Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.

The only sense to make of tragedies like this is that terrible things can happen to perfectly innocent people. This understanding inspires compassion.

Religious faith, on the other hand, erodes compassion. Thoughts like, “this might be all part of God’s plan,” or “there are no accidents in life,” or “everyone on some level gets what he or she deserves” – these ideas are not only stupid, they are extraordinarily callous. They are nothing more than a childish refusal to connect with the suffering of other human beings. It is time to grow up and let our hearts break at moments like this.

—Sam Harris

If you believe in a God that uses violence to “save” humanity, you’ll start believing that violence is permissible in certain circumstances, such as suicide bombing or invading other countries to spread democracy, Crossan says.

The human addiction to violence, though, is so ingrained that even the authors of the New Testament had trouble accepting Jesus’ nonviolence, Crossan says.

So they did a little editing.

Crossan’s proof: Jesus preaches nonviolence at the beginning of the New Testament. By the book of Revelation, he’s leading armies through heaven to kill evildoers.

“Christianity both admits and subverts the historical Jesus,” Crossan says.

from John Dominic Crossan’s ‘blasphemous’ portrait of Jesus

Tides go in. Tides go out. Never a miscommunication.

That’s right — tides prove the existence of God. Wikipedia may say, “Tides are the rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the Moon and the Sun and the rotation of the Earth” … but that was probably written by a 10 year old in his underwear. We really have NO IDEA how the tides work! We can’t predict them. It’s simply beyond our comprehension, and if someone says differently, they should be stoned to death with small pebbles.

You can watch Papa Bear stun the world with his revelation here (along with some heretics poking fun of him):

There’s more where that came from, I assure you.

Update: Here’s a combination of the two… but it’s a parody, thank God!

(via)

Source: Non Sequitur

The main difference between a prophet and a psychopath, says Ralph Hood, who teaches psychology of religion at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, is “whether or not (they) can get followers.”

Source: Line between divine inspiration and religious insanity is a narrow one

What’s different about religion is that people don’t feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone’s an expert.

Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there’s no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions. [...]

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan.

I know that 99.9% of religious and political arguments I’ve taken part in on the interent have been pointless. I’d say about 90% of my non-online arguments in religion and politics have been useless.

I think Paul’s theory is a very insightful observation on why this might be so. I’ve found that very few people are willing to rationally talk about topics that are wrapped up in their identity.