Unless you’re in middle school, which I could foresee of some of the readers of this site are, you can recall that subtle territory wherein the “everybody’s equal” mentality of kindergarten started to dissolve in favor of, ”Wait now. That more popular kid is getting far more attention from the suddenly appealing females,” or, “Hold up now. That nerdy weakling is doing far better than I am with his grades,”  or, “That… that kid dressed in black that’s both unpopular and of medium intelligence – that kid with openly neglectful parents that seems to be getting really, really into satanism and buying a small army’s worth of assault rifles – seems to have an awful lot of maps of the school.”

At this point of your life you began to pick up on a sense of individuality, even if you chose to give up your burgeoning sense of independent thought in favor of more traditional or ‘normal’ ideas. You started developing your political ideals. Your sense of humor also blossomed. Humor that, if you’ve ever endured a conversation with me that was longer than 10 minutes, has become far more abstract than it was a few decades ago.

I wanted to cry when Bon Iver became mainstream, but crying is so mainstream.

Shit, I was in Williamsburg Brooklyn for the first time in my life last night, and if what I saw there wasn’t a dress code and lifestyle based on a maladapted sense of self-deprecating humor, then I have no idea what was going on. By some certain measure: ironic humor is clearly alive, if not unwell and malnourished there.

I’m digressing because I need to mention that I loathe hipsters, but it’s not completely off topic. This particular episode of Southpark really highlighted the desperate need to be recognized that seems to be present in the your average meme-er. [that's 'meme-ist,' fuckhead -ed.]

They’re funny, I know; and I love running gags and stuff, but has anyone else picked up on the downgrade from the Warhol 15 minutes to a 30 second prolonged fart clip or single shot of your buddy imitating an inanimate object? Do you know where memes come from? Well, Wikipedia sure does. And it’s easily the laziest way to get an answer across. It’s the desperate hope that something you’ve done will live on, and in this case it’s just in the form of a jpeg.

Yes, because when I invented Memetics, what I really wanted was for idiots to use it to graph My Little Ponies on D&D alignment charts.

Is it some small, morbid, concern that I have that the advent of memes, in the social media sense, is also the iconic sign that we’re finally hitting a point where an ever larger number of people are again realizing they’ll never be more than silly cogs in a malfunctioning machine? It’s like Billy Corrigan saw this shit coming in ’99, and dressed in an attention-gettingly-appropriate way for the video:

Let’s have a nice quick round of applause for musicians with unignorable substance abuse problems, and then I’ll get back to my point.

I’m constantly hearing people over 50 that I know comment that the world is in its all-time worst condition ever. It isn’t that I have a distrust of the opinions of most baby-boomers (though I might), it’s that there’s a very large percent of our population, born between ’46 and ’64 that doesn’t have a grasp on proportion. I’d far sooner say that bad news sells, and since every news corporation is in danger of closing down, they have to announce as much bad news as possible to stay afloat.

By proxy, with more news and information sources available on a daily basis, the people still under 25 have always grown up knowing a constant flow of information, much of which has been deflating their concept of individuality or importance. And thank GOD, because we just didn’t need another generation of boomers. There. I said it. I think we’re also finally hitting the turning point on Social Darwinism in the means of establishing the hierarchy in classroom vis a vis lateral evolution. I can go on a bullying in popular culture tirade another time.

What kind of faggot doesn't know basic C++? Gunk gunk.

What I’m seeing in all of this is a post-goth indifference to the world as expressed through a poorly understood grasp of humor and irony; it is exemplified in everything hipster, but iconified in the pan-sub-culture knack for memes to appeal to everyone. I’m not a cat person, but I’ll troll through cat memes for hours, just because the affectionate jokes appeal to my distaste of the creatures.

Me? I write articulate, verbose social commentary with complex puns, and I feel like I’ve left my mark on the universe. But I’m smarter than you are, so I don’t have to make a video of taking turns dry humping a sofa with my friends, or riding something precarious over, on top, or near something more precarious, and then post the video after something somehow goes wrong.

Is this a good thing? If you’ve ever seen the Darwin Awards, and then watched a video with someone overtly stupid, acting… stupidly, you’ll agree we’re at least thinning the herd. Do I need to experience another wave of the black background 6 framed ‘this is what ___ thinks ___ does’? No. No, I do not. However, if this helps keep nitwits in line and taper back the sense of entitlement and self importance that MTV has been so content to cater to since the first season of ‘Real World’ then I’m totally OK with it.

 

By Ms Lori

Hey there. My name is Lori, and I am here to take you to school. Yes, darling, I know you don’t want to go to school. There is just such a glut of elitist intellectual smarty-pants propaganda floating around this country, that we could all use a little less school and a little more common Bible sense. And not only that, book-learnin’ is so hard. So I thought that, as your teacher, maybe I could pop a few blouse buttons, put my finger in my mouth, and make you hard for education.

Recent History 101

(If you know the story, you may skip this section, but I will be talking about my vagina, and it will be on the test. My vag, I mean. I dip it in red ink and leave a nice little lip hug for all my A students.)*

I’d like to introduce you to Jessica Ahlquist. A lot of you may know her from the death threats you sent her and her family. Some of you may even remember promising to rape her, mostly from the safe, cowardly anonymity of the internet. Some of you have done it in person, in public, and for that I applaud you. For those of you who don’t know Jessica, she is female, like I totally am, and she is a sixteen year old high school student from Rhode Island. And she is an atheist, so her opinion doesn’t count.

