A lot of people think that way.  How many “Urgent: Virus Alert” emails have you received from well-meaning relatives and friends that warn how clicking on a certain link will clean out your address book or erase your hard drive?  Similar emails make the rounds every year.  None have been fact-checked.  Yet many of them have caused people to damaged their computers or worry unnecessarily.

Of course not all are that serious.  In fact some are quite humorous.  The only thing about them that’s misleading is the attribution.  Yet even an innocent joke can cause hard feelings between people.  Here’s an example of a comical email that’s been passed around a lot:

To the citizens of the United States of America:

In light of your failure to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas , which she does not fancy). Your new prime minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a governor for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed. To aid in the transition to a British Crown Colony, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

1. You should look up “revocation” in the Oxford English Dictionary.

2. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

3. The letter ‘U’ will be reinstated in words such as ‘favour’ and ‘neighbour.’ Likewise, you will learn to spell ‘doughnut’ without skipping half the letters, and the suffix -ize will be replaced by the suffix -ise. Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. (look up ‘vocabulary’).

4. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as “like” and “you know” is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell- checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter ‘u’ and the elimination of -ize. You will relearn your original national anthem, God Save The Queen.

5. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

6. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you’re not adult enough to be independent. Guns should only be handled by adults. If you’re not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you’re not grown up enough to handle a gun. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. A permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

7. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean.

8. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.

9. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline)-roughly $10 per US gallon. Get used to it.

10. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar.

11. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager. South African beer is also acceptable as they are pound for pound the greatest sporting nation on earth and it can only be due to the beer. They are also part of British Commonwealth - see what it did for them.

12. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters. Watching Andie McDowell attempt English dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one’s ears removed with a cheese grater.

13. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies). Don’t try Rugby – the South Africans and Kiwis will thrash you, like they regularly thrash us.

14. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware that there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You will learn cricket, and we will let you face the South Africans first to take the sting out of their deliveries.

15. You must tell us who killed JFK. It’s been driving us mad.

16. An official from Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue (i.e. tax collector) will be with you shortly to ensure the collection of all monies due (backdated to 1776). Until these are paid, there will be no representative government in the USA, in line with the policy: “No representation without taxation.”

17. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 pm with proper cups and saucers (never mugs), and with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; strawberries in season.

18. Some tea has gone missing, and we expect it back. We’ll be searching Boston first.

God save the Queen. She should be saved, and only He can.

John Cleese

A quick search of Snopes reveales the truth about this letter.  It has a long internet history, it was written about eight years ago.  You can further investigate Snopes’ claims by checking their references.  (You’ll also find some comical rebuttals on that page.)  Another source of information on urban legends is ScamBusters.org.

Remember, just because it appears on the internet doesn’t mean the information is valid.  Think, and investigate claims, for yourself.

(Did you at least click on that link to see if I was accurate, or did you just take my word for it?)

For those of you reading this is an RSS feedreader and for those who may not click over to the “About RA” tab, I would like to post the reason I created Radical Atheist; the reasoning behind the site and why I’m an atheist.

No one debates the reality that the vast majority of the world’s population are religious. But “vast majority” does not imply every single person is religious, nor does it validate religious belief. All that it indicates is that humans tend to fall rather easily into religious belief and do so by the millions.

That number does not include me.

My name is Jack Carlson. In my early 20s I enlisted in the U.S. Army and served proudly as a member of the Army Security Agency (376th ASA) assigned to Ft. Meade, Maryland as an intelligence analyst. Learning to analyze encrypted intelligence requires developing an attitude of skepticism and curiosity. You can’t believe what you see on the first examination, you have to dig deeper and deeper to uncover the real message.

That was over 30 years ago, but it began a life-long affinity for skepticism and curiosity. Before I enlisted I had been a devout Christian, like most people I knew. During my tour I began to apply skepticism and curiosity to my religious beliefs. Instead of simply blindly believing everything I was told, I began to dig deeper, trying to uncover the real message. What I discovered is what I share here on Radical Atheist.

Why “Radical Atheist”? That was inspired by an interview American Atheist conducted with Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god - in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague wishy-washy Agnosticism - both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much.

People will then often say “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would chose not to worship him anyway.)

