Greetings, my friend, to the FUTURE!

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And here is a website that tells you everything that will happen…in the Future!

You may be excited to know that we have a specific date for the imminent demise of Christianity: 2240. It’s all based on this very scientific graph.

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Yes, my friends, in the future we will be able to predict complex sociological phenomena from a short sample of data by fitting it to a straight line. We cannot do this today without gagging, but in the Future, it will be easy!

My friends, there is so much more. Before Christianity fades away so completely and so linearly, hunger and disease will be eradicated in 2200, you’ll be able to upload your mind to a computer in 2220, and you’ll be able to travel to nearby stars in your anti-matter fueled starship in 2230. Well-fed godless starfaring software minds for the win! For the Future!

Even greater wonders await us in 2300, when we become naked blue superhumans. In the FUUUUUUTUUUUUURE!

The more you repress it, the more you want it

The biggest consumer of porn in the US is Utah, and hotels report increased viewing of porn during religious conventions. Could there be a relationship between religiosity and private viewing of porn? Here’s another datum: use google to look at searches for pornographic terms world-wide.

Google ranks Pakistan No.1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in searches per person for certain sex-related content, FOXNews.com said.

Pakistan has ranked No.1 in searches per-person for “horse sex” since 2004, “donkey sex” since 2007, “rape pictures” between 2004 and 2009, “rape sex” since 2004, “child sex” between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, “animal sex” since 2004 and “dog sex” since 2005, according to Google Trends and Google Insights, features of Google that generate data based on popular search terms.

The country has also been No.1 in searches for “sex”, “camel sex”, “rape video” and “child sex video”.

Yuck, FoxNews is saying this? Confirm it for yourself, try looking at the data on Google Trends. Pakistanis do love their Google. Next in the running: India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, Turkey, and trailing the pack, the United States and Australia. Just to see if it was some weird artifact of Pakistanis googling everything, I checked a few random terms, big screen TV and football and oil. Nope, Pakistan was nothing special in any of those searches — they just really want to see more camel sex.

Before you get too smug, though, the US is #1 in searches for squid sex.

That one might be my fault.

Darn, I knew I was missing something

Schools often block access to parts of the internet, which is fine, if only to focus students’ attention a little bit. It is not fine when they discriminate, like Indianapolis public schools, which block on religious views other than the Abrahamic religions. Their rules, though, mention something I did not know.

Sites that promote and provide information on religions such as Wicca, Witchcraft or Satanism. Occult Practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or other forms of mysticism, […] the use of spells, incantations, curses, and magic powers. This category includes sites which discuss or deal with paranormal or unexplained events.

Now I know I have this reputation as a big fat atheist, but I have to confess to not knowing something here. Can anyone tell me what the atheist spells, incantations, curses, and magic powers are? Please give me recipes in the comments. They might be handy, but, well, no one ever taught them to me. I blame it on being brought up in a Christian family — they didn’t know anything about atheist rituals or enchantments.

Oh, and if Indianapolis schools ban sites that talk about “paranormal or unexplained events”, why aren’t they blocking all of the Christian sites? Jesus was one paranormal dude with unexplained magic powers, you know.

Creepy and annoying

Jean Stevens was a lonely old lady with an unpleasant obsession. She dug up her dead twin sister and husband and kept the corpses in her house, dressing them up and offering them tea and talking to them. That’s a little disturbing, but mostly harmless — except that you can’t help but think that she’d be a lot happier with living company.

But here’s the annoying part. They just had to interview a psychiatrist about it (that’s actually a good idea), but then they got a singularly cluelless one.

Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a psychiatry professor at UCLA who researches how the elderly view death and dying, said people who aren’t particularly spiritual or religious often have a difficult time with death because they fear that death is truly the end.

For them, “death doesn’t exist,” she said. “They deny death.”

Say what? That makes no sense. Everyone has a difficult time with death, no matter what they think of religion. And good grief, atheists don’t deny death. This is a woman who seems to have never spoken to one.

And what makes it even more annoying, is that this opinion is completely irrelevant. From the rest of the story, Jean Stevens is not an atheist. She talks about a creator god and worries about what happens after death.

British royalty receives a long-awaited shakeup

I was so excited about this lead.

A famous Newfoundland sea monster will soon occupy a space normally reserved for Canada’s Queen.

I was even more excited when I saw a picture of the Newfie beast:

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That’ll teach that dingleberry Charles — bypassed by a giant squid, soon to be ruler of all Britannia.

It was a major letdown to discover the details.

Glover’s Harbour’s giant roadside squid statue has been chosen to appear on a new Canadian stamp.

A fellow can still dream, though. Someone needs to drop a hint to Queen Elizabeth that a giant aquatic mollusc would do a better job on the throne than that dullard she birthed.

Must have copy…for the pictures

You know how New Scientist published that horrible magazine cover that said “DARWIN WAS WRONG” in big letters, which we now get to hear about all the time at school board meetings as every authority-happy creationist waves it around and announces that they were right all along? I want a copy of the July issue of the Portuguese edition of Playboy for the same reason.

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Jesus is on the cover of the July Playboy, sitting on a bed, holding a scantily clad female. The title of Saramago’s book is engraved into the headboard of the bed.

The other explicit images in the magazine show Jesus watching a lesbian sex scene, standing next to a street prostitute, and looking over the shoulder of a half naked woman reminiscent of a Catholic school girl.

This is purely for pedagogical purposes, of course. For any other purposes I’d want the weird bearded guy airbrushed out of the picture.