Historic TV moment: 'I'm actually an atheist'

Someday, somebody's going to look back at this moment on CNN and draw a "before and after" line in the history of the U.S. and religion.

All I can say is, thank God for this lady.  Oh wait, woops!  I mean, just thank this lady for being honest about the good fortune of her decision, but with tolerance and a sense of humor for those who want to chalk it up to an invisible, all-powerful ghost.  If only religious folks would show the same tolerance when faced with those who don't share their "wrong" beliefs!  





I'll say it again, I can't stand people saying, "Thank God," or "Thank the Lord" when they've survived some tragedy while many others died. That makes no fucking sense. Do they think God wanted them to live and everybody else to die, or what? What makes them so fucking special, do you think?  Or is it all just part of God's mysterious plan that they got lucky? [Spiritual shrug of the shoulders].  

Same deal with those killed in a tragedy.  Believers say, "It was God's will," or "It was their time to go," or "They're in a better place now."  Oh really?  Are you sure?  Has anybody ever managed to interview the dead people flattened by debris in tornadoes, drowned by floods, swept away by tsunamis, or swallowed by earthquakes, where they're actually at (besides a grave) and if indeed it's better than where we're at, alive?  The dead tell no tales, they say.  That's OK, we tell spiritual fairy tales for them.  

Well, I'm glad more & more folks are realizing how self-serving and presumptuous our rationalizing really is.

UPDATE: A friend of mine replied:

You are irritated at religious people who are intolerant, yet you go off in your blog about hating it when people thank God for not being killed when some kind of natural disaster happens.  Practice what you preach a little.

Besides, what people mean when they use phrases like "thank God", or "due to the grace of God", what they doing is acknowledging that it could have just as easily been them that were killed.  If they had the attitude you want to believe they did about being "special", they wouldn't be thankful for anything.

Stop being so intolerant and judgmental.  You like this lady because she is a brave atheist.  Great, be happy for her.  To use it as an opportunity to kind of give a middle finger to those people who lost their homes, but survived and who happen to believe in God, is pretty low class.  Coexist.

To which I replied:

Wolf Blitzer, who is allegedly part of the liberal media axis, pushed this woman whom he didn't know to thank the Lord she was alive.  That has been considered a normal, even appropriate reaction to tragic events. However she didn't cooperate. On live TV. That was historic.   

Imagine if the Blitzer had said, "It wasn't God or fate that saved you, but your own quick thinking!  Right?  Right??"  You and all the conservatives would be up in arms about the lib'rul media and the degradation and godlessness of modern culture.   

Just have a bit of honesty and admit that your side dominates the conversation, and it's a rare person who has the courage to stand up to people like you, for fear of offending your precious half-thought-out beliefs and being ostracized. 

I am precisely criticizing the thoughtlessness in the phrase "thank God!"  It means something!  It applies not only to the person saying it, if you follow it to its logical conclusion.  But no, you choose to leave it at that.  It's brainless.  I can and do coexist with thoughtless people, I have no choice, but I'm not going to ignore their flawed thinking.  If they -- you -- can't take my pointing out the crazy logic in their beliefs, it's not my problem, it's a problem with their logic.  Don't blame the messenger.

Grieving over Newtown - without God

Here's a brave voice! To see this on CNN shows that the times they are a-changin'. It's no longer shameful to proclaim your non-belief.

But back to Krauss's argument: if God causes everything, or at least in His infinite goodness allows everything, having been forewarned, to happen, then God wanted these 20 children to be murdered. Then, in our grief, we are obliged to pray to Him lovingly, seek solace and give thanks. GWTF?

Sums up Krauss:

If instead of automatically assuming that prayers to a deity callous enough to allow this sickness, or worse, to encourage it out of divine retribution, are what families in grief need from their president and from the media, that we focused on rational grief counseling and community support, including better mental health care combined with sensible gun control, we as a society might ultimately act more effectively to stop this madness.

Why must the nation grieve with God?

By Lawrence M. Krauss

December 26, 2012 | CNN

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/26/opinion/krauss-grief-faith/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

Mourdock, rape and the Book of Job

Before I tell you why, let me quote two whole paragraphs from a rape apologist's apologist's blog post:

Bigger picture now: The essence of religious monotheism is that everything comes from one God, which naturally leaves humans befuddled when “Bad things happen to good people.” The faithful nevertheless persevere in their faith, believing that God is unknowable to human minds. This is the essence, for example, of the Book of Job, which I felt compelled to reread this afternoon. (It is a deeply disturbing story precisely because it raises these fundamental issues about the nature of God, good and evil, etc.) Suffice it to say the last place to delve into these matters is a U.S. Senate debate two weeks before the election.

