This Martin Pribble fellow has gained a whole 1% on me in the Readers' Choice Awards – Favorite Agnostic / Atheist Blog of 2011. Now I’m only crushing him by 60 points, and this will not do. Go vote again (you can vote once a day). He’s getting cocky, and we simply can’t have that.
I am very pleased to see that the Army spells his name correctly…but I do wonder if his dog tags are accurate.
Also, he’s much too young to be commanding a 70-ton tank around. I remember when it was Hot Wheels.
The Imagine No Religion conference in Kamloops had darn well better be good (OK, it will be), because it’s scheduled for the very same day as the Women in Secularism conference — and every time I look at the speakers’ list, I want to go.
“It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another that belongs to the twenty-first century.”
Wafa Sultan
You are all aware that, while the speakers are all women, men are allowed and encouraged to attend and contribute, right? And that the topics are all relevant to every human being on the planet, not just the ones with vaginas? It’s just that women are in the forefront of the conflict with the patriarchal religions that have poisoned our cultures for centuries, and it’s about time they had a forum to tell their stories.
Sign up! I know we’re in the midst of an embarrassment of riches as far as godless conferences go, but this one is going to be exceptional.
Did you know that Greta Christina has a book, Why Are You Atheists So Angry?, available on the Kindle store? You should read it, it’s fabulous and ferocious.
If you don’t have a Kindle, you do realize there are free apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, PC, and Mac, right? If you’re reading this, you’re probably able to be absorbed into the Amazon borg.
I’m an atheist because there is nothing else I can be.
My parents are both British scientists. I was born in Africa because my father was doing postdoc work on, I believe, giraffe respiratory physiology (we have pictures of him standing on a ladder holding a mask over a giraffe’s nose) but spent my first seven years living in England. While I was aware of religion and churches because, well, in Oxford it is difficult to go thirty feet without banging into a church of some description, it never really occurred to me that the people who attended those churches did so because they believed in a god. I didn’t even truly understand that both my grandmothers were believers. Church to me meant Nativity scenes, ringing bells, those little palm-leaf crosses, the smell of brass polish and damp and lilies, cross-stitched kneelers, worn carvings of various saints, and (most fascinating of all) graveyards with all sorts of interesting headstones and tombs in them.
We moved to America when I was seven, and have lived here ever since. I’m thirty-one and I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that people, many of whom are otherwise quite sane and sensible and have advanced degrees, actually believe that a god exists–let alone that that god a) requires people to live up to an impossible standard, b) damns them to hell for not living up to this impossible standard, and then c) creates and murders an avatar of himself to “redeem” everyone from the artificial damnation he himself invented. I can understand the idea of wanting to shift responsibility for oneself and one’s decisions to a greater authority, but the Big Three Abrahamic god is such an insecure, reactionary, vicious, cruel, irrational, demanding, and untrustworthy entity that I fail to see why anyone would give (H)im the time of day.
My parents never told me that there was no god; they just never suggested to me that there was one, and therefore I grew up without the need to believe in one. Without, in fact, the ability to believe in one. Sometimes I think it’d be easier, in a country as overwhelmingly christian as the US, to be able to believe in their god to the point where I was no longer cross with the vast majority of the population for subscribing to such a bloody stupid concept. Proselytizers I’ve come across have said “you just have to have faith” that a god exists, but how? I can say “I believe in the Great God Om and His holy horns” or “I believe in Ahura-Mazda” or “I believe that the Republican Party is not a conclave of viciously misogynistic homophobes who hate the idea of anyone anywhere having a good time,” but I can’t actually follow through on any of those statements.
Most of the time I don’t discuss my atheism with people other than my close friends (or the internet) because it always comes down to the fact that yes, I do think religion is not only stupid but actively poisonous, that continuing to give tacit approval to this limited and illogical worldview hinders humanity’s development as an intelligent species, and that people who are clever and educated and literate enough to understand the scientific method damn well ought to discard fairytales and embrace reality. This is not a popular viewpoint and rarely leads to constructive discussion so much as “so you’re calling my (father, mother, doctor, academic advisor, etc) stupid for being a Christian/Jew/Muslim?”
I’m calling your authority figure intellectually dishonest. Which may on some levels be worse.
Elizabeth
United States
Read and weep. Answers in Genesis has a voluminous line of crap books, and a significant chunk of it consists of propaganda for kids. Joe Csonka reviews Dinosaurs of Eden, by Ken Ham, with scans of the contents.
You knew that, according to AiG mythology, dinosaurs lived with Adam and Eve, and were vegetarians, right?
There’s more at the link. There’s threat of more to come. Let the groaning commence.
I think I understand now why some less-than-appropriate speakers are appearing at the Reason Rally: those are the siesta breaks.
I owe this revelation to a church sign. Just turn your brain off for five minutes turn to your neighbors and start a conversation, just cool off and ignore the bozo on the screen.
Also as I’ve been learning on twitter and elsewhere on the blogosphere, this event is not one where atheists stand up and let their values shine, it’s one where we’re supposed to bow and scrape and show that we can be accommodating to senators and other assholes.
But what if I don’t want to get along with them? What if I want us to change the world?
When I was 7 years old, my 2nd grade teacher was giving a lesson about dinosaurs. Another student asked a seemingly sensible question at the time, why hadn’t the Tyrannosaurus Rex eaten all of the people. The teacher replied that dinosaurs and people didn’t live at the same time. This answer didn’t sit well with me and in a rare case of assertiveness, I muttered defiantly, “Yes, they did.” The teacher’s eyes went wide and her gaze snapped onto me, burning the image into my memory, and stated, “No. They. Did. NOT!”
I can only imagine that my teacher must have thought she had a creationist in her class. But in my young, malleable mind, I was calling forth reference materials such as “The Flintstones” and “Captain Caveman”. While her harsh admonishment may have temporarily put me off from classic schooling, it started something else in me. If I was to be so publicly scolded for my ignorance, I wanted to know why I was wrong. More than that, I wanted to know how to find the real answers.
That philosophy of curiosity stuck with me. When I tried to apply this in my catechism classes however, not only was I not given a good reason for many of the strange traditions and beliefs in the Catholic religion, but people became angry with me for honestly trying to figure them out. Their anger told me they didn’t know either. “Faith,” I was told tersely, was essential to understand, but never once given a reason for that either. I got the distinct impression that discovery was not a valued virtue in religion. So, it ceased to be important to me.
I am an atheist because the things I want to believe are only the ideas that have a satisfactory answer to the question I should have asked my 2nd grade teacher and have since asked repeatedly of those seeking to share the “truth” of their religion with me, “How do you know that to be true?”
Matthew Kiffmeyer
United States
This one doesn’t seem to be the product of a conspiracy of morons, though.
I think that’s my new favorite pseudo-scientific phrase. It’s part of a whole mind-numbing compendium of utter nonsense and woo — it claims that junk DNA plays a role in data storage and communication, that it contains “basic rules of grammar”, and that it responds to your words.
This means that they managed for example to modulate certain frequency patterns onto a laser ray and with it influenced the DNA frequency and thus the genetic information itself. Since the basic structure of DNA-alkaline pairs and of language (as explained earlier) are of the same structure, no DNA decoding is necessary.
One can simply use words and sentences of the human language! This, too, was experimentally proven! Living DNA substance (in living tissue, not in vitro) will always react to language-modulated laser rays and even to radio waves, if the proper frequencies are being used.
This finally and scientifically explains why affirmations, autogenous training, hypnosis and the like can have such strong effects on humans and their bodies. It is entirely normal and natural for our DNA to react to language.
Just think of all the mutant babies spawned by listening to Rush Limbaugh. But be prepared: we might be sucking in alien propaganda.
But the higher developed an individual’s consciousness is, the less need is there for any type of device! One can achieve these results by oneself, and science will finally stop to laugh at such ideas and will confirm and explain the results. And it doesn’t end there.?The Russian scientists also found out that our DNA can cause disturbing patterns in the vacuum, thus producing magnetized wormholes! Wormholes are the microscopic equivalents of the so-called Einstein-Rosen bridges in the vicinity of black holes (left by burned-out stars).? These are tunnel connections between entirely different areas in the universe through which information can be transmitted outside of space and time. The DNA attracts these bits of information and passes them on to our consciousness.
Stop to laugh, everyone! It’s expected!
Now here comes the “science”:
In nature, hyper communication has been successfully applied for millions of years. The organized flow of life in insect states proves this dramatically. Modern man knows it only on a much more subtle level as “intuition.” But we, too, can regain full use of it. An example from Nature: When a queen ant is spatially separated from her colony, building still continues fervently and according to plan. If the queen is killed, however, all work in the colony stops. No ant knows what to do. Apparently the queen sends the “building plans” also from far away via the group consciousness of her subjects. She can be as far away as she wants, as long as she is alive. In man hyper communication is most often encountered when one suddenly gains access to information that is outside one’s knowledge base. Such hyper communication is then experienced as inspiration or intuition. The Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini for instance dreamt one night that a devil sat at his bedside playing the violin. The next morning Tartini was able to note down the piece exactly from memory, he called it the Devil’s Trill Sonata.
I’m going to stop there. The rest is Indigo Children, collective consciousness, UFOs, anti-gravity, and how DNA is superconducting and transforms gravity into electricity. There’s only so much I can take.
