Archive for December, 2007

Church

Married To The Sea
marriedtothesea.com

In Summary

Excellent summation on why a lot of us are angry at religion: http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/10/atheists-and-an.html

Huckabee wants a theocracy

Original article Despite some of the comments we're receiving on other posts lately, Mike Huckabee really does a bang up job of causing a lot of heartburn around here. This is because Mr. Huckabee seems incapable of abiding by our Constitution and that whole pesky Freedom of Religion thing. Now, now, I know no where in the Constitution was 'separation of Church and state' mentioned but come...

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Friendly Atheist Contest #13: The New Atheists’ New Year’s Resolutions

Last week, I ran this contest:

Complete the next line(s) of the poem:

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

I was just expecting a couple lines, but some of you wrote entire poems! And they were awesome. I’m only included some lines of the winning poems below, but the link provided sends you to the entire thing.

Here are the Top 5 lines… or more (with submitters)!

5|

In the week before Christmas, commercials abound
Letting us know of the sales all around
The billboards were run by the highway with care
In hopes that consumers soon would be there…

(Full poem)

(Tim)

4|

My life mate and I, seeing kids off to their bed
Decided to stay up and watch TV instead.
Then as it went on our ears burst in pain
FOX News was having its ‘War on Christmas’ again.

(Anatoly)

3|

As the pious Christian families were kneeling in prayer
The atheists began a war on christmas, Bill-O did declare.
“They hate the sweet baby Jesus,” the right-winger host did say.
“Stop giving gifts, heathens. This is our Good ‘Ol US of A.”
Sure, we don’t mind, you can have prayers and your nativity
But we just prefer Einstein’s theory of relativity.

(Josha)

2|

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse,
We hide in silence, the creatures and I, all equally fearful,
Outside the Evangelicals swarm, they’ll give you an earful

Yowling and buzzing, a song of insect and cat,
A hideous, horrible, heinous Hillsong, if you could imagine that,
“Lord this, Lord that, baby Jebus be praised,
Believe us, The Word is Truth. You’ll be shocked and amazed!”

(Full poem)

(Bartlett)

1|

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
For the mouse was dead, the children sedated,
And Santa was late, the neighborhood gated.

He got to the house, nanosecond to ten,
Dropped off the coal, in the atheists’ den.
He does this work early, to save him some stress,
The naughty were many, logistics a mess.

(Full poem)

(Tolga K.)

Congratulations to the winners! The top three will be receiving specially-made Friendly Atheist wristbands (in the color of their choice), sent to me by blog reader Shauna and her sister Danni!

FriendlyAtheistBand

If you’d like to win your own wristband, here is the new contest:

What will be the New Year’s Resolution for any of the “New Atheists” (Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, etc.)?

Funny and creative answers will have a shot at winning.

Good luck!


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Bustin’ out all over

Yikes. More Florida school boards — in St Lucie, Palm Beach, and Martin counties — are infested with creationists. Florida Citizens for Science is maintaining a watch list.

So…have you checked your local school board? Do you have creationists biding their time, waiting to corrupt your schools?

Read the comments on this post...

You know who’s got a hard job?

It's those poor creation scientists.

Read the comments on this post...

Policy or Persecution?

Christine Lutz, a Seventh Day Adventist was asked to leave a Fort Worth City bus for reading her bible too loudly. She claimed to be observing the Sabbath by reading to her children on the way to church.

...'Oh, but it's the perfect time and the perfect place since it is our Sabbath and it is the time with the Lord and therefore I'm going to continue.' And I continued," she explained.

Then, a TRE supervisor came on board. Lutz also told him that she would not stop reading. She and her family were escorted off the bus.

Source: cbs11tv.com - Woman Escorted Off Fort Worth Transit Bus For Reading Bible Aloud

Sounds like policy enforcement to me. I smell a fundie nutball.

I wonder if the story would have received the same coverage if it had been the Koran?

