I wish there could be blasphemy every day

I somehow missed that it’s International Blasphemy Day today until pretty late in the evening. Just for the sake of keeping up appearances, I’ll repeat a few things from last time: – I deny the divinity of the holy spirit. – Here’s a picture I made of the prophet Muhammed doing a dance: O-Z—< – [...]

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A brief observation about the Nazis:

They were bad. Reel ‘em in with a bold, controversial statement. I sure know how to keep a captive audience. Let’s trying something a little more specific: The Nazi movement had a strong religious component, and strong ties to the Catholic Church. Most Nazis were Christians. However: The Nazis were bad for reasons almost entirely [...]

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Back in blog

Some things in brief, easing myself back into this slowly after a few more days of uselessness: – Bill Donohue believes that the Catholic Church has “less of a problem with the issue of sexual abuse” than any other institution in existence. Can we please stop acting as if the Catholic League isn’t just this [...]

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To “New Atheism”… and beyond!

Russell Blackford sums up the problems I had with that piece by Caspar Melville, editor of the New Humanist, about the state and direction of New Atheism. Which is handy, because it means now I don’t have to. Well, okay, just a bit. Here’s one bit which resonated with me: Melville seems to think there [...]

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Toning down the Popery

An attempt to change the damn record already is edging into sight. To that end, I’m just linking to a few things tonight, some of which will continue the Popey protesty theme, but with strictly limited accompanying ranting from me: – It’s annoying when the Guardian gets stuff really wrong. It has many excellent regular [...]

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Hating the haters

People are still going after Richard Dawkins and the Pope’s protesters for all the wrong reasons. I commented yesterday on Buffy’s article about her objections to Dawkins, in which she disavows the entire atheist movement, and the very word “atheist”, because of the way some prominent non-believers are behaving. The parallels to the things she’s [...]

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Where are the religious protesters?

On Twitter yesterday, Graham Linehan raised some concerns about the tone of the Protest The Pope campaign. He was more careful, measured, and reasonable than most complainants, and raised some points worth considering. I still don’t think there’s anything to panic about myself, but he mooted the question in a way that expressed the possibility [...]

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Protest The Atheist

The Pope’s left us alone now, and the protest march is over. A comprehensive summary of the event, reportedly attended by 12,000 people, has been written up Noodlemaz, and it all sounds to have gone rather well. Benny Sixteen himself won’t have been swayed on anything, but the very real opposition to his dangerous and [...]

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As bad as the Pope?

If you didn’t have enough evidence yet that the Tea Party – the bizarre right-wing movement that’s been moving in from the fringes of American politics lately, determined to “take back their country” from the scary black man who somehow took charge – is actively dangerous, then here ya go. Christine O’Donnell is the Republican [...]

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Shouting “Fire!” at a burning Koran

Another thought regarding the Koran-burning thing. Nobody’s disagreeing that Pastor Jones’s chosen form of protest was both metaphorically and literally incendiary. I imagine everyone shares the concerns that the Islamic extremists’ response would be violent, and would hurt people unnecessarily. As I’ve said before, these concerns are both reasonable and demonstrably correct. One place where [...]

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