On Sunday, November 8, atheists will launch a coordinated prayer attack against God. Nonbelievers around the world will hurl a bevy of meaningless prayers at God, coordinated by Facebook, in an effort to inundate God’s prayer receptors and force them offline. The offensive is based on the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks that have been staged against Iran, Georgia, and the Global Atheist Convention website.

In true nonbeliever fashion, athiest blogger PZ Myers responded, “I won't be able to join in, because whatever I have planned for that time, whatever it may be, will be far more interesting and productive than babbling to an invisible man.” A commenter on the Facebook page gave his RSVP as, “i'm probably gonna forget, but if i don't, sure.”

If any prayers go unanswered on November 8, this coordinated attack could be the reason why.

(Thanks, Net Effect.)

Source: Facebook 

Image by gruntzooki, licensed under Creative Commons.

Why are increasing numbers of Americans declaring themselves as having “no religion”? Don’t automatically assume that a new wave of godlessness is sweeping the land, writes Christopher McKnight Nichols in the Fall 2009 issue of Culture magazine. Nichols attributes the trend to three different factors, none of them having to do with humanism, paganism, socialism, or Satanism taking over:

“First, over the past few decades there has been a marked trend toward sharper polarization among religious outlooks.” Nichols cites the rise of evangelical Christian influence under the George W. Bush presidency, but also the more recent emergence of polemic “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.

“Second, diverse changes on the geopolitical stage have had profound impacts on images of public religion.” Americans’ common enemy used to be the godless powers of Europe and Asia. Now we are chilled by the specter of Islamist extremists driven by a deep religiosity—and suddenly it’s not so clear whose side God is on. “No doubt there will be important consequences for American civic culture,” he writes, “now that affirming America’s godliness no longer servers to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them.’ ”

“Finally, alienation from organized religion is growing for other reasons.” While Nichols is hard pressed to speculate on these reasons, he notes that while fewer of us are calling ourselves “religious,” more of us are calling ourselves “spiritual,” indicating a growing acceptance that the two are not synonymous—and that “one can believe in God and yet have no religion.”

Source: Culture (article available in PDF)

Image by *BGP*, licensed under Creative Commons.

Listening to a mortar attack in Iraq, Army journalist and avowed atheist Spencer Case felt the urge to kneel down and pray. Later, staring at the stars in the dead of night, he offered this prayer:

Dear God, I have come to the conclusion you probably don’t exist, but I’ve also come to the conclusion that any one view I hold may turn out to be mistaken, however unlikely the odds seem. So if you are there, if I am wrong, you know where to find me.

In an article for The Humanist, Case explores his impulse to pray, in spite of his nonbelief. He concludes that “every serious nonbeliever must take a good hard look at what he or she is walking away from.”

Source:  The Humanist  

Image by  Khrawlings , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Parents, does the overt (and sometimes covert) Christianity of many summer camps give you pause? Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, feels your pain. According to a report in the UK current affairs site First Post, The Richard Dawkins Foundation is funding an atheist summer camp, and it sounds rather fantastic:

Alongside the more traditional activities of tug-of-war, swimming and canoeing, children at the five-day camp in Somerset will learn about rational scepticism, moral philosophy, ethics and evolution. Camp-goers aged eight to 17 will also be taught how to disprove phenomena such as crop circles and telepathy. In the Invisible Unicorn Challenge, any child who can prove that unicorns do not exist will win a £10 note - which features an image of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory—signed by Dawkins.

Wait, are we talking invisble unicorns or just plain unicorns? A challenge indeed.

Source: First Post

Image by  Steffe , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Religious fundamentalists and modern atheists have something in common: Neither one can take a joke. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and the other heirs to the enlightenment are not funny, Giles Fraser writes for the Philosopher’s Magazine, “And that’s as sure a sign as any that the Enlightenment is as creatively dead as the proverbial parrot.”

“Whenever laughter is absent,” Fraser writes, “the heavy drumbeat of political control is never very far behind.” Humor is the most effective way to speak truth to power (see: Steven Colbert), and without humor, political views become too serious, too certain. Laughter promotes understanding, and Fraser writes, “whereas understanding leads to peace, certainty leads to conflict and violence.”

