God the Mafia Boss

I stumbled across a video the other day called “So I called the Atheist Experience today.” Here it is below.

Now the conversation he’s referring to is one I know quite well. I quite often watch Atheist Experience clips on Youtube and this is one that comes up a lot. That would be this one. Unfortunately the Atheist Experience channel on YouTube often cut out bits that they don’t think are relevant. That’s kind of annoying but you get the gist.

So this guy has something of a point at the start but I’ll leave that alone for now. He really just doesn’t seem to get the point throughout the rest of the video. He keeps saying ‘well if he can judge the murderer and the rapist, then he can judge you too’. That’s not at all the point. If God exists, there’s nothing we can do to stop him judging whoever he wants to. The point is that if God saves the murderer or the rapist on the basis of faith, but not a relative innocent because they didn’t believe, then we can say that the moral standard of God is inferior. A god which rewards beliefs over deeds is a morally inferior god, particularly if the thing you’re supposed to believe is not supported by sufficient evidence. And if you posit the existence of a god that does that, and also claim that this god is the highest moral standard, then your god-concept is incoherent and therefore untrue.

Then he’s got his 2 questions that he wants to ask Matt Dillahunty, and he seems to think he’s making a big point here but he’s not at all. The first question is ‘are you guilty?’ and he insists that he’s not trying to guilt-trip anyone, but actually it’s exactly what he’s trying to do because he then goes on to say everyone’s guilty. It’s a tactic used across the board by Christians, as a way to say ‘I’m not worthy’ and that therefore we deserve whatever we get. Ray Comfort does it all the time, he goes through the Commandments and asks if people have broken them (my favourite time was when he asked someone “So what do you call someone who tells lies?” and the guy replied “Ray Comfort”). It’s even a part of Catholic Mass, they say “Lord I am not worthy to receive you…”. Then he asks “does God have the right to judge you?” I’d answer no (more on that later) but even if he does have the right to judge, it’s not just about him judging or not but how he judges that is important. Matt’s point is that God is said to judge in an immoral way.

Next he tries to take on the mafia boss analogy and fails spectacularly at that too. He says “I think what’s going on is that there’s a mafia boss, you know it, he knows it, and he has every right to break your legs because you screwed him over, and he doesn’t. In fact the ‘or else’ isn’t you paying it, the ‘or else’ is him paying for you to get let off.” If that were true then absolutely everyone would be saved, no matter what they did. In fact what the Bible says is that the only unforgivable sin is not accepting Christ as your saviour. God will break your legs unless you worship him, in other words. You can dress it up in flowery language that makes it sound like love, but that’s what it means. Yes, the ‘unless’ involves God paying for you to get off (John doesn’t see the irony in that – who’s he paying? He’s paying himself…), but you still have to worship God, and what if you don’t even believe God exists? It’s definitely not the case that ‘you know it, he knows it’. Even if that is true, what kind of a stupid system is that? God decides that the way things are isn’t good enough, so he creates a loophole for the rules that he created in the first place by killing himself in human form for 3 days, thereby taking the sin of everyone else onto himself, but you can only benefit from it if you believe the whole story… c’mon! That’s complete and utter twaddle and unworthy of any kind of respect. It’s profoundly immoral at worst, and inefficient at best, two unlikely characteristics of a supreme being.

Big Week for Atheists in Oxford

In a couple of weeks there are two events in Oxford that will be of interest to anyone of an atheist bent or anyone interested in discussions on that kind of thing. First of all, the AHS national convention is one the 27th. The AHS is the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secularist Student Societies (that’s why we shortened it to AHS), which the Humanist Society at the University of Edinburgh helped found back in… 2008, I think. This isn’t open to the general public but if you’re a member of a society that’s part of the AHS, see if you can get along to represent your society. Alternatively if you’re a student of our kind of mindset, get in touch with them via this facebook event. Maybe you might be interested in starting a society at your own university? In any case, it’s always great to meet people from around the country of a similar mindset, and these events are always good fun.

