Second Skeleton

"Christianity Crucifying the Constitution" - how all religions fear rational thinking more than each other

2010-03-07T23:57:00.000-04:00

FTA: "Fear and defensiveness permeates the Christian response. Their high level of societal control was called into question. From the perspective of the religious, what non-theists represent is far more frightening than any opposing theology. The challenge represented by non-theists is a greater threat than any gun, bomb, sword or tank. Religions seem to thrive and even strengthen with war, conflict and martyrdom. They have no defense against the peaceful challenge of rational thinking."

http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/03/07/christianity-crucifying-the-constitution/

Is blocking comments, deleting comments, or deleting peoples blogs appropriate?

2010-01-30T16:04:00.002-04:00

The following blog post was deleted by the admins of "Think Atheist". They felt that it openly questioned the policy of the site admins, and for me as a relatively new participant, I was in no position to pose such concerns outside of direct, private communication with them. So, I left Think Atheist. His exact words were "Think Atheist is not a government, even though we will allow most posting, any drama within the site WILL NOT be tolerated. " I didn't see anything in their site guidelines about "no drama" and I'm not exactly sure what "drama" is in this context, to be honest. If its drama you are looking to avoid, welcoming Christians and Atheists to hang out in the same place is probably not the best idea!

Here is the blog post. My first blog post that started this is gone..didnt save it. It had to do with a specific member that was blocking comments. You can post comments here or at Atheist Nexus if you like!

"I recently had one of my blog posts deleted by the admin. This caused me to want to ask some questions about deleting people's posts and comments, or blocking comments all together on any public discussion or post.

On these Ning.com sites, it is possible to close off comments on posts we make, and we can delete comments in discussions we start. To me, this directly is opposed to freedom of speech. If I post some dumb statement like "God is real and you all are dummies" and close comments, I have eliminated the opportunity for people to debate my statement, and effectively muzzled them.

If, further, I post something, block comments, and add a link to my personal site on which comments can be posted, I am also muzzling comments because I am changing the context AFTER the statement has been made, which effectively alters the debate.

Point is, I think it should be policy in spite of the technical functionality to make it against the rules to close a discussion or delete comments unless the comments fall under specific categories such as spam, or are libellous, or totally off topic with no justifiable connection (and even then, deletion of a person's comment should be taken as a grave responsibility).

When you delete a persons comment or block them from commenting in the first place, you are hurting them and their chosen legacy. It just seems wrong to me."

I would further argue that by deleting blogs, comments, or posts, you are violating the freedom of speech of an individual and their own content. Of course many of these sites are private etc, but people join them under the pretense that their comments will not be deleted unless they violate the site's rules. If an OP deletes comments because they want to, or blocks comments altogether, well, are comments a right or a privilege? What should they be in a free, civilized society? Should anyone be able to make any statement or "report" and be able to silence dissent in the context of the statement?

Some famous atheist quotes.

2010-01-25T22:05:00.000-04:00

The bible says "a fool says in his heart there is no god". (psalm 14:1) I am going to assume that since the verse is in the bible, the implied definition is the Jewish god, not any definition of god. I think thats a fair call, unless some religious folks can make a case for the existence of Xenu or would be willing to acknowledge Allah or Zeus as a reasonable god belief to qualify one as a non fool.

From Dictionary.com:

Fool –noun
A silly or stupid person; a person who lacks judgment or sense. A weak-minded or idiotic person.

The bible is wrong. As it is almost all the time, here is some proof in sayings by some very wise men who say, in their hearts, there is no god.

Was Thomas Jefferson, chief architect of the US constitution a fool? How about Albert Einstein? Steven Hawking (literally the most intelligent man alive by most standards)? I think its fair to expand the definition to include the evangelical christian god. So, lets qualify here, the bible says anyone who does not acknowledge the Evangelical Christian God is a "fool". That really widens the group, as there are probably less than 100,000,000 evangelical christians in the world today. That means, the earth is, according to the bible, populated by 5.9 billion fools. Lets see what some of the fools have to say.

"Faith is believing things you know aint true" - Mark Twain 1835 - 1910

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true; by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." --Seneca the Younger 4 B.C.E. - 65 C.E.

"All thinking men are atheists." Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961

"Belief in God is Childish" - Albert Einstein

"The world holds two classes of men -- intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence. Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri

"If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!" Clark Adams

"It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society, it is belief." George Bernard Shaw

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” - Steven Roberts

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason: The Morning Daylight appears plainer when you put out your Candle." Benjamin Franklin

"We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There’s not much personal about the laws of physics." Steven Hawking

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."
Sigmund Freud

"Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions."
Blaise Pascal

"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike."
Delos B. McKown

"Our ignorance is God; what we know is science."
Robert Ingersoll

"If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle."
Dave Barry

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
- Epicurus

"I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder."
Bill Maher

"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived."
Isaac Asimov

"One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion."
Arthur C. Clarke

"If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.” - Richard Dawkins

"Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

Evangelical christianity is an arrogant, wealthy persons religion that preys on the poor and lonely to fill its cavernous churches and practically bottomless coffers. As its been said, in America, "In God We Trust" is right where they want it, on the MONEY.

Final Quotes:
"If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself. He must sell all he has and give it to the poor". "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" "if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it in the fire."

Who, exactly, then, are the fools?

To be fair on Pat Robertson

2010-01-17T15:17:00.001-04:00

A day ago I posted a blog on Pat Robertson, and largely jumped on the bandwagon condemning him to whatever fate he felt his imaginary god was bestowing on the poor people of Haiti. While I am still quite adament that his comments were totally out of line and easily almost the stupidest and most insensitive I've heard from a public figure, its important to realize his organization donates millions of dollars in support of impoverished nations around the world, and having been in Haiti for quite some time leading up to the most recent tragedy, has stepped up their support to include "millions of dollars worth of medications" for those affected by the earthquake.

This action needs to be considered when labeling him with various epithets, and while his faith and reason may be utterly, almost pathetically misguided most of the time, his deeds and those of his organization "Operation Blessing" in terms of fighting poverty is certainly laudible.

from his site:

"Dr. Robertson’s compassion for the people of Haiti is clear. He called for prayer for them. His humanitarian arm has been working to help thousands of people in Haiti over the last year, and they are currently launching a major relief and recovery effort to help the victims of this disaster. They have sent a shipment of millions of dollars worth of medications that is now in Haiti, and their disaster team leaders are expected to arrive tomorrow and begin operations to ease the suffering."

Christians teach about something called "grace" and "mercy". They are called to show it, even though their imaginary god sends people to imaginary hell ultimately for simply not "worshipping and adoring" his imaginary self, the Christians themselves are called to a higher standard of morality than their pretend ruler, and that is one of being merciful, giving to those who suffer, and not causing the suffering or standing idly by when you can help, and that is something we can all learn from.

