I happen to be male. I found myself unable to read the following story without feeling an urge to double over and cup my crotch, which was really awkward when sitting in a public coffee shop. So stop here if you are prone to sympathetic pains.
A man in British Columbia decided that he and his four year old son needed to be circumcised.
Already, half my readership has decided to flee to less cringe-inducing websites. That’s OK, just leave quietly, and close the door behind you.
There is a gigantic pile of plastic garbage accumulating in the Pacific. It’s concentrate by currents into one floating mass of bottle caps and detergent bottles and nylon debris, all slowly breaking apart into broken bits of polymer bobbing in the waves. It’s not good for marine life.
One of the most vivid demonstrations of the effects is this series of photos of dead sea birds on remote Midway Island — all completely undisturbed and photographed as found. Finding decayed bird corpses reduced to bones and feathers isn’t at all surprising, but some of these remains look more like the remains of some colorful cyborg, half biological and half industrial byproduct.
Recycle, and buy food that doesn’t use plastic packaging. That stuff is a poison pill for the environment.
And I’m not even a teenaged girl.
The authors of Freakonomics have a new book out, called Superfreakonomics. It doesn’t look promising: a couple of reports have it promoting climate change denialism, which is unfortunate. There are risks in having skepticism with the status quo (which is a good thing all around) when people lurch too far into simply finding excuses to reject everything.
The story Barbara Bradley Hagerty cobbled together from interviews with atheists is now up. It’s called “A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists“, and it’s very strange. Her emphasis is on the differences within the atheist community, and she makes it sound like atheism is about to blow apart into a collection of warring sects, just like religion, and offers scornful quotes about how the New Atheism offers nothing.
That’s not the message I gave when she interviewed me, but maybe she got it from the others. Or maybe it’s what she wanted to hear.
I told her a number of things. I said that atheism doesn’t have a central dogma or doctrine, so of course we have a variety of different views under the catch-all category of atheism; and that is a strength of our ideas, that we can freely argue among ourselves. I also explained that we need a variety of approaches to appeal to a wide range of people, and that my personal belief was that we should encourage a thousand flowers of godlessness to bloom, all different.
As to the charge that atheism is a purely negative philosophy, I also said that wasn’t so: that it’s a rejection of old dogmas and superstitions, sure, but that it’s built on the positive value of rationalism and materialism, and scientific thinking. We adopt moral values from humanistic ideas that are centered on stuff that actually exists, like other human beings, rather than imaginary commands from an invisible man in the sky.
She also asked about Paul Kurtz, who does sound rather bitter in the sound bites used in the interview. I think Kurtz is a smart guy, and he has made and is making significant contributions to atheism, and I told Hagerty that I respected him…but that he’s only part of the atheist mosaic, not the totality of it. And the same goes for people like Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris and Dennett.
None of that mattered, I guess. She had the goal of making a story that put atheism in a bad light, so she picked a version that made us look like schismatics on the verge of a Thirty Years War. If there’d been some kind of alien unity among us, she probably would have made a story about our intent to crown Richard Dawkins pope. Oh, well. She’s wrong.
This thread is useless. I must have another. And it must be sound…and young.
If only I can keep it going until…
(Hey, does anyone else think Colin Clive was drunk as a skunk when he did this scene? Listen to him slur “simulacrum”.)
Last month, we were told that the Rapture was coming on 21 September. It didn’t happen. You know that there must have been some little mistake in their calculations.
The prophets have double-checked their numbers and found the error, and fixed it. We now know without error the date of the end.
THE RAPTURE IS COMING ON 21 OCTOBER!!!!
Scurry and flee, everyone. They can’t be wrong everytime, can they? This might be it.
It’s a modern-day version of a long-running evil: children in Africa are being murdered in the name of God.
The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.
His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.
A month later, he died.
Inciting violence against “witches” is only part of the recipe for religious success — that’s the fear part — with the rest of it coming from greed.
Church signs sprout around every twist of the road snaking through the jungle between Uyo, the capital of the southern Akwa Ibom state where Nwanaokwo lay, and Eket, home to many more rejected “witch children.” Churches outnumber schools, clinics and banks put together. Many promise to solve parishioner’s material worries as well as spiritual ones — eight out of ten Nigerians struggle by on less than $2 a day.
“Poverty must catch fire,” insists the Born 2 Rule Crusade on one of Uyo’s main streets.
“Where little shots become big shots in a short time,” promises the Winner’s Chapel down the road.
“Pray your way to riches,” advises Embassy of Christ a few blocks away.
It’s hard for churches to carve out a congregation with so much competition. So some pastors establish their credentials by accusing children of witchcraft.
So here we have a desperately poor region where the people need help…and instead, they get parasites who make promises of prosperity and blame failure on witches. Religion is the obstacle here, it doesn’t help.
We can’t be too smug here in comfortable America, though. Look inside Sarah Palin’s church, and you see exactly the same formula of fear and greed at work. Her church even supported the work of a Kenyan witch-hunter!
This is a video by an apostate: an atheist who has left the flock and become a believer. I was all ready to point a gnarled bony finger at him and screech to my minions that he must be rent limb from limb, but then I made the mistake of listening further…and he actually makes a good case.
I’m thinking, though, that if I get sick this year and don’t recover, then I’ll be able to mock and laugh at him again. Briefly. From my deathbed.
