A good mocking is better than a pointless bombing any day

It’s weird what can suddenly go viral on the web. Jen is riding the tiger right now with her light-hearted ‘boobquake’ idea…and it’s getting picked up all over the place. CNN has a decent article on it, good because they let her explain what it’s about.

“It’s not supposed to be serious activism that is going to revolutionize women’s rights, but just a bit of fun juvenile humor,” she wrote. “I’m a firm believer that when someone says something so stupid and hateful, serious discourse isn’t going to accomplish anything – sometimes light-hearted mockery is worthwhile.”

Back on Boobquake’s Facebook page, McCreight took a moment to be serious and encouraged followers to consider donating money to the American Red Cross’ disaster relief efforts or to the AHA Foundation, an organization that strives to “defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam.”

Some seem to be getting a bit indignant about it all, and are taking it way too seriously. I think it’s great that people are willing to point and laugh at the stupidity of religious beliefs — I wish more would do so!

Long overdue house cleaning

The bishop of Bruges,Roger Vangheluwe, has suddenly resigned over sexual abuse — he has confessed to abusing and harming a young man years ago. I’d be more impressed with his contrition if it hadn’t arisen after the media started making a lot of noise about the issue.

It seems there is a small wave of resignations sweeping through the high ranks of Catholicism.

The bishop’s resignation came just one day after church authorities in Germany said that Bishop Walter Mixa, one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken conservative clerics, had tendered his resignation to the pope after being accused of beating children decades ago.

On the same day, the Vatican said the pope had accepted the resignation of Bishop James Moriarty of Kildare and Leighlin, Ireland, under a code of canon law that allows a bishop to resign before the retirement age of 75 for a “grave reason” that makes him “unsuitable for the fulfillment of his office.”

Keep it up.

Mohammed’s dead hand still ruins lives from the grave

I’ll be going to the Atheist Alliance International 2010 Copenhagen Convention to listen to a fine group of godless speakers, but there’s one who won’t be there — there was going to be a surprise speaker, not mentioned for security reasons, and now he has decided it would be too dangerous. The meeting is being held in Denmark, so of course they were going to have Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who infuriated so many Muslims, speak about his experience.

But not now. The threats and the risk are too great, and he has withdrawn.

That is genuinely disgraceful, that the idiots of Islam can rely on intimidation and fear to silence their critics. “Religion of Peace,” my ass; Islam is the religion of ignorance and hate. It seems entirely appropriate to turn things over to Pat Condell:

He’s a little too generous towards Islam at the end, though. Strip away the fear-mongering and hatred from Islam, and it would still be a religion of ignorance and delusions.

Enter this sweepstakes!

It’s a trivial little contest from JetBlue — it does require that you give them your contact information, which may be more than you want to surrender…but you can win fabulous prizes! Look at what you can get:

  • A vacation in the Dominican Republic!

  • A vacation in Costa Rica!

  • A vacation in the Sonoran Desert!

  • A Vespa scooter (they’re giving away 10 each week)!

  • The Grand Prize: A complete kitchen makeover with a set of appliances from Amana, and a $5000 gift card!

And that’s not all! There’s an ULTIMATE PRIZE. Looking at that list of pricey luxury items, you know this has got to be good. It’s got to be the kind of stunning I-can’t-believe-they’re-giving-that-away kind of prize that make the rest look paltry. Brace yourself for it, this has got to blow you away…

The ULTIMATE PRIZE is…

The prize that has to be better than 10 grand worth of appliances is…

The one thing that will send you running to that page to enter is…

…a meeting with Deepak Chopra?!?? Seriously?

Win a one-on-one meeting with the renowned author and mind-body expert, Deepak Chopra, M.D. and rejuvenate your spirit with his Seduction of Spirit Retreat at the Chopra Center. Dr. Chopra is a global force in the field of human empowerment and the prolific author of fourteen bestsellers on mind-body health, quantum mechanics, spirituality and peace. Time Magazine heralds Dr. Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century and credits him as “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine.”

Holy crap.

They have got to be kidding. The very worst prize in their whole list is what they’re calling the “ultimate” prize? It’s a good thing they didn’t push it any further and offer a mega-super-duper-colossal prize, which at this rate would involve a hot date with a starving, rabid wolverine.