What Pat said and is motivated by is, in my opinion, deluded, but the end result of helping those less fortunate experience some modicum of humanity and right to life is commendable.

Its honestly very encouraging to see human beings put their religious and political ideologies aside to fight our common enemies...poverty and despair.

Who's fault was the tragedy in Haiti?

2010-01-14T19:52:00.000-04:00

Its the Earthquake's fault?

NO. Earthquakes are normal. They occur all the time and without them we would lack an atmosphere, water, and several other life giving aspects of our planet.

Directly, the killer was poorly constructed buildings that were that way because of poverty. Haitians are poor for many reasons like large corporations using them for "cheap labor" without paying them a living wage that they would have to pay in developed countries.

Why did the corporations do that?

Because consumers reward and support the corporation for giving the lowest price so they can consume more. This tragedy was simply the result of us in the 1st world not buying fair trade, not curbing our spending, not being wise about where our money goes, and not using our powerful governments to put an end to poverty.

Haiti's tragedy is our fault. Their blood is on our hands. Us, in the first world. We have let them down. Effectively, it is third degree murder. We need to face that and change how we spend, how we vote, and how we live.

Pat Robertson is proof god is imaginary, a real god would strike him down.

2010-01-14T19:17:00.002-04:00

Many christian bloggers seem to be either disassociating themselves from Pat Robertson's remarks, or at least trying to find the "truth" in them by applying various "contexts". Here are my thoughts.

The actual truth is, accidents happen, the are just accidents, flukes. The poor people of Haiti felt this in a particularly acute way because they are impoverished and do not have the same level of building codes and infrastructure a more developed country would have under the same circumstances. This is not god, vengeance, or anything, its just a terrible tragedy and we need to step up and help them. God, in fact, is imaginary. False hope to many for certain, but false none the less. Stuff happens. Pat Robertson is just added proof that there actually is no god, and he is behaving as a delusional person would be expected to behave, and the evangelical christian community is quietly in agreement with him because they share his delusion.

Given all the terrible things Pat Robertson has said for no purpose other than to keep himself in the news and controversial, you would think this extremely vengeful god would ultimately strike him down with some ironic disease like losing his voice or all ability to do anything but listen and observe. But, again, since god is imaginary, that wont happen, and even if it did, it would only be yet another fluke.

The best way to support the people of Haiti for most of us is going to be ensuring that support remains consistent well beyond the media hype that is going on now. When the country is relegated to the bottom of page 12 on CNN, that is when the real "heros" will appear, and support for them will be the most important. I thought it was kind of sad to see Sanjay Gupta taking care of a minor cut on a 15 month old baby in Haiti as front page news on CNN.com today. Seemed a bit opportunistic to say the least, the ultimate "photo op". I wonder what he does "off camera".

In the mean time, whoever Pat Robertson's sound guy is...please, turn off his mike.

context and inspiration for this post:
http://www.dennyburk.com/what-is-pat-robertson-talking-about/comment-page-1/#comment-54803

Pastoral spiritual guidance is like taking health advice from the CEO of a tobacco company.

2010-01-10T15:16:00.003-04:00

Ever stop to think of the incredibly strong motivation that Pastors, Rabbis, Priests, Imams, etc. have when it comes to convincing their flock that God is real, and very, very necessary?

The validity of the message completely aside...consider it.

A pastor spends many, many years of their life in mentorship, training, and consideration to enter their calling under normal circumstances. They enter churches, and over several years can build and manage a flock who literally pays their salary, making it possible for them to take care of their families.

In their communities, they often take on a certain position of respect, easily on par with Doctors, law enforcement officers, teachers. They can be called on to be legal witnesses or be legally responsible for certain kinds of advice they offer.

They also have a kind of trust placed in them to a greater degree than many people place in their own family members.

So, at least using this example based in western culture, you can see what a pastor has to lose if they one day just decided there "was no god".

-lose their job, lose their friends, have to start over with a totally new career, disappoint everyone they know, feel the guilt of misleading so many for so long.

Often there can be other kinds of financial pressure as well. Churches are organizations that can actually house their priests or pastors, or cosign on their mortgages or help them with debt. This means they could often lose their homes.

How much worse it is for directors of the colleges these pastors attended, or the leaders of the evangelical movements. With Rick Warren, perhaps since he gives so much of his money away, still, the innumerable beneficiaries of his charity work would stand to lose 10s or 100s of millions of dollars in money that in many cases provides food and housing for thousands of families.

The employees of huge christian organizations all depend on their leaders to "stay the course" and be consistent, and on message. So even if a leader doesnt care about what they stand to lose personally, their basic humanity could strongly compell them to maintain a facade of belief and "christian leadership" in order to ensure the thousands employed by their organizations can continue to have jobs and take care of their families.

One could try to argue that Richard Dawkins is similarly motivated, but could you imagine how many churches would warmly welcome a person like him into their congregations as leader and successful author if he "recanted" his atheism? If anything, he stands to be vastly wealthier and much more popular if he "came into the flock" as a prodigal. The same applies to almost any half credible biologist or scientist. Even then, only a tiny few trade in their scientific honesty for a career in the well funded ID movement.

So, with such strong motive, one should take sincere pause and be very wary when considering the "advice" of a Pastor, Rabbi, Imam, or Priest. Consider where they are coming from, and the almost unbearable pressure they are under to ensure you stay "in the flock", just like you would when watching an ad that claims "smoking tastes great and makes you cool" paid for by Philip Morris.

Its important to note that almost 1 in 2 people in the western world spend at least 1-4 hours per week silent before a person giving a "sermon" who has everything to lose and nothing to gain from intellectual honesty. Imagine if 1 in 2 men, women, and children in our society spent 1-4 hours a week getting concentrated propeganda from Phillip Morris? (I suppose they do to an extent on television...)

"Love me or go to hell"

2010-01-09T23:23:00.002-04:00

When I was a kid, I had a "friend" who owned an Atari game thing. He was the only one on our block that had it, and we had to basically pretend to like him in order to get a "turn" on his Atari. He would usually make us play floor hockey for a while before letting us play it, and largely hog it anyway, and I'm sure he knew no one really actually liked him.

What would you think of a person that said "unless you love me with all your heart, mind, and 'soul', I will set you on fire, then put you out just before you died, then when you were healed up enough I would set you on fire again, and keep doing that as long as I could." I mean, the person might be an aquaintance, you might be indifferent to them, have a slight dislike of them, or possibly even hate them. God, in the bible, demands total, complete denial of "self" and an impossible amount of commitment to him. So much commitment and adoration that you actually end up needing his help to give it to him. And you either do that, or suffer unimaginable torment being burned and burned for eternity, as long as God can possibly burn you.

