THE HEAVENS—Sources close to God reported Thursday that the Creator of the Universe and Author of Our Eternal Salvation suffered a crippling bout of existential dread this week, lying awake all night as He pondered His own immortality.

Anxiously drumming His fingers, the all-powerful being was reportedly unable to sleep as His mind raced with thoughts of the unfathomable nature of eternity, the relentless expansion of space and time, and His own never-ending existence.

“Is this all there is? I’m here now, 70 or 80 years go by, and then I’m still here—forever?” said God, staring up at the ceiling after a half hour of tossing and turning. “That’s horrible! And what’s worse, at some point everyone I know will have died, which means no one anywhere in the universe will even remember I ever existed.”

“Fuck, that’s a terrifying thought,” God added.

According to reports, God then got up, put on His robes, and paced through the heavens, feeling a sense of dread in the pit of His stomach as He contemplated His overwhelming significance in the grand scheme of things.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/god-freaks-self-out-by-lying-awake-contemplating-o,31097/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=standard-post%3Aheadline%3Adefault

Religion is still very important to many Americans and it will be a very long time before we will live in a world without religion. It might not ever happen. However, we are getting much closer to that world, and before we know it, religious belief will occupy the same place as fortunetellers in our society. We are at the dawn of a new reality in America in which people are starting to be more interested in actual reality than they are in ancient superstitions.

According to a 2012 Gallup-International poll (PDF), the number of "convinced atheists" in the United States has risen from 1 percent in 2005 to 5 percent in 2012. I want to point out here that we are not talking about some vague group of "nones," or even people who shy away from the "A" label. That 5 percent doesn't count those who only identify as agnostic or secular. It doesn't count those who only use the Humanist or rationalist labels, either. We aren't even talking about people who are just a little bit atheist; we are talking about "convinced atheists." That's 5 percent of the American public.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/staks-rosch/godless-america-the-new-r_b_2561272.html

New Billboard in San Diego Puts Atheism in Positive Light


(San Diego, California, January 30, 2013) "Atheism: A personal relationship with reality."

These words appear over an image of a curtain, held open by a stack of books, that reveals an appealing natural scene. They are part of a prominent 14 ft x 48 ft billboard scheduled to go up today along the Martin Luther King Jr. Freeway (SR 94) near College Avenue. Its appearance is the product of a joint effort by the national American Atheists and the local San Diego Coalition of Reason. The latter is a cooperative network of 18 atheist, humanist, skeptic and church-state separation groups. These include student, military, parenting, support and social groups as well as lecture societies and congregationally-structured communities.

The billboard cost $4,000, paid for by American Atheists and local contributors, and will remain for the next four weeks. For a graphic art image of the billboard, free for media use, visit www.SDCoR.org.

http://atheists.org/new-billboard-san-diego-puts-atheism-positive-light

It is quite extraordinary how religious people seem to be comfortable telling atheists that they are arrogant for asserting publicly that there is no god. Those on the liberal end of the political spectrum tend to be particularly prone to this failing, perhaps feeling the need to protect their flank with the ‘religious moderates’.

As part of this effort they sometimes equate atheists and religious fundamentalists. One example I came across recently is Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald, who in 2011 expressed his displeasure with us atheists who annoyingly keep asking believers to produce credible evidence for the existence of god. He thinks we are arrogant for saying that god does not exist since no such evidence has yet been produced.

He begins his essay with a quotation from a 4th-century Christian philosopher named Gregory of Nyssa that pretty much tells you what his argument is going to be: “That which is without quality cannot be measured, the invisible cannot be examined, the incorporeal cannot be weighed, the limitless cannot be compared, the incomprehensible does not admit of more or less.” Or as Pitts puts it, “God is not proven. God is felt.”

Unsurprisingly, Pitts finds common ground with Marilynne Robinson whom regular readers of this blog will know that I find insufferable because of her wooly-headed thinking buried under layers of metaphors that obfuscate rather than clarify.

Both of them seem to not realize that there is no difference between the imperceptible and the nonexistent. They both seem to think that because they ‘feel’ god, that this makes god real, though how they know that this feeling is caused by an external agent and not by the same workings of the brain that give them other feelings is never explained. When Pitts ‘feels’ thirsty, does he think that some supernatural agent creates his desire for a glass of water? How would he know if this is the case or not?

http://machineslikeus.com/news/i-feel-therefore-it-exists

In Texas public schools, children learn that the Bible provides scientific proof that Earth is 6,000 years old, that the origins of racial diversity trace back to a curse placed on Noah's son, and that astronauts have discovered "a day missing in space" that corroborates biblical stories of the sun standing still.

These are some of the findings detailed in Reading, Writing & Religion II, a new report by the Texas Freedom Network that investigates how public schools in the Lone Star State promote religious fundamentalism under the guise of offering academic courses about the Bible. The report, written by Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University, found that more than half of the state's public-school Bible courses taught students to read the book from a specifically Christian theological perspective—a clear violation of rules governing the seperation of church and state.

Many school districts pushed specific strains of fundamentalism in the classes:

"The Bible is the written word of God," proclaims a slide shown to students in suburban Houston's Klein Independent School District (ISD). Another slide adds: "The Bible is united in content because there is no contradictions [sic] in the writing. The reason for this is because the Bible is written under God's direction and inspiration."
A PowerPoint slide in Brenham ISD in Central Texas claims that "Christ's resurrection was an event that occurred in time and space—that is was, in reality, historical and not mythological." (emphasis in original)
In North Texas, Prosper ISD promotes the Rapture, claiming in course materials that "the first time the Lord gathered his people back was after the Babylonian captivity. The second time the Lord will gather his people back will be at the end of the age."

Some Bible classes in Texas public school appear to double as "science" classes, circumventing limits placed on teaching creationism. Eastland ISD, a school district outside Fort Worth, shows videos produced by the Creation Evidence Museum, which claims to posess a fossil of a dinosaur footprint atop "a pristine human footprint."

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/01/how-texas-public-schools-still-teach-creationism