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"One of the most annoying things about religious folks is that they just cannot keep their 'good news' to themselves." - Jeffrey Tayler
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"It’s time we woke up: religion is never the solution, never to be respected, and, always and ever, the problem." - Jeffrey Tayler
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"Stating belief in a sky god and his magic book suggests gullibility, childish wishful thinking, and a damning dearth of cognitive rigor, and, if nothing else, prompts the question, what other absurdities might they believe in?" - Jeffrey Tayler
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"After all, in the United States, as has already happened across much of Europe, rejection of the supernatural continues its unstoppable expansion, with religion’s demise promising the sunniest pastures mankind has ever known." - Jeffrey Tayler
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"Religion is, after all, implicitly arrogant. It assumes it knows the truth, that its followers are saved and that the rest of us are deluded and even damned. Are we really going to sit by as faith movements demand “tolerance” for such views, and try to make us to submit to their wills? Whether religion offers solace to some isn’t the issue. The submission and control it seeks to impose is. Toss out the Supreme Being and we’re left with one set of humans striving to dominate another, and justifying themselves with ideology based on nothing but myth." - Jeffrey Tayler
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Religions are nothing but sets of ideas, and as such should be susceptible to discussion, criticism and even ridicule and satire. All the more so since candidates (both Republican and Democrat) often drag their faith into the public arena and boast about it, pander to religious blocs (and especially the evangelicals) for votes and cash, confer with religious leaders and (mostly where Republicans are concerned) base policy on precepts originating in religious texts (think reproductive rights, opposition to same-sex marriage, and right-to-die legislation).
In view of this, journalists should have long ago declared open season on religion. Interviewers should be hounding faith-flaunting candidates with hard-hitting questions, as they would on any other subject of import. They should disregard faith-based assertions and demand justification on evidentiary grounds. Politicians should be made uncomfortable for ignoring the worldview and concerns of rationalists.
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"The Bible is brimming with rank absurdities that insult our intelligence and affront our dignity as twenty-first-century, post-Enlightenment humans residing in one of the most developed countries on Earth." - Jeffrey Tayler
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Ted Cruz and Kim Davis, true love forever: The right-wing theocracy that threatens the rule of law:
The faith-flaunting Senator Ted Cruz and evangelical diehard Kim Davis are meant for each other. It’s a pity both are already married – with Davis, in fact, having been so many, many times.I wish that there were millions, even billions of Jeffrey Taylers. The world would be a better place.
Davis is, of course, the Rowan County (Kentucky) clerk who, citing authority from a made-up heavenly satrap (aka the Lord Almighty), has defied a federal court ruling ordering her to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and who now, as a result, sat several days in a Kentucky jail for contempt of court. Cruz, a practicing Southern Baptist, is campaigning for the Republican nomination, and is displaying contempt for the Constitution he swore to uphold (on a Bible, unfortunately, but some are working to abolish this practice) by supporting Davis. He is thereby fomenting disobedience to the Supreme Court, which, as we know, ruled in favor of same-sex marriages early in the summer.
Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution establishes the Supreme Court as the locus of overriding judicial power in our land. One who defies it must be made to suffer the legal consequences; should any American, for any reason, be able to ignore the Supreme Court and suffer no penalty, we would be justified in saying none of us live in a law-based republic.
That a government employee is displaying symptoms of late-stage faith-derangement syndrome and, as a direct result, behaves boorishly, cruelly and even illegally, should surprise no one. Look no further than the headlines and you will find, on any given day, the votaries of at least one Abrahamic mythology showing no decent respect to the opinions of mankind and behaving in ways that outrage their fellow humans. Wherever you find monotheism, you find pig-headed ignorance, thuggish coercion and even violence...
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Every Sunday Jeffrey Tayler writes about religion in Salon. He doesn't pull any punches and I think he's great.
Matthew Balen doesn't like Jeffrey Tayler, he doesn't like him one bit. He tells us what Tayler has already told us in his own article. I guess one is to assume that there is no need to dissect what Taylor writes. The fact that Matthew Balen finds it all so horrible, shocking and unbelievable must mean that it actually is. Balen really doesn't offer any reason or insight as to why this is so, it just is. Kind of like God and the Bible, I suppose.
At the end Balen just can't help himself. After telling us that: "Tayler vomited up a final attack on Pope Francis near the end of his article" he concludes with the extremely tiresome, often repeated canard that atheists are evil incarnate:
Of course, as Tayler decries how the Pope and the Church supposedly bring "ruin" to the masses, he glosses over how his fellow atheists actually don't have a history of being a "forgiving, reasonable bunch." One would only need to look at the tens of millions butchered at the hands of atheist despots like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the Kim family of North Korea.
Religious apologists, particularly those of the Christian variety, are big fans of what I have dubbed, the atheist atrocities fallacy. Christians commonly employ this fallacy to shield their egos from the harsh reality of the brutality of their own religion, by utilizing a most absurd form of the tu quoque (“you too”) fallacy, mingled with numerous other logical fallacies and historical inaccuracies. Despite the fact that the atheist atrocities fallacy has already been thoroughly exposed by Hitchens and other great thinkers, it continues to circulate amongst the desperate believers of a religion in its death throes. Should an atheist present a believer with the crimes committed by the Holy See of the Inquisition(s), the Crusaders and other faith-wielding misanthropes, they will often hear the reply; “Well, what about Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler? They were atheists, and they killed millions!”
The atheist atrocities fallacy is a multifaceted and multidimensional monster, comprised of a cocktail of illogically contrived arguments. It is, at its core, a tu quoque fallacy, employed to deflect justified charges of religious violence, by erroneously charging atheism with similar, if not worse, conduct. But it is much more than this, for within its tangled and mangled edifice can be found the false analogy fallacy, the poisoning of the well fallacy, the false cause fallacy, and even an implied slippery slope fallacy.It's a long article which should be read in it's entirety. I like these two examples:
Example 1:I do think, however, that some Catholic priests are rapists because of the Catholic Church, and that ISIS is extremely violent because of Islam.
Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were all non-figure skaters. Therefore we can conclude that not being a figure skater causes a person to commit atrocities.
Example 2:
None of these three dictators believed in the existence of leprechauns, hence the lack of belief in leprechauns causes people to commit atrocities.
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