From the Search Logs: Why Atheism is better?

While browsing through the logs to see what sort of intriguing searches bring people to this site, I found this little gem: "why atheism is better?"

I'm really torn. Because, on the one hand, there are all sorts of tongue-in-cheek, snarky, or otherwise humorous answers: you can sleep in on Sunday. You can eat anything you want, any time you want. You can shower in private, secure in the knowledge that there aren't any Peeping Tom's watching you from On High. Seriously, depending on your particular {complaints with/view of} religion, you can compose an entire Top Ten List of reasons.

But on the other hand, there's also a serious answer: atheists think atheism is better because we think it's true. We think that the world we live in is more accurately explained, and better understood, as the result of impersonal natural processes than as the work of some all-knowing, all-powerful creator. As far as we can tell, the available evidence does not indicate the existence of any sort of active divinity, singular or plural.

So when, for example, Gerie (of Exposing The Darkness And Telling The Truth) was shocked - shocked, I tell you! - to discover that atheists have already made up their minds, my reaction is basically, "Well, duh. Of course we have." I mean, we don't say these things because we're faffing around; we say them because, after careful consideration, we have come to think that they're true.

Evangelizing Zombie Children???

Okay, somebody recently found my blog by searching on "reaching your zombie children for christ". So, whoever you are? I'm sorry. I can't help you with that. 


But as a concept for a particularly bizarre and surreal little horror story, it sounds awesome.

From the Search Logs: Religion and the Meaning of Life

So there I was, looking over the analytics for this blog, when I ran across this:

how would atheists respond to religion as a way of finding meaning in their lives

Someone stumbled onto my blog using that as a search string. Since they probably didn't find the sort of answer they were looking for, and since I am by nature always trying to help, here's my answer.

First of all, I can't speak for all atheists - and I wouldn't if I could. It's like trying to speak for all Christians, or all Buddhists; the term encompasses a wide variety of views. But, okay, how would this particular atheist respond to religion as a way for someone to find meaning in their life?

I'd say, "Does it work for you? If so, wonderful."

See, here's the thing: people are different. What works for me, might not work for you - and vice-versa. As an irreligious person, what I mainly want from religious people is acceptance of the fact that I'm not religious - not because I'm angry, in rebellion, or too attached to my sinful ways, but because in a fundamental way, religious belief doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't work for me; I don't seem to be wired for it, if that makes any sense. And if I'm going to ask for that acceptance from religious folks, it only makes sense for me to accept that their religious beliefs work for them, that they make sense to them.

There are, of course, some limits and conditions on my willingness to be accepting. To the extent that your faith helps you personally, and encourages you to right action towards other people, I'm in favor of it. To the extent that your religion encourages you to do things that are harmful to yourself or others, I'm opposed to it. (In most cases, I can't see that it particularly does either one; it's just a part of who that person is.) So if someone is practicing a particularly toxic sort of religion, I'm perfectly willing to try to argue them out of it... but the goal isn't to argue them out of their religious beliefs; it's to argue them out of hurting people. And if you feel like you can't quit hurting people without giving up your religion, then I have to ask if what you have is religion worth keeping.

But as far as being a way of finding meaning in life? Go for it.

From the Search Logs: Man Eating Daffodils

Someone, it seems, stumbled across this blog while doing a search on "human eating daffodils". As you all know, I'd love to help this person... but in this case, there's kind of a problem. It's... well... it's the syntax.

If the search was for (pictures of, or information on) a "human, eating daffodils," then I'd say it's a bad idea. At least, this home cooking site includes it on a list of poisonous/non-edible flowers. I'm not saying you could use this to speed up your inheritance from rich old Uncle Ambrosius, but I'm betting that eating daffodils could make you pretty sick.

If, on the other hand, you were looking for "human-eating daffodils," then I'm sorry to report that the Mad Science Consortium has not finished refining that particular project. We have carnivorous daffodils available, and they do eat people. Unfortunately, they also eat birds, squirrels, house pets, mice, snakes, insects, and rubber tires. (One prototype was planted a bit too close to the water, and cleaned out our Mutant Koi pond.) Designing a strain that feeds exclusively on human beings turns out to be surprisingly tricky. Rest assured, however, that sooner or later we will overcome the remaining obstacles and produce a species of daffodil that feeds exclusively on humans.