Christians always say that seperation of god=hell, but I think god could have made a more pleasant place for his enemies/strangers/wrong religion types and still been "just", in fact, that would actually make him "just". Hell isnt justice at all. Hitler maybe deserves 400000000 years in hell, but no one human truly deserves eternity there.

This might be a step closer to "just":

God: "hey dude, you dont like me, I see that. You read the bible, and you didn't like what you saw. You have free will, and you can go live here in this relatively nice place for eternity. Its as good as heaven for the most part, just doesnt have me around. Just stay away from me, OK?"
You: "um...ok God. What if I get bored and I want to come visit"
God: "aww ok. you can visit some times. In fact, I would like that"
You: "Cool."

But, the bible instead plays out the psychotic scenario of this:

God: "Love me, worship at my feet, adore me, sing my praises with all your heart, mind, and soul forever!"
You: "Um...seems kind of petty, plus its really hard to believe you even exist given the 'faith' required as you are largely invisible and only appear as a 'still small voice' in my head that could easily be mistaken for the other voices in my head."
God: "Too bad. You had your chance and now you will burn for eternity!"
You: "crackle crackle crackle" (which, is a bit of a shock, since you're not quite dead)

So you see? Christianity is really based on a very ridiculous premise. There is only fear, you cant love someone you fear or has you threatened. You might THINK you love them, but its more like stockholm syndrome. You are so afraid of not "loving them properly" and ending up burning for eternity, that you dont really bother to find out exactly what this person is like and what they have done to deserve your love. "but he died on the cross for us" ... not really. I didnt ask him to die, I wasnt in the garden of eden, I didnt make up the entire scenario. I didnt put the "tree of knowledge" in the garden , this all happened thousands of years before I was born. God did it all for himself, its a sick, twisted pageant he is the author of and we are supposed to love him for the way it comes out in the end? Well, this all makes it so clear to me that its not God, in fact, its a story that resembles the greedy, petty, violent desires of evil men throughout the ages who have justified war, rape, pillaging, and an overt paternalistic society that abuses women. They seem vastly more likely to be the true authors and not the same "creator" of butterflies, stars, and roses.

Final point. You can't truly love someone unless there is no consequence to not loving them. Only if both parties are free to walk away at any time from the relationship with zero consequences can you know for certain you have pure, true love. So in truth, its really impossible for anyone to truly love God as long as the threat of hell exists. In fact, if christians instead knew that sticking with God meant they would actually end up in hell for eternity, while all the non-believers went to heaven instead, then you'd really know they were completely and utterly in love with God.

What greater love has a person than this, that they would suffer eternal torment in hell to be with them?

I dont believe in the existence of Christians.

2010-01-04T13:13:00.001-04:00

I've decided after giving some thought to the matter, that there arent any Christians, and probably never have been.

A "Christian" is a follower of Christ. To follow Christ, you have to do what he did, obey what he instructed on specifically how to "follow him".

Christ gave a number of instructions, but some fairly clear ones are as follows:
1. Sell all you have and give it to the poor.
2. If any part of your body causes you to sin, cut it off/gouge it out.
3. Take up your cross, and die by crucifixion. (physically die).

So, since I havent heard of a person who has sold all they had and given it to the poor, cut off a bunch of body parts, then hung whatever was left of themselves on a cross to die a horrible, painful death, I will continue to be convinced there are no Christians walking among us.

Thats it for this week! Please feel free to post comments/questions.

Software is the "soul" of a computer, that is...

2009-12-22T16:12:00.000-04:00

I've come to realize that we are not the "sum of our parts". Its a fairly big revelation for me, because I've held to that idea since first officially calling myself an atheist. As I've come to understand the concept of what thought is, what memory is, in the context of my programming career, its become increasingly clear that our "sense of self" is not literally brain tissue or neurons, it is further abstracted to the communication between the neurons. This is analgous to the idea that a mathematical forumla is not literally composed of graphite scrapings on a piece of paper, and if you remove Microsoft Windows from a computer, it doesnt "weigh any less". A full hard disk weighs exactly as much as an empty one.

So, in essence, what constitutes a human is not the "hardware", rather the software. I am convinced of this, that if it were possible to slowly replace each neuron in our brain with a fully functioning but silicon based substitute that used standard electricity instead of the complex of chemicals required by our biological neurons to function, we could, quite literally, replace our "brains" with new hardware probably without noticing anything, except perhaps increased clarity of thought and significantly better memory. We'd also stop needing to eat and breath oxygen and be able to last much longer, presumably. The point is, each of us, our "ego", the I...would simply continue on because we are the software, not the hardware. You can replace an organ, an arm, an eye, a leg. We remain.

Ergo, if we are just software contained inside a relatively complex machine, we actually are "souls" in the sense that we are, to put it very primitively, software running on hardware just like a computer.

Continuing on that thread, we then, if it were technically possible, could be "downloaded" on to other hardware, say, smaller hardware that is miniaturized, or hardware that exists in a smaller paradigm such as using quarks, or if the string theorists are correct, as strings.

That tangent leads us to realize that since we know quarks and strings do not exist as we do, in a material plane, and can pop in and out of our universe, presumably if our conciousness could be contained by these things where they were functioning as neurons do currently on the macro [sic] scale, living with "brains" spread across strings would mean we could coexist in several planes, several dimensions. It would also mean we could simultaneously perceive across vast regions of space in several places at once, only as long as communication could occur between strings via hopping in and out of planes in a multi-dimensional space.

The short answer is, then, that the idea of God, souls, heaven, all of these universally held but as yet un observed and unproven phenomena become more possible. Given our limited perspective, however, it is still no more likely that that Christian explaination of all things is any more accurate than the flying spaghetti monster. A grand unification theory would explain a potential mechanism for this "spiritual software existence" to manifest itself across the universe, but until we managed to cross over by "upgrading our hardware" it would be impossible to know.

Another interesting point is speed/time. When you dream, you can experience days, weeks, or months in the space of a few minutes during what we clumsily refer to as "REM" sleep, 5-15 minutes of real (our physical perspective) time. To software though, time is not a constraint. A computer can process 1 Billion calculations in 1 second or less. Presumably our brains do something similar or much faster but in less easy to quantify ways as far as we can tell.

So, if we return to our "string" powered brains, we end up having the capability to live thousands of lifetimes in a nanosecond, and perhaps our physical 3d neighbours in universe 45Tg4b (ours), become rather like statues that take millenia just to move a finger. Impossible or at least completely uninteresting to even try to relate to. Have you ever tried to sit down and have a conversation with a mountain? Its simply moved 2-3 inches and you have lived and died 900 times. Talking to a physical person might be as boring as watching grass grow.

