Atheism on the web

• www.infidels.org: The Secular Web, a.k.a. The Internet Infidels
  I don't believe in saving the best for last. This is my favorite atheist site. You can visit it almost every day as they frequently update their content with new articles and discussions. They do book reviews several times a month, on books both for and against religion. They have regular contributors who write commentary on relevant current events and political issues. They answer a lot of mail, with the same flair and humor that I also appreciate regularly on Austin's Atheist TV show. The Internet Infidels site also includes an extensive online library, divided up into historical and modern sections. The historical section contains essays by all the most famous freethinkers in history, including Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Mark Twain, and Thomas Jefferson. It even includes the complete text of three books by Charles Darwin. The modern section gets updated frequently, with articles published after 1970. In many cases, contact information or links are included so that you can speak with the author directly.
  
  
• www.sonic.net/~jhuger/kisshank.htm: Kissing Hank's Ass
  This is great atheist humor. It's a satirical parable about a billionaire philanthropist who is supposed to give people money if they kiss his butt. His disciples also claim that he'll beat you up if you don't kiss his butt. The only problem is, no one has ever actually seen Hank or his butt, and the only information that anybody really knows about him is written down on a very cryptic memo that he supposedly wrote which explains how the world works.
  
  
• www.skepdic.com: The Skeptic's Dictionary
  As the name suggests, it's a skeptical dictionary about all kinds of bizarre claims. Each article usually gives a brief explanation of what the claim is, who the followers are, and why the claim is probably a bunch of baloney. The Skeptic's Dictionary is divided into several sections, such as religion, alternative medicine, paranormal and psychic, frauds and hoaxes, and so on. It's also fun to browse right through the index if you prefer to do it that way. Among the hundreds of entries in the Skeptic's Dictionary, a few you'll find include:
  • God
  • UFO's
  • Channeling
  • Scientology
  • Uri Geller
  • The Bermuda Triangle
  • Amway
   
• www.talkorigins.org: Talk.origins archive
  This web site is affiliated with talk.origins newsgroup, which is where you go when you want to see and participate in furiously heated arguments about the origin of the universe and life on earth, including the whole creation/evolution controversy. This site is sort of a repository for the best arguments and discussions on the issue. Although the newsgroup is populated about equally by people on both sides of the argument, this web site falls quite squarely on the "natural causes" side. Talkorigins.org has extensive FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions, for you newbies), covering everything from "The argument from design" to carbon dating methods to well-known transitional forms that are catalogued today. They also have transcripts of live creation/evolution debates that have taken place recently. This is a great place to go if you are planning to get in arguments about evolution yourself but you don't quite know what you're talking about. There are answers to most standard creationist arguments here.

  The Other Side

• www.bible.com: The Bible (what else?)
  I thought it would be good to include at least one actual online Bible in this discussion. There are several available, but the easiest to find is, of course, bible.com. Now you may be asking, why would I want to include the Bible as part of a list of atheist websites? Well, I am firmly of the opinion that actually reading the bible is the best cure for Christianity. Now, you can actually read the bible straight through on the internet, but you'd probably be more comfortable with an actual printed version. What the internet is good for is jumping around text quickly and searching. Online Bibles can be really handy for looking up odd passages; for instance, if you heard that Jesus said you have to hate your parents and wonder "Did he really say that?", you can just do a search and turn it up pretty quickly. This can be a useful tool for quickly looking up Bible contradictions. And above all, if you read the Bible then you will have a pretty authoritative answer to those Christians who tell you that if you'd only read the Bible, you'd become a Christian too.
  
  
• www.chick.com: Jack T. Chick publications
  If you want to read something that's WAY out there, you can get much farther out than Jack Chick. Maybe some people have read these obnoxious little comic book tracts in which cartoon sinners are shown the error of their ways and usually wind up going to a stylized cartoon hell. When I was in college, I would occasionally run across people lurking on campus, waiting to give tracts to students as they passed by. Now I've found that Jack Chick has his own web site, with complete online versions of his cartoons. This guy is extreme. He not only opposes atheists and liberals, he also thinks there's some grand world-wide conspiracy by Catholics and that the pope is the Anti-Christ. I think these tracts are about as entertaining as they come.
  
  
• www.capalert.com: ChildCare Action Project
  Christian movie reviews, believe it or not. No, not reviews of Christian movies, but reviews of movies by Fundamentalists. He has a rating system that uses that acronym WISDOM, short for Wanton violence, Impudence, Sex, Drugs, Offense to God, and Murder. Each movie is given a score up to 100. The more of these six items that the movie contains, the lower the score. The only movie that has EVER received a 100 on this ratings scale is Mary Poppins, with some of the worst movies being The Basketball Diaries, Scream 3, and of course South Park. After reading a few reviews you may believe that it's all a joke, but they're very serious and they have editorials explaining why they go through the obvious torment of watching these movies that they hate so much.

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