From the Search Logs: How To Mock Atheism

I keep a fairly close eye on the analytics for this blog. Not only does this tell me how much traffic it receives and what pieces are popular, it also shows me what sorts of search terms bring people here. This is often deeply amusing. Why?

Well, a lot of these searches bring people to posts that... um... probably aren't exactly what they were looking for. This, of course, makes me sad for that poor person, who couldn't find what they sought. So, on occasion, I'll take one of those search strings and write an answer for it. I like to think of this as a public service.

Today's search string is: "how to mock atheism".

Naturally, as an atheist myself, I'd love to help... except, I'm not entirely sure how to approach this. I mean, I'd think that if you had some particular reason to want to mock atheism, you'd already have some idea of what it was about atheism that you wanted to mock. At least, when I set out to make fun of something, it's because something in particular about that item or topic has struck me as specifically deserving of mockery. So the fact that you're looking for a How To guide suggests that you're already off to a bad start.

But, y'know, okay. You're sure that atheism needs to be mocked, even if you're not quite clear on why. You can still come up with something.

For starters, assume that atheists don't have any valid reasons for our lack of belief. The moment you consider that we might have some sort of point, your mockery will go off-track. Instead, assume that we're too stupid, gullible, or willfully ignorant to see the clear and evident Truth. Alternatively, just assume that we already know the truth, but refuse to admit it.

Whatever you do, you absolutely must avoid speaking of atheism in atheistic terms. Instead, talk about how atheists use the free will that God gives them to defy Him. Or how we use the brains that God created for us to doubt Him. Make it clear just how foolish we are to be ignoring our eternal peril - maybe compare the atheist to someone floating in the middle of the ocean who keeps refusing to climb into the lifeboat. That one always goes over well.

Feel free to quote Bible verses showing how foolish unbelievers are. Even atheists believe the Bible is true, after all. And we've got to be spectacularly misguided if the Almighty - or at least the Apostle Paul - took the time to point us out for our foolishness. God doesn't bother with the little everyday stupidities, after all. He saves His time and attention for the big stuff.

Lastly, don't forget to talk about how empty and meaningless our lives are. Atheism denies God, after all, so if the atheists are wrong then they're going to spend eternity in Hell - and if they're right, then life is meaningless anyway. It takes a special sort of person to carry on with a faith like that. You've got to be really in love with your sins to choose that willingly.

And there you go. That's how you mock atheism.

I know, I know: I shouldn't be helping you with this. What can I say? I'm an atheist. Mocking things is what we do. It's one of the few pleasures left to us without God in our lives. Admittedly, we prefer to mock things that are Good and Right and True, but in a pinch we'll mock anything, ourselves included - as you can plainly see here.

So now that you've seen how it's done, go forth and make fun of us!

Search Logs: how do atheists find meaning in life?

From time to time I browse through the logs to see how people are coming to this blog. The search strings that bring people here are particularly interesting, and some of them are people looking for material that I don't - or don't quite - manage to cover.

One of these searches was a deceptively simple question: "How do atheists find meaning in life?"

I call it "deceptively" simple because I'm fairly certain that the obvious answer, "By doing things that matter," isn't what the querent was looking for. That is, after all, an answer to the broader and altogether more useful question of how people find meaning in life - and that wasn't what the searcher asked. He, or she, asked how atheists find meaning in life. And that's... interesting.

Just by specifying atheists, the question implies that that sort of people might have (or do have, or ought to have) unusual trouble finding meaning in life. Which, in my experience, is not the case at all - though I don't have any actual scientific data handy, I haven't found that atheists are particularly more or less prone to feeling that life has no meaning than religious folks are. Religious beliefs are the sort of thing that sound like they should make a difference in whether someone feels like their life has meaning, but as a practical matter there's no connection - at least not as far as I can tell.