Now the other thing, which seems to be linked to the first, is Think Week. This is a week of free events from the 22nd to the 28th February (apparently that’s called ‘6th Week Hilary’ – weirdos) organised by several non-theistic groups; the Oxford Atheists, Oxford SecSoc (yes they have two), Oxford Skeptics in the Pub, Oxford Humanists and an interesting one called Sea of Faith, which according to the website seeks to “explore and promote religious faith as a human creation.” Cool.

Their week of events looks immense. There are discussions on everything from faith schools to science to poetry and choir recitals to stand up comedy, and Britain’s Best MP Dr Evan Harris will also be making an appearance. You can get in touch with them via this facebook event, or by the website.

So see if you can get along, it promises to be a week you can’t afford to miss.

The Hitchens Challenge

I briefly alluded to this in a previous post. I’m going to very quickly present Christopher Hitchens’ challenge on morality and try to explain why I think it’s a bad argument. Here he is presenting it at a debate with (I believe) Alistair McGrath.

So if you can’t watch that for whatever reason, the challenge basically goes that noone can show an example of a moral action or statement that is made because of religious belief, that would not also be made by an atheist. On the other hand, everyone can think of an evil thing carried out explicitly because of religious belief.

Now I’ll admit that I haven’t read any of Hitchens’ books (except for The Portable Atheist, but he was more an editor in that one). I presume he makes this argument in God is Not Great, and perhaps there he explains this further, but this is my objection to the way I’ve seen the argument presented.

The first thing that a religious person would probably use as an example is prayer, or praising God, or confession or something like that. This would be rejected because it has to be something that is demonstrably a moral thing to do, and things like that aren’t demonstrably moral. But if he’s asking for something that can be shown to be moral, then an atheist would also do such an act purely because it is demonstrably moral. So he’s excluding the very kind of thing that would refute his argument right from the offset.

Now I agree that those kinds of things aren’t moral, but if a god were shown to exist then you could argue that they would be. So we can’t really answer his challenge until we can show that a god either does or definitely does not exist. On that basis I think this is a poor argument, one that Hitchens makes frequently, and one that I wouldn’t expect from such a great thinker as him. It’s not really a good argument one way or the other.

Edited to include: What I suppose it does show is that morality does not come purely from a religious belief. But then that’s not an argument I’ve ever seen a Christian make.

Now reporting from Portugal!

Cross posted at the Edinburgh Exchanges blog – most of this is insight for next year’s Erasmus students.

I thought it was about time for an update, it’s been a few months. This post will deal with how the exams went in Spain and my arrival in Portugal.

I was quite pleasantly surprised by how simple the exams were in Malaga. Although I am one of those swots who always manages to make it to class no matter how little sleep (or how much alcohol) I get the night before, on the whole even the people I hadn’t seen in class for most of the year didn’t seem to have that much of a problem with them. They were, however, quite different from exams in Edinburgh. Most obviously of all, apparently the phrase ‘exam conditions’ hasn’t made it into the Spanish vocabulary yet. There were people quite obviously whispering at the back; in translation we were allowed to use the internet; I know a few of the Spanish students in my class managed to get away with reading their notes during the exam; in one of my exams a student got up to go to the toilet, and took his bag with him full of his notes, then came back in and started writing again; and in one of my friends’ exams the teacher even left the room to do some work in their office next door! In the one essay I had to hand in during the year, there didn’t seem to be any plagiarism control and we didn’t have to reference anything, and in a presentation some of the students had to do, I recognised the text as C&V’d from Wikipedia! So it’s considerably less formal.

The standard of the exam questions was also a fair bit lower than I’ve been getting used to at Edinburgh. The literature essays were more like GCSE or A Level standard questions, often something like ‘comment on this section of the text’ (so you can get away with writing more or less anything). In none of the exams were we required to make any kind of argument at all, just regurgitate what we’d learnt. There was an awful lot of reading in one of the courses and for one of the novels I didn’t read even one page. Instead I read a few articles about it off JSTOR, and the question turned out to be so vague that I managed to write a 2-side essay very easily without even knowing the storyline. Now the problem is that there was no continuous assessment throughout the course, so we had no idea how we were getting along until they put the exam in front of us at the end of the semester. I managed to get an 8 out of 10 in translation, which will probably still be a first even after it gets marked down on the way to Edinburgh (that reminds me, make sure you read the handbook carefully – there are some things in there that will come as a surprise), although I know others who got a 1, so they don’t exactly give the marks away. Bottom line: do the work, show willing and the exams should be no problem.