That said, of course, in our dreams, we escape to a world where we can experience the vastness of the universe in a blink of an eye, travel at the speed of thought , and defy our physical reality. Perhaps our less "land locked" neighbours do communicate with us in dream, their software interfaces with ours, and they show us sights. Who knows. If you assume our conciousness is effectively software locked in some relatively crude, large hardware (think a vaccuum tube computer the size of a warehouse compared to a digital PDA), there could be something to it.

Of course, this kind of olive branch makes one vulnerable again to the pitfalls of religion, that is, if all this is quite possible, who is to say that Joel Osteen is a quack? That L.Ron Hubbard wasnt making up his fanciful stories of aliens? That Joseph Smith actually did talk to Moroni and wasn't simply a moron. It becomes thorny for certain. Thus it is clear that we need to be vigilant in maintaining an intellectual clarity and openness to questioning everything, avoiding "sacred unquestionable knowledge" which I can still say I am an "a" to. "Asacrist" perhaps..."adogma", "asuperstitious"...it continues.

Egg Nog for the holidays! or is it?

2009-12-19T22:47:00.000-04:00

Growing up I always loved egg nog. I looked forward to it every year and couldnt get enough of it.

Since I saw this movie "food inc." I've been paying closer attention to the ingredients of things, and to my massive disappointment, discovered that I could find no egg nog with either eggs or milk in it at any supermarket.

The ingredients are quite startling actually. Usually leading with "Modified Milk Ingredients" - which Ive come to discover can be absolutely anything chemically derived from milk or milk products. The advantage seems to allow producers to ship the dry flakes or whatever then combine them later with other chemicals to produce things as they need them without having to worry about local labour and farm restrictions, and the dry protein derivatives can last for many years unlike real milk which has a relatively short shelf life. Ever had powdered milk? Canned milk? like that. So, you could be eating 30 year old milk combined with some goats milk from china combined with some milk powdered casien solids from india in that icecream or eggnog.

But I digress. The Frankensteinian ingredients of eggnog notwithstanding, I defy anyone to find eggnog in a local grocer that does actually contain milk or eggs, or vanilla, or nutmeg. What I came to realize is that in my entire life, I've probably never actually tasted real eggnog because we've always bought it at the store. So, I decided to find a recipe on the internet and voila, found one that used cooked eggs so I didnt have to be as paranoid about salmonella from the raw eggs (almost unheard of but still)

So mixing my 1 litre of whole, 3.8% organic milk with local, 6 farm fresh eggs, some vanilla, regular white sugar (only 1/4 cup per quart surprisingly - so about 1/8th of whats in Coca cola typically) and tomorrow when its all chilled, I'll actually have my first "nog" of "egg nog"! Its exciting.

I went a bit further to try to find Modified Milk Ingredients on wikipedia, but couldnt, so I've requested the article and added a list of ingredients to the existing EggNog article there. Here is what I put in case some dairy dept. stooge comes along to delete it:

Commercially produced eggnog in North America rarely contains milk or eggs, and is typically a mixture that can include Modified milk ingredients, Glucose Solids, Hydrogenated Canola Oil, Partially Hydrogenated Coconut Oil, Sodium Caseinate, Tricalcium Phosphate,Modified Cellulose Gel, Dipotassium Phosphate, Mono and Diglycerides, Silicon Dioxide, Artificial Flavor and Maltol. In spite of this the product continues to be marketed as "Eggnog" and typically appears on supermarket shelves around the winter season in the United States and Canada.

Pretty gross huh? Well, I have to admit, in spite of the grossness, its the taste that drew me to it in the first place so I guess it worked. (As well as with ice cream), so I cant fault the scientists for making it cheap and taste good, but I can fault the companies and shareholders for letting profit dictate ethics. Thats what they do though, I suppose. For me, I'm just going to look for whole foods IE products with milk, eggs, and those kinds of real ingredients, and avoid "modified milk ingredients" while I still can. Modified cellulose gel? Ewwww.. folks, I like my cellulose gel the way nature intended it!

was that my email being read on the radio? I suppose it was...oops.

2009-12-19T17:55:00.005-04:00

Listening to an angry guest on a local radio show broadcast by our Canadian public broadcaster "CBC", I developed some rather angry emotions about the major current conservative viewpoints of "anti marijuana", "anti climate/science" and "anti homosexual", and decided to send this rather unloving, poorly thought out letter to the station.

Hemp competes with corn, cotton, and other major corporate centralized industries, as well as disrupting clear corporate pharmaceutical interests as pointed out by the guest you had on the phone.

The Harper government represents an extremist, delusional, religious agenda that, like the clerics in the Muslim theocracies, makes use of "their sacred unquestionable values" to prevent our society from making use of hemp, doing something about alternative energy research, and eroding the rights of our homosexual minorities. Under the guise of "doing their god's will", they are, in fact, performing the will of corporate interests, because it is so easy to make the gullible religious masses believe whatever they want as long as it comes from one of the pulpits in their closed, dark halls.

As Voltaire said, "get them to believe absurdities and you can make them commit atrocities".

Thinking to myself, ah, I got that off my chest and chances are they will never read something like that on air. But, they did. I didnt hear it, but my evangelical conservative mother mentioned it to me that one of her fellow churchgoing friends pointed out my "rather hateful" rant was played on the radio and asked her if that was indeed "her son??"

I should point out that while many of my posts on this blog site are very anti religious, in this case my rant is not against all religions, or even against Christianity. For the most part, Christians are relatively benign, reasonable people with little to differentiate them from anyone else. They largely do not dispute (or even care about) evolution or the climate issues, and generally do a lot to make the world a better place at least when it comes to helping people in poverty, and many of them probably partake in the odd toke now and again like most people. This letter was aimed squarely at James Dobson & Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionist politics. I see those movements as a direct threat to our secular democracy, and its important to remember, modern democracy is not a biblical ideology in the least, it has no roots in biblical teaching - nor does a "republic" either. This movement that somehow has managed to twist the bible into being in lockstep with 4 key principals while ignoring others that are clearly mandated in the bible. The three are anti-hemp, anti gay, anti abortion, and anti science (evolution in particular)

The bible says nothing about hemp, drugs, marijuanna specifically. Nothing. The bible is also silent on abortion, except for clearly condoning it in a few circumstances. There is no dispute the bible is anti gay, but its also anti a lot of things that are routinely practiced by James Dobson and his ilk. (eating meat, sacrificing animals, women allowed to speak in church etc). There was no "science" as we know it at the time of the bible, evolution was not an existing theory, and the bible is truly vague at best when it comes to the origin of the universe.

