Q: How can you sneak a candy bar into a Colorado movie theater?
A: Hide it in the magazine of your open-carry handgun.
Alethian Worldview
If it's not reality, it's not the truth
Q: How can you sneak a candy bar into a Colorado movie theater?
A: Hide it in the magazine of your open-carry handgun.
I bet this will come as a shock.
Nearly five years after it hit best-seller lists, a book that purported to be a 6-year-old boy’s story of visiting angels and heaven after being injured in a bad car crash is being pulled from shelves. The young man at the center of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Alex Malarkey, said this week that the story was all made up.
Oh, you knew that already?
I’ve always said that, as a skeptic, I am willing to believe whatever is most consistent with the verifiable evidence, even if it contradicts beliefs I have long cherished. That commitment has probably never been challenged as strongly as it was the day Jesus did come back, as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and, well, President of Presidents.
That was a shock, I must say, but seeing him on CNN and Fox News (of course) and even Al Jazeera, I had to face the evidence and admit that he was really real. God the Son had come down from heaven to dwell among men, and even the most die-hard skeptics had to agree. Fortunately (as he explained later), the Revelation prophecies were misunderstood predictions about Christian persecution in the Roman Empire, so we didn’t have a bunch of terrible calamities to worry about. But still, just having him be there, and be real, was a great shock.
The Christians, of course, were jubilant, or at least, at first they were. For the first few days, you couldn’t turn on a television or go to a news outlet on the web without some believer or another sitting there smugly wagging their fingers and telling us all, “See? We told you so.” Even people like Richard Dawkins were only on long enough to sheepishly admit they’d been mistaken. The Christians had all the microphones and camera time.
And then came the audience with the Pope.
Re-posted from Evangelical Realism, 5 Dec 2007
Was Santa Claus a part of your childhood? He was definitely a big part of mine (bigger than Jesus for most of my very-young days, in fact). It was only natural, then, that my wife and I would want Santa to be part of our kids’ childhood as well. But therein lies the dilemma: Santa is not real, and we didn’t want to lie to our kids. So we found a way to have fun with Santa, without ever lying about him.
Via Ed Brayton’s blog last Halloween, we have this story of Raelians attempting to debunk the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.
In this study we tested the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation by DNA analysis. Results showed unequivocally that the rituals performed by the priests during the Eucharist sacrament have no detectable effect on the substance of altar bread at the DNA level.
Very amusing, but pointless. The reason the doctrine is called “transubstantiation” instead of “transformation” is because when Catholics say “transubstantiation” they mean something very different from transformation. And it all goes back to Aristotle.
There’s an amusing story on BizPac Review entitled “God’s justice: Jesus painting gets sweet neon revenge on ACLU.” The “revenge” in this case, consists of removing an overtly religious painting from a public school, and putting it on private property—just where the ACLU says it belongs.
An Ohio couple who got angry when their neighboring high school was forced last year to remove a religious painting that had hung for more four decades decided to take matters into their own hands.
The couple acquired the painting, which depicts Jesus as the “Good Shepherd” in a field with lambs and the first words of the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my Shepherd”) and placed it in a highly visible position in a yard that can be seen from the school.
Ah, sweet revenge. God should take equal revenge on all the Ten Commandments monuments and nativity scenes believers are trying to force onto the government. That’ll show the old ACLU!
The Christian News Network has caught Bill Nye the Science Guy deliberately and even flagrantly indulging in reasonable thought and rejecting pious fallacies.
In the latest issue of a widely-circulated science magazine, Bill Nye ‘the Science Guy’ defiantly defends his evolutionary beliefs and says that even if he ends up ‘going to Hell,’ it still won’t prove that the earth is young.
Imagine that. You know what else would not be proved if Bill Nye was condemned to Hell by a vengeful God? Lots of things: that the earth was flat, that the sun orbits around the moon, that Jesus was a marmot with an addiction to penny loafers, lots of things. You can threaten people with horrible suffering and/or death unless they believe what you tell them, but that has nothing at all to do with whether or not the things you say are true.
You know, my wife and I have been married for over 30 years now, and I’ve been trying to explain proper marital roles to her, and she never listens. But now she’ll have to, because I’ve got this.
Years of doing chores around the house, including ironing, dishwashing, vacuuming and dusting, could turn heterosexual men gay, according to the results of a study headed by Dr. Kareem Ongyz, Turkey’s most famous sexologist from the University of Istanbul’s psychology department.
See? He’s a Dr, and he does studies. Checkmate, feminists and gay rights activists!
[Update: no, it’s a spoof. Still funny tho, just slightly less ironic.]
This article is a bit old, but it recently popped up in one of my news feeds, and I had to smile a little.
Time is actually a created entity. The first verse of the Bible reads: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, emphasis added).
A study of this verse reveals that God created time, space, and matter on the first day of Creation Week. No one of these can have a meaningful existence without the others. God created the space-mass-time universe. Space and matter must exist in time, and time requires space and matter. Time is only meaningful if physical entities exist and events transpire during time.
“In the beginning . . .” is when time began! There was no time before time was created!
It’s a classic example of how superstition can corrupt your thinking to the point that you can look right at the truth and even report what you are seeing, without ever actually seeing the truth you are looking at. If there was no time before time began, then there has never been a time when time (and space and matter and energy) did not already exist. In other words, there has never been a time when the material universe did not already exist. And since there has never been a time when the material universe did not already exist, then there has never been a time when it could have been created. Not even by a God.
Ken Ham knows this. He looks right at it and reports it to us. And yet, as you can see by the way he phrases it, he still believes that at some point in time, God created a universe that did not exist before that point. It’s a self-contradiction, but it’s what he believes, despite what he knows.
A propos of nothing in particular, here is the chart of the day:
| Fool me once | Shame on you |
| Fool me twice | Shame on me |
| Fool me fairly often | Hey, it’s a free country, I can believe what I like |
| Fool me repeatedly | That’s just your interpretation |
| Fool me every day | We report, you decide |
| Fool me all the time AND take my money on a weekly basis | God said it, I believe it, that settles it. |
Now I just need to think of a good name for it.