A little encounter back home

Just a brief one today, a little bit of pisstaking. I spent 5 days back at home for a funeral, but had to get some work done while I was there. To this end, I decided to go the Blackwell’s in Liverpool to find a book I needed. They didn’t have it because their foreign literature section is tiny. Anyway my mum said she’d pick me up so I waited outside (in the cold – won’t be heading back in a hurry) with a coffee, and whilst I was standing there, a guy came over and handed me a flyer. This is nothing unusual on university campuses.

Anyway so the flyer read “If you don’t believe in God, then you’re in for a shock!” Interesting, I thought, (not) expecting to find some irrefutable evidence inside the leaflet. Instead it was just repeating what the Bible says about Jesus’ “cross-work on Calvary” and that believing in him is all the proof you need.

So I said to this guy, “oh, the Bible, I’ve read that.”
“Do you believe it?” he said.
“No, I’m an atheist, a humanist actually.”
“Oh,” he replied sneerily, “I see you’ve hardened your heart like the Pharoah did, then.”

I was quite taken aback by his tone (and that he of all people was apparently accusing me of a lack of critical thinking), but luckily he brought forward an example that I knew quite well, so I replied “Well I’m glad you brought that up, because actually, the Pharoah didn’t harden his heart, the Bible says that God did it.”

“No he didn’t, not the first time.”
“Really? Because I have the Bible quote, you can look it up if you want. It’s in Exodus 4.”

So he pulled out a Bible from his bag and I went through Exodus 4 and picked out the quotation, well before Moses meets the Pharoah. God says to him, “When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.”

And again, before the second meeting with the Pharoah, God says it again “And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.” He’s essentially saying “I’m not going to let Pharoah agree, so that I can punish the Egyptians”. Nice guy, this god. Don’t know why he doesn’t just punish them anyway, doesn’t seem too far out of his character.

So anyway, this guy kept flicking backwards and forwards in his Bible, trying to look for some time before Exodus 4 when Pharoah hardens his own heart. He couldn’t find it, so he slammed his Bible with a huff and walked off without a word. Sometimes I love it when I know the Bible better than they do.

A nd I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.

(7:4, 13) “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” God hardens Pharaoh’s heart for the second time. Who hardened the Pharaoh’s heart? (7:4) “Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt.” God will make sure that Pharaoh does not listen to Moses, so that he can kill Egyptians with his armies. (7:5, 17) “And the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD.” (Who else could be so cruel and unjust?)

7:4 But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.

Ray Comfort and The Way of the Master

I presume people will be familiar with Ray Comfort. He’s the guy with the Atheist Nightmare video which you must know. If not just type Atheist Nightmare into youtube, there’s lots of versions but the one that hasn’t been modified is the best one. Anyway I stumbled across this video today which I genuinely thought was a spoof. So here it is, and I’ll take apart a few of the things said within it. Sorry it’s a bit outdated.

So first of all we have the thing about atheists removing the part about the coke can, “missing the point of the illustration completely”. I fail to see how taking out the part about the coke can misses the point. I haven’t found the part about the coke can but I know how Comfort works, he takes something that is designed and compares it to something natural, indicating that it must be designed. He’s done it with the Mona Lisa, a painting in a cave, all kinds of stuff. That message about how bananas must have been designed for us came across clearly without the need for the stuff about the coke can. But that’s not important.

Next up is about how the atheists actually ended up helping Ray Comfort. Apparently on the day of release, Comfort’s book “You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think” went from number 69, 572, up to number 38 on it’s day of release. Meh, that’s kind of impressive but books always shoot up on their release days, they’re being released that day. After the kind of audience that were viewing the atheist nightmare vid, I suspect a fair few of those were atheists looking for more material to laugh at. But whatever. Next up it beats The God Delusion on Darwin Day. Comfort’s book came out in 2009, according to the inside cover which is on Amazon. The God Delusion came out 3 years earlier in 2006. This is not good evidence that more people are interested in Comfort’s opinions than Dawkins’, just that lots of people already had a copy of the God Delusion. That doesn’t really matter either.

Ray apologises for the atheist nightmare after it’s pointed out that bananas were bred by humans, but maintains that God gave ‘man’ the ability and knowledge to modify it. So God gave people this knowledge but chose to conceal it until people figured it out for themselves, or what? This is an act of humanity, God can’t take the credit for this one. But more than that, he’s missed the whole point of the criticism. The videos weren’t just showing that this example was wrong, but that he’s using a dodgy argument. Why does he just look at the banana when there’s the whole of creation out there? The coconut isn’t easy to eat at all, but supposedly God also designed that. Additionally, fruit evolved on this planet, often collaboratively with birds, for example, so that they’ll be eaten and their seeds will be spread, so it’s no suprise that they’re tasty, it’s in their own interest.

