Richard Dawkins is WRONG!

Richard Dawkins is WRONG. He’s just plain wrong and even though his wrongness is perhaps understandable, that doesn’t change a damn thing.

Oh it’s okay, he’s not wrong about god or gods, Evolution, Genetics, Biology, the age of the Earth, and a whole heap of other stuff. He’s smack on the money on all that.

But he is dead wrong about religion—specifically, the one he himself was nominally raised in, the Church of England,

French Onion Soup! for free-UPDATE

I’ve received quite a lot of interest in my new book, French Onion Soup! This will remain available here as a free download till Christmas.

However some people have expressed that they’re having difficulties with the original download, so I have added a few alternatives. They’re below.

Something Greater

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I’m sometimes asked if I don’t feel that I am missing out, by not believing in ‘something greater’. It’s a valid question and actually one that I think all atheists should ask themselves. But the answer, at least for me, might also be of interest to others.

Yes I am part of something greater, in a very real and immediate sense. It’s not so much a question of believing but of accepting the evidence in front of me. I am part of the Earth. The Earth is not just a core of molten iron covered in a crust of rock and water, with an outer gaseous atmosphere, though it is these things. It is a living system, an entity. And I am—we are all—part of that entity.

Consider what you are: you are composed of billions of individual living things called cells.

French Onion Soup! (At Last!)

French Onion Soup! is here at last!!!! My hilarious, quirky, must-read book about a crazy Scotsman living the French Dream with his family, is at last available as both a print and e-book. Yaaay! You can buy it HERE on Amazon.co.uk

or

HERE on Amazon.com

It has been a huge amount of work, but I have already begun the sequel, which will be just as funny.

Since it’s Christmas, Hanukah, Saturnalia, Yule or Solstice (depending on your own particular penchant) soon, I’m going to give you all a present. You can download the French Onion Soup! e-book This offer is now closed, but you can buy a copy here.

The Storytelling Ape

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It’s a striking thought that civilisation evolved here on Earth only 7,000 years ago. Since then, humans have achieved many really incredible things. But even in terms of our own—mostly unwritten—history, 7,000 years is almost insignificant; it’s less than 4 % of the time Homo sapiens, the storytelling ape, has existed.

Atheism and Antitheism

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It's quite obvious that there is a huge amount of real hatred for atheists amongst some groups of people. American Christians in particular seem to be particularly virulent—which is not to say there are no American atheists, there are plenty. But they are definitely are in the minority and are frequently victimised.

I live in a country where that simply does not happen. France takes its secularism seriously, and I sometimes wonder if that is the real reason for the resentment so often shown by Anglo-Saxons against France and the French. But that is for another day. Here, nobody cares if you're an atheist. In fact it's the default position. People, generally, at least educated ones, will assume that you're an atheist, or at least a secularist, without asking. France actively excludes religion from all State functions, including schools, and has even curbed the most offensive of public religious displays.

Happy Fire Festival!

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Well, it’s the Fifth of November; Samhain (that’s pronounced sow-en) is very much upon us and winter, that bane of my life, is on the way. I’m already lighting the stove in the evening now, and of course fire is important in these Celtic lands. It's the season of the Fire Festival, that ancient Pagan ritual. (Cheerfully adopted by the Christians, of course.)

Samhain was the Celtic version; it has equivalents all over the world. The Celtic year was divided in two ways, one solar and the other lunar. The Celts weren’t daft (well, not as daft as some I can think of) and they knew damn fine that lunar calendars are not consistent; a twelve-month lunar year and the solar one are different in length, since a lunar month is 29.5 days. This adds up to only 354 days in a 12-month year, which means that relying on it is hopeless as far as the seasons are concerned. And for an agrarian people like the Celts, the seasons were really important.