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The Governor of Virginia will be appearing with this “healing prophet” today. This comes hot on the heals of McDonnell’s blunder in forgetting to mention slavery in his proclamation declaring April “Confederate History Month”.
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Every 10 years the media re-discovers the Catholic church’s campaign to cover up child rape that occurs in their ranks. Typically, interest in holding the church’s feet to the fire wanes and the national media forgets about them for a time. This round, however involves the top dog Pope Benedict. Prior to being elected Pope, Benedict (known as Cardinal Ratzinger) was head of a disciplinary department for wayward priests. Dealing with child rape cases was in his job description and he arguably knows more about the intricacies of the cover up than any other Cardinal or Bishop alive today.
New developments on this front come rapid fire. So here is a brief overview of the last week:
Connecticut Bishops fight sex abuse bill (April.11.2010)
Connecticut legislature is proposing a bill that would remove the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse cases. Conneticut Law currently limits sexual abuse victims 30 years past their 18th birthday to file a lawsuit. The proposed change to the law would rescind that statute of limitations, allowing child abuse victims to sue beyond their 48th birthday.
Considering that many previously quiet victims are around the age of 50, the church in conneticut has taken a very vocal stance against this proposal. Signed by the bishops of Conneticut, a letter posted on their website suggests that this new law would put “all Church institutions, including your parish, at risk.” This leads us to wonder… how many pedophiles does the Connecticut church have in the closet? Are there so many child rape victims over the age of 48 that they fear bankruptcy?
Read more: CNN.com
Writing on the Wall: Pope’s signature attached to key letters (April.9.2010)
The Pope’s correspondence in postponing the defrocking of California Priest Rev Kiesle has be discovered linking him to the 5 year wait in defrocking the priest after he was found guilty and sentenced to 3 years probation for molesting two young boys. Ratzinger wrote that the “good of the universal church” needed to be considered when defrocking a priest, putting the interest of the church before the well being of the victims and Kiesle’s parishioners.
Via the BBC: “Rev Kiesle was sentenced to three years of probation in 1978 for lewd conduct with two young boys in San Francisco. It said the Oakland diocese had recommended Kiesle’s removal in 1981 but that that did not happen until 1987.
Cardinal Ratzinger took over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases, in 1981.
AP says the 1985 correspondence, written in Latin, shows Cardinal Ratzinger saying that Kiesle’s removal would need careful review.
Cardinal Ratzinger urged “as much paternal care as possible” for Kiesle.
Kiesle was sentenced to six years in prison in 2004 after admitting molesting a young girl in 1995.
Kiesle is now 63 and is on the registered sex offenders list in California.”
British Scientist Richard Dawkins threatens to arrest Pope Benedict (April.11.2010)
Outspoken Atheist and Biologist Richard Dawkins has set in motion the legal measures necessary to arrest Pope Benedict on his next visit to Britain.
Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.
Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.
They have commissioned the barrister Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens, a solicitor, to present a justification for legal action. - timesonline.com
It is shocking how Catholics put the interest of one man, the Pope, above the interests of thousands of children who have been molested and silenced by the machine of the church. For those of us observing from outside the box, we think what their version of god must think of this scandal and cover up at the highest level. It certainly seems that Catholics value the personage of the Pope more than they value justice and moral consistency. The right thing to do in this case is to vote with your feet.
Ten years ago in America, the Catholic Church was hit with multiple scandals of child rape by Ordained Priests. Recently the Dutch have had the beginnings of their own version of this, followed by Brazil and the rest of Europe seems to be following fast on their heels. The New York Times broke news this week that Pope Benedict (formerly Cardinal Ratzinger) played a heavy hand in dismissing a Wisconsin case against a priest who had raped over 200 deaf boys at the religious school where he ministered.
The American priest Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy worked at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin from 1950-1974. During that time he raped and sexually mollested over 200 students. The Catholic Church was slow to consider repremand for Rev. Murphy and began proceedings to investigate Murphy only after threats of a public lawsuit from a victim hit the Vatican. Proceedings for a secret canonical trial began and Murphy was liable to be defrocked. Murphy wrote a pleading letter to Cardinal Ratzinger begging not to be dismissed saying that he was old and had repented of his “sins”. There is no record of a response from Ratzinger, but the trial was immediate suspended after Murphy wrote this letter to Ratzinger.
Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest. – NYTimes
Ratzinger’s role in dismissing and moving around Murphy is disturbing at best. Even more shocking is the mentality that if a 
man who rapes over 200 deaf boys simply confesses his “sins” to an mythical god, this is enough to let him slip by without consequence. The Catholic Confessional stands as the proverbial slate washer that apparently dismisses ordained priests from facing the consequences of ruining so many young lives.
The Catholic Priesthood is breeding grounds for child rape. First, the priesthood attracts gay men because it is offered as the only viable vocation for a gay Catholic teenage boy. Studying in the seminary, living with other gay men does not help their situation either. Secondly, the Catholic Church requires all their followers (but especially priests and nuns) to refrain completely from masturbation.(1) This unnatural request leads to a sexual build up that is truly unhealthy when trying to live a life without the opportunity for sexual release. Sexual release through masturbation or sexual intercourse is a natural need of the human body. Wet dreams are the body’s way of satisfying this need if it is not dutifully taken care of. Thirdly, when you combine homophobia and this unhealthy view of masturbation and sex with settings where priests are in unsupervised contact with young naive children (who are not taught about sex and masturbation) you end up with a lethal cocktail of child rape.
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1. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church: #2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. “Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.”137 “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.” For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of “the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.”
Other sources: Slate The Great Catholic Cover-up
Another brilliant article by Christopher Hitchens. This one deals with the outdated and very useless 10 commandments of the Judeo Christian religions. He brings up many fabulous observations about how the bible actually has four versions of the 10 
commandments within the Old Testament and how the first 4 commandments have nothing to do with how to behave but rather demand that its followers grovel before their god. Here is an excerpt from his Vanity Fair Article:
“There is in fact a good biblical precedent for doing just that, since the giving of the divine Law by Moses appears in three or four wildly different scriptural versions. (When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.) The first and most famous set comes in Exodus 20 but ends with Moses himself smashing the supposedly most sacred artifacts ever known to man: the original, God-dictated panels of Holy Writ. The second edition occurs in Exodus 34, where new but completely different tablets are presented after some heavenly re-write session and are for the first time called “the ten commandments.” In the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses once more calls his audience together and recites the original Sinai speech with one highly significant alteration (the Sabbath commandment’s justifications in each differ greatly). But plainly discontented with the effect of this, he musters the flock again 22 chapters further on, as the river Jordan is coming into view, and gives an additional set of orders—chiefly terse curses—which are also to be inscribed in stone. As with the gold plates on which Joseph Smith found the Book of Mormon in upstate New York, no trace of any of these original yet conflicting tablets survives.” – Christopher Hitchens
Audio taken from a Q&A of Richard Dawkins.
1. GIVE IT UP. Every Lent it never fails: my Facebook news feed is loaded with Christian acquaintances posting what superfluous toy or 
food they have decided to deprive themselves of for 40 days. I vaguely recall a passage in the gospels where Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for publicly displaying their fasting and how god will not “count” it on the list he is supposedly making and checking (twice). You poor martyrs! How terrible that you have to do without soda, candy, chocolate, video games, TV, etc for a WHOLE FORTY DAYS. Have you given any thought as to all those who live in abject poverty and NEVER have ANY of that stuff? How arrogant of you to think that your god will reward you for giving up such luxuries when so many starve to death every day because they have nothing to eat? Four years ago I gave up eating all processed sugars, sodas, fast food and excess. I have never owned a video game and have not owned a TV for 3 years. I do this because it benefits my health and encourages exploration of the world. I fail to see how you giving up candy for Lent and complaining about it does anything to benefit you or those who go without every day of their lives. For Lent, try giving up God and see how clear things become.
2. FISH. If you have ever cooked a meal for Christians on a Friday in Lent, you know about how they “deprive” themselves on Fridays in Lent (only 4-5 Fridays in the year) and make a big deal to make sure everyone knows they 
can’t “eat meat”. The last time I checked, fish was meat. This whole fish on Fridays tradition has an interesting metamorphoses through history. Fasting rules for Catholics in particular used to be very strict. It progressed from no meat allowed on EVERY Friday of the year to only Wednesday and Fridays during Lent and then lastly to “no meat” on only Fridays during Lent. Then, as people tend to do, the faithful found a loophole in their rules because they did not “count” fish as meat by saying that it came from water animals, not land animals. After decades of their flock bending the rules so they could have fish on Fridays, the Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI decided to allow Fish on Fridays in 1966. Now, I don’t mind accommodating my vegan friends, people with allergies or intolerance to certain foods. What does bother me is the “poor me” message that “fasting” Christians bring to my dinner table and to the world. McDonald’s even caters to their “fast” season, commercializing and capitalizing on the pointless tradition of one religion. I fail to see how eating expensive fish, now in short supply is a sacrifice.
