St. Valentine's Day

Well, I had a lovely evening last night for St. Valentine's Day, and I hope everyone else did too.

I used to be a real cynic about this day. I saw it as similar to Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day as being consumerist corporation led consumables orgies. But I've had a change of heart. Wouldn't it be great if the people could take this day back, and claim it for our own as a day of love. Not just between couples, but between friends, families and people in general. A day when everyone just loves everyone else. This may sound disgustingly saccharine, but the effect, I believe, would be huge. Love inspires more love, and nothing makes people happier than love. A bank holiday would be nice too, a day for us all to remind ourselves how much we love each other. Dedicated to love.


I'm feeling very loved up, and I hope everyone else is too.

The Bible is Not Good (work in progress)

This is a work in progress post, any comments and constructive criticisms are greatly appreciated as well as any ideas for things to include.

It is such a simple thing, but something that is not said enough; the Bible is not true. It is not internally consistent, it is not historically accurate, it is not scientifically accurate; it is not true.

It has often been said that one of the best cures for Christianity is actually reading the Bible. Many people find that they cannot reconcile the veneer Christianity has of being a good and kind religion with the god they worship. In that link alone god sanctions the extermination of a group of people, with his right hand man Moses doing the honours. They kill everyone, except the women, and so Moses gets angry;

"Have you saved all the women alive? Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves"

You may think, well that was Moses, god can't have approved. Well the "booty" that Moses took included 32,000 virgins and 16,000 "persons" and god got 32. He loved it. He commanded it. This "all loving god" ordered genocide.

But genocide is not all, not so hidden in the command to "keep alive" the virgins "for yourselves" is but one example of the sexism which is rife throughout the Bible. My personal opinion is that women who are devout believers can not have read the book properly, or are engaged in such a deeply embedded form of doublethink that professional help is probably required.

It starts with genesis, when an all knowing and all powerful god neglects to notice the possibility that the people he's created, who do not know right from wrong, will not know that it is wrong to eat from a certain tree. (Why this god had to create this tree at all is a complete mystery?) Eve is the first in a long line of scapegoats for gods mistakes. Not only this, but Eve was actually created for Adam. This is said in Genesis, and later is backed up in Corinthians; "1 Corinthians 8 For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. 9 Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man."

Women after Eve had things no better. In fact I would wager that the Bible is currently the only book in wide circulation that has specific guidelines for selling women (and people in general);

1 Now these are the laws which you are to put before them.
2 If you get a Hebrew servant for money, he is to be your servant for six years, and in the seventh year you are to let him go free without payment.
3 If he comes to you by himself, let him go away by himself: if he is married, let his wife go away with him.
4 If his master gives him a wife, and he gets sons or daughters by her, the wife and her children will be the property of the master, and the servant is to go away by himself.
5 But if the servant says clearly, My master and my wife and children are dear to me; I have no desire to be free:
6 Then his master is to take him to the gods of the house, and at the door, or at its framework, he is to make a hole in his ear with a sharp-pointed instrument; and he will be his servant for ever.
7 And if a man gives his daughter for a price to be a servant, she is not to go away free as the men-servants do.
8 If she is not pleasing to her master who has taken her for himself, let a payment be made for her so that she may go free; her master has no power to get a price for her and send her to a strange land, because he has been false to her.
9 And if he gives her to his son, he is to do everything for her as if she was his daughter.
10 And if he takes another woman, her food and clothing and her married rights are not to be less.
11 And if he does not do these three things for her, she has the right to go free without payment.
Exodus
Chapter 21

Not only does the Bible despise and subjugate women, but it is scared of them too;

18 And if a man has sex relations with a woman at the time when she is unwell, he has seen her fountain and she has let the fountain of her blood be uncovered, and the two of them are to be cut off from among their people.
Leviticus
Chapter 20

The whole of that chapter in fact makes for disturbing reading; why does this god care so much about private sexual acts between consenting adults? "Methinks thou doth protest too much".

The Bible also forbids women to teach; "1 Timothy 2: 11 Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. 12 I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent." and on top of that, "11 If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, 12 you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity." which is found in Deuteronomy 25.



As was mentioned previously, the Bible sanctions the selling of women, and even gives guidelines. On top of this, however, the Bible sanctions slavery in general throughout its pages, and even Jesus was not foresighted enough to predict the abolishment of the slave trade when he missed an opportunity to condemn slavery in favour of performing his magic tricks;

8:5 And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him,

8:6 And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.

8:7 And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him.

8:8 The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.

8:9 For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.

Not only does Jesus not condemn the slavery, but he then marvels at how obedient the slave is; "8:10 When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel."

However, the New Testament brought with it something far more terrifying than Jesus' acceptance of slavery. This is the fact that Jesus introduced possibly the single most wicked idea in history; that of eternal torment.

Finite crimes punished with infinite fire? Even the most depraved of child molesting priests must acknowledge that this is a grossly unfair deal, but then "god moves in mysterious ways".

The damage this idea must have done to the minds of sincere believers, but more distressingly, children, through the centuries is incalculable and in the 21st century, inexcusable.

