Dryope

Scientists Startled to Discover Christians Don't Like Their Faith Compared to a Side Dish

From my post at: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/still_straining_to_find_an_exc.php?utm_source=mostactive&utm_medium=link

on the "Expelled" movie clip on You Tube:

...In any case, people who put so much stock in their faith have every reason to see the comments in this film as insulting and possibly threatening.

1) Because it's Christians making this thing and Christians hold dear their founding myth of persecution.  It feeds right into the idea that they are constantly surrounded by forces trying to destroy them, so they need to huddle together and protect themselves.

2) Because if you told a little girl that her parents were lying to her and Santa didn't exist, she not only might not believe you, she might get angry at you.  How much more so an adult who has held onto beliefs long into the age of reason.

3) Because the audience is by definition people who enjoy being conformists and being told the right answer in advance, so they can feel good about being on the right side.  They don't need to be smart, they just need to stand behind on the good side.  (This is not to say all people with beliefs are conformists, just that this movie caters to a certain kind of smugness.  The Michael Moore type.)

As the Oingo Boingo song goes: "We've got all the right answers on the winning side"

What PZ and Dawkins have said here in this clip is scary to the Christians--the music and the nose pans help, but isn't the main thing.  And no one likes their god compared to knitting.  I'm a knitter, and I would be furious if a Christian said my making sweaters was a form of prayer. 

Pretty video of blasphemy

I love this band.  Not only do they give away their music, but the songs have a lot more depth than the usual stuff around.  Though this one's a little tongue-in-cheek... Anyway, their free tracks are here: http://thebastardfairies.com/download-memento-mori/.  Though this is the only atheist one--the rest are about other antiestablishment issues dear to my heart. :)

Area Woman Answers US History Question Using Only iPhone, Glee

the iPhone is awsome-- a random woman just came up to me (after asking someone else) and asked if I knew what the Homestead Act was. I'm sitting in Borders, so this is not an everyday situation (now I wish I'd asked her why she was going person to person in a bookstore cafe asking US history questions. Getting her GED? Helping her kid with his homework?)

It was like a commercial.  I said I didn't remember but I had the Internet and could check.  "Where is your Internet connection?" she asked.

"IN MY PHONE!" I said. 

I looked it up for her right there and in two minutes we both knew what the Homestead Act was. =)

no reason not to post

just got an iPhone....no excuse not to post now.

Oh. Except using the keyboard is like surgically removing one corn kernel at a time.

I'm exhausted.

I love exorcisms, and I hear they're making a comeback.

No word yet if homicidal nuns are also in the Vatican's plan:

Vatican chiefs are concerned at what they see as an increased interest in the occult.

They have introduced courses for priests to combat what they call the most extreme form of "Godlessness."

Each bishop is to be told to have in his diocese a number of priests trained to fight demonic possession.

The initiative was revealed by 82-year-old Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican "exorcistinchief," to the online Catholic news service Petrus.

"Thanks be to God, we have a Pope who has decided to fight the Devil head-on," he said.
[...]

The Vatican is particularly concerned that young people are being exposed to the influence of Satanic sects through rock music and the Internet.

Yay! Vindication!

From Newsweek's top ten health myths, two of my least-favorite:

Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight. While this is one myth that parents around the world have loved for generations, it has very little scientific backing. Reading in the dark can cause a temporary strain on the eyes, but it rapidly goes away once you return to bright light. The practice has been blamed for increasing rates of myopia (nearsightedness), but Carroll says those claims don't align with the evidence—we're living in the best-lit conditions the world has ever seen. "Seventy years ago we were reading by candlelight and weren't going blind," says Carroll. "There's no evidence for this whatsoever."

You should drink at least eight glasses of water a day. The source for this myth may be a 1945 article from the National Research Council that claims that a "suitable allowance" of water for adults is 2.5 liters a day, although the last sentence of the article notes that much of that water is already contained in the food we eat. Existing studies suggest that that often-omitted fact is key to understanding water intake. We get enough fluids from our typical daily consumption of juice, milk and even caffeinated drinks. And drinking too much water can cause water intoxication, a severe electrolyte imbalance in which cells swell with excess fluid, and even death.