Another problem with Christians eating Fish on Fridays is overfishing and how much Christianity has helped to decimate global fish populations.1 Fish is an expensive, rare meat on our over-fished planet. Christians are happy to help themselves to the almost extinct Tuna and Salmon in the name of their religious “fasting”. Eating a delicacy is a far cry from depriving one’s self in the name of Jesus. I also fail to see how encouraging people to consume fish during Lent is an example of good stewardship of the earth.
3. OBESITY. The thin priest will talk about it, but the fat ones won’t touch the subject. Gluttony, one of the ‘seven deadly sins’, plagues a large swath of the faithful across all Christian divides. They sit in their pews and hear about how they should give in charity, deny themselves pleasures. Yet they exit church each Sunday to find a doughnut at the community hall and fail 
to connect how eating 2 to 3 times the amount of calories needed to live each day equates to starving children dying in third world countries. Even here on American soil, families are finding it difficult to find enough food to survive and the pious obese flock to church every Sunday to be reassured by their pastor that they are checking off all the necessary dates to be admitted into heaven. This type of hypocrisy abounds during Lent when the biblical reading encourage homilies about abstinence, moderation, charity and self denial. Obesity is perhaps the most un-Christian behavior of all, exercising gluttony, sloth, greed, addiction, destruction of your “god-given” body and a complete lack of compassion for those who have no food to eat. I fail to see how being 200 pounds overweight exemplifies Christian behavior.
4. TRADITION. If you ask a Christian why they celebrate Lent, the common response is because Jesus went into the desert for 40 days. There he supposedly ate no food and was tempted by the Devil. The irony in this is that to remember this improbable story, Christians “deprive” themselves of American comforts and “fast” on Fridays, even though they found the loophole of eating meat. It is almost as meaningless as reenacting the cannibalism of eating the flesh and blood of Jesus with wafers and cheap wine. Oh wait… they already do that.
5. HISTORY. Let’s put the record straight. There are rumors out there that Pope Paul IV had monetary interest in seeing a budding new fishing industry succeed. It is not improbable, but still devoid of sources. Pope Paul IV was rumored to have had a mistress who’s husband owned a fishing fleet. What is known about Pope Paul IV was his strong Antisemitism and his major role during the Inquisition. In 1555 he issued canon law forcing Jews to live separate from Christians, which created the Roman Ghetto. He strengthened and reorganized the Inquisition and believed that outside of Catholicism there was no salvation. He also had fig leaves painted over the nudes in the Sistine Chapel. 2, 3
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REFERENCES
1. The Pope and the Price of Fish, Full article
3. NNDB
Sam Harris, author of[amazon ASIN="978-0393327656"]The End of Faith[/amazon] and[amazon ASIN="978-0307278777"]Letter to a Christian Nation,[/amazon] narrates this definative documentary on how Christianity is in no way a unique religious story. “The God Who was Not There” details the inconsistancies in the Bible’s A new perspective about the Apostle Paul reveals that Paul never mentions any of the Jesus story written in the four gospels. Paul speaks of Jesus as an idea, not as an actual human being with the narrative in the Gospel writings.
Where do you think this quote comes from? “He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation” Sounds like it came from John’s gospel 
and indeed, John did say something very similar when he put these word’s into Jesus’ mouth: “Unless you eat of the flesh of the son of Man and drink his blood, you have not life in yourselves. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood will live in me and I in him” The first quote is from the Mysteries of Mithra, a deity who was worshiped hundreds of years before the gospel writers. Mithra’s popularity as a deity grew alongside Christianity, with it’s high point occurring in the 3rd Century AD. Mithra’s narrative parallels that of Jesus with striking similarity.
Get information on the Documentary at TheGodMovie.com
Daniel C. Dennett frequently contributes to NewsWeek but this recent article caught my attention. Mr. Dennett, renown atheist, philospher and best selling author tackled the subject of religious taboos in American culture. The following is a quote from Dennett’s article titled ‘Religious No Longer A Protected Class’:
“Q: Is there widespread media bias against Christianity? Against evangelicals such as Brit Hume and Sarah Palin? Against public figures who speak openly and directly about their faith? Against people who believe as you do?
There is no media bias against Christianity. If it appears to some people that there is, it is probably because after decades of hyper-diplomacy and a generally accepted mutual understanding that religion was not to be criticized, we have finally begun breaking through that taboo and are beginning to see candid discussions of the varieties of religious folly in American life. Activities that would be condemned by all if they were not cloaked in the protective mantle of religion are beginning to be subjected to proper scrutiny.
There is still a lot to accomplish however. We need to change the prevailing assumptions in the same way that public opinion has been reversed on drunk driving. When I was young, drunk drivers tended to be excused because, after all, they were drunk! Today, happily, we hold them doubly culpable for any misdeeds they commit while under the influence.
I look forward to the day when violence done under the influence of religious passion is considered more dishonorable, more shameful, than crimes of avarice, and is punished accordingly, and religious leaders who incite such acts are regarded with the same contempt that we reserve for bartenders who send dangerously disabled people out onto the highways.
I also look forward to the day when pastors who abuse the authority of their pulpits by misinforming their congregations about science, about public health, about global warming, about evolution must answer to the charge of dishonesty. Telling pious lies to trusting children is a form of abuse, plain and simple. If quacks and bunko artists can be convicted of fraud for selling worthless cures, why not clergy for making their living off unsupported claims of miracle cures and the efficacy of prayer?
The double standard that exempts religious activities from almost all standards of accountability should be dismantled once and for all. I don’t see bankers or stockbrokers wringing their hands because the media is biased against them; they know that their recent activities have earned them an unwanted place in the spotlight of public attention and criticism, and they get no free pass, especially given their power. Religious leaders and apologists should accept that since their institutions are so influential in American life, we have the right to hold their every move up to the light. If they detect that the media are giving them a harder time today than in the past, that is because the bias that protected religion from scrutiny is beginning to dissolve. High time.” - Daniel C. Dennett
Quoted from Alternet.org:
“Debates over faith often leave non-believers holding the bag: look like a jerk or leave the debate unfinished and apparently concede defeat.
The only thing that would make atheism a true article of faith
would be if atheists said, “Nothing you could possibly say, nothing I could possibly see or experience, no evidence you could possibly provide me, could ever convince me that my atheism was wrong. My belief in the non-existence of God is an a priori assumption; it is unshakable, as constant as the Northern Star.” And I have yet to encounter an atheist who says that.
Finally—and maybe most crucially of all:
When we speak out in any way about our atheism—and when we continue to organize, and to make ourselves and our ideas more visible and vocal, and to generally turn ourselves into a serious movement for social change—we are accused of being hostile, fanatical, rude, evangelical, bigoted and extremist.
But if we don’t speak out, if we don’t organize, if we don’t forge ourselves into a powerful and visible movement…then the bigotry and misinformation and discrimination against us will continue unabated.
Why this is untrue and unfair: We really can’t win on this one. Even the most mild forms of atheist activism and visibility result in believers accusing us of disrespect, intolerance and forcing our beliefs on others. If we do something as mild and unthreatening as putting up bus ads saying “You can be good without God” or “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone,” you can bet good money that plenty of believers will get worked up about how those terrible atheists are insulting Christians and other believers. The purest act of visibility—the simple act of standing up and saying out loud, “Atheists exist and are good people”—is treated as another example of the offensive, dogmatic, in-your-face extremism of the atheist movement.”
Since Haiti was hit by the earthquake I have been patiently waiting for any religious person I know to excuse god for the disaster and blame 
“mother nature”. I didn’t have to wait very long. Haiti’s misfortune brings up the blaring inconsistency in religion, especially the monotheistic religions: the problem of good and evil.
Pat Robertson, Christian TV evangelist was so disabled by this conundrum that he publicly claimed the reason Haiti suffered such great misfortune was because they had “made a pact with the devil”. For Pat, this was a sufficient explanation for the recent Tsunami, Hurricane and now Earthquake that has brought this country to its most desperate hour.
Haiti serves as a prime example of the problem of “good and evil”.
Naturalists point out that if a god who is claimed to be omnipotent (all powerful) and omniscient (all knowing) controls the universe, by definition such a god must take credit for EVERYTHING that happens, not just the good stuff. Such a god would know that an earthquake was about to happen and have the power to prevent it from happening. With this information about the omnipotent, omniscient god, we must conclude at least one of the following:
1. Such a god is intrinsically evil by allowing the disaster to hit
2. Such a god does not exist (omnipotent, omniscient)
A theist will disagree here and say that god does not control the evils in the world because Adam and Eve sinned and the rest of humanity must suffer because of their sin. This leads us to conclude that the omnipotent, omniscient god has no sense of what constitutes a “just” punishment for the “sin” of two humans. We must also consider that if the theist’s argument that “evils like Tsunami’s are not god’s fault” rests on the existence of two storybook characters in Genesis the argument falls apart. We begin to doubt the historical accuracy of the Adam and Eve story because it is embedded in a creation myth that sets the earth at 10,000 years old, having been fashioned in 7 days by a sky-god.
