So, we survived Christmas. Just.
Christmas is kind of nice, in theory, but it has some troubling aspects:
It’s supposedly a religious festival, but we’re all atheists now.
Families are forced together for an unnaturally long period of time.
Christmas is an ugly orgy of conspicuous consumption.
Fixing Xmas
How can we fix Christmas?
Make it illegal to mention Xmas prior to [...]
To a child, a church’s pointed steeple can look a lot like a rocket. I know this because my son excitedly points them out, shouting, “ROCKIT!”.
I thought this was very sweet, and I gently explained that the ‘rocket’ was actually a building, a building called a ‘church’.
Then it occurred to me how very different churches [...]
Garments are sacred. Not just fancy designer garments, but pants too. Mormons have special pants for praying in. It seems the pants are part of their belief system.
Do other religions have special underwear?
I wonder what happens if you pray to Mormo without the special knickers on?
Some religious people go nuts with joy when they worship. It’s not like in England, where people sit very still and wear Laura Ashley.
Step inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, touch a monk and have a piece o’ SMACKDOWN:
They’re not even well choreographed! Surey God (if he exists) deserves better dancing?
We’re all going to die!
Sorry… in the first of my series of nice ideas and general acts of intelligence, I present a series of stickers by the Existential Resistance Army. Intended to interrupt daily life with messages designed to create cognitive dissonance in the minds of the mindless, these stickers should help us all remember [...]
Jesus is all over the buses, on adverts paid for by religious groups . But soon atheism will be represented on public transport too.
The British Humanist Association have taken on Ariane Sherine’s idea and set up a fund for atheism advertising.
Now, thanks to a rapidly growing pool of donations, the views of atheists will stand [...]
I’m not a big fan of greetings cards. People buy them automatically, at prescribed times, regardless of whether they want to or not. People buy meaningless, sentimental, mass-produced cards from jumbo tat emporiums, write something meaningless inside and send it off to join the meaningless pile.
I love writing. I really do. Provided I have something to write about, I could do it all day long. But there’s a problem with writing all day: you don’t move.
And the problems with not moving are:
Bed sores
Cardiac lethargy
Thickened arteries
Rusty joints
Premature death
Numb bottom
Stale brain
I could go on, but I’ve made my point. I really hate [...]
A couple of years ago I read an amazing book. It was thrilling and terrifying and made me look at life in a new way. It is The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker.
Ernest Becker believed that people are massively affected by their fear of their own death:
“The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, [...]