So after my last exam, I had a whole two days without any work to do before I had to go to Portugal. You might think that’s enough, but the day I had to leave also just happened to be my 21^st. Fortunately the bus wasn’t until 9pm yesterday so I had time to half-recover from an outrageous hangover and grow back the lung that I must have puked up the night before. Loads of people came out for it and I was suddenly hit by the sheer number of really good friends I’ve made in just a few months. I’m really sad to have had to leave.

The journey here was a bit weird. Like I say I went on the bus, because I don’t like making short flights and because it meant I could buy the ticket later, handy because I didn’t know when I had to leave. From the ticket it looked like it would be a direct 10 hour journey to Coimbra with some other stops on the way. Of course it wasn’t. No-one told me that I’d have to change at Lisbon, neither when I bought the ticket or when I got on the bus and they asked me where I was going. What I thought was my arrival time was actually the departure time of the second bus, printed in the wrong box on the ticket, so what I thought would be a 10 hour journey turned into a 14 hour journey, because it was 3 hours to Coimbra from Lisbon, and that second departure was in Portuguese time, and I forgot about the time difference.

After crossing the border, we went to a bus station in Faro, where the bus was surrounded by about 15 police officers with massive guns (as in firearms, not biceps), and then plain clothes police got on and started going through a few people’s passports. Those who weren’t Portuguese had to get off the bus, small groups at a time for some reason. Strangely, when I got off the bus, I wasn’t directed to the left or right like the others had been, so I just stood where I was. After a couple of minutes, a policeman came over and asked where I was from so I told him, and he asked me where I was going so I told him, and without even asking to see my passport, he said I could get back on the bus. I could have been lying through my teeth for all he knew. We were at this border check for about an hour, it seemed like such a waste of time.

Portugal is beautiful. It was pitch black most of the way but when the sun came up this morning I was surrounded by lush forests and mountains, which makes a big difference from the scorched earth and gnarled olive trees of Andalusia. Cities just seemed to be nestled in within these mountains, and every town we passed had more greenery than any city I’ve ever been to. Not just sections set aside like Holyrood and the Meadows in Edinburgh, throughout the whole city. Some of the architecture’s a bit Eastern Bloc but I like it.

The people are also ridiculously helpful. For the first month I have a room in a university residence, and even though I woke him up as I came in, my roommate immediately showed me around, and told me about a really good deal he’s seen on mobiles, and took me to the centre on the bus. He had other things to do so he asked the bus driver if he could tell me where the phone shop is at the last stop, and instead of that, the driver went to the end of his line and then actually drove me to the shop whilst talking to me about when he saw the Liverpool side with Iain Rush playing against a Portuguese team back in the 80’s or something. The guy in the phone shop was also really helpful, translating between me and his colleague because I didn’t know any of the vocab in Portuguese. The only thing that’s a problem so far is communication. It’s become pretty clear that what we’ve done so far in Edinburgh is really inadequate. I can make myself understood well enough, even if I just speak Spanish with a dodgy accent, but understanding other people is very difficult. This is quite alarming because I’ll be starting classes before I know it, so I’m going to work hard on that, and it looks like I’m going to have to sign up to the Portuguese language course.

Simplicity, complexity, and chaos

I just watched a BBC documentary about Chaos Theory presented by Jim Al-Khalili, and it was superb. Beautifully shot, thought-provoking, informative, and with a brilliant soundtrack, it’s not one to be missed. I had to wait a while for it to make it onto YouTube but it went up last week on the AtheistPlanetBlog channel, which has a lot of other very interesting videos, not necessarily anything to do with atheism. Anyway here’s the first part:

There are 6 parts (just shy of an hour long altogether), and it moves from Turing, through to Belousov, Lorenze, and Mandelbrot, among many others. I really do recommend it.