Still, Jessica is the newest champion of constitutional civil rights in the US, and many regard her as a hero. Just the excitement of her young age and her superior reasoning skills make my nips all hard. Go ahead, feel your screen. Can you feel that? I’m working on two semi-symmetrical avocado pits here.

There are some that suggest this is not a specifically Christian prayer.

Nine months ago:  As a non-believer in all fairy tales, no matter their tenacity or popularity, Jessica was particularly perturbed by a banner hanging in her public high school’s auditorium or gymnasium or whatever. The banner was very clearly a Christian prayer, albeit one with a surprisingly well-thought-out list for Santa Jesus. As a person, she felt excluded, and a little frightened. The institution responsible for her mental and social development during some very formative years not only espoused ideals a five year old child could see was bullshit, but also considered her a second class citizen. This is all not to mention that her peers are not exactly of an age where being different got you a good seat at the lunch table. When I brought my first menstrual painting in for fifth grade show and tell, I shouldn’t have been surprised when the kids took me out back at recess and pelted me with used tampons, right?

But as a citizen, Jessica knew that laws we being broken, laws in place specifically to protect people like her, and took it upon herself to see them fixed. She politely asked her school to take the offending tapestry down, in accordance with local and federal law. When they declined and told her to shut up, she sued their fat, pious asses.

The case caused a bit of a row in her Rhode Island community, one that FOX News couldn’t help but assist in rippling across the country. Dissenting opinion came in the form of angry letters, threats from fellow students and their parents, and a strongly worded letter from God on a tortilla. Still everyone basically believed she was a kind of upstart heathen on her period, and she would never win her case.

Last week:  Boy were their faces red when the judge unequivocally ruled in favor of Jessica Ahlquist, and ordered the school to burn the prayer banner as part of a wholesome Satanic ritual. By red, I mean the kind of red an old-school shit-faced Irishman’s face gets when you tell him you anally raped his sister, and she loved it. The kind of red my pussy gets when I do 7 tabs of ecstasy and am left to my own devices for a whole day. They were pissed, and rubbed the wrong way is what I mean.

Primate Behavior 201

There hasn’t been so much feces thrown since I went to the monkey habitat at the zoo and took their gestures as a personal challenge. I mean, this shit got bad. They weren’t angry at the judge for handing down the objectively, unarguably correct ruling, nor the lawyers who clearly let him know he’d be the laughing stock of the judicial gym locker room if he came back with any other verdict. They were mad at the little girl that outsmarted them.

Locally, Jessica and her family do not feel safe going to the supermarket. She’s been called evil, told she’s going to hell, that she’d be injured, raped, even killed. By followers of Christ. Her peers, marinated as they have been in their folks’ backward ass, witch-hunty philosophy as if it were their own, jeered, mocked, and threatened her, holding the same torches and pitchforks the adults carried. It got to the point this week where Jessica had to make a public plea that all the haters’ beef was with her, and could they please leave her sister alone. I don’t even have a joke for that. That’s fucking disgusting.

In the anonymous halls of the internet, people hiding behind avatars and screen names behaved with their expected grace and tact. Here’s a sampling:

“Let’s all jump that girl who did the banner #fuckthatho”
“I want to punch the girl in the face that made west take down the school prayer… #Honestly”

“hail Mary full of grace @jessicaahlquist is gonna get punched in the face”
“Fuck Jessica alquist I’ll drop anchor on her face”
“lol I wanna stick that bitch lol”
“We can make so many jokes about this dumb bitch, but who cares #thatbitchisgointohell and Satan is gonna rape her.”
“Brb ima go drown that atheist in holy water”
“”But for real somebody should jump this girl” lmao let’s do it!”
“shes not human shes garbage”
“wen the atheist dies, they believe they will become a tree, so we shld chop her down, turn her into paper then PRINT THE BIBLE ON HER.”
“May that little, evil athiest teenage girl and that judge BURN IN HELL!”
“definetly laying it down on this athiest tommorow anyone else?”
“yeah, well i want the immediate removal of all atheists from the school, how about that?”
“If this banner comes down, hell i hope the school burns down with it!”
“U little brainless idiot, hope u will be punished, you have not win sh..t! Stupid little brainless skunk!”
“Nothing bad better happen tomorrow #justsaying #fridaythe13th”
“How does it feel to be the most hated person in RI right now? Your a puke and a disgrace to the human race.”
“I hope there’s lots of banners in hell when your rotting in there you atheist fuck #TeamJesus”
“literally that bitch is insane. and the best part is she already transferred schools because shes knows someone will jump her #ahaha”
“gods going to fuck your ass with that banner you scumbag”
“I found it, what a little bitch lol I wanna snuff her”
“if I wasn’t 18 and wouldn’t go to jail I’d beat the shit out of her idk how she got away with not getting beat up yet”
“nail her to a cross”
“When I take over the world I’m going to do a holocaust to all the atheists” (Alternet)

Oh, hi. I´m Jessica. I´M SIXTEEN!

Mother fucker! I cannot say this enough, this girl is sixteen. The fact that these people have the intellect of a two year old doesn’t excuse them from basic decency and, I don’t know, not gloating about the Satan raping she’s got coming to her.  I mean, I wouldn’t mind, because that sounds like fun to me. Muscles all red and ripply, cock veins purple and hot as thousand suns, probably Hitler and Mother Teresa there to watch. But of course these people think it would be a bad thing, so screw them.

