Freud on Religion

From The Future of an Illusion (published in 1927), in which he applies psychoanalysis (the method of psychology he pioneered) to the origins and development of religions. The following are some passages I found interesting. (Emphasis mine.)
[edit: Just for reference - This is actually my own extraction from a larger extraction which appears in Christopher Hitchens' book The Portable Atheist, which is a collection of writings on religion, science, morality and belief from atheists, agnostics and even some theists from the last 2000 years. As the book is arranged chronologically, this essay appears earlier in the book than more recent writings, obviously, thus this is was one of the first essays I've summarized for my own reference. The essays in the rest of the book make excellent points also, and are more recent, however I haven't summarized them for myself yet. Once I do I will try to blog some of the more relevant points of those also. In the meantime, I posted this selection as I thought it made very valid points, regardless of when it was written.]

We turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas. These which are given out as teachings are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lie in the strength of these wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection - for protection through love - which was provided by the father [Keep in mind this was published in 1927.]; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a Divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place. Answers to the riddles that tempt the curiosity of man, such as how the universe began or what the relation is between body and mind, are developed in conformity with the underlying assumptions of this system.
.....

[What is an illusion?]
An illusion is not the same thing as an error, nor is it necessarily an error. [As an example he states that Aristotle's belief that vermin are developed out of dung was an error, whereas Columbus's belief that he had discovered a new sea-route to the Indies is an illusion.] What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. [He also makes the distinction that these are similar to psychiatric delusions, but differ in that delusions are necessarily in contradiction with reality.] Illusions need not necessarily be false - that is to say unrealizable or in contradiction to reality. We call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relation to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification. [I.e. calling a belief an illusion makes no judgment on whether or not it is true; it is simply stating that it is primarily motivated by the fulfillment of human desires.]
.....

Let us return to the question of religious doctrines. We can now repeat that all of them are illusions and insusceptible of proof. No one can be compelled to think them true, to believe in them. Some of them are so improbable, so incompatible with everything we have laboriously discovered about the reality of the world, that we may compare them to delusions. Of the reality value of most of them we cannot judge; just as they cannot be proved, so they cannot be refuted. We still know too little to make a critical approach to them. [Once again, remember: 1927. I'm not saying we know everything now; just that we are a lot more knowledgeable about the state of the universe, evolution etc than those of the 1920's.] The riddles of the universe reveal themselves only slowly to our investigation; there are many questions to which science today can give no answer. But scientific work is the only road which can lead us to a knowledge of reality outside ourselves. It is once again merely an illusion to expect anything from intuition and introspection; they can give us nothing but particulars about our own mental life, which are hard to interpret, never any information about the questions which religious doctrine finds it so easy to answer.
.....

At this point one must expect to meet an objection. "Well then, if even obdurate skeptics admit that the assertions of religion cannot be refuted by reason, why should I not believe in them, since they have so much on their side - tradition, the agreement of mankind, and all the consolations they offer?" Why not, indeed? Just as no one can be forced to believe, so no one can be forced to disbelieve. But do not let us be satisfied with deceiving ourselves that arguments like these take us along the road to correct thinking. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe can be derived from it. In other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the line he takes. It is only in the highest and most sacred things that he allows himself to do so.
.....

We have recognized [religious doctrines] as being, in their psychological nature, illusions. This discovery also strongly influences our attitude to the question which must appear to many to be the most important of all [i.e. are they true]. We know approximately at what periods and by what kind of men religious doctrines were created. If in addition we discover the motives which led to this, our attitudes to the problem of religion will undergo a marked displacement. We shall tell ourselves that it would be a very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an afterlife; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. And it would be more remarkable still if our wretched, ignorant and downtrodden ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe.