Some people laugh at the dry humor of Christopher Hitchens, but his “vitriolic attacks upon Islam as something backward and ignorant” make Fraser anxious. Though Fraser doesn’t mention them, Hitchens’ recent attacks on women’s humor are decidedly not funny. And most of the other new atheists don’t even try to find humor in their attacks on religion and their defense of science. “Without laughter,” Fraser writes, “all this is smug and dangerous.

Image by  Jutta , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Sources: The Philosopher’s Magazine 

You’ve got to hand it to atheist champion Christopher Hitchens for going out and engaging with his ideological foes. Ever since the 2005 release of his best-selling book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens has been publicly debating Christian speakers on the existence of God. In advance of his latest bout—a March 3 face-off with Oxford University professor John Lennox at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama—Hitchens spoke about his atheistic, er, crusade with Greg Garrison at the Birmingham News.

Hitchens is in fine, feisty form in the interview. Here a few highlights:

On the God question: “There is not another greater topic. It’s the first question humanity began to ask itself. Religion was our first attempt to make sense of things.”

On Mother Teresa: “I was invited by the Vatican to testify against her, and did. I’m the only person who’s represented the devil pro bono.”

On the sincerity and depth of Christian belief in America: “A lot of people go to church for reasons that are not strictly theological.”

On the success of his book: “There’s a big thirst for a reply to the theocratic bullying that’s been going on. There are a lot of people of faith buying it on a ‘know your enemy’ basis.”

(Thanks, Religion News Service.)

Image by ensceptico, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: Birmingham News

Washington D.C. buses are the front lines in a new kind of religious conflict: ad wars.  

The American Humanist Association threw the first punch by running an ad on 200 city buses reading: “Why believe in a God? Just be good for goodness’ sake,” On Faith's Under God blog reports. The ad is part of the group’s “godless holiday campaign,” aimed at raising humanism’s profile and connecting non-believers through whybelieveinagod.org.

“Humanists have always understood that you don’t need a god to be good,” said AHA executive director Roy Speckhardt in a statement posted on the association’s website. “Morality doesn’t come from religion.”

The D.C. Examiner reports that one woman is leading a grassroots effort to counter the AHA with an ad saying, “Why believe? Because I created you and I love you, for goodness’ sake. –God.”

While Under God calls the back-and-forth, “a light-hearted joust,” some are taking the campaign quite seriously. The Dakota Voice reports that Christian groups calling the ads “another attempt by those waging a war on Christmas to ban God from the public square.” In a more aggressive response, executive director of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, David Hankins, attacks humanism in the Baptist Press:

We do have some recent examples of societies that do not believe in God nor recognize a mandated divine value on human beings. They are associated with names like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, and Saddam Hussein. Devoid of any sense of God or godliness, they created a social order of mayhem and evil that destroyed millions of lives. So much for the morality of godlessness.

Barack Obama’s faith was the subject of a lot of analysis on the campaign trail, and many are pondering the effect that his victory will have on religions in America. Jeff Sharlet at the Revealer wonders whether Obama’s election signals the demise of the Religious Right, but some think that reports of the movement’s death are premature. Sharlet quotes conservative scholar D. Michael Lindsay who predicts that an Obama Administration will give the movement something rally against: “Political movements like the Religious Right don’t need a ‘god’ to succeed, but they do need a devil. Nothing builds allegiances among a coalition like a common enemy.”

The Religious Right might make an enemy of Obama, even though he is a Christian, because his faith is moderate and measured, and because he’s prone to seek out different opinions and shun absolutism.

This measured worldview could be why Obama will present a problem the New Atheists, too. As Frank Schaffer wrote for the Huffington Post the day after the election that Obama’s victory is drawing the curtain on an era on spiritual certitude and intolerance at both extremes:

Into the all or nothing culture wars, and the all or nothing wars between the so-called New Atheists and religion the election of President elect Obama reintroduces nuance. President elect Obama’s ability to believe in Jesus, yet question, is going to rescue American religion in general and Christianity in particular, from the extremes.