photo by TrevinC
“Life sucks and then you die.” Or so said my coworker when she heard about my break-up with my boyfriend yesterday. I laughed, and she promised she would pray for God to take away my troubles. Another acquaintance tried to comfort me by saying I shouldn’t be afraid about finding another man in the future. God would provide, and we have nothing to fear.
Well, sometimes life does suck, being lonely is no fun, and once in a while I wonder if I will find a mate for the long haul who will be an amazing match for me. But am I afraid? Does being an atheist have anything to do with my heartache? I don’t think so, no.
Fear and Humanity
Do atheists fear the world? Is fear a bad thing? Would believing in God protect us from trouble and remove fear from our lives?
(Read more after the cut…)
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Ahura Mazda
An email from Rev. Richard Robbins:
Your name is wrong. You are not a godless girl. Your name should actually be denial girl. You can tell me till the cows come home there is no God but I know for a fact that you believe in God you are just living in denial. If you admit there is a God then you have to deal with being accountable to Him. Not such a happy thought.
I bought the wrong domain name, folks! Is denialgirl.com still available?
Mr. Robbins,
I didn’t think one of the “gifts of the spirit” was telepathy. Apparently I missed that in one of Paul’s epistles. It seems you claim to have the same mind-reading power as the deity you worship. Do you also claim to be all-knowing? Maybe it’s limited to the thoughts and views of atheists? Very curious indeed!
I’ve stated before that the ignorant claim that atheists can’t handle being accountable for our actions and “sins” is ridiculous. Apparently atheists’ refutations of this canned accusation haven’t made a dent in the condescending beliefs behind it, so let me hold up a mirror for you:
You can tell me till the cows come home that Ahura Mazda does not exist, but I know for a fact that you believe in Ahura Mazda and are just living in denial. If you admit Ahura Mazda exists, you have to deal with being accountable to him. Not such a happy thought.
See how amusing that sounds? How likely are you to convert to Zoroastrianism because of what I said? Your answer is going to be the same as mine if you had asked me how likely I am to take your statements seriously. Sorry, Mr. Robbins, it just doesn’t work that way. I can’t be shamed or frightened into believing in a deity if there is no evidence that one exists. Doing so would be intellectually dishonest and delusional.
One more thing: According to Christianity, it doesn’t matter if someone admits there is a God or not; they will still be held accountable for their actions (as will all Christians, if you’ve forgotten what your guy said in Matthew 7:21-25). Of course, you wouldn’t have this problem if you believed in the true god, Ahura Mazda. Good luck!
It snowed quite a bit yesterday. A nice, fluffy sheet a few inches thick rested undisturbed on my car all day (hoorah for time off work to sit at home like a bump on a log!). I had heard a bit of rumble about the lunar eclipse, and since I was up in the middle of the night, I thought I’d go take a peek. Alas, the sky revealed nothing but solid gray, and no stars nor any moon was visible at all.
Not to be disappointed by weather, I decided to embrace an idea that sprang on me like a gazelle in heat (I hope they do that in real life). What if I wrote a little message on my windows to see what would happen? Many folks write phrases like “Jesus!” and “Wash me!” all over their cars. But what about something a bit more heathen?
4am is as good a time as any to spread the godless news!
Voilà! Happy with my snow art, I went back inside to bed.
Twelve hours later I decide to surface once again to take out the trash and see what happened to my car.
Ta-dah! Free window cleaning!
Lo and behold, it appears that some kind person had brushed off the snow for me! What a sweetie. I’m starting to think this might be an easy way to scrape my car every morning. I could just get some offended passerby to clean it for free! Ah, godless genius.
Editor’s Note:
It has been suggested that natural causes, and not an intelligent agent, were at fault for my clean car the next day.
I don’t know who you intellectual elitists think you are, but I’m sure you’re just in denial that an Intelligent Scraper exists. Clearly he/she could be the only cause for this result. One day it was snowy, and the next day it was clean. Obviously we have a powerful, purposeful individual behind this. There can be no other explanation than the Intelligent Scraper!
Randall Munroe, the creator of the well-known webcomic, xkcd, is on a relaxed publishing schedule due to a very sick family member right now. And out of that trying experience, he draws these three awesome panels:
Hell yeah, Randall.
Something Personal
When my father was fighting cancer, he (even while being a man of faith and prayer) relied on the advances of medicine and scientific research to fight the disease and keep it at bay as much as possible. Even though he wanted God to heal him, he still knew that medical care and advanced technology would be the most important weapons in the fight.
Now I look back and think, Why did we hope for miracles when we knew medicine would do all the real work? I’m honestly not sure if there are any practical reasons for prayers. When someone you love is dying, you want them to be instantly free of illness and suffering. Who wouldn’t? A miracle is a get-out-of-cancer-free card that no believer would turn down. To faithful Christians like us, we prayed for that easy-out, but we truly trusted in the doctors, the chemotherapy, and all of the other treatments used that were backed by tested science.
When praying for healing, you never know if you’ll be heard or if it will ever happen. There can be no reasonable expectation or time table; healing either happened or it didn’t, and sometimes a “miraculous healing” looked just like something explained just fine by science anyway. So when a loved one is ill or dying, you can feel free to hope for an immediate improvement, but trust in those who have tested treatments and medicines that you know can help. Even if your loved one does die, you can at least be thankful that it wasn’t your fault, your lack of faith, or anyone’s relationship with a deity that was at fault.
Science works, bitches!
Meghan on 
LeetheGirl on 
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