Demonstrating an astounding lack of faith in the motivating effects of an eternity in heaven, the
The bonuses, which will apply to the 3,000 people who work in the Vatican, from the highest cardinal to the humblest cleaner, will be awarded on the basis of “dedication, correctness, professionalism and productivity”.
There is no word yet on how the productivity of those charged with communicating with God will be measured. Number of prayers answered perhaps.
The Catholic League wants Christians to stay away from this movie precisely because it knows that the film is bait for the books: unsuspecting parents who take their children to see the movie may be impelled to buy the three books as a Christmas present. And no parent who wants to bring their children up in the faith will want any part of these books.
this is no time for that man [John Howard] to be defeated. Well he’s not going to be. Amen. He is Lord to the glory of God the Father. He is Lord to the glory of God the Father. He is Lord over Australia! It has been announced! Amen.And god has also spoken to Danny Nalliah:
The Lord told me to spend some personal time with Prime Minister John Howard and to prophetically prepare Federal Treasurer Peter Costello as the future Prime Minister of Australia.And Nalliah isn't some crackpot cult leader. In August he had private meetings with the Prime Minister and Peter Costello. (Which may explain why the Coalition has been campaigning so badly - they know they've already won so what's the point in trying.)
... Prime Minister John Howard will be re-elected in the November election (if the Body of Christ unites in prayer and action) and pass the leadership onto Peter Costello sometime after.
Jim Belshaw argues:
that
How do we know?
The first official buildings built in new settlements after police stations and pubs were churches.
So
So, the French are striking. Old news, huh?
It so happens that I’m personally affected. I may or may not be able to travel in two days time to see someone in France depending on whether the strikes are still disrupting rail service. Hence I disclose that:
I am personally affected by the strikes disrupting the rail network in France.
Having said that, and beyond a selfish reason to hate the strikes (many don’t need another reason, and with good, well, reason), there are plenty of points with which to poke the railway strikers!
1.- They’re not fighting for civil liberties, their jobs, or their rights. They’re fighting for a privilege.
Current French legislation gives workers in difficult or hazardous professions the privilege to retire after 37,5 years rather than 40 years of service, allowing some workers to retire at 50 with a full state supported pension, costing the State some 7 billion Euros a year.
Not good.
Even worse: Rail unions have just organised the biggest strike in a decade over this privilege. Imagine if they had something real to complain about!
Bottom line: The strikers are fighting not for their jobs, not for their rights, both of which are noble causes which I would fully support, but for a privilege. They’re fighting for two years and a half of pensions. Given that to be applicable they would have had to have spent 37,5 years in the industry, their life expectancy as a rail worker would have decreased considerably with respect to the average, so there are two years and a half they’re just not going to be able to profit from anyway. Bitter. Fucking. Truth. Now smoke it.
Aristocracies fight for privileges. Nobles and clergymen fight for privileges. Workers don’t fight for privileges. These strikes are characterised by a very distinct bourgeois feel of “We want cake, but the State, she gives us bread!”.
I stress: Not Good.
French rail worker: “We want cake, but the State, she gives us bread!”
2.- They’re unjustly holding the nation hostage.
They’ve taken the liberty to choose for 62 million people. They’ve taken the liberty to remove the right to freedom of movement and to get to their bloody jobs from a whole nation, all over a damned privilege.
Bottom line: In the self-appointed importance and arrogance of the rail workers, they’ve managed to detonate public support (I suppose they never expected any) and be generally hated.
Emotionally defused message to the rail workers of France: You’ve hijacked the trust the public had laid onto you by giving you such astounding union freedom and turned it into nothing more than a cheap, bourgeois dictatorship which is widely hated by everyone.
Emotionally charged message to the rail workers of France: I fucking hate you, you fascist bastards. You’re the reason I haven’t slept a wink in over 8 days and I hope you get replaced by robots within the next few months. So fuck you.
I have commented about this before on another blog, but never written a post of my own concerning it.
On Monday we had our Thanksgiving lunch at work. Before we ate the president of the company did a prayer thanking God for our food and friendships. This has also often happened when my wife and I go to a cookout or dinner at her sister’s house with a large group of religious people.