The public forum hasn’t been overly sexy for Jessica either. Outside of various circus clown pundits, her state senator suggested she was the puppet of the ACLU and that she shouldn´t be using money with “In God We Trust On It.” But Beth Moura is just an idiot. Her own representative Peter Palumbo called her an “evil little thing” on the radio. SHE’S SIXTEEN.** Forgetting the fact that this guy took an oath to uphold the Constitution and knows damned well Jessica is entirely, 100% in the right, he’s a grown man! I get it. I do. Men sometimes need to feel big and important, and statutory importance is easy pickins. He’s a big man, now that he’s broadcast to the world that a sixteen year old girl is evil. He really pulled them pigtails and took the little girl down a peg. She was pretty much asking for it, being all vulnerable and underage like she is. And that shirt! What did we expect, really? One time, when I was a kid, I suggested to my uncle he may have had a couple too many Fosters, and he proceeded to hold me down and make me taste what too many recycled Fosters tasted like in one swallow. I had it coming.

Most recently, a scheduled school board meeting or whatever was held, and while school lunches and parent prom committee are probably pretty pressing this time of year, guess what was discussed, for the entire meeting.  Yop. The immediate repeal of the court decision.  But guess who had the immense, Jolly Green balls to show up and speak.

Fuckin’ A, Jessica Ahlquist! She and a classmate took the mic and calmly, rationally explained to the standing room only crowd of adult animals parents why they were fucktards, and frankly, sore losers. How did the community react? Why, the booed and heckled the shit out of her of course. One more time, all together now, SHE IS SIXTEEN! These are adults who, it has to be said, are responsible for raising their own children (scary, no?), and they were outclassed by a couple of kids with an appropriate reading level. While Jessica cites legal precedent and logic, these grown assed proto-humans carried on like so much poked baboon.  So far all that has been proven is that omniscient, all powerful God needs rural New England bumpkins to stand up for him. (Serious props go to the superintendent for taking the mic and telling them they were acting like children)

Recess

This is really long, and I’m sure reading so much is hurting your tiny brain, so here is a picture of me with less clothes on.

Philosophy 104

A lot of the aforementioned hullaballoo was a result of the mistaken impression so many of us have adopted that in America, majority rules. The majority of the people living in the town or county or whatever are Christian, so they should be allowed to decide if an exclusionary prayer should hang in the auditorium. When I hear this bit of fuck-nuttery, I feel like I just heard a five year old tell a dead baby joke. “Where do you pick this shit up?” you want to yell at their faces, whilst shaking them with a will. “It’s not like we teach you this in school!” In fact, for more than 250 years, we have run the United States of America on the exact opposite precept of “majority rules.” Do you so misunderstand the country you love so much that you’ll kill a queer to keep him from marrying and ruining it, that you don’t even know how Democracy works?

This is why the conservative establishment rails so very hard against schooling of any kind. “Universities are evil!” they shout. “Go ahead and home school your kid so they don’t learn anything that contradicts the Bible, including social skills and monkey humpin’.” It is in their best interests to keep 95% of Americans in a real live medieval serfdom, so you don’t learn how to fucking read your own country’s founding documents. Whenever an American slave was found to have learned how to read and write, they hung his ass. Even we women were not allowed to read at certain times, because men knew it wouldn’t be long before we developed Xerox capabilities and started emailing copies of our vagoos around the office.

Constitution one-oh-fucking-one

If majority did indeed rule, slavery would never have been universally abolished. States would still be allowed to call people property, and do not be so naive to think some would not opt in. The decedents of those slaves would have their own toilets and schools and counters at the malt shops that deign to even let them through the door. When my cunt starts to smell of fish, as all cunts do from time to time, I would not be allowed to get that fixed medically. Elvis Presley records would come with labels warning parents that the content could cause cancer in children under 17. We have fail-safes in place so that the majority of people can’t straight up vote to have all second born Phillipino boys’ nutsacks sealed in tuna cans if the religious establishment suddenly decided to make you believe that is what Jesus wants.

And if you had your dumb fuck wish, and majority did in fact rule, can you at least have some bleeding forethought about it? Today you clamor that, because most of you are Christians, you can shove it in anyone else’s face that lives there. Every day. So that every day, some atheist 16 year old girl has to come to grips with the fact that a public institution she has no choice but to attend thinks of her as a second class citizen. What happens when a shit-ton of Muslims show up because, I don’t know, there’s a huge demand for falafel. Suddenly the Muslims outnumber the Christians, and the prayer banner in the auditorium praises Allah. Are you going to sit back and say, “Well shit, there’s more of them than us”? Or are you going to have kittens and yell NINE ELEVEN until the Muslims are drug out into the streets and shot just to shut your shrill ass up?

Phys-Ed

It’s a matter of rationality fellas, and I know you’re allergic to that word, but it wasn’t prayer that built the Chrysler building. It took deductive reasoning skills, and math and science, and yes, a fucking liberal arts degree in engineering. This prayer hubbub is the exact same sans-reasoning as this recent bit of cock-knockery in which extremist group Focus on the Family took the opportunity, during Tim Tebow’s last game as Jesus’ butt boy, to air an incredibly expensive advertisement that showed a bunch of good white Christian kids talking about John 3:16.

