Month: September 2009

Well shiver me timbers!

Jason Thibeault

Quiche Moraine has up the latest Carnival of the Elitist Bastards, an epic pirate-themed blog carnival linking to tons of really great posts from elitist eggheads and other such basement-dwelling intelligentsia from across the blogosphereohedron. You know it’s gotta be elitist when it uses Roman numerals for its numbering scheme! Cap’n Stephanie Zvan presides over Elitist Bastards XVI.

And as it turns out, I happen to have made the cut this time around. The best part about it is I’m a slacker and never bothered to submit anything, and yet I’m still the first one to end up with a musket ball between the eyes. Go read!

Yo ho, and a bottle of rum.

Well shiver me timbers!
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Why Lord of the Rings is better than the Bible

Jason Thibeault, 5 Comments

We all know that Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were both faithful — Tolkien even famously converted C. S. Lewis from atheism to Christianity. There’s no zealot like a convertee, though, so where Narnia is a total Bible plagiarism (Aslan = Jesus, duh), at least Lord of the Rings was a little — or a LOT — more subtle in its allegory. But how does it stack up against the Bible? Let’s see…

  • It’s all canonical — no worrying about apocrypha or passages that were “for a different time”
  • There are physical manifestations of every character, whether god or demigod, which can be defeated through physical means if you have the power
  • Sam rescues Frodo from his torture — nobody rescued Jesus
  • We never see Gandalf “die” during the fight with the Balrog, so it’s a lot more plausible when he’s “resurrected” — especially since Gandalf explains how he fought the Balrog after the fact.
  • Instead of the rewards of the “Kingdom of Heaven”, Frodo and the Elves leave for the Grey Havens to fade away and eventually cease to exist.
  • Frodo’s burden, which he carries to Mount Doom, is not human sin like Jesus at Golgotha, but ultimate power over all creation.
  • Nobody spends any time telling Hobbits that they are broken and sinful by default, but rather praises their hearty and good natures throughout the book
  • Tom Bombadil is awesome. Name me anyone in the Bible that’s anywhere as cool.
  • Even after the final climactic battle of good vs evil, LotR doesn’t culminate in the destruction of the world
  • The Bible has predicted unicorns, chimaera, cockatrices, dragons, behemoths, leviathans, and twenty foot giants, none of which has shown up in the fossil record. Homo floresiensis, however, has.

I’m sure there’s dozens more bullet points I could come up with, but I’m at work at the moment, and I should turn my attention to my lunch before I’m out of time. Why don’t you folks take a turn at amusing me on this one?

Why Lord of the Rings is better than the Bible

RCimT: Procrastination Edition

Jason Thibeault, , , , ,

I’m procrastinating from my posts about the Big Bang (which is growing pretty enormous itself), and an attempt to take apart a link sent to me a while back by a theist in a proper and appropriate manner, by putting together another edition of Random Crap in my Tabs. CyberLizard linked this page on Twitter which seems strangely appropriate.

The FTC is implementing new rules in the States today that will impose heavy penalties on robocalls — whether political, spam-related or otherwise. Hopefully this should put a stop to disingenuous smear campaigns perpetrated by both sides in unequal measure (weighing heavily on the Republicans’ side, of course). Hooray, right? As always, I’m worried this’ll be abused to nefarious ends, but I’m a bit of a pessimist sometimes.

Here’s how to rename a domain controller under a Windows ActiveDirectory domain. Note that it includes a lot of command line work. Funny, that.

Glenn Greenwald is one of the few reporters still dogging Dick Cheney on the fact that he’s a torturer. He takes The Washington Post to task for their uncritical, laudatory reviews on how torture is totally a-okay and probably prevented terrorists from exploding a shelter full of kittens or something.

Another instance of religious faith-healing nonsense took the life of a 17-year-old who had a ruptured appendix. The most galling part of this one is that it happened in Washington State, where there are laws about this kind of thing:

Washington’s child-abuse law has a religious exemption for parents. It specifies that a person treated through faith healing “by a duly accredited Christian Science practitioner in lieu of medical care is not considered deprived of medically necessary health care or abandoned.” Other religions are not mentioned.

That’s right, laws against the parents being held responsible if they’re Christians and they have a “duly accredited” faith-healer do the praying.

Atheists won a small victory in Kentucky against religious nutters insistent on establishing laws with respect to the Abrahamic god to the exclusion of all other religions or lacks thereof. The law was proposed to totally steep the Homeland Security offices in Christianity specifically: it was to declare that the country could not be defended without reliance upon “Almighty God”, to include statements of such in the educational and promotional materials, and that a permanent plaque was to be displayed with the text of the law at the Emergency Operations Center in Kentucky. Thankfully the judge ruled this to be a gross violation of the separation of church and state. Fine if you personally want to pray, but don’t force others to pray to your god if they don’t believe in it. Assholes.

And finally, Pope Ratzy blames atheists for environmental destruction, never mind all those people in the States who nix environmental protection laws because “the Bible says we’re to have dominion over all the Earth so drill baby drill! Mountaintop removal and uranium mines for everyone!” PZ Myers is rightly pissed. Mike Dunford mostly agrees, but is a bit put off by a few claims of PZ’s. I don’t see what the big deal is, figuring that Ratzy is an extreme right-winger and has been politicizing Rome and the entire Catholic faith since taking up the pointy hat, as PZ’s claims fit in with other issues that Ratzinger has brought up that directly contradict his claims to being an environmental crusader.

RCimT: Procrastination Edition