Every time this happens, I always wonder why everyone thanks God and not the people that actually allowed the food to be sitting there in front of us?
We should be thanking the farmers for the turkeys and vegetables. My grandparents had a farm before I was born, and though I never visited it, I heard enough stories from them and my father that I knew farming was not the greatest job around. I can only imagine the conditions of being a poultry worker. I for one thank them, I know I wouldn’t want that job, but I do want to eat turkey.
Then there are the workers at the canning/frozen food factories. Probably not as difficult a job as a farmer or poultry worker, but still thankless in the big scheme of things. I have worked in a factory before and can attest this is true.
What about the truck drivers getting the food to my grocer? That’s another job, that me sitting in my cubicle, I know I wouldn’t want to do. I beg out of a 5 hour drive to Lubbock so I can take a plane there instead; I know I couldn’t handle driving for a living.
And speaking of the grocer, I remember a time when nearly every store was closed on Thanksgiving except the 7-11′s. now nearly every grocery store is open. Can’t forget about the almighty dollar, so those in retail don’t get the holiday off like the majority of us do. And don’t forget even if you are a retailer that gets Thursday off, chances are you are getting up at the butt-crack of dawn to go to work for Black Friday. That almighty dollar again. I think we know another god this country worships.
I am sure there are plenty more thankless jobs out there that help get my turkey and all the trimming to my table every Thanksgiving. So if you are like me and get caught into giving thanks to an imaginary being, do what I do, and silently think of all of those people and thank them and hope they are able to enjoy their holiday as much as you do. And even if you are religious, you should still give thanks to the right people as well as the god you believe in.
In one word: Prove it.
Both fascinatingly and worryingly, there is an increasing discourse about the notion of ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID).
Rather, and allow me to clarify that previous statement, quote bait for ID proponents, there is an increasing discourse about Intelligent Design within the framework of science and education, notably with very mainstream and manipulative events.
Nobody in the science community will try and force someone not to believe in Intelligent Design, the notion of a higher purpose in the universe. Nobody will say a word about how the parents tries to educate indoctrinate their child within the realm of their home and/or church (although perhaps they should).
The problem with the modern ID push, and indeed, its reason to be, is that it is trying to wedge the discourse into education all over the world.
In a nutshell, Intelligent Design is an idea which claims that since science is inadequate to respond to very ominous and big Questions about existence, then there surely must be an intelligent designer to fill in the gaps.
Do not expect, of course, ID to present a shred of evidence to back up their claim, other than bringing up apparent ‘holes’ in the scientific theories of today and claiming that they must be filled with Intelligence of a higher order, since naturalism apparently cannot fill them.
The Intelligent Design Network maintains it believes in objectivity in science (an otherwise absolutely noble belief which I fervently subscribe to) yet it also believes in the promotion of ‘scientific evidence of intelligent design’ in order to achieve scientific neutrality. Of course, this leaves the fact that their ‘interpretation’ of the 0 point in the axes of neutrality rest firmly on their side of the 0. Not to mention that the scientific evidence of intelligent design has yet to materialise.
So far, the only points intelligent design has going for it is that it makes patently false statements about modern science and takes them as cues to introduce the Great Watchmaker. It also relies on including a great many quotes from scientists who profess belief, forgetting on the way that a quote from a scientist does not constitute any more evidence of the intelligent designer than a quote from a fashion artist.
Outlining the misconceptions of science Intelligent Design makes is a task that has been done to exhaustion yet the relentless religious fervour with which ID proponents follow their prey (i.e. post-Stone Age civilisation) begs that this task be done even more.
As I said at the beginning, nobody is trying to convince you otherwise if you believe there is a superior intelligence out there setting physical constants or even taking interest in terrestrial affairs.
Yet, in the full knowledge that the hallmark of a solid scientific theory is its ability to predict the future in light of current evidence, it’s hard not to conclude that Intelligent Design is a load of hot air. Indeed, to its credit, an interpretation of ID, namely “There is a Higher Intelligence/God/Allah/FSM and He did it” is quite apt at predicting the future and explaining the past in a lazy, convoluted and intellectually manipulative way, especially considering that the required evidence for ID to hold water is nowhere to be found.
