Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly God was tired of hearing all the bickering.

Finally fed up, God said, “THAT’S IT! I have had enough. I am going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job.”

So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away.

They moused.

They faxed.

They e-mailed.

They e-mailed with attachments.

They downloaded.

They did spreadsheets!

They wrote reports.

They created labels and cards.

They created charts and graphs.

They did some genealogy reports.

They did every job known to man.

Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency and Satan was faster than hell

Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off.

Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld.

Jesus just sighed.

Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted their computers. Satan started searching frantically, screaming:

“It’s gone! It’s all GONE! “I lost everything when the power went out!”

Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours of work.

Satan observed this and became irate.

“Wait!” he screamed. “That’s not fair! He cheated! How come he has all his work and I don’t have any?”

God just shrugged and said,

JESUS SAVES

It’s certainly a valid criticism of most of the churches I’ve gone to, as many Churches aren’t friendly to nonreligious people wanting to see what things are like. I’m utterly sick of people asking me “What church do you go to?”, and then seeing the look of shock on their face when I tell them I don’t go to any church, I’m not religious, or (worse!) if I was to use the word “atheist”.

The quote being discussed by the Friendly Christian is as follows:

“I’m not religious. I don’t think much about God, except when I am in a pinch and need some special favors. I have no particular reason to think he’ll deliver, but I sometimes take a shot anyway. Other than that, I’m just not that interested in God.”

This, to me, sounds like a person who has no reason to believe in God except for the simple fact that many others seem to have this belief. If one is raised in a society where God is almost universally accepted, if one made no effort to actively think about God, what possible conclusions could that person come to?

This is where I think the Friendly Christian has got it wrong. This person doesn’t sound like someone who’s been shunned by the church, but someone who (quite legitimately, in my opinion) has no interest in God because the idea has little or no influence on their life. In an ideal world (one where personal beliefs in supernatural beings remained personal – in the sense that your beliefs were unable to affect my way of life), I think such a lack of interest in God would be quite common.

That’s not to say an interest in God is a bad thing, however. As you might have discovered, however, I do have an interest in religion and the concepts of God. These ideas do have an influence on my life because our politicians make them relevant, and because I want to understand why so many people have these beliefs. I find the idea of God interesting from a historical and cultural point of view, and want to learn more.

Are you interested in God? If not, why not?

1. Well, not so recently, but it was recently when I first drafted this post. As you can probably tell if you’ve been subscribing to my blog, I’ve been quite slack recently. I won’t bore you with the personal details, but lets just say there’s been a lot on my plate. My apologies, and I’ll hopefully get back to a more reasonable blogging schedule again now.

Update (26/08): Thanks to all of you who are spreading the word, with any luck they’ll get their required members through this post alone! Two points to clarify:

1. This post was in no way authorised or endorsed by the party – it’s just my way of trying to help out.
2. If you’re not eligible to vote in Australia, don’t try and join up, but help spread the word if you know other Aussie Atheists.

Hey all you Aussies out there (if you’re not an Aussie, keep reading, you might still be able to help by spreading the word),

I recently received an email from Frank Gomez of the Secular Party of Australia (previously the Freedom from Religion Party), which I wanted to get your help with. Members of the Secular Party are hoping to run in this year’s election, but as the party doesn’t have enough members yet, they’ll need to run as independents, giving them a much lower chance of success.

All you need to do, if you want to help, is to fill out and mail (yes, snail mail) in the form below to join the party – membership is free. For 20 seconds of your time, and the cost of a 50c stamp, you could help Atheists get a stronger voice in Australian parliament.

• Secular Party of Australia Membership Application

Perhaps if you’re not an Aussie yourself, but might have Australian readers on your own blog, or know of some Aussie Atheists? Please help get the word out there, either direct them to this blog, or post something on your own blog if you can!

If anyone’s interested, I’m posting the full text of the email below.

Hi members and supporters,

The party’s executive has decided to contest this year’s Federal election. However, as we do not have the numbers yet to register as a party, candidates will have to run as independents. This means that we cannot use the words “Secular” or “Freedom From Religion” on ballot papers.

