Month: December 2009

…So get up and do something!

Jason Thibeault2 Comments

I sometimes feel like screaming at the religious. Not because they’re religious, but because they’re so adamant that God will provide for them, their kids, their animals, and so adamant that God has THEIR back because God likes all the same things as them (thanks to the feedback loop of self-projection-as-God), that they won’t lift a damn finger to fend for themselves.

Take the recent death of a 550lb man who sat down in a recliner after an injury to his leg and didn’t move, for eight months, until he died at 800lbs and had to have his trailer cut apart to be removed. The family was too poor to pay the $300 deductible fee to see a doctor about the leg, so the man relied on his faith instead — adamantly believing that God would heal him so he could proselytize afterward, having been through Job-like trials. The man’s wife finally took him to the hospital when he was in so much pain he could barely answer, and he died shortly thereafter.

Granted, part of the problem here was the lack of single-payer health care — such a situation would never come to pass in Canada unless the person involved was just too stubborn to visit the hospital. But no matter how hard the man believed, his wound was not healed and his weight problem was not overcome by the grace of his faith alone. This might cause certain pernicious idiots to claim that his faith was insufficient — that he didn’t clap hard enough, that he didn’t put his trust into his god with enough fervour, that he did not suffer enough. I contend that dying for your god when help is available through Earthly means is more than sufficient martyrdom for any all-loving deity, and that since this deity was supposedly once capable of sustaining and resurrecting people that were faithful, but is apparently uninterested in doing so now, that such a deity either never existed, or has abandoned his flock.

Flock like this woman, who expected God to provide food for her family of five children after she lost her job. They starved, at one point going 11 straight days without food, because the woman didn’t even attempt to get a job, much less rely on any of the social support structures that are designed to help people in exactly this kind of situation.

Flock like this doctor who distributed marijuana, who was supposedly abused in jail and who attempted to bribe witnesses to get himself cleared of his crime. Of course, the “crime” is the possession and distribution of a plant which was, if the deity in question exists, designed intelligently by God, so the very act of treating him as a criminal would be an affront to said deity.

The commonality between all three — none of them would take responsibility for their situations. And in each case, the situations that they want God to fix, could be fixed by taking responsibility and making a goddamn effort to sort things out. Whether by fixing the social structures that are failing to support you, or by finding a job to feed your kids, or by fixing the laws that put people in jail for offenses that by no rights should be offenses. One way or another, whether you believe in your magical fairy god-father or not, you absolutely must take matters into your own hands and effect whatever change you need rather than praying for it.

Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
-Anonymous

…So get up and do something!
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Think horses

Jason Thibeault6 Comments

When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. (Unless you’re in the Savannah.) When something is odd, don’t assume supernatural causes a priori.

You know, like these UFO douchebags do here:

There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, of course. The time coincides extremely well with a Russian missile test, and the pattern generated fits the possibility that this test was a failure due to a rupture of the missile causing ejecta to stream out — making the missile spiral, creating the spiral pattern we see. Here’s an excellent video showing exactly how it could happen.

Of course, this is “all part of the conspiracy” and a “half-baked cover-up” in the minds of the pseudoscientists that scream UFO first, deny the evidence afterward. Like all anti-reality groups, where the conclusion doesn’t match the evidence, the evidence is wrong and/or cooked.

It’s crap like this that makes me weep for humanity.

Think horses

Maddow v Cohen – as one-sided as Magneto v Popeye

Jason Thibeault,

Convicted by his own words, Cohen claims to be a victim of a hate crime in having his accreditation pulled by EVERY SCIENTIFIC BODY EVER… while being raked over the coals for his “curing the gay” books being used to promote the Ugandan kill-the-gays laws.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

You can suppress your homosexuality, just like you can bleach your hair blonde to suppress your redheadedness. That doesn’t make you blonde, or straight. Enforcing a cognitive dissonance and making money off of this practice is execrable. No wonder the religious fundies that hate gays so much, twig onto the “ex-gay” movement so zealously.

