A Day in the Life

This was an excellent piece of writing.

Wow, what a life Richard Dawkins lives. He is perhaps my favorite person on earth presently.

Excerpts:

The payoff for bin Laden has been mayhem and chaos, costly delays and maddening inconvenience to millions of travellers, in every hour of every day, in every airport of every country (except some third world ones with the good sense to ignore the whole charade). Those useless plastic knives and forks were nothing but a signal to the home electorate: We're gonna kick some ass, and these plastic knives show it, you better believe it. And did some bearded loon once pack explosives into his shoes? Right then, we'll show those folks we mean business. We'll smoke 'em out and teach those terrists who rules this town, yessirree. From now on nobody – and ah mean nobody – boards a plane without first removing their shoes, whenever they board a plane anywhere – and ah mean anywhere – in God's own country.


Not that we here have anything to be proud of. In the Britain presided over by Bush's loyal friend and co-religionist, our security services were surfing the web when they spotted what looked to their fevered imaginations like a plot to make a 'binary' explosion on a plane by mixing two otherwise harmless liquids. For a hilarious explanation that this is, and always was, totally unrealistic (you need large quantities of ingredients and buckets and buckets of ice) see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/. Yet, as a direct consequence of what seems to have been an elementary misunderstanding of chemistry, we all have to dump even the tiniest bottles of liquid on our way through security.

Proving that the pope has never read the Bible

Visit www.godisimaginary.com and watch all the videos.

Gig Harbor Priest Molests Child

We're all aware of the epidemic of child molesting priests. The statistics are staggering:

US clerics accused of abuse from 1950-2002: 4,392.

Individuals making accusations: 10,667.
Victims' ages: 5.8% under 7; 16% ages 8-10; 50.9% ages 11-14; 27.3% ages 15-17.
Victims' gender: 81% male, 19% female
Duration of abuse: Among victims, 38.4% said all incidents occurred within one year; 21.8% said one to two years; 28%, two to four years; 11.8% longer.

Victims per priest: 55.7% with one victim; 26.9% with two or three; 13.9% with four to nine; 3.5% with 10 or more (these 149 priests caused 27% of allegations).
Abuse locations: 40.9% at priest's residence; 16.3% in church; 42.8% elsewhere.
Known cost to dioceses and religious orders: $572,507,094 (does not include the $85 million Boston settlement and other expenses after research was concluded).

(Hartford Courant, 2/27/04)

"It should be noted that 30% of all accusations were not investigated as they were deemed unsubstantiated or because the accused priest is dead.

In any case, these figures are widely suspected to be grossly underestimated."

I just watched the documentary "Deliver Us From Evil" about the devastation caused by one priest serial rapist over a lifetime of a family. It's really eye opening.

What prompted me to watch this award winning film was that a pastor from one of our local churches in Gig Harbor ( a virtually crimeless, older aged wealthy conservative community where I grew up) admitted to repeatedly raping his 7 year old relative. Of course, the church members were shocked. I'm not. This is rampant and it has touched every community, even though it is estimated that 80% of those abused never speak out. Sad thing is, statistically, over a given number of churches you see driving down the road, you can rest assured that some poor boy is getting shishkabobbed by someone and will probably live a life of internal devastation without telling anyone.

Finger Length Predicts SAT Performance

UPDATE:

I visited my father today and discovered that his ring and forefinger are the same length. My ring is almost 1/4" longer than my forefinger. My dad says he struggled with algebra, where it came relatively easy to me. He is great at Jeopardy tho.

We've known this for some time now. I remember posting the interview with the women having a sex change, who after being given massive doses of testosterone suddenly had a newfound understanding and interest in math and physics. Also, the preponderance of males in worldclass chess, engineering and science versus the preponderance of women in english and language classrooms is not a fluke.





Finger Length Predicts SAT Performance





"Kids with longer ring fingers compared to index fingers are likely to have higher math scores than literacy or verbal scores on the college entrance exam, while children with the reverse finger-length ratio are likely to have higher reading and writing, or verbal, scores versus math scores. "

Hitch vs. Hannity on Falwell

I just can't get enough of this! It's just so in your face. Here's the full clip. Hitchens says what millions of us wish we can say to these fake Christian assholes. And pay attention to Hitchens' last line which sounds garbled but was: "If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox".

Devil Ducky; Republican Talking Points

Make sure you don't have anything in your mouth when you watch this.

http://www.devilducky.com/media/61988/

At a loss...

I haven't known what to write about.

For the last couple of months, I haven't participated in any discussions or contributed online.

What is there to say?

Human beings haven't changed since the beginning of recorded history. I just viewed the horrific murder of a seventeen year old girl -- a frightened child by any standard -- who just wanted to return to her family. She wanted what any daughter wants, the safety of her family. Instead, she was ambushed and stoned to death by a thousand men... literally.

