totally crazy, one could even say the Brits are more crazy than the Muslims eh
Funding religious fanatics schools.. muhahaha
No faith schools should get taxpayers money.. end of story.

University of Chicago atheist biologist Jerry Coyne, at his blog today, summed up Robert Wright’s recent piece in the New York Times this way:

The title of Wright’s piece is “Who created Major Hasan?”, and of course the answer is “America!”

Coyne then went on to attribute to Wright a rather base motive for his lack of patriotism: he wants to win a religious prize! Coyne also got in a Sean Hannity-like swipe at Islam as well:

This is all part and parcel of Wright’s apparent bid for the Templeton Prize, most recently displayed in The Evolution of God. Well, I’m not in favor of stereotyping individual Muslims, but as for Islam, well, it does seem to be an intrinsically belligerent religion.

And if there is any danger of Coyne being unclear, he also said:

Wright explicitly blames American belligerence against Islam as the force producing the Fort Hood shooting spree by Major Nidal Hasan.

Wright’s piece is being wildly misread and given a misleading spin. I’d ask fair-minded readers to actually look at what Wright said in his essay here. Wright does not say in any way, shape, or form that Maj. Hasan is America’s “fault.” Wright is making a sociological and media observation. He is not evaluating America’s essential “goodness” or “badness” with regard to foreign policy. He is not saying that America produced Maj. Hasan.

What then, is Wright saying? It’s simply this: Living in an Internet age means that fundamentalists can magnify emotional responses to military occupations, provoking unbalanced people to rogue violence and acts of terrorism.

Barack Obama’s potential assassination is the proper analogy. Barack Obama occupies the White House (as America occupies Iraq and Afghanistan). Does it screw up moderate and liberal white Christians for Obama to occupy the White House? No. But there is a whole Fox media-Internet subculture of “patriot fundamentalists” for whom occupation of the White House by a black man makes them crazy, and if Obama is assassinated it will probably come from someone steeped in this fundamentalist Internet subcultural. Occupation is a psychologically freighted condition in which people make parental projections (the motherland, the mother religion, the father’s house) and unbalanced people can become violent when their psychosexual boundaries are broached.

It appears that Hasan is one of those people on the fundamentalist Muslim side who cracked. That’s all Wright is saying: fundamentalism in the Internet age spreads malignant viral memes very effectively, and emotionally poisons unbalanced people. And it’s one of the things that Americans have to take into account when deciding what to do about the fact that they occupy two Muslim countries: Iraq and Afghanistan.

What Coyne doesn’t like is Wright’s prescription: If America is going to continue to occupy two Islamic countries, then Americans need to be careful not to conflate Islam generally with fundamentalist Islam in particular (just as, if Obama were assassinated, we would be careful not to equate moderate Christianity or soft patriotism with the fundamentalist brands of Christianity and patriotism that might fuel an assassin).

Here’s the salient passage from Wright’s piece (and that Coyne failed to quote):

One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies — notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video — help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them. This calls into question our nearly obsessive focus on Al Qaeda — the deployment of whole armies to uproot the organization and to finally harpoon America’s white whale, Osama bin Laden. If you’re a Muslim teetering toward radicalism and you have a modem, it doesn’t take Mr. bin Laden to push you over the edge. All it takes is selected battlefield footage and a little ad hoc encouragement: a jihadist chat group here, a radical imam there — whether in your local mosque or on a Web site in your local computer.

The world has become like a close-net village
http://forum09.faithfreedom.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4253&p=82713#p82713

Hello Paar, I understand your love of Jesus, Mary and Moses. However, about Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster and Cyrus, are you sure you are not violating the Quranic injunction?

Buddha particularly was an agnostic or a Deist who never really discussed about divinity and supernatural in his teaching. Maybe your answer will be that these people were originally prophets but their teachings interpolated over time period. Right?

How about Confucius? Do you love him too?

Humanity is but one family.

Paarsurrey wrote:

Hi friends.

Since Quran is a Word of Revelation from the All-Wise, the Creator- God Allah YHWH; He sent Messenger Prophets to all the lands of the world to guide the humanity to His path. Now that the world has become like a close-net village; all these Messengers Prophets have been honored by Muhammad. The truthful Revelations, deeds/acts of all these Messengers Prophets have been secured in Quran; and their role has been set by God to introduce their nations and lead them to Muhammad – the Seal of Messengers Prophets; Muhammad authenticates their truthfulness, under lasting principles mentioned in Quran.

