I’m going through a whole bunch of links that I’ve bookmarked over the past couple years — some of which I should link as ‘resources’ in my right sidebar, perhaps — but for now will note in this post.
Sites:
BibViz Project – Bible Contradictions, Misogyny, Violence, Inaccuracies interactively visualized – with lots of cool graphics
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Graphic: The Dummy’s Guide to the One True God
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The World Religions Tree — click on the graphic to expland and explore. (Of course, *your* religion is the one true religion, and all the others are wrong.)
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Evil Bible
A site that compiles the various “vicious criminal acts that the Bible promotes”, the sort of passages that modern Christians tend to ignore (though not all of them).
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Handy poster of Logical Fallacies
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A list of Gods We Don’t Believe In — two parallel lists; the difference between the Christian list and the atheists’ list is one, out of several hundred.
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Via Jerry Coyne:
A Venn diagram of woo and bollocks
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Graphic: 50 Years of Progress: Scientific Progress on one side; Religious Progress on the other side.
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Articles and posts:
Salon: Religion may not survive the internet. Subtitle: “There’s a reason churches are struggling to maintain membership, and it has nothing to do with Neil deGrasse Tyson”
The premise is that exposure to knowledge might erode religious belief, and perhaps this is happening. It seems to me the internet just as easily promotes insular groups who only look at sites that support their beliefs — whether left wing or right wing — and actually eroding any kind of common knowledge or cultural standards.
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A post on Adam Lee’s Daylight Atheism site: The Biggest Challenges to Staying Christian
A survey of doubts of believers (which I would take as, rather, reasons to not to believe in the first place).
1, Biblical contradictions and implausibilties
2, Conflict between Biblical worldview and “verifiable, widely accepted, and likely correct” scientific explanations
3, “Where is God?” — why in the presence of suffering you can’t count on ‘God’ being there
4, The bad behavior of ‘Christians’
5, How can Christian claims only they are right?
See his post for elaborations, and two other key points: arguments from religious confusion (i.e., out of so many religions, how can one decide which one is true?), and locality (i.e. the observations that most people’s religious convictions depend on one’s parents and where one grew up).
If there was a God, why would it not have revealed itself equally to everyone everywhere, throughout time?
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Another post by Adam Lee, #1m1w in the Bible, citing the many passages in the Bible that are explicitly not about one-man-one-woman “traditional” marriage.
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A post by Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist who is tireless in his attention to religion’s and theology’s presumptions on matters of truth: “When you insult my faith you go right to the heart of what makes me me”
I bookmarked this a while back, but really, he does incisive posts like this every week.
In another post, Coyne responds to Steven Pinker’s brilliant New Republic essay “Science Is Not Your Enemy”.
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A famous post by PZ Myers, responding to a common criticism of the ‘new atheist’ writers — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — that they do not understand the sophisticated thoughts of theologians: The Courtier’s Reply. From which I will supply a sample:
I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.
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Blogger Greta Christina: What Would Convince You That You Were Wrong? The Difference Between Secular and Religious Faith (from 2008)
The difference is that secular ‘faith’ (not the appropriate word, but a word that is applied to science by folks who don’t understand science) is open to challenges; religious faith manages to be unchallengeable and privileged. Any scientific theory is open to refutation by evidence (from eager postdocs hoping to make their reputation and win a Nobel Prize, at the very least). What evidence would convince a believer that they are wrong? Apparently none; this is by definition irrationality.
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A Paul Krugman column, column about how the Republican Party promotes ignorance.
For these days [this] party dislikes the whole idea of applying critical thinking and evidence to policy questions. And no, that’s not a caricature: Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
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TED talk by Daniel Dennett, responding to Rick Warren’s idea of a ‘purpose-drive’ life: Dan Dennett: Responding to Pastor Rick Warren.
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Classic post from 2009 from former-right-wing blogger Charles Johnson, on site Little Green Footballs, about Why I Parted Ways With The Right. Brief summary:
Support for fascists, for bigotry, for religious fanaticism, for anti-science, for homophobic bigotry, for anti-government lunacy, for conspiracy theories, for raging hate speech, for anti-Islamic bigotry, for “Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories”… and much, much more.
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Five Books: Author Susan Jacoby on Atheism
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The Crazies:
Right Wing Watch: More Evidence That David Barton’s ‘History’ Cannot Be Trusted
Speaking to the gullible. And also this about David Barton:
Barton Rewords Some of His Lies
Right Wing Watch regularly documents Barton’s crazy talk, including his venomous opinions about gays, but I can’t bother to document any more of them. Why does anyone pay attention to this person? (I guess you can fool *some* of the people all the time.)
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A cute comic about the incoherency of Biblical narrative.
Seems Perfectly Normal to Me
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Another, from The Oatmeal: How to Suck at Your Religion
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The Gays:
Slate: Gay Couples Do It Better
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The Atlantic: The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss. Subtitle: “Research finds that same-sex unions are happier than heterosexual marriages. What can gay and lesbian couples teach straight ones about living in harmony?”
