In a New York Times article today, recent studies have shown that the fastest growing “religious” group is Unaffiliated. This group includes people who could still be religious but don’t want to be part of church, to people like Richard Dawkins, and then to people like me, who think God is an asinine concept. These people aren’t necessarily agnostic or atheist, but once they and their descendants are out of the Godbag factory, you’d have to think (hope) more atheists are coming! Oh to live to see the day with just 25% atheism!

Well..I’m a day late. Let me explain.

Anyone who knows me and my wife, know we’re atheist. On the Richard Dawkins scale of atheism, I rate even more atheist than Dawkins himself. I don’t think we should be discussing if there is a god or not, I think we should be discussing why people even ask such a silly question to begin with. Why don’t we debate the existence of pink, winged, unicorns while we’re at it?

Now I despite being an atheist, I’ve always celebrate Christmas, because my parents did. They never baptized me, never sent me to church, and never said anything either way when it came to religion and the connection to Christmas. You could say I had as secular a Christmas as one could have. Considering how commercial Christmas is now, and the litany of secular traditions now associated with the holiday, I never felt uncomfortable celebrating.

This year, however, in honor of our atheist convictions, we changed up the holiday. For starters, the central figure in our holiday is the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all the accompanying traditions. Pasta and pirates play a big part in Pastafarianism, and Kelly really decided to go out all this year to celebrate the holiday we now call FSMas as well as the celebration of the first holiday in our new house. You can see all the decorations she did up here: Flickr Set. I think you will be impressed at the depth of her devotion. In addition to the name change, new decorations, we now celebrate on the 24th. The 24th is for presents, the 25th is for relaxing and using said gifts. The traditional FSMas meal is vegan lasagna with vegan tiramisu.

Because of the rather large purchase we made this year (our house), we kept gifts between us rather small putting a roughly $100.00 limit. Kelly early on went slightly over, so the limit ended up being $110.00 or so. When asking me what I wanted for Christmas, I kept telling her over and over again, all I really wanted was Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. I thought it looked fun. The though of seeing a grown man play a small toy guitar was too much for Kelly apparently, and she said no way would she get me that game. Later, on a South Park episode featured GHIII and pretty much mocked exactly the same things Kelly did. So I thought my chances were pretty slim or non of actually getting it.

To my surprise, when I opened up my gift (it was the only gift), I saw GHIII staring back at me. The only thing I wanted, right there. Kelly had basically been messing with me the whole time, and actually bought the gift pretty early on. Apparently, the Wii version was hard to get (as all thinks Wii are), while PSIII versions were aplenty. I played about for about an hour and a half yesterday, and damn, it really is fun. It takes a little while to get used to it, but you can get sucked into the songs pretty easily.

Oh, and I really do look ridiculous holding a toy plastic guitar, but I really don’t care. My hope is that Kelly also likes the game, and we go and get a second guitar to play co-op career mode with.

For Kelly, I bought her 2 Wii games, Mario Party 8 and Resident Evil IV: Wii Edition. The ResEvil game is one of the highly rated games on the Wii, and has been called a modern classic, so I hope she really gets into it. We played Mario Party 8 and got pretty sucked into it. I know the reviews were kind of middling for the game, but those seemed to be from people who played the previous games, which we haven’t. It’s all new to us.

So that sums up our celebration of FSMas I think. Not sure what we could do for New Year’s Day, but we’ll see!

Once again, Islam (like all religions) has put a blight on our record as a human society. After a teacher, who let a students name a teddy bear Muhammed, was “only” sentenced to fifteen days in prison, Islamic godbags decided to stage a massive, violent, threatening “protest.” To highlight how stupid the whole incident is, one of the students who voted for the name Muhammed was naming the bear after himself, who was named…Muhammed. It’s just absolutely moronic. I’m sure some Christian godbags will be jumping up and down yelling “See, I told you so, they’re savages.”, as if Christianity has some pure history free of hate of stupidity. Anyone who’s read or even skimmed the bible know how much hatred and bigotry it’s filled with.

This week, while violating the establishment clause of the United States Constitution, Governor Sonny Perdue decided to make a public spectacle of himself, praying to “God” for rain. You see, Georgia is suffering from a bad drought, and apparently, if I’m to understand ol’ Sonny, “God” won’t help you unless you get on your knees and whimper for relief. Some “God”, eh?

All snarkiness aside, why would prayer work? Does God not care about you unless you pray? Is there minimum level of prayer needed to effect change? What if people in other states decide to pray for Georgia to not have rain? Whose prayer wins out? Do you get brownie points for praying even if God ignores you? Is God up there laughing at the prospect of people in Georgia running out of water?