That said, the bible is EXTREMELY clear about one thing. Poverty. Jesus seems to have no tolerance for the rich. He says at one point it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is incredibly ironic that the greatest concentration of these "fundamentalist christians" are in the parts of the earth where the worlds wealth is the most concentrated. (Texas, New York, Southern California etc).

Anyway, the 4 non poverty related things like being anti homosexual, anti science, anti hemp, and anti climate/science/evolution play very well into the hands of the largest corporations in the world IE Exxon, Gilead Pharmaseuticals (controlled by one of the most powerful Christian Reconstructionists, Donald Rumsfeld) etc. Hence my email. Could I have included all this explanation and context, I would have been more comfortable hitting send the other day but I posted it here instead on the off chance some people heard the broadcast and know my blog.

Thanks for reading!

How Christian absurdism threatens humanity.

2009-12-13T11:28:00.002-04:00

http://www.stormfront.org

As its been said, teach them absurdities and you can get them to commit atrocities. Once you get people to embrace the absurd premise that an invisible man lives in space, loves us, but sends everyone who doubts his invisible existence to eternal torment, and he needs money...you can get them to commit atrocities or contribute to the subjegation of others or themselves as we see in poor but highly religious parts of the world. One absurdity trumpeted by this self styled Christian web community "stormfront" is that diversity is actually bad for evolution.

Evolution has made it unmistakeably clear that diversity always wins, in every instance, without fail. If you only ate potatoes, you would actually suffer disease and likely die from malnutrition. Monocultured farms (growing only one crop constistently) are extremely succeptible to disease. Inbreeding causes many hereditary problems simply due to the fact that only 1 gene pool is tapped and recycled, making the offspring vastly more likely to develop health complications and genetic defects. When two "races" cross breed, the resulting offspring invariably gains the positive aspects that aid the survival of the parents and recessive genes are left behind. This is patently obvious and the medical and sceintific record stands behind it.

Stormfront.org seems to be made up of folks who accept some common absurd premises based on ignorance of science, and a common thread of "Christian faith".

Clearly most Christians are not racist and largely embrace science and evolutionary theory, depending on how inclusive the term is used and in what context. That said, the danger with all faith is that it encourages the "blind acceptance" of certain things that are "unquestionable". By teaching that certain concepts and even leaders are infallible, you lose all accountability for those concepts and leaders, and ascribe them to the divine. Since no one actually has seen or heard from the divine in a way others can independently verify, it is nearly impossible to determine whether a claim of divine inspiration is true or not. So if I claim "god told me that I need to be racist" in spite of the fact that science demonstrates that racism is absurd, theology does not have a valid rebuttal. Science of course does, as stated simply above, but in religious context, the belief in something that is absurd (IE a human walking on water or turning water into wine) is ascribed the term "great faith" and "super natural acceptance", implying that the more your premise disagrees with science, the greater the opportunity for faith.

So you have a group of people, the most "faithful" of which are diametrically opposed to what science would term as "intelligent behavior", and therefore are ripe for conscription by unscrupulous leaders into committing various atrocities on their behalf, such as racist violence, terrorism, suicide bombing, and in less extreme instances, rallying against postive world movements such as eco-responsibility (as evidenced by Stormfronts clear anti-environment stance by twisting the Copenhagen summit into something "sinister"), or supporting a corporately owned government that exists to prop up the wealthy and subjegate the poor.

"Get them to believe absurdities and they will commit atrocities" has been attributed to Voltaire, and in spite of the fact that Atheism by definition really implies no antagonism at all, has been viewed by the "disciples of the absurd" who are legion, to brand us with epithets like "godless commies", "satanists" which, in their tangled web of apologetics and paranoia fueled world view, is the worst possible thing a person can be.

In summary, religious faith is clearly insanity. It is a cancer on society that provides nourishment for negative, self destructive human behaviour and will either be the death of our species, or nearly eliminate us in its fantasy of apocalypse and rivers of blood. It feeds on hate, poverty, ignorance and violence, and can only be eliminated within a culture that fosters education, honest debate, rational thinking, compassion, generosity and logic.

The story of it all - an original second skeleton sketch

2009-12-10T23:08:00.000-04:00

This is a story that ends in almost nothing, starts in almost nothing, and contains everything. Everything you know anyway, everything that matters to you.

You all are familiar with the claims of evolution, about all we know as life on this thin varnish covering the planet we know as home. Microscopic elements coming together to form the first cells, the first flesh, the first life. Our microscopic ancestors journey from the sea to land that is mimicked in every womb tens of thousands of times a second every day across our planet. We rapidly grow from tiniest of nothing to self aware complexity unrivaled in the known universe.

This story isn't about that. It is about our future, our return to nothing. It was our beginning, and it will be our final destiny. Its happened several times before and we will see it happen again. We are just now at the point of seeing the very beginning of the miniaturization, the compression, the Great Smallening.

The year is 2745, or 2,090,567 BCE as we would know it from our time. Life has evolved to form many plant and aquatic species for which there are records today, but another path of evolution, some 300,000,000 years in length, is coming to its final destination, its Great Smallening.

Lets back up a little, some explanation is in order. We have watched in the past 90 years as machines have grown smaller, more efficient. Because we have such short lifespans, we see this Smallening as gradual, barely noticable, at least until very recently when the speed of Smallening has become so that we can literally see a hard disk drive that was 35 pounds 10 years ago become a few grams today, both storing equal amounts of data.

Now, it is known that if you were to take 1 gram of DNA, you would be able to store 1000 times all the data currently stored on all earth's human inhabitant's computers, which would include all "entered" data into the record of civilization. This data is mostly vague, descriptive data, so one quickly realizes that packing every single experience, every memory, every observance of every human from every millisecond of every lifetime PLUS a complete simulation of every living and non living thing in our thin varnish of an existence would be staggering by today's standards.

On top of all that person specific data, one can further extrapolate that the very gathering and interconnecting of it would form an enormous amount of incidental data, data that could not exist without the neural network of interconnectedness, data that forms its own kind of existence upon the matricies of combined experience.

All that data is staggering, but lets say it could, for the sake of argument, theoretically be stored in several pounds of DNA, say, about the size of a human brain. That would be 1000 times 1000 times all the data currently stored on all computers in all the world. A million civilizations literary works built over milenia, A million descriptions of all the known biological life on a million planets. A million personal financial records of billions of people for their lifetimes. A million different civilization's views, observations, and perspectives of the universe.

Seems staggering, but interestingly, not unfathomable, and certainly not dependent on our modern silicon based technology. DNA. What we see today is an old, aging, inefficient version of something perfected around 2745, or 2,090,567 BCE as we would know it from our time.

