Hey, gang! Let’s put on a show!

I’m going to be participating in an internet show this weekend to raise money for charity — Doctors without Borders. It’s going to be going on on BlogTV Saturday and Sunday (I’ll only be on for an hour early Sunday morning), with a lot of interesting people like James Randi and Matt Dillahunty in an interactive format — ask us questions, and maybe we’ll answer.

Here’s all the information you need. It isn’t required, but remember…the purpose is to encourage donations to an excellent charity.

This video can be downloaded from here;
http://www.mediafire.com/?fvv4bf2ssvk…
Please feel free to mirror it, but if you do please also included the links contained in this description.

The Show:
The show will start at 4pm (BST) on Saturday 18 September.
It will be shown here;
http://www.blogtv.com/People/dprjones
To see what time that is where you are go to;
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock…

The Charity:
If you want any information about the charity please contact me or watch my previous videos or go to one of the websites, some are which are;
MSF(UK)
http://www.msf.org.uk/
MSF(US) (Doctors without Borders)
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
MSF(Australia)
http://www.msf.org.au/
MSF(Canada)
http://www.msf.ca/

The MSF(UK) youtube channel is here;
http://www.youtube.com/user/msfuk

How to donate:
On MSF’s recommendation I have set up donation pages at the following sites;
Justgiving;
http://www.justgiving.com/dprjones24h…
THIS SITE ACCEPTS DONATIONS THROUGH PAYPAL
Firstgiving;
http://www.firstgiving.com/dprjones

Both these sites provide an effective, safe and secure method of making donations. You will not get junk e-mails not will your details be distributed.
The pages are open now if you want to donate. They will also remain open for a further 2 months after the show.

The schedule of the hosts and co-hosts:
This video contains the best information that I can give at the moment. There are likely to be some minor changes before the event. I’ll be posting an update video nearer the time with a full schedule.
For the avoidance of doubt, Michael Shermer will not be on the show, but was kind enough to provide the clip used at the beginning of this video.

The e-bay auction:
If you have any items that you wish to donate then please contact;
http://www.youtube.com/user/Proportio…

The MSF’s got Talent competition is open until 12th September. Please watch the video below for details on how to enter. NOTE, mirroring of the video is no longer a necessary requirement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PKQz…

One way holy books can alter your brain

I’m amused to see an Australian burned pages from a Bible and Koran — to good purpose!

I’m happy to report, too, that Muslims in Australia are reacting in a reasonable way, with the leadership urging no retaliation. There is a bit of silly whining going on, though.

Sheik Wahid said the burnt pages represented a sacred connection for Muslims.

“He doesn’t understand people have a strong feeling towards those sacred books,” he said.

“It’s not a piece of paper, it’s a sacred law by the divine for the humanity to follow and we have a very, very strong connection to those books.”

Nope. To me, it’s just a piece of paper. To Sheik Wahid, it’s magic paper. I can burn it unconcernedly. He can put it on an altar and sing to it, if he wants.

Oh, wait. Now I’m not amused. His university has put him on administrative leave, and he may lose his job over this.

But the QUT, which employs Mr Stewart, is not impressed. Vice-chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake said that the university does not support the destruction of religious artefacts.

“The university is obviously extremely, extremely unhappy and disappointed that this sort of incident should occur,” Professor Coaldrake said in Sydney today.

“It may have occurred in the individual’s private time or on a weekend – it doesn’t matter.

“There is always in the community collateral damage to these sorts of things.”

“Religious artifacts”? These were not the Buddhas of Bamyan — it was a pair of books you can buy cheaply at your local bookstore. Up yours, Professor Coaldrake — you are threatening to fire someone for expression of free speech in an act that violated no laws and did no one any harm.

That’s not my nation, Mr President

My lukewarm support for this president is cooling fast. First he’s making absurd excuses to kowtow to the easily inflamed sensibilities of Islam, and now, apparently, he’s forgotten that this is a secular nation.

Obama said he was proud the country had rallied around the idea that we can’t be divided because of religion or ethnicity – and hopes that is something that can continue.

“We are all Americans, we stand together,” Obama said. “I think it is absolutely important now for majority of Americans to hang onto that thing that is best in us: a belief in religious tolerance. We have to make sure we don’t start turning on each other.”

“We are one nation under God. We may call that God different names, but we are one nation.”

