A pointless clarification

That dull, boring, moronic slimepitter ScentedNectar has put out a youtube video (which I will not link to) accusing me of nefarious and underhanded manipulation of the ads on FtB to get an unfair edge in revenues. I’d call it a lie, but it’s clearly a product of her stupidity and incompetence. Just to clarify: 1) I have absolutely no control over the ads here at all. Ed Brayton handles all the accounting and ad placement. I don’t even want to have to deal with ads. 2) All revenue from ads at FtB, without regard to their source, is put into a common pool and shared out to all blogs on the basis of their page views. If I were somehow gaming the system to bring in extra ad money, it would go into the pool and benefit everyone blogging here.

I don’t know why I’m bothering to respond, since she also whines that I’d just lie and make excuses anyway, so she’s not going to care about the facts. But I hate being accused of somehow scamming my colleagues here — this network is about building a cause, not lining my pockets. If I cared about nothing but the money, I would never have left Scienceblogs — their rates are much better!

Around FtB

Who needs to read any other site? Freethoughtblogs has it all.

  • Digital Cuttlefish has a poem about Texas cheerleaders. Don’t worry, it’s not porny at all!

  • Ophelia Benson finds Simon Singh in trouble again, being threatened with a lawsuit by quacks who don’t like him pointing out the duck-like nature of their voices.

  • Dana Hunter is searching for a notorious car — one that survived the eruption of Mt St Helens.

  • Ian Cromwell dissects gay conversion therapy and discovers something completely obvious about its proponents.

  • Sikivu Hutchinson also puts the smack down on the religious fanatics pushing gay conversion therapy.

  • Maryam Namazie notices that women are mysteriously disappearing from the pages of Ikea catalogs in Saudi Arabia. Turns out it’s a Swedish conspiracy.

  • Richard Carrier is going to Skepticon! So am I!

  • Mano Singham reveals the logo of our American drone program. Are we the baddies? Yes, we are.
    It’s not a joke. That’s really their logo.

  • Taslima Nasrin notes a recent archaeological discovery: Bronze Age women worked as metalsmiths. Must have been before the patriarchy took over.

  • Zinnia Jones makes my brain hurt. You MUST watch the video she posted; it’ll make you feel so good and happy. Then you can read the comments from the Religious Right about it, if you want to be whipsawed into fearing a large chunk of humanity. Or if you’d rather just wallow in despair, skip the heart-warming video and go straight to the Commentator Accountability Project.

Christian zealots really can’t identify with anyone else

The Canadian government is firing all their non-Christian prison chaplains. Not all their chaplains, which would be a move that would be both smart and fair, but just the ones who don’t love Jesus enough.

The federal government is cancelling the contracts of all non-Christian chaplains at federal prisons, CBC News has learned.

Inmates of other faiths, such as Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jews, will be expected to turn to Christian prison chaplains for religious counsel and guidance, according to the office of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who is also responsible for Canada’s penitentiaries.

Toews made headlines in September when he ordered the cancellation of a tender issued for a Wiccan priest for federal prisons in B.C.

Toews said he wasn’t convinced part-time chaplains from other religions were an appropriate use of taxpayer money and that he would review the policy.

In an email to CBC News, Toews’ office says that as a result of the review, the part-time non-Christian chaplains will be let go and the remaining full-time Christian chaplains in prisons will now provide interfaith services and counselling to all inmates.

"The minister strongly supports the freedom of religion for all Canadians, including prisoners,” the email states. “However, the government … is not in the business of picking and choosing which religions will be given preferential status through government funding. The minister has concluded … [Christian] chaplains employed by Corrections Canada must provide services to inmates of all faiths."

I’d like to know how Vic Toews would react if all the Christian chaplains were kicked out of the prisons and all the Jebusites had to turn towards “interfaith” services provided by rabbis and imams. I suspect he’d suddenly see a major problem with such a decision.

One other interesting note: Canada has about 15,000 prisoners, and their religion breaks down like this:

There are nearly 15,000 inmates in federal custody and a large majority of them identify themselves as Christian:

  • 37.5% are Catholic.

  • 19.5% are Protestant.

  • 4.5% are Muslim.

  • 4% First Nations spirituality

  • 2% are Buddhist.

  • less than 1% are Jewish.

  • less than 1% are Sikh.

Hang on, that adds up to less than 70%. What are the other 30%? Polls show that less than 20% of the Canadian population has no religious affiliation (recent polls bring that up closer to 30%). Have we finally found a country where the criminals are as godless as the general population?

Why I am an atheist – Harry Salzman

This could be a much longer response, going over my background and
struggles with religion, how good it felt to believe that there was
always someone invisible watching over me, that there was someone who
saw all injustice and ensured that it all came out right in the end,
but frankly, I don’t think there’s anything there that you haven’t
already read or experienced yourself.

[Read more…]

Hasn’t changed a bit in half a millennium

Archaeologists are digging up a Tuscan convent and have found some skeletons that might include the remains of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, also known as Mona Lisa. She’s still lovely after all this time.

One investigator has been going through the bones, trying to identify the dead woman, so they can apply forensic reconstruction to her skull.

Wait…why?

I mean, we already know what she looked like. I can understand general historical research on Renaissance remains, but pawing through the graveyard to find one famous person simply to reconstruct a face we’re already familiar with seems peculiarly ghoulish — nothing but a sensationalistic game. What question does this answer, what do we learn from this pointless exercise?

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who wonders about that.

But not all experts are convinced by the claims of Dr Vinceti and his team. Dr Kristina Killgrove, an anthropologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the US, said on her blog: "Although the excavation is being carried out in a professional manner, Vinceti’s quest to dig up the ‘real’ Mona Lisa is not grounded in scientific research methodology." She added: "The news media’s breathless coverage of it threatens to signal to the public that archaeologists are frivolous with their time, energy, and research money."

Maybe, once they identify the skull, they can send it off to the Louvre and mount it on the wall next to the painting. <sarcasm>That’ll be informative.</sarcasm>

Whoa — they’re literally dehumanizing atheists

I didn’t realize how thoroughly the Catholic church regarded atheists as sub-humans, but Michael Nugent documents it all, straight from the hierarchy’s legion of mouths. It is literally a Catholic teaching that atheists are “not fully human”.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part One, The Profession of Faith, reads: (27) “The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God;” and (44) “Man is by nature and vocation a religious being. Coming from God, going toward God, man lives a fully human life only if he freely lives by his bond with God.”

In 2012, Pope Benedict, in a letter to a Catholic meeting in Rimini, wrote that “every person is created so that he may enter into dialogue with the Infinite… To truly find himself and his identity, to live up to his being, man must turn and recognize that he is a creature, who is dependent on God.”

In 1998, Pope John Paul II, in an apostolic message delivered in Croatia, said that “A culture which rejects God cannot be considered fully human, because it excludes from its vision the One who has created man in his own image and likeness, has redeemed him through the work of Christ, and has consecrated him with the anointing of the Holy Spirit.”

In 1995, Pope John Paul II, in a homily at Saint Joseph’s Seminary, Yonkers, USA, said that when he was addressing the United Nations: “My task is not to speak in purely human terms about merely human values, but in spiritual terms about spiritual values, which are ultimately what make us fully human.”

In 1986, Pope John Paul II, in an Angelus statement in Adelaide, Australia, said that “Jesus did not come to lay burdens upon us. He came to teach us what it means to be fully happy and fully human.”

That’s just a small sampling. Fortunately, I don’t share their bigotry: I regard all Catholics as my fellow apes.