Random images from around town

I went to the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art on the weekend, this was a neat installation called Reflection (view from above):

And the view from between floors:

Walking back to the train station, I passed a little patch of flowers, from the bridge where I was standing it looked like a painting, and the photo came out the way I wanted it to:


This is my last week at my current school, Makuhari Nishi JHS. I'm really sad to be leaving them, especially my favourite class 1B. Here is a video of 1B singing Sing by The Carpenters. The first attempt was aborted due to their even-more-so-than-usual extra-genkiness.


On the second attempt they were their usual extra genki selves.



Aren't they adorable? I'm going to miss this school :(

Some images from the Makuhari skyline. Every day I pass something I would only expect to see in this country. A love hotel in the shape of a UFO, with a castle-shaped love hotel in the background.



Currently reading: The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong - a history of fundamentalism in religion.
Currently listening to: lots of Björk.

The Beauty of Björk

Many people dismiss Björk because she's weird. Well, yes, she is, her music certainly isn't like anyone else's out there. But she's also produced some of the most beautiful music I know of. Here are four of my favourite Björk songs.

Pagan Poetry - impossibly beautiful, with a filmclip that was banned on MTV.



New World - the uplifting final song in the terribly depressing but brilliant movie Dancer in the Dark. A bit more accessible - she even uses rhyming lyrics here! (No official video released, this is a fan-made one.)



All Is Full of Love - groundbreaking video for a stunning song.


Verandi - could be the soundtrack to a Bollywood 50's sci-fi film. Wait for the breakdown around 2:10. (No actual filmclip, just the audio.)

MooMoo in Japan

My friend Moo visited me in mid-March - she was my 4th visitor in the space of an exhausting 2 months. Given I hadn't seen Moo (or anyone from my much-missed Tori group) in over a year I was tremendously excited in the weeks preceding her visit!

Her first meal in Japan - Moo had some difficulty with her chopsticks...

... but still enjoyed her meal. Especially gyoza.
Moo's first day in Tokyo - and we were lucky to happen upon a Shinto wedding at the Meiji Shrine.



The place I was most looking forward to taking Moo was Harajuku - I knew she'd go nuts walking down Takeshita-dori.
One of the few Japanese words I taught Moo the night before (when she arrived) was かわいい (kawaii), which means "cute". As anyone who has been to Japan can attest, it has to be one of the most spoken words in Japanese culture (hey look! It even has it's own wikipedia entry!) - you hear it EVERYWHERE. Everything is described as "kawaii", because, well, nearly everything in Japan IS kawaii. And sure enough, while Moo was purchasing a dress at a small boutique in Takeshita-dori, the store clerk pointed to Moo and said "kawaii" and "dooru"' (ie she was saying Moo looked like a doll). Moo, while flattered, was quite taken aback, especially considering the store clerk herself was about 5 ft nothing and looked even more like a doll (including her clothes). See? Kawaii, ne.
Moo prizes her long-desired crepe in Harajuku.

On the evening of the second night of Moo's visit, we went to a monthly dance party called Hard to Explain. Moo quickly realised that living in Japan does have its annoyances (taking off shoes inside the door)...

... but also its benefits (alcohol vending machines).
In our favourite music t-shirts (mine: Patrick Wolf; Moo's: Blondie) we got our boogie on down to indie music I'd mostly never heard before but could still dance like a nutter to.

Well.. when you stand in front of the speakers...

Moo getting to know the locals. I think this photo was taken just before Moo jumped like a kangaroo across the dance floor - either to explain she was from Australia, or to scare him away, I can't remember. (This photo is actually quite innocent - just poorly timed and the depth is difficult to work out).

Another case of timing and difficult-to-determine depth. Moo wasn't REALLY slapping Annie - Annie is quite lovely (and from Brisbane!) - but it's an amusing shot ;)

At about 4am the fatigue set in, however the first trains don't start running till 6am, so we had to soldier on.

On Monday 17th of March Moo and I took a trip to Nikko. I'd visited Nikko once before, back in November, and loved it. It's one of my favourite places in Japan, offering amazingly beautiful scenery, spectacular temples, and is quite peaceful, with much fewer tourists than places like Kyoto. Plus, it is possible to visit on a day trip to Tokyo.

