This is a promotional video for CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. When I meet any Australian scientist in the future, I will be expecting them to break into song.
The town of Lockland, Ohio is another of those places that worships a graven idol, an ugly stone block with the ridiculous 10 commandments on it . They never read it, though, or they’d notice that Commandment #2 says they shouldn’t worship graven idols…and actually, if they read them at all, they’d know that the only two that even come close to real laws in our nation are the ones that say don’t kill and don’t steal. The rest? Dross and superstition.
The town is being sued to have the nonsense removed, and of course the newspaper has to run a poll. Do you think that if we run this up to a good strong majority for removal that the city will send out a crew to dynamite the monstrosity?
Should Lockland be forced to remove the 10 Commandments from its town hall?
Yes 25.48%
No 74.52%
It’s not that funny. Anyway, here is this utterly hideous ‘infographic’ (‘infographic’ is the term they use when they torture information with a useless pile of graphic clutter) which tries to illustrate the changes in the numbers and percentages of various religious beliefs with a photo of a group of representatives of each faith in a bar, with a graph superimposed on each. The bar photo is busy, distracting, and adds nothing but visual noise to the data. However, one thing stands out.
The members of the different faiths are sitting around on bar stools. Guess who represents the godless? A hot tattooed chick…and she’s the bartender.
I wonder if the photographer reads Jesus & Mo?
Be warned, this tribute is a song in Satan’s genre, that loud rock music.
Feel like watching a little TV tonight? PBS is showing a new Nova tonight, Darwin’s Darkest Hour, which looks to be about his worries about publishing his theory.
Ouch. What a painful piece of right-wing kitsch.
I had no idea that Jesus personally delivered the Constitution, or that it was a religious document.
If you go to the site hosting this…thing, you can mouse around and it will spell out the symbology behind all those figures. I rather like the professor; he’s the one on the far right, near the shadowy figure, Satan.
He tightly holds his “Origin of Species” book by Charles Darwin. This represents the liberal lefts control of our educational system. His smug expression describes the attitude of many of the educational elite. There is no room for God in education. There is contempt for any other viewpoints. Humanism dominates the educational system of America and I believe that is wrong. Notice that he is the only one sitting on the top step. He tries to place himself on an equal footing with God, but he is still nothing next to the intelligence of the Creator.
There’s that smug thing again. It’s hard not to be smug when you see this kind of ham-handed kitsch, you know.
Well, actually, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak won the prize for discovering telomeres and telomerase, a strange and clumsy arrangement that we have evolved to cope with the fact that our enzymes make awkward fencepost errors when they hit the ends of our chromosomes. They’re definitely important, though — as they press release mentions, these are critical functions in stem cells, cancer, and ageing.
Would you believe the creationists are already sneering at it? Intelligent design creationism really is an anti-science movement.
I get thrown the miracle of the shroud of Turin on a regular basis — just last week someone confronted me with it, basically saying “A-ha! Jesus existed because there’s an old scrap of cloth with a face on it!” It doesn’t matter that I point out that it’s been dated to the 13th century, and was nothing more than a profit-making ‘relic’ for churches that would also hawk Jesus’s foreskin and John the Baptist’s pinky bone. They’d usually retort that it was not humanly possible to make the shroud, so it had to be a religious miracle.
Now I’ve got more ammo. The Shroud of Turin has been recreated, using simple medieval technologies. No magic, just acidic pigments.
I know, it won’t stop the kooks, but it’s still useful to know. Next up, we need more evidence against the patently goofy Miracle of Luciano, which is the other ‘proof’ of god that gets flung around a lot.
There is an utterly ludicrous evangelical ‘course’ which has been advertising in England by slapping big ol’ polls on the wall. Like this one:
As is, those boxes are blank…but man, they’re just begging to be filled in, and a lot of people can’t resist walking up to them and marking the right answer. Unfortunately, the transit police are then arresting them.
There’s a metaphor there. Looking at this Alpha Course, what I see is a narrow evangelical game that pretends to be an open arena for skeptical inquiry, but is actually nothing of the kind. Their ads are full of questions that by their very nature reveal that they expect certain kinds of answers, answers that only verify the dogma of Christianity. Look what they go on about:
Who is Jesus?
Why did Jesus die?
How can we have faith?
Why and how do I pray?
Why and how should I read the Bible?
How does God guide us?
How can I resist evil?
Why & how should we tell others?
Does God heal today?
What about the Church?
Who is the Holy Spirit?
What does the Holy Spirit do?
How can I be filled with the Holy Spirit?
How can I make the most of the rest of my life?
But it seems to me that if your answer to the basic question of whether there is a god is “no”, it’s silly to go on to make assumptions about the divinity of Jesus, or babble about prayer, or talk about mysterious magical entities like the Holy Spirit.
You know what they’re doing. Answer any question with reason, or an expectation of evidence, anything but blind affirmation, and they will lock you up. It’s how religion works.
I’m supposed to remind you down-under people that the 2010 Global Atheist Convention, The Rise of Atheism, is taking place on 12-14 March in Melbourne. You have to sign up soon or you won’t be in the uprising, and you’ll find yourself trampled beneath the iron treads of our all-conquering robot army. Register now! The High Priest commands it!
You will also notice that, in the list of presenters — Richard Dawkins, Catherine Deveny, Phillip Adams, Taslima Nasrin, Peter Singer, PZ Myers, Dan Barker, Stuart Bechman, Sue-Ann Post, Kylie Sturgess, John Perkins, Tamas Pataki, Max Wallace, Russell Blackford, Ian Robinson, AC Grayling, Robyn Williams, Jamie Kilstein and Simon Taylor — Bill Maher is noticeably absent! And there is much rejoicing.
Oh, and non-Aussies are also welcome to attend. It’s probably recommended, even, since otherwise you’ll miss the Rise of Atheism and will have to take a subsidiary role as minions and/or lackeys.
(By the way, I’m getting a lot of requests to stop by this place and that place in Australia, and everyone is offering me beer if I show up. I have to figure out my schedule, but I do plan to do some jitterbugging about the country, since I can’t very well go all that way and miss out on a little tourism! I’ll probably have to demur on many of the beer offers, however, since the quantity suggested will be enough to fix my soft tissues, making me only suitable for touring the country as a pickled exhibit in a freak show.)