Now the video slips into weird casual sexism which is why I thought it was a spoof. It repeatedly refers to people as ‘man’, which is nothing new, but then says that “man did the same [modified through hybridisation] with wild cats, so that they are perfectly fit for his wife”. What the hell! Accompanied by an old sepia photograph this definitely gave the impression of women as sitting at home helpless, waiting for their big strong husbands to come back with a gift of a domesticated cat. The waaay outdated use of a singular, masculine pronoun to refer to the human race actually gave me the impression that Ray was talking about God at this point, which got a bit weird when he started talking about God’s car and God’s wife.

Then the vid takes a swipe at Dawkins using the Expelled film. When pushed to admit that Intelligent Design may have some kind of input into genetics and evolution, he said that it’s possible that a very intelligent being with superior technology may have designed a form of life, which is a possibility, and that it’s possible that there could be some kind of signature. Stein then goes on to claim in a voiceover (drowning out something else that Dawkins said) that Dawkins considers Intelligent Design a possibly legitimate pursuit. I notice he didn’t say that in the interview, else he would have clarified that there’s no evidence of that in the evolution of life on Earth. The implication is then that Dawkins just has a problem with the idea of God and is biased, when actually he even says in the clip that whoever created this new life would have had to have evolved by Darwinian means, because it couldn’t just spring from nothing! This isn’t a bias, this is a good argument! What’s the problem with stating a possibility, I mean we’re not all that far from creating life now! But instead of listening to what he actually say, the Way of the Master video hears a reference to an alien and giggles like a schoolgirl “ooh, he say alien, he stoopiid”, as if mentioning this possibility is as stupid as Ray’s banana argument. Wow.

What Comfort doesn’t seem to realise is that Dawkins’ objection to debating stupid creationists isn’t anything to do with money or fear that he’ll lose. He has stated repeatedly that he won’t do it because he doesn’t want to give creationism the honour of being put side by side with science.

The Ontological Argument

Ok, so seeing as the Ontological Argument is so terrible and won’t take long, I’m going to preface this with a bit of a jibe at Conservapedia. If you read the blogs you’ve probably heard by now that they’ve decided to rewrite the Bible to get rid of all the liberal bias contained within it. It’s pretty ludicrous but nothing particularly new, there are plenty of translations out there with their own theological bias and this is just one more. One little thing though. If we’re taking Conservative to mean an effort to maintain the past and oppose reform, then isn’t this action quite distinctly un-Conservative of them? I mean it’s bordering on liberal to just change the Bible. Also, they say it would take one person a year to do it, which is obviously going to be spread across a lot of people. But if anyone can edit it (in fact it’s likely a Poe that started this whole thing), then how are they going to be sure that only Bible experts are going to translate? There aren’t all that many people fluent in ancient languages.

Anyway onto the Ontological Argument. The argument was devised by St Anselm, and I’m ashamed to say that my school was named after this dweeb. One day I decided to look up who he was and when I came across this argument, it was a real facepalm moment, even though I was still a Christian. Here’s how it goes:

1. God is defined as the greatest individual that can be conceived.

2. A God that exists is greater than a God which does not exist.

3. Therefore, God exists.

Just go and read that again, hopefully you won’t need to read the rest of this post. Amazingly I’ve heard this argument used within the last couple of years. A friend of mine who isn’t a Christian but has been known to consider the first cause argument quite persuasive wrote an essay for his philosophy course agreeing with it, and somehow got a good mark. I read it afterwards, it was bollocks!

Anyway there are several lines of argument against this travesty of logic. Let’s start with the most obvious. Being able to conceive of something does not mean that it exists. Sounds pretty obvious but Anselm was one of those people who claimed faith comes before reason, which tends to lead to circular reasoning. What this argument does is assert God to be perfect, and then claim existence to be a perfect attribute, effectively asserting that God exists in the first premise! When what we should really be doing is taking a list of all the things that can be conceived, next to that taking a list of everything that exists, and then cross-checking the lists to find the Highest Common Factor (in terms of perfection), which then we know exists. This would be something like… Oreos, I dunno.