So there's the second answer: religious beliefs don't correlate to a sense of meaning, so atheists find meaning in life the same way everybody else does. For further clarification, scroll back up to the obvious answer I offered above.

Then there's the Socratic response: answer the question with a question. In this case, I'd ask: "How do Christians[1] find meaning in life?" Consider the following thought exercise:

Christians, as a rule, believe the world was created by a being who is all-knowing. That means that everything you do, God knows about. Everything you're going to do, every decision you will ever make, God already knows about and always has. As far as God is concerned, all your choices are already made. So how can anything you do have meaning?

On top of that, Christians believe that God is all-powerful. That means that anything that needs to be done - spreading the Gospel, helping the poor, teaching immigrants to speak English - He could do, Himself. Sure, the Bible says that God wants his followers to do certain things, but it's pretty much make-work; it's just to keep you busy and let you feel like you're accomplishing something. How could anyone find meaning in that?

If that sounds a little odd, a little off to Christian ears, well... it's supposed to. My point here is that asking "How do atheists find meaning in life?" sounds just as strange, just as wrong.

Look, if you want to get good answers, you have to ask good questions. This one isn't a good question. It's too caught up in its own assumptions. It depends too much on the answers to other questions that haven't been asked yet. But that aside, I hope this post will at least point you off in the general direction of an answer.

What about you? How do you find meaning in life?

1. I assume that the searcher was a Christian. This is mainly because fixating on atheists seems to me to be most common among Christians, and modern American Christians in particular.

Another request from the search logs

I've noted before that people find this blog through a variety of improbable and surprising search terms. Often, I suspect, they're disappointed: for one reason or another, what's actually here isn't quite what they were looking for. And I'm very sure that was the case in our most recent example, who was searching for "spider bondage sexy art".

I say this because I have exactly one spider picture on this blog, and it isn't sexy. But, as Bigweld says, "See a need, fill a need." And here at Mock Ramblings, we are all about helping out our fellow spider fetishists, as well as anyone else who happens along. So, in the spirit of brotherhood and solidarity, I offer you Spider Bondage Sexy Art:

And now I take requests from the search logs

Time for a quick question-and-answer session, for the benefit of those poor souls who were reduced to searching online for the answers to life's difficult questions. Today we'll be addressing two important issues:

1. How to explain the Zombie Apocalypse to parents

First of all, I'm a little worried about this. I mean, I'm a parent, and I already know about the coming Zombie Apocalypse. So does my wife. In fact, we're usually the ones trying to explain it to other people.

But we're parents with young children, and not everyone is in our particular stage of life. I suppose it's possible that grown men and women might find it difficult to explain the impending arrival of the Walking Plague to their parents, who - being of an earlier generation - might have grown up thinking that the dead would only rise when Gabriel sounds his trump to announce the Last Judgement. They might be wholly unaware of the Cambodian "zombie" outbreak (caused by a new strain of Malaria), especially since the original article is no longer available. (Government cover-up, much?) And in that case, I suppose that, yes, they might find it a bit difficult to understand why they need to prepare for survival in a world overrun with hordes of the hungry dead.

Still, the basic concept isn't that hard to explain. I mean, the zombie rises from the dead and bites someone. The person who just got bitten turns into a zombie, and then bites other people. Those people all turn into zombies, who go out and bite even more people, and the next thing you know, human civilization has come to an abrupt and messy end. Either you're ready to survive, or you're part of the problem - the shambling, moaning, flesh-hungry problem.

So here's my advice:
First off, use visual aids. Halloween is almost here, and it's not like there's any shortage of zombie films around. Invite your parents over for a "Scary Movie Night" and watch one. Any of the classic Romero films are good, but if that's more than your parents are willing to watch you could try Zombieland instead. Not only is it a lighter take on the coming apocalypse, it's full of useful safety tips. Then, when the movie is over, switch off the television, turn to your parents, and explain: "Now, when this happens, we'll need to be ready..."

They'll probably listen. Nobody wants to be zombie food, after all.