Now, putting aside the fact that no one called CPS on their asses, a commercial during that game reached 34.2 million Americans in their living rooms (a playoff record). The NFL is a family event nowadays, as evidenced by the shitty half-time shows we’ve had to endure these past decades (you think your average male NFL fan gives a crispy Christ about Britney Spears?). But when recently a few atheist billboards showed up over the highways of relatively rural butt-fuck Ohio (for example), which could only have conceivably reached 350,000 adult, licensed, supposedly reasonable Ohioans, being generous, the whole blessed country took a collective pants-dook over the in-your-face indoctrination, and they were removed.

It’s only fair that, if you should have to change for gym class, I should too.

If those kids were quoting the Qur’an as an aside to Tom Brady’s triumphant reckoning, Christians across the nation would be hootin’ and a hollerin’ about those poor kids having to parrot some silly sandy-ass superstition. If my religion said I had to jam out with my clam out at state fairs every summer, they’d call it a cult, and worse, feminism, and they’d shoot it down in a second. Literally the only conclusion that can be reached is that you believe Christians reckon higher amongst the American caste, and in every conceivable sense, that is the antithesis of American. It isn’t democratic, it isn{t legal, it isn’t fair, and it damned sure isn’t right. “Freedom of religion” does not mean that you’re welcome to choose something other than what the majority of Americans are if you’re willing to have your rights stripped away.

In other words, it is unconstifuckingtutional.

*”Lip hug” being a term coined by the lovely Danielle Hurley as a female alternative to the tea bag, so if you tell her I stole it, I will kill you in your sleep.

** Here is his phone number and email address. Let him know what a piece of shit he is.rep-palumbo@rilin.state.ri.us    (401) 785-2882

Jessica Ahlquist is indeed a hero, with speaking engagements across the bible belt and beyond, and at this year’s planned Reason Rally, pretty much opening for Tim Minchin. Hott. Concerned citizens have started a scholarship fund to help her through college, and I hope you’ll consider supporting her.

I call this picture, "Nice Shirt"

I first encountered your work when a Catholic friend of mine pointed me toward an article in which you speak briefly about Christopher Hitchens, a great hero of mine who recently passed away. It was condescending as all get out, but it was chock full of underhanded compliments, and seemed to be relatively thoughtful. It is, of course, gratifying to see a great American champion of humanist ideals remembered fondly by members of the non-secular class, so I decided I might read some more of your work.

The first article I read was entitled “Six Myths About Atheism,” and I have to say, the title excited me, because I assumed you were a man of thought, and perhaps you’d be spending your time dispelling some of the myths that are propagated amongst the religious about non-believers. The article turned out to be the epitome of those very lies: a carelessly thought out bigoted bit of blatant propaganda, a brainwashing tool to keep the hate for atheists alive among the religious.

My first thought was of completely ignoring it. After all, ignorance abounds in your community, trying to change one mind in the sea of under-used brains you call a church leaves one feeling impotent and frustrated. As my beautiful wife put it, quoting someone else: “Never argue with an idiot. They´ll drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience.”

On the other hand, several of my friends and readers across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. expressed concern that I said that all of your points were entirely wrong, your research was ass-on-fire, and your intentions were entirely malicious, so I decided that I might address your points and show you why you’re an untalented, proselytizing asshole.  After all, even you said in your article that it is easy to be a quiet atheist. Allow me to loudly defend my position, retain my atheism, and serve your ass on a platter to my ravenous readers. (Seriously, friends, go read Tom Hoopes’ article first. I don’t want you to miss out on anything.)

Myth 1: Atheists are not more logical than believers, they’re just super scared of God so they hide from him.

I waited until the end of my writing to address this one, because while the other points you made are flat out wrong, this is downright insulting, and I needed my blood to cool to sound reasonable. Next to you, a syphilitic hyena would sound reasonable, but I do pride myself on sprinkling a small amount of wisdom over my usual string of fart jokes.

The "Nice Guy Lucifer" meme is super entertaining, helps my point along, and saves me from having to do more work after writing this long ass article.

Anyway, how exactly did you come to the conclusion that atheists are a’scared of God, so that’s why they say they don’t believe? Did you survey a hundred random atheists, and they admitted as much? Was there a study done in which minds were read? Forget for a second that this is the biggest load of crap I have read since I had to take a Jane Austin class in college. This argument is unmitigated hurtfulness. Survey says: you’re an insulting waste of air, your mere presence on the same planet as me disgusts me so much I want to puke blood. How’s that feel?

This is blatant, textbook propaganda. It’s like you read Mein Kampf to get tips on writing an essay about Jesus. Not a bad idea, He’s mentioned enough in that book.

Are you unaware of the wealth of “logical” writings available concerning why we don’t believe there is a god? Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris? Have you visited Youtube, Reddit’s r/atheism, Wikipedia? You can say what you like about our lack of faith, but don’t you dare suggest we did not logic this out. Based on available evidence, philosophy, science, and arguments, the vast majority of us have decided that there is no reason to assume a higher power.

You can’t (and don’t, stop lying) truly believe that people who consider themselves logical, reasonable thinkers would risk everlasting torture, not to mention our spiritual health on Earth, just because we were afraid. Even though, by all accounts, there shouldn’t be anything to be afraid of. Follow a few simple rules, don’t have buttsecks, try not to kill anyone unless it is in God’s name, accept Christ as your lord and savior, show up at Church, and BAM! Heaven. God’s not capricious; he is all knowing, all forgiving, all singing, all dancing. Trust me, we wouldn’t risk our everlasting souls just to hide from what amounts to some pretty simple spiritual chores.