Secondly, since when is existence a greater attribute than non-existence? I don’t think you could even call existence an attribute at all since things that don’t exist don’t have any attributes. That’s a premise that you would have to justify. But besides that, I can conceive of plenty of things better than the Christian God. One who’s not such a prick for a start! So suck on those mouldy apples, Anselm, my God is more perfect than yours and therefore by your logic exists.

Another thing is, we could prove the existence of anything! Every God who is claimed to be perfect exists, even the ones who say the other ones don’t exist. Babe Ruth is apparently the greatest baseball player ever. But I can conceive of a baseball player who was better than Babe Ruth, and since existence is a greater attribute than non-existence, then a baseball player better than Babe Ruth must exist!

There are plenty of parodies of this argument but this is my favourite, which I robbed off Iron Chariots (which, by the way, is an excellent resource both for counter-apologists and for religionists who want to strengthen their arguments). It’s called Gasking’s Proof:

1. The creation of the universe is the greatest achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement consists of its intrinsic greatness and the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the handicap to the creator, the greater the achievement (would you be more impressed by Turner painting a beautiful landscape or a blind one-armed dwarf?)
4. The biggest handicap to a creator would be non-existence
5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the creation of an existing creator, we can conceive a greater being — namely, one who created everything while not existing.
6. Therefore, God does not exist.

Thoughts on science and not-science

PZ Myers posted this excellent video of a section of a standup routine by Dara O’Briain this week, and it covers a few points which I think are pretty pertinent. Here’s the clip:

So first of all, he says that lots of people have no idea about statistics and how they should be used, and subsequently incorrect information gets peddled out by the media. I mentioned this in a post a couple of weeks ago, that some basic skills in stats and probability wouldn’t go amiss and would probably allow some people to see past some superstitions. Next up, he criticises how the media tend to report both sides of a story in a totally uncritical way. The BBC are notorious for this! Every science story that goes up on their website has a few paragraphs at the end of it dedicated to a loony fringe belief with no substance, expecting the reader to make up their own mind with the limited information a 300 word article can provide! Take CERN, for example. The possibility that it could create a black hole which would destroy the planet was taken seriously by a large proportion of the public, even though nobody involved in CERN thought there was the slightest chance, simply because the media portrayed both sides of the story with no critical thought whatsoever.

But Dara hits some nails right on the head. “But there’s this notion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who’s been a professor of dentistry for 40 years does not have a debate with some eejit who removes his teeth with string and a door!” Damn right! I can’t count the number of times in a discussion with an alternative medicine advocate or a religionist or something, I’ve made a good point and they’ve come back with “well that’s just your opinion”. Well yeah, it is my opinion, but if my opinion is backed up by evidence, and yours is your intuition or a story from a book, then I’m sorry, but mine is just better than yours! Show me some evidence and maybe I’ll start taking you seriously, but not until then.

But at 1.48 onwards he comes out with this gem: “but just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you can just fill in the gaps with whatever fairytale most appeals to you!” Damn right! We once had a Christian come to one of our meetings at the Student Humanist Society and say that we all needed to do some philosophy of science because what we know is always changing so we can’t be so sure about trusting in science, using this in some absurd sense to justify their belief in Christianity. How ridiculous! So was this person not only pinning their hopes on the things not yet explained by science as all gap-worshippers do, but also hoping that other things incompatible with Christianity like Darwinian evolution* would be proved wrong by future scientists?!

But this goes even deeper than that, it shows an ignorance of what science is. Science is not just a bunch of stuff that we know about the universe around us, it is largely a method, an evidence-based process by which we can find things out about the universe and everything in it. If current scientific knowledge is proven wrong in the future, it will be through the scientific method itself, win/win! When was the last time the faith-based approach led to a significant advancement in human knowledge? The faith-based approach gave us leeching, witch trials and homophobia, I don’t think we need to hear about anything more from where they came from.

So anyway, a round of applause for Dara!

An act of God?

The regime of nonsense up in the Hebrides are demonstrating their fundamentalist side once again. The first Sunday ferry from Stornoway to Ullapool is scheduled to take place tomorrow, not due to aggressive new atheist reformists as the nutters would probably have you believe (or maybe they’re so backwards they refuse to believe that the new atheists exist), but due to popular demand instead. However, the ferry that was originally going to carry out the crossing, called The Isle of Lewis, yesterday broke down with exhaust problems, and now of course they’re all saying that it’s an act of God. One warned that bad things will happen, saying that God has the power to sink a ferry (really? I’ve never seen him do anything). Personally I put this at about the same level of fundamentalism as the Bishop of Carlisle who said the flooding a few years ago was a punishment from God for our moral decadence, or the Westboro Baptists who claim the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are God’s punishment for the “fag-enablers” amongst the American people. Pretty much the same thing on a different scale of offensiveness.