George H. Smith quasi-endorses Ron Paul

George H. Smith, author of the famous introductory book on atheism "Atheism: The Case Against God," endorses Ron Paul for president in 2008.

Sad State Of Affairs


Don’t you think that it is a sad state of affairs when the President of the United States can’t be trusted to make a controversial appointment to some public office without the advice and consent of the Senate? That’s what’s going on at the moment. The Senate has scheduled, while out on holiday recess, a series of pro forma sessions, in order to create the fiction that the Senate is still in session, thereby preventing Bush from making a recess appointment, something he’s allowed to do under the Constitution. You can read about it here.

The Senate had asked him to, essentially, promise not to do that, by offering to ratify certain proposed appointments of his, in return for holding off on one that they deemed controversial. He refused. So the Senators now have to go through the sham of taking turns showing up in the Chamber, gavel the Senate open, then gavel it closed again, all in the matter of a few short seconds, just to prevent the President from defeating the “Advice and Consent” provision of the Constitution, albeit if for only a year.

You would think that the Senate could trust him to hold off until proper consideration could be given to his appointment proposal, or that he would agree to allow the normal process of Senate hearings to review the appointment, but apparently past experience led them to the current state of distrust. They probably remember when he appointed John Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations, when he was unable to be formally confirmed after being officially proposed by Bush. Bush waited until the Senate was in summer recess, then appointed him for a year.

Anyone remember when Bush claimed he was “a uniter, not a divider”?

Silly scurrilousness against the sanctimonious

I've been slacking off on Pharyngula lately — I've had a week to relax and get caught up on a few other things. Here, though, are a few links to ridiculous religiosity that have been piling up in the mailbox.

Read the comments on this post...

happy 2008!

this has been an amazing year for me -- a year ago i never suspected that i'd be living and working in china! 2007 was full of surprises, obstacles, breaks and happy times. i've grown and learned so much and have come to intensely appreciate what i have. 2008 promises to be even more interesting and eventful -- more living in china, contributing to another olympic games and, finally, a much-anticipated return home.

blogging has opened my mind, helped fill a hunger for worthwhile ideas -- and i've met some wonderful friends on the way.

my best wishes for a happy and healthy year for all!

A Fresh Start, A New Purpose


This is the time of year when people pause to look both backwards and forwards. As I look back on the year 2007, I am struck by the tremendous intellectual changes the deacon and I went through this past year. The processes began years, even decades, earlier, but it was only within the past year that we set our minds free and dared to examine our lives, our world and the universe in ways that are, to us, completely novel.

Looking ahead to 2008, we have decided to use this New Year to mark the start of a new, faith-free life together. We will be doing this by renewing our marriage vows in a private ceremony. The vows we exchanged in 1979, which we composed, were heavily laden with Christian language and ideals. The vows we will exchange tonight, again composed by us, have been stripped of all religious imagery. The old ideals that constrained us will be replaced by a new vision of our life together. The new vows reaffirm our commitment to each other’s individual growth and fulfillment, as well as to our relationship, and express our joy in venturing forward into a future unbound by the shackles of religious dogma.

People who are steeped within religious traditions often have difficulty understanding how non-believers can face the world. They ask, what is your purpose in life? Or, what do you hope for? At this point, the deacon and I are still developing our answers to such questions. We are excited by the idea that we are free to design our own purposes for living. Our hopes are to live our lives in ways that will honor our families, our friends and ourselves, and to do whatever lies within our small powers to leave this world a better place than it was when we entered it.

I think these excerpts from two well-known humanist authors, one still very much alive and the other long dead, summarize our thoughts very nicely.

The first selection is excerpted from Richard Dawkins’ lovely essay, To Live at All is Miracle Enough:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here….

[W]e have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

The second excerpt is from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass collection:

O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless–of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light–of the objects mean–of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all–of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest–with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring–What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here–that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

I hope all of you will join the deacon and me in contributing a few humble, worthwhile lines to the drama of life!

