Archive for February, 2007

When religionists get into nasty debates because one of them thinks he’s found such-and-such evidence proving this or that claim about their god/savior/holy man, and all the others think he’s full of it for one reason or another, atheists find themselves in the curious position of watching the whole scrap from the sidelines. It’s like being a parent, watching your kids arguing over topics that seem profoundly important to them, like who would win in a fight between Superman and the Incredible Hulk, but couldn’t matter a hill of beans to you as you spend most of your time in the real world. Most recently, there was the whole flapdoodle over The DaVinci Code, a bad novel that became a boring movie that nevertheless sold zillions and launched an entire cottage industry of Christian apologetics works dedicated solely to debunking the novel. That evangelists sincerely seemed to believe that the faith of millions could be blasted to smithereens by a book written and openly marketed as fiction (and thus at least more honest than the Bible in that regard) says more about the worth of faith than any criticism an atheist could make. Now we have a similar media circus in the offing over a Discovery Channel documentary premiering this coming weekend, executive produced by no less a filmmaking luminary than the King of the World himself, James Cameron. The Lost Tomb of Jesus purports to present physical evidence of not only the burial place of Jesus, but also Mary Magdelene, and the rest of a whole massive family the two of them are said to have sired as man and wife. That this claim will prove staggeringly provocative to Christians doesn’t begin to describe the full impact of it. If what the documentary claims is true (and I’m not for a nanosecond saying it is), then it would be proof that the Resurrection never occurred. And if the Resurrection never occurred, then Christianity is false. Full frickin’ stop. Two thousand years,...
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Huzzah! Although I don’t think this guy is who the billion and a half-odd Christians around the globe probably had in mind…

The more one turns to actual news websites these days, the more that actual news starts resembling The Onion. Here’s a bizarre report from CNN about a situation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Some dopey pranksters set up portable CD players with timers on them, hiding them beneath the pews of a local church. In the middle of Ash Wednesday services, the players kicked on, blaring nonstop profanity and sexually explicit language at high volume. Yes, this was a stupid thing to do, a purely infantile prank. But was it necessary for the dang bomb-squad to turn up and blow up the CD players? I guess in a situation like that, people let panic take over. But if someone had actually wanted to blow up the church and everyone in it, you’d think they’d have just done that. Can’t see the sense in ambushing a bunch of people with offensive recordings only to blow them up afterwords. Although it’s not as if there’s any sense present in this situation in the first place.

From the “That’s What You Get” file (hat tip to Susan on the ACA mailing list): Scumbag sidewalk evangelist street-preaching at the University of South Florida does his usual sexist thing of calling a random woman passerby a slut, whore, etc. Thing is, the woman’s boyfriend is right there, and he reacts as any boyfriend should…

While most major American news outlets are obsessed today with Britney’s shaved head or the identity of Anna Nicole’s inseminator, they all missed this awesome and, arguably, relevant story about a quick-thinking airline pilot who thwarted a hijacking of his plane. Maybe the indifference is because this happened in Mauritania, which most navel-gazing Americans have never heard of, and if Americans have never heard of something, I guess that officially means It Doesn’t Matter. But you know, considering how we’re supposed to be in this “war on terror” or somesuch, you’d think a positive and even hilarious story such as this one would be good for everyone’s morale. Short version: An Air Mauritania plane was hijacked by some dink who somehow managed to board the plane with two loaded handguns, which I sincerely hope means someone in airport security is out today job-hunting. The guy demanded to be flown to France. It transpired that the pilot learned the hijacker spoke no French. So the pilot brazenly announced, in French, to the entire plane, over the PA system, his plan for foiling the hijacker, encouraging crew and male passengers to shift to the front rows to be ready to pounce while women and children were asked to move to the back. Then the pilot made an intentionally rough landing, knocking the hijacker on his ass, whereupon he was dogpiled by no fewer than ten men. How to Rock, 101. Perhaps another reason this is being ignored stateside is that what this pilot and his passengers accomplished does not redound to the credit of Bush and his cronies, whom we are all supposed to keep believing is leading the charge against global terror wherever it may rear its ugly head. I mean, if we really were under the yoke of a Liberal Media in this country, with a simple partisan agenda of looking for anything at all to show that there were other folks out there getting done what Bush continues to fail pitifully doing,...
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