Philip Norton

I was thinking the other day on what I could call a church without saying the word church. This might seem a bit odd, but I am trying to distance myself from the life of a theist and so I use terms like decemberween to describe religious things.

So what about church? Well it suddenly hit me yesterday. People who go there like the bible, so why don’t I call it The Bible Appreciation Society? I think its quite a good term, it belittles religion for being a weird collection of fools and makes it sound like the entire thing is a teeny-tiny operation run by Bob from Essex.

I know that isn’t true, but I would like it to be. Maybe one day the human race will be smart enough to do away with the fascist, dogmatic, stupid, hateful, ludicrous tissue of lies that is religion.

I don’t think it will happen overnight. Douglas Adams once said that “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” I think we have a long way to go yet…

Tags: Atheism by Philip Norton
No Comments »

I answered a knock at the door the other day to be met by a pair of old women. The first thing the lead woman tried to give me was a copy of the Watchtower. As soon as I saw it I politely said that I wasn’t interested. When she asked my reasons we went into a 20 minute long discussion about evolution and the fallacy of stories in the bible.

Bearing in mind that this is the middle of winter and I was stood on my front door step with only a t-shirt and trousers on, my teeth started to chatter. After several attempts to say things like “well I’m getting cold” and “I’m busy now” Mandy had a go at them saying “My partner has been very reasonable and has asked you to leave no please go”. This was the break I needed and i simply said that I wasn’t going to close the door in their face, but that they should probably go now. so they left.

Their understanding of evolution was very poor, in fact their whole understanding of physics, including basic things like boyancy theory was totally skewed. They even started to state things like the human brain only uses 10% of its power, which I quickly deposed as the urban myth it is.

It is almost like they don’t want to listen. Like they are doing a sales pitch and they get comission for every person signed up.

Tags: Atheism by Philip Norton
1 Comment »

Nick Clegg, the New Liberal Democrat leader, answered no when asked if he believed in god on BBC radio. He did say that he had a lot of respect for people who have faith. Which is odd, because I have no respect whatsoever for anyone who is taken in by that steaming pile of coprolite.

At last! A politician who isn’t afraid of telling the world that he doesn’t believe! I was totally sick of Tony I-want-to-sleep-with-the-pope Blair droning on about how much he loved his god. At least with Mr Clegg in charge we won’t have to listen to that rubbish. I know who I’ll be voting for this year.

Just to back up that statement. Some might say that it’s a little shallow to vote for a political party just on the basis of their leader being atheist. My answer to that would go along the lines of "have you seen the other political parties???". I was thinking recently that Labour are just getting old, and the Conservatives are just a large shower of bastards who wet themselves every time Labour make a mistake (which seems to be rather a lot). So the only other choice is the Lib Dems, who have always had good policies and a weak leader, so I wasn’t really interested in them. Until now. From now on I’ll be taking more of an interest in the activities of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.

However, he isn’t completely brave as he also states that his wife is catholic and that his children are being raised as catholic. Sounds like child abuse to me!

Of course the Archbishop of Canterbury got his stinking nose stuck in and said that christianity wasn’t imposed by law. Well not any more it isn’t! Why does that vapid, ridiculous, crazy, monkey scrotum have to get his disgusting tissue of lies stuck in every time someone says that they don’t buy his fairy tales? Why can’t he just leave well alone! What has it got to do with him anyway!?!?!

Tags: Atheism by Philip Norton
No Comments »

I don’t know if you have been following the news recently but there is a British woman called Gillian Gibbons, who has been in prison in Sudan for about 7 days. She has been released today following a pardon by the President Omar al-Bashir. She was originally going to get 50 lashes followed by several years in prison. This was then reduced to 15 days after she was convicted in court of the crime she committed. After two British Mulsim peers went over to Sudan to talk to Omar al-Bashir she was then given a full pardon and is now on her way home. About bloody time really! It should never have happened in the first place.

So why was she in prison? Well she is a school teacher, and after asking the children that she was teaching what they should call the class teddy bear, the name "Muhammad" was chosen. She was then arrested for "insulting Islam".

That’s it. There is nothing more than that. Pathetic.

I have been seeing newspaper reports over the weekend with the front page titles of "KILL HER KILL HER". It seems like not so much the reasoned response of a civilised nation, more the coarse mutterings of some half-demented, stone-age, brainwashed fool. Yet another reason why I find religion distasteful. Islam is definitely a rediculous affair and should be banned worldwide, along with every religion. And before you start saying things like "you shouldn’t mock closely held beliefs" or some dumb rubbish like, that I will say this. If someone came up to me and denounced my beliefs (or lack of them) I would enjoy the discussion. The second you even slightly hint at an Islamic person that they are wrong they start talking about beheading people and then run up and down the streets setting fire to flags. Does this seem disproportionate? Maybe just a little bit!