I entered anyway for the tiny shot at howling at Chopra face-to-face for a little while. Maybe that’s the logic behind this “ultimate” prize — it’s more like getting to confront Chopra with a rabid wolverine. One thing that would be almost as satisfying as winning that myself would be if some other skeptic won — so spread the word, get lots of woo-critics to enter the sweepstakes. Let’s make Chopra sweat a bit over this one, by worrying that he’ll get someone who won’t bend over and take his quantum nonsense compliantly.

Roger Ebert ticks off video gamers

Tycho and Gabe seem a tad peevish that Roger Ebert has dissed video games as art — he says video games can never be art, which may be a bit excessive. Still, I read Ebert’s explanation, Penny Arcade’s cranky dismissal, and a serious advocates counter-argument, and you know, I tend to think Ebert is mostly right. It might be because I’m a “wretched, ancient warlock” too.

I think video games can contain pieces of art — artists participate in their creation, after all — but art isn’t the intent, the performance is. A basketball game is not art, no matter how well somebody plays; it’s as physical as a dance performance, and the participants are just as skilled and often just as amazing, but dance can be art while the game is simply sport. Not to dismiss it entirely, which is not what Ebert does at all, but to point out that they are different things.

Art is a kind of distillation and representation of human experience, filtered through the minds of its creators. A great painting or poem is something that represents an idea or emotion, communicated through the skill of an artist, to make you see through his or her eyes for a moment. Computer games just don’t do that. No team sits down to script out a video game with the intent of creating a tone poem in interactive visual displays that will make the player appreciate the play of sunlight on a lake, for instance. It’s all about balance and game play and keeping the action going and providing a means to win or lose, and most of all, it’s about giving the player control in the game environment. No one wants to play a game that’s on rails and simply leads you to the conclusion the author wants. In that sense, a good game hands the player a toolbox to work within the game environment — it is to art as providing a studio and a set of pigments and a collection of brushes.

Video games will become art when replaying the performance becomes something we find interesting, when the execution of those tools generates something splendid and lasting. It just doesn’t now, though. If you want to see something really boring, watch someone else playing a video game. Then imagine recording that game, and wanting to go back and watch the replay again sometime. That’s where games fail as art, which is not to say they can’t succeed as something comparable to a sport — we may want to explore the rules of a game at length, and repeatedly, and we may enjoy getting better at it. But no matter how well or how long you play a game, it’s never going to be something you can display in your home as a representation of an experience.

Simple questions

I like this. Larry Moran has the summary of a talk by Francis Collins, who asserts that science and religion are entirely compatible. Here are Collins’ last few slides:

[First Slide] Almighty God, who is not limited in space and time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.

[Second Slide] God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that plan included human beings.

[Third Slide] After evolution, in the fullness of time, had prepared a sufficiently advanced neurological “house” (the brain), God gifted humanity with free will and with a soul. Thus humans received a special status, “made in God’s image.”

[Fourth Slide] We humans used our free will to disobey God, leading to our realization of being in violation of the Moral Law. Thus we were estranged from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.

That’s it. A very simple but, I think, entirely compatible view that does no violence either to faith or to science. And puts them in a harmonious position …

Then Larry asks six simple questions that are basically, “where is the evidence for that claim,” or “how do you know that?”. I could break those slides down into more than six questions; if you listen to Collins’ whole talk, you know that every one of those claims for what his god did are simply phwooomfed into existence magically, with no supporting reason at all, other than the fact that he is a Christian who needs to believe in these miracles in order to continue being a Christian.

As for his final sentence … he’s wrong. He has done great violence to science. He might as well have dragged science into a dark alley and hacked it to bits with an axe.

I guess I’ll have to watch South Park tonight

Are you ready for civilization to end? I guess the television show South Park is going to show a cartoon rendition of Mohammed tonight. I think the show has been steadily declining in quality, but I’ll tune it in one more time just to support the public desecration of the sacred.

Have they ever done a show where they lampoon juvenile libertarianism? I’d also tune in for that, but that probably hits a little too close to home for the creators.