You can take my word for it. I’m one of them. I go to the baby eating seminars every week. Imagine I never went to Church but felt comfortable in saying, “All Catholics take dumps in their children’s mouths. It’s part of their whole deal, really the reason to even be Catholic at all.” That’s you. That’s how you sound. Seriously, pick up one of our myriad books, and if it doesn’t burn your fingertips off, give a couple chapters a read. Whether or not it is true, there’s scores and scores of plain, old fashioned, Greek symposium style logic to be found.

As to whether atheists are more logical than believers? My first answer would be a resounding, “Hell yes.” However, I know plenty of incredibly smart believers (you should all follow Jim Rigby on The Facebook), and generalizing is more of a religious game. So I can’t really speak to that. But what I do know is that most atheists are more logical than you, sir.

What I can speak to is that, if I wanted to be a dick, I could mention that many believe that it is fear that makes people religious, despite their misgivings about the logistics of it. Fear of being wrong, fear of  everlasting torture and pain, fear of being stricken with malady or bad weather, what have you… That’s the great lie of religion, after all. Man made myths, monsters, and superstitions to keep the rabble in fear with supplicant hearts and open wallets while the religiously powerful reap the rewards. It’s been the same story since Judaeo-Christian monotheism came on the scene. If a medieval pope scares the shit out of some village and tell them their dead children will go to hell, they might just build him a new cathedral. If an evangelical preacher can trick a bunch of saps into believing the he has the power to exorcise demons, guess who’s getting a new Cadillac! Religion was invented for the sole purpose of making class warfare easy for the already powerful. It’s why the Republican party and Christianity go hand-in-hand. Keep the rabble in fear of the power of an almighty punisher, and they’ll strip the rights from women, gays, and darkies, and support bullshit wars against other theocracies that don’t believe in the same invisible friends, but do manage to have the same idiot laws and aggressive tendencies. This is all not to mention the plain fear of being wrong, so believing just n case. But I won’t mention that. I won’t call you a ‘fraidy cat and a supplicant pussy, because the first (and only) commandment of atheism is “don’t be a dick.” Try it some time.

By the way, I love how you casually threw in there that beauty, truth, and goodness are proxies of Christ. Man, how did anyone ever appreciate the world before 33 AD, huh?

Myth 2: The burden of proof is on atheists, and the house in the woods.

If I came up to you in a bar and said, “I can suck my own cock,” you’d be well within your rights to retort, “Bullshit, nobody can do that, prove it.” (Some lucky few can, but stick with me…) Would it be enough for you if I said, “Nope, you just have to believe me”? It would not even be enough to hear corroborating reports from some of the bar patrons who had seen my autofallatic powers at work, because a smart man would assume he is the brunt of a joke or a confidence scam.

That’s why anecdotal evidence isn’t worth the crap it’s made of. For instance, if someone said, “Steven prayed, and the disgusting boil on his nose went away.” Whether or not Steven cleared the Walmart out of Oxy pads is beside the point. You saw this, did you? Did the hand of Yahweh descend from the clouds with a cotton ball of divine isopropyl?  Did you monitor Steven’s boil 24 hours a day? In person or on CCTV? And anyway, why should I believe you?

And I swear to your god, if I hear the cabin in the woods argument one more time, I am going to go on a baby murdering spree that will make all the goddamned angels cry. All of them. I will go on a national tour of forcibly performed abortions, just me and some groupies and my rusty hanger, just to spite you. This is a bit of stupidity that cannot go unanswered, especially considering the tenaciousness of it. First of all, why are we making the assumption that complexity cannot be natural? There’s nothing to suggest it cannot be. In fact, much of the tampering of human “creators” has the sole purpose of simplifying things.

And yes, the cabin in the woods was built by people, dipshit. You’ll notice in your cabin, though, that perhaps a picture is slightly askew, or that a door needs a little WD-40 attention. That is the world we live in.

For all the universe’s complexities, perfection is not part of the scheme. Forget the universe, how about your own body? Your eyes have more redundancies than your feeble mind has learned to count. You have a tail bone left over from your not-so-distant ancestors. Do you even know where the appendix got its name? The god you believe in is supposed to be singular, omniscient, and omnipotent. If there is a creator, he was a cut-rate stoner with no sense of professionalism, or at any rate this was his first try or something. Forget for the moment that we KNOW where people came from, and I will concede that there may indeed be a creator. The universe we know could be a Petri dish in the lab of some more advanced being, or perhaps our DNA was spread to this planet by aliens, a la Star Trek. Still, is that any reason to assume divinity?

THIS is where burden of proof comes in. You’re welcome to believe there is a creator; I don’t, but you could make the argument. But if you’re going to start calling that creator(s) a god, a perfect ruler who has rules for us to live by and needs constant pandering to assuage the very human ego you’ve assigned him (a perfect being would not have such traits, by the way), and can read my thoughts and punish me for them, then you are going to have to come up with some evidence. Because all the evidence I see around me suggests the “cabin in the woods” we all share consists of pretty shoddy workmanship.

Not to belabor the point, but builders usually put their name or their seal on the cornerstone of their buildings. You could find that stone, and look up the guy in the phone book. That’s the kind of evidence we’re looking for here, the kind of proof it is absolutely your burden to shoulder. You say to me, “My invisible friend is real and he’s got super magic powers and can punish you for eternity for not being sorry you got laid in high school,” isn’t it incredibly silly to ask me to prove he isn’t or that he hasn’t or that he won’t?

