Well, according to Andrew Brown at the Guardian, it was. I hadn’t heard about this piece until reading comments on it from Why Evolution Is True. I disagree entirely with Andrew’s perspective. However, I couldn’t help but wonder at the topic. And as a devoted atheist, freethinker, and skeptic, I have to say that I agree with the assertion that it was good for religion.

All religions thrive on fear. They convince children that they had best behave or there would be some form of ultimate, brutal consequence. The more devout the religious doctrine, the more fear is expressed. But Hell or its contemporaries await those who do not believe and those who do not obey. Not only that, but we are told that the all-powerful deity of our choice will help us by giving us strength, giving us calm in the face of trouble, and sometimes even altering the physical world to protect the faithful.

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A little while ago, the Lovely Lady recorded this for me. It’s a terrible show on History, but they have some really great archaeological information that she finds absolutely fascinating. But then they go off on a tangent. So I thought I’d watch the episode and live blog it.

We’re starting in Turkey, in a remarkable area where wind and whatever else has created absolutely amazing caves. Recently, they found a cave that led to a city of 20,000 under the ground. It’s remarkable, but of course they are going to go down a ridiculous path.

Whoops! We’re just over four minutes in, and we have the first ridiculous conjecture. This underground city was obviously a rather serious bit of engineering done in a time when that was anything but the norm. How could this have been done? Forget the notion that necessity is the mother of invention, instead we get “Perhaps they had help from some other civilization…” Riiiight. It had to be aliens.

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I get annoyed when schools ban books from their libraries. In some cases I can understand, like an elementary school banning Judy Blume’s Wifey due to the rather adult nature of the book. But in the past we’ve seen schools ban things as pedestrian as Tom Sawyer and Where The Wild Things Are. The latest tale of literary stupidity comes from Missouri.

The victim? Among other things, Slaughterhouse Five. Fortunately, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library are fighting back.

In fact, book banning is still rather commonplace. There is a list online of books that have been banned that shows just how weird the minds are who want to prevent children from learning. And in this case, the culprits are right-wing Christians.

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I am working from home today, and just got a knock at the door from the Jehova’s Witnesses. This is, I’m pretty sure, the first time this has happened since I became an atheist, and it was an interesting experience which I thought I would share. You often hear people talk about greeting missionaries in the most ridiculous of fashions, such as the “I had Satanic black metal playing and was covered in blood” and the like. These stories are most likely nothing more than fantasies, whereas mine is all real. However, I won’t be quoting either myself or the missionaries accurately, as I wasn’t taking notes, but this is the gist of what was said.

I answered the door and there stood two older men. They told me they were sharing some good news, which is of course the calling card of the missionary. I explained that I was not interested. They asked if I had noticed that there were a lot of problems in the world. I said yes, of course. They seemed to be leading the conversation in the direction of trying to get me to say that humans seem powerless to fix these problems, and thus open the door to “that’s because we can’t do it without God” talk.

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