New art contest: Celestial soul portraits

My sister-in-law Erin has linked me to what must be the most fabulous thing to ever grace the internet: Celestial Soul Portraits! An artist will do a “magical” portrait of you by taking “normal” photos that represent “the real you,” getting “your unique essence,” and “transforming” it into a Celestial Soul Portrait (his use of quotes, not mine). …For a small price of $150. But don’t let that bother you, look how fabulous they are!

and
I’m dying. They’re so horrible they’re awesome. It’s like Lisa Frank got high on shrooms and discovered Photoshop. I love it.

Your challenge: Make me your own Celestial Soul Portrait! Do a self portrait, do one of a celebrity, do one of me – I don’t care. The most creative/lol-tastic/well-done one will win a doodle from me.

The only rule is that you should link to both the before and after photo for the full effect. Oh, and from what I’ve seen so far, I think “your unique essence” has to somehow include rainbows. Use caution when “transforming” flamboyant gays – their portraits may result in blindness and/or diabetes.

This is post 23 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Results from my modern art contest

A little while ago I challenged you guys to write the best summary you could of the painting I did at age 2 that would make it worthy of an art museum.Here are my favorites!

Most creative interpretation: Chabneruk

“Genius rarely shows itself in a pure, elementary form. But the early work of Jennifer McCreight demonstrate the instinctive, pure emotion of an artist yet unaffected by trivialities like form or training. Her famous ‘watercolor hanging in my bathroom that I did at age 3’ – the title underlining the naive importance of the work – has fascinated generations of young atheists-to-be, symbolizing the struggle to overcome ancient systems of belief. The central piece, washy in its definition, is mostly though to represent the respective deity. The red center symbolizes the conflicts every religion brings with itself, gradually weakening towards the green rim – a sign of the positive possibilities religion might bring. This contrast of a strong, violent center towards the soothing outher ring has also been a topic in Dan Brown’s new bestseller “Watercolour”, where protagonist Robert Langdon deciphers McCreights secret code. The points that move towards the edge of the painting represent the people that left their religion and their way to freedom – leaving the frame of the painting. McCreights work is currently exhibited in the Center of Modern Atheistic Art in New Town.”

Most lol-worthy: Annie

A consideration of Jen McCreight’s watercolor, “I named my cervix Rob Bior.” McCreight’s early work denounces toddler conventionality by breaking the color spectrum at the third level. The metamorphic deprecation of “Roy G. Biv” to “Rob Bior” boldly illustrates this artist’s youthful abandonment of the unwritten “Preschool Principle”. McCreight’s obsession with her own cervix haunted her work well into her preteens. Other examples of this fixation include “My cervix is like a camera lens”, a bold multi media exhibit, and “My cervix hates you!!!!”, which is an exemplary example of the modern use of charcoal on dry dog food. The original of this replica is housed in the lavatory of the McCreight family estate.

Best inspiration for a new piece of art: Matt

Here we have a watercolor ripe with political satire from Jennifer McCreight in her typical avant garde Post-Toddlerist style. As one can plainly see, the picture conveys the anger the artist feels from her frustrations with potty training and being denied by her mother the fundamental right to eat dirt. Bold in her defiance of typical artistic norms, she uses amorphous concave shapes as a method to display her imagery breaking with strict adherence to geometric and mathematical principles popularized by M.C. Escher. One may be familiar with Jennifer’s more recent artwork such as her recreation of Georges Seurat’s, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte” by means of vajazzling Martha Stewart.

And the winner is… Stephen!

The “painting” “entitled” “the watercolor hanging in my bathroom that I did at age 3” stands in purported postironic metacontext as a subliminal representation of Neo-Foucauldian sexuality contrasted with the hegemony of the religiopatriarchal discourses that typify the extradominant, self-perpetuatory narrative of spiritual immortality. Introspective re(cap)itualtion of the painting’s historiography demands that we make a choice: either accept the privilege of a Pre-Raphaelite objectification of the biological as “G/god-deposed” interrelative to the broader Leftist mythological discourse, or reject hypertrivial assertions of hierarchical dominance /en rejoivivant/, which typifies and creates a counterpublic expression of modern /Dasein/, as counterrevealed in analysis by Heidegger. Of course we must not and cannot unprejudicially disregard the Derridian supplementarity called by the work within it’s own subtextual, self-referentiality. The drawing (re)presents the “cell” as deemed by imperialist Western “biological” standards and recuses itself of those standards by both reifying itself as its own creation, but by suggesting its status as part of a larger social organism, recreating and allegorizing the struggle of the global proletariat against multicultural capitalism, contra Lacan Overall the work succeeds in drawing together and unifying diverse /narratif(ve)s dehors l’hors-texte/ and challenges our assumptions about the state of our privileged day-to-day lives.

Congratulations, Stephen! You’ve won a doodle from me. Comment here with your request.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

This is post 22 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Dealing with death

From formspring.me: How do you personally come to terms with “having to close the book before it reaches the climax”?

For anyone who’s confused, that’s a line I use in a post earlier today for describing death.

And to be honest, I don’t have a very satisfying answer. I just kind of… don’t think about it.

That doesn’t seem like a good method, but it’s the best one I have. Obsessing over death can be paralyzing, and I used to fret about it way too much when I was younger. But one of my mantra’s in life is “Don’t worry about anything that may happen that you have absolutely no control over,” and I’ve learned to apply that to the issue of death as well.

Since I’ve done that, I’ve been significantly happier. It just does not help to stress about the inevitable. I will die. You will die. We can take actions to increase the probability of that happening when we’re much older, but we can’t achieve immortality (at least not yet). Wasting the precious time we do have on our planet worrying about the inevitable seems like a shame to me.

People often give atheists a hard time, saying that our outlook on life is bleak because we think this way. They say even if we enjoy life and aren’t all committing mass suicide, the lack of an afterlife is just too dreary for them to ever be an atheist. There may be many good arguments against religion, but that comfort alone is enough for them to believe.

To an extent, I think they’re right. Certain ideas about the afterlife are very heartwarming. Like I said before, I’d much prefer reincarnation over ceasing to exist. Even heaven would be nice. That’s an area I think atheists really need to work on if we’re to deal with our growing numbers, and keep them growing. We need psychologists, philosophers, poets, artists – whoever – to come up with equally comforting but true messages about atheism.

But to be honest, I was much more depressed, worried, and stressed about death when I was an agnostic and deist. Basing my philosophy on unknowns just led to constant pondering – no, obsessing about death. I’m not saying all agnostics and deists are this way, but it just did not work for me. “Nothing happens when you die” was a much more comforting message to me than “You have no idea what happens when you die, so constantly freak out about which outcome is actually right.”

Thinking about death still makes me a bit melancholy. I’ve been lucky to not lose anyone extremely close to me yet, and I do worry about how I’ll handle it when it happens. The Flaming Lips have a line that goes, “Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?” It still gets to me whenever I hear that song because, well, it’s not exactly a cheery thought. But then I think of some of the religious people (granted, a minority) who are actually happy when people die. Who rejoice when their love ones pass away because they think they’re actually in a better place. Who can’t wait for death themselves. I rather know the truth and appreciate the true loss and sadness of a friend dying. To deny that, to me, is more terrifying than death.

This is post 21 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Just in case you haven’t rage punched your screen yet today

…here you go. Transcript:

“When I decided to homeschool my six year old son, I told him we were going to do “Dinosaur Week”. Which turned into “Dinosaur Month”… at the least! We watched “Walking With Dinosaurs” and a lot of other documentaries. He’s a pretty smart kid, too, so even he ended up saying “Ok. Scientists say that God isn’t real. They say earth is a kajillion years old. They say that people and dinosaurs weren’t alive at the same time and that a lot of dinosaurs could have died from a big flood, but that The Flood didn’t happen. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!”. He gets really upset about people not believing in God – as in he doesn’t want them to go to hell and he can’t believe people can ignore God all around us. Every time we watch one of those dinosaur things, he gives a big, overly-dramatic sigh whenever they start talking about “millions of years” or evolution.

One that really cracked him up was where they theorize about reptiles evolving into humanoid creatures. Good grief! And they teach most of this stuff as FACT in schools!!!! I can’t believe it. Neither can a six year old. So WHY is it so accepted?!!?

I teach him what makes SENSE. NOT what science textbooks say. I also teach my kids to question what they are taught – especially what they learn in school. It’s really not fun at all having a bunch of junior scientists in the house when 99% of science seems to be atheistic.”

*brain explodes*

Yes, because if something doesn’t make sense to a 6 year old, it’s obviously wrong. That’s also how we’ve disproved gravity and economic policy and algebra. Ironclad logic.

…I …I’m not even going to bother refuting everything Random Internet Creationist Parent has to say. It’s really not going to accomplish anything other than make me weep for humanity. Seriously, it kills me that little kids are being brainwashed like this. Is he one day going to wise up, and then have to deal with the crushing social stigma of leaving your family’s religion? Will he become trapped in this mindless acceptance of unthinking religious dogma and never have the skills to do anything more than flip burgers? Or even more terrifying, will he go on to be your child’s biology teacher?

Auuugghhabbbbllllhhh. Should have saved this post for night so I could relabel it as a scary ghost story.

And yes, it was painful for me to type those periods outside of the quotes.

This is post 20 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Welcome to Atheistopia!

Loving County, Texas is the only county in the US that does not have a single religious group:…What? That’s because the whole county only has a population of 67? Oh, well then. They have plenty of space if we all move there, then! Just think, a place for all the ostracized atheists in the US. Need to run away from fanatically religious parents? Sick of being the town atheist? Have I got the place for you!…What? It looks like this? Oh, well then… It looks so, uh, quaint. The kind of place you’ll learn to love, especially if hordes of atheists take it over. I mean, just imagine how awesome it would be to never have to worry about accidentally offending religious people, or creationism being taught in schools, or religious laws being passed. If we bought enough land we could take over the local government!

…What? Libertarians already tried to do that and failed? Oh, well then… …poop.

Libertarians, always dashing my dreams.

(Via r/atheism)

This is post 19 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Creationist hijacking lessons in Queensland, Australia

On one hand, it’s nice knowing the US isn’t alone in its appalling understanding of evolution. On the under hand… WTF, Australia:

Fundamentalist Christians are hijacking Religious Instruction (RI) classes in Queensland despite education experts saying Creationism and attempts to convert children to Christianity have no place in state schools.

Students have been told Noah collected dinosaur eggs to bring on the Ark, and Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because they were under a protective spell.

Critics are calling for the RI program to be scrapped after claims emerged Christian lay people are feeding children misinformation.

It’s bad enough children are being fed religious garbage that will only muddle their real scientific education. But when parents opt to have their children removed from this program (which they have the right to do), the children are often ostracized and discriminated against. Here’s just one unfortunate example:

A parent of a Year 5 student on the Sunshine Coast said his daughter was ostracised to the library after arguing with her scripture teacher about DNA.

“The scripture teacher told the class that all people were descended from Adam and Eve,” he said.

“My daughter rightly pointed out, as I had been teaching her about DNA and science, that ‘wouldn’t they all be inbred’?

“But the teacher replied that DNA wasn’t invented then.”

After the parent complained, the girl spent the rest of the year’s classes in the library.

Removed for being too bright and inquisitive. If that doesn’t show the true nature of creationism, I don’t know what does.

I do like photo and caption the article uses, though:“The only time man has walked with dinosaurs – in the Jurassic Park films.”

Journalism Win.

This is post 18 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

“Easy A” is not destroying the atheist symbol

I like the blog Atheist Revolution, but I think Vjack may have missed the boat this time:

Look at the trailer for the upcoming film, “Easy A” and imagine what this could do to the meaning of a favorite atheist symbol. If this ends up being a hit, people will likely mistake our symbol some sort of odd promotion of the film. Admittedly, almost nobody outside the atheist community seems to recognize this symbol, but now they might assume we are die hard fans of this flick.

Here’s the trailer for “Easy A”:

Vjack makes it clear that he knows the scarlet A stood for adulterer long before atheists chose to use it as our symbol… so then what’s the problem? We co opted it because it was a symbol of religious persecution. If this movie helps publicize that, then good for it! The general public is way more accepting of sexual promiscuity than atheism anyway – it doesn’t exactly hurt our cause to be associated with it. Hell, we already are.

From the trailer alone, I’m actually kind of excited about this movie. Taking a dig at judgemental religious people? A strong willed female standing up for sexual women at her own risk? And doing that because it’s the right thing to do, not just for personal gain? I’m having a geekgasm over the possibility of feminist teen movie!

This is post 17 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Want more skeptical atheist women? Defend us

People in the skeptical and atheist movements often ask, “Where are all the women?” We’re here, but we’re still a minority. The next question someone will ask is, “How can we get more women to feel welcome?” Greta Christina hit the nail on the head during her talk at the Secular Student Alliance conference:

Defend us.

I don’t mean you have to act like our knight in shining armor, swooping in to save us frail women when someone says something particularly nasty. Implying that we can’t defend ourselves is belittling. But joining us in calling shenanigans on sexism helps us feel welcome.

For example, Greta commented on why GLBT people felt so comfortable in the atheist community. Whenever she would read something homophobic in a forum or blog comments, a swarm of straight allies would descend to rip that idiotic argument to shreds.