(PS you didn’t come up with the already ridiculous Cabin in the Woods argument, so stop trying to take credit for it)

Myth 3: Atheists  believe science makes God obsolete, and the tuna casserole.

It is actually a myth that atheists even think that science makes God obsolete. Science doesn’t make the belief in a creator wrong per se, though it does offer the absolute necessity of faith a nice challenge. No, science makes religion absolutely obsolete, and has been doing so since the beginning of recorded history. How many times has your own Catholic church been forced, kicking and screaming like a petulant child, to change its purportedly flawless dogma based on new scientific evidence? Well, not new. By the time a religious institution gets around to changing their views, the rest of civilization considers it old hat.

Be that as it may, the very method of science makes a justified mockery of the institution of religion. Science is humble enough and intelligent enough to recognize that it does not yet, and may not ever, have all of the answers. It adjusts its views based on observable evidence. What it does not do is insert a convenient placeholder for the answers it does not have, and call it magic. There was a time that we thought thunder and lightning was the wrath of a god (some poor brainwashed people still do). Now we know differently, and similar shit has happened every day to refute one or another of the strictly static worldview your religion demands we all believe. There is no reason at all to suspect that will not continue to happen

Also, tuna noodle casserole? Put aside for the moment the fact that you just made your “cabin in the woods” argument again, tuna noodle casserole? Jesus, man. Were you just super hungry for the bland Christian food your poor wife has to serve you? Yes, the tuna casserole was created by a person, because there are clearly no such things as naturally occurring tuna casserole trees. However, the cooked fucking tuna doesn’t know that, but if it was curious, it could look outside and see the fucking cook. Evidence! Just because it is impossible for us right now to disprove a creator, however unlikely, does not make it “stupid” or “irrational” to demand a little evidence before we drop to our knees and live half a life on the off chance there is a “cook.” A cook who not only made our casserole, but gives a shit if the tunas fuck each other in the butt.

Myth 4: Atheists believe science alone is a reliable and sufficient guide for us, when in fact science is so dangerous we should probably do away with using it as a barometer altogether.

Nobody ever said science was infallible, or that it was a guide for us at all. You pulled that directly out of your clenched puckered calamari. Again, science and those who practice it recognize its fallibility. Sometimes a hypothesis (not a theory, they are very different) is disproven, and it is back to the drawing board. It will never, ever have every answer perfectly, it is a burden science can’t meet, and it doesn’t have to. That is science’s greatest virtue. It doesn’t make absolute claims until it is absolutely certain they are true, and they are provable 100% of the time in a test setting.  For some reason, however, religious institutions believe they are above this. They make claims that are often proven false or are entirely ludicrous, and stick by them no matter what. Which, then, is more intellectually honest?

Benedict said that some questions “cannot be answered within science itself.” This is false, science eventually gets around to providing sufficient explanations for everything. In his time, it may have seemed crazy to imagine that science would answer every question. In our time, it is crazy not to.

“What we need is a truth outside of science that can keep it in perspective,” you said. Tough titties, you don’t have one. Not yet. Inventing one won’t give you any truths outside of the ones you already thought you wanted. Also, isn’t “need” an incredibly strong term? Do we truly need any truths outside of the ones we are offered by our own intellects? On the surface, your statement seems reasonable, but really think about it and get back to me. For my money, I can stand to wait until those truths come to me.

If by “guide” you’re insinuating that religion offers some kind of efficient and correct moral code, well, that will have to be an entirely different article. But trust me, I will blow your mind with how entirely wrong you are.

Myth 5: Religion and science are not incompatible.

You’ve made this point twice in different words now, and I have answered you sufficiently, I believe. However, I would like to briefly touch on your point about Galileo. For all I know, you pulled a fast one and actually did your homework on this. Fine. But then the truth becomes that a vocal opponent of your church was imprisoned in his own house and made to fear for his life every day, simply because he thought your pope was an asshole. That’s not even a big stretch; most of your popes have been complete shithead criminals, including the current one. Galileo and thousands like him have been punished, physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, mortally, simply for denouncing the power of the Church and the truly ludicrous fairy tales and threats of hell that gave them that power in the first place.

Which leads us to your next point…

Myth 6: Religion has not led to violent intolerance, but atheism has, somehow.

This is one area in which your intellectual dishonesty shines through like a spotlight through cheese cloth.  Let’s start with your “research.” Holy Christ on a Honda, it’s no wonder you sound like an absolute dolt if you think linking to a book that doesn’t even concern the subject matter on fucking Amazon counts as research. I have no doubt you read that book, there are probably many pictures, but if you’ll notice in the big words on the front we literates call a title, it concerns Communism. Not atheism.

You’ll argue that Communism is atheism, and I will respond that I thought Communism was a system of government, not a religion. Communism does not necessarily denote atheism, though you’d be correct in assuming that it doesn’t hurt. I mean, the very concept flies in the face of dictators, real, imagined, or godly. That’s what God is, after all. As Hitchens put it, “a celestial North Korea.” He can convict you of thought crimes, send you to hell for eternity, has strict rules for you to live by, etc. etc. etc. in perpetuity. Come to think of it, Christianity isn’t exactly compatible with Democracy either, but that’s another rant altogether.

That was a bit of an aside. The point here is that the atrocities you mentioned, that were committed by Communist dictators, were not performed in the name of atheism. These were men, megalomaniacal psychopaths that created cults around themselves. This is a tough concept to grasp, so put the bubbles down and pay attention. These dictators made deities of themselves, and their subjects were their worshippers. And worship they did: with parades, marches, symbols, salutes, uniforms, new and strange customs. Sound familiar? If anything, these dictatorships were strident lessons on the dangers religion can embody. Left unchecked, as these were, and yours still is a little bit (we’re fixing that), cults of personality can lead to torture, imprisonment, and death for countless millions.

In any case, no one ever said, “I am sacking your city, putting your children to the sword, and raping your women in the name of non-belief.” There were other reasons for these tragedies, and the fact of their atheism has nothing to do with them being murderous pricks. Remember, there are good people and bad people, but it takes religion to make a good man do bad things.

In contrast, the innumerable atrocities committed by your Church alone were done in the name of your god. They were committed to appease Him, to forcibly draft innocent people into his service, to take revenge on those who took issue with you, or simply just to be dickish and have a decent excuse.

And did you just say the Inquisition wasn’t all that bad? Forgive me, but I want whatever it is you’re injecting directly into your eyeball. Wasn’t that bad? Compared to what? You have to be out of your fucking mind to be an apologist for the unspeakable horror your people inflicted on Europe at that time. Even if the death toll was lower than originally reported. Even if the genital torture was only slightly worse than a fetishist’s wet dream. Even if only one innocent woman was killed in the witch hunts, how do you live with yourself even attempting to justify it?

This is how history repeats itself – - nay, IS repeating itself as we speak, in America. All it takes is people like you justifying it, saying it wasn’t that bad. Fuck, let’s torture some Muslims because some of us still have bad dreams about 9/11. Let’s hang atheists by their testicles until they agree God is their rightful liege lord. It won’t be so bad. Only most of them will die, and the rest will at least pretend to be saved. Jesus fucking Christ, you sick bastard.

This is all not to mention the shit you’re forgetting. To name a few: the crusades, in which an estimated 900,000 – 3 million people perished (and in which even your people admit they were entirely in the wrong); the thousands dying of AIDS as you read this in Africa because your Pope has convinced them that God thinks condoms are bad, and ludicrously believes they would make the problem worse; the genocide of the indigents in Canada (check that one out, man, that is some brutal shit); the systematic, institutionalized, continued, condoned rape of children in churches across the globe (that doesn’t even require citation); the people dying needlessly every day in Mother Teresa’s death camps she called hospitals; the beating, imprisonment, and killing of people simply because they were born gay (that isn’t an opinion, it is science*); the countless starving poor who might have been fed, sheltered, and clothed had the Church not hoarded charity, alms, indulgences (they’re back!), and downright lootings for pointless shit like cathedrals and the nice golden throne your Pope rests his holy ass on.

I could go on about every single other organized religion, but you get the point. Since you decided to single us out as horrible people, I figured tagging you back was enough. How can you possibly believe “religion has led to violent intolerance” is a myth? You included that in a list of myths! Whatever planet you live on, where the first result of religion isn’t violent intolerance, I want to live there. I might even come by and sing a few songs with you. You ignorant bastard.

Catholics should be aware of the threats to faith posed by the resurgence of atheism, but we don’t need to be afraid of them. The Church has faced far fiercer and cleverer opponents for more than 2,000 years, and we’re still here to tell the tale. How are we able to come out ahead so consistently? That’s easy. It’s because there really is a God.

“Come out ahead”? I’m sorry, is this a game for you? Are we playing a game of spiritual hot potato? I thought we were looking for objective truth here, not trying to win a contest deciding who gets burned in hell forever.  And not for nothing, you aren’t coming out ahead, by a long shot, and you know it. That’s why you wrote this hateful piece of propaganda in the first place. Because you know, especially in the Catholic arena, church attendance is faltering, people are pissed off at the institution, you have to steal to stay in business, some are even becoming atheists because being touched in their naughty bits by a priest led them to investigate your Mickey Mouse organization more thoroughly. You need to fill as many people as you can with outright lies just to keep your numbers, and that is pretty friggin’ sad. As you said, the number of atheists is growing, and we will see who’s “fierce” and “cleverer” when we show the dismantling of the Vatican and the distribution of your hoarded wealth on basic fucking cable.

My dear minions, and readers who have stopped by and stuck around for the duration: If there is no other proof of how harmful and disastrous religion can be, then consider this: Tom Hoopes is a professor of journalism at a college. A college where people pay money to learn things and get degrees. He molds young minds, teaches them a craft, and all the while he isn’t qualified to cover a children’s birthday party. His research is shoddy, when he even bothers, and he is dishonest about his meager findings. His logic is not just suspect, it is entirely non-existent. To think he is worthy of even mentioning Hitchens in one of his journalistic abortions, let alone have the balls to mock him, is an outrage to one of our most important professions. How could he possibly have gotten this teaching job, and become a “writer in residence,” if not for the fact that he is adept at spouting the same spurious crap as his bosses? I’d like to be a writer in residence! I’m immenselt more qualified than this goon.