–the chaplain

the cassini favorite image contest

and the winners are....

are your favorites among them? some of mine was:


click pic to source

and the great crossing!

stunning, stunning, stunning.

New Year, and New Improvement: Syndication!

Currently Reading:
The Way of Zen
by Taisen Deshimaru



We Are Live:
I have set up my blog now, so that it can be syndicated w/a RSS feed or ATOM. The links are near the top-left of my blog, just under my pic. As you all know, just click on the type of subscription you use, and you'll be notified every time I make a new post. No having to manually go here and check, though you can do that if you REALLY want to. ;-)


Cheers,
CET

"Much of the suffering in the world comes from the illusion that we are separate from one another." - Gautama Buddha


Human evolution on the upswing

I found this article rather fascinating mostly because I’ve long thought that “our technological and medical advances have removed most of the selection pressures acting upon us”. That such is not the case makes for interesting possibilities.

Human evolution is speeding up. Around 40,000 years ago our genes began to evolve much faster. By 5000 years ago they were evolving 30 to 40 times faster than ever before and it seems highly likely that we continue to evolve at this super speed today.

Our population explosion and rapidly changing lifestyles seem to be the drivers of this acceleration, the discovery of which contradicts the widely held notion that our technological and medical advances have removed most of the selection pressures acting upon us.

Modern times causing human evolution to accelerate - being-human - 14 December 2007 - New Scientist

Happy New Year!

In case neither Heather or myself get the chance before tomorrow (GMT of course), this is just a quick Happy New Year to all our readers - even those whose calendars don’t change over at midnight -) . We will try to get back into the swing of lots of ranting about idiocy as soon as the holiday season allows us.

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easy-bend teaspoon

uri, eat your heart out.

click pic to source
via boingboing

Huckabee on Homosexuality

Huckabee is a fundie of epic proportions. He is so anti-gay that to elect him would be equivalent to ushering in  a fundie inquisition. American Gays would face four hard years.

In 1997, Huckabee requested an amendment to a state Senate bill stating “that it is Arkansas public policy to prohibit sodomy to protect the traditional family structure.” [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 1/23/1997]

Source: Think Progress: Huckabee: "I Don't Know" if People are "Born" Gay, But It's A "Choice" To Act Gay

Huckabee would bring his morality and sense of Christian superiority to the White House. And then.... well, it is not a pretty picture.

Jesus Camp Follies

I finally got to watch Jesus Camp, a movie that everybody had been recommending. It was on A&E last night so I commandeered the TV and set my brain to stun mode.

It was actually painful to watch because so much of my life was caught in that movie. Some of the stuff that lady was preaching were the same themes that I had been taught and that I in turn taught to others. What was different was the age of the kids. Her sermon topics were standard rhetoric for teenage audiences of my day and much of it was taught in youth group, at teen camp and at the annual Provincial Youth Convention. My Sunday School years were mostly just happy songs about loving Jesus and bible stories illustrated with felt board characters. That's not to say we weren't indoctrinated, but the idea of taking political stands on the makeup of the supreme court or protesting abortion rights or thinking of ourselves as suicide bombers for Jesus came a little later on.

The most disturbing part was that she was so easily convinced the children that becoming a martyr and dying for the faith was a good thing. I was taught the same thing, but that was seen as a standing firm for your beliefs in the face of someone saying "give up your faith or die". Now it's done in a setting of an offensive war against the forces of Satan while they admiringly discuss Islamic extremists and suicide bombers. Scary stuff.


Here are a few of my favourite quotes (paraphrased as I remember them):

"I want to say a few words about Harry Potter. I don't care what kind of a hero he is or what good things he does. A warlock is the enemy of god. If this were the Old Testament, Harry Potter would be put to death". Yeah lady, and if this were the Old Testament you'd have to sleep out in a tent in your backyard every time you had your period. It drives me nuts how christians wish it were Old Testament times when they want to deal with homosexuals or wiccans, but they have no intention of turning in their cotton-poly blends or substituting their lobster dinner for a plate of locusts.