Up to the time of the ancestors, what you know as RNA was the primary means of life propagating itself, passing information from father to son, mother to daughter, progenitor to progeny. Eventually one species came to know itself, to know themselves, and become self aware. The agents. And in 2745, the Agents history, like ours, had become an information age. That is where the similarity ends.

The technology of the Agents was different than ours in that it was entirely organic, chemical based manipulation that they came to be able to use to communicate and store information. How they managed to discover and manipulate this may have come from another planet or some kind of teachings from previous cultures, but the point is, by 2745 they had discovered the ability to store and retrieve information by organic, electro-chemical means. They erected great cities, incredible structures, and buildings all based on this technology but the only thing that remains for us to see today are the vast quantities of petroleum we find underground. Oh, and our own DNA. The evidence of a massive, earth dominating civilization only represented by those two things. Two things that are crucial to our way of life, more than monuments, like the pyramids or The Sphinx, something far more that we take for granted.

But DNA was nothing more than a means to an end, a footnote in the rapid Smallening of the Agents. As the agents became aware of their ability to store and retrieve data using RNA, it was quickly discovered that RNA could be improved into DNA, to store more complex data. DNA was rapidly developed and installed into every cell, every living organism, and subsequently Evolution took on a completely new dimension, new capabilities, and life itself became far more interesting.

The Agents subsequently discovered that DNA could be improved, but the cells of every living thing could not work with the optimized DNA, the compressed, efficient DNA, so they could only implant it into certain, optimized substrates. These substrates then became the vehicles for an information age that far surpasses even the most grandiose dreams of our modern science fiction. We might call them Super-Super-Super computers, but the substrates allowed the Agents to pass their very beings into pure information, and the improved DNA allowed them to store all this information in a matrix the size of a pea.

So at this point, 2945, the Agents had all but entirely translated their population into a completely simulated world, a matrix that stored all their personalities, their perceptions, and their ongoing existence in an elaborate, evolving and indescribably beautiful world that they perceived as avatars inside a virtual world, and the miniaturization, the smallening, resulted in them distilling their entire existence, and all they could possibly hope to experience and perceive into a physical structure about the size of a sugar cube.

Of course, this tiny structure could not possibly hope to survive for any length of time on our volatile planet, so at an imperceptibly small energy cost, the structure was sent into orbit, an orbit exactly 3 times further from the sun as our planet, to ensure survival for a very long time. Being so small, of course, the structure can change its orbit to move with the sun, so it would survive the red giant phase, and when the sun goes to dwarf, the structure could use stored energy to leave the Solar System and move to the next suitable one, using the coolness of space to operate at peak performance. The anaerobic aspect of space also made it optimal for the structure to exist in perpetuity.

So, now, the Agents continue their existence. Being small does not diminish their power of observation, however. Are we not a pea in the great Milky Way Galaxy yet can observe it and beyond from our pin-prick of existence? No, the noisy neighbour and founding planet earth is a constant source of entertainment for the Agents. Earth is observed using means of perception impossible for us to comprehend or understand, but the energy we require just for listening, just to move our giant, un-optimized eardrums is completely impossible for the Agents to muster. In fact, the very energy it takes to power the movement of 1 ear drum to hear 1 call for dinner from a passionate food preperation specialist could power the matrix for several years.

The Agents do not comprehend our use of energy as wasteful particularly since energy abounds to such an extreme in our galaxy, but regards us as a rather clumsy, thumb-fisted evolution towards their smallening using electro-physical means and this rather silly step of silicon towards the process.

The really interesting part is that from the Agents perspective, the earthlings have longed for and searched for intelligent life beyond the Solar system, and the Agents are there, just beyond the moon, just beyond mars, ever watching, listening, and knowing so much, so much they could share but no means to do so until the earthings have reached their own smallening. Sorry about the DNA mistakes, but interested to see the result of them.

What is this world of the Agents like? I am not here to rewrite the story of the popular Matrix movies, or snowcrash, or other great novels about possible computer simulated worlds, but you get the idea. Start with the ideal of existence in all possible dimensions, then evolve from there. No hardship, no war, no religion, no violence. No cruelty, no hate, no greed. It is hard to understand how life could be "interesting" without these things because of our context as humans, how we have triumphed in adversity, sprung forth as new flowers grow from the remains of forest fires. That is what we know. We have never known existence without evil, without these kinds of pain. Suffice it to say that absent these things, life not only thrives, it thrives beyond imagination in every possible direction.

To the physical world, the Agent's universe is naught but a tiny frozen crystal, a miniature, very dense thing that if observed under a microscope would be increasingly complex down to its fundamental particles. The information is stored across multiple dimensions and its interconnectedness is compressed in ways yet inconceivable by humans. You could almost say the Agents exist in theory as the "thoughts" of a computer chip, only the computer chip is so vast, so powerful that its individual thoughts could actually be self aware and simultaneously perceive and create their own universe.

Second Life is an example that might help picture what it is like to be an Agent, only in the most crude, primitive way. One visits Second life as an avatar, perceives islands, vast oceans, buildings, and other avatars, chats with them, and interacts with them. The physical "version" is just a rack of servers in SanFrancisco, a bunch of CPU's and hard disks. Two leaps from this. 1. imagine the world in Second Life as indistinguishable from reality, you view it not on a monitor, but with closed eyes as in a dream. 2. imagine the servers are so big, so powerful, that you can actually download your brain into them, so your physical body is no longer required for you to "exist" outside of the servers.

Now 3. imagine the servers were shrunk to the size of a 1 cm cubed computer. Thats probably the easiest part given what we have observed in the past 100 years of technological smallening.

What of food, what of clothing, global warming, greenhouse gasses? If we observe our society, we can gather that all our necessities, our transportation, our massive food industries, our roadways, our electrical distribution systems, or need for so much energy are all geared towards our need to exchange information. Imagine making this ability efficient, that is, making all of our existence as interconnected as our individual neurons are. No need for food, no need for clothes, no physical needs at all, and suddenly all the limits of communication disappear. I dont have to drive 5 miles to see my daughter's graduation ceremony. I dont have to drive a car to see my son's play. I dont have to fly to Japan to breath in the cool, crisp air on top of Mount Fuji. If I can think about it, I can do it. Experience is as simple as changing one's mind. I can be skiing and the next thing I am swimming in a tropical paradise. I can be in a crowded party on top of a building in downtown Manhatten, then in an instant be observing the birth of a star in a multicolored nebulae. This is the life of the Agents. This is what they exist, and experience. If you are familiar with the "Q" in Star Trek, that is pretty close to a description of life as an Agent.