2. How To Tell If Your Velociraptor Is Having Pre-Marital-Sex
Okay, look. I know it's not easy being a parent. I mean, you watch the kid hatch, you get those wonderful moments where they stare at you adoringly with those big saurian eyes. You do your best to raise the child right, you make sure they have enough food to grow big and strong, you try to get them a good education - or at least teach them how to hunt for themselves.

But then they get older. They start hanging out with 'raptors from different packs, kids you don't know or don't approve of. Or maybe they've gone even farther afield; maybe now they're spending their time with that T-rex down the street. And they get cranky - threatening to rip your guts out if you try to set a curfew, little things like that. It's perfectly natural for you, the parent, to start wondering what else they might be doing. After all, you can't be with them all the time.

Don't panic. There are some things you can look for.

First of all, is your velociraptor still wearing his or her purity ring? If so, you're probably safe - no matter how far they've backslidden or how wild their behavior has gotten, no young raptor would ever have sex while wearing their ring.

Unfortunately, there is a very slight chance that they might take the ring off, have sex, and put it back on afterwards. If you're suspicious, examine the purity ring itself. Does it show the sorts of dents and scratches that come from trying to remove jewelry using claws designed to tear into your hapless prey? If the marks are there, then your sweet little baby is probably having pre-marital sex.

But what if your child doesn't have a purity ring? Speaking frankly, if that's the case then your parenting is definitely part of the problem. Oh, sure, the "experts" will tell you all about building trust, talking to your children, and letting them make their own choices. Who's giving you this advice? Dr. Grat is an apatosaurus, Professor Loyork is a triceratops, and that talk show host Miss Lowrrr is a stegosaurus. Look, I'm not prejudiced, but every single one of them is a herbivore.

So maybe that sort of approach works for them and their plant-eating children. Believe me, if you're trying to raise a velociraptor, you can't afford to think that way. That sort of soft, touchy-feely approach leads to teenage rebellion, loose morals, pre-marital dinosaur sex, and eventually the extinction of our entire way of life with a massive meteor impact. Don't let that happen! Get your little 'raptors to a church, get their tails in the pews, make 'em take the pledge, and slap a purity ring on those lovely clawed fingers. Your hatchling's future happiness depends on it!

From the seach logs...

I don't get a huge amount of traffic. It's tragic, I know, but it's true. It's also not entirely unexpected; I write mainly to amuse myself, and because I enjoy writing. Since I have no particular theme - aside from, y'know, "This Is What Wandered Into My Brain" - and since I tend to put entries up without a great deal of proofreading or revision, I don't really expect to attract a huge and devoted following. Quite the opposite, in fact: I'm pleasantly surprised by the number of people who do read, and sometimes comment.

So I'm always interested in what brings people here, especially the folks who presumably aren't regular readers. Most of the time it's nothing special - I get a small but steady number of hits related to people searching for information on the Carmelite Hotel phishing scam, for example. Other hits are quirkier, but not especially surprising given the sorts of things I write about: people have landed on the blog while doing searches for "holiday horror movies", say, or "dreams about alien invasion". Variations on the theme of "creepy metaphors" show up regularly.

And, of course, I get the occasional hit from someone looking for information on the process of deconversion, or evangelizing to unbelievers, or things like that. Which is fine; the Blog o' Doom isn't an in-depth resource for such things, but I think that the information I do have is worthwhile.

Every once in a while, though, I get hits from some search terms that would never have occurred to me. In the past week, for example, I've had someone search for "Gofulu Cthulhu" - apparently it's a popular misspelling? - and, on a related note, "why do people spell cthulhu different".

This is funny to me. (The answer, by the way, is that "Cthulhu" is an approximate phonetic rendering of a name which was never meant to be pronounced by human speech organs. So if the person who was doing that search stops back by, well... now you know.)

Those weren't the best ones, though. The best searches were the ones that, well, put it this way: not only would I not have expected anyone to find my blog this way, I wouldn't have expected anyone to ever search for this. There are two of those from the last week's logs:
1. how to explain the zombie apocalypse to parents
2. how to tell if your velociraptor is having pre marital sex

I just... thought I'd share that.