But most importantly, the counter argument to those who say “evil is the devil’s doing, not god’s” places the omni-god in a position of NOT being omnipotent. If the omni-god is not in control of nature, this by definition deems him not omnipotent. This leaves us to conclude that the omni-god is either:
1. Not actually omnipotent or
2. Unjust in dealing out his punishments and hence, if he be doing the punishing for Adam’s sin, he IS responsible for earthquakes and natural disasters (omnipotent)
This past weekend I listened to a Catholic homily by a deacon who was trying to help his congregation understand how to reconcile god with the Haiti earthquake. His best shot was to tell a little story about a mother in Haiti who dug her children out of the rubble of her home and saved their lives. All three of her children lived (after extensive medical surgury and the science of medicine). She told reporters that “now she knew that god loved her”. The deacon pointed out that good can come of such atrocities like this women who finally knew that god loved her. He failed to bring up all the other thousands who perished or the other mothers whose children were crushed and killed. Did ‘god’ love them? It was perhaps the weakest argument of the century. What a fickle god Christians daily defend.
Don’t pray or wish that Haiti be helped, do something to help. Donate to a non-theistic charity organization dedicated to helping Haiti.
The history of the celebration of Christmas is not surprisingly devoid of anything Christian.
The Winter Solstice is the real ‘reason for the season’, and it belongs to everyone. When man first looked up into the sky and began to take note of the patterns of the celestial 
bodies, Winter Solstice has stood as a turning point in the seasons.
Many of the Christmas traditions that American Christians celebrate harken back to distinct pagan origins. The tradition of bringing a tree in the home and decorating it was practiced by pagans in northern European countries who celebrated the Winter Solstice or “Yuletide”. The evergreen, holly and ivy were some of the few greenery that could be found in the cold winter. They were used as part of the winter solstice celebrations. The Yule Log gets its name from the Norse god, Jul. In recognition of the return of the sun, fathers and sons would bring home large logs, which they would set on fire. Also around the time of the winter solstice, Romans observed Juvenalia, a feast honoring the children of Rome.
Winter Solstice was a month long celebration in the month of December that celebrated the turning of days from getting shorter to getting longer because of the earth’s rotation on its axis around the sun. In other words, the reason for the season is the axial tilt of the earth, to put it bluntly.
On December 25th the Romans celebrated the birthday of Mithra, the god of the unconquerable sun. Mithra, was an infant god said to have been born of a rock. However, when Christianity began to spread, the Christians simply adopted the pagan holidays and laid a Christian “reason” for the celebration over the existing celebration because they could not stop the festivities. The actual date of Jesus’ birth is never mentioned biblically and in the time when Jesus was born birthdays where not celebrated.
So athiest, humanist and non-theist, feel free to celebrate on December 25th.
Do it in thanks to the mythical gods and fairy tales if you wish: Santa and Jesus and Mithra alike, but say “Happy Solstice!” with a drink in your hand, for that is the way it all began.
Behavioral scientists have provided a window into how religion resides in the human brain. A study published in in the Nov. 30 early edition of the Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences discusses how people infer their own opinions and judgments onto their “god”, using their own moral instincts to conclude that the imaginary being they worship must think similarly. From Science Daily:
The final study involved functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the neural activity of test subjects as they reasoned about their own beliefs versus those of God or another person. The data demonstrated that reasoning about God’s beliefs activated many of the same regions that become active when people reasoned about their own beliefs.
The researchers noted that people often set their moral compasses according to what they presume to be God’s standards. “The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing,” they conclude. “This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.”
Read more at Science Daily
We’ve all heard it before. The classic argument from a theist’s perspective on why a god must have created our universe. I can’t tell you how many times religious people have said to me: “well, can you think of one example where something comes from nothing in the universe?”
They are correct in noting that “something cannot be created from nothing” within our known universe, as far as we have been able to demonstrate through
Hubble Deep Field: thousands of galaxies
scientific inquiry. However, when considering the big bang and the origins of our known universe, we cannot apply the laws of physics WITHIN the known universe to that which act OUTSIDE the known universe. Before the start of our universe, it is plausible that other laws of “physics” governed and dictated how our universe singularity began and where the energy and material originated from.
There is also a notable phenomenon observed in quantum mechanics. Particles composed of quarks such as protons, neutrons, positrons, etc have been observed popping into existence from nowhere and leaving again just as fast. Such particles “appear” in a vacuum where no other matter or energy exists. At the quantum level, even empty space is not truly empty but is seething with activity; particles are constantly popping in and out of existence everywhere. In pair creation, a particle and its antimatter partner seem to “appear” (see Bosons). This is cutting edge quantum mechanics research. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzlerand was built and is just recently up and running in the search for the Higgs-Boson particle.
We cannot apply the laws of this universe to that which acted outside of the universe. The laws that hold true within the bubble of our universe may not govern outside the bounds of this universe. 
It is plausible that there are endless numbers of other universes “floating” about and our universe is just one of them. Within each of these multi-verses different laws and properties may govern the interactions within. This “Multiverse theory” is the leading theory in the scientific cosmology community, though it remains untested and still a speculation. (Though this speculation is based on other observations and evidence of how our universe operates). It is probable that the “laws” that act outside our bubble universe commonly call into existence something from nothing. We cannot say with certainty so it is irresponsible to jump to a conclusion without the ability to test or prove it to be false or true. This applies to the multi-verse theory and the theory of a god or gods.
Watch this 10 min video where Dr. Michio Kaku, a leading cosmologist explains the multiverse theory:
Schaeffer: “A village cannot reorganize village life to suit the village idiot. We have to understand we have a village idiot in this country and it is called Fundamentalist Christianity.” He goes on to say that the Republican party is the party that caters to the village idiot and the extreme subculture of Fundamentalist Christianity.
Jeff Sharlet has the balls to unearth the dirty secrets of a Christian Mafia in his book “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” This wealthy group was established during the great depression with the ideology that power and wealth were bestowed by the christian god and should be things to be sought after. The Family openly admires Hitler, Stalin and Mau as men who understood how to attain and wield the type of power they seek to attain. The Family acts as a lobby group (unregistered) and claims non profit status as a religious organization. They also house prominent members of government in a sort of exclusive resort house call the “C Street House” where the officials are waited on hand and foot and served meals by college girls of the local Catholic College. Some of these men who are part of The Family who have recently been in the news for extramarital affairs have been Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford,
The Family regularly pays for a select group of statesmen and government officials to travel overseas to befriend third-world dictators and oppressive regimes. It is the philosophy of The Family that these dictators have god given power and deserve to be included in the christian mafia in an attempt to unite powerful, rich men all over the world with the goal of influencing public policy on a global scale.
Sharlet’s book exposes this wicked group in an in-depth
manner that draws ties to a large number of elected government officials including President Ford, George W. Bush and Ronald Regan.
Sharlet recently interviewed on Jon Stewart’s Daily show (clip below). Even better is his interview on NPR.
LISTEN to the NPR interview HERE
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Jeff Sharlet | ||||
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I hesitated to post this for many months because it made the human race so deplorable (similarly to what Gulliver in Gulliver’s travels felt like after living with the Whinnem). But here it is. Knowledge is power. Just don’t get to down on humanity and do something uplifting after you watch it. Volunteer or donate to a charity to cheer yourself up 
And take it all with a pinch of salt… use your critical thinking skills.
I hesitated to share this because it was so blatently bias and unscientific that it made my stomach turn. At EveryStudent.com people can read about a proof for god that is highly prefaced with a disclaimer. The disclaimer starts by saying that the proof for god offered at their website will only be worth something if the reader has an open mind. Fair enough. Skeptics like myself are far from close minded, we just demand extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. The disclaimer continues:
If a person opposes even the possibility of there being a God, then any evidence can be rationalized or explained away. It is like if someone refuses to believe that people have walked on the moon, then no amount of information is going to change their thinking. Photographs of astronauts walking on the moon, interviews with the astronauts, moon rocks…all the evidence would be worthless, because the person has already concluded that people cannot go to the moon.
Their use of this analogy floored me. It is almost too easy to start shredding this argument. If someone had a photograph of god, taped interview with god, pieces of god’s skin under a microscope, I would be hard pressed not to believe that evidence. However, when people say that god is real and is the biggest most powerful force in the natural world, they need to come up with some pretty amazing evidence to support that claim. Only conspirator theorists and nut jobs don’t believe that the moon landing actually happened. More recently, spacecraft flying over the moon’s surface have photographed the lunar landing site complete with footprints and spacejunk left behind.
Yeah, if someone had credible video of Santa Clause flying his reindeer through the winter’s sky, I’ll believe in him.
From New Zealand another religious parent takes offense at their child’s independent mind and shows his anger with a concrete block to her head.
A 55-year-old man who beat his daughter over the head with a lump of concrete when she refused to go to his Mormon church “does not understand what all the fuss is about”, Hastings District Court has heard.
Uluia Muliipu appeared in court after pleading guilty to one count of assault with intent to injure. via nzherald.com
This series explores how fundamental Christianity is using the military as an active extention of their “mission” to make the USA a Christian nation.