By this stage Moo was handling her chopsticks like a pro - I'm so proud of her :)

Some shots of Nikko:

Spot the Moo:

Moo in front of Shinkyo Bridge.

Just as my first trip to Nikko gave me my first glimpse of snow, so did Moo's. Isn't she kawaii?
On Tuesday 18th of March we went to Disneyland.
Moo really wanted to ride "It's a Small World". I, having gone on this ride back in December and knowing it to be equivalent to one of the circles of Hell (uh, let's say the fifth - that's got a boat, right?), was vehemently against this idea. However, I was bribed into it with the promise of going on the teacups next. And so it was that Moo and Tyrone boarded the boat across the river Sty- sorry, the boat through Fantasyland.
About halfway through, Moo realised how terrifyingly dull the ride was, and so tried to teleport out of the boat.

However, there is no escape from this diabolically designed ride (unless there's a fire, in which case you have to look for the bright green "Exit" signs - kinda spoils the fantasy), and thus her attempt to flee failed. She had no other option but to sit, grin and bear it. Look at the frenzied look in her eyes - like a caged animal!

As promised, we then rode the teacups. Moo doesn't handle motion well, but she stuck it out like a trooper.


This is Moo concentrating on her breathing.

This crazy bastard invited us to a tea party, made us repeatedly change positions around the table, and then stole my hat!

Unfortunately, we happened to go to Disneyland on a day which was in the student holidays, and so the park was incredibly busy. This meant that the lineup times for the popular rides was ridiculously long. It was also quite cold. Luckily we'd remembered our headphones.
I believe this picture was taken about halfway through our wait in line for Space Mountain.

This picture was taken a bit further along, as evidenced by the progression on our faces from boredom to misery.

In a bid to relieve our boredom Moo practiced her magic "disappearing fingers" act, and had trouble with the "reappearing fingers" part of the act.

Moo has a shocking experience in Toon Town.


Cartoon doors. Difficult.

For the record: this was my third visit to Disneyland in as many months. If I never see Mickey Mouse again I'll die a happy man.


Moo brought a special friend for Beaker. However, while Gumby was very kind and open to friendship, Beaker snubbed him with a look of startled nonchalance (is that possible?).
By the second last day, Moo had grown to love Japanese food so much, she was quite protective of her lunch.


Alas all holidays must come to an end. Here we are at the airport, thinking back on all the fun we'd had over the previous week...

And then realising it will be months till we see each other again, and then it won't be in Japan :(

Moo is probably the last visitor I will have had visit me by the time I leave Japan - and I'm happy to say that every visitor I've had has fallen in love with the country (I think). It is such a great way of renewing your love for the city you live in, when you show people around. It is very easy to get stuck in the same cycle of work-home-work-home, and so when friends or family visit, you of course show them the things you love, and in doing so remember just why you're living here (or why you enjoy living here). The few periods over the last 15 months in which I've been feeling frustrated with living here, for one reason or another, have ended because I've had people visit me, and I've seen them experience the things that have made me come to love this country so much - the food, the unique culture, the quirkiness, the (amazingly) efficient transport system (seriously!), and most importantly, the Japanese people. This country will always hold a special place in my heart, and I will definitely be returning at some (many?) time in the future. For the next two months I will be trying to see as much of Tokyo as I can.

This post is dedicated to the memory of my Poppa, Henry Richard Miles, who passed away on the 17th of March, 2008, aged 75.

