Sunday Twitter Sermon

Since it's Sunday, here are some of Richard Dawkins' Twitter musings on religion:

"Because it's a faith some people feel comfortable with." What kind of idiot thinks feeling "comfortable with" X is a reason to believe X?

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 30, 2013

Being afraid to die is not a cogent reason for believing you won't. If you want to join a religion, you need a better reason than that.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 30, 2013

"Feeling you need to belong to something" can't be a reason for believing anything. Only evidence can. If you want to belong, join a club.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 30, 2013

I've said most of these things at times to people I know, to little or no effect, of course. Partly as a consequence of that "to little or no effect" part, I'm still feeling lazy, and I wanted to try out the new Twitter method for embedding its message, so here we are.

I like this new Twitter message API, by the way. It works in Blogger, which the old one never did, at least for me. Thanks to Lambert Strether for pointing out how to use it.

UPDATE: Just saw this one on Dawkins' Twitter stream, and I really like it:

"What reason to believe in anything though? Whatever makes you happy." No, your happiness is irrelevant to truth. Believe only evidence.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 30, 2013

I'm not all that bright, at least not by the standards of a lot of folks who write opinions worth reading. As I've written a time or two, folks like Glenn Greenwald and Marcy Wheeler make me feel like a moron in comparison. One advantage I've had over a lot of people, though, is that I've never developed the habit of assuming that because I wanted something to be true meant that it was. I realized that there was no reason to assume the Christian god existed not long after I finally figured out that Santa Claus didn't. While I wasn't especially prodigious in figuring out about Santa Claus, I was way ahead of some very smart folks on atheism. That I learned early on that wanting something to be true didn't make it true was an advantage any time I needed to figure out what the truth was. It's one less way to lie to yourself.

Quote Of The Day

Juan Cole discusses the relative threat of Islam versus the West:

Listening to Newt Gingrich, the great bloviator, go on this morning on the alleged Muslim threat, set me off. Gingrich did his dissertation on Belgian educational policy in the Congo, where he managed to miss the genocide perpetrated by the Europeans. Gingrich knows better, he is just hate-mongering. But since he brought it up, it is Westerners like Gingrich (who supported illegally invading and occupying Iraq, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths) of whom one might justifiably be a little afraid…

Who’s the Threat? Western Powers have invaded and Killed Millions of Muslims

He then presents a short table showing a rundown of who has invaded or attacked whom since the end of the 18th Century. Let's just say it doesn't look good for our side, unless you think that killing more people is winning. I can't think of any Muslim invasions to add to that list, that's for sure.

Islam, as a religion with some incredibly intolerant adherents and leaders, is certainly a source of evil in the world. But when I'm almost simultaneously presented with a Foreign Policy article extolling the virtues of signature strikes, and Secretary of State John Kerry lying his ass off about how America isn't bombing targets where civilians are present (see NOTE 1), I have to say that Muslims aren't the only ones who can go to extraordinary lengths to avoid admitting the human costs of what they're doing.

NOTE 1 Since when have we refused to bomb valid targets that don't happen to have civilians in the area? In World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, our clear policy was that, while we might try to minimize civilian casualties, that wouldn't stop us from destroying something we thought was important enough to send planes to bomb.

And for those not familiar, please note, I've defended some of those bombings in the past. I just recognize those statements of Kerry's as the utter horse shit that they are.

Twitter Message Of The Day

What more needs to be said?

Twitter Message by @TheTweetOfGod: May 21, 2013

When you accept the ideas that there is an entity who is all powerful, and that human beings are made in this entity's image, there's really no room to argue with this one.

Islam And The Notion Of Race

Caption: From left, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, and Dzohkar Tsarnaev. None of them "look Muslim", and two of them aren't. (see NOTE 1)

Image credit: Wikimedia. See expository links for details.

Recently, I've noticed a trend among atheists to deny that their discussions of Islam and its dangers are not motivated by racism, because Islam isn't a race. Both Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne have recently expressed this view, which as that first link notes, Richard Dawkins has also supported in Twitter messages. To which I can only reply: Horse pucky. Perhaps that's not erudite enough given the caliber of folks I'm arguing with here, so allow me to rephrase:

It's smug nonsense.

Let's start with definitions, shall we? Here's what Websters, generally considered the reference on American English, has to say about what racism means:

1: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary: racism

As you can see from the italic emphasis, all it takes to be a racist is to like your race over all the others.

Just to avoid accusations of parochialism, here's the Oxford Dictionary's online definition of racism:

The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

Oxford Dictionary of English: racism

Once again, I added the italic emphasis.

Belief that one's own "race" (a term I have to put in quotes these days for reasons anyone familiar with how arbitrary the notion of who belongs to what race can be) is the one with better qualities is, in fact, racism. This is a point made in at least some of those articles decrying "racism" against Muslims. Most Muslims are not white. Many Westerners, including Dawkins, Coyne, Harris, are. Christopher Hitchens, often mentioned along with Dawkins prior to his death, was white as well. They're right to wonder whether it's some subtle manifestation of racism, especially when Harris' deeply unfortunate comment that we know who "looks Muslim" is taken into account.

I don't believe for a second that Dawkins or Coyne are racists. I've read their writings for too long to think so. I have my doubts about Harris at times, but he and Hitchens strike me as more xenophobic than racist, with the "xeno" here implying a strange religion and culture, not just the looks of people. Nevertheless, this is a reasonable thing to wonder if you're not familiar with their work. Preference for one's own "race" is as much racism as is prejudice against another.

Plus, as this unfortunate young woman found out while trying to attend a cocktail hour at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, sometimes that racism isn't subtle at all:

As I left the hotel and my husband went to the ballroom for the dinner, I realized he still had my keys. I approached the escalators that led down to the ballroom and asked the externally contracted security representatives if I could go down. They abruptly responded, "You can't go down without a ticket." I explained my situation and that I just wanted my keys from my husband in the foyer and that I wouldn't need to enter in the ballroom. They refused to let me through. For the next half hour, they watched as I frantically called my husband but was unable to reach him.

Then something remarkable happened. I watched as they let countless other women through -- all Caucasian -- without even asking to see their tickets. I asked why they were allowing them to go freely when they had just told me that I needed a ticket. Their response? "Well, now we are checking tickets." He rolled his eyes and let another woman through, this time actually checking her ticket. His smug tone, enveloped in condescension, taunted, "See? That's what a ticket looks like."

When I asked "Why did you lie to me, sir?" they threatened to have the Secret Service throw me out of the building -- me, a 4'11" young woman who weighs 100 pounds soaking wet, who was all prettied up in elegant formal dress, who was simply trying to reach her husband. The only thing on me that could possibly inflict harm were my dainty silver stilettos, and they were too busy inflicting pain on my feet at the moment. My suspicion was confirmed when I saw the men ask a blonde woman for her ticket and she replied, "I lost it." The snickering tough-guy responded, "I'd be happy to personally escort you down the escalators ma'am."

My Racist Encounter at the White House Correspondents' Dinner

Seema Jilani is, as she noted, a native-born American. She is also a Muslim, but if her description of events is not complete fiction, it's hard to imagine that the guards would have questioned any of those white women about whether they were Muslims. Appearance alone seems to have determined her treatment. She could have been an atheist, or possibly even a Christian, and received the same treatment.

That's what "looking Muslim" means in America these days. And yes, that's racism. I can't blame American Muslims, many of whom "look Muslim", for wondering if what all those white folks believe about their religion might not be motivated by racism, too.

That's why I termed the attitude of these particular atheists as "smug nonsense". The world looks a lot different when you're the one who is treated like shit just because of the way you look.

NOTE 1: Tsaernov's guilt has yet to be demonstrated in court, and thus should be considered a possibility rather than a certainty. Let's face it, though, he doesn't "look Muslim", either.

Afterword: Anyone who has taken more than a cursory glance at the atheism or religion keywords here ought to realize that I think all religions are nonsense. Most have a bit of wisdom wrapped up in that nonsense, but you'd probably do better at finding wisdom by reading comic books or watching television. Still, in America we don't have freedom from religion, we have freedom of religion. That means that, as long as they are functioning and law-abiding members of our society, all people are supposed to be treated equally no matter what their beliefs. As I've mentioned before, the Constitution only mentions religion in two places, and in neither place does it say that there's a right or wrong choice in that realm. It just says we all get to be Americans, and government officials, no matter what our convictions are.

Which, as long as people are as they are now, is how it should be.

I've also objected in the past to the over-use of the word "racism", as this article and this one, among others, should make clear. That over-use cheapens the word. It has been used to characterize just about anyone who criticizes President Obama, for instance, as a racist. That's not what's going on here. Right or wrong, this is a different conversation. It's about people being mistreated, if not demonized, because they look a certain way. To say this isn't helpful to either our country or its relations to the rest of the world is beyond obvious.

Erroneous Assumptions

Image credit: Aaron Tang/Flickr

It's unlikely in the extreme that anyone who needs to be exposed to this information will be reading this blog, but I'll pass it on anyway. First off, that guy who was tackled by bystanders yesterday for looking Muslim didn't have anything to do with the Boston Marathon bombings:

The Saudi Arabian man whose apartment was searched by Boston Marathon bombing investigators is not a person of interest in the continuing search for the persons responsible for Monday’s terrorist attack.

“He has been checked out,’’ said a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation. “He is not involved. He is just a victim.’’

Sources: Revere man not suspected in Boston Marathon bombings

Whoever it turns out to be, let's put that one to rest, shall we? And maybe we can note the law enforcement official's phrase "He is just a victim."

While we're on the subject of Muslims in Boston, a Huffington Post article notes:

Security officials at Boston's largest mosque requested police to guard its campus in the wake of Monday's deadly explosions at the Boston Marathon, a sobering reminder that Muslims in the U.S. often face threats after alleged terrorist attacks.

...

"We're Bostonians - we mourn with the city," said Suhaib Webb, the Oklahoma-born imam who leads the congregation. "We stand in support with the city, with the victims. We're hurt, equally shocked and equally pissed off."

The relationship that a Muslim community has with the city it inhabits can often be tested in the aftermath of acts of terror. But in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon attacks, the prevailing sentiment inside this mosque was of shared grief rather than instinctive distrust.

Boston's Largest Mosque: 'We're Bostonians -- We Mourn With The City'

And this Twitter message came from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) yesterday:

Twitter message from CAIR, April 15, 2013

If you visit the byline link, you'll notice that at least one bigot made sure to explain how CAIR is a front for the Muslim League of World Conquest, or whatever. Nice to know ignorant clowns are everywhere, making sure we don't slip up and assume people are innocent until proved guilty, or some equally soft-headed liberal notion.

In short, American Muslims think the bombing sucks, too. That ought to be enough to let various folks, including Sam Harris, know how stupid it is to be profiling people because of how they look, but I'm sure it won't. Prejudice is pretty powerful, and it doesn't have the power it does because the people who have it are used to examining their assumptions. After all, smart people with Ph.D.s shouldn't have to accept the idea that they might be wrong, should they?

Image credit: OverpassLightBrigade/Twitpic

Now, I'm done with this subject, at least until something useful turns up.

UPDATE (Apr. 18): FireDogLake contributor CTuttle dropped by to let me know that the "Aloha Boston" sign in that last photograph was the work of Occupy Hilo. Good, work, OH.

Twitter Message Of The Day

Anyone who has read this old post of mine can understand why I liked this:

Twitter Message by @Whoozley

That's how freedom works - you get to have your religion, and I get to tell you what's wrong with it. In other words, we both have to put up with something we'd rather not, but we both get to do what we want. Religion should be criticized and even mocked when it violates logic, human decency, or our high water mark for irony.

Right now, in Russia, there are two young women serving terms of hard labor for, supposedly, mocking religion. The health of one may be in danger. I'd suggest that if you feel that your religion is above mockery, that you move there.

Quote Of The Day

The friend who is a helpmate,
the friend in happiness and woe,
the friend who gives good counsel, the friend who sympathizes too -
these four as friends the wise behold
and cherish them devotedly
as does a mother her own child.

Buddha
Sigalovada Sutta, Digha Nikaya
Buddha Quotes: Page 5

I've just had reason to look up the sayings of Prince Siddhartha, and this one seems apt, given the reasons.

What I find interesting about quotes like the ones on the link that quote was taken from is how much people knew about each others' behavior back then. At least, the wise ones did. Many times, that wisdom was dressed up in religious trappings, but the basic understanding of our nature was clearly there. Why and how all that behavior comes about is still a mystery, and social scientists and biologists will probably spend decades more figuring that out, but how all that neural activity plays out has been known and recorded for a long time.

As Buddha might have put it:

See the false as false,
The true as true.
Look into your heart.
Follow your nature.

Buddha Dhammapada

Buddha Quotes: Page 2

Understanding your own mind is a good way to understand others'.

OMG! Now They're Recruiting Kittehs!

They had a cow when atheists put up this billboard in Iowa:



They went medieval on our butts when atheists put this one up in New Jersey:

Image credit: American Atheists

So, do you think there's any chance that they'll finally see that atheists can be kind, thoughtful people when this billboard goes up in Springfield, Missouri next week?

Image credit: Skepticon

Not a chance. I can't wait to read an editorial decrying how militant atheists are enlisting kittens in their campaign of evil. Actually, it's even worse. There's been an active campaign to recruit 400 lbs mutant St. Bernard puppies:

Image credit: Cujo359

What depths will they sink to next? Stay tuned.

There's one unalloyed good religion has done for us - it's been a perfect laboratory experiment demonstrating just how oblivious and small people can be when they put their minds to it.

Trying To Blog Against Theocracy Once More: Blog Against Theocracy 2012

Caption: Baal: "You dare mock me?" O'Neill: "Baal, you know me. Of course I dare mock you."

Image credit: Screenshot by Cujo359 (see NOTE 1





Easter is upon us once more, and in one of those traditions that pass for a long standing one on the Internet, it's Blog Against Theocracy Weekend. Which, in itself, is all sorts of ironic to folks like me.

Yes, we're supposed to take seriously a holiday that is faithfully observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. Why in the world would anyone put a holiday on such a bizarre schedule? I miss it at least half the time because it happens earlier than I expect it should be. Just to make things even more fun, this is supposed to be the day when that religion's founder came back from the dead, wandered the Earth just long enough to be seen by all the cool people, and then ascended somewhere. Not that any of that is crazy, mind you.

Caption: Mortally insulted by this sign? Sadly, you're not alone, either. And yet, you're also an idiot.

Still More Atheist Outrage

Apparently, atheists are getting uppity again:

On Monday, March 5, American Atheists will erect two billboards with identical wording: You know it's a myth, and you have a choice. One board in Brooklyn will have both Hebrew and English, and the sister board in Arabic will be erected in Paterson NJ. Each will have the Hebrew and Arabic word for Yahweh/Allah on the left side.

American Atheists: Billboards 2012

Which, I think means in Hebrew "the god whose name we dare not speak is a myth". In any case, you'd think that if people get upset over this, then surely they'll be mortally offended by someone actually declaring that what they believe in is a myth. The New York Daily News found someone willing to comment:

Mohamed Elfilali, executive director of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, was not particularly troubled by news of the billboards. "It is not the first and won’t be the last time people have said things about God or religion,” he told CNN. “I respect people’s opinion about God; obviously they are entitled to it. I don’t think God is a myth, but that doesn’t exclude people to have a different opinion.”

Billboards saying God is “a myth” to go up in Jewish and Muslim communities

Strange as it might seem, I don't find it all that remarkable that there are religious leaders out there who can accept that there are people who aren't going to believe what they do. As I've mentioned a time or two, faith that's shaken by someone professing differing views isn't all that strong. What I find remarkable is that a major newspaper actually bothered to find such a person.

Every once in a while, it's nice to be surprised. As for the billboards themselves, let's hope they let people who haven't dared admit they are non-believers know that there are folks like them out there.

Saturday Entertainment: The Who's Tommy

This song has been going through my head lately:

(see UPDATE below)

It's the British rock group The Who performing "Overture" from the rock opera Tommy. It's actually not a particularly good performance (this one sounds better, for instance - Pete Townsend's guitar playing is almost letter-perfect), but it's a good look at what a Who concert was like back then. It's from the 1970s, when The Who were hip, young, and, well, breathing. I think Keith Moon was gone five years after this concert. John Entwistle lasted much longer, but he's gone now, too.

In fact, Tommy is so old, it's now a musical, and two amateur theatres in the Puget Sound region will be putting it on in the next few months.

What has always amazed me about The Who's live performances of Tommy is that it was usually just the four of them playing and singing. If the theatres showing The Who's Tommy in our area follow the usual practice, they'll be performing in similar numbers. If they play this well, I'd say they'll be doing as much as can be expected of them.

Tommy is a story about personal enlightenment and the way that organized religions can sometimes get in the way of that process. In perhaps the most revealing lines in the song "I'm Free", once Tommy is finally freed of his handicaps, he says:

If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high,
You'd laugh and say nothing's that simple.
But you've been shown many times before,
Messiahs pointed to the door,
and no one had the guts to leave the temple.

Life, he was saying, is best understood by living it, not trying to find out what the rules were for happiness or enlightenment. As his own following grows, Tommy forgets this, and eventually his followers go elsewhere looking for "enlightenment".

Burien Little Theatre be showing it February 17 through March 25.

Centerstage, in Federal Way, will pick up the silver ball, and show their own production of it May 4 through May 27.

Check those links for showtimes and possible schedule changes.

If you live in this region, and you don't see it, you just aren't trying very hard. Treat yourself to one of the best works of popular music to come out of the 1960s.

UPDATE: I think from now on, when this message appears in a post I do about a show that was over forty years ago, I will just leave that graphic up with no link to the greedy asshats who think that they should make more money from something that was made by people who are now dead, and thus cost them next to nothing to put on the Internet. Whoever WMG is, they can kiss my furry butt.

Quote Of The Day

New York Times columnist Gail Collins, on the U.S. Catholic bishops' attempt to paint the Obama Administration's decision to provide access to free contraceptives to women who want it as the work of the devil:

[T]he bishops have totally failed to convince their own faithful that birth control is a moral evil and now appear to be trying to get the federal government to do the job for them.

The Battle Behind the Fight

I don't think anyone has put this quite so baldly, at least not in a dead-tree publication. Catholic women overwhelmingly use birth control. Catholic doctrine is clearly not important to them, let alone to the rest of us. All the pontificating about how religious rights of churches that own hospitals and other businesses will be violated if they're forced to pay for contraception ignores the fact that Catholics have freely chosen to tell their religion's leaders to take a hike on this issue. In summing up a recent poll on religious belief and contraception, the Guttmacher Institute wrote:

• Among all women who have had sex, 99% have ever used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same among Catholic women (98%).
• Among sexually active women of all denominations who do not want to become pregnant, 69% are using a highly effective method (i.e., sterilization, the pill or another hormonal method, or the IUD).
• Some 68% of Catholic women use a highly effective method, compared with 73% of Mainline Protestants and 74% of Evangelicals.
• Only 2% of Catholic women rely on natural family planning; this is true even among Catholic women who attend church once a month or more.

Contraceptive Use Is The Norm Among Religious Women

As USA Today points out regarding a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute:

58% of all Catholics agree employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception. That slides down to 52% for Catholic voters, 50% for white Catholics.

New surveys: Catholics want birth control coverage

For those who aren't good at math, that 58 percent figure means that there are at least some Catholic men who believe birth control should be available for free, too.

And why not? When you get right down to it, this decision benefits most of us in some way or another. Preventing unwanted pregnancy leads to less expense later, from preventing birth-related health problems to lowering crime. Oh, and as Media Matters notes:

Catholic United's Executive Director: "There Is A Silver Lining In Today's Ruling. Increased Access To Contraceptive Services Will Dramatically Reduce The Abortion Rate In America." James Salt, executive director of the group Catholics United, issued this statement in response to the contraception ruling[.]

New Polls Showing Catholic Support For Contraception Coverage Further Undermine "War On Religion" Claim

It's a winning idea for anyone who isn't married to some baseless idea of when a human life starts.

For once, the Obama Administration confounded me by doing the right thing. Of course, he did it in such a way as to avoid directly confronting the religious fanatics, so at least in that regard he stayed in character. He won't make a habit of it, but this definitely is a good decision, and anyone who thinks it violates his religion needs to take a step back and ask himself whether enforcing his religion's point of view on an entire society makes sense when its leaders can't even convince their own adherents.

And frankly, I don't even care what they think about that question.

UPDATE/Afterword: Just to belabor the obvious for a moment, it seems pretty clear to me that a newly elected President Ron Paul or a newly elected President Santorum would make short work of this new insurance requirement on taking office. I'm not sure whether Mitt Romney would, and as Art Pronin points out at TM.com, neither is he, but there's enough reason to suspect he would to give anyone who valued this policy pause.

So this is a smart political move for the President, which is something I've mentioned before. What amazes me is that he did it anyway.

UPDATE 2: Fixed attribution of the quote about Mitt Romney in the previous update. I had said it was Taylor Marsh who wrote it, but it was an article by another writer at her site.

The Real Question

Caption: Screenshot from Live Leak video of U.S. Marines about to urinate on dead Taliban.

Image credit: Screenshot of this video taken and reduced by Cujo359

The video is making the rounds, if you want to see it, it's here, among other places. You can see screenshots here. Personally, I've seen all I want.

There are people, like the sad excuse for a human being CNN hired as its Tea Party viewpoint who think that things like this are just dandy, and what's everyone's problem? Needless to say I disagree with this point of view.

On the other hand, I am neither shocked nor appalled by it. This sort of thing is going to happen in a war. Behavior like this, as disgusting as it is to us, isn't unknown in warfare. I've never been in combat, so I can't speak to what that's like. But I know my own personality well enough to know that if a group of people scared the hell out of me, making me fear for my life or the life of someone I cared about, and then I had a loaded weapon placed in my hands and the chance to deal with the problem, the results would not be pretty, nor would the aftermath.

The Price Of Freedom: Religious Expression

Over at her new home at Free Thought Blogs, Maryam Namazie wrote this:

Today, the [French] weekly [Charlie Hebdo] was firebombed for publishing a special edition on the Arab Spring and calling itself Charia (Sharia) Hebdo for the occasion. Mohammad was featured as the ‘guest editor.’

In solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, Mohammad is being featured here as a guest blogger though I can’t really publish anything he’s written because it violates every anti-discrimination code in existence (to say the least!).

A photo will have to do.

A photo of Mohammad will have to do! (In support of Charlie Hebdo’s firebombing)

Ms. Namazie is no doubt right that there will be folks out there explaining how Charlie Hebdo brought this on themselves. Horse hockey. No one has the right to burn down a building because its occupants wrote something they don't like about them, unless they're burning down their own building. Even then, they'd better have a permit.

As I explained earlier, this numskull has the right to burn a Koran, just as I have the right to burn a Bible if I want, and this moron can burn a copy of The God Delusion if his reading skills are up to finding it. We all get to make fun of each others' beliefs, too. That's part of the price of freedom - seeing something you love or value mocked or ridiculed.

I'm not sure of the value of mocking someone's religion, although I'm perfectly happy to point out the parts of it I think are silly or senseless. I am absolutely sure, though, that anyone who hurts others or destroys their property because he is offended by what they say is utterly wrong.

Charlie Hebdo had the right to publish those cartoons without being threatened or assaulted. Anyone who lives in a free society who doesn't think that's true has no idea what freedom is.

And People Wonder Why I Don't Do Social Media

Caption: Believe it or not, my furry mug is now on Twitter.

There's a reason I don't do social media, and it mostly boils down to that it's just another way of reminding me what creepy little shits some people can be. As JT Eberhard reports:

Kenny Flagg, a leader with the Freethinkers of The University of North Dakota put this image on the r/atheism subreddit after 1am this morning. Overnight we get a gaggle of international traffic.

This morning it hits the front page of reddit and we start getting domestic traffic. Also, Christians start hammering it with downvotes.

Matching Offer For The SSA

This is creepy and stupid on levels I don't want to explore. Go to the linked article if you want to know more, and/or do something.

How did I learn about this? Via Twitter, of course.

By the way, I'm registered with Twitter now as Cujo359. Mostly, what I do is announce new articles on it, so no one is following. It's just another way for the world to ignore what I have to say, which seems to suit the world just fine, and doesn't bother me as much as it perhaps ought to.

Did Rapture Happen To You?

Anyone see a Rapture on Saturday? I sure didn't. There were these guys:

Caption: Roger Clyne And The Peacemakers in concert - Neumos, Seattle, WA, May 21, 2011.

Image credit: Cujo359

They made some jokes about the world coming to an end, but that didn't happen, either. And they didn't get sent to Hell or anything.

Go figure.

Unless the Rapture involves standing in a bar listening to country rock, then it didn't happen anywhere near me. Guess maybe someone was wrong about all that, huh?

UPDATE: If you want some more about how the concert was, Dana Hunter has some more pictures of the concert, with a promise of more later.

Did Anything Happen?

Did the Rapture happen today? Some nut said it would. Some other nut said it wouldn't. The worst part about it is that it might have happened and I just hadn't noticed, being that the people who disappear would, for the most part, be people I do my best to avoid noticing anyway. It's really tough to tell if something happens when you're not sure what is supposed to happen, and you're not sure you care anyway.

It's not the end of the world, after all. That's supposed to happen in October. I figure I'll notice if that happens. I scheduled this article to appear at 5PM Pacific Time, so I figure if it were going to happen by now it would have. Of course, if the world actually did end today, this article would have appeared and I wouldn't be around to read it.