Tolerance is a good idea. But Obama has just divided the nation, forgetting all of his previous brief, superficial mentions of non-believers, into those who are part of his one nation under God, and the rest of us, who are…what? Not part of the nation?

Although it is true that we do call his god many different names. Maybe that’s how Oblivious Obama can consider us godless folk part of his name-calling nation — we do call on god with words like abhorrent, abominable, absurd, acrimonious, appalling, asinine, atrocious, awful, bad, bad-tempered, bananas, barbaric, barbarous, batty, bitter, bloodthirsty, bonkers, brutish, callous, certifiable, childish, cold-blooded, concocted, contemptible, corrupt, cracked, crackers, crazed, cruel, cuckoo, cutting, dangerous, demented, deplorable, depraved, deranged, despicable, detestable, disagreeable, disgusting, dishonest, dishonorable, disreputable, distasteful, disturbed, dreadful, dreamed-up, evil, execrable, fanciful, fatuous, ferocious, fictional, fictitious, fiendish, fierce, foolish, foul, foul, frightful, frivolous, harsh, hateful, heartless, homicidal, hostile, idiotic, inane, inhuman, iniquitous, insipid, insufferable, intolerable, invented, loathsome, loco, loony, loopy, ludicrous, mad, made-up, make-believe, malevolent, malign, malignant, mean, merciless, monstrous, murderous, mythical, mythological, nasty, nauseating, nefarious, noisome, nonexistent, nuts, objectionable, obnoxious, obscene, offensive, pettish, petty, poisonous, pretend, psycho, psychotic, quarrelsome, querulous, rancorous, raving mad, remorseless, repellent, reprehensible, repugnant, repulsive, ridiculous, ruthless, sadistic, savage, schizophrenic, screwy, senseless, sickening, spiteful, storybook, stupid, terrible, unbalanced, unconscionable, unhinged, unpalatable, unpleasant, unprincipled, unsavory, unscrupulous, unspeakable, unstable, vapid, venomous, vile, vile, villainous, vindictive, violent, wicked, and wrongful. I could go on, but I thought I’d be nice and leave out the more scatological and pornographic terms we apply to “that God” and his batty believers.

One diverse nation, yes. Under the thumb of a god, no.

Mormon turnabout

The LDS church has a weird habit of baptizing dead people into their faith — and now you can get even. Atheize anyone!

It works, too! I atheized Brigham Young, and next thing I knew, his ghost was hanging about whining about how I’d gotten him kicked out of Mormon heaven and how all his celestial wives had laughed as they tossed his newly godless patriarchal butt off out of their palace. That may sound like a bit of an annoyance, getting haunted out of the deal, but really, it’s no problem — just remind them that they don’t believe in the supernatural, and you might get a brief look of quizzical startlement before they vanish in a puff of ectoplasm. Easy.

Biases confirmed!

The OKCupid site dug deep into their database of users and analyzed…a lot of stuff. The interesting one is this chart of reading/writing level by religious belief.

i-494e92bf76f08c2545ad7477c5c8e4ff-readinglevel.jpeg

Look there: the godless users of OKCupid score higher than the religious users; and furthermore, being more serious about agnosticism/atheism is correlated with better scores, while the more devout you are within a religious tradition, the lower your score.

Is anyone surprised by this? Not me.

We should regard these data with a little suspicion, though — OKCupid is an online dating site, so it’s not an entirely random sample of the population. It could mean that the most earnest atheists have a hard time getting a date, while the smart believers are all off getting married or indulging in wild orgies all the time and have no need of a dating service.

Hitchens sets an example for us all

So I’m having a few niggling little health problems, but all is well and getting better; meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens mentions this:

“Well, I’m dying, since you asked,” Hitchens replied. “So are you, but I’m doing it faster and in more rich and fecund detail.”

And what does he do? He gallops off to Birmingham to debate that supercilious pompous nitwit, David Berlinski. And by all accounts, whips him into slime. I am extremely impressed with Hitchens right now.

I’m not at all impressed with Berlinski, but then I never have been. He dredged up the rotting corpse of Hitler to claim he was under the spell of Darwin!

When Berlinski linked Nazism and Darwinism while connecting atheism with violent government regimes of the 20th Century, Hitchens bristled and went on the attack in his next turn at the podium.

Connecting Nazism with Darwinism “is a filthy slander,” Hitchens said. “Darwinism was derided in Germany.”