"Science doesn't prove anything. That's why I'm glad we have the truth of the bible to guide us". I've heard so many christians parrot this sentiment. They reject science because it does not offer irrevocable Truth, preferring to forgo rational thinking and evidence in favour of clinging to their discredited beliefs by faith alone.

"I think Galileo made a good decision giving up science for Christ". The historical ignorance of that statement is simply flabbergasting.

"I was born again when I was five because I just wanted more out of life". Can you say brainwashed? I knew you could.

Please pass the Burka

As I contemplate the weighty consequences of holiday food-binging, I think how much I’d really like to hide it all under a Burka for at least a month. By the end of a Weight Watchers followed month, I could imerge again like a svelt butterfly from her cocoon. Danielle Crittenden of The Huffington Post wrote a four part series Islamic Like Me where
she wore a burka for a week during her daily life in Washington, D.C.
Actually, as many pointed out in the comments, she wasn’t actually wearing a burka but an abaya and a niqab, but the function was the same. She wandered around D.C. doing her shopping, riding on the subway, even bought a one-way ticket to New York that she had no intention of using, just so she could go through airport security. Everywhere she went, she was surprised by the lack of hostility she experienced. People went out of their way to either act indiferent to her or interested in speaking with her about “her culture”. However her final conclusion, really it was her viewpoint all along, was that such clothing was a symbol, much like the uniform of the Klan, and should be banned for what it symbolises.

I have a problem with banning symbols. I have a problem with office dress codes too, mainly because it involves forcing me to wear pantyhose which is way more torture in Arizona than a Burka. Workplace rules aside, forcing people to dress a certain way, or preventing them from dressing a certain way, all boils down to someone taking control over another. If I were in control, I’d like ban flip-flops. I don’t want to see your ugly feet and hear that fthp-fthp every where you go. I’m sure you don’t want to see me sweeze my fat-ass into a leather skirt and watch my belly jiggle over the waistband. While I have the fashion-sense not to, I still have the right. And you have the right to wear your flip-flops to the grocery store.

Is that a Twisted Sister Pin on your uniform?

Which is more important? Freedom of expression or freedom from oppression. Can we preserve both? Is it possible to protect the rights of those who want to wear the niquab while at the same time protecting the rights of those who don’t? Do we ban such attire in schools? How do we on one hand tell a child that this is the land of religious freedom while on the other tell her she can’t wear the headscarf? A girl in Canada was strangled to death by her father because she didn’t want to wear the hijab. Would she have been safe if there were a dress policy at her school that would have banned such covering? Or would that have given her father just another reason to pull her out of school? Maybe the answer is letting children wear the headscarf to school, while stressing to them that while they’re at school they can take it off or leave it on, it’s completely their decision.

Women in favor of the hijab have argued:
In the Western world, the hijab has come to symbolize either forced silence or radical, unconscionable militancy. Actually, its neither. It is simply a woman's assertion that judgment of her physical person is to play no role whatsoever in social interaction.

In Islam, a woman is free to be who she is inside, and immune from being portrayed as sex symbol and lusted after.
The second concept unfortunately leads a lot of Muslim men to believe that those who don’t cover do want to be treated as sex symbols giving them the license to harrass or rape (after all men can’t control their sexual desires, oh no). And since they don’t want a whore for a wife or daughter, they force them to cover.

Banning the symbol doesn’t erase the underlying philosophy. Women who wear the hijab, whether by choice or not, are visable. We can speak with them, ask them, “do you wear that because you want to?” Girls in school can be given a little extra instruction about rights and equality. It’s far better to have these strangely dressed females out in the world where they can be exposed to ideas than hidden away. Even if that idea is that she is wearing the hijab because she wants to and is proud of it.

Now excuse me while I go find a mu’umu’u.

