Idiotic stories of the superstitious folks are endless. Here is yet another bizarre and amusing story that I found on Yahoo News that resembles something one might find in a production of Monty Python.

ANKARA, Turkey – Over a thousand Turks spent the first day of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in emergency wards on Sunday after stabbing themselves or suffering other injuries while sacrificing startled animals.

At least 1,413 people — referred to as “amateur butchers” by the Turkish media — were treated at hospitals across the country, most suffering cuts to their hands and legs, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Four people were severely injured, crushed under the weight of large animals that fell on top of them, the agency reported. Another person was hurt when a crane used to lift an animal tumbled onto him, the agency said.

Three other people suffered heart attacks and died while trying to restrain animals, CNN-Turk television reported.

Muslims sacrifice cows, sheep, goats and bulls during the four-day religious holiday, a ritual commemorating the biblical account of God’s provision of a ram for Abraham to sacrifice as he was about to slay his son. They share the meat with friends, family and neighbors and give part of it to the poor.

Turkish authorities have introduced fines for those who slaughter animals outside facilities set up by local municipalities, but many Turks ignored the rules and sacrificed animals in their backyards or on roadsides.

I usually don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but this year I have made one that I am going to follow through with. I am going to be totally open about my atheism and will no longer hide it. I am not going to be obnoxious about it like xians and go “witnessing” to people or knocking on doors or standing on street corners passing out pamphlets and carrying signs, but I will no longer sit silently and allow religious folks to think I agree with them or “respect” their superstitious, judgemental belief system. I can no longer just sit and smile politely while someone tells me I am going to a place called hell for simply not believing in their magical being, and who act like they are so much better than I am because they have an imaginary friend and I don’t.

I have already started gradually over the past couple of years, and have already been shunned by my niece and her self-righteous fundie husband for it. Does it bother me? Yes. But does pretending for the sake of peace and giving in to their guidelines and catering to their beliefs bother me? Yes…so I would rather be honest and be bothered than hide and be bothered because of things I want to say but do not.

I received an email from Martian from Martian Anthropologist some time ago, concerning the issue of atheists “coming out of the closet”, and he suggested this topic would make for a good discussion. I know that for many atheists, admitting openly that they are atheists poses great risk to their jobs and could even put themselves and their families in physical danger. We would all love to know about Sean for instance, about his talents, his life, his background and family, but for his family left behind, that could have consequences that one must be ready to deal with. And consideration must be taken for the safety of job and family. Who would think we need to be this secretive about who we are in the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” in the 21st century?

There is a recent article at American Atheist titled Atheists say they’ve been threatened over their views The article illustrates just how cautious one must be when expressing ones views if they are the “wrong” views according to those so-called loving xian folks.

TommyKey of Exercise in Futility says he has a bumper sticker he wishes to put on his car, yet is hesitant to do so even though he lives in the vicinity of NYC. My son has a science fish on his car, and so far no one has bothered it. But he doesn’t deny that he could one day come out and find a nasty note like this fellow in the story at A.A. had happen to him:

The note on Blair Scott’s windshield wasn’t a nice one.

The anonymous writer had to have seen Scott’s atheist-themed bumper sticker, an uncommon sight in the small south Alabama town where he lived at the time.

“It just amazed me that people would take time out of their day to return to their car, grab a pen and paper and write a ‘You’re going to hell and you’re going to burn in a lake of fire,’ and stick it under my windshield,” said Scott, a 36-year-old veteran who installs computer systems in prisons.

While atheists cannot have a simple bumper sticker on our cars without fear of vandalism and hate-filled notes being placed on our windshields, we must be tolerant of 50-foot-tall execution symbols along highways, billboards that advertise Jeebus and tell us we are going to hell, xian fishes and crosses on cars, etc. and we are not to vandalize these things. We are expected to “respect” them.

The article ends with this quote:

“I think there’s almost an unwillingness to come out of the closet for most atheists, especially in the Bible belt, because of the type of repercussions from people of faith,” he said. “Some nasty stuff has happened to people, some really nasty stuff. And people are afraid of that.”

I, for one, am getting to old and fed up to be afraid anymore. I AM who I AM. Anyone who doesn’t like my worldview, can just learn to “respect” it.

Sean wrote a similar post on this on May 23rd, 2006 titled: Are you an “out” atheist?