The only thing I wonder is what it must be like for the people who actually live there. How many people have been beaten or imprisoned wrongly because they walked across the street in the wrong way? I think Sudan, and the rest of the Islamic world, should take a long, hard look at themselves.

Tags: Atheism by Philip Norton
No Comments »

We were on our way home yesterday and I decided to take a different route than I normally take and go through Middlewich. I should have taken the normal route really.

All of a sudden all of the cars in front of me stopped, there was no traffic lights or anything, they just stopped. After a while we moved on a bit, but we all stopped again. By this point there were a lot of cars turning around in the road. I see this a lot and didn’t think anything of it. It was at this point that a police car pulled up and stopped us going any further. A police man then approached my window and informed me that I couldn’t go to Middlewich this way. When I asked what was going on he said "firearms incident".

And I thought nothing could ever happen in Middlewich!

Tags: Atheism by Philip Norton
No Comments »

The Pope has apparently written a document that attacks Atheism, calling it the cause of "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice". The document, which consists of some 75 pages, has been entitled "Saved By Hope" and seems to have been getting a lot of press since it’s release on Friday.

What an idiot! He has been quoted in the text of the paper as saying that Atheists should stop looking at science and knowledge for the answers and look at the Catholic Church instead. This paper is obviously an attempt by the most foolish man in the world to rescue the dying religion that he is the head of. He is attempting to make his mark on his time as ruler, rather than fade into obscurity. The fact that he said this clearly shows that he hasn’t a clue what he is talking about. If I wanted to get answers from a bunch of geriatric crazy people then I would go down to the local old peoples home. Except that I would have to go to a foreign country and do that as the Catholic Church, being the "progressive" church that it is, still speaks a language that died out in common usage more than a millennia ago. Namely Latin. I know a few words of Latin, going through a biology degree it’s hard not to pick them up, but what is the point of learning it only to read out a bunch of drivel written by some crazy stone age man centuries ago?

Looking at his main point, that Atheism is the cause of "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice", I find questionable to say the least. Christianity has been oppressing peoples for more than a thousand years now, with such horrible periods as the crusades, the Spanish inquisition and the Northern Ireland conflict to name a few. Whereas The Pope can only draw his conclusions from a few people who followed what Karl Marx said to the letter. The thing about Marxism is that is has been tried, but it hasn’t worked. This is fair enough, you make mistakes and you go on. However, I wouldn’t say that communism was Atheist. Indeed the main point of communism is that the state is usually turned into a religion in itself and everyone preys to the state and not the church. The Pope seems to have forgotten that Atheism is more than just saying "I don’t believe in god", it’s about not going in with everything that religion stands for. The oppression of knowledge, the oppression of free speech, the oppression of free choice, the oppression of minorities. One of the reasons I am not religious is because I do not want to be associated with anyone who singles out a particular race, creed, life style and says "I hate you because you are different".

The main theme of this paper is hope. That for some reason everyone should have hope that god will fix everything. I notice a small lexical transition from the word "faith" to to the word "hope" here, and I really do hope that it goes no further. I find it totally and completely abhorrent that anyone would sit about for their entire life and say "well there is no point in doing anything because I know god will sort it all out for me". The only person who will sort out your life is yourself. If we all actually got off our backsides and stopped crying and complaining at each other about how he believes in that, and she doesn’t dress properly, and actually DID something about the world it would be fantastic. I would love to live in it! Religion doesn’t have the answers because it just gets you to "pray" for someone, rather than helping them. Oh yes, I won’t actually do anything for you, but I will "pray" that everything becomes good. This is quite clearly rubbish and I feel sorry to anyone stupid enough to fall for it.

I sometimes find it hard to imagine what The Pope does all day long. I know that a certain amount of his time is spent "making stuff up", but what else does he do? Obviously he is looking for more people to join the Catholic Church, and for what reason? The answer is simple, to line his pockets with huge piles of cash. I’ll bet it isn’t cheap to run an organised religion! With the recent best selling books that have published on the subject of Atheism I suspect that he is trying to jump on the gravy train and soak up some of the cash to be made in publishing. Either that or he is trying to get more bums on seats, or pews in his case, but only from a monetary point of view.

Personally I can’t stand The Pope. He stands for everything I find hard to understand about the human race. I don’t see that he serves a useful purpose, other than to "make stuff up". The only good use I can see for the Vatican City is to bulldoze it down and make it into farmland. Feeding people, now there’s an idea that doesn’t involve sitting on your bum and praying/doing nothing.

Tags: Atheism by Philip Norton
No Comments »