The most disturbing thing I heard from this documentary was that Christian soldiers are convinced they are fighting in the middle east in the name of Christianity. Also, for active troops there is no alternative to religious gatherings. Humanist or psycological support for the emotionally depraved soldiers are not provided or funded alongside the thousands of Chaplin. So sad… they are preying on the emotionally vulnerable and the state is not providing alternatives to find support without the superstitions and myths attached.
This seemed to me like a fruition of what the movie “Jesus Camp” fosters. If you haven’t seen, go find it.
This article in defense of god’s “omnipotence” was brought to my attention and I took note of how the author went through great lengths to stretch reason to the breaking point. It was too irresistible to let it go unanswered from a skeptic, as the author deems it his mission to address the many flaws in “omnipotence” that skeptics have pointed out.
He shoots himself in the foot right from the start by admitting to assuming that a god exists and then assuming he knows the characteristics of said unproven being. But we will let him get away with it, or there would be no fun to be had.
The author goes on to set up a straw man argument against omnipotence by saying that skeptics say that god cannot be omnipotent because god is unable to create a scenario where he is unable to do something. What he fails to address is some basic flaws in the definitions he offers of what his god is (both omnipotent and omniscient).
Omniscience is “all knowing” or “infinitely wise”. Omnipotence is “having unlimited power”. “If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.” – Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) The author of this article fails to address these irreconcilable characteristics of said god.
The author continues with an argument that the attributes of god are “simple” because he says “god is actual” and has an “unchanging nature”. Basically he is stating that god is simple because he exists and does not change. How we equate existence and static being to simplicity, is unclear. What he means when he says “simple” is also unclear and the purpose in doing so is not explained.
Continuing on, he poses another straw man argument by saying that skeptics point out that god cannot sin and therefore is not omnipotent because there is something he cannot do. This guy suggests that god CAN sin, but he chooses not to do so. Yet from there he goes on to state:
In fact, it is my belief that God’s omni-benevolence (God’s all-goodness) prevents him from sinning
He suggests here that god would probably sin if it were not for this omni- part of him that stops him from doing what might otherwise come naturally. Which seems absurd to me. Isn’t sin the act of offending god? So wouldn’t it be impossible for god to sin against himself? Self contracting reasoning here.
The author then poses this question when making his point about a god who chooses not to sin and then considers the alternative:
Could you imagine a “God” who stopped refraining from sinning and started raping, pillaging and destroying randomly? Certainly this is not the Christian God!
Well, I am glad you asked. I don’t have to imagine that god. People already worship him! Let me introduce you to the Judeo-Christian god who in the Old Testament commands his followers to pillage, commit genocide, take more than one wife, and kill each other when Moses catches them dancing around the golden bull. This god killed every first born child in Egypt and did not stop Jepthah from killing is only daughter as a sacrifice to god for his help in winning a genocide battle against a neighboring tribe. The Christian god is a murderous, two faced mafia boss whose twisted ways are well documented in the bible.
And here I will let this author contradict himself again:
a skeptic might suggest that if the above definition is true then that still means that a human can steal candy from a baby but God cannot. Does this suggest that we have the power to do something that is impossible for God? Yes, in a sense this is true. We have one power that God does not: we can sin.
Next, the author tackles the problem of evil. He presents the skeptics’ argument:
P1. Evil exists in the world
P2. God is all-good and all-powerful and all-knowing
P3. An all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God should only create a world of total goodness
C1. Yet P1 conflicts with P3 so we must conclude that an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God does not exist.
He suggests how to solve this logical argument by denying any one of the 3 premises. He admits the difficulty in denying P1 and P2. So he resorts to rejecting P3 with this justification:
God allows evil to exist so that the highest form of good can exist.
Essentially he is stating that the highest form of good is reliant upon the existence of evil. Which logically makes evil more powerful than good. Tell that to the child who was raped by his parish priest at the tender age of 9. Tell that to the starving children in third world countries. Tell that to the family of people murdered by the KKK. Go ahead and tell them that this evil is good for them in the long haul.
Next, the author states:
evil is not a tangible thing; in a way evil is not a reality like goodness
He expounds on this fallacy by saying that evil is the absence of goodness and therefore goodness is a thing and evil is a non-thing. This is a logical fallacy. “Good” and “evil” are words humans use to describe events and behaviors. Neither is a tangible thing and neither is the absense of the the other. These terms can change what they describe as a society evolves and grows. For example, slavery was a good thing in the bible and was condoned by god, but today we recognize slavery as an evil form of human repression. These terms can also be applied to the same act with varying circumstances. For example, the act of killing someone can be called both good or evil depending on the situation (aggression verses self defense). Good and evil are not tangible things, rather they are words used to describe behavior and circumstances.
In a final hurrah, he attempts to dismiss all evil as originating from another mythological being called Satan. So we have a “good creator” who is unproven who created Satan. Satan (an unproven mythological scapegoat) choose to disobey the “good creator” and hence became powerful enough in his rejection to spark a whole bunch of other evils.
…the free choice of the devil to refuse submission to the divine will lead to a corruption and a dissolution of the natural powers of Satan’s will. In a metaphysical sense, the will of Satan was corrupted by his choice to disobey God. This was the beginning and origin of all evil: for the choice of Satan lead to a corruption within the very will of Satan.
He then goes into the mythology of angels and their ranks, powers and how they cannot be forgiven like humans, which is why the devil cannot repent and go back to heaven. All unproven scapegoat ideas to excuse the problem of evil. Make up some “evil force” character who takes the blame for all the stuff that we don’t want the “good force” taking credit for.
Finally, the author pulls out the big creation myth guns and says that all humanity must suffer the evils of this world because Adam and Eve sinned big time when the talking snake convinced them to eat forbidden fruit in god’s garden right after he created the world in 7 days. Right. So babies have to die horrible deaths from crippling diseases because some bloat 6,000 years ago couldn’t find another piece of fruit to snack on?
Either god is omnipotent or not. If he is, then the bad stuff that happens is part of his knowledge/plan. So the child who died last year at the hands of her religious mother because the parents wanted to pray away her diabedes instead of seek medical help was all part of god’s plan. And the starving children who die every day are part of the plan of the omnipotent god.
This author is essentially saying “God does the good stuff and nature (and Satan) does the bad stuff”. An omnipotent god controls EVERYTHING by definition, even the evil and suffering. So next time you hear of a priest raping a young child, make sure to thank god for it (because god has a “greater good” in store for that molested child and can justify letting a priest follow through with rape).
Khyra, the daughter of a Muslim convert family, has died of starvation at the hand of her mother in Britain.
Khyra was unconscious when paramedics, called to the house in the early hours of last Saturday morning, discovered her and her five brothers and sisters lying on mattresses in a bedroom. Allegedly severely emaciated, she was taken to hospital but died on the way. 1
Evidently the neighbor lady noticed that three of the five children would eat the bread crumbs she spread out in her yard for the birds. Both parents have been arrested on child abuse and the investigation is looking into the religious practice of starvation as a form of exorsism.
Irish Catholic priest Fr. Gannon, a repeat child sex offender is on trial for sexually mollesting an 11 year old boy in the 1960s. Gannon alledgedly assulted the boy 3 times, once in the rectory when the child appeared for altar boy duties. 
He told the youngster that he was giving him an anatomy lesson and not to tell anyone because no one would belive the boy.
Gannon has been previously convicted of sexual assult but only served time for one conviction. Despite the many testimonies agaist him, Gannon refuses to apologize or show remorse for his destructive and offensive behavior.
And he fondled and kissed the boy in the pump room of the local swimming pool in 1969, the court heard.
Asked by police why he took the boy to the secluded bush location and touched his penis, Gannon replied he was explaining the “differences in anatomy”.
“I thought it was less formal rather than inviting him into the presbytery and that’s all,” he told police. 2
Fr. Gannon’s behavior suggests he does not fully understand the severity of his actions. The submissive behavior fostered by the Catholic church provides pedofiles like Gannon a furtile playing field to wreak havoc on the lives of youngsters who are told to trust priests and elders in their parent’s religious cult.
This article in the World Net Daily blows the big scare horn on gay marriage being legalized in America. Evidently some groups are concerned that gay marriage is a slippery slope to legalizing polygamy. Lets take a closer look.
1. Currently, polygamists do live in America and practice polygamy, a large majority of them being Mormon, a modern offshoot of Christianity. The multiple wives of these polygamy families claim single parent status on their taxes and welfare. This results in the polygamy families receiving thousands of tax payer monies to pay for their many children’s welfare on account of all but one wife being single with little or no income.
It is well known that a handful of mormon polygamy families live soley off this government money, the husband of all the wives collecting their government paychecks and acting as a stay-at-home father to all his wives and children. If the United States made polygamy legal, it would not have to pay the welfare checks of these polygamy families.
2. For the Christian readers, we have a bit of polygamy in the good old bible. You don’t have look too hard to find all the many wives of so and so and of god bestowing the plunder of wives upon a conqueror. Here is just one obvious example:
“And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul; 8: And I gave thee thy master’s house, and thy master’s wives into thy bosom, and gave thee the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would moreover have given unto thee such and such things” (2 Sam. 12)
If polygamy was good enough for the heros of the bible, why should we turn our noses up at those who choose to practice polygamy in the silence of their own private lives? As an Atheist I could care less whether something is or is not in the bronze age storybook, but to some it could be difficult evidence to pass up.