I was wandering around on the Net aimlessly (as usual), and I found this interesting little piece from the Associated Press:

So, I guess it turns out that not only Dubya is a massive dickhead — i.e., 25x more of a dickhead than Satan — but it also seemed to downplay in some sense how much of a dickhead Satan is — i.e., I mean, he only got 1% of the vote.

I also like the commentary:

SCARBOROUGH: Now you don’t have to have a political doctorate in Political Science to realize it’s never a good sign when you’re outpolled by Lucifer.

Hey GifSters, it’s been a while. I’ve missed all of your blasphemy like crazy, but I’ve been incredibly busy for the last few months and have been neglectful of you all. In a nutshell, I began teaching at the university I’m getting my Masters Degree from and am still taking classes. Compound that with some various family issues and whatnot and you get an absent King Retard. But no more!!! So enough about me, let’s get on to the atheism!

Today I’d like to share some reflections and observations I’ve made about the religious beliefs of college freshmen at a fairly liberal Southern Californian public university. First, a little background. I teach freshman composition, so all of the writing is essay writing and all of the reading I assigned was non-fiction. I primarily used a textbook, but I also gave out some handouts, notably from Demon Haunted World. The second essay I assigned this semester was to analyze an argument made by another author. Not to make their own arguments, simply to analyze. Discuss why an argument is valid or invalid, how the argument is effective or ineffective, etc. One of the five essays they had to choose from to analyze was titled “Do Kids Need Religion?” Now, the author of this piece was discussing religion in general, of course it always seems to come back to xianity. So, on to the observations.

1. Freshmen seem incapable of distinguishing religion from xianity.

My students seemed to be pretty accepting of other religions, but whenever talking about the need for children to have some exposure to religion, they invariably used xian imagery. They would describe images of crosses, bibles, ministers/priests, etc. Now I realize you need to go with what you know, but most of them would pay lip service to the variety of religious belief out there and then wholly ignore it.

2. Given any opportunity, fundie students will witness to you.

Keep in mind, the assignment was to analyze an argument. It seemed that my students with any kind of religious bent took the opportunity, and hurt their grade, to ignore the parameters of the assignment and instead tell me all about why they are religious. No analysis, just how they couldn’t imagine a life without their awesome church and how gawd is a part of everything they do. A lot of them were shocked during conferences when I explained to them why they scored so poorly on that essay because they ignored the assignment and I could care less what they believe.

3. After hearing all about “liberal education,” xian students come in ready to fight.

True, higher education, especially English departments, tend to be a little more liberal than mainstream society because the main enterprise is critical thinking. When questioning things, you tend to be less conservative. I’m definitely very liberal, but I try not to force my beliefs on my students. That said, that’s what everyone has warned them about. A lot of religious students came in expecting to be force fed gay marriage, evolution, and godlessness. worked it in, but very subtely. Early on though, they were ready to jump all over me and were disappointed by my facade of neutrality.

4. The more religious, the lower the quality the writing is.

“Children are so innocent.” By far, this was my favorite quote of the semester and became my office version of “Oh, how the fire crackled.” One of my colleague’s students wrote this describing an ad with three little girls praying. The whole paper had that smarmy, glassy-eyed tone. It seems the more religious the student is, the worse the writing becomes.

5. Religious students have no concept of why someone wouldn’t be religious.

Much like our religious trolls around here, religious students seem to have absolutely no concept of why someone would reject belief in invisible sky daddies. Any time they would address non-believers, they would do so in the tired and false terms of anger at gawd, not going to church out of laziness, or reactions to scandals, such as priest molesting children. Many of them stared blankly at me when I explained that some people simply did not believe in gawd and felt no anger or resentment towards a being they did not believe existed. That one always seemed to throw them for a loop.

Vjack at Atheist Revolution has pointed to an excellent post titled Faith Hospital by Alonzo Fyfe at Atheist Ethicist. To look at the potential conflict between religion and science, Mr Fyfe imagines two hospitals: One hospital is the Institute for Scientific Medicine which is scientifically-based, and its cross-town rival is Faith Hospital which relies on scripture and prayer rather than science. Given the choice, how many Christians would select this hospital over the scientifically-based hospital if given the choice? Vjack, and I recommend everyone taking the time to read this very thought-provoking essay.

