Monthly Archives: May 2013

“Not believing in devil leading cause of atheism”

Atheism

I know mocking the Catholic Church is like shooting fish in a barrel but this is just to absurd to pass up.

The Pope’s exorcism is a splendid sign because one of the main causes of today’s atheism is that people don’t believe in the Devil any more. But Jesus said: ‘Who is not with me is with Satan.’ If you don’t believe in Satan, Satan has got you in his pocket.

Those are the words of Father Gabriel Amorth, the Vatican’s leading exorcist who claims to have performed 160,000 exorcisms.

After seeing a video in which he claims Pope Francis performs an exorcism, he is calling on the Pope to allow all priests to perform exorcisms, citing growing demand for the practice.

His thinking is that by performing more exorcisms, the Church will suddenly become relevant to the billion people with no religion because apparently it’s Satan’s fault.

I see no flaw in this plan. When in doubt, double down on the crazy.

Just for the record: not believing in god is the main (and only) cause of atheism.

There are more than 50,000 atheists in Canada

Atheism, Canada

The first bit National Household Survey is out, and aside from it’s methodological issues, there’s still lots of data to pour through.

Over the next few days I’ll be looking at lots of it in prep for a presentation to the BC Humanist’s Vancouver meeting this Sunday on this data and our recent poll. Details

But one myth I want to quickly debunk is the tendency to report Canada having a tiny fraction of atheists based on these numbers. Based on the NHS data, Statistics Canada estimates that there are 48,675 atheists in the country, a number that is utter rubbish.

The Survey asks what religion a person is, to which the answer “atheist” is illogical (unless you are religious about your atheism).

We also can’t claim that the “No religion” responses are uniformly atheist – the BCHA poll found about half of those who don’t practice a particular religion or faith do not believe in a higher power, or about 20% of BC. While people may not self-identify as atheist when asked ill-formed questions, they’re still out there not believing in god(s).