New Atheist Bus Campaign Coming to Edmonton

I wish.
Or how about...

Ph’nglui mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

Make your own lovely bus campaign slogans here!

In God We Don't Trust

The folks over at NBC have a poll up asking whether or not "In God We Trust" should be removed from U.S. currency. The "No" side is winning, unsurprisingly, 84% to 14%.

The issue of removing the official American federal motto - which, by the way, has only been official since 1956 - is one I hear popping up in the news every so often. Of course, the idea is constantly scoffed at in the media, but it is one that I support. Separation of church and state is, by constitution, mandatory in America and the motto does nothing to achieve this.

But that is not the main reason why I think "In God We Trust" should be removed from coinage, or anything that has to do with politics. The main reason I think is because it is quite simply wrong.

I don't trust in God (but then again, I'm Canadian, so I don't count). Any reasonable American doesn't trust in God. I mean, that God fellow is notoriously untrustworthy. Think of all the poor cancer patients who have been prayed for, only to die a few short months or even weeks later. Think of the residents of New Orleans who, when hurricane Katrina hit, prayed for their situation to get better, only to find their city spiral into wreck and ruin. For someone who is supposed to hear all those prayers, and give aid to those who really need it, you really can't trust him to deliver on that.

He's also a deceitful God. Consider the story of Isaac and Abraham. God tells Abraham "You must take your son Isaac, and sacrifice him to me, to prove your faith!" Now, when a voice booms down from the sky, commanding you to kill your kid, you have to be very very sure that's what the disembodied voice told you to do. You don't want to be mistaken about that sort of thing. God must have reassured Abraham that, yes, honestly, he had to kill his son. Abraham trusted God. But right at the very last second, God sends an angel down to stop Abraham and is all "Haha, just kidding man, I can't believe you fell for that shit! Go sacrifice that ram instead." Now, does that sound like someone you can trust? Someone that makes you almost murder your child just for a laugh? I don't think so.

And what about the second coming of Jesus he promised? It's been two thousand years and he hasn't shown up yet. I don't think he's coming. We've been duped. Mislead.

So no, in God we don't trust. God's a lying bastard.

The God that Time Forgot

It is a somewhat common claim by creationists that the concept of time is a huge problem to atheists. Just days ago, for instance, Kirk Durston used this same argument in his debate with P.Z. Meyers. The "Argument from Time" may have different varriations. Durston's argument went something like this.
"When did time start? What created time? In order for time to start/be created, there had to be a time prior, which was 'timeless'. The prime cause/creator, then had to be timeless"
Ray Comfort makes a similar claim about the "timelessness" of God:

"Time is a dimension God created, to which He subjected man. With God there is no time. He dwells in "eternity," a dimension of which we have no comprehension. You will go into eternity when you "pass on" from the earth."

However, the way I see it, time creates a bigger problem for Creationists than for us atheists.

Consider how we measure time. Surely we can count the seconds ticking away on the face of a clock, but our ability to measure time goes deeper than that. As conscious beings, we can measure time in our head. That is to say, we have the ability to "feel" the passage of time. You might not know exactly how much time has passed since you got up this morning without checking your watch, but you have the intrinsic knowledge that it's in the realm of "past". You know that it happened prior to the current instant without refering to a clock. Our minds have the abiliy to sense the passage of time, however inaccurate timepieces they may be.

Now let us consider God. God is supposedly omnipotent. There is supposedly no limit to God's abilities or capibilities. Argubly, God is a concious entity (it is claimed that we cannot know the "mind" of God, after all), and his omnipotence, then, applies to his cognitive prowess as much as it does to his other aspects. It follows that we cannot posess a cognitive ability that God does not, him being omnipotent and all. God, then, should be able to sense the passage of time, just as well - if not better - than we can.

Creationists like Ray and Durston claim that God existed "before time", in an era of "timelessness". It was during this "timeless" era that God decided to create the universe, giving birth to energy, matter and time itself. Being a conscious entity, the creation had to have been a conscious effort on God's behalf. If God was conscious before he created time, then he would have been able to measure the passage of time in his Godly mind before he had even created time. This is an obvious logical contradiction.

"But time didn't exist, so he was unable to measure it in his mind!" the Creationists will cry. But that is unallowable if God is conscious and creation was a conscious act. For example, imagine God thought to himself "Gee, it's awfuly boring sitting in this vast nothingness. I think I'll create the universe for some entertainment." If God was conscious - and he would have to be to think such a thing - then in his mind, he would know that a certain amount of time elapsed between him fist muttering "Gee" and ending with "entertainment".

The bottom line is if God is conscious and the creation a conscious act at all, God could not have existed in a "timeless" era. There are two ways Creationists could ratify this problem. One is to change their mind about the nature of time: that it has no beginning or end, that it exists independently of God or Nature - in which case it ceases to be a problem for anybody. The second, more likely way a creationist would try to dodge the logical hurdle they ran themselves into is to say that the genesis of the universe was NOT a conscious act, and that (at least prior to creation) God himself was not conscious.
But if this is the case, why need God? With an unconscious Creator/creation you can claim no theistic or deistic explanation for the origin of the universe. The best you could get away with is a pantheistic explanation - that the universe IS God, however it came to be.

Time, then, is far more of a problem for Creationists than it is for atheists. Claiming God created time leads to a logical contradiction, and trying to avoid this contradiction gives no support to the idea that a theistic/deistic God exists in the first place. Quite to the contrary, it supports the idea of His nonexistance.

God: The Failed Science Professor

I wish I could say I was creative enough to have come up with this, but I didn't.
Taken from http://www.getamused.com/jokes/0101103.html

Why God Never Received Tenure at Any University
1. He had only one major publication.
2. It was in Hebrew.
3. It had no references.
4. It wasn't published in a refereed journal.
5. Some even doubt He wrote it Himself.
6. It may be true that He created the world, but what has He done since then?
7. His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.
8. The scientific community has had a hard time replicating His results.
9. He never applied to the Ethics Board for permission to use human subjects.
10. When one experiment went awry He tried to cover it up by drowning the subjects.
11. When subjects didn't behave as predicted, He deleted them from the sample.
12. He rarely came to class, just told students to read the Book.
13. Some say He had His son teach the class.
14. He expelled His first two students for learning.
15. Although there were only ten requirements, most students failed His tests.
16. His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountaintop.