Commenter Peter alerted me to a story on This American Life about a gung-ho evangelical who went through the process that I have described before, where he goes to seminary and on learning Biblical history and scholarship becomes an atheist.

Filled with all the new information he now has as to why Christianity is false, he becomes zealous for atheism and tries to convert his family members, before he realizes that people join religious groups for a lot of benefits that have little to do with belief in god and that sometimes, on a personal level in the private sphere, it may be better to leave them alone.

The story starts at the 8:20 minute mark and goes until the 20:00 mark.

By the creators of That Mitchell and Webb Look. It is probably funnier if you have seen the original 1940 film or read Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel.

The university computer network, which includes this blog server, has been suffering major problems which is why posting has been so erratic.

Sorry about that.

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In the previous post, I wrote about how modern scholarship based on scientific and literary analysis has shown that almost all the things claimed in the Bible and their stories and characters are fictional.

One can immediately see why this knowledge is so dangerous to religious institutions and why they would not be anxious to have it widely known. The religious establishments have a vested interest in hiding the truth about the religious texts because they must be well aware that their entire business model and revenue stream depends on people thinking that at least some of the major parts of their religions are true. All religious institutions thus have to find a way to keep their followers in the dark about what their own scholars know.
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There seems to be a problem with the comments feature in that all comments are being rejected.

I have informed the system administrator and hope that it will be fixed soon.

My apologies to all those who tried to comment and were rebuffed. Please don’t take it personally – my comments were rejected too!

UPDATE: The system administrator has fixed the problem.

Doesn’t Fox News have anyone who knows geography?

(via Brent Martin)

(via Machines Like Us.)

A Mystery: Why Can’t We Walk Straight? from NPR on Vimeo.

(via onegoodmove)

As the story of the tragic events in Arizona unfold, it is good to bear in mind that the immediate reports of events like this are often confused and contradictory and full of uniformed and misleading speculation about what actually happened and who did what and why.

It is best to suspend judgement for at least a few days until it becomes clear what the facts of the case are, based on the statements of people who are usually reliable sources (hospitals, local police officers, actual witnesses of events).

Here are my predictions.

On the political front, things are not going to be good.

• We can expect an assault on Social Security, the dismantling of which is a long-held dream of the oligarchy. This will be facilitated by Obama, the faithful servant of the oligarchy, who has already signaled that the fix is in by (a) reducing the employee contribution to 4.2%, thus creating a resource problem where there wasn’t one before; (b) saying that he wants to ‘reform’ it so that others don’t do a worse job; and (c) encouraging his ‘Catfood Commission’ to use Social Security as part of their budget deficit plans.
• We can also expect Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan to continue their assault on public education by diverting resources to charter schools and continue the practice of bribing school districts to fire teachers.
• We will see Obama go along with the attack on public sector employees (he has already frozen their salaries) by cutting their numbers and undermining their unions.
• We will continue to see further encroachments on our civil liberties and a further tend towards an imperial presidency, all in the name of fighting terrorism.
• We will see a further attempt to siphon wealth towards the oligarchy by means of ‘tax reform’.
• Providing adequate health care to people and controlling its costs will loom as the biggest problem facing the US because of its refusal to adopt a single-payer system.
• There is going to some political theater in February when the debt ceiling will need to be raised in order to continue funding the government. The oligarchy needs this to happen so the ceiling will be raised but there will be some Kabuki theater before it happens in which Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress will pretend that they are being held hostage by the mean old Republicans in Congress and that they are forced to concede to some of their demands in order to keep the government running. I don’t know what specifically the Democrats will ‘reluctantly concede’ but you can be sure that it will be something that harms the less well-off.
• There will be no end to the military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and only token reductions in forces in those two countries. Furthermore, the wars in Pakistan and Yemen will escalate.

As I have said repeatedly, the oligarchy is most successful in their assault on the poor and middle class when a Democrat is in the White House because then the base of the Democratic Party is lulled into inaction, thinking that the president is looking after their interests when all the evidence points to the opposite. Measures that would have had them howling in protest if a Republican president proposes them are meekly acquiesced to when a Democrat advocates them.

On the bright side, the longer-term prospects are better. All oligarchies contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction and from the ashes of the wrecked US economy, there might emerge a better society. But the interim is going to be brutal.

There is also every indication that religion will continue its slide into oblivion. I know that this does not seem obvious, but the signs are pretty good, actually.

I will elaborate on these issues in the coming year.