Hitchens said Adolf Hitler claimed in “Mein Kampf” that he was doing God’s work with his policies against the Jews and that the first Nazi treaty was with the Vatican.

“To say that there is something fascistic about my beliefs, I won’t hear said, and you shouldn’t believe,” Hitchens said to the audience, almost thundering despite his diminished voice.

Good grief, please. Hitler was a nominal Catholic with an extremist pseudo-scientific philosophy that excluded Darwin and evolution, and found justification in religious dogma. It’s absolutely nuts that people still play this game of blaming Darwin for the Nazis; there’s just no historical reason to do so. Why not settle on that mass murdering tyrant, Stalin, instead? He was no friend of Darwin, either, but at least he was openly atheist, so they’d at least have a tiny pinch of logic (but not much of one) in correlating atheism and tyranny. At least, pointing at one godless anti-Darwinian and blaming all his crimes on godless evolution is marginally more sensible than pointing at a god-walloping anti-Darwinian and blaming all of his sins on godless evolution.

Another bizarre bit from the story is this little anecdote from Taunton, the organizer of the debate:

Taunton said he drove Hitchens to Birmingham this week from the Washington, D.C., area, and had Hitchens read aloud the prologue of the Gospel of John, which they then discussed.

Hitchens referred to that in the debate, saying that if Taunton found out Jesus did not exist, it would ruin his life.

Taunton responded at the end of the debate. “It would ruin my life,” he said. “It would suggest this life is a sham.”

Hitchens shook his head. “Don’t give up so easily,” he said.

Exasperating nonsense. It ruins your life to believe that an old book of fables is all that gives it meaning. What would be a sham is the wasted investment in promoting lies; that isn’t corrected by insisting on continuing to live on falsehoods.

Unclench those sphincters, Alabama

Hemant Mehta is going to be speaking at the University of South Alabama in Mobile next week, and it turns out that the local newspapers won’t mention it! So I’ve been asked to post something about the talk so more people will know to show up. Here’s their ad:

i-831a181a4be361ba4c9285fe00fffb8c-Mehta_usa.jpeg

Hmmm. They left out the horns and the flames and the profanity and the naked backup singers. He must be doing something horrendous to frighten the local media, after all.

Anyway, go if you’re nearby. I suspect there are many more open-minded interested people in the region than the newspaper reaction would imply.

I think Wayne Laugesen believes he’s my nemesis — but his only superpower is bad polls

I hate to break the news to him, but he’s just so Johnny Snow. I’ve grated against ol’ Wayne a few times before to mock his awful polls, and now I think he has finally snapped, babbling out incoherent mush about how atheists are just like believers, only worse…and he really doesn’t like me. I don’t think. Hard to tell with mixed messages like this one.

Just as James Dobson and other evangelists cultivate audiences in order to spread their beliefs, so do atheist evangelizers. The bigs are Britons Christopher Hitchens, who is battling cancer, and Richard Dawkins, who turns 70 in March. Myers, who grabbed attention by vandalizing sacred religious property, is a young and energetic American evangelist on track to become the James Dobson of atheism.

Excellent whiplash there — my eyebrows were pressing up against my hairline with that “young and energetic” remark, but then I had to do a major eyeroll at the comparison to Dobson. He’s giving my face quite a workout.

Anyway, yeah, he’s got another terrible little online poll, and it’s already going the wrong way for him. I think he’s got a reputation as the noisy little freak of Colorado Springs, so people all over already gawk at his train-wreck editorials. Here is this week’s, which really out to be answered with data, not opinion polling:

Per capita, do athiests provide as much charity as members of traditional religions?

Yes, atheists are at least as charitable as members of traditional religions
68%
No, atheists are less charitable than members of traditional religions
16%
I don’t know
5%
I don’t care
10%

According to the statistics, religious people do donate more time and money to charity, but it’s also complicated: atheists aren’t organized and even when they are, typically aren’t associating as community service organizations. It’s like asking who gives more, TV repairmen or members of Habitat for Humanity? It’s biasing the sample of TV repairmen (or atheists) by selecting from a more diverse pool, while Habitat for Humanity (or many religions) are preselected to contain more volunteers. Then of course there’s also the confusion of needing only one godless Bill Gates to skew the data.

I like to skew it another way, and say that giving for religious purposes shouldn’t really count, any more than flushing money down a toilet should count as charitable outreach. Instead, let’s only consider productive charities, like hospitals.