When I was watching this, I came to a very suddent realisation that this documentary, and other programmes like it, are the reason we need the BBC. Can you see ITV or another major commercial channel funding a programme like that? The primary goal of such companies is to make money through ratings, not to make great programming. The majority of the British TV audience wouldn’t give that programme a second look, they’d hear the word ‘theory’ and turn it off as boring scienceystuff. Even look at the niche science channels, a lot of it is dry and stuffy, and another lot of it is just about blowing things up, or they’re just glorified freak shows. The well thought-out programmes don’t get the exposure they should. This is something of a change of heart for me. Not really seeing the point in preserving something just for the sake of preserving it, in the past I’ve said that if the fine arts can’t support themselves, then they should be allowed to die. Obviously I wouldn’t take such a position when talking about something as important as science, that if it doesn’t make money it shouldn’t happen, and this documentary’s given me the opportunity to reconsider my position on other things as well. We need this kind of thing to inspire the next generation of scientists and artists.

A related point is that it demonstrates a fallacy often committed by creationists trying to discredit the theory of evolution. They’ll say that it led to eugenics, and ultimately to ethnic cleansing. This is incorrect on two points. Firstly, eugenics is based on a misunderstanding of the theory of evolution by natural selection, which clearly demonstrates that in the case of a natural disaster or something similar, one of the best ways to ensure the survival of the species is to maintain genetic diversity in the species, that way the species is more adaptable to new environments. Secondly, even if that were true, it is fallacious to disbelieve a scientific theory because you don’t like its consequences. But the more general point, related to the BBC, is that just because we know that natural selection happens in nature and has led to the point we’re at now, that does not mean we must accept it as an ideology. We don’t have to see it as a good way to organise a society. We can protect things that otherwise would not survive in the free market economy.

So yes, watch the documentary.

On debating

I was thinking about something today (no, it didn’t hurt). When I was watching a video by cdk007, blood type was mentioned. It took me back to one of the first things I did at the student Humanist Society. We went to a presentation by the Australian creationist, John McKay, who is the International Director of Creation Research. I think they use the term ‘research’ to mean a google search. And apologies for linking to such an ugly website – I just noticed on the right hand side “What was neanderthal man’s favourite hymn?” which I really hope is the opening line of a joke rather than the title of a serious piece of work.

There, we handed out some flyers with such dandy captions as “And next week: Flat Earth – Final Proof… Electricity: Witchcraft on wires?”, and I remember that a guy came over and asked me to stop handing them out because it was making a joke of the event, and I couldn’t resist replying “I think this event is a joke already”. Then after listening to the talk, we asked some questions, like you would at any presentation (and I promise I’ll get to the point soon). My question was that if we were descended from Adam and Eve, then how can we have the 3 different blood types? Not only were there only 2 created beings to begin with, but one was supposedly made from the rib of the other, so surely they’d both have the same blood type? He was, to my delight, stumped (I suppose he hadn’t googled that one), and I made a note to ask it again in the future. That I did when I went to the Edinburgh Creation Group, when Marc Surtees replied that it’s down to the Fall. Adam and Eve would have been A+ and other groups are degenerations.

So after all that, here’s the point. I’ve never used that argument again. Never. I may look at it again because AFAIK the B antigen is a different protein, not just losing a protein, but until I’ve hammered it out I’m not going near it. There is of course the bigger issue that anyone created from Adam’s rib – if that were possible – would be an exact clone, and therefore a man, not a woman, but whatever. Even though I know that I could probably stump a few creationists who haven’t thought about it, I know that there is a hole in the blood type argument, so I don’t use it. For me, the reason for debate and discussion is usually to get closer to the truth.

This is in complete contrast to the debating style of many theists I’ve encountered, who’ll sometimes not bother responding in any depth to any refutation that you offer, instead just changing their argument in the hope that you’ll find that convincing instead, without any possibility of them changing their mind. Then, the next time you have a similar discussion, they’ll be using the same arguments even though you thoroughly refuted it the last time. This is a generalisation, and there are of course many exceptions. Particularly notable is that Answers in Genesis has a list of arguments that they think creationists should not use. There are also plenty of atheists who will deliberately use a bad argument for a cheap win (Hitch’s challenge is perhaps one, maybe I should save that for another blogpost though).

