Carnival of the Godless

Welcome to the 57th installment of the Carnival of the Godless!

Let’s get right into the best Godless blogging of the past two weeks.

Alon Levy of Abstract Nonsense discusses the fallacy of equating the Bible with a science or history book in On Evidence. He makes a very good, concise case for treating different sources differently, as well as for trusting scientists.

In one last push for the holiday season, Carol Hanson of Letters from a broad engages in “a light discussion of how holiday specials and movies portray skeptics vs. belief in Santa.” Skepticism never seems to fair well in movies, which is a tragedy.

In another final holiday commentary, Rich from the Disillusioned kid presents Reindeer: Horses With Antlers, a discussion of all things Christmas.

Robert McNally from Ironwolf, makes the case that we atheists should focus on the things that inspire us, rather than fighting various superstitions in 2007: Year of the Inspired Atheist. I’m inclined to agree, while the case for atheism needs to be made forcefully and repeatedly, there’s much more to an atheist than lack of faith, something we should emphasize.

Jeff G of Minds, Meaning and Morals argues that the burden of proof of God’s existence is on the theist in The Flying Spaghetti Monster and Presumption.

Justin Lowery of blog4brains.com wonders Is God Bad for You? He comes to the conclusion “God may be good for some of us some of the time, but not good for all of us all of the time”, a sentiment that I find hard to disagree with.

The Ridger from The Greenbelt tears Cal Thomas a new one in Intellectually Lazy? You bet it is!

No more Mr. Nice Guy! discusses fundamentalist book-banning (and burning) in Is our children learning?

Shalini of Scientia Natura: Evolution And Rationality dissects some common Christian claims in Responses to religious nuts. This almost reads like Talk.Origins Index of Creationist Claims, except with Christian in place of Creationist. Nice job.

John of hell's handmaiden looks at the selective rationality of the religious in St. Isidore and his Etymologies. This is definitely one of those things all Godless people have noticed, and surely prompted Roberts’ famous quip, “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

Martin Wagner of The Atheist Experience has some fun with Pat Robertson in For your enjoyment: Ring in 2007 with some Pat Robert-fun! It made me laugh a few times, but Pat Robertson is almost too easy of a target.

Simen from import Mind.Reason uses an analogy to look at the difference between an atheist, an agnostic and a theist. It’s a pretty good summation of the semantic differences between the groups, although I bet agnostics and theists would beg to differ.

J-Bar of Lord J-Bar For Democracy, Not Theocracy takes a personal look at the Evolution/Creation controversy in Some Thoughts on the Evolution-Creation Controversy.

The next two posts are about morality, and I’m a little surprised there were only two of these. Aaron Powell of Symbolic Order presents The Primacy of Secular Morality, and Aeger of Kingdom of Heathen presents Morality Without God. Both are good discussion of secular morality and its superiority to religious morality. Combating the misconception of amoral secularists is quite important, and even though it has been done quite a bit, it can never be done enough.

Finally, Skadhi of Lacrimae Rerum has a nice distillation of the reasons to be godless in Why I don’t believe in god.

That’s all for this Carnival, tune in two weeks from now when it’s hosted at Abe Linkum.

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As a final note, if I’ve made any mistakes please do notify me right away. To the best of my knowledge all of these links work (and names are correct, etc), but hosting a Carnival is actually quite a bit of work, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I messed something up. Also, I interpreted the guidelines pretty strictly (and tried to stick to current posts), so I did reject a few entries (sorry!).