3. The last thing this article tries to do is beg the question. They say, well if people can have sex with someone of the same genitalia or with more than one person, what is to stop the law from granting incest or bestiality to be constitutional?
To answer this we back up a few steps and recognize that people in the gay rights groups and pro-polygamy groups are not asking permission to have sex in the manner in which they choose. They are asking for equal rights between legal adult citizens of the USA. In the context of granting equal rights for men and women (human beings) who are members of the society of the USA, we recognize that animals are not included in this criteria of consideration for legal status. An animal is not a human being of consenting age and could therefore not be considered a valid partner in the legal status of a civil union. For two human beings to get married requires a few basic things: legal citizenship, consent, and declaration of intent. An animal cannot meet these requirements. It is not required however to show your genitalia in order to obtain a civil union, and such a requirement of showing sex or sexual preference is discrimination (as society has deemed today) and hence the reason for the gay rights movement. Incest on the other hand, is performed in this country already, mostly through rape. Consensual incest could be made legal if we again changed the criteria for marriage by not requiring consenting adults to be unrelated. This would be a decision made by society if it deemed that was something of value to the society. Which leads me to my final point:
4. Marriage and Civil Unions are not RIGHTS. They are statuses that our society has devised to provide a set of privileges to consenting adults who agree to enter these legal agreements together. For example: the speed limit for Highway XZY is 55 mph. This law was enacted by President Eisenhower during an oil shortage. It was thought that if everyone would drive slower they would conserve fuel. This law made sense at the time and society agreed to it by enforcing it and obiding by it. Since then, cars have become more efficient and often are more fuel efficient when cruising at 70mph.
We have also made them safer so as to sustain accidents at these higher speeds. The top speed limits on Highway XYZ hence are changed to 70 mph reflecting the new societial and technological circumstances. Society agrees by enforcing the new speed limit and abiding by it. Likewise when civil union was devised in the early workings of the USA, the opinion of society was that such a priviledge was between a human with a penis and a human with a vagina. Today, society disagrees with the criteria of the 1800s and votes to change the law to reflect new societal and technological circumstances. We understand now through the use of MRIs that the brains of gay men show similarities to those of heterosexual women. We also understand that the people who institutionalized marriage back in the 1700s also thought that slavery acceptable. As a society, we make the law. If society finds reason to believe that consensual incest is a benifit to the group, then it will change the critieria for the priveledge of marriage to reflect such an agreement of change. There are no absolutes. If the entire population of the world was killed off and the only remaining survivors to populate the earth were blood relatives, I’ll be damned if they don’t have some incest right then and there. Heck, if Adam and Eve really were the first and only humans on this planet, who do you suppose Cain and Able had sex with? 
In the wake of the Daniel Hauser Minnesota case, news from Britain tells of a criminal convinction of parents Thomas and Manju Sam. Attempting to treat their child’s chronic eczema. The 9 month old baby died in 2002 and just recently have the court proceedings found the parents guilty of criminal negligence by continuing homeopathic treatments as their child’s condition worsened to the point of her skin weeping and pealing off when they changed her clothing. Read the full report here.
A recent article in New Scientist gave us a glimpse into the family feud between Christian Creationists and Christian Evolutionists. Not suprisingly, each side puts up a website designed to give credibility to their side of the story.
What tickles me pink is that both sides look indistinguishable from the standpoint of a scientist and atheist. Ultimately, Creationists argue that “god created the universe as it appears today out of thin air” while their friends on the other side of the mud flinging fence say that “god created the circumstances for the known universe out of thin air.” Ultimately, they are arguing for the same thing (that a magic man did it), while throwing spit balls at each other over where to place the magic man in the history of the universe. It is no different than seeing a peach on the ground underneath a tree and agreeing with your friend that Zeus made that peach fall, while arguing with your friend over whether or not Zeus put it there on the ground or whether he put the peach tree there to make the peach to fall on the ground.
Let’s be fair to the Creationists though. The reason they must defend the bible’s position that the earth is 6,000 years old and that humans are all decended from one man and one women is to defend their entire religion. If the creation story is just a myth, a story, a nice little bedtime tale as the modern Christian believes, then what is the point of Jesus? According to the bible, Adam and Eve sinned by eating an apple, thus making God upset. God then sent himself in the form of Jesus to placate himself for that little Eden upset. You may agree that even if the Eden/Creation story is true, that circular reasoning sounds like bullshit, however this is what 75% of Americans are told sounds reasonable. So, to defend their religion, the Creationists are forced to argue against evolution in order to keep intact the entire POINT of their religious following. That Jesus came to die because of what happened in the Creation/Eden story.
Being a outspoken Facebooker and Blogger, I get a fair amount of email. This one shocked me because of the author’s uninformed disposition. The name has been changed to protect identity.
Kara:
I’m sorry if I’m bringing up a touchy subject with you, but a mythical deity? How can you think or say that Jesus Christ is mythical? Just look all around you at everything and everyone, even your beautiful Arizona couldn’t have just appeared. Someone had to create it; and that was God. And this is the greatest weekend in the history of the Catholic Church, when we celebrate Jesus’ life, passion, death, and resurrection! How and why did this change in religion come about? Again, sorry if this is a touchy subject, but I’m very surprised. You were raised Catholic, attend a Catholic University.
What is Astrophysics? Never heard of it! Lol! Well, I hope everything works out for you. And I will keep you in my prayers!
Chrystine:
Thanks for opening up discussion. This is by no means a touchy subject and something that I am happy to talk about with others.
Having been indoctrinated with religion, I was given a chance to think for myself upon entering college and found that religion does not stand up to the microscope of logic and reasoning.
The universe and the small planet we call earth are all a result of the “big bang” and the aftermath of that. Life began on earth in the microbial stages billions of years ago and evolution has taken life to what it is today. Through technology we have been able to find over 1 billion galaxies in our universe. Each of those galaxies has aprox. 1 billion planets within it. Therefore, there is 1 billion billion planets (at least) in our known universe. If you say that the chance of an earthlike planet being formed is a 1 in a billion chance, you still have 1 billion earthlike planets that could have formed. The odds are rather high, even for a probability equation. None of this gives evidence to a sky-god.
You say “someone had to create it; and that was God”. Why did someone have to create it? Why is that the only option? Just because we do not understand something does not give us credence to shove a god into that crack of the unknown. Religion has operated in this sense for many years. we didn’t understand lighting so Zeus must be throwing it down. we didn’t understand rain, so God must be opening flood hatches to dump water on us. we didn’t understand the sun and moon so we worshiped them. the church was convinced the earth was flat, and then that the earth was the center of our solar system. Wherever science honestly says “we don’t know the answer, but we are looking for evidence of the correct answer” religion steps in and shoves god into that gap. That is otherwise known as “God of the Gaps”. I have yet to see provable, repeatable evidence for any type of god.
Kara:
Hmm… If you couldn’t guess already, I don’t agree with you in the least. The Catholic Church is my everything and I will do my very best to defend Her. From what you’ve wrote above, you have studied this and I have studied my Catholic Faith, but you’ll have to give me a little bit to gather my thoughts! But, in reaction to the “big band” theory you believe in, (I hope this doesn’t come across as sarcastic) but saying that the world just “became” or “came into exsistence” is like saying that a dictionary is the product of an explosion in a printing factory. The Book of Genesis, says it all. It takes you through day by day of how God created the universe. Now all of the information you gave above of the billions of galaxies seem to be information from within the big bang theory and therefore, I don’t believe it. As for evolution, do you believe that we evolved from apes? Because if you do… why are there still apes on this planet? Adam, the first human being, did not just come to be. God created him from the dust of the earth. That is why on Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent, we have ashes placed on our foreheads and the words “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” are said. God then created Eve, from Adam’s rib. From Adam and Eve came the rest of the human race. There are some things that we need to just believe and not always have an exact reason or logic for. Again, in the Bible Jesus Christ said: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.” The supernatural things throughout the Catholic Faith, for instance: The Eucharist, Heaven, Purgatory, Hell, Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven are things that a human cannot wrap their mind around and will go absolutely crazy trying to figure out. This is where God, Jesus Christ, and the Catholic Church come into play. Seminarians, Theologians, Priests, Deacons, Bishops, Cardinals, and Popes have studied this and questions like these for centuries and the only way any of this world can be true is if someone supernatural created it. Which brings me to the question: “Where do you believe that people go after they die?” We don’t just cease to exsist. Depending on the way we live out life, we will go to Heaven and spend eternity with Our Almighty Father, Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and all the saint and angels, or we will go to Hell and burn in fire with the devil and his followers. And yet there is hope for those who die with sin still on their soul. These people go to Purgatory and are purified from their sin and then will be taken to Heaven. Those are my thoughts and belief’s. I have many more but I don’t think Facebook has the capacity to hold them all!