But let’s take a closer look, shall we? If God really wanted to show us puny humans and stop the Sunday ferry service, why didn’t he sink the bugger? Why didn’t he burn the ferry station to the ground like he did with Sodom and Gomorrah? Why didn’t he cause a massive storm every Sunday so the ferry would have to be cancelled? Something a bit more obvious than, you know, something that could’ve happened anyway. More importantly, why couldn’t he get the day right?  If it broke down on Sunday itself, maybe they might have some kind of basis for claiming that God is angry, but two days earlier? That’s just sloppy workmanship! What’s the point in serving a God who doesn’t even know what day of the week it is? As it is, another ferry is just going to do the crossing. Mistakes like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being. I’m actually not surprised he got the day wrong, Christians can’t even get which day the Sabbath is right (hint: their stupid book says it’s Saturday).

If it was the work of God, well he’s certainly fucked up, hasn’t he? As one of the commenters on that story said, why didn’t he make one of the Somalian pirate ships break down? Why didn’t he do something useful? If he’s so concerned about keeping Sunday holy, why haven’t all the shops that are open on Sunday burnt down, or at least (seeing as he’s insistent on taking the lazy route and not doing much at all) come across a series of complications on Sunday that they don’t encounter for the rest of the week? (What happened to you God? You used to be cool. You used to be all about the fire.) It’s so stupid that these nutcases think they can interpret the mind of a nonexistent entity through the malfunctions of seabound public transport systems.

But I do find this line of reasoning a bit weird. It’s a perverse version of the kind of logic people try to use to justify their belief in God, similar to in this video. You’ve probably heard it before, something like “oh I believe in God because I prayed that I would get a new job/get better again and I did.”  But usually this is only used if good things happen, because otherwise bad things happening would be evidence that God didn’t exist, or that God was evil. They don’t normally mention the bad things because it works against their argument.  It’s kind of like a conscious recall bias. But here the bad things are evidence that God does exist and that he’s angry. Whatever happened to this all loving God who’s waiting to take me into his arms if I just say the word? When did this God turn to doing bad things to prove (or rather not prove) his existence? How does an omnibenevolent being even do bad things?

But like I say, the ferry’s going ahead, and a small amount of normality will return to people’s Sunday lives. Hey, here’s an idea? Why don’t we let people sign a contract saying they want to observe the Sabbath on Sunday, and then if their house burns down, or they need an air ambulance, we can just say no because that’s work. Or, even better, why don’t we charge the Sabbatarians with false imprisonment. They’ve been keeping people cooped up on their island one day a week for how long now? Hmm… food for thought.

Pepsi = cure for straightness

Just wait, I’ll get to it. Some of you may know that a few months ago I decided to boycott Coca Cola. Here’s some reasons why you should do the same. Basically they divert water supplies from poor people who need it, operate in Darfur despite the ban, and perhaps most shockingly, torture and kill their workers if they demand rights.

Anyway I read somewhere today that Pepsi stands for “Pay Every Penny to Save Israel”. This despite Pepsi being much older than Israel, hmm…. Anyway I decided to have a look online to see what evils Pepsi have committed to see if I’m being daft boycotting Coca Killer and not Pepsi. All I found was the same conspiracy theory about Pepsi and Israel (which totally isn’t true btw, apparently Pepsi wasn’t even sold in Israel until 1991) and this little gem.

Yup, that’s a website from the American Family Association (and the name seems so nice and loving), declaring a boycott on Pepsi because they promote homosexuality. Brilliant. You couldn’t make this up if you tried. Damn that PepsiCo and it’s equality-promoting ways, damn it to hell! I especially love that on the right hand side, the word ‘bisexual’ and ‘gay’ are put in inverted commas, as if even just using the words dirties your soul somehow. The little captions on the right by the videos also seem to imply that Pepsi actually causes gayness, too.

So I’m gonna keep not buying evil Coca Cola, and carry on having no problem buying equality-promoting Pepsi.

Royal Fail

The perfect blogpost opportunity! It’s antimonarchy, antialtmed and involves climate change too. I did post this yesterday but somehow half of it got deleted and I couldn’t be bothered typing it again at the time.

