I’m doing some morning travel today, and won’t be able to access the interwebberies until this afternoon, so I’m closing the perpetual thread instance a little bit prematurely — this never happens, he said.
To compensate for the horrible awful stinky video in the previous thread, here’s something better and more inspiring.
(Current totals: 11,839 entries with 1,272,058 comments.)
I am very excited about this new technological development. The pope has blessed an iPhone app to help you figure out what to say in confession. I’m not at all interested in throwing away a whole $1.99 on it, but what’s interesting is the potential. Next: an app for priests to guide them in the appropriate penance to deliver. Then we add a little bluetooth/wireless capability to the apps, and confession becomes a matter of walking up to a priest and bumping your cell phones together — instant exchange! Next step: an app that reads your penance — say you’re supposed to say 25 Hail Marys — which then does it all for you, and maybe even broadcasts the recitations to a central repository (Can we call this app iRosary?). Automated contrition, perfect redemption, and all while demanding minimal effort on the part of the over-taxed, ever-dwindling population of Catholic priests.
You may be wondering why I, an atheist, would think this would be a fabulous development. I’m dreaming of the day when I buy a network ready Confession app, fill out its list of sins honestly and accurately, and walk up to a priest running iFather and do a confessional bump…and watch his cell phone detonate in his hand. It’ll be awesome.
Once upon a time, everyone trembled in fear at the thought of antagonizing the Church of $cientology. Everyone knew their response to any criticism would be heavy-handed and unconscionable, and that they’d harrass you persistently if you ended up on their enemies list. That’s changing, though, and the stupidity and viciousness of the cult is seeing more and more exposure. The latest is Lawrence Wright’s big exposé in the New Yorker and upcoming book on the subject. The article is well worth reading, all 28 online pages of it.
I hope the book casts a wider net, though. The New Yorker article focuses almost entirely on Paul Haggis, the recent apostate from the cult, and the impression I got from the article was that he is a flighty flibbertigibbet, a gullible enthusiast who’s been insulated from the consequences of bad decisions by an overpaid career as a Hollywood fantasist. I came away from it really disliking Haggis, and almost feeling like he deserved to be sucked into an all-devouring celebrity religion.
Which is really unfair…$cientology is being investigated for brain-washing and human trafficking, and these techniques do destroy human lives.
Albert Mohler, that deluded Baptist zealot, has written an analysis of the New Atheism that puts evolution front and center. I actually sort of agree with him — these New/Gnu Atheists are predominantly scientific atheists who consider scientific explanations to be far better and more satisfying and most importantly, more true than religious explanations. Mohler lards his summary with gloppy accusations of “worldview” and “dogma” and other such buzzwords that religious apologists use as insults when applied to atheists but virtues when applied to theologians, but otherwise, it’s a fair cop.
The Dogma of Darwinism is among the first principles of the worldview offered by the New Atheists. Darwin replaces the Bible as the great explainer of the existence of life in all of its forms. The New Atheists are not merely dependent upon science for their worldview; their worldview amounts to scientism — the belief that modern naturalistic science is the great unifying answer to the most basic questions of human life.
As Richard Dawkins has recently argued, they believe that disbelief in evolution should be considered as intellectually disrespectable and reprehensible as denial of the Holocaust. Thus, their strategy is to use the theory of evolution as a central weapon in today’s context of intellectual combat.
The New Atheists would have no coherent worldview without the Dogma of Darwinism. With it, they intend to malign belief in God and to marginalize Christians and Christian arguments. Thus, we can draw a straight line from the emergence of evolutionary theory to the resurgence of atheism in our times. Never underestimate the power of a bad idea.
Mohler just lets it lie there — isn’t it enough to just point at the Other and shriek, “DARWINIST!”? — but I can see where he’s going with it, and it’s the same place creationists go. All they have to do to prove atheism wrong and Christianity true, they think, is to prove that evolution is false. I welcome this tactic. I love watching creationists butt heads against the evidence. They’re so cute when they’re reeling about, blood streaming down their faces, brains getting increasingly addled, as they try to deny reality. I guess it’s a kind of historical tradition in Christianity, this business of tying a blindfold on and throwing themselves to the lions. It used to be you needed a legionnaire or two poking them with a spear to get them to enter the arena, but nowadays they just do it voluntarily.
And I guarantee you, we atheists do not underestimate the power of bad ideas. We witness them in action every Sunday, and every time a public official whines that they need to say a magic chant to their sky-fairy before they get to work.
While I can agree with much of their philosophy, the phallocentric attitude of this new religion of dudeism is unacceptable, so I can’t really endorse them.
Although I do hear that their prayer rugs really tie the room together.
Homeopaths have another opportunity to get rich quick: all they have to do is show that it works, and Randi will give them a million dollars.
This is what Randi demands:
Randi issued a one-million-dollar challenge to the manufacturers of homeopathic products to prove their claims, and challenged major drug retailers like CVS, Rite-Aid, and Walgreens to stop tricking consumers into paying real money for fake medicine.
I noticed that my local grocery store is selling generic chain-labeled homeopathic “remedies” for colds and flu and other common ailments. Somebody is making a lot of money selling sugar pills.
There’s more in the LA Times.
I have learned that AOL is buying the Huffington Post, which is an act of compounding irrelevancies. AOL was a joke (something about landfills full of shiny disks) ten years ago; the Huffington Post started with a flake running the show and has descended to capitalizing on celebrity sleaze, and is on its way to becoming the Weekly World News of the internet. I think the two of them belong together, and hope they sink each other.
But pay no mind to my cynical and pessimistic views. Go read a more substantial summary of the ongoing fluff collision.
It was! We had salmon for dinner tonight, which must have inspired this choice.
(via National Geographic)
The battle is over, you godless chattering monkeys, and it wasn’t our reasoned arguments or our ferocious onslaught on religious institutions that finally led to the collapse of Christianity. The War on Religion was won by this video:
Game over, man. Game. Over.
(Current totals: 11,831 entries with 1,270,301 comments.)
Justice in the UK apparently regulates all kinds of things.
The 41 year-old had been in a relationship with a man whom he lived with and told officials “it would make me feel happy” for it to continue.
But his local council decided his “vigorous sex drive” was inappropriate and that with an IQ of 48 and a “moderate” learning disability, he did not understand what he was doing.
A psychiatrist involved in the case even tried to prevent the man being given sex education, on the grounds that it would leave him “confused”.
Mr Justice Mostyn said the case was “legally, intellectually and morally” complex as sex is “one of the most basic human functions” and the court must “tread especially carefully” when the state tries to curtail it.
But he agreed that the man, known only as Alan, should not be allowed to have sex with anyone on the grounds that he did not have the mental capacity to understand the health risks associated with his actions.
Oh, come on. Fruit flies can have sex; it’s not something that requires a great deal of intellectual capacity to perform adequately. And I think the man understands sex perfectly. “it would make me feel happy” is a beautiful reason to do it.
And deciding to enforce unwanted celibacy on someone because they aren’t educated enough to understand the consequences while also refusing to educate him is grossly injust.