And who gets hurt? The kids that thought they were getting an education, not a crash course in how to make a mockery of their chosen profession. The parents that were lied to and told you can get a better education at a private Catholic institution, and so shelled out the extra dough, because God is perfect, but He. Needs. Your. Money. The honest people who are duped by the newly educated journalists when they get their first jobs at Fox News or some other Murdoch human embarrassment, because those are the only places that will hire a scion of Tom Hoopes. It’s abuse, and when you read a book or two and learn it is all lies, you too can be free of the psychological torture that theists like Hoopes see fit to inflict on us all.

*In the interest of fairness, I have linked here to several quotes with outgoing links from different sects of society. I will let you decide whether  the APA and PhDs carry more weight on the subject than the Mormons who reject science because it goes against their “plan of salvation.”

More “Good Guy Lucifer” here.

The only difference between subject A and subject B is shitty parenting. Somebody get this kid a rat.

A few months back, Scumbag Style brought to your attention a serious parenting fail involving an Indian family and their miracle spider child that could have grown up to be New Delhi’s most badass masked avenger. Barring that, she could have remained the living Hindu godthe ignorant rurals had already made her, collecting riches and fame and endless cunnilingus from her personal harem. But no! They had

A team-up for the ages.

to go and “fix” her, further homogenizing Eurasia into the blandest place that smells like shit on Earth, and not the comic book mecca of justice and cleavage it might have been, replete with onomatopoeic violence bubbles and grappling hooks.

That was all not to mention the schooling she could potentially have given those Bollywood hussies, all tryin’ to use their inhuman sexiness to distract us from the fact their evolutionarily inferior number of extremities. But the surgery was a “success,” and now other parents are feeling empowered to deprive their children of their most basic and innocent dreams. Like this mutant turtle kid in China:

Dad Maimaiti Musai said: “We were told surgery wasn’t possible when he was very young so we waited. But the growth got bigger and harder and became like a turtle shell. (der SUN)

You cured your son of being a Ninja fucking Turtle? Can your deranged – - nay, diseased mind possibly comprehend the implications arising from the damage you have done? I – - I… fffffuuuuh… hold on.

Despite my clenched, grinding teeth of incredulous rage, I have forced myself to count to ten, and rub one out* for good, calm measure. I want to make myself perfectly clear, so there is no chance of misunderstanding. I was born in 1984. Between the ages of three and eleven or so, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the most important thing to ever happen to the planet. My friends and I would put on bulbous green noses and plastic shells on our backs, on purpose, just so we could spaz out like an epileptic cat at a laser show in the middle of the street, and beat each other senseless with crappy carnival-prize swords. Every kid, at one point or another if not for a solid couple of decades, fantasizes about being a mutant turtle that knows karate and eats pizza for dinner every night and doesn’t look gay yelling, “Cowabunga!” before going serial killer on a super villain whose costume was sponsored by Ronco.

I’m not saying you’re the worst parent in the world, sir, but if you had a fan club, Andrea Yates would be president. This kid couldn’t have been closer to living the fuckin’ dream if he rolled around in mutagenic ooze with a Chinatown turtle up his ass, and you literally lanced the awesome off of him. Why?

“People bullied him and we were determined to end it. He is such a good and brave boy and he never complained. We are so glad that he is now on the mend.”

On the mend from evolution, maybe. Oh, boo hoo! He got teased for being different. When has that ever happened? I bet the thousands of socially awkward but otherwise physically sound kids that get teased around the world wish you could surgically remove their bullies, but they know nothing is coming. Some of the most important people in history were teased at school, because the other kids had nothing but their good looks and their Starter jackets to bolster their foundering self esteem.

Billy Joel likes to recount how he used to get beat up for being a little Jewish piano playing pussy on Long Island, and look at him now. He’s a blubber-plated alcoholic who hasn’t put out a record in a decade, and he could ruin the back door of any chick within a hundred mile radius, and your mom, just so he can hold banging your mom over you. You don’t take adversity away from the kid because it makes him feel uncomfortable now. You make it a life lesson, help him develop some metaphorical callouses to match his gross real one. Wait until the mayor of Shanghai hands him the key to the city for foiling the plot of an evil super-genius with his bullet-proof back, and ask him if he’s worried about what the adult failure version of the kid that bullied him thinks.

Medics at Urumqi Military General Hospital say they have taken away the growth and replaced it with skin grafts from Hali’s scalp and legs.

Oh, that’s much better. He’ll definitely get teased less when he shows up for school in September with the head of a horror movie monster and the legs of a burn victim. At least with his disfiguring shell he had the potential to win some ladies over by saving the day. Not to mention, he could probably be the greatest break dancer of all time. The west has like three hundred talent shows that somehow pass as real entertainment that would kill to throw him a few million bucks to roll around on the ground smacking pajamaed street punks with his nunchucks on camera. If all else fails, you can make a damned decent wage on the freak show circuit nowadays. I’m just saying, parents tend to lack the foresight that people who are willing to exploit others’ kids have. It’s cool, you didn’t know. But what we should really be doing is collecting all the freaks that are born immediately after birth, setting up an kind of X-Men mansion school scenario, just in case they prove to be valuable freaks. Their parents might think they know best, but that’s all the genetic conditioning and hormones talking. We’ve already lost two potential super heroes – that we know about. Can the world afford another misstep?

* To this, in case you were wondering. If you need to go a good, philosophical, angry #3 that clears your mind of all concepts of evil and lets you, say, watch a Sarah Palin speech without rupturing an important blood vessel, this is well aged scotch of masturbatory fodder.