And, as an extra bonus, this one:

We use only 10 percent of our brains. The notion that our brains are not running at full speed simply doesn't hold up. "Numerous types of brain imaging studies show that no area of the brain is completely silent or inactive. Detailed probing of the brain has failed to identify the 'nonfunctioning' 90 percent," Carroll and Rachel Vreeman, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, write in the British Medical Journal study. Carroll says the notion may go as far back as the snake-oil salesmen of the early 20th century, who used the myth to sell a tonic that would increase brainpower.

Axial Tilt -- it's the reason for the season!

And it only cost me most of my life this month.

An Atheist Reads Revelation, Is Disturbed, Reads a Commentary on Revelation, and Is Even More Disturbed

Hmm, I thought.  I wonder what the Book of Revelation is all about.  I mean, god kills people horribly for unclear reasons, and Jesus fights with a sword in his mouth.  I didn't get it.  It's obviously a dream, so there must be some theologian to interpret the symbolism.  So I poked around online, and came almost immediately across this: http://www.biblebookofrevelation.com/ch4.htm.  Holy Hell! 

Some disturbing tidbits:

1. Right off the bat, the guy who wrote this commentary is creepy.  First, god hates gays.  Obviously.  Because god is love and homosexuals are all about love.  So...no.  I still don't get it.

"Before we move on, I would like to add a comment about the Daniel prophecy above in regards to the phrase, "He shall regard neither the God of his fathers nor the desire of women ..." In my opinion, this statement about the desire of women may well indicate that Antichrist will be a homosexual....The tremendous explosion of homosexuality in our world today and the ongoing and unprecedented push to legitimatize it in every realm of society may well be laying the foundation for the future acceptance, and indeed adoration, of Antichrist. In a very short period of time, homosexuality has become accepted and is now aggressively being endorsed on a world-wide scale. I believe this is an indicator of the late hour in which you and I are living."

2.  Remember the part in Revelation when all the good people die, too?  I know, seems like the whole thing, but specifically the 5th seal.  Apparently, god's okay with killing people as a way to recruit them into a celestial army.  What's wrong with taking everyone up bodily?  Isn't that what's supposed to happen in the rapture?  I am very confused here.  The rapture is nowhere in this story!

"The question arises, "In what sense is the fifth Seal then a judgment of the Lamb when it is his own saints who are being killed?". The answer probably lies in the fact that those who are murdering God’s people are storing up for themselves vengeance against the day of vengeance (Romans 2:5). As Christ's murdered Saints swell in number in Heaven, the wrath of God will be swelling as well ... toward their murderers below...John heard the Tribulation martyr's cry to their Lord for vengeance. This precipitated the handing out of white robes to each one followed by the Lord's words to them, "that they should rest a little while longer, until both the number of their fellow servants and their brethren, who would be killed as they were, was completed". What a long-suffering God our Lord is! Even in that awful day, when his own beloved people are being slaughtered by the score, he will continue to delay his wrath for his great mercy’s sake."

3. Why does god start killing people--really cruelly--all of a sudden?  It's not clear from John.  Well, this guy has an answer.  It's because we don't believe in Jesus.  Really?  God massacres almost everyone on Earth horribly because they don't believe in him?  I must be missing something because to me that seems kind of...evil.      

"The only sin that God is holding men accountable for today is the sin of unbelief in his Son and that sin has not yet brought judgment on mankind. However, at the end of the Age of Grace, it will."

But of course, that's not true, because in Rev. 9:20-21 it says:

But the rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, that they should not worship demons, and idols of gold, silver, brass, stone, and wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk. And they did not repent of their murders or their drugs or their sexual immorality or their thefts."

But most of these are silly.  Plus, the Greek for drugs was apparently "sorcery", which is even sillier. 

Anyway, god chooses a special number of just-converted Jewish virgin men to be nice to, while he beats on everyone else.  This, I also do not get.  What about all the Christians? 

"This seal will protect each one of God's Jewish servants when his judgments fall upon the Earth. They will not effect these 144,000 chosen servants of Christ....There, demon locusts are instructed to hurt only those men who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. God’s judgments on the wicked are never designed to be inflicted upon his own people."

Then, there are these Orwellian statements:

"Shortly, our loving and gracious God will arise and begin a systematic and decisive intervention on planet Earth...In the days of the great flood, I believe it was Satan who moved all of mankind to become so wicked that God would have to destroy them all...Sadly, many many people, even some of the saints of God, readily receive and believe what they see and experience over what they read in their Bibles"

And then this horrifying thought:

"The first Trumpet will be the beginning of an environmentalist’s nightmare for Earth. However, we need to understand that God has no great concern for his creation when man who is the crown of that creation persists in willful rebellion against him. To care about the creation when this is going on would be analogous to one’s son being killed while riding a bike and then being concerned about the bike! Make no mistake about it, God will not give a rats eyebrow for all the forests and grasses of Earth if, by means of burning them, just one man or woman could be saved."