I am writing to all of you because we need your membership of the party to be official so that it can count for registration.

I have attached a membership form, and for those of you for whom I have a postal address you will receive (or may have already have received) these in the mail also.

I urge you all to complete and send back the attached form to the below address.

I also wish to ask you whether you know someone else who would be interested in joining.

We currently have around 300 members and need only 200 more in order to register as a party for this year’s election. Registering the party would mean being able to use the party’s name and abbreviations in how to vote cards and ballot papers, and would increase out vote many fold.

If every member of the party sent back two forms – their own and for someone else – then we would reach the 500 we need in a matter of weeks.

Otherwise we need to wait another 3 years to contest as a registered party. That’s another 3 years of more religion in politics – whoever wins the election. MAKE A DIFFERENCE !!

FRANK GOMEZ
SECULAR PARTY www.secular.org.au
NATIONAL VICE-PRESIDENT
19 Fishers Reserve
Petersham NSW 2049

While I don’t think Australia will ever be as dominated by fundamentalist religious dogma as is the case in the USA, it’s scary to see religion and politics closely intertwined in Australia, as it’s certainly possibly that we could head down a similar path. Our two major party leaders, Kevin Rudd, and John Howard are both strong Christians (or, so they claim), as are many of the other Members of Parliament.

Democrats¹ leader Lyn Allison says there are too many federal MPs with strong religious views.

Senator Allison says the separation of church and state is becoming blurred.

“The Prime Minister this morning said that there were a great number of Members of Parliament in Coalition ranks with very strong ties to the Christian church,” she said. “I know this is a Christian country but people with very strong religious views are heavily over-represented, if I can put it that way, in the Parliament,” she said.²

I’ve always been a swinging voter, and I don’t support either major Australian party – my votes in the past have gone to the Greens, the Democrats, or the odd independent (with the unfortunate necessity of nominating both of the major parties somewhere with my preferences). It worries me, however, when I can see the line between politics and religion in Australia getting blurred.

Some claim that comments like those of Lyn Allison are misguided, but I think it’s a legitimate concern. There’s certainly no problem with having a reasonable percentage of Christians represented in parliament (if 64% of the population are Christian, then their views might be well represented if we have 64% Christian MPs). My problem is that politics seems to be becoming more about religion than it should be, and who knows where that will lead? Honestly, I don’t care what religious views our leaders have, as long as they’re able to put their views aside when it counts. I worry that the efforts of our potential Prime Ministers to emphasise their Christianity will push the focus where it doesn’t belong.

(Oh, and sorry this post was late – I try to write one major post each Sunday, but I’ve had a rather busy weekend!)

1. A minor party in Australia
2. Donald, P., Iggulden, T. (August 2007) Howard, Rudd Woo Christians Online, ABC News

I think that all the “prophets” and religious leaders believed in the message they preached, but they didn’t expect (or want) their messages to be accepted as divine and unquestionable truth – they wanted people to think for themselves. I believe that Jesus, if he was a real man and if his message hadn’t been distorted by religion, would still be revered today without needing needing to claim that he was “God”¹.

Christians often ask themselves, “What Would Jesus Do?”, and I think if Jesus lived today, he’d be amazed by the magic all around us, and might even “find God” in a similar way to Einstein:

Sometimes he was really using God as just a sort of convenient metaphor. But he did have, I think, a genuine cosmic religious feeling, a sense of admiration at the intellectual ingenuity of the universe. Not just its majesty, but its extraordinary subtlety and beauty and mathematical elegance.²

I think Jesus, today, would be more like a modern Buddhist or perhaps a “hippy” (jokes are often made about Jesus being the first hippy, but I think all jokes aside there’s a lot of truth to that).