When you’re in the minority, it helps to know that even the majority has your back. For one, it gets tiring being the only one defending a certain topic – and when you’re already in the minority, you can devote a considerable amount of time and effort to its defense. For once Greta didn’t have to lift a finger, and that felt good. But more importantly, it lets you know that you have allies. It’s a lot easier to feel comfortable in a community when you know others got your back.

Life isn’t quite as pleasant when you go around assuming all men are misogynistic pricks. And the vast majority of feminists do not believe that, despite our man-hating stereotype. But that stereotype is so persistent because there are women who are on their guard – I’m sure we’ve all met at least one by now. But when you think of it, it makes sense. When all women see are either misogynistic men or silent men, it’s easy to incorrectly lump the silent ones with the misogynists.

The same thing happens with Christians. Christians who are homophobic, misogynistic, and downright nasty are in the minority. But when pro-gay, feminist, friendly Christians are silent, we wrongly assume that the silent ones are the same as the unsavory ones. It means a lot to see a Christian group actively defending gay rights because it makes gay rights seem less like a secretive minority agenda.

And the same holds for women. The more men rip apart sexist arguments without needing prompting, the more comfortable women will feel. I love it when a sexist asshole comments here and is absolutely obliterated by my blog readers – it makes me feel safe in my community.

Now, I don’t mean you should blindly defend everything any woman ever says. Women can be wrong too, and yes, even women can say sexist things sometimes. But I do recommend counting to ten before calling out a woman as saying something sexist. I’ve seen a lot of comments here and elsewhere who think they’re calling out sexism, but are actually pretty damn sexist. If you feel like you need to brush up your knowledge on sexism, I’d recommend the Feminism 101 FAQ.

I think PZ is an excellent example of an ally. For example, take the end of his post on the Girls Gone Wild “implicit consent” debacle (emphasis mine):

As you might guess, skeptical women are clear that this was a violation, and they can reasonably feel threatened by such a decision, but even worse — they can feel threatened by fellow skeptics and rationalists who react inappropriately to this case. I was left feeling rather queasy about the discussion on the JREF forums. A good number of people did respond appropriately, deploring the decision, but quite a few others react by either making jokes about breasts (way to make women welcome, guys), or by legalistic analyses that justify it in various ways, which all boil down to the “she was asking for it” defense, with a bit of the “she was too greedy to ask for so much compensation” argument.

Look. It’s simple. Violations of personal liberty are wrong. There is no reasonable excuse to justify pulling someone else’s clothing off in public, against their will. There is no reasonable excuse for profiting off such actions. Don’t even try to defend it, accept it and move on. Don’t make jokes about the inherent humor in assaulting women. Don’t make it easier for women to be made uncomfortable in the presence of men.

[…]There has been a lot of discussion of “dicks” in the skeptical community lately, where “dicks” are people who are rude and brash. I think we’ve been using the wrong definition. If you’re someone who does any of the above, or who thinks with a pretense of calm rationality that we can justify what happened to that woman, then you are a DICK with capital D-I-C-K.

So, men, if you want more women in the skeptical and atheist movement? Call out the dicks.

This is post 15 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Apparently dancing = rip my clothes off!

I have no idea how this story eluded me for so long, since it’s the type of thing I generally get ten million emails about. A woman is suing Girls Gone Wild for using footage of her shirt being pulled off against her will in one of their videos…and lost the case:

But Patrick O’Brien, the jury foreman, told a reporter later that an 11-member majority decided that Doe had in effect consented by being in the bar and dancing for the photographer. In a trial such as this one, agreement by nine of 12 jurors is enough for a verdict.

“Through her actions, she gave implied consent,” O’Brien said. “She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing.”

Told of that reasoning, the tearful woman said, “I was having fun until my top was pulled off. And now this thing is out there for the world to see forever.”

[…] Stephen Evans of St. Louis, her lawyer, argued Thursday that Doe never gave consent — and even could be heard in original footage saying “no” when asked to show her breasts shortly before another woman suddenly pulled Doe’s top down. Evans said the company usually gets women to sign consent forms or give verbal consent with cameras rolling.

Yes, “she was totally asking for it” was successfully used as an excuse in a court of law. What. The. Hell. Since when has dancing been consent to rip clothes off a woman? While she’s saying “no”?! It doesn’t matter how flirty she was being or how sexy she was dressed – that is not consent for what GGW has done.

This is the same bullshit argument people use to defend rape, and now a court has actually accepted it. For the sake of women across the country, I hope they try to overturn this ruling. The last thing we need is people getting off for sexual assault or rape because the woman was showing cleavage at the time of the crime.

This is post 14 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.