It is actually all to easy to paint a completely disgusting picture of the Biblical god, but perhaps a similarly easy task is showing the Bible to be erroneous so in my next blog, that is what I shall do.

Christian Bus Pass Fascists

Yes it's a deliberately provocative title, but this was first brought to my attention here and I find it to be absolutely disgusting.

Essentially, the council for a Catholic school in west Yorkshire has decided that it will bus in pupils of Catholic for free, but any other pupils must pay. This is flagrant and appalling discrimination, but unfortunately, this is not a unique event.

The story for the first school can be watched here.

It just should not be possible for this kind of insanity to be tolerated whatsoever in 2008. There is another less obvious side to these stories; children being labelled with their parents' faith. This too is something which should not be tolerated by a thinking society.

Atheist Out Campaign

If anyone is actually reading this, they may have noticed the shiny red "A" to the sinistral side of the page. I have a fondness for this letter that is only natural, since it is my first initial, but in this instance, the letter stands for "Atheist".

It is the symbol for the "Out Campaign", which was started by Richard Dawkins and takes its inspiration from the gay-pride out movement. People from certain countries such as the UK may scoff at this, and see absolutely no need for such a campaign, but their good fortune has narrowed their experiences, and they just won't understand (I'm not pretending that I do) the courage it takes for a teenager in bible belt America to make vocal his or her viewpoint on the existence of any gods to family or peers.

The campaign is not there to force people "out" and "outing" people is discouraged, but merely to show people that they are not alone, that they are not "sinners" or immoral, but in fact according to statistics which measure such things far more likely to be decent people by the standards of drink, drugs, abortion, divorce and giving to charity (see Switzerland). It is a campaign of support, and if you too support the campaign and have a website, plonk that seemingly innocuous red A somewhere on it and send an email to the people at www.outcampaign.org to let them know.


Some people are genuinely afraid of hellfire because they don't believe having been indoctrinated and consequently psychologically abused as children, help them know there's no reason to be.

Creationist theme park planned in Britain

There was me thinking "those poor Americans having to put up with those stupid cdesign proponentists with too much money making moronic theme parks, at least there's nothing like that here".

Well there wasn't, but now there might be.

There are a couple of consolation points however, the first is that the trust involved has this to say;

'The church in this country is in crisis and many church leaders living in Australia, America and Canada have openly proclaimed that God has left the church in England,' the trust states on its website.

Which shows that just maybe we are winning this battle in the long run. It's clear from several angles that the religiously inclined are getting scared. The other point is that they've already been refused permission by one council to make there theme park in an old B&Q warehouse.

Also in the news today, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury has told American Anglican leaders to curb there pro-gay stances. However he's managed to piss off both the "liberals" by being too harsh, and the conservatives by not going far enough.

Dinesh D'quotemine

There are few people who I think it is fair to say this about, but Dinesh D'souza is one of those people whose absence would make the world a better place.

Just to give you a little bit of insight into the workings of this guy's mind, his book "The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11" places the blame for 9/11 in the hands of Britney Spears and Noam Chomskey, and those darned liberals who want irreligious and "anti-American" things like equal rights for homosexuals, and "sexual freedom for women and gays through birth control".

Well now you know just how much of a fruitcake he is, let me elucidate on from whence my particular ire springs. While his opinions are complete bullshit, they are his opinions, and he is entitled to them. But after a recent debate he had with Daniel Dennett in which he used the tactic of shouting loudly and mincing maniacally around the podium he declared on his blog that he had "won" and gave various quotes from the Richard Dawkins site as evidence of this.

Now, I don't need to do the work of exposing this thoroughly because a great guy with the online nickname of Happy Jihad already has.

Unfortunately this thorough demolition of Dinesh's deceitful tactics will probably never be read by the sheep who thinks Dinesh's squawking amounts to intellectual thought, but it is enough that it is out there and Dinesh can be seen for what he is.

Ad hominem this blog may have been, but I think it was warranted.

Tardigrades!

A Tardigrade (otherwise known as a little water bear) is perhaps one of the most incredible creatures I have ever learned about. These microscopic animals were first discovered in the 18th century by a German guy, who thought they looked a bit like bears, in miniature, with 8 legs.

But I bet he didn't realise just how cool his discovery was. These things are so unique in their biological make-up, that they constitute a phylum of their own! There are over a thousand recorded species of tardigrade, and there are probably a few near you right now, because they can be found pretty much literally anywhere on the planet. They have been found at the bottom of the oceans, at the top of the Himalayas, underneath 4 metres of ice and can even survive in a vacuum like space.

But that is not all! If a human is exposed to 2,000 rads of radiation, they will die, but these little beggars can survive being exposed to 570,000 rads! Holy cow man! They can survive at -272 degrees centigrade, which is one degree warmer than absolute zero, and the can survive at 151 degrees centigrade. They can survive being completely dehydrated for 10 years, and they can survive under 6,000 atmospheres of pressure. They can pretty much survive anything you chuck at them, except a microscope slide which will crush them.

For more information, a video, and pictures, check out http://www.tardigrades.com/

Yes this was poorly written, but who cares, tardigrades are cool.