It’s not about the Bible per se…

but two sisters are refusing to return to school after an incident at their school. The incident in question concerns a classmate who decided to rip pages out of a Bible.

As many Parker High School students get ready for Christmas break, junior Elle Jacobson is at home and will not be returning like her friends.

“I have never felt threatened like that in a classroom before,” said Jacobson.

The 17-year-old is talking about an incident in her English class two weeks ago during a class presentation.”

This boy got up and his visual aid was a Bible and a book. And he got up and started his speech by saying ‘Now, this piece of crap’ and pointed to the Bible.”Jacobson said that she quickly felt threatened.”He took the Bible and he said, ‘I’m going to do this because I can. I’m going to do something that your stupid, little minds aren’t going to be able to comprehend and he took the Bible and started ripping out pages.”

What caught my eye is that the Bible was only one of the books the unnamed student held up.  The second is alleged to have been a collection of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  If you’re familiar with Emerson’s work then you know that a reoccurring theme is that conformity is a vice.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Emerson:

Conformity is the chief Emersonian vice, the opposite or “aversion” of the virtue of “self-reliance.” We conform when we pay unearned respect to clothing and other symbols of status, when we show “the foolish face of praise” or the “forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us” (CW2: 32). Emerson criticizes our conformity even to our own past actions-when they no longer fit the needs or aspirations of the present. This is the context in which he states that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines” (CW2: 33). There is wise and there is foolish consistency, and it is foolish to be consistent if that interferes with the “main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, …the upbuilding of a man” (99).

Conformity in America as it relates to the Bible is that the collection of works is something good, worthy of being preserved - despite what one may actually think of the collection.  It’s the foolish face of praise, the forced smile.  If this unnamed  book was in fact the student’s second book, it puts his remark about doing something the other student’s could not comprehend into striking context and proved his point.

“Little minds” cannot fathom that someone would look upon a revered symbol and precede to destroy it.   Such minds retreat back to the castle, where all is safe and sound.

BB2006 1

Science, Religion, Reason and Survival: 1



Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer
A-Deism describes a rational view based on all the evidence that points to the nonexistence of supernatural entities.

BB2006 2

Science, Religion, Reason and Survival: 2



Neil deGrasse Tyson, Discussion
A-Deism describes a rational view based on all the evidence that points to the nonexistence of supernatural entities.

BB2006 3

Science, Religion, Reason and Survival: 3



Joan Roughgarden; Richard Dawkins; Discussion: Desire, Value, and Meaning; Carolyn Porco
A-Deism describes a rational view based on all the evidence that points to the nonexistence of supernatural entities.

BB2006 4

Science, Religion, Reason and Survival: 4



(And now for something completely ridiculous) Stuart Hameroff; V. S. Ramachandran
A-Deism describes a rational view based on all the evidence that points to the nonexistence of supernatural entities.

BB2006 5

Science, Religion, Reason and Survival: 5



Paul Davies; Stephen Nadler; Patricia Churchland.
A-Deism describes a rational view based on all the evidence that points to the nonexistence of supernatural entities.

BB2006 6

Science, Religion, Reason and Survival:6



Susan Neiman, Loyal Rue, Elizabeth Loftus
A-Deism describes a rational view based on all the evidence that points to the nonexistence of supernatural entities.

BB2006 7

Science, Religion, Reason and Survival: 7



Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Dawkins, Scott Atran
A-Deism describes a rational view based on all the evidence that points to the nonexistence of supernatural entities.

BB2006 8

Science, Religion, Reason and Survival: 8



Scott Atran, Sir Harold Kroto, Charles Harper, Ann Druyan
A-Deism describes a rational view based on all the evidence that points to the nonexistence of supernatural entities.

BB2006 9

Science, Religion, Reason and Survival: 9



Sam Harris, Jim Woodward, Melvin Konner, Discussion
A-Deism describes a rational view based on all the evidence that points to the nonexistence of supernatural entities.