If we ask ourselves the question, “What Would Jesus Believe?”, whatever the answer is, I definitely don’t believe he’d be a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim, for that matter. It makes me think of the Cat’s religion in Red Dwarf…

1. As far as I’m aware, there’s not a lot of evidence that he actually claimed that he was God, but even if he did, perhaps he meant it in an entirely different way.
2. Davies, Paul (2007) Einstein’s God

• 7 Proofs That We Live in a Computer Simulation – or Why Proofs of Gods Existance Are Unconvicing
• Why I took so long to accept evolution – a.k.a. Why every christian should read their own bible. “part of what helped me along was actually reading the Bible in high school, being horrified by much of it”
• denialism blog : I can has souls? – There is a god, and it’s a cat.
• Religion and Sexual Ethics – A nice summary of the moral position of various religions. Interesting to compare catholicism and buddhism side by side! (I think I’m with the Buddhists, here)
• LOL cat Bible – Personally, I hate this pathetic LOLspeak crap, although this picture is funny… “In teh beginning, Invisible Man make univerz. Invisible Man say, I can has light. Gots light.”

I must admit, I used to think that science and religion were natural enemies. How can something that relies on faith not be in direct opposition to a practice which specifically relies on reason and evidence? The thing is, it wasn’t always like that, and to some it still isn’t. Of course, there are those who choose to create conflict, but conflict isn’t necessary. Historically, science grew from the church. The first scientists were clergy, and scientific research was sponsored by the church. The church wanted to understand God’s world, and science was one of the ways they tried to do that.

Before I really began looking into things myself, I thought that the only rational scientific view could be that God (as always, I use the term very loosely) does not exist. But there is so much magic in the universe that we can’t help but feel insignificant in it. Even if the universe does exist due to a cosmic fluke, that’s still pretty darn amazing and if we could ever truly understand that, I think that would be on par with a religious experience.

Arthur C. Clark’s famous quote “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” seems to be true not only of technology as we know it, but also the natural world around us, which possibly explains why many seem to believe the only option is that this world was created by a “sufficiently advanced being”. As our science advances, we discover more and more things that seem like magic – we continually discover new exciting things that seem completely unreal and magical. The quantum world, for example – even the greatest scientific minds still can’t fully grasp what happens in our world on a quantum level. As time goes on, our science progresses, and we understand these things differently, but that doesn’t make them any less amazing. While I accept that both science and spirituality/religion have limits to what they can explain, they both seem to be striving to understand this same magic.

Can’t science be a path to God? If God exists in all things (as is often claimed), then by understanding the world around us through science, we could begin to understand God. Sure, the God we might find wouldn’t be Yahweh, Allah or Jesus – but some parts of the bible have to be interpreted as metaphor, right?

Further Reading:

• The Myth of Conflict
• Ferngren, Gary (2002) Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction

(via GoComics)

• Prince Of Peace – God Of War Gets First Review And A Release Date – A film by John Campea (of The Movie Blog) about Christianity and the war in Iraq. The first five minutes are available in the post.
• Ten reasons why beer is better than Jesus – and #11. Beer tastes better…
• The Ultimate Spoiler… – Don’t click this link if you don’t like finding out how the book ends (but… come on, you know you want to click it)
• The Primate Diaries: Today’s Math Lesson – The differences between fundamentalists and moderate believers and atheists.
• Actus Formalis Defectionis Ab Ecclesia Catholica instrument of debaptism – The “Actus Formalis Defectionis Ab Ecclesia Catholica” (that document you can use to ask to be “debaptised” from the Catholic Church – NOW IN ENGLISH!
• BibleMap.org – Want to know where all those places the bible talks about actually ARE? Look no further…

• Letter to the Editor: Kick the Atheists out of America – “I don’t care if they have never committed a crime, atheists are the reason crime is rampant.”
• Philosophy and the proof of God’s existence by Roger Jones – A nice summary of many of the traditional “proofs” of God’s existance, including the argument from design, pascals wager, and the philosophies of Kant, Hegal and others.
• What Evolution Left Behind On Humans – “I?ve always been fascinated with human evolution. To me, the most fascinating part of human evolution is learning about what was ?left behind? on our bodies from our ancestors and from our prenatal development.”
• Wife Beating – It?s therapeutic – I’m glad someone’s cleared this up. Wife beating is not a rule, it’s just therapeutic. Oh, but there are limits!
• Pharyngula: They’re running out of virgins! – Nice tasteless video about terrorists debating how many virgins they get in paradise