Last weekend I was introduced to comedian Tim Minchin by my friend Nicki. Thanks to her I’ve spent the last few days firmly entrenching myself in the Tim Minchin fanclub, watching damn near all his videos on Youtube, as well as his “Ready For This?” DVD last night.

Minchin’s act is a combination of comedic songs (he’s an impressive pianist), regular standup and poems. There are so many great bits that had me in tears, including “If I didn’t have you” (which was the video that first sold me on him) and “Fuck the poor“. But his beat poem “Storm” was particularly clever, and the animated short film that was created for it makes it even better.

My favourite part (emphasis mine):

“You’re so sure of your position
But you’re just closed-minded
I think you’ll find
Your faith in Science and Tests
Is just as blind
As the faith of any fundamentalist”

“Hm that’s a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, it’s absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts its beliefs based on what’s observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I’ll spin on a fucking dime
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

You can check out Tim doing the bit live here. I’ve got two other Minchin items queued up for as soon as I find time to watch: 2007′s “So Live”, and also a documentary that was made about Tim called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nerd”.

If you like comedy, particularly clever comedy, be sure to check him out. You can also check out my newly created list of atheist comedians for more godless jokers. I’m always on the hunt for others, so please share your favs in the comments.

And while Bullshit! certainly hinted at the pair’s atheistic views, it wasn’t until I started watching Penn’s podcast on Revision3 that I learned Penn was an outspoken atheist and libertarian, two traits that I (while not quite as outspoken) share with him. As such, I was excited to recently get my hands on his new book, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales.

I’m a big fan of atheist propaganda. I’ve read more Dawkins and Hitchens in the last few years than I have any other authors. I’m a sucker for nodding along to stunning realizations about the blazingly obvious.

With its title, and Penn’s frequent mention of Hitchens in his podcast, I had assumed this book might be somewhat Four Horsemen-esque. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I loved the book, but the title is complete bullshit. It’s obviously a grab for the atheist crowd, and I think it does itself a bit of a disservice. I like Penn not because he’s brilliant like Hitchens or Dawkins, but because he’s much more of an every-man. He’s weird, swears like a trucker (juggler?) and just speaks his (well reasoned) mind. He doesn’t try too hard to sound smart, but frequently fails at that. I like Penn because he’s likable.

“God, No!” is about atheism like the bible is about being a good person. It’s in there, but it’s largely anecdotal. People looking for an exploration of evolution, or the evils of religion through history will be disappointed; but fans of Penn will be rewarded. The book is essentially a very disjointed, very honest biography of a guy who has repeatedly found himself in some extraordinary situations. It’s personal bar stories from a masterful storyteller.

For “Penn Point” watchers, some of the material will sound familiar as it has been briefly touched on in the podcast, but the book does a good job of fleshing out stories that were well-truncated in the 5-10 minute videos. And for voyeurs, it’s chock full of tales of sex, nudity, general debauchery, and (painfully) one grilled penis.

I was telling my wife the other day that there are very view people’s voices I would recognize in a crowd, but Penn’s is one of them. I was grateful to find that the audio version of the book has Penn reading the whole thing. Not grateful because Penn has a particularly beautiful voice, he most certainly doesn’t. But it’s so familiar, and the stories so intimate, that I can’t imagine it being read any other way.

What I liked most about the book, and where the title earns back a bit of relevance, is that Penn does an excellent job illustrating that you can be a good, moral, honest and intelligent human without the fantasy of religion or the fear of a god keeping you in line. It’s an obvious truth, but then books about atheism always are.

Buy it here, or here if you’re in China.

Holy Christ is it funny.

For those that don’t know who David Thorne is, and haven’t visited his immensely hilarious site 27b/6, essentially he writes satirical, at least partially fictional, articles that are frequently in the form of e-mail exchanges. Here’s an excerpt from Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus have a sword fight:

Darryl. The kind of friend Jesus would have.

While preaching is not allowed in Australian public schools, it is apparently fine to replace school counsellors with ‘Christian Volunteers’ such as Darryl.

A few years ago, the government realised that they could hand over school counselling roles to a willing Christian church without having to pay for the privilege. Now almost half of Australian public schools have a Christian volunteer as a full time member of the school community with parents having no direct control of how much their children are exposed to.

Although usually an advocate of people being entitled to their opinions, sexual preferences and beliefs, I seem to have developed some form of mental glitch that makes me want to punch Daryl’s fat head.

From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 10 March 2010 7.12pm
To: Darryl Robinson
Subject: Permission Slip

Dear Darryl,

I have received your permission slip featuring what I can only assume is a levitating rabbit about to drop an egg on Jesus.

Thank you for pre-ticking the permission box as this has saved me not only from having to make a choice, but also from having to make my own forty five degree downward stroke followed by a twenty percent longer forty five degree upward stroke. Without your guidance, I may have drawn a picture of a cactus wearing a hat by mistake.

As I trust my offspring’s ability to separate fact from fantasy, I am happy for him to participate in your indoctrination process on the proviso that all references to ‘Jesus’ are replaced with the term ‘Purportedly Magic Jew.’

Regards, David.