So, in the tried and true model of challenging budding scientific theories (and otherwise, as in this case), there is but one simple requirement for ID to present in order for it to begin to hold water as a scientific and eventually educational theory:
Evidence.
Challenge: Bring me evidence, found on its own merit i.e. not child’s play ‘evidence’ of the kind: “Darwin recanted on his deathbed!”, “There are such a thing as transcendental numbers!”, “Quantum mechanics scares me so it must be God!”, “The eye is too complex to have evolved!”, etc. but more like what bubble trails are to particle physics kind of thing.
Response, if successful: I will videotape myself eating a popular edition (unabridged!) of the Origin of Species and post it to Youtube. That’s right, tearing off each individual page and ingesting The Origin of Species.
Good hunting.
P.S. Clarification: Holes in modern scientific theories do not automatically validate your own – at best, they eventually strengthen the modern science theory in question. Logic arguments do not constitute evidence. Biblical prophecies do not constitute evidence. Find me a genuine fossil of a dinosaur, dated with modern scientific methods to 6000 years ago which is used to sustain a peer-reviewed and accepted paper on ID and I shall recant.
If you are an acknowledged atheist, sooner or later someone will ask you this question. The only ways to avoid it are to keep your atheism a secret, or to become a hermit. There is a certain type of religious person who views the mere existence of an atheist as an affront to their faith. (As they should: it is a weak argument in favor of atheism that skepticism is not prevented by supernatural means.)
This question is an attempt to trap an atheist — a rhetorical cleft stick. It invites a yes or no answer, and neither answer bodes well for the atheist. An answer of “yes” — however much the atheist may lean in that direction — is a direct insult, inviting retaliation. (The question is always asked by a theist.) If the atheist plays it safe and answers “no”, however, it suggests the thought “there are some religious people who are not stupid, so religion must be a smart choice, so the atheist must be stupid.” The question is approximately on a par with “have you stopped beating your wife yet?”
The fact of the matter is that any atheist who has actually considered their own position would give an answer which is neither “no” nor “yes”, but closer to the latter. If given time or space to expand on the question, most atheists would answer along these lines: “The suppositions of religion contradict the observed state and operation of the world. A responsible, rational, and well-informed person would not become religious. But religions deliberately seek out people who are not responsible (usually by reason of youth), rational (often temporarily because of stress), or well-informed. Everyone in the world falls into at least one of these categories at some point, and so there is no shortage of people who become religious without a serious act of will, and who would not have done so if given a conscious choice.”
This answer — or one like it — is seldom allowed, if for no reason than it lacks panache. The question is intended to be part of a debate, and no matter how often one wishes things were otherwise, style often trumps truth in a debate. The questioner is testing you, and thoughtful-yet-styleless answers fail the test.
Recently, I found what I believe is an answer which is reasonably short, reasonably accurate, and better than a simple “yes” or “no”. I may not be the first to come up with it — in fact, I would be surprised if I were. But it is nearly a perfect metaphor.
“Do you think all people who eat candy are fat?”
A not so long while ago, I met up with a very interesting young woman who had all sorts of things to say. One of these interesting things was a hobby of her mothers, Homeopathy.
Homeopathy was developed in the early 19th century by a character named Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann. At the time the development of scientific medicine in Western Europe was very much embryonic, and Samuel developed the idea that to cure a disease, instead of following normal – and damned dangerous – practices of bloodletting, he would try and keep the disease inside the system and purge it out by restoring the vital life force.
The development of scientific medicine was essentially materialistic and, well, scientific. Homeopathy differed from this by following a metaphysical and subjective approach.
Today, the practice involves dissolving insignificant amounts of remedy (that in larger doses would produce symptomatic effects similar to the ones being treated) into solution in order to cure the patient. The idea that a special form of shaking the solution confers a kind of ‘memory’ to the molecules ingested by the patient.
There is, however, absolutely no evidence which could demonstrate the validity of any of these statements. It’s all very nice on paper, and indeed, within the realm of metaphysical and spiritual practices, it holds quite a reputable status. The methods involved might seem scientific in that they search for a reliable remedy to suit the disease, but instead of attacking the disease, they focus on restoring the life spirit, whose balance was damaged by the miasm, or disease in question. As far as evidence-based science and reality checks go, there’s nothing which could distinguish homeopathy from the placebo effect. Indeed, it is often speculated that many of the concepts in homeopathy smack of religious revelation in their inane proclamations.