Dawkins wrote briefly about this in one of his books, although I forget which one. It was the reason that he doesn’t go to debates offered by debates unions. After the debate he asked his opponent how he became a Christian, and he said that he wasn’t a Christian, he’d been assigned that position and didn’t actually believe what he’d been debating for. I’m a member of the debates union at university, but I don’t tend to go, and when one of the committee tried to convince me to come more often, I brought up this point, and the response was that it’s the best way to learn about an opposing viewpoint, if you have to argue in its favour. At first I thought that was fair enough, but now I think I disagree, and this is what I was thinking about today.

You can become familiar with an argument without debating for it. If, in preparation for this debate that you don’t agree with, you genuinely do change your mind on it, then that’s fine. But if, as is usually the case, you prepare for the debate and you don’t change your mind, then you are presenting an argument that you know has a flaw, hoping that your opponent doesn’t notice so that you win the debate. That’s intellectually dishonest, and has nothing to do with getting closer to the truth. Furthermore, people listening to the debate may well be convinced by your flawed argument, and go on to use it again.

Well that was a bit of a ramble.

I may have to cut myself off from the outside world

because almost everything I catch wind of makes me pretty fucking angry.

Here’s the latest perpetrator. A court has cleared a group of men of rape, after it was revealed that the victim… well, I suppose I’m not allowed to call her a victim now… complainant then, had mentioned a fantasy about having group sex over an internet conversation.

So, here’s how this goes as far as I can tell from the BBC article (which has the most information out of the coverage I’ve seen, all the others just seem to be rewrites of this). Woman in Liverpool and man in Bolton meet over the internet. She talks about a fantasy of hers about having group sex. They agree to meet up, and she later admits that she was willing to have sex with him at the time. When they met up, he has his mates around and they all have sex. She alleges that it’s gangrape but I suppose we can’t know for sure.

Now, there are a couple of ways you can read this, I suppose. It could be that in the conversation, she consented to having the group sex with this guy and his friends on this day that they were meeting up, but you’d think that whichever reporter was at the trial wouldn’t deem it newsworthy in that case, the story becomes “rape alleged, turns out it wasn’t rape”. And if somehow they did consider that newsworthy, you’d think they’d mention that she gave consent, rather than all this business about fantasies. That reading doesn’t really make sense to me.

The other way, and the way that seems more plausible to me from the reading of the article, is that she had mentioned that she liked the idea of having group sex, and the prosecution has used that fantasy to assassinate her character. This seems to be backed up by the statements. The prosecutor said:

It is right to say that there is material in the chatlogs from the complainant, who is prepared to entertain ideas of group sex with strangers, where to use her words ‘her morals go out of the window’.

This material does paint a wholly different light as far as this case is concerned.

If I’m right about that, then I’m disgusted. They may as well be saying “she’s basically admitted she’s a bit of a slut, so she probably enjoyed it, the dirty bitch.” And I also have other problems with this story, why the hell did the BBC think it appropriate to refer to this woman as “rape woman”? Even the Telegraph had a less offensive headline on this story than the BBC, instead deciding to call the story “Men cleared of rape after online chat on group sex revealed”.

Just to be clear in case someone doesn’t get it, mentioning a fantasy about having group sex is not the same thing as consenting to it. Plenty of people like to have normal one-on-one sex. That does not mean that if someone comes over and shags them, it’s not rape.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know that the case would probably have got down to their word against hers, and that the vast majority of rape charges do not bring a guilty verdict. I have no idea how to fix that situation, and I’m not saying that if the case went on they would have reached a guilty verdict. But throwing the case out on the basis of a fantasy that she mentioned, before any evidence has been heard, is surely unacceptable.

If I ever meet Pat Robertson, I swear I’ll kick him in the nuts

… and he’ll bloody well deserve it too.

Sorry about the lack of activity here, I’m coming up to my exams in Spain and it’s all a bit hectic. I doubt I’ll be posting again until I move to Portugal in February.

