Literal pop

Do you remember the 80s, when MTV actually played music videos, and pop bands all had weird concept videos that didn’t seem to have much to do with the song, but were just productions to make you look at them? How about this: imagine if the lyrics of the song actually told the story portrayed in the video. You might get something like these renditions of Tears for Fears and A-ha. I laughed. Especially at “I’m gunna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench.” Pipe wrench fight!

Where will you be after you’re dead?

Jesse Bering has an interesting article on why many people have so much difficulty holding a realistic view of death — why they imagine immortal souls wafting off to heaven, and why they can’t imagine their consciousness ceasing to exist. He’s trying to argue that these kinds of beliefs are more than just the result of secondary indoctrination into a body of myth, but are actually a normal consequence of the nature of consciousness. We never personally experience the extinction of our consciousness, of course, except for the limited loss of sleep — and we always wake up from that (at least, until the last time), so we at least have personal evidence that would inductively imply immortality.

It’s also a set of beliefs that are remarkably pervasive. Our language and culture and habits of thought make the idea of survival after death continually crop up.

[Read more…]

Radio reminder

Don’t miss this one! Today, Atheists Talk radiowill feature the physicist Lawrence Krauss for the whole hour, talking about the Origins initiative.

Follow the link to get streaming audio from Air America, as long as you know a Minnesota zip code (like, say, 56267) and catch it in time — 9am Central.


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Creationists have a time machine!

That’s the only possible explanation for their curious anachronisms. The Institute for Creation Research has just claimed that Mendel published his paper on genetics in 1866 to refute Darwin’s theory of pangenesis (which, by the way, was published in 1868). Furthermore, Mendel’s paper was initially rejected for publication by editors who were in thrall to the dogma of pangenesis, which, as was mentioned, wouldn’t be published for two years.

Wait…that means just about everyone in the 19th century must have had time machines!

Whoa…this is better than crashing polls

Michele Bachmann is a great fundraiser…for Democrats. Since that creepy video of her calling everyone who isn’t a rightwingnut “anti-American” has spread all over, money has been pouring into the Elwyn Tinklenberg campaign. Check out Tinklenberg’s ActBlue page: he has received over $100,000 since yesterday. I opened the page a few hours ago and just checked again, and it had shot up about $20,000. Add a few pennies to the total, if you can!

Lady Hope was a piker

This is really weird. Dr Imad Hassan claims to have proven Darwinian theory from the Qur’an and the Bible. Only…his version of Darwinian theory is a bit eccentric.

Then we disclosed that the word ‘Adam’ is a simple Arabic term for ‘convertible’ or ‘adaptable’. It is a collective description by God in the scriptures for a species of lower creatures which became ‘adaptable’ for radical change after long evolutionary processes.

We followed the description of modifying the ‘Adams’ and arrived at the conclusion that there were many individuals, males and females, who were converted to intelligent ‘humans’ by direct detailed divine intervention. This is the missing link in Darwin ‘s theory!

The ‘Adams’ were then given an induction period in the divine custody, in a specific garden on the earth, a few miles away from the location of conversion which was the same location where the first ever living cell was created! In their induction period, the ‘Adams’ were allowed freedom except from approaching the forbidden tree, which is ‘Shajara’ in Arabic! As a result of their failure to keep the commands, some of the female ‘Adams’ got pregnant from ‘eating’ from the Shajara! The whole group was then expelled to take the role for which they were created as intelligent beings on the Earth.

You might think this is awfully unlikely, if you didn’t know that Darwin was inspired by Muslim philosophers, that he had access to a decrypted series of messages from the Qur’an, and in fact died a Muslim, something we noisy atheists don’t recognize.

In his new delusional short-sighted religion, Richard Dawkins has adopted the work of Charles Darwin as the prophetic message on which the new dogma – ‘There is no God’ – is based. Despite the apparent respect and appreciation of his work, no one could harm Darwin as much as those who unlawfully associate his name with their atheism. The idea of Charles Darwin of the ‘Evolution and the law of natural selection’ was an ‘evolution’ of ancient Islamic theories, not innovation! In his Creation and/ Or Evolution, T O Shanavas provided enough evidence that: attributing the concept of evolution to Darwin alone is a ‘gigantic rip off’! Over 800 years ago, Ibn Arabi proposed the idea that the monkey was the last animal and first human in the evolution ladder. It was Darwin ‘s grandfather who studied these ancient Islamic theories that inspired Chares to find the proof for that. Charles Darwin was so honest that he described only what he could proof, leaving the missing link very prominent in his incomplete evolutionary work. That missing link, to the dismay of Dawkins who misused the work of Darwin , is now confidently and astonishingly proved by the very God that Dawkins struggled to deny. The process of evolution is described in a series of coded messages in the Qur’an, the divine book that somebody like Dawkins would be too reluctant to challenge, as he can only challenge the man-made, outdated misconceptions attributed to God in the translated Bibles.

It’s crazy time all the time on that site…and I haven’t even gotten to the extraterrestrial origin of cows. But I can’t go on. It’s just too much.

Our local horror

If you think Sarah Palin is bad, try listening to
Michele Bachmann for seven minutes. This is her interview with Chris Matthews, in which she accuses swarms of people of being “Anti-American”.

One thing is amusing. Intermittently, Matthews tries to pin her down in her blanket screeds against liberals, and asks her to state specifically whether some Democrat is actually, literally anti-American. You can see her expression lock in place, her eyes stare blankly out, and you can imagine her tiny brain doing little shuddery spasms of confusion in the vast and roomy vault of her cranium…then <click> <reset> <reboot>, she glides right past the question and continues her imprecatory rant.

This is one of Minnesota’s representatives. Please, people in the 6th district, vote for Tinklenberg. It’s embarrassing to have this shrill munchkin in office here.