Other people will ask how I can possibly claim to know? Isn’t belief-that-there-is-not-a-god as irrational, arrogant, etc., as belief-that-there-is-a-god? To which I say no for several reasons. First of all I do not believe-that-there-is-not-a-god. I don’t see what belief has got to do with it. I believe or don’t believe my four-year old daughter when she tells me that she didn’t make that mess on the floor. I believe in justice and fair play (though I don’t know exactly how we achieve them, other than by continually trying against all possible odds of success). I also believe that England should enter the European Monetary Union. I am not remotely enough of an economist to argue the issue vigorously with someone who is, but what little I do know, reinforced with a hefty dollop of gut feeling, strongly suggests to me that it’s the right course. I could very easily turn out to be wrong, and I know that. These seem to me to be legitimate uses for the word believe. As a carapace for the protection of irrational notions from legitimate questions, however, I think that the word has a lot of mischief to answer for. So, I do not believe-that-there-is-no-god. I am, however, convinced that there is no god, which is a totally different stance and takes me on to my second reason.

I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” - then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.

Throughout history people have invented gods. At first they were credited with all the good things that happened in a person’s life and blamed for all the bad things. Lightening, thunder, fire and death were all manifestations of mysterious gods. As time went on and humans acquired a better understanding of nature, science began to provide more sensible explanations for those things we used to attribute to the gods. As we enter the 21st century, there is no longer any need for a belief in gods. We don’t have answers to all our questions yet, some of our questions may never be answered to our complete satisfaction. But our knowledge has advanced sufficiently for us to know that nothing in nature requires belief in a supernatural force to explain it. Religion has been reduced to the role of gap-filling. If we don’t know something, rather than attempt to find a natural answer or accept that it’s an unknown at present, we fill the gaps in our knowledge with “god did it”. And since most religions teach that we cannot understand how their gods operate, we are then relieved of any further responsibility to pursue a natural understanding. God-of-gaps reasoning is intellectually dishonest. It’s an abandonment of our humanity.

While I’m not a professed anti-theist, I am hoping that humanity will not be shackled by religious belief for much longer. Religion in the modern world has only lead to divisiveness between the people of antagonistic beliefs, providing a “reason” for wars and hostilities. Religion has outlived its usefulness. It’s outdated and has now become a greater liability to civilization than an asset. I see no reason for modern man to retain beliefs more appropriate to nomadic herders thousands of years ago.

A life lived without any belief in the supernatural or gods is not immoral, bleak, pointless or pathetic. Atheists are just as happy, productive and decent citizens as anyone else. Our motivations may be different but the result is the same. We hold jobs, we have families, we are involved in our communities. We tend to be less visible than the religious simply because we don’t mention our motivation at every opportunity. We don’t support charities in the name of atheism. We don’t attend atheist meetings every Sunday or send 10% of our income to the atheist headquarters. In fact, there is no atheist headquarters, no dogma, no belief system. Atheism is a conclusion we have reached after examining the claims of religion and finding them unsupported by reality and therefore unbelievable. In rejecting the claims of the religious we do not suggest an alternative belief system. Each individual is free to develop their own purpose in life, to find their own reason for being here. Even those of us who do not believe there’s any reason for us being here can enjoy this life. Just because it’s pointless doesn’t mean it’s worthless.

I sincerely hope you enjoy reading Radical Atheist. If nothing else, I hope it causes you to question your own beliefs, to be skeptical and curious about life. Nothing worth believing should fear examination.

just don’t grab a Snickers bar.

Many religious dietary laws, like the vast majority of other religious precepts, served a practical purpose hundreds of years ago when sanitation, microbiology, proper food preparation and handling were unknown. Even in our modern world, strict vegetarians may find reason to agree with Muslims about many of the items listed below. Whatever the reason to observe dietary laws, we should acknowledge that their observance in the 21st century is due to philosophical considerations and no longer mandated by medical reasons. And for that we have science to thank.

Here’s a list of other products that Muslims have to be careful to avoid to comply with the dietary requirements of Islam.

Nutella Hazelnut Chocolate Spread, Ferrero Rocher Chocolates, Bounty Milk Miniatures; Celebration; Funsize – Mars, Milky Way, Snickers; Galaxy Caramel Swirls and M&M’s Peanut, Milky Way Crispy Rolls, Milky Way; Twix Kingsize, Aero – Milk chocolate, Orange, Peppermint; Animal Bar; Black Magic – Caramel, Hazel Cluster, Hazel in Caramel; Blue Ribband; Breakaway – Milk Camarac and Milk Chocolate; Caramac; Dairy Box – Almond Fayre, Autumn Hazelnut, Caramel Classic, Country Fudge, Nut Swirl, Strawberry Fool, Toffee Cup, Turkish Delight, Vanilla Truffle, Wafer Sandwich; Golden Cup; Kit Kat; Lion Bar; Matchmakers – Coconut, Mint, Orange; Milkybar White Chocolate Mini Eggs; Munchies; Quality Street – Caramel Cup, Coconut Éclair, Dairy Fudge, Fruit & Nut Delight, Hazelnut Éclair, Hazelnut in Caramel, Milk chocolate Hazelnut, Noisette Triangle, Toffee Deluxe, Toffee Fingers, Vanilla Octagon; Rolo Bar; Rolo; Smarties – orange only; Walnut whip – Vanilla; Yorkie – Milk Chocolate, Nutter, Raisin & Biscuit. Kraft Singles Cheese Food Slices