Before I say anything more, here’s the link to the Red Cross Haitian earthquake appeal. I know you’ll give what you can.

So I was recently following what’s been happening with the most popular creationist on Youtube, Venomfangx, also known as PCS and Shawn. Just a warning, this post will contain a lot of links, most of them are good watching.  The guy’s been shown to be an idiot, and a despicable one at that (that last video is particularly revealing, especially from about 4 mins on – I like how his Joker sounds like Yoda). First a bit of background.

Over a year ago now, Venomfangx and Thunderf00t, a YouTube Atheist, had a long bit of rivalry between each other over YouTube. Venomfangx would post a stupid video, Thunderf00t would post a video taking the piss out of it, then it got a bit more personal. There is a US Copyright law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. It’s all about reproducing images and technology and things like that that I don’t really understand all that well. This is the important part. Filing a false DMCA takedown notice is illegal under perjury laws. Venomfangx filed a false DMCA against Thunderf00t, and regretted it (that’s a playlist going through the whole thing). He claimed that defaming his character was a DMCA issue, which it is not, and also claimed Thunderf00t had been giving out his personal details so that his family would be in mortal danger of attack. Here he is apologising for the whole thing. It’s worth watching. Oh, he was also involved in a fundraising scam but I can’t be bothered finding the video for that.

So, a week or so ago, Venomfangx filed a hell of a lot of false DMCA’s against a lot of atheists on YouTube, most notably one called dprjones. Dprjones then filed a counternotice against him, and released a video about it. There was also an email exchange between them. Once he had received dprjones’ personal details from the counternotice, Venomfangx posted a video claiming that dprjones had asked an underage girl to expose her breasts on his blogtv account, and encouraging his subscribers to report him as a paedophile. He then gave out the personal details of dprjones to anyone who contacted him for them.

How sick in the head can one person get? This is someone who used to frequently moralise about the atheists on YouTube, claiming that he believed in Christian love and that he didn’t attack the atheists like they did him, whilst also comparing them to Hitler, amongst many other examples. I was pretty disillusioned with the whole idea that Christian morals are superior.

Which is why I was perfectly primed to go apeshit over this:

That is Pat Robertson, one of the most famous televangelists in the world, claiming that the reason Haiti was hit by this earthquake was because over 200 years ago, when they started the revolt against the French colonials, they signed a pact with the devil. Yes, in a show where he was raising money to help (or supposedly, he’s allegedly been involved in scams of a similar sort in the past), he decided to blame the victims. There’s an estimated 100,000 dead. Some of the papers have been claiming it’s more like 500,000 but I don’t know. Millions have been affected by this, and days later he thinks it’s appropriate to blame the victims? Or the victims’ ancestors? Ho-ly shit. It’s nothing new either, he did it with 9/11 and Katrina, blaming it on abortion and teh gayz. There’s your Christian morality right there. Yes, I know not all Christians are like this, although I also know that a lot of Christians in the states will have had no problem with what he said and will have sent him money anyway. But clearly being a Christian, even one who seems to have a personal relationship with God, does not make you a moral person.

There has been an awful lot of commentary over the issue, and this post will not be adding anything new. A friend of mine posted this article on why we shouldn’t be surprised by what Robertson said, citing that this is a necessary belief for him to hold to explain why this happened. He has to blame the people, because otherwise he’s left with blaming God. That may be true, in fact I did a bit of research on the Haitian revolution when I studied Carpentier’s El Reino de Este Mundo, and it’s fairly well known that there is said to have been a Voodoo ritual before the start of the slave revolt (I’d say they were praying for victory, something which happens at the beginning of most football games in the US, rather than signing a pact with the devil). But I don’t care. You don’t go to the funeral of someone who’s died of lung cancer and tell the grieving family that the deceased should have stopped smoking when they had the chance. It’s disgusting, it’s inhuman, it’s fucked up, and it detracts attention away from some of the real reasons this earthquake was so deadly. Even if he did hold that belief, he didn’t have to broadcast it on national TV. So I don’t care if Pat Robertson is 700 years old, if I ever meet him, I will be proud to kick him squarely in the crotch.