Maddow v Cohen – as one-sided as Magneto v Popeye

Palin supports birthers

Jason Thibeault3 Comments

Sarah Palin has gone on the record expressing that in her opinion, Birthers are right to question Obama’s nationality, despite nary a shred of evidence suggesting he hails from anywhere other than Hawaii. And this all because some liberal crazies questioned Trig’s parentage as possibly being the pure and virtuous Bristol’s — and despite Obama’s explicit denouncement of the accusations.

In a radio interview, Palin endorsed those who question Obama’s national origin. Her rationale? “That weird conspiracy freak thing that Trig isn’t my real son.” Those jerks wanted to see Trig’s birth certificate—now she must see Obama’s.

Like I said on Facebook on a poll just an hour or so ago — America needs to stop electing politicians. You’ll only end up with more nonsense like this. Switch maybe to scientists. I for one would be ecstatic to see Phil Plait and Neil deGrasse Tyson run in 2012 against PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins in the Outreach Scientists vs New Atheists race.

Palin supports birthers

Ferrofluids

Jason Thibeault1 Comment

Ferrofluids are awesome. They are made from oil, water, iron filings and a surfactant, and they have unique properties when exposed to magnetic fields. They are used in most computer hard drives, medicine (like MRIs), military (stealth!), and many other applications. But mostly they’re used for awesome art like this!

Science rules.

Ferrofluids

Lusting for death

Jason Thibeault, 6 Comments

I need to watch this documentary.

The Rapture Doctrine, the belief that good Christians will be bodily spirited away during the tribulations leading up to the End Times, was invented by John Nelson Darby in roughly 1828 and taught primarily by the Plymouth Bretheren, making its way to American soil in about 1860. Since then it has been thoroughly integrated into fundamentalism such that it provides a convenient escape valve for the good Christians to avoid the pain that their Bible assures them will occur:

These things I have spoken unto you, that in Me you might have peace. In the world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.
-John 16:33

I guess God’s divine plan of catching the good Christians up at the last trumpet-blast post-tribulation isn’t good enough of an insurance policy, and fundies would prefer to be spirited away suddenly and before any of the prophesied bad-stuff happens. And so, since bringing about armageddon would also result in the good Christians being spirited away, there are whole sects of Christianity that make a concerted effort to bring about war in the Middle East over a tiny scrap of land that was “promised” by God to three different religions simultaneously. At least, according to each one’s foundational texts.

I have to wonder how cynical those that preach Rapture doctrine are, given that they recognize pet insurance ventures as scams, without also admitting that they’re scams because the Rapture is a fevered invention of someone who thought the End Times would be scary and painful, and not a good bait for the hook of Christianity. The pet insurance ventures are good in two ways — they separate the credulous and their money, and they force the cynical religious leaders to tip their hands and admit they’re scamming their sheep.

I hope I haven’t frightened you all too much this Tuesday morning.

Hat tip for the video to The Good Atheist.

Lusting for death

Wishful thinking

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 5 Comments

I’ve gotten a reasonably thoughtful and articulate response to my recent blog post about morality — and I’m not merely calling this response articulate as a prelude to ripping the piece to shreds, as we see so often in the blogosphere. Granted, I think the majority of the post is wrong, resting as it does on chapter-and-verse of an unverifiable collection of stories that were put together in 325CE, but that doesn’t mean it’s not internally consistent and well-spoken. Believe me, it’s a welcome change from our usual semi-literate evangelical blog-stalker.

As an attempt to be civil I will sheathe the sarcasm, per a request for civility and dialog from @roofwoofer, the author of this response, on his month-old blog Faith, Reason & Good Sense. Many of these arguments were floating about in the back of my mind while I wrote the original post, but it’s rather difficult to bullet-proof your work against every possible line of argumentation without writing a novel-length post as a result, so I opted to stay on topic as much as possible instead of going on the wild tangents that would have been necessary to insulate against these charges. This will be lengthy, though. Fair warning.
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Wishful thinking