So, if the Rapture happened, please drop a word in the comments. Assuming we're all still here, of course.

Otherwise, have a nice Saturday.

Quote Of The Day

P.Z. Myers for his properly skeptical view of this:

The Buffalo Beast has an interview with sadly delusional Harold Camping, the senile old man who is predicting the end of the world on the 21st. I say "Pshht!" and "Humbug!" — it's no big deal to get an interview with that loony attention hog on the 19th; I will be impressed with the fellow who gets the first interview on the 22nd.

Camping Meets The Beast

[link from original]

I'd be impressed, too, partly because it will probably take a lot of persistence.

It's perhaps emblematic of how our mainstream news has degenerated into the circus of competing scare stories and superstitious nonsense that it is today that we have even heard of Harold Camping. Richard Dawkins, a British scientist and former professor, asked the Washington Post recently why it would even bother covering such foolishness:

Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon? I suppose the answer must be that, unlike the average loon, this one has managed to raise enough money to launch a radio station and pay for billboards.

Science explains the end Of The World

I think Dawkins' supposition is at least part of the explanation, but that's hardly the end of it. They also seem to be more interested in covering this sort of thing than they are interested in doing the kind of reporting we need them to do - actually investigating things, and then telling their readers what they find. This stuff is easy - just write down what the crazy guy says, or write down what's on his billboards, and print it.

It's pretty much how they cover politics, come to think of it.

I Get E-mail

Image credit: See NOTE 1

I received this bit of silliness in e-mail the other day:

From: Weston Rogers
To: undisclosed-recipients@null, null@null
Subject: God loves you.
Date: May 7, 2011 2:45 AM

Hello,
A very important message for you.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only SON. So that anyone that believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
John 3:16

For more details about how to find salvation in God, kindly reply.
God bless.

Erickson

Since I wrote about this idea awhile back, it amazes me that anyone would think that I'd be persuaded by it to write to someone who believed such nonsense. At least, I would be amazed by such a presumption if this e-mail wasn't so obviously part of a giant spam e-mail. The entity that supposedly created the universe and all the things in it couldn't figure out how to save the humans from wickedness, etc., except by sending its son here to be murdered by sadists?

Think about that one for a moment. The intelligence that parted the Red Sea and created an astonishingly specific plague to help Moses and Co. escape from Egypt couldn't just whip up something that would make us better? Couldn't have made the world a less Darwinian place so we all could be nicer to each other without having to compete for resources? He had to send someone here to explain it all to us, and then be murdered in a horrible manner so that we'd take what he said seriously, or something like that.

Oh, no, we had to choose freely so that we could all keep him company up there in wherever. Otherwise, we wouldn't be worthy, or some such.

Of course, if he didn't send his kids out to be murdered by sociopaths, he might not be so lonely.

Are you buying any of that idea, Jessie?

Yeah, me neither.

Any adult who believes something this crazy isn't likely to explain anything to me. I love the optimism in this quote from P.Z. Myers the other day, trying to explain how pointing out that taking some religious beliefs literally is obviously foolish can be a good thing:

At the very least, I hope that a few of them will realize, even if they don't change their mind about the god nonsense, that quoting the Bible at me has no effect, and maybe some years down the road I won't be hearing as many idiots telling me "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'" as if they've made a profound point.

We aren't angry, we're effective, which is even scarier

Good luck with that.


NOTE 1 These screenshots of the Mr. Deity episode "The Really Big Favor" were taken by Cujo359. Mr. Deity is a copyrighted work of Brian Keith Dalton and Lazy Eye Pictures, who are in no way responsible for this article, nor did they approve this article. It's funny. Check it out.

I Have To Do What?

There was a time when I could keep track of when Easter happens, but that was when I was using an ephemeris program regularly. These days, it's hard to remember when the first full moon after the first day of spring happens.

It seems like every year I write something on Easter, just to counteract all the religious nonsense. Thanks to not remembering when it occurred this year, and thanks to having other things to do, I just didn't have the time this year. Thankfully, there's a rich treasure trove of thoughts on this day from people whose view of things is similar to mine. Here's an old Mr. Deity episode on the subject:




I love Jessie's expression as Mr. Deity is explaining things to him. The guy can really play being out of his depth, which anyone with any sense would be in that conversation.

Happy Zombie Jesus Day, or happy first Sunday after the first full moon of spring, whichever applies.