4. The guy who wrote this essay on Revelation isn't just a hater, he's a nut.  He claims all kinds of things are "scientifically impossible".  But they just...aren't. It's clear that worldwide earthquakes have happened in the past (through meteors), and "stars" can fall to earth as shooting stars.  Or, well, super-dense tiny neutron stars that are only a few miles wide (but that would cause us all kinds of other problems). The sun can go dark through, well, all kinds of ways--dense cloud cover (which has happened within human memory after really big volcanic activity), not to mention eclipses.  The cool thing about science is that it never, ever says something is impossible, just really unlikely.    

But again, if god exists, sure he can also do all that. But then why does he have to kill people to get a spiritual army to fight the devil and the antichrist?  Can't he bend the rules so all those people don't have to die horribly?  Honestly, the "god can do anything" argument just makes it all the more cruel.  The real question is why is he doing it?  There is no redemption here: like Santa Claus, god's already decided who's saved and who's irredeemable.  So why make the saved people suffer?

"A worldwide earthquake is scientifically impossible. Earthquakes are caused by shifting tectonic plates and thus only occur in specific and very limited locations. A worldwide earthquake cannot occur apart from the supernatural.

    A temporary and total darkening of the sun is scientifically impossible. It just couldn't occur apart from the supernatural.

    The reverse of earth's light source from the sun to the moon is scientifically impossible. Can you imagine how such an event is going to affect the scientific community in that day? For a period of time ... the moon will be earth's only light source.

    Stars falling to the earth is scientifically impossible. Many would say that the very fact that such a thing is stated in the Bible is proof that it is a scientifically inaccurate book. They would object, "Real, stars falling to the Earth? Do you realize the nature and size of a star? You Christians are so ignorant and unscientific! Why, if this literally were to occur, the stars wouldn’t fall to the earth, the earth would be sucked into the first star that got close and then burn up like a moth in a flame!

    The skies parting is a scientific impossibility. They would say, "The skies ... 'rolling back like a scroll' ... preposterous ... impossible!".

    The shift and relocation of every mountain and island on the face of the earth is scientifically impossible. How could that be? Yet, it shall.

    Finally, the rolling back of the heavens above like a scroll is scientifically impossible. But it will occur."

5.  This guy is hilarious.  I love that "burden of proof is on the skeptic" part!  And honestly, how many scientists do you know who are politically correct?  Though yes, yes, they are often puny.  But seriously, John had a dream once.  Why should all of human civilization have to prove that dream wrong?  Can't we just assume that it was as off-base as that of another Christian covert who influenced a generation, Hong Xiuquan?   

"Puny scientific man .. politically correct man .. sophisticated modern civilized man .. is scheduled for a rude awakening at the breaking of the Sixth Seal...At the breaking of the Sixth Seal, God will arise and bear his right arm and the supernatural will become undeniable. Can you picture what effect that these things will have when men witness such a contradictions of their so-called laws of nature!? We don’t need to scientifically to prove that stars can fall to the Earth, by the way, nor how the heavens will roll back like a scroll ... we just need to believe the Word of God, dear saint, whether it makes sense to us or not. The burden of proof is on the skeptic. He must prove that these things will not occur as they have been written here in the Word of God."

6. God is all about the torture.  The whole point of the really cruel stuff that happens is so that people will become so desperate they'll say anything for it to stop.  Seriously.

"At that time, men and women will not even be able to kill themselves. Why do you think God will not allow men to die during those days? Would it surprise you if it was because of his mercy? That is exactly what this Fifth Trumpet is about. It is about the grace and mercy of God. Think how many poor lost sinner will repent and be saved during those days. That being the case, bring it on, aye?"

Who says America won't elect an atheist?

"The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected [Washington; Adams; Jefferson; Madison; Monroe; Adams; Jackson] not a one had professed a belief in Christianity.... Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism."
-- The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson, an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, in a sermon preached in October, 1831; first sentence quoted in John E Remsbert, "Six Historic Americans," second sentence quoted in Paul F Boller, George Washington & Religion, pp. 14-15

From: http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/qframe.htm