No one has to believe this. Many people don’t. That is why it is better left out of political campaigns. (Repeat: [Richard] Mourdock will and should pay a price for this.) But Mourdock does believe this. No one who knows him or has interviewed him doubts that he’s a sincerely religious person. He was not expressing a lack of sympathy with rape victims (hence the term “horrible situation”).

And here is what Mourdock said in his own defense, clarifying his initial statement:

“God creates life, and that was my point. God does not want rape, and by no means was I suggesting that He does. Rape is a horrible thing, and for anyone to twist my words otherwise is absurd and sick.”

But actually I don't want to talk about rape.  I want to talk about religion.

For me, what Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock said is important not because it reveals his true beliefs about rape or abortion -- why we continue to be "shocked" or "outraged" when knuckle-dragging fundamentalist Republicans admit to believing what we already know they believe is beyond me -- but because Mourdock's moment of honesty reveals the absurdity of believing that God decides what happens in our lives, and then praising God for pulling our puppet strings.

Mourdock should be getting dinged for saying something really philosophically stupid and self-serving, which was that: God doesn't intend for rape to happen, but if a rape does happen and it results in pregnancy, God does intend that to happen, and for the rape victim to carry that rapist's fetus to term.  Because life is precious, or something.

Let me make that real simple.  Rape = not God's fault.  Innocent life = God's plan.  See how God wiggled out of that one?  Pretty slick, huh?  

Moreover, people like Mourdock are the first to go Tebowing the instant anything good happens in their lives.  But when something bad happens?  It's because somebody sinned against God. Or, as Jennifer Rubin says above about evil, God's mind is "unknowable." That's just another double standard, I'm sorry. That's not even an attempt at theodicy, it's just an intellectual shrug of the shoulders.  We are letting God off way too easy here.  If God made us in His image then certainly He didn't intend for us to be so dumb.

Ms. Rubin also mentions the Book of Job in defending Mourdock, and, well, God. That's a funny choice. That's the one where Satan makes a bet with God that he can make holy Job curse God's name if Satan makes Job suffer enough.  God takes Satan's bet and gives him permission to put Job and his family through the wringer.  

Now, if you are a fundamentalist who believes that the Bible is God's word, then there is nothing "unknowable" about God's intentions in the story of Job.  It's written quite clearly and simply.  God made a wager with the devil and let one of his most devout children be tortured and played with to prove a point.  Job's friends, meanwhile, come to the very modern-Evangelical conclusion that Job must have sinned terribly against God to have earned so many creative torments, one after another.  That was just salt in Job's God-inflicted wounds.  Then toward the end of Job, God's voice rings out from the heavens and says Job isn't a sinner.  And God defends himself by telling Job and his accusers how hard His job is, and how men really aren't qualified to question His decisions.  Get over it, in other words.  

The dramatic irony in all of it is that only the reader knows about God's bet with Satan.  Job remains clueless to the end that he was celestially punked.

Overall, Job is a great story.  It's one you'll want to tell your kids before bed, again and again, so the next time they say, "Why should I?" you can answer, "Because you're too stupid to understand why, so just do what I say."  Which is pretty much what religious conservatives believe parents should tell their children, and what they think CEOs and Republican Presidents should tell us adults.  

This is all a long way for me to say: the next time somebody says, "It was God's will," or "Thank God for your blessings," or "The Lord works in mysterious ways," you'll know that person is either dumb or full of shit. 

UPDATE: The Eds. at conservative National Review thought Mourdock's absolute pro-life stance needed their special defense.  But for the record, I'm not arguing the pro-life question in my post; I'm arguing about what is really God's fault, and how do believers explain evil in the world, like rape.  Or how something "good" (an innocent baby) could come from something bad (rape), and at what point in that chain of events is God involved or not involved.  Mourdock was just my launchpad into that discussion, which I find much more interesting and fundamental.

If you believe that great good can come from evil, then you are less likely to want government to help the poor and suffering among us, because, hey, it's all part of God's plan for them... or for their kids, or somebody three generations down the line.  Their suffering makes no sense and seems pointless to us, but it does make sense to Him, and that's all that matters.  --> That kind of attitude is a logical extension of what Mourdock, et al believe about God and evil.   

And that's why they must be exposed and opposed. Because their backwards thank/blame-God-for-everything attitude harms all of us.