---

From: Darryl Robinson
Date: Thursday 11 March 2010 9.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Permission Slip

Hello David

The tick in the box already was a mistake I noticed after printing them all. I’ve seen the play and it’s not indoctrinating anyone. It’s a fun play performed by a great bunch of kids. You do not have to be religious to enjoy it. You are welcome to attend if you have any concerns.

Darryl Robinson, School Chaplain

---

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 11 March 2010 11.02am
To: Darryl Robinson
Subject: Re: Re: Permission Slip

Dear Darryl,

Thank you for the kind offer, being unable to think of anything more exciting than attending your entertaining and fun filled afternoon, I tried harder and thought of about four hundred things.

I was actually in a Bible based play once and played the role of ‘Annoyed about having to do this.’ My scene involved offering a potplant, as nobody knew what Myrrh was, to a plastic baby Jesus then standing between ‘I forgot my costume so am wearing the teachers poncho’ and ‘I don’t feel very well’. Highlights of the play included a nervous donkey with diarrhoea causing ‘I don’t feel very well’ to vomit onto the back of Mary’s head, and the lighting system, designed to provide a halo effect around the manger, overheating and setting it alight. The teacher, later criticised for dousing an electrical fire with a bucket of water and endangering the lives of children, left the building in tears and the audience in silence. We only saw her again briefly when she came to the school to collect her poncho.

Also, your inference that I am without religion is incorrect and I am actually torn between two faiths; while your god’s promise of eternal life is very persuasive, the Papua New Guinean mud god, Pikkiwoki, is promising a pig and as many coconuts as you can carry.

Regards, David.

Read the rest of “Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus have a sword fight.” Equally hilarious are … well… pretty much every article on the site. Some of my favs:

• Ten F26-A formal complaint notices in six months
• Party in Apartment 3
• Blockbuster Late Fees
• Next time, I’ll spend the money on drugs instead
• Missing Missy

David’s also published a book, “The Internet is a Playground: Irreverent Correspondences of an Evil Online Genius“, which is (somewhat surprisingly) also available via Amazon.cn.

One thing I should add is: expect to pause frequently. I kept pausing the whole way through the video to read the captions, silently cursing the video’s creator (remarkably intelligent designer) only to discover he clearly warns about this in the video’s description.

No offence intended to my Christian friends, I’m glad you’re still here.

God I love the Onion.

However, I have absolutely no belief in any god or gods, nor do I believe in miracles or magic. I have no hope of heaven, nor a fear of hell. I believe that when I die, as with all living things, I am dead. I do not believe that my soul, which I view as a sense of self, lives on after the death of my body.

I am an atheist.

A couple months back I changed my about page to include a section on my “beliefs”, and inserted the atheist graphic (above) in my sidebar. I had decided it was time to put a bit more of a voice behind what had been my, mostly quiet, thoughts on the world for a long time.

Maybe there is no need for such a declaration. Maybe the fearsome bulk of irrational religious-based actions portrayed daily by the media is grossly overstated. Maybe the lunacy of creationism is not on the verge of being taught in science classes around the world. Maybe the complete denial of proven scientific facts is only really practiced by a small, but vocal, minority of religious zealots.

Maybe, but I doubt it.

Something in me feels that we, the silent non-believing minority, need to speak up. We need to make a stand not for what we believe in or what we have faith in, but for what is fact and what is truth to the limits of our current understanding. We cannot allow this back-stepping in the grand evolution of human knowledge to continue.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating any sort of persecution. I believe, fundamentally, that every person should be allowed to believe whatever they like. This is personal freedom and personal liberty. However, to say that religion is a matter of personal liberty is a bit of an oversimplification, and ignores or denies what religion, at its foundation, is. Religion is a large and powerful method of control which indoctrinates the young, the poor and the sick. It works to evangelize a specific (and often archaic) set of values and hide or destroy knowledge that conflicts with its tenets. That is exactly the opposite of liberty.

In writing this I understand that the religious among you are just itching to drop to the bottom of the page and leave heated comments calling me all sorts of ungodly names and explain to me how I’ve got the path to god all wrong. And such is your right to have your own opinions, I’ll not remove them. However, before you do, please stop and ask yourself how it is you came to believe what you believe.

Can you honestly say you came to your unquestioning belief in a supreme being, or beings, without the overt influences of your family or the culture you grew up in? I’m sure there are some of you that are “born again”, or have come to your faith as an adult in some way, but the vast majority of religious people blindly follow the faith of their parents or forefathers. How then can anyone who has spent their entire life surrounded by a specific set of ideas possibly have an objective view about their religion?

We must stand up to the enemies of reason

“We must favour verifiable evidence over private feeling – otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.” – Richard Dawkins, “The Enemies of Reason”

Here’s the thing. I understand the pull of believing in something greater than ourselves. The desire to believe in some master plan for our existence. Numerous times throughout my life I’ve felt that pull – whether because of tragedy or trepidation. Despite seeing all signs of rationality point towards atheism, I was drawn to the colourful and imaginative world of religion.

But it never sat right. Sort of like, as a child, you go to slay dragons in the forest behind your house and only find trees.

I resigned myself to the cold, but truthful, reality of a world without god and the supernatural. And then I began to realize something: the workings of nature are much more fantastic and amazing than anything dreamed up millenniums ago as a means for explaining what we could not then possibly understand.

The blind belief in anything, anything, is flawed. And this is why science, and its methods of proof, is so brilliant. Science holds the answers not because it has all the answers, but because it wants to find them. At its core, science has no allegiance. It will quite happily do away with what it thought it knew, and replace it with a new set of understanding. In short, it learns. It grows. It evolves.

“Relativism – the quaint notion that there are many truths all equally deserving of respect, even if they contradict each other – is rife today. It sounds like a respectful gesture towards multiculturalism. Actually it’s a pretentious cop-out.

“There really is something special about scientific evidence. Science works. Planes fly – magic carpets and broomsticks don’t. Gravity is not a version of the truth – it is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a 10th floor window.

“Evolution, too, is reality. You don’t believe it or not believe it on the basis of whom or culture – the evidence supports it. Evolution is the plain truth.” – Richard Dawkins, “The Genius of Charles Darwin”

I think what Dawkins is saying is that moderates, whether religious or atheist, tend to hide in relativism. There is nothing wrong with being a moderate, if (and that’s a big ‘if’) doing so does not allow extremists to push forward their agenda. There are numerous places around the world where this is being done, that it’s in my own backyard is more than a little disturbing to me. By allowing religious fundamentalists to elevate creationism to the level of being considered a “scientific theory” and pushing for it to be included in science class is nothing more than pure insanity.

We live in a scientific world, where the direct results of scientific methodology can be seen absolutely everywhere. The extent of human knowledge is in a golden age. Whereby past centuries were lucky to be graced with one or two major scientific marvels, we experience them weekly – so much so that we’re hardly phased or amazed by them anymore.

We take for granted the fact that the life expectancy of the average human being living in a (scientifically) developed country has nearly doubled in the past hundred years – and infant mortality rates have dropped even more drastically. This isn’t from an increased belief in religion; this is because people, largely non-believers in a god, dedicated their lives to improving and understanding the world.

(c) AtheistCartoons.com

Because of science playing such a huge role in the comforts we all now benefit from, churches can’t but add science to the conversation. History has repeatedly shown how the church first denies, then covers up, and finally adapts/adopts scientific discoveries that conflict with religious belief. The most shining example, of course, is the belief the sun revolved around the world. Or, just as relevant, that the world was flat.

Now, of course, these are considered undeniable facts as proven by (not even all that) modern science. So, how then can there still be an argument, any argument, that teaching our children the world is less than 10,000 years old is anything but wrong? How can the fiction that God created two humans before all other animals be elevated to the same “scientific” level as the undeniable and proven fact of evolution by natural selection?

But this is exactly what is being done when people subscribe to a literal belief in the Bible, Torah, or Qur’an. By its very nature religion asks its followers to suspend their rationality and blindly believe, via “faith”, that what is being said is truth. Nonsense.

Equally nonsensical is the argument by creationists that goes something like: “Evolution isn’t proven because we can’t see it. Why aren’t gorillas still evolving into humans? Why aren’t other animals still evolving if that’s how it happens?”

But that’s not how it happens. We didn’t evolve from gorillas, or chimps. Rather we all evolved from a common ancestor – modern apes went their way and we went ours. And we are still evolving. It’s just that evolution doesn’t happen in a lifetime, or 100 lifetimes, it takes thousands upon thousands of years.

(c) AtheistCartoons.com

This is not a theory. It is a fact. It is evidenced by a meticulously gathered mountain of research initially through paleontology, and now conclusively by scientific strides in the understanding of DNA. As human evolution deals with times dating back millions of years (at least 4-5 million years since splitting from our closest cousin – the chimpanzee), there are bound to be some fuzzy areas that scientists aren’t certain about. However, it is not a question of whether man originated several million years ago or six thousand years ago. The latter is simply false.

That returns us to the moderates – those who largely agree the young earth theory is nonsense. The religious liberals who don’t look at their holy book as being literal, but rather allegorical. Religion is thus just a set of moral codes or laws to follow to live a healthy and happy life – or else burn in hell for all eternity. And that’s where you lose me. I get living a moral life, and I totally understand wanting some guidance on how to do that. We’re social creatures, and learning from others is how we grow.

Why though must we tack on supernatural ideas to such a moral code? Why do we need the prize or punishment of Heaven and Hell to force us to behave in a proper fashion? The truth, of course, is that we don’t. I am an atheist and I live a happy and fulfilling life that, by most’s standards is completely moral. In fact, I am certain that morality has no connection to religion, and atheists by and large are no less moral than the religious.

And though it could be argued the opposite isn’t true – that much death and immoral actions are done in the name of religion – I’d hazard a guess that even without religion we’d find ways to kill each other.

Where my problem with religion lies is that it infects systems that I both desire and require to stay non-religious. It creeps into and infects education and political policy – two things that should never be marred by a lack of rationality.

It is for this reason that I am standing up and stating, loudly and longly, that I am not a communist, I am not an anarchist, I am not immoral, I am not unethical, I am not non-spiritual, but I am an atheist.