Cheese Quavers; Cheesy Monster Munch; Savoury Cheese Snaps; Walkers - Cheese & Onion Crisps, Cheese & Onion Lites, Tomato Ketchup Crisps, MAX Hard Cheese & Onion, Kettle Chips Yoghurt and Green Onion.

More surprisingly perhaps these products from The Body Shop are alleged to contain by-products from the meat industry: Bath Beads – all varieties, Bath Bubbles – Cola, Forest Jelly, Ice Cream, Satsuma, Strawberry; Hawthorn Hand Cream; Shampoo – Mint & Thyme, Orange Oat, Seaweed & Peony; Tea Tree Oil Facial Wash

And finally Kellogg’s Pop Tarts which quite frankly should be haram (forbidden) for everyone.

The products listed contain Gelatine (derived from skin, tendon, ligaments, and bones of animals which may not have been slaughtered according to halal practice) or Rennet, derived from calves stomachs and used in cheese making. Whey powder is produced when cheese is made using rennet. If rennet is taken from animals slaughted according to Islamic law it is halal, but abstinence from rennet is often advised to be on the safe side. (Source)

Enjoy that salad.

If you’re a student facing the sometimes daunting task of writing a term paper or essay, write it yourself. No matter how much you may be tempted to copy and paste an essay from an online source, your own writing will reflect your own attitudes and personality.

In addition, you won’t be wasting twelve bucks to purchase drivel like the following, sure to earn you an “F” from any qualified English teacher. I’m not addressing the content but the form. It’s terrible.

Happiness & Homosexuality Free Essay, Term Paper and Book Report

In your whole life, maybe you will bring into contact with some people, whose work, whose appearance is almost same as other folks, but they also have a different life. They are a little crowd in this society. They conduct their life in a weird way which in other people’s eyes. Too many sufferings and lacerations from pressures of their families, the society and the traditional moralities are born on them. They ever lost themselves; ever walked back and forth without knowing where to go. However, they even thirst for getting happiness than anybody. Homosexuality, it stills a sensitive topic in the society up to now. Social opinions for the homosex, generally, it seems Aids; seems corruptness; seems anomalism and something bad else. Whereas some people advocate justice and admitting to homosex, I never gainsay those opening kind people were busy for this little crowd, but in fact, most of people still consider that homosexuality is a sick of psychology, is morbidity. During the semicentury, some relational researches already proved it is wrong, but they just the same can not accep……

Word Count: 600
Page Count: 2.4 (250 words a page / double spaced)

I’m not sure what’s worse; the poorly constructed sentences, the misspelled words or the made-up words. Perhaps the most ironic facet of this garbage, this was found on a site that bills itself as Free Eassays while charging money for the content.

	View Essay Instantly:
	View Essay Free:	To view the entire free essay of Happiness & Homosexuality, you must donate an original essay of your own to our web site so that we can grow our collection of free essays, book reports and term papers.

In other words, pay us or submit your own waste of 600 words in order to access this crap for free. If you’re going to spend time writing an essay simply to get another for free, why not compose your own and submit that to your class?

AC Grayling

It is time to reverse the prevailing notion that religious commitment is intrinsically deserving of respect, and that it should be handled with kid gloves and protected by custom and in some cases law against criticism and ridicule.

It is time to refuse to tip-toe around people who claim respect, consideration, special treatment, or any other kind of immunity, on the grounds that they have a religious faith, as if having faith were a privilege-endowing virtue, as if it were noble to believe in unsupported claims and ancient superstitions. It is neither. Faith is a commitment to belief contrary to evidence and reason, as between them Kierkegaard and the tale of Doubting Thomas are at pains to show; their example should lay to rest the endeavours of some (from the Pope to the Southern Baptists) who try to argue that faith is other than at least non-rational, given that for Kierkegaard its virtue precisely lies in its irrationality.

On the contrary: to believe something in the face of evidence and against reason - to believe something by faith - is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect. It is time to say so.