Chrystine:
The bible says the earth is 6,000 years old. Science and evidence through carbon dating and zirconium dating have dated the earth to be 4.5 billion years old. Astrophysics has established that it has been 13.7 billion earth years since the big bang. all these numbers are supported by evidence, repeatable math equations, fossil records and physics. arguing against it is the modern equivalent of saying the earth is flat.
Humans did not evolve from apes. do some research on this from non religious science sources. Humans, Neanderthals and apes and chimps evolved from previous lines of now extinct ape like ancestors. That humans somehow evolved from monkeys is the uneducated reply to evolution.
You claim god created the universe. Prove it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
What is your proof that something happens to humans after death? Humans have created the allusion of eternal life because death scares us. Our brains do not know what it is like to not exist. However I did not exist for billions of years before I was born and I imagine I will be just fine not existing for billions of years after I die. There will be no “me” to be sad or concerned about it either.
How Evolution works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpNeGuuuvTY
Kara:
Well, for my point of veiw this hasn’t really been “fun”, because I’m worried about your soul. I’m glad you enjoyed it though. Again, I must say I’m extremely shocked at your change of religious beliefs. God bless you Christine and I will pray for you. AND I will also come up with form of proof for you in the future! And then we shall continue this discussion! Talk to you later!
Chrystine:
If you can prove that I have a soul, I will let you be worried about it. Please do not pray for me, as it is a true waste of time and will amount to nothing. Instead, educate yourself and branch out from your comfort zone. It is refreshing outside the box. I look forward to your proofs, though I must warn you I haven’t found one yet that has held up to logic. Let me leave you with this little gem:
In The God Delusion, Dawkins discusses evolutionary by products. The example he chooses to use is a moth flying into a flame as a demonstration of what we see as abject stupidity. Why would a moth deliberately fly into a flame?
This is not an example of natural selection….it is an example of natural selection gone wrong. Moths evolved to fly at night by using celestial objects as guides: Keep the light source in a certain position and you can navigate, much as we do with a compass which points north. Dawkins notes that it was not until comparatively late in evolutionary history that there was anything like artificial lights to throw off the moths. We see only the moths who get distracted by the flames. We do not see millions of moths who merrily go on their way without self-immolating themselves.
So, what is the Darwinian answer to religion? Dawkins sees it this way.
“My specific hypothesis is about children. More than any other species we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations and that experience needs to be passed on to children for their protection and well-being. Theoretically, children might learn from personal experience not to go too near a cliff-edge, not to eat untried red berries, not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But, to say the least, there will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents; obey the tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn, minatory tone. Trust your elders without question. This is a generally valuable rule for a child. But, as with the moths, it can go wrong.”
Dawkins then continues:
“Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-produce is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses. For excellent reasons related to Darwinian survival, child brains need to trust parents and elders whom parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot know that “Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo” is good advice but “You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail” is at best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy. Both come from a respected source and are delivered with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience.”
The Jesuit maxim “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man” clearly understand the net result of this principle.
It should not surprise you that abortion rights extremists are praising the murder of abortion clinic doctor George Tiller this week. Dr. Tiller was shot and killed while he was serving as an usher at his home church in Kansas. The killer was motivated to shoot Tiller on account of his day job.
Pro-life advocates are now publicly lauding the actions of Tiller’s killer because they claim that the murder was justified. This should not come as a shock to the non-religious, as the typical pro-lifer is Christian and a follower of the bronze age book of morals, the bible. The bible has an interesting story in Judges 11 where a man named Jephthah asks his god to help him commit mass genocide on a neighboring tribe because they have a practice of offering child sacrifices to their gods. Because Jephthah’s god has ordered that “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, Jephthah finds it his duty to stop their murderous acts. But get this: he does so by killing the entire tribe. Murder. Yes, Jephthah justifies answering murder with murder. To top it off, Jephthah had made a deal with god so that if Jephthah was successful in his genocide, he promised to sacrifice to his god the first thing that walks through his door upon returning home. (He of course hoping it might be a servant or slave). Instead, his daughter greets him. So he keeps his promise to the lord of “Thou shalt not kill” and murders her as well (after she bewails her virginity).
To all those who applaud what Dr. Tiller’s killer has done, I would like for them to personally tell his wife and children that they think he deserved to die. Unbelievable behavior….
I am very vocal on facebook about my opinions on current events and religious idocity. I commonly post videos and links about science or atheism. Harkening back to my days as a homeschooled, brainwashed catholic, I have a good handful of “carry-over” facebook friends that undoubtedly shuffle through my outspoken linkage on the FB. As a result, i get a lot of personal messages (as well as public ones) from people defending their religion or challenging my atheism. I love this sort of dialogue, however there have been a few nasty ones that resulted in me being taken off a friend list (yes, like in gradeschool). Here is one of the best (name has been changed to protect identity).
Ann:
You’re entitled to think what you want about God, but to make gross generalizations about religion promoting ignorance or a lack of understanding really is just that, ignorant, and it’s also malicious. I follow God because he’s the reason the universe exists in the complexity of the organization that it does. There has to be a reason all this matter is here in such minute organization and with so many defined laws of nature. What I’ve learned clicks with the teachings of Christ. I study theology, science and the Bible to understand my faith and search for the truth more than I study material for my career or anything else I read for fun. So before you make generalizations knocking everyone else’s faith just because you had a bad experience with yours, please keep in mind that everyone has reasons for their faith, some better than others. Not everyone understands their own faith, and that’s tragic. I know you know what God’s teachings are, and you know those aren’t the problem in this world. Religion has done vastly more good than evil. People are the problem, godless ones just as much as people of faith. The act of following God, when it’s done the way God wants us to, is not the problem. I sincerely hope you find your way back to God, but until you do, please refrain from insulting everyone else’s faith.
Chrystine:
Thanks for opening up discussion.
You speak of knowing that a god is the starter of the universe. How do you know this? I am a reasonable, rational being and when presented with evidence or proof, I accept the claim provided the evidence is provable and repeatable.
You say you have faith, but what is that? Faith is believing in something that has no evidence or proof. I do not see that behavior as commendable. Here we are back to my status message. Religion makes a virtue out of not knowing something, assuming an answer devoid of evidence and calling it the truth. On top of this, religions start wars, control others who disagree promoting hatred, cover up child rape, deal in hoards of money through mega churches, and even discourage science at every crossroad; ALL in the name of a god.
Until the claim for a god can be proven, I will remove myself from superstitious groups and challenge those who blindly follow groups that promote ignorance and human suffering on so many different levels.
George W Bush once said that God told him to start the war in the middle East. In normal society, people who hear voices in their head telling them to harm others are committed to a mental institution for treatment. Somehow if the voice hearer claim a sky god was the voice, then we let them obey those “voices in their head” and even defend them.
Ann:
I wasn’t trying to open up discussion about this. I have reasons for following God and you have reasons for being an atheist. Like I said, you’re entitled to think whatever you want. But you can think it without hurling insults at religion and making gross generalizations about Christians. I try to follow Jesus’ teachings and he never promoted hatred, covered up child rape or dealt with hoards of money or started wars. I took you off my friends list because I was just sick of seeing it. It’s bigotry and you’re using some nasty stereotypes. I’m tired of seeing it so I took you off my friends list so I won’t have to. I was just hoping you would realize what you’re doing.
Chrystine:
that’s fine. I understand that u can’t defend what u think and it is easier to make me go away than argue your side.
Ann:
This isn’t about defending what I think, it’s about you being nasty and offensive. I’m not going to waste my time arguing with you because it would be like what they say about wrestling with a pig. You only get dirty and the pig likes it.
Chrystine:
I have a hard time understanding what is offensive about logic and reason. If you find it in you to insult me by comparing me to a pig that is your prerogative.
—–
And here is where I was removed from her “friend list” and conveniently ignored without reply.
Sam Harris, prominent author and outspoken American atheist has just launched a new website project call “The Reason Project”. It is a great resource for articles and tools to equip you and others with reason and knowledge.
In the 2008 year I came out to my family as an atheist. I agree with some atheist homosexuals I know that coming out as an atheist can be more taboo in some families than finding out one’s son or daughter is gay. Perhaps it means that people truly understand that a person is unable to alter their sexual preference, unlike one’s religious or non religious standing.
It did not help my family to console them with the notion that they to a certain extent are just as atheist as I am; I just take it one god further. As in most families, news such as this spreads like wildfire. I was fairly certain that every one of my extended family members knew I was openly non-theistic by the time a family wedding took place. My partner and I flew back home for the event, so our arrival was packed with family and friend visits.
To my astonishment, many people who would never wish to open their mouth and let the word religion spill out of it, approached me with religious questions or topics on atheism. 5 family members of mine and 1 family member of my partner engaged in discussion with me on the topic of atheism. 3 friends also spoke in length about religion and atheism. Although, I may have instigated the conversation of a one or two of those. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole visit. At the family wedding I was the atheist magnet, ushering out questions from family whom I suspected were not on the religion merry-go-round, but have not yet made the move to “come out”.