Once again, I’ll post the link to the Red Cross appeal.

The 10:23 campaign

You may have noticed a lot of bloggers putting 10:23 at the end of their posts about homeopathy. It’s something called the 10:23 campaign, and so far it’s very secretive. Don’t ask me any details, I know nothing more than any of you can find out on the website (although I can tell those of you who don’t know that 10:23 refers to Avogadro’s Number).  If you clicked on that you’ll notice that the website’s changed in the last few days, I only just noticed myself. Now it has an nuclear bomb style counter on it counting down until (I presume) the campaign launches properly.

So what can you do? You can sign up to help the campaign in you do want to be involved, or you can sign the letter to Boots which the Merseyside Skeptics came up with, or if you don’t know that much about homeopathy, you can get some information.

If there is a god, he can deal with me himself

The BBC have just broken the news that a man has broken into the home of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who, out of the 12 involved, caused the most controversy across the Islamic world when his cartoon was published in 2005. The man was carrying a knife and an axe, and apparently told the police that he intended to kill Mr Westergaard, who has a $1 million price on his head.

This is the cartoon here. It was published in Jyllands-Posten in 2005 (the beeb have been saying it was 2006 for about half an hour now, I know better), and you may remember that it went unnoticed by pretty much everyone until a group of radical muslims took it to the Middle East and showed it to everyone, along with some other cartoons that hadn’t even been published. This sparked outrage across the Middle East including violent attacks on Danish embassies and calls for the deaths of the cartoonists and anyone else who insults Islam, ironically kind of proving the point of the cartoon, really.

It was fitting that this happened on the first day of the new year, the same day that the anti-blasphemy law came into effect in Ireland. This law will bring a 25,000 euro fine down on anyone found guilty of blasphemy, defined as “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted“, according to Atheist Ireland. It’s an affront to freedom of expression and it’s received widespread criticism.

So how have Atheist Ireland responded? Today they published a list of 25 blasphemous comments, originally uttered by such people as Jesus H Christ, Mohammed the alleged prophet (yes, I liked that touch too), Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Frank Zappa, Salman Rushdie, Bjork, Christopher Hitchens and Ian Paisley. They also included the comment by alleged paedophile-harborer Cormac Murphy O’Connor where he said that atheists were not fully human, to illustrate that atheists will not receive any protection from similar insulting attacks, and that therefore the law is discriminatory as well as contrary to freedom of speech.

I wonder exactly what will count. If a Christian expresses the fairly commonly-held opinion that anyone who doesn’t accept Jesus of Nazareth as their personal Lord and Saviour will be tortured for eternity after they die, will they be arrested under this law? It’s certainly very offensive to a lot of people, religious and non-religious. Perhaps the almost-polytheism of Catholicism will be deemed too offensive to the strict monotheism of Judaism, and every time the creed is repeated there’ll be a flurry of arrests? Of course what’s very dangerous about this law is that it encourages religious groups to be easily outraged. This is detrimental to community cohesion and may lead to more situations like the violent attacks on the Danish embassies, and more fatwah’s being issued. It’s irresponsible.

Once again when people get offended when people insult their religious beliefs, I was reminded of this passage from Judges 6: “Are you going to plead Baal’s cause? Are you trying to save him? Whoever fights for him shall be put to death by morning! If Baal really is a god, he can defend himself when someone breaks down his altar.” It applies equally well to any god. Why do offended religious types think their gods can’t stand up for themselves? If your god has a problem with what I have to say, he can strike me down himself. But of course, although the world’s gods differ greatly in many respects, one way in which they’re all the same is that they all prefer the non-interventionist approach. They prefer to let the known universe behave exactly as it would if there were no gods.

So in the interests of good healthy not-illegal-anymore-in-the-UK blasphemy, here’s my favourite George Carlin clip. There is something quite funny about this though. If you click on the window below, read the information box on the right hand side. The person who posted this video didn’t see the irony in referring to the dead George Carlin in the second person (“thank you George Carlin, your insight was of huge importance etc”) for a video in which he declares that religion is bullshit.