I love Jesus, Mary, Moses, Moses’ mother, Krishna, Buddha, Lao Tse , Confucius, Socrates, Zoroaster, Cyrus etc great leaders of the world in Ethics, Morals and Spirituality; I love them all; this is the teaching of Quran/Islam/Muhammad as explained by the Promised Messiah 1835-1908. I think it has got a lot of common sense and wisdom; my Atheist and Agnostic friends would admit.

Thanks

I am an Ahmadi peaceful Muslim

Fear not, religious nuts.  Atheists have not yet taken over the world.  Not yet, anyway.

Remember the infamous Atheist Bus Campaign that stirred up all that controversy at the end of 2008?  You know, the posters on the side of UK buses that said: ‘There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”?  Well, Ariane Sherine, the creator of that campaign, has come up with yet another brilliant idea.

The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas is a clever collection of 42 mini-essays about the birth date of Jesus Christ contributed by an assortment of well-known people from all walks of life.  Stand-up comedians, scientists, writers, journalists, filmmakers, cartoonists and bloggers.  And the one thing all of them have in common?  None of them believe in God.  Any God.

Now, I use the term ‘well-known’ loosely, as there are many names in the list that I’m sure many are not familiar with.  The ones people should at least recognise include Derren Brown (the illusionist who does all that freaky mind control stuff), Zoe Margolis (blog author of Girl with a One-Track Mind), Brian Cox (the physicist – though I erroneously thought it was the Scottish actor from X-Men 2), and of course, the most famous atheist of them all, Mr God Delusion himself, Richard Dawkins.

As for the names you don’t recognise, there is a helpful biographies section at the end.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know about this section until I got there.  A shame, because if I had read about who the authors are and what they do before reading their respective essays it would have put their words in the proper perspective  (potential readers take note).

The various essays are separated into categories: Stories, Science, How To, Philosophy, Arts and Events.  However, I think this was just to make things more manageable for the reader, as each essay is written so differently and touch on such a wide array of issues and themes that it would have been impossible to classify them with any degree of specificity.  The essays range from personal stories and experiences about how they lost their faith, to opinions on what Christmas means to them as an atheist; from complex scientific explanations to discussions on Christmas shopping, gifts, parties, music, film and literature.  You really do get a broad spectrum of views, as some authors were brought up as Catholics, some are Jews, while others were raised by atheist or agnostic parents.

While you may not find all the essays appealing or interesting, the good thing with having 42 different entries is that you can pick and choose what you want to read, and skip, skim or come back (or not) to the others.  The entries range from just a couple of pages up to 10 pages at the very most, so even if you skip a few completely, you won’t feel as though you’re wasting the book.

My favourite essay of the lot is by comedian Catie Wilkins, who wrote a hilarious yet heart-felt little piece called ‘110 Love Street’.  As a film lover, I also liked ‘An Atheist at the Movies’ by David Baddiel and Arvind Ethan David, who discuss everything from The Golden Compass to The Passion of the Christ to Contact.  Of course, the big names don’t disappoint either.  Derren Brown’s piece ‘On Kindness’ and Richard Dawkins’ original Christmas story ‘The Great Bus Mystery’ are both fabulously written and exceptionally well thought out.  Even if you don’t agree with where they are coming from you can at least marvel at their intellect.

I know many religious people will scoff at such a book (especially one with this title), but it is honestly quite harmless.  There is nothing grossly offensive to be found between the covers (unless you are a nutjob).  It can definitely be enjoyed by agnostics (referred to by Sherine as ‘eggnostics’) and non-self-righteous, open-minded religious folk (who aren’t crazy).  At the end of the day, The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas is a funny, eye-opening read that turned out to be more educational than I could have imagined.  It would make a great gift for Christmas, especially since 50% of the overall total profit from the book goes to the Terrence Higgins Trust, the UK’s leading HIV and sexual health charity.  For religious fanatics who ‘refuse to read such nonsense’ (or are just too lazy to turn the page), the book is also available in audio format on iTunes.
4 out of 5 stars!