Now of course, at some point, it will rain in Georgia. It’s the law of averages, but there will be those who claim God’s intervention was the reason. I tend to think, though, it will just be a case of things returning to the mean. After an extended period of time without rain, people get desperate and start praying, rain dancing or maybe even giving themselves over to Satan. However, at some point, the end of the dry period and the period of panic overlap, leading some people to see a causal relationship between prayer and rain. I hope the majority of Georgian’s see how stupid praying for rain is, and maybe think about actual solutions a state could do to prevent shortages of water in the future.

In tonight’s overhyped, but better than usual, debate, a lesbian couple asked the candidates if they support gay marriage. The only candidate who had the correct answer was Dennis Kucinich. Bill Richardson was close by saying he thought he could realistically achieve civil unions, but not gay marriage. Christopher Dodd and John Edwards flubbed by by saying they didn’t support gay marriage but support civil unions.

Also, a reverend asked why it was okay to use to use religion to deny people their civil rights. John Edwards blew the question with a mostly idiotic answer about his own personal problems with *gasp* the though of a same sex couple being treated any old married couple under the law. If he can’t get past such bigotry, I suggest he drop out of the race and go back to guilt tripping juries into giving him huge sums of cash.

As a party, the Democrats are pretty pathetic when it comes to the issue of gay marriage. Most of them claim to support gay rights, but only with a “separate but equal” policy. Why do they push this antiquated concept? Either they are too weak to stand up to “Big Religion” in this country, or they have been permanently tainted by religious bigotry.

The issue is simple: Marriage in a church, civil unions under the law. That’s it. That’s how it should be. We shouldn’t have two different kinds of state contracts depending on your sexual orientation. That’s blatantly bigoted. If you want to get “married” and have it blessed by Jesus, Ganesh, or some pagan tree god, go for it. Knock yourself out. Just leave everyone else alone.

To all you anti-gay marriage crusaders out there, stop pushing your conservative, outdated, Abrahamic beliefs in the family structure on every else. Oh, and to the rest of the Democratic party, stop raising my taxes.

I know lots of people take issue with the style of Christopher Hitchens. I don’t agree with him on every issue, and I think his style can sometimes take away the power of his arguments. However, there is one thing that Hitchens is dead on almost every time: religion. His book, The Missionary Position, which revealed to me more filth and evil about Mother Theresa than I ever imagined, is possibly his best work. When I had him, in obvious sarcasm, sign a picture of Mother Theresa for my wife, he gleefully called Mother Theresa a “fucking cunt”.

Here are some links to transcripts, where Hitchens obliterates Jerry Falwell. Must reads.

Hannity & Colmes Transcript

Anderson Cooper 360 (quarter way down the page)

Update: I made it clearer that Hitchens was calling Mother Theresa a cunt, and not my wife.

Well, while the chances of me voting for John McCain were already in the slim range, this latest story makes it zero chance:

McCain Wants ‘Dialogue With Dr. Dobson

“Sen. John McCain said Tuesday he hopes to patch things up with conservative Christian leader James Dobson, who recently said he wouldn’t support the Republican’s presidential bid under any circumstances…”

So, yeah, uh, fuck you John.

This morning, while looking at a stack of Dawkins and Gould books (a wonderful gift from my wife Kelly), I thought of the question I’ve been asked so many times: Why am I an atheist?. My pithy answer is usually “Because there is no God, duh!” which naturally makes people ask me “How do you know there is no God?”. I don’t have as pithy an answer for that, because really, there is reason for me to prove there is no God. It’s up to the religious to prove there is a God. We all know you don’t prove negatives.

However, that is never a satisfactory answer to anyone questioning my lack of faith. So after some thought I’ve concluded that the best response is simply this: Every god worshiped by human beings is a god of a religion borne out of ignorance of the natural world. With ignorance as the basis for religion, the whole “is there a god question” becomes a silly one. For if you are of a people unable to explain how thunder makes a sound, what gives you an infection, or where the Earth is in the Milky way, I see no reason to accept your “answer” of how the universe was created. You’re just not qualified.

Not even sure what to day about this one:

http://www.slate.com/id/2155745/

There may be no psychic who pisses me off more than Sylvia Browne. Her smoker’s voice, her pompous attitude, and the shameless way she takes advantage of people’s pain all just make me angry. I can’t look at her with cursing. I hate her.

I haven’t had the chance to see her in person, and it would be hard not to shout expletives over her awful, awful cold reading. Rebecca over at skepchick.org has recently been blogging about it and I think she does a good job of describing Sylvia’s scam.

http://skepchick.org/blog/?p=206
http://skepchick.org/blog/?p=263

The second post illustrates just how scummy Sylvia is and how just plain terrible she is at readings. The worst I’ve ever seen her do, I already blogged about here:

http://www.shanebrady.com/2006/08/28/sylvia-browne-sucks/

Disgusting.