Carnival Of The Godless #24

The 24th COTG is being held after all at Pinoy Atheist! Sorry about that, folks. It appears as if you can only see it if you are using Internet Explorer. In Firefox, John's blog is a little wacky. Heh. No problem, though, as I have left the UTI version below the flip of this post.

http://atheistangpinoy.blogspot.com/2005/10/welcome-to-carnival.html

Welcome to UTI's backup of the 24th COTG. This is here in case you do not use Internet Explorer. Enjoy!

• Franky of Frank's Atheistic Ramblings asks the question, "Is Atheism A Religion?" A good discussion tied into the current Pledge ruling.
• No More Mr. Nice Guy! writes a nice story called "Faith and Gomorrah" about four Christians that he admires. "I wish more self-proclaimed Christians were like them," he says.
• Chris Hallquist of The Uncredible HallQ conducts a lively discussion about spirituality, atheism, theism, agnosticism, and the relationships between them at his post called "Spirituality".
• Mark A. Rayner of the skwib tells us a story about mankind's early skeptical distrust of holy men and shamans with "Thag not like f#&*ing shaman!". Atheist cavemen! I love it!
• Pixelation of A Pixelated Mind gives us "Darwin Recanted on his Deathbed!". Short, sweet, and hard to beat. Sacriledge in five words or less.
• Jarndyce of Fair Vote Watch gives us something to chew on with his post entitled "No atheists, please, we're Christian". An interesting post on religions schooling in the UK. It is not a widely known fact, but about one third of all state-funded primary schools in Britain have religious entry criteria. And everyone thinks it's the US that's full of Christian crazies! At least we're not still segregating kids at 4 years old!
• Sean Gleeson writes an exhaustive follow-up study to Gregory Paul's "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies ^[link]", in the current Journal of Religion and Society. Please enjoy Sean's wickedly devastating satire, "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Goodness with Gleeson Readership in Countries Beginning with U".
• And finally, our good friend vjack of Atheist Revolution asks the question; If Christians are supposed to operate on a higher level of morality than everyone else, how does one explain their behavior? This post uses the example of how people refuse to get out of the way of emergency vehicles to explore Christian morals. An interesting read (as always) called "Fire Engines and Ethics", from vjack.

Well, that's about it for our (late) COTG #24. The next host for COTG #25 will be in the UK at The Common Man. COTG #25 will be held on Sunday, October 16, 2005. Please send in your submissions to cotg-submission@brentrasmussen.com. If you would like to host a future COTG, please send your hosting request to cotg-host@brentrasmussen.com and I will get you on the list.!

There were some additional entries for this one, but I did not think that they were in keeping with the COTG's guidelines. Specifically, they did not address the meta-topic of godlessness in a sufficiently recognizable way. So, I'm going to place them here, at the bottom, in a new section called COTG Rejects. Check them out, if you'd like. By the way, the name "Rejects" does not in any way imply that these are not good blog posts, just that they are not COTG blog posts.

COTG Rejects

• The first was a post from Daniel Levesque of "The Raving Conservative" railing against us uppity atheists for, well, being atheists, I guess, and having the unmitigated gall to actually stand up for our rights. He's putting forth the latest conservative wack-job talking point that atheism should be recognized as a religion by the Federal Government so that Christian Conservatives can then play the church/state separation card and claim that recent rulings against their own particular flavor of religious belief are indeed "establishing" the recognized religion of atheism, and therefore violating the First Amendment. Ridiculous, I know. Check it out, if you'd like a laugh. I'm sure he would appreciate a comment or two. Heh. "The No God Religion".
• The second was an interesting series of posts from DUB of the blog called "Out Of Respect..." showing that the differences in religious culture of Americans, in particular the differences between blacks and whites and the the psychological damage of a slave mentality, or the perceived and realized privilege of a master mentality, as they apply to religion, and as religion applies to them. Not exactly my cup of tea, and it did not address the meta-topic of godlessness at all, but an interesting read nonetheless called "The Race To God".