This post is inspired by recent disagreements (to put it mildly) with fundie relatives who choose to believe in a perfect, all-loving god. None of them, and no xian I have ever encountered have an adequate explanation as to where evil in the world came from, except to say that it came from god-given free will, human nature, disobedience of humans to follow the rules laid down by the great sky daddy and a host of other reasons they have to choose from in their mental databases of fantasy. But, at the same time they say that their god created all things and saw that they were good. So, where did evil come from if this god only created good?

If we examine closely what the Bible says, evil was instigated and started by god and his “who has the bigger dick” games in heaven and giving his celestial counterparts (angels, including Lucifer) the choice of joining him or rebelling and fighting to overthrow him. Then later god makes a little game of keep-away-from-evil in the Garden of Eden after creating his ignorant little human pets,and then punishes them and all of the human race for merely using their free choice option.

In both stories of the fall of Satan, and the fall of Adam and Eve, this god of xian mythology gives his creatures a choice even though he knows that he can only accept one. If he wanted his creatures to have free will, and he is an all-good god, why not have multiple good choices instead of bringing evil into it? Here were beings, freshly created, who supposedly didn’t know anything yet, but god put bad in their brains. If this god had wanted obedient little puppies, he shouldn’t have created evil choices for his creations to choose from in the first place.

I have brought this subject of the origins of evil up to many xians and the question really agitates them when trying to explain it to me. They come back with “god gave us free will”…and I counter with “and free will to choose what?” They say , “to choose between good and evil”…and I say, “where did the evil come from?”…they say “Satan”…and I say…”WHERE DID SATAN COME FROM?” and they say “Satan was one of god’s fallen angels.” I then ask, “how did Satan fall?” They say, “he chose evil”…I then ask “where did the evil come from that Satan chose?”….Using their logic…it all goes back to GOD, and xians hate pinning responsibility for evilness on their god. Yet, that is where it all leads back to according to their own mythology book.

They get quite flustered with this debate and come quite close to telling me to just go to hell.

Here’s a great YouTube pointed to by Chuck A and also blogger Mikayla at bits of starstuff:

“Quotes from the esteemed evolutionary biologist, atheist, and author of the current best seller ‘The God Delusion’. Visit his website at: http://richarddawkins.net”

Dedicated to Sean: In Memoriam.

Many thanks to all who submitted. (This excludes all the xian-dumbass-trolls.)

Before I begin the Carnival, I just want to make a quick announcement that Santa Claus died the other day, and that we’re all very concerned.

Anyway, moving on…

I guess if there’s one way to start a Xmas Eve Edition, it’s to deny that annoying Holy Spirit straight off, and Aaron does this on Kill the Afterlife. Yes, there’s nothing like blasphemy to get things going.

Aaron, maybe it was just the timing of the season — i.e., I was noticing the nativity scene on the lawn across the street from me when I saw it — but that video really cracked me up. Nice job. (Your soul will, of course, burn in hell forever. But, still, nice job.)

And now we can focus on other aspects of this holiday season. Bruce from Grounded in Reality writes about how Xmas is not a religious holiday:

You want your religious holiday back? How about “ChristDay” or “JesusDay”? Just make sure you get the date right this time.

Stardust has a nice little ditty about why she has a holiday tree — with, I should add, some hilarious examples of the visual contradictions of other xmas displays.

We also have, from the About Atheism site, a slightly more formal selection which asks (and answers) the question: “Is Jesus the Reason for the Season?”

Vjack has a nice one simply called, “Happy Holidays — Deal with It.”

Over at Lemons and Lollipops you can find one suggestion for an atheist greeting for the season — which, I should add, seems to work all year round.

Given a previous conversation on this site concerning Santa and kids, there’s a related entry called The Spirit of Christmas, which gives a negative answer to whether or not parents should introduce the concept of Santa to kids. (Maybe he could print out the article on Santa’s death and show it to children. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t tempted to do it.)

And, finally, since I’m always a sucker for the problem of evil stuff, we have a non-xmas entry from Aaron over at Symbolic Order called “The Trouble with Prayer.” (If you want a classic piece on the same theme, I’d suggest “A Moral Argument Against Miracles” by James Keller.)

Thanks again for everyone who submitted entries (except those xian-dumbass-trolls).

The next Carnival of the Godless will be held at Daily Irreverence on January 7th — so be sure to tune in.