The Substrate is the home of the Agent. I have previously referred to it as matrix for ease of description, but the Agents call home the Substrate, and it has been home since their departure from earth in 2955, or 2,090,357 BCE as we would know it from our time. And believe me, the Agents know everything we know, everything we experience, and perceive it all and have even created a full simulation of our entire civilization inside their tiny, frozen existence, the Substrate.

Contact with the Agents is quite impossible as I previously stated, until we acheive our own smallening. Eventually we will discover, in our own clumsy way, that form of modified DNA that makes up the Substrate, or perhaps, as some of the Agents hope, discover something better, or at least something that provides new insight. Once we have acheived the smallening, the Agents will contact us and we will add ourselves to the network of smallened civilizations currently circling the Sun, and there are quite a few, some from other systems in the Milky way that have naturally gravitated towards our solarsystem, but the reality is, smallened civilizations far outnumber the very mass of the observable, lightened universe, and account for what baffles our current scientists as "dark matter" that they agree must exist to account for the universe.

On their way to becoming smallened, many civilizations fail, as must be. Ours may succeed, may fail, but in the many hundreds of millions of years to come for our planet, there will be many more to come as came before us.

The Agents wish us the best of luck in our journey, and look forward to meeting us in what they observe as the near future.

the end.

Hyperbole is the language of the fool, fearmonger, and gossip, Humility is the language of the wise.

2009-11-30T17:02:00.000-04:00

I use a lot of Hyperbole I have to admit, in fact, I would claim it is a significant deterrent to my effectiveness as a communicator. It is always so tempting to lash out at ones perceived enemies with exaggeration or even spin on words and phrases to imply serious insult or harm to their credibility.

I found myself criticising conservative pundit Glen Beck for this, when while pointing my finger at him, I failed to notice the three fingers pointing back at me.

If our goal is to achieve peace and prosperity for all humans, to eliminate poverty and advance science and health for all, advancing our species to higher plains of understanding...

One of our greatest enemies is our own tendency towards hyperbole. "Cheney is Satan" is equally as unhelpful as "Obama is Hitler" to the cause of either the "left" or the "right".

I need to avoid it myself, I tend to make idiotic, emotionally charged statements like "religious people love to eat jesus" and "religious people are insane" etc. Neither of those statements encourage tolerance and compassion for my fellow human beings, and I need to realize whatever ideology I embrace, a mutual respect for others and a measured, compassionate, well thought out approach to speaking is far more effective at fighting religious extremism and fundamentalist dogma.

My challenge for myself and other atheists is to be wise and compassionate in our speech, and differenciate ourselves from our detractors with our patience, our love, and our understanding for others and ourselves.

Debating Creationism

2009-11-28T23:32:00.000-04:00

"Debating Creationists on the topic of Evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory."
- Scott D. Weitzenhoffer

Its a good point, and very true to anyone who has slogged through that 3.5 hour conversation at the various family holidays. It takes one sentence to say "Radiocarbon dating is unreliable" and several pages or even volumes to explain how it works and is, in fact, as reliable as any other established scientific procedure. You dont see Creationists debating XRay technology with their physician presenting them with their prognosis.

In my experience the best thing one can do is avoid topics neither participant is an "expert" in, and keep the conversation as biblically focussed as possible. Ask them to explain the various apparent contradictions in the Bible, and focus on real life examples of the bible either being silent or flat out wrong. "How exactly is an appendix an "intelligent design" ? Why do I need glasses exactly? Why wont God heal amputees? Why doesnt God reveal himself to people...is he shy? Nervous? Can create the whole physical universe but has trouble with the whole materializing thing?

One particularly powerful statment and something generally difficult to refute is "If God puts together marriages in Christian Churches, why is the divorce rate equally as high among christians as non christians?" Why is the instance of child abuse higher among priests than almost any other group in society? etc. They are old but very difficult to refute. The fun ones I like are the paradoxes of the almighty: "can god make a machine so complicated even he cant comprehend it?" If God is bigger than the universe, Does he have to wait 6 trillion lightyears to see his hands? If so, why couldnt he have made light faster, or the universe smaller?

etc. Enjoy!

Deepest Bore hole and the skin of an apple.

2009-11-26T01:00:00.003-04:00

The deepest hole ever dug by humans was around 12 kilometers deep. Relative to the size of the earth, that is approximately the same as taking a pin and poking a hole just through the skin of an apple but no further. Bearing in mind that 12KM is deeper than all the mines, all the oil drilling holes, the grand canyon...everything.

Also bear in mind the average thickness of the atmosphere is 60 Kilometers or so, although nothing really lives past 12 Kilometers. The highest you'll fly in a commercial jet is well under 12 Km.

So we exist in an incredibly thin film on the surface of our planet. All life as we know it evolved in this incredibly insignificant wisp of a layer of nothing on the surface of the earth.

Then, going further, if you could combine the mass of all the planets in our little solar system wayy out on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, the Sun would account for 99.8% of that mass. So including Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Uranus, Venus, Mercury, pluto, the asteroid belt, and Earth...all that accounts for .2% of the mass of the solar system, which, by the way, is a completely unnoticed nothing on the edge of a galaxy with 100-400 BILLION stars in it. So if the milky way "shed" our solar system like our bodies shed skin cells, it would amount to losing a few dozen cells or so.

Why would God go to so much trouble to create something so impossibly gigantic compared to this tiny species on a tiny planet in the middle of nowhere? Is he a "god of waste"? Why not simply make a few lights for night, a nice big light for day, and call it done? Saying we are literally designed by God is like saying a designer would make an entire city, no, country just to house a single ant farm, with the ants oblivious to most of it.

Another interesting point is...if you were as big as the Milky Way, which, by the way is only one of billions of galaxies in the visible universe, it would take you 100,000 years to "see" your feet. Yes, its 100,000 light years across, so if you could see your feet, you would be seeing them as they were 100,000 years ago. Talk about delayed messages.

Again, I ask...why would God make things so impossibly far away like that? Its entirely unnecessary. We could have a beautiful night sky full of stars less than a few dozen light years away and have practically the same effect of "night lights". But instead, to make an entire universe just for some "night lights" for humans on an insignfiicant planet seems like the very height of hubris, the very height of arrogance.

What is more likely is the universe is billions of years old, it is massive, and we evolved on our own out here and dont amount to more than a tiny blip in the scale of the universe. We are guests in its house, not the other way around, and we need to show it the proper respect it deserves by ending our hubris to believe our tiny, imaginary gods had anything to do with it.

Nationalism is Dumb.

2009-11-24T23:52:00.002-04:00

The only thing dumber and more detrimental to earth than religious faith is "nationalism". We are not countries, we are all humans. Every human being is a "citizen of earth". We need to forget the idea of countries and relegate the notion of "immigrant" to history.