So, what have I got against this woman’s mother practising homoeopathy? Absolutely nothing. She has every right to believe whatever she might seem fit.
The problem arises when one tries to substitute real medicine with alternative medicine. The notion that a spiritual cure can claim a privileged position in face of science is very dangerous, not only for the state of society, but for the patient involved, above all!
I’m not drawing at straw-men. In the UK, homeopathy is offered by the NHS. Homeopathy pharmacies are licensed by the Department of Health.
The notion that an alternative remedy, just because it does not involve chemicals, is somehow more apt than a doctor to cure an illness belittles the leaps and bounds of scientific medical progress, without which the average life expectancy of a developed nation would not go much over 30. Indeed, there are herbal remedies which, because they include the same chemicals found in medicine, help to sooth symptoms of serious diseases or cure minor ills. That is, of course, only natural.
Yet the unsubstantiated notion that statistically and chemically insignificant dilution of untested remedies will cure a patient by balancing their life force is not so different to shamanism or voodoo incantations.
Everyone has the right to bask in their own beliefs as they see fit, be it religion or homeopathy or whatever. However, one thing which must remain clearly defined is the line between public health and quackery. It hurts to see taxpayer money be diverted into sponsoring remedies which are indistinguishable from placebo effects yet masked as real medicine. It endangers the separation of politics and superstition, a separation which has taken millenia to materialise.
If you feel that ingesting a couple of molecules of whatever will make you feel better, you are entitled to that belief. If you believe that a couple of molecules of conium maculatum will kill your tumour, well, it’s a dangerous delusion but you are entitled to it nevertheless. However, if in some way or another the State gives its blessing to this quackery and non-sensical shamanism, then you start to threaten all the medical progress that has been made to date, and we’ve got a problem.
A long while ago, I decided to pull the plug on the GoR, anticipating a lack of time required to honour the learnèd readership of the blog.
Noticing that comments still kept flowing in, and noticing I had severe blogging withdrawal symptoms, I’ve decided to look into perhaps restarting the Gospel of Reason. I’ve found I have the hunger and the time to keep on writing, so I hope my words will not fall on empty ears – even if they do, I intend to keep on writing. It feels really good! What can I say.
It’s been a fairly long time, so I suppose it would be beneficial to make a fresh start. I stand to reiterate the following goals:
This blog is run by a scientific atheist who finds Truth through evidence and through natural beauty. These are all themes I’ll touch upon in the future, including how they relate to current events.
There’s a market for talking about reason and science because of late, these two bastions of civilisation are under attack. We need to take it unto ourselves to defend from a position of elevated tranquility the two safeguards of our way of life from the onslaught of superstition and dogma.
Notwithstanding, I am also a Libertarian, and as such, although I may disagree with someone’s opinion, I will defend to the death their right to say it. I set out resolutely convinced I will not try to convince anyone of my opinions. If someone finds an argument set out here convincing, then so be it, and all the better. I have an open mind and will examine contrary arguments with all the cold blooded criticism and scepticism which which I regard my own arguments (and change them, were it to be necessary in light of new evidence).
So in the spirit of free discourse and in the aim to expound the virtues of reason and science while at the same time blowing off some intellectual steam (others might call it intellectual masturbation), I invite you to stay at the Gospel of Reason for a while, and to enjoy the discourse that inevitably appears.
Good day.
Vote for a pro-choice politician and burn in Hell. So said the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at this week's annual meeting. (Technically, the Bishops said such voting "may affect individual salvation," but we all know that's intellectual theologian code for pitchforks and eternal roasting.)
What seems unfair to me is to threaten voters with catastrophic supernatural consequences for not towing the line. Threatening catastrophic Earthly consequences for political decisions is one thing--voters can presumably evaluate for themselves the chances that impeding the Bush administration will result in "the smoking gun . . . be[ing] a mushroom cloud." But to suggest that Jesus is peering around the curtain at your Diebold Accuvote TSX--and will cast you into the abyss if you touch "Giuliani"--crosses a certain line.
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