An Atheist Manifesto - Part 4

Part 4 (Religion as a Source of Violence) of Sam Harris' essay An Atheist Manifesto. I'm sure those who wanted to read it already have, but anyway, a quick look at a couple of sections:

In a world riven by ignorance, only the atheist refuses to deny the obvious: Religious faith promotes human violence to an astonishing degree. Religion inspires violence in at least two senses: (1) People often kill other human beings because they believe that the creator of the universe wants them to do it (the inevitable psychopathic corollary being that the act will ensure them an eternity of happiness after death). Examples of this sort of behavior are practically innumerable, jihadist suicide bombing being the most prominent. (2) Larger numbers of people are inclined toward religious conflict simply because their religion constitutes the core of their moral identities. One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to raise children to fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religion. Many religious conflicts that seem driven by terrestrial concerns, therefore, are religious in origin.
...

Why is religion such a potent source of human violence?

• Our religions are intrinsically incompatible with one another. Every religion makes explicit claims about the way the world is, and the sheer profusion of these incompatible claims creates an enduring basis for conflict.
• There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us-them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If a person really believes that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. It may even be reasonable to kill them. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism or politics.
• Religious faith is a conversation-stopper. Religion is the only area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give evidence in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet these beliefs often determine what they live for, what they will die for, and--all too often--what they will kill for.

...
When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One’s convictions should be proportional to one’s evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn’t--indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable--is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and refused to make them his own.

An Atheist Manifesto - Part 3

Part 3 (Faith and the Good Society) of Sam Harris' essay An Athiest Manifesto. This deals with the claim that a world without religion would also be free of morals. Read the full thing. Here are a few extracts:

People of faith regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Although it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion--delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism.

Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself--of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

An Atheist Manifesto - Part 2

Part 2 of Sam Harris' An Athiest Manifesto (The Nature of Belief) focuses on religious moderates, and the illogical arguments used to justify their faith. Read the whole thing, but here are a couple of important paragraphs (emphasis mine):

When a tsunami killed a few hundred thousand people on the day after Christmas, fundamentalists readily interpreted this cataclysm as evidence of God’s wrath. As it turns out, God was sending humanity another oblique message about the evils of abortion, idolatry and homosexuality. While morally obscene, this interpretation of events is actually reasonable, given certain (ludicrous) assumptions. Moderates, on the other hand, refuse to draw any conclusions whatsoever about God from his works. God remains a perfect mystery, a mere source of consolation that is compatible with the most desolating evil....
Between catastrophes, it is surely a virtue of liberal theology that it emphasizes mercy over wrath. It is worth noting, however, that it is human mercy on display--not God’s--when the bloated bodies of the dead are pulled from the sea. On days when thousands of children are simultaneously torn from their mothers’ arms and casually drowned, liberal theology must stand revealed for what it is--the sheerest of mortal pretenses. Even the theology of wrath has more intellectual merit. If God exists, his will is not inscrutable.
...
It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a rational human being can believe in God simply because this belief makes him happy, relieves his fear of death or gives his life meaning. The absurdity becomes obvious the moment we swap the notion of God for some other consoling proposition: Imagine, for instance, that a man wants to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in his yard that is the size of a refrigerator. No doubt it would feel uncommonly good to believe this. Just imagine what would happen if he then followed the example of religious moderates and maintained this belief along pragmatic lines: When asked why he thinks that there is a diamond in his yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet discovered, he says things like, “This belief gives my life meaning,” or “My family and I enjoy digging for it on Sundays,” or “I wouldn’t want to live in a universe where there wasn’t a diamond buried in my backyard that is the size of a refrigerator.” Clearly these responses are inadequate. But they are worse than that. They are the responses of a madman or an idiot.
...
The incompatibility of reason and faith has been a self-evident feature of human cognition and public discourse for centuries. Either a person has good reasons for what he strongly believes or he does not. People of all creeds naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to reasoning and evidence wherever they possibly can. When rational inquiry supports the creed it is always championed; when it poses a threat, it is derided; sometimes in the same sentence. Only when the evidence for a religious doctrine is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence against it, do its adherents invoke “faith.” Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for their beliefs (e.g. “the New Testament confirms Old Testament prophecy,” “I saw the face of Jesus in a window,” “We prayed, and our daughter’s cancer went into remission"). Such reasons are generally inadequate, but they are better than no reasons at all. Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail.