I can only encourage those who have not let it known how they stand to friends and family to be the voice of reason. If you can defend your position, can defend your worldview and competently debate claims of sky-gods, you will be a vital resource to others who might not yet have the knowledge or courage to be a lighthouse for others in your circles of friends and family. You might be as pleasantly surprised as i was that weekend. Your odds are growing just as fast as the percentage of non-religious Americans increases (8% in 1999 to 16% in 2008). At that rate, we might catch up to Europe’s 48% non-religious sooner than you know!
View this “map of war” to get a visual of how many nations have overthrown the middle east. While you are watching, recall how many conquering nations did so in the name of their religious sky-god.
Understanding why the Catholic church does not allow men to marry is a sticky, muddled mess. It is one of the few differences between the Eastern Byzantine and Roman Catholic branches that split in the Great Schism. In a nutshell, Catholic priests cannot be women because Jesus had a penis (so all priests must have penises like Jesus). Also, priests cannot use their penis for masturbation or sex (in or out of marriage) because the are “brides of Christ”… or grooms of Christ… wait, is that gay? The result is a large population of gay and straight men who cannot help themselves “beat the demon out” and run about horny as toads, many of whom prey on little boys or have secret affairs like our friend Fr. Cutié. Yes, that is his REAL last name.
Fr. Cutié was caught this week by the the tabloids getting cozy with a lady friend. He is a mega-catholic-church priest who was adored by his sheeple, I mean flock, and has a strong media presence on EWTN and in the Spanish community. [read the full Times Article]
The “bride of Christ” code words that are thrown around to describe a priest’s celibacy vows reminds me of so many Christians I know who have a love relationship with Jesus or God that is indistinguishable from a crush on a teacher or pop star. “God is love”, right? To anyone who has had to listen to a virgin, celibate priest’s sermon on how to have a good relationship, I feel your pain. You hear them at weddings all the time. It is akin to asking the Amish how to improve the battery life on your Prius.
Fr. Cutié is just another in the long line of religious hypocrites who say one thing and do another. The very types that this Jesus guy supposedly came to do away with. Celibacy in the church is a joke, and I care naught if it remains as is or changes to allow marriage. One thing is clear: human biology is strong and our DNA wants us to pass on our genes. The unnatural state of forced celibacy does more harm than good in repressing those needs rather than addressing them as parts of the human function. We eat, we sleep, we breath, we have sex.
Recently, the NOAA published these photos taken by a guy in Idaho. They are a very rare phenomon that require very specific conditions to form. It looks designed, doesn’t it? It looks like man made them or a sky-god was playing in the snow. Nope! Just natural causes APPEARING to look designed (just like evolution). Enjoy!
This is a real website, not a joke. It is irresistibly funny though, for a professional web designer AND an non-theist.
Click here for the Flash intro from HELL
Watch the Debate: Included is Christopher Hitchens. Around the 30 minute mark, the Christian panel says that atheism (or as he likes to call it anti-theism) is for the intelligent, the strong and the well connected of thought. He then asks Hitchens why he is so opposed to Christianity which offers (easy) answers for the weak and unintelligent. Enjoy the response!
Hitchen’s book “God is Not Great” presents a detailed look at why religion spoils everything. The extent of logic and examples he presents concerning many different religious cultures and how they commit atrocities will shock even a moderate atheist. His chapter on child abuse and religion was particularly revealing. He describes in depth the torture inflicted on young children through female circumcision in many religions (including Islam) and male circumcision in the Judeo-Christian religion (among others).
I highly recommend this especially to those who wish to know more when demonstrating to the religious how religion does more harm than good. The minimal “good” that religion produces by no means justifies the increasing number of large scale demonstrations of greed, manipulation and bloodshed incurred by religion. I’ll let Hitchens take it from here and plug his own book:
The next 5 pages I will condense into one post, as they are all in the “God Caused” category and there is little else to say about all of them as we have many times previous to this debunked the arguements building up to this point, making the claims rather devoid of logical foundations. But anyway, here we go:
The main arguement for tying Justice to a god is summed up in the line:
..since all humanity accepts the knowledge that some events and standards are better than others—even though cultures may differ on what those events or standards may be—there must be an ultimate Source of such thinking, even if the absolute standard has become distorted over time.
This sort of “reasoning by popularity” stands to prove nothing in the way of what is supposed to be perfect “First Cause”. Saying because a behavior or standard of human interaction is common among humans because God put them there is absurd. This would be like saying
Most humans agree that they like sugar, therefore there must be a god who also likes sugar.
or
Most humans have a fear of pumas, therefore there must be a god who also fears pumas.
This is the argument:
The very fact that we can love and be loved (by God and by others) is yet another proof of a Creator’s love.
Again, they are using a human emotion/action/ability to argue that the “First Cause” cares about humans and made them like itself. The same could be said about hate. Other animals, as far as we can tell, do not carry resentment or hatred for others. Humans can hate, destroy and torture like no other animal can. If we use the same logic as the ICR to say that “God is love” because of the extra-ordinary way humans are able to love, then we should also say that “God is hate” in the same extra-ordinary way that humans are able to hate.
Here, the ICR argues that atheists have no purpose in life because they think they are here only for the time they spend on earth, and nothing comes after death. They go on to say
Humans in particular seek a “reason to exist” and for the most part find it difficult to accept that we are simply here to consume the earth’s resources and die.
Here we have to ask if seeking a reason for existance merits there to be a reason beyond our existance. An atheist will tell you that the reason for your existance is to exist. Once you are done existing, you are done existing and there is no “you” to worry or be sad about your non-existance. You did not exist for trillions of years before you were born and that didn’t seem to bother you. Why should not existing for trillions of years after you exist bother you?
They go on to say that not having religion causes problems without offering an iota of evidence, stats or logic to back up the claims:
Such hopeless beliefs drive many into lives of debauchery and hedonism, and fill the couches of psychologists and psychiatrists all over the world. Teenage suicide is alarmingly high, and the therapitst themselves continue to manifest one of the highest suicide rates in civilized countries. Scandals abound among the leaders of world business, politics, and churches.
I could say the same about religion. Relgion causes wars, hatred between peoples, and encourages discrimination of women, atheists, homosexuals and people of other religions. Religions regions of america order the most cable porn, cause child sexual abuse by clergy.. religion even encourages people to pray instead of seeking medical help, resulting in their death or the death of their child.
The ICR here tries to say that God is the law of entropy. Because things natural degrade to a state of less energy or order, they assume there must be a creator without providing evidence, math or logic to back it up. Simply drop a bottle of milk and you’ll see what they are getting at.
Everyday experiences, such as broken watches and spilled milk, remind us that order does not happen by itself. In fact, our entire universe teaches us that same truth. The earth’s rotation, the moon cycle, and the changing seasons are just a few of the ordered processes observable in nature. These processes don’t happen randomly but are divinely caused by God.
The last sentence is the clincher. Because of Darwin’s research, it is incorrect to say that nothing we know looks designed unless it is designed. “Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious hights of complexity and elegance.”-Dawkins These accomplishments of natural evolution manifest goal-seeking behaviour that “rewards” the process with survival and the continuation of the species and designs.
The last one, God Caused Wisdom is arguably the most absurd gap of logic in the entire “God Caused” portion.
To the extent that humans have any wisdom at all, much less the wisdom necessary to understand a meaningful amount of the working of the universe, the very fact that we can understand at all is more amazing than the marvelous physics of the universe! How can an immaterial mind, residing inside a human body, made mostly of water (along with other constituent elements of the earth), comprehend anything, even this sentence?
The ICR is pulling a classic “it’s complicated therefor it must be supernatural”. The irony of statements like this is that our brains thought up the word “wisdom” and the created the sentence. Our brains find patterns and meaning in our surroundings for survival and we can visual see inside the procesees of the brain with a machine that we created with our brains! Wisdom, or the ability to know and understand, is a lable humans give to a function of the brain. The brain, being the only organ in the body that is aware of itself is unique and highly evolved, however that does not prove or even suggest that a supernatural sky-god exists. If brains were so special and self-awareness so unique a thing, why does every living creature have one and monkeys one very similar to our own? Did god run out of blue prints or ideas and decided to make humans with the same genetic mold as monkeys? Why is it that we share 99.9% similar gene makeup with monkeys?
DNA is like code for living things. This DNA can be turned on or off as demonstrated by science. We see evidence of human evolution from a tailed animal or fish in the womb when a fetus has a tail early in devolopement. Through science we are becoming more versed in the workings of our world and the processes that shape it. Religion is just trying to catch up by taking science and inserting “god” into the unknown gaps of science that is being explored today. Religion runs behind science cleaning up all its blunders in history when religious leaders have been certain about the earth being the center of the solar system or they have been certain that god punishes sins with contageous diseases or when they were positive that the earth was 6,000 years old according to the bible. After they clean up their messes, they run ahead of science as say the have the answers for the unknown portions.
