Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
Facebook.
Have you seen or considered this?
http://www.preparedtogiveananswer.com/2010/04/billboards-against-god-by-pastor-adam-barton-of-akron-ohio.html
Michael, honestly, it’s better not to consider it. I don’t know about you, but such intense, concentrated, wilfully ignorant stupidity depresses me.
I really like that meme. I keep having to argue with morons who tell me my lack of myth-belief is itself a belief system. I might find myself quoting you. Well put. 🙂
a lovely concise way to show the theists their claims of “but we’re the same so you can’t criticize me” are wrong. Wish I could write as well as you, Greta.
It is across already. Christians just simply more evidence to the contrary. Until you can prove that every scientific discovery was NOT created by God, all of those marvels will be seen, by us, as His creations and His works. We simply believe that nothing comes from nothing. For all these things, he must have been there before.
And to the people above me, I totally agree with you to be honest. I also hate the stupid ignorant, especially those who think it’s “cool” to be “liberal and modern”, instead of “those lame conservative squares… like seriously.” Anybody, if they wanted to, can act like a block of stone for a brain. If you met a few bad Christians, move on and meet good ones. If I truly hated atheists, I would have just typed offensive stuff over and over again instead of bothering with this post. Just setting an example, as you can see I gracefully agree with you, as I have stated.
John A, why is the choice only between “X comes from nothing” and “X comes from a very specifically defined entity with consciousness and a direct interest in and plans for us who is in charge of everything and is literally capable of all possible actions”?
The right thing to say about scientific phenomena that we don’t know the origin of… is simply that we don’t know their origin! It doesn’t make sense to pick some kind of default explanation to be the one we use when we don’t know what the explanation is, particularly if that default explanation is arbitrarily complicated.
Greta, beliefs held by x ‘because’ x is x, are x beliefs. If you wouldn’t believe it if you weren’t an x–it’s an x belief, even if that belief or assumption is a ‘provisional conclusion. For example, if someone wouldn’t believe a particular belief if they weren’t a capitalist, that marks that belief as a capitalist belief and is part of what it means to believe as a capitalist believes. Your meme, “Atheists do believe in something bigger than ourselves. We just don’t believe that it’s God, or anything supernatural. We believe in the universe, in humanity, in the arc of history, in principles of kindness and justice, and so on.” Since no one who isn’t an atheist believes those things are “bigger than ourselves” or that the “something bigger” isn’t “supernatural”–that is part of what it means to believe as an atheist–if you do, in fact, speak for all atheists. All that is really required to count as an atheist, of course, is to believe (even if ‘tentatively’) in a world with no God. When I was an atheist, I didn’t fit your meme, being a nihilist.