So hopefully most of you will be familiar with Prince Charles and his often unorthodox behaviour. He talks to plants (not an entirely stupid thing to do but it doesn’t have to be a conversation, they respond to any noise, like a radio), he’s very much into his alternative medicine, and indeed he has his own complementary medicine charity. He also has a company called Duchy Originals which sells herbal tinctures. Recently there was coverage of a funny typo which is still there. And then of course he has pledged to declare himself the Defender of Faith should be become monarch, to reflect the multicultural British society. Brilliant.

Anywho now Charlie is turning his hand to climate change. He’s going to write a book and make a film, Al Gore style, under the title Harmony, which will attack big businesses and their effect on the environment. Here’s what he had to say:

“I believe that true ’sustainability’ depends fundamentally upon us shifting our perception and widening our focus, so that we understand, again, that we have a sacred duty of stewardship of the natural order of things,” said the prince in a statement yesterday. “In some of our actions we now behave as if we were ‘masters of nature’ and, in others, as mere bystanders. If we could rediscover that sense of harmony; that sense of being a part of, rather than apart from nature, we would perhaps be less likely to see the world as some sort of gigantic production system, capable of ever-increasing outputs for our benefit – at no cost.”

Fair play to the guy, I say. I’m sure rationalists and holistics can can be bedfellows on this issue at least for now, although phrases like “sacred duty of stewardship” and “natural order of things” should be ringing alarm bells for some people. To me it seems that holistics care less about actually solving the problem of climate change and more about getting back to nature, which is often at odds with modern science. But as I say, he’s on the right side here.

That was a while ago now. 2 days ago, I came across this blog post from Republic, a campaign group for an elected Head of State (HT Lay Scientist). They point out that The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health, the complementary medicine charity mentioned above, has investments as follows (pg 21 of that pdf):

• £112,000 in Artemis UK Special Situations, which includes investments in BP, Shell, GlaxoSmithKline and BAE systems
• £92,000 in Investec Global Energy, 26% of which is invested in ‘Oil and Gas Exploration’
• £65,000 in Jupiter Emerging European Opportunities Fund, whose top ten holdings include LUKOIL (Russia’s largest oil company) and Gazprom (the world’s largest gas company)

Take a look at that first point. The man who bangs on about climate change, whose new book and film are going to attack big businesses that affect the environment, his charity has large investments in oil and gas companies and funds oil and gas exploration! The babe of the altmed community has investments in GlaxoSmithKline! Astounding. Even if Charles doesn’t have anything to do with this, why does a complementary health charity have investments with GSK? It doesn’t make sense.

Anyway I don’t have Photoshop so I made my own ridiculously crap fail picture on MSPaint. Enjoy.

And whilst we’re on the topic of alternative health, here’s a story from the Irish Independent where a man died from anaphylactic shock an hour after being treated for his peanut allergy by his chiropractor. Yeah, these kinds of people are going to be able to prescribe drugs in British Columbia, but I’m sure it’ll be ok, don’t you worry.

Biblical bling

Thanks to Bill at Skeptobot for bringing this to the attention of the blogosphere.

I urge you to read that whole short post, but the highlight is links to various phenomenal church websites, some of which I’ll link to here (some of them are kinda samey so not all of them). If you click on one link this spring, it has to be one of these, they’re superb.

• The International Congress of Churches and Ministers – if you stay on past the explosive intro it reads out it’s remit in a robotic voice. Now you’re going to think it can’t get much better than that one but oh… it can.
• Evangel Cathedral – the intro to this is awesome but similar to the others (although it does have these weird lights flying into the sky that presumably represent the Rapture), but what steals it for me is on the website itself, where a screaming electric guitar solo they’ve probably taken straight out of a Van Halen song goes on for too long, and then the friendly pastor Don Mears introduces the site on his soundbyte. Look out for the cheesy picture of Don in action and just… pulling stupid faces for some reason, up in the top left hand corner.
• Truth Transformation Ministries – Ever wondered what the world would look like if a lot of nuclear bombs went off at once? Well after the intro, run your cursor up and down the menu on the left and the globe at the top looks just like that, along with a nice jingly noise.
• K&K Mime Ministry – Ready to be elevated to a new dimension in worship? Didn’t think so. Pay these guys a visit anyway, the intro is superb, but not as good as the concept itself. These guys bring the psalms to life, right before your very eyes, through the medium of mime. I’m assured this is not a parody, but it’s my personal favourite.

Just a bit of nonsense. Is it just me though, or does this remind anyone of the trailer to a really bad film? Something like… (I looked up the Knowing trailer but it’s just as bad as the film itself, apparently) xXx. You watch the trailer, it looks good, it looks flashy, but when you dig a little deeper, it’s bullshit!

