Kristin Chenoweth Responds to Ricky Gervais

I love the inability of most Christians to comprehend the idea that something can just happen. It doesn’t have to have a causal agent. She asks the silly question yet misses the obvious;

…but then who made the ape, the fish or the spark?

Well Kristin, who made God? If God doesn’t need a maker, why does the spark need one. I won’t bother to explain who made the ape or the fish; nobody on the board wants me to describe wild monkey sex for them and the reproductive activity of fish is kind of boring after wild monkey sex.

I think the opposite of her final statement makes a lot more sense:

Just because you believe in something, doesn’t mean it’s true.

I liked her piece.

It was humble. She all but concedes that atheism (or really naturalism) could well be true but that she wants to believe things that she admits sound a bit absurd. I’m okay with that sort of “leap of faith” so long as it’s not a cudgel to strip people of their rights or affect what is taught in schools.

I don’t know, Hemant, I found it funny!

The article by Lee Strobel is funny, too. In a ‘Yeah, yeah we believe your “I used to be an atheist until I found teh evidence”, schtick, Lee Strobel’ kind of way

“Sometimes people want to debate or try and change me. I just giggle because I know I won’t be changing the fundamentals of my faith to fit my lifestyle. It’s a relief when you get to the place in your life when you kind of don’t care WHAT people think anymore. I’ve graduated from giving a crap! Yay!!!!”

“She always said, “read the Bible like you eat fish: take the meat that serves you well, but don’t choke on a bone.””

So… I don’t alter my faith to fit my lifestyle, but if something in the Bible doesn’t suit me, I’m free to ignore it? Ah I see, this is one of those cafeteria Christians. Kind of sad that she doesn’t even realize it, she actually thinks she has principles!

Gervais’ article pwns this one. I don’t know how people can admit to not knowing that their beliefs are true and then get away with chastising a belief system founded in what is actually known about the universe (atheism/ agnosticism).

Faith is believing in something you know ain’t true. – Samuel Clemens

Are her eyes and toes demonic-looking on purpose as a joke? I don’t think there is a square inch on that person that wasn’t primped or painted for that photo. She looks embalmed.

That criticism aside, she didn’t seem to touch on WHY she should believe. She didn’t claim morals, advances in knowledge, riches, better family life. .. SO do you think she would ever admit that she perpetuates the crap simply out of fear of death or being ostricized by family?

“Just because you don’t believe in something, doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

This is equivalent to “just because something is true, that doesn’t mean you believe in it.” Which is an uber-rational way of saying people are irrational. Her defense amounts to “Leave me alone, I can be irrational if I want to.”

I think the accusations of cherry-picking and cafeteria Christianity are true but irrelevant. She knows what she believes isn’t rational, and she doesn’t care. She even says she doesn’t give a crap anymore. I just wonder if she realizes that’s the same thing as believing regardless of the truth.

Who am I kidding? She probably believes that there are other ways of knowing, that reason isn’t the only path to truth.

i have no idea who she is; another pretty celebrity i suppose. why they chose her to defend faith has to do mostly with her hair, smile and tits, i suppose. but she’s no scholar of religion, that’s for sure.

Because she is more then happy to wait for as long as possible.

let’s be blunt: she doesn’t off herself to go walk with granny on streets of gold because in truth, she has real and significant doubt about the tenants and claims of her “faith.” just like the rest of us, some part of her is pretty sure the xtian mythology is bunk. they all have that doubt, believers. the Game for them is spending a lifetime pretending they don’t, mostly because they are sheeple who don’t want to stand out in a crowd.

I bet you think you made a good point, but the atheist position depends 100% on science, which needs a cause.

No, it doesn’t necessarily. Evolution especially doesn’t concern itself about the origins of life. It’s about how life develops. Explaining where life came from on the first place is at most a niche issue in that specific field. See: abiogenesis

Same with cosmology. Yeah it would be nice if we could know the origins of the universe in every last detail, but we probably won’t. That doesn’t make our observations and current understanding about the early universe, its expansion or the creation of galaxies and the stars and less true.

The “first cause” argument is silly anyways. So what created god? Believers either say the he always existed, which is just silly, or totally evade the issue by trying to move it beyond human comprehension. Either way, they muck things up by saying something less complex came from something more complex when all the evidence out there contradicts that.