It is time to demand of believers that they take their personal choices and preferences in these non-rational and too often dangerous matters into the private sphere, like their sexual proclivities. Everyone is free to believe what they want, providing they do not bother (or coerce, or kill) others; but no-one is entitled to claim privileges merely on the grounds that they are votaries of one or another of the world’s many religions.

And as this last point implies, it is time to demand and apply a right for the rest of us to non-interference by religious persons and organisations - a right to be free of proselytisation and the efforts of self-selected minority groups to impose their own choice of morality and practice on those who do not share their outlook.

Doubtless the votaries of religion will claim that they have the moral (the immoral) choices of the general population thrust upon them in the form of suggestive advertising, bad language and explicit sex on television, and the like; they need to be reminded that their television sets have an off button. There are a number of religious TV channels available, one more emetic than the next, which I do not object to on the grounds of their existence; I just don’t watch them.

These remarks will of course inflame people of religious faith, who take themselves to have an unquestionable right to respect for the faith they adhere to, and a right to advance, if not indeed impose (because they claim to know the truth, remember) their views on others. In the light of history and the present, matters should perhaps be to the contrary; but stating that religious commitment is not by itself a reason for respect is not to claim that it is a reason for disrespect either. Rather, as it is somewhere written, “by their fruits ye shall know them”; it is this that far too often provides grounds for disrespect of religion and its votaries.

The point to make in opposition to the predictable response of religious believers is that human individuals merit respect first and foremost as human individuals. Shared humanity is the ultimate basis of all person-to-person and group-to-group relationships, and views which premise differences between human beings as the basis of moral consideration, most especially those that involve claims to possession by one group of greater truth, holiness, or the like, start in absolutely the wrong place.

We might enhance the respect others accord us if we are kind, considerate, peace-loving, courageous, truthful, loyal to friends, affectionate to our families, aspirants to knowledge, lovers of art and nature, seekers after the good of humankind, and the like; or we might forfeit that respect by being unkind, ungenerous, greedy, selfish, wilfully stupid or ignorant, small-minded, narrowly moralistic, superstitious, violent, and the like. Neither set of characteristics has any essential connection with the presence or absence of specific belief systems, given that there are nice and nasty Christians, nice and nasty Muslims, nice and nasty atheists.

That is why the respect one should have for one’s fellow humans has to be founded on their humanity, irrespective of the things they have no choice over - ethnicity, age, sexuality, natural gifts, presence or absence of disability - and conditionally (ie. not for intrinsic reasons) upon the things they choose - political affiliation, belief system, lifestyle - according to the case that can be made for the choice and the defence that can be offered of the actions that follow from it.

It is because age, ethnicity and disability are not matters of choice that people should be protected from discrimination premised upon them. By contrast, nothing that people choose in the way of politics, lifestyle or religion should be immune from criticism and (when, as so often it does, it merits it) ridicule.

Those who claim to be “hurt” or “offended” by the criticisms or ridicule of people who do not share their views, yet who seek to silence others by law or by threats of violence, are trebly in the wrong: they undermine the central and fundamental value of free speech, without which no other civil liberties are possible; they claim, on no justifiable ground, a right to special status and special treatment on the sole ground that they have chosen to believe a set of propositions; and they demand that people who do not accept their beliefs and practices should treat these latter in ways that implicitly accept their holder’s evaluation of them.

A special case of the respect agenda run by religious believers concerns the public advertisement of their faith membership. When people enter the public domain wearing or sporting immediately obvious visual statements of their religious affiliation, one at least of their reasons for doing so is to be accorded the overriding identity of a votary of that religion, with the associated implied demand that they are therefore to be given some form of special treatment including respect.

But why should they be given automatic respect for that reason? That asserting a religious identity as one’s primary front to the world is divisive at least and provocative at worst is fast becoming the view of many, although eccentricities of dress and belief were once of little account in our society, when personal religious commitment was more reserved to the private sphere - where it properly belongs - than its politicisation of late has made it. From this thought large morals can be drawn for our present discontents.

But one part of a solution to those discontents must surely be to tell those who clamour for a greater slice of public indulgence, public money and public respect, that their personal religious beliefs and practices matter little to the rest of us, though sometimes they are a cause of disdain or amusement; and that the rest of us are as entitled not to be annoyed by them as their holders are entitled to hold them. But no organised religion, as an institution, has a greater claim to the attention of others in society than does a trade union, political party, voluntary organisation, or any other special interest group - for “special interest groups” are exactly what churches and organised religious bodies are.