An Atheist Manifesto - Part 1

This is part 1 of a brilliant article by Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith. I bought Sam's book back in March this year, it and the books I've read since (including the book I am currently reading, The Portable Atheist, Christopher Hitchens' compelling collection of essays from atheists, agnostics and even a few theists over the last 2000 years or so) have had a profound effect on the way I see the world, and particularly religion. Previously agnostic (I guess), I now proudly and confidently proclaim my atheism.

I'll post this in 4 parts, spaced out over a few days, so that it's not such a huge read for those who are intimidated by long posts. Those who want to read the whole thing straight away, click the link above or below.

An Atheist Manifesto - Sam Harris

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl s parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

No.

The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist does not want.

It is worth noting that no one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, atheism is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87% of the population) who claim to never doubt the existence of God should be obliged to present evidence for his existence and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny our situation is: Most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public policy in our country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions appropriate to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.

We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. Parents lose their children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the last time. This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss. Most people in this world, however, imagine that there is a cure for this. If we live rightly—not necessarily ethically, but within the framework of certain ancient beliefs and stereotyped behaviors—we will get everything we want after we die. When our bodies finally fail us, we just shed our corporeal ballast and travel to a land where we are reunited with everyone we loved while alive. Of course, overly rational people and other rabble will be kept out of this happy place, and those who suspended their disbelief while alive will be free to enjoy themselves for all eternity.

We live in a world of unimaginable surprises--from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this lights dancing for eons upon the Earth--and yet Paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn’t know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.

Consider the destruction that Hurricane Katrina leveled on New Orleans. More than a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and nearly a million were displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend.

Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm of biblical proportions would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Advance warning of Katrina’s path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn’t have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. Nevertheless, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80% of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.

As Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran: Their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence; their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God’s grace.

Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world’s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is--and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the 20th Century, many of them infants. God’s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith. In matters of faith, we have kicked ourselves loose of the Earth.

Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either he can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities or he does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If he exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: The biblical God is a fiction. As Richard Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate enough to take the profundity of the world’s suffering at face value. It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion--to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources--is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

Same politics, different name

There comes a time after each election when you finally accept (after hoping and hoping for months that it really isn't the case) that the party you voted for, which you held up throughout the campaign as some bastion of all that was good in politics, was really just the lesser of two evils, and that effectively all political parties are the same. That moment came for me last week, when, after not one week earlier announcing that for all intents and purposes gay couples would be treated in the same way as heterosexual couples, the Rudd Government refused to allow the ACT to pass its Civil Unions bill as it "mimics marriage". Right. So... you're fine with gay couples having all the entitlements of a married couple... with the exception of a ceremony. This article sums up this ridiculous situation. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Marriage is for one man and one woman. It is not for two men or two women, unless one is no longer a man or woman. A woman born a man may marry a man, as long as he remains a man, and she keeps taking her hormones.

The only way gays may marry in Australia is by sex-change, a rather extreme declaration of love, and anything that even "mimics" marriage is likewise banned.

The internet is great...

I've just discovered an internet comedy called Mr Deity, which takes a satirical look at God (here called Mr Deity) creating the universe with the help of his assistant Larry, Jesus and his ex Lucy. The writing is brilliant, you need to watch each episode a couple of times to catch all the references and jokes (easily done since each ep is only about 5 minutes long).

The first episode is good, but it's really from about episode 4 that its brilliance shows.

From Crackle: Mr. Deity and the Evil - Season 1, Ep 1

My favourite episodes are
Mr Deity and the Messages - Season 1, Ep 4
Mr Deity and the Tour de Hell - Season 1, Ep 7
Mr Deity and the Really Cheap Meal - Season 2, Ep 5