She has some mighty fancy toenails. That’s all I got.

I bet you think you made a good point, but the atheist position depends 100% on science…. blah blah der duh derrrrr…..

Christians love to make public displays of stupidity, it would seem.

Let’s not forget here that Chenoweth is a big player in gay and lesbian rights – I think GLAAD recently honoured her for it. To me, that makes here a nice person and her faith doesn’t really bother me.

Duelling celebrities has got to be the dumbest of all pissing contests.

My grandmother had dementia, so no I don’t want to meet her again, she wouldn’t know me and someone would have to taking care of her all the time.

I don’t want to pick on Kristin Chenowith, who, all things considered, seems like a nice person.

But I have to wonder about the title of that article:

In A World of Make-Believe, I Still Believe in Easter

Assuming that she selected the title, it seems supremely ironic that she didn’t realize the irony of that statement. For atheists, Easter is as “make-believe” as any other form of theater or pageantry.

@AxeGrrl

And how does someone who doesn’t believe something because of lack of compelling evidence have “more faith” than someone who does believe in spite of lack of compelling evidence?

Maybe you haven’t thought about this, but atheism contains an amazingly large amount of belief, not a lack of belief. It is naive to think that atheists simply DON’T believe in things. Atheists DO believe that there is no God. That is a belief, and a pretty bold one at that. In believing this, they disagree with the vast majority of people who have ever walked the earth that believe there is at least some sort of higher power. Those who believe in a higher power do because they need an explanation for the unexplainable things.

Atheists, however, choose to believe in a concept that has no known cause except that it happened to happen. Chance. One in a billion. One in a trillion. One in an infinity number of possible combinations of events, and this one just so happened to be. Chaos somehow turned into an infinitely complex ordered system of life. ANY religion, however silly, is more likely than that. Talk to a statistician and they will tell you that an atheist perspective is not probable. Just because it is not probable doesn’t mean it’s not true, just less likely to be true. Even a staunch atheist has to agree with that. Atheists, then, choose to believe something that is not likely to be true, so they have “faith” that it is true.

So, in reality, atheists have even more faith than theists.

Bargain wrote:

they disagree with the vast majority of people who have ever walked the earth that believe there is at least some sort of higher power.

So what? you’re not seriously proferring the ‘argumentum ad populum’ here are you? there’s a reason it’s listed under ‘fallacies’

Those who believe in a higher power do because they need an explanation for the unexplainable things

Again, you’re not exactly helping your case here. Some of us feel no need to go beyond acknowledging that some things are (so far) ‘unexplainable’. Just because some people “need” an explanation doesn’t mean that the explanation they ‘like’ is true.

Atheists, however, choose to believe in a concept that has no known cause except that it happened to happen.

(sigh) I don’t mean to be unkind, but you seem to be very misinformed on the issue of what atheists ‘believe’.

Chaos somehow turned into an infinitely complex ordered system of life. ANY religion, however silly, is more likely than that.

I’m extremely curious as to where you’ve gotten your comic-book-esque ideas about cosmology/evolution/probabilties.

Just because it is not probable doesn’t mean it’s not true, just less likely to be true. Even a staunch atheist has to agree with that.

*gobsmacked* please tell me you’re a Poe, Bargain! pleeeeeease.

If you’re not, then please ponder this little nugget of wisdom:

“because you win the lottery does not mean the game is fixed”

There was so much nonsense in that post; thank you for chopping it up for us Axegrrl.

My money is on a Poe.

@SecuLuv

Seriously? Her grandmother told her to ignore the parts of the Bible that didn’t suit her, and she’s spouting it as if it’s good advice? Even after hearing this kind of stupidity a thousand times, I still despise cherry-pickers.

I still don’t understand why a lot of atheists loathe cherry pickers. In my experience, the “good stuff” Christians are much, much better people than those who believe in the whole shebang.

Religion is never going to be completely replaced with reason, so I’d much rather have good theists than bible thumping fundies.

@Axe grrl

You have sucessfully taken a simple statement by me and misinterpreted it. I sense this is something you do often, hence the reason you are an atheist.