Her name was Doaa Khalil Aswad.

Her crime? Falling in love and converting to Islam.

Or so they thought. I just saw an update on CNN stating that Doaa had neither eloped nor converted to Islam. The lynching and murder of Doaa was entirely the result of religious and misogynistic ignorance. The report states that 4 men have been arrested and police are searching for another four.

To which I can only ask: That's all?

I can only hope that Aaron is 100% right, that when we are dead, we are dead.
The absolute oblivion of death sounds soothing to me.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS on The DEATH of JERRY FALWELL-CNN 360

Hitchens lambasts the fat man. Priceless.

Hitch vs. Sean on the existence of God

Sean Hannity- the living breathing bobble head hot air machine. And the beloved Christopher Hitchens, whom I am beginning to enjoy as much as Sam Harris.

The Fat One is Dead

Jesus came into his room and snatched his soul into paradise, leaving his pale obese frame sprawled out on the cold floor of his office, chicken grease still fresh on his cheek.

Dogma

The guy sounds like a robot, bubt this is as crystal clear in logic as Sam Harris. I'm very impressed. These other videos are equally good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4724R6mR18

The ethics of hell


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmsis-motuY

dogma

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elEYKpo7kFk

the golden rule

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NcRPQeRp_M

global warming

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot

I'm reading Sagan's varieties of religious experiences now, and he gets you close to having a kensho experience. Here's a taste of his mind from pale blue dot.

Atonement Trailer

Wow! They are making a movie from my favorite book by my favorite author- Ian McEwan.

Gerardo Nunez

That last part is done with a thumb technique called Alzapua. It's inhuman. I've never heard anything like that.

Mind Control Cults

Have these guys got this down to a science or what? You can tell most of them have certainly been there before themselves.

My Amazon Review

My Amazon review of Hitchens' "God is not Great"

Crusader For Reality, May 6, 2007
Reviewer:

I thoroughly appreciated Dawkins and Harris, and now Hitchens adds a crucial element to the argument which is wonderfully written and much worth reading. Though it seems there is no way to magically wake people up and coax them into being critical thinkers, these books challenge those moderates who read them carefully (forget the true believers) to really stop and ask themselves if they are being intellectually honest. I think the cognitive dissonance between what religion actually is versus what it pretends to be is building up to a breaking point in our society. Just today a video was released of a young woman being stoned to death in Iraq over a boyfriend she had with a different religious affiliation. On message boards Americans unanimously called the throng "barbaric animals", which of course they are. But I wonder how many of the people condemning the atrocity were strident worshippers of Jehovah, who explicitly commanded the same barbaric stonings to be carried out in his name for similar, if not cruder reasons. "But that was before Jesus", the Christian would say, as if somehow such an observation makes a difference.

If a man marries, then decides that he hates his wife, he can claim she wasn't a virgin when they were married. If her father can't produce the "tokens of her virginity" (bloody sheets), then the woman is to be stoned to death at her father's doorstep.

22:13-21 Deuteronomy

Those fanatical atheists

Brilliant article. So simply put, but I haven't seen it said this way.

Those fanatical atheists

It's popular these days to equate those who question God
with the worst kind of zealots, but it's not fair
Dan Gardner, The Ottawa CitizenPublished: Saturday, May 05, 2007

God is not Great

I have just finished this excellent book. It is well worth the read, providing many insights from Hitchens not included in Dawkins or Harris. Where reading Dawkins is like having a friendly conversation with a brilliant professor in your living room, and reading Harris is like listening to a perfect symphony with it's stunning precision and clarity, reading Hitchens is like a ceaseless staccatto of interesting facts and notes tied into a tapestry which provides a convincing bird's eye view inundated with one-liners which will make you literally laugh outloud.

I was very interested in seeing that Hitchens dedicated the book to Ian McEwan, who happens to be my favorite novelist. I had no idea there was a connection, and assumed that their views on the Iraq war were opposed (as most people are opposed to Hitchens' insistence that the war was a good thing to start). But on Charlie Rose, Hitchens says that McEwan more or less agrees that the war was a good idea and it is tragic it has failed.

Personally, I believe that if it were possible to inject democracy into the Middle East through war, I would be for it. Everyone agrees that our administration has gone about it foolhardedly. The question is, would *any* administration have succeeded. I personally don't think so. And this makes the idea of war for democracy naive, in my opinion. Everyone with an opinion is more or less just a horse better.

It is sad that the talk radio hosts and pundits have conflated religion, foreign policy, and liberalism into false dichotomous terms to rouse conflict and sell the big fight to make money off commercials. In reality, there are many of us atheists who despise what passes for modern political conservatism yet who are consistently disgusted by the moral relativists who want to give certain people in society their fair say- for instance, not showing the pictures of the Danish cartoons to appease a bunch of superstitious lunatics.