Rock on, Corrie!

I went home over Easter (sorry for not posting but I didn’t take my laptop with me), and spent a while (which I’ll never get back) watching Coronation Street with my mum, who watches it regularly. One of the storylines was about an Easter service at the local church with a pet blessing afterwards. Here’s more or less how it goes…

A kid and his dad are putting the rabbit away in the garden. The nice old bag from next door compliments the rabbit and the hutch which the dad built, and after a conversation tells them about the pet blessing which they could take the rabbit to if they wanted. She thinks it’s a good harmless way of getting more people to go to church, even if it is just a novelty. Later the kid, his dad, his turkey-necked grandmother and narky (but surprisingly funny) old bag great grandmother, as well as the rabbit, are getting ready to go to church, when this scene happened, and my new hero Ken Barlow spoke out about the kid being indoctrinated, and after the service tried to teach him about humanism, albeit somewhat badly.

I didn’t think about it that much at the time, but apparently a load of fuddy duddies have complained! Seemingly, they called what he said “anti-Christian”, and said it was a disgrace to air such a thing on the holiest day of the year. (As I’m sure I’ve blogged before, theologically it may be the most significant day of the year, but in practice it takes second place to Christmas in terms of observance). 23 people complained to OfCom, the broadcasting watchdog, and 100 complained directly to ITV!

I fail to see how this is greatly offensive, as one viewer put it. When else are they going to run a religious storyline like this, just at any time of the year? It’s entirely appropriate to screen this storyline (alongside another one about the girl over the road becoming a Born Again, I might add) on one of the few days when attendance at church spikes. That’s when a non-Christian would be likely to go to church! At this time of year religion is also fresh in some people’s minds. I think some people need better things to do with their lives.

So if you want to speak up in favour of these comments, feel free to contact ITV with your views.

Religulous

Last night the Humanists went to watch Religulous, Bill Maher’s documentary about religious belief. If you haven’t heard about it, here’s the trailer:

We all thoroughly enjoyed it and it was very funny. Actually a lot of the laughs weren’t even at the expense of religious belief. So for example when some truckers in a chapel put their hands on Bill to pray for him when he was leaving, he walked away and said “Hey! Where’s my wallet?”, and after a conversation about hallucination, he told the cannabis-worshipping Dutch guy that his hair was on fire, and he shat himself. Brilliant. Some of the  best parts were when someone said something stupid or ironic and he just sat in silence, like in the trailer where the senator for Arkansas says “well, you don’t need to take an IQ test to get into Congress”, or when Ken Ham said “Well, he is God. Are you God?” as if he’d won some big point, and Bill just shook his head and quietly said no.

Now I’ve heard a lot of people saying that it was biased, that it only dealt with the craziest beliefs, that it didn’t poke fun at atheists too (‘Schindler’s List’ didn’t show the Nazi side of the story either, so what?), and I agree! The whole thing was slanted against religious belief, it was obviously edited to make the people he was interviewing look more stupid, but it’s a comedy documentary about how ridiculous religious belief is! It’s kind of in the title! Besides, you can’t deny that some of the things those people said, no matter how they were edited or what context they were in, were ridiculously stupid. Things like “I’m gonna go up to heaven and come back on a white horse!”, or ‘No, it wasn’t in here, Mohammed kept the winged horse outside in the courtyard!’, or that the Messiah was going to come, raise people on the Mount of Olives from the dead, hop over a wall and go through the Golden Gates. WTF?!

Anyone out there, especially theists, I encourage you to go and see it. Maybe it’ll show you a glimpse of how ridiculous some of your beliefs seem to people on the other side of the fence, people who don’t just make some of their beliefs immune to scrutiny or evidence, just because it comes under the label of ‘religion’ or ‘faith’. Maybe you can laugh when he pokes fun at a different religion, but remember that they’ll be doing the same thing to you too.

At one point Bill seemed to be making the point that lots of religious people will happily laugh at beliefs like Mormonism and Scientology saying they’re stupid, but they need to take a look in the mirror! Compared to the daftness of their own religious beliefs, Mormonism and Scientology are only a tiny bit more stupid. I sketched a quick chart, hopefully it’ll come out ok.

(You may ask why I don’t think Islam is as stupid as the other Abrahamic religions. Well this isn’t exactly to scale, I think it’s less less stupid than Scientology is more stupid [if you can follow that], but at least we are more certain that Muhammed existed than we are Jesus did.)

So yeah, go see it.