Read http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm for the way to make it a reality (the last part is where it becomes clear)

"their country...our country..." dumb. We are all earthlings. Poverty is EVERYONE's problem. Unemployment anywhere is EVERYONE's PROBLEM. Poor labor laws anywhere on earth is EVERYONE's PROBLEM.

Darwin and the case for "militant" atheism - Richard Dawkins on CNN

2009-11-24T23:14:00.001-04:00

http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/11/23/dawkins.darwin.atheism/index.html

I dont think Dawkins is suggesting we literally form an atheist militia, but it is strongly implied that atheism and science need to be rigorously defended under the growing onslaught of attacks from the ignorant religious right. The attacks are particularly insidious because they do not occur in the form of intellectual challenges or debating points (which I think most Scientists and Atheists would welcome), rather, they take the form of propeganda outside of forums to the illiterate and under-educated, children etc. They take the form of backroom deals cooked up in churches and pushed into government policy directly past open public scrutiny.

These religous attacks literally circumvent accountability to intelligence by operating well away from the light of public inquest. The damage from the attacks is spreading ignorance, illiterate and undereducated generations, and thus a general increase in crime, violence, support for unjust wars, and the ablity for corporations to take advantage of a large, undereducated voting bloc to effectively rob taxpayers blind while "praising jeebus" in public.

This is why "militant" atheism should be discussed and defined...we need to proactively do something about the cancer of religion, delusion, and ignorance.

The Lord is My Healthcare, I shall not want.

2009-11-23T17:49:00.002-04:00

So I've been reading and trying to understand why all these poor/middleclass people are so vehemently opposed to having a decent common standard of healthcare in the US.

You listen to their reasons, and when it comes down to it, what I hear over and over again is just the word "Socialism" without any apparent understanding of what socialism actually is. I think it sets up a connection for a mentally less endowed person to make, basically if they say "socialized medicine" which straightforwardly means people can get access to a minimum standard of healthcare. The word "Socialist" in extreme is often associated with "communism" which in turn is associated with "Atheism" so to a mentally challenged religious person, its easy to be convinced that "socialist medicine" is the same as "atheism", which they believe is actually satanism, or more poorly but accurately for their under utilzed mental facility put, devil worship.

So its no surprise that Republican Christians are opposed to Public Healthcare, they literally believe it is the exact same thing as Devil Worship.

Should mentally challenged people be allowed to make decisions for all of society? I personally do not believe so. You take care of them because if you didnt, they would poke their own eyes out with forks. Its true.

Canadian Border Agents can turn things away based on their own personal morality

2009-11-23T09:00:00.003-04:00

Canadian Border Agents apparently have carte blanche to determine what is "obscene" material you are carrying and can impound it based on their own personal moral judgement. Check it out: http://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/publications/dm-md/d9/d9-1-1-eng.pdf Is the year 1935? I thought we had freedom and couldn't be oppressed by religious nutbars.

Apparently I was wrong. As I read this, if the words "sex" appear in a book, any book, any film, any thing, Canadian Border Service agents have the power to keep it. Its like having to take all your personal belongings to a church and have a priest approve them.

This is religious oppression if your agent happens to be an evangelical zealot, and you happen to have "the God Delusion" chances are they could impound it as obscene.

This entire law needs to be removed. Steven Harper's christian uptight delusional morals need to stay out of government.

In God We Trust - Why is it on US money?

2009-11-22T23:18:00.005-04:00

According to this page on the US Treasury site, the following letter is the reason for the motto, the weird "all seeing eye" and the bizarre pyramid design on modern US dollar bills. Pictured here are comparisons, the relatively benign version and the modern, superstitious, religiously adorned version c.1956.

Dear Sir: You are about to submit your annual report to the Congress respecting the affairs of the national finances.
One fact touching our currency has hitherto been seriously overlooked. I mean the recognition of the Almighty God in some form on our coins.

You are probably a Christian. What if our Republic were not shattered beyond reconstruction? Would not the antiquaries of succeeding centuries rightly reason from our past that we were a heathen nation? What I propose is that instead of the goddess of liberty we shall have next inside the 13 stars a ring inscribed with the words PERPETUAL UNION; within the ring the allseeing eye, crowned with a halo; beneath this eye the American flag, bearing in its field stars equal to the number of the States united; in the folds of the bars the words GOD, LIBERTY, LAW.

This would make a beautiful coin, to which no possible citizen could object. This would relieve us from the ignominy of heathenism. This would place us openly under the Divine protection we have personally claimed. From my hearth I have felt our national shame in disowning God as not the least of our present national disasters.

To you first I address a subject that must be agitated.
So it stands. While fighting this nonsense is likely a near impossible battle, the truth of history bears repeating loudly and clearly from all who find religious symbols emblazoned on public property offensive and anti-humanist. Why must we preserve our uncivilized, ignorant religious roots? Why can we not move past them and embrace our future?
Superstition: literally, to stay still, to be fixed, unmovable. To cling to cherished ideas and beliefs in spite of new contradictory knowledge and evidence.

Get them to believe absurdities, and you can convince them to commit atrocities. - Voltaire (paraphrase)
The above letter was written to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase by Rev. M. R. Watkinson, Minister of the Gospel from Ridleyville, Pennsylvania.

The Atheist Blogroll-on it

2009-11-22T22:44:00.000-04:00

SecondSkeleton.com has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

Article on CNN encourages parents to assure Kids that Monsters arent real...

2009-11-14T21:07:00.004-04:00

This article:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/11/14/children.fears.real.imaginary/index.html

did a good service, but stopped short at movie monsters. Should have continued with telling kids that God is imaginary, there's no such thing as Hell, and not to worry about some guy tortured for their "sins" because crazy people like to believe crazy things. You know, to keep kids from getting unnecessarily scared or traumatized.

In other news...I heard some Mormon spokesperson suggest that the idea of marriage for homosexuals would "do violence to the definition of marriage". Isnt "violence" to any definition also known as progress? We did "violence" to our definition of elements, our definition of the shape of the earth, and the origin of the universe. It is, I suppose, then, valid to consider the "defence of the definition of marriage" exactly equal to Superstition and willful ignorance.

I for one am very glad we did "violence" to the definition of human via the civil rights and suffrage movements, and I hope to see a lot more definitions get roughed up, such as the "definition of fraud" to include religious teaching.

the difference between a leader and a manager

2009-11-11T10:53:00.000-04:00

leader, from the root "lead", are people that get the "lead out" of others and inspire them on with enticement.

Managers, from the root "mange" or eat, are people who feed and care for those whom they are responsible for.

©2009/2010 the institute for invented etymology, inc.