I thought this had to be a political Poe…but then I find it’s full of Alex Jones crap, and he takes himself seriously, vile and stupid as he is. So take a swipe at this poll, anyway.
Yes 67%
No 29%
Unsure 4%
Believers get another phenomenal reward: if they have student loans, they can all be forgiven by working for a non-profit, which includes most churches. I can approve of the idea of rewarding people with debt forgiveness if they dedicate themselves to charitable works, but most priests are more interested in spreading the useless noise of the gospel rather than helping real people, and most churches do not deserve their status as a charity — and if they do, they ought to open their books to the same level of scrutiny as a secular non-profit, and they typically don’t.
Say, why don’t we forgive the student loans of people who go to work in science or education, instead? Maybe we should be giving incentives to teachers rather than preachers.
Everyone should watch this video. Dan Savage has started a new project, prompted by the suicide of a bullied gay teenager, Billy Lucas, in Indiana. So they’re trying to get the word out: It gets better. Don’t despair. And they’re collecting other people’s stories, too.
This particular project is specifically about giving gay kids the strength to carry on, but it’s not just gays who are made miserable by schools and religion and other agents of the enforcement of artificial norms. I suspect that the readership of Pharyngula, all you geeks and nerds and oddballs, is enriched for people who were outliers in their youth…and still are, but most of us have reconciled ourselves to our status. It gets better for all of us.
Another good essay to read is The disease called “Perfection”. We all face ridiculous expectations from our culture, and we all face these pressures to conform with the boring mundanes with their distressingly unrealistic and uninteresting ideals. I didn’t have the stigma of being gay, but I was the homely, unathletic, four-eyed weirdo no girl would look at twice…and I can say that it got better for me, and it can also get better for everyone.
By the way, Dan Savage also talks about the unenlightened oppression of a Catholic upbringing. If that’s your burden, rest assured that that can get better, too—you can become an ex-Catholic, and while the world may still be tinted in shades of sin and guilt for a long time to come, you’ll get better.
Hang in there.
How can you simultaneously be such leaders of advancing secularism and pandering cowards to the demands of religion? The police have arrested 6 people who posted a video of a Koran-burning. They did not break into a mosque and steal somebody else’s book, they had their own copy and destroyed it … they did nothing illegal. But they’re still arrested, and the police are making excuses.
In a joint statement, Northumbria Police and Gateshead Council said: “The kind of behaviour displayed in this video is not representative of our community as a whole.
Our community is one of mutual respect and we continue to work together with community leaders, residents and people of all faiths and beliefs to maintain good community relations.”
Oh, bugger that. If you want to maintain good community relations, you do it be allowing every member freedom of conscience in all matters that do not cause harm to others. You do not accomplish an atmosphere of tolerance by telling one group that they have the privilege of imposing their religious requirements on everyone else.
That settles it. I have a copy of the Koran at home right now. I will not have a copy tomorrow, because I will not respect a religion of such intolerance enough to allow their propaganda a space on my bookshelf.
And if I had a relic representative of the pious ninnies on the Gateshead city council, I’d destroy that too.
This is terrible, wasteful, stupid news from Africa.
A measles outbreak has claimed the lives of 70 children in Zimbabwe over the past two weeks, mostly among families from apostolic sects that shun vaccinations, state media said Thursday.
I’m still waiting for news of evangelical atheists traveling to distant lands and killing people by encouraging ignorance. It doesn’t seem to happen.
The content of the preternaturally miscellaneous thread is random, so I think I can open them with random weirdness. So this is what they’re wearing in London now?
(Current totals: 11,046 entries with 1,131,158 comments.)
I was interviewed for this article about how atheists respond to signs of their own mortality. It’s a little unsurprising…atheists don’t expect to live forever, after all, so there’s no news there.
I am very uncomfortable with the comparison between my recent experiences and what Christopher Hitchens is facing. I had a little cardio-hiccup and quick & easy surgery to correct a potential problem (and a little warning to make some life style changes); Hitchens has a serious disease that is likely to take his life. These aren’t the same thing. These aren’t even close.
I’m also feeling pretty good right now. I’ve been in cardiotherapy three times a week, which has been feeling a little peculiar — I get strapped into an EKG monitor and exercise with a class of 70-80 year olds who’ve had recent heart attacks. It means for the first time in my life it’s like being the jock in PE class. I can run rings around those nice folks. And finally, the instructors have decided I’ve got no problems to worry about, and I’m graduating on Friday.
This is excellent news, because the class was scheduled right before I have to teach here at the U. So no more rushing back to class all sweaty and fatigued, and most importantly, no more keeping my chest shaved (hint if you’re going in for routine heart monitoring: a good shave will save a lot of annoyance when they start taping electrodes all over your body).
So yes, atheists are aware that they’ll die someday. And this atheist is fairly confident his death isn’t imminent, OK?
Something like, “The probability that a religious leader is a sex offender is directly proportional to the the virulence of his homophobia.” It’s happened again.
Two young men in Georgia said Tuesday that the pastor of a 33,000-person Baptist megachurch, Bishop Eddie L. Long, had repeatedly coerced them into having sex with him.
In two lawsuits filed in DeKalb County, the men said that Bishop Long, a prominent minister and television personality, had used his position as a spiritual counselor to take them on trips out of state and perform sexual acts on them.
It’s gotten so I can’t see any of these crazy god-wallopers and not assume they’re going to leave the podium and run off to a back room to do exactly what they’ve been railing against. It’s sort of like a Dorian Gray scheme: they’ve got a lilly-white sanctimonious face for the public, and what they reveal when off-camera and out of sight is something sickeningly depraved. What Pope Ratzi does behind closed doors must be nightmarish.
Everyone should read this very good, very clear article in Seed magazine. It stomps on the concept of a soul from the perspective of modern neuroscience.
The evidence supports another view: Our brains create an illusion of unity and control where there really isn’t any. Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism, from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson, it is clear there is very little understanding of the brain. In fact, to advance their ideas, these authors have to be almost completely unaware of neurology and neuroscience. For example, Robinson tells us, “Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM.” The translation might be, “indoctrination tells us we have a soul, it feels like we are a unified little god in control of our bodies, so we are.”
It’s all illusions, all the way through.