No one could dream of demanding that political parties be respected merely because they are political parties, or of protecting them from the pens of cartoonists; nor that their members should be. On the contrary. And so it should be for all interest groups and their members, without exception.

Every President’s Day local companies produce ads to entice buyers to purchase their products. Nothing unusual about that. What amazes me is the length some stores will go to in order to relate their product to the presidents. How do you sell furniture in relation to a federal holiday celebrating two U.S. presidents? You offer “presidential-sized savings”. Are those Taft sized savings (he was so fat, weighing 330 pounds, that he got stuck in the White House bathtub) or are they only James Madison sized (5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed under 100 pounds)?

What the hell, presidential-sized saving? And we wonder at the illiteracy rates among our children.

A cosmetics line that extolled the virtues of “Lookin’ Good for Jesus” has been pulled from stores in Singapore after a number of complaints from shoppers, according to media reports Tuesday.

Promising to “Redeem your reputation and more,” the product line included a “virtuous vanilla”-flavored lip balm and a “Get Tight with Christ” hand and body cream, The Straits Times said.

Wing Tai Retail, which manages the British retailer Topshop, removed the line late last month after receiving complaints.

“These products trivialize Jesus Christ and Christianity,” it quoted Nick Chui, 27, one of the complainants, as saying. “There are also sexual innuendoes in the messages and the way Jesus is portrayed in these products.”

One product has packaging with the image of Jesus wearing a bright white robe as he looks toward the heavens, while a heavily made-up blonde woman with an arm draped across his shoulder gazes dreamily at his face.

“Why would anyone use religious figures to promote vanity products? It’s very disrespectful and distasteful,” the report quoted 24-year-old accountant Grace Ong as saying.  (Source)

What accounts for the recent increase in incidents of religious whining about respect?  Muslims get offended by cartoons while Christians take offense at a line of tacky cosmetics.

Read the Koran or Bible and highlight all the humorous passages, all the scriptures that indicate the gods or their followers have a sense of humor or even a healthy self-image.  You’ll be reading a lot and highlighting nothing.  Believers may have the light of fanaticism in their eyes but you’ll be hard pressed to find one with a twinkle of wit.  Considering how comical religious beliefs are, it’s too bad the religious lack the ability to appreciate that.

One of my favorite classical pieces is Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. It is in turn melancholic, inspirational, profound and restful. I’ve put together four videos featuring different musician’s interpretation of this beautiful melody.

I can’t honestly say I prefer one to the other. In their own way each version illustrates another facet of the work.

The first is the traditional, classical version. Second, a vocal version performed by The Choir of Trinity College,Cambridge,UK.Directed by Richard Marlow. Third, an electronic interpretation by William Orbit and finally, Dj Tiesto presents the Adagio in a techno style.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

One of the factors that makes religion attractive and atheism unattractive to many people is that atheism offers no community. Humans are social animals. Churches have long exploited this aspect of our humanity. I would wager that many theists place more value on their church membership than they do on the theological implications of belief.

A problem with trying to organize atheists into a community is that we have a single point of view in common, our disbelief in gods. Other than that, we believe a wide range of concepts that we may or may not share with other atheists. I know atheist UFO fanatics, atheists who follow politics “religiously” and others who barely know who the president is, atheist hunters and atheist animal-rights advocates.

Free thought isn’t a set of beliefs or attitudes, it’s the means by which a thinking human comes to conclusions without being distracted or blinded by preconceived notions. So even free thought doesn’t really offer itself as a rallying point for a group. “We’re free thinkers!” “What do you free think about?” “Uh, everything…”

Free thought groups and atheist groups have been reasonably compared to a herd of cats. I think that’s an accurate assessment.

I been thinking lately.

Should I be satisfied with defining my beliefs in the negative (atheist), or should I make more of an effort to accentuate the positive aspects of my personal philosophy (free thinking)?

I don’t know that either viewpoint should be exclusive. But I am going to try to address my interests from a more positive than negative angle for a while and see what effect it has on my general disposition. Usually I’m a very happy person, I love humor and wit. Theology is such a silly concept, I should find it fairly easy to discuss it with less disdain. Instead, I want to emphasize the positive aspects of a life without religion, a world view free from superstition and mythology, the ability to think for one’s self.

I was reminded the other day that most of my recent comments have been restricted to Christians; I’m in danger of becoming too focused on a single branch of theism.

Let me correct that oversight by posting something that I can only hope will offend the Muslims.

Now to go find something that offends those pesky suicide-bombing, door-to-door salesman like Buddhists.