The next 5 pages I will condense into one post, as they are all in the “God Caused” category and there is little else to say about all of them as we have many times previous to this debunked the arguements building up to this point, making the claims rather devoid of logical foundations. But anyway, here we go:
The main arguement for tying Justice to a god is summed up in the line:
..since all humanity accepts the knowledge that some events and standards are better than others—even though cultures may differ on what those events or standards may be—there must be an ultimate Source of such thinking, even if the absolute standard has become distorted over time.
This sort of “reasoning by popularity” stands to prove nothing in the way of what is supposed to be perfect “First Cause”. Saying because a behavior or standard of human interaction is common among humans because God put them there is absurd. This would be like saying
Most humans agree that they like sugar, therefore there must be a god who also likes sugar.
or
Most humans have a fear of pumas, therefore there must be a god who also fears pumas.
This is the argument:
The very fact that we can love and be loved (by God and by others) is yet another proof of a Creator’s love.
Again, they are using a human emotion/action/ability to argue that the “First Cause” cares about humans and made them like itself. The same could be said about hate. Other animals, as far as we can tell, do not carry resentment or hatred for others. Humans can hate, destroy and torture like no other animal can. If we use the same logic as the ICR to say that “God is love” because of the extra-ordinary way humans are able to love, then we should also say that “God is hate” in the same extra-ordinary way that humans are able to hate.
Here, the ICR argues that atheists have no purpose in life because they think they are here only for the time they spend on earth, and nothing comes after death. They go on to say
Humans in particular seek a “reason to exist” and for the most part find it difficult to accept that we are simply here to consume the earth’s resources and die.
Here we have to ask if seeking a reason for existance merits there to be a reason beyond our existance. An atheist will tell you that the reason for your existance is to exist. Once you are done existing, you are done existing and there is no “you” to worry or be sad about your non-existance. You did not exist for trillions of years before you were born and that didn’t seem to bother you. Why should not existing for trillions of years after you exist bother you?
They go on to say that not having religion causes problems without offering an iota of evidence, stats or logic to back up the claims:
Such hopeless beliefs drive many into lives of debauchery and hedonism, and fill the couches of psychologists and psychiatrists all over the world. Teenage suicide is alarmingly high, and the therapitst themselves continue to manifest one of the highest suicide rates in civilized countries. Scandals abound among the leaders of world business, politics, and churches.
I could say the same about religion. Relgion causes wars, hatred between peoples, and encourages discrimination of women, atheists, homosexuals and people of other religions. Religions regions of america order the most cable porn, cause child sexual abuse by clergy.. religion even encourages people to pray instead of seeking medical help, resulting in their death or the death of their child.
The ICR here tries to say that God is the law of entropy. Because things natural degrade to a state of less energy or order, they assume there must be a creator without providing evidence, math or logic to back it up. Simply drop a bottle of milk and you’ll see what they are getting at.
Everyday experiences, such as broken watches and spilled milk, remind us that order does not happen by itself. In fact, our entire universe teaches us that same truth. The earth’s rotation, the moon cycle, and the changing seasons are just a few of the ordered processes observable in nature. These processes don’t happen randomly but are divinely caused by God.
The last sentence is the clincher. Because of Darwin’s research, it is incorrect to say that nothing we know looks designed unless it is designed. “Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious hights of complexity and elegance.”-Dawkins These accomplishments of natural evolution manifest goal-seeking behaviour that “rewards” the process with survival and the continuation of the species and designs.
The last one, God Caused Wisdom is arguably the most absurd gap of logic in the entire “God Caused” portion.
To the extent that humans have any wisdom at all, much less the wisdom necessary to understand a meaningful amount of the working of the universe, the very fact that we can understand at all is more amazing than the marvelous physics of the universe! How can an immaterial mind, residing inside a human body, made mostly of water (along with other constituent elements of the earth), comprehend anything, even this sentence?
The ICR is pulling a classic “it’s complicated therefor it must be supernatural”. The irony of statements like this is that our brains thought up the word “wisdom” and the created the sentence. Our brains find patterns and meaning in our surroundings for survival and we can visual see inside the procesees of the brain with a machine that we created with our brains! Wisdom, or the ability to know and understand, is a lable humans give to a function of the brain. The brain, being the only organ in the body that is aware of itself is unique and highly evolved, however that does not prove or even suggest that a supernatural sky-god exists. If brains were so special and self-awareness so unique a thing, why does every living creature have one and monkeys one very similar to our own? Did god run out of blue prints or ideas and decided to make humans with the same genetic mold as monkeys? Why is it that we share 99.9% similar gene makeup with monkeys?
DNA is like code for living things. This DNA can be turned on or off as demonstrated by science. We see evidence of human evolution from a tailed animal or fish in the womb when a fetus has a tail early in devolopement. Through science we are becoming more versed in the workings of our world and the processes that shape it. Religion is just trying to catch up by taking science and inserting “god” into the unknown gaps of science that is being explored today. Religion runs behind science cleaning up all its blunders in history when religious leaders have been certain about the earth being the center of the solar system or they have been certain that god punishes sins with contageous diseases or when they were positive that the earth was 6,000 years old according to the bible. After they clean up their messes, they run ahead of science as say the have the answers for the unknown portions.
As an ex-catholic and professionally trained musician, I substitute as organist for local catholic churches in my area. I find ample opportunity to have a good internal laugh listening to the deception and misinformation that flows from pulpits. Let me explain:
In The God Delusion, Dawkins 
discusses evolutionary by-products. The example he chooses to use is a moth flying into a flame as a demonstration of what we see as abject stupidity. Why would a moth deliberately fly into a flame?
This is not an example of natural selection….it is an example of natural selection gone wrong. Moths evolved to fly at night by using celestial objects as guides: Keep the light source in a certain position and you can navigate, much as we do with a compass which points north. Dawkins notes that it was not until comparatively late in evolutionary history that there was anything like artificial lights to throw off the moths. We see only the moths who get distracted by the flames. We do not see millions of moths who merrily go on their way without self-immolating themselves.
So, what is the Darwinian answer to religion? Dawkins sees it this way.
My specific hypothesis is about children. More than any other species we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations and that experience needs to be passed on to children for their protection and well-being. Theoretically, children might learn from personal experience not to go too near a cliff-edge, not to eat untried red berries, not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But, to say the least, there will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents; obey the tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn, minatory tone. Trust your elders without question. This is a generally valuable rule for a child. But, as with the moths, it can go wrong.
Dawkins then continues:
Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-produce is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses. For excellent reasons related to Darwinian survival, child brains need to trust parents and elders whom parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot know that “Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo” is good advice but “You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail” is at best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy. Both come from a respected source and are delivered with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience.
Recently I played an Easter Vigil service at a mega catholic church. They did the whole candle lighting bit where the entire place was dark and the only light emitted was from each person’s candle and one giant 4 foot tall candle on the altar. At this point in the service, I had started zoning out until a large moth flying about caught my attention. I watched it with intrigue having just read the part in Dawkin’s book about moths and religion. It flew in and out of a beam of artificial light that shone on the priest reading something from the altar. Then it got distracted by the giant man-sized candle on the altar. It promptly flew over to the candle and immolated itself right there in the flame. It was a very fitting display to myself and anyone else who might have known the resemblance to the moth’s suicide and the horrible side effects of religion on humanity.
The Jesuit maxim “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man” clearly understand the net result of this principle. Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
The next sections of the ICR attribute causality of the things we appreciate to a god. The first deals with “God Caused Beauty“. The entire argument states that beauty is a ration and emotional reaction to the world around us and that we hunger for beauty:
That such a hunger exists only in the human being is a wonder in itself! The flower is not impressed with its own majesty; it merely exists with no conscious awareness. The chimpanzee does not gaze longingly on the enigma of the Mona Lisa, nor do the stars muse on the heavens they themselves grace.
First of all, we do not know for certain whether other animals see and appreciate the world in similar ways as humans. They certainly are not at a cognitive level where describing, labeling and recreating beauty is within their power, but that is not evidence for the lack of appreciation. Secondly, through evolution, humans are conditioned to seek what we describe as beauty in nature. It is a survival mechanism when hunting for colorful fruit or lush streams to drink from. We see “beauty” in the opposite sex as part of an attraction mechanism that is involved with natural selection. “Beauty” is a human observation given to visible things around us that we take pleasure in. If the human race evolved to what it has become today but on the planet Mars, we would think red skies and barren desert landscapes were beautiful. Things are what they are regardless of the human qualitative descriptor.
In fact, all humanity eschews destruction and random chaos as “ugly” and attempts to mask death with various levels of cosmetic disguises, and this speaks to the realization that some sights and sounds are not beautiful, and thus there must exist a standard of perfect beauty.
This deduction does not follow. The human perspective on human actions as positive or negative does not require that there be a standard of perfect beauty. The author here is using human attributes as proof for a supernatural perfect being while asserting that humanity is itself imperfect. Perfection does not equal existance.
The next “step” in the ICR proof for a god is in the The Logical Implications. I find it difficult to continue at this point because everything argued in this portion rests upon the premise that there is undeniably one “First Cause” for the universe. In my previous three posts on ICR, I have provided numerous fallacies in this line of reasoning where the ICR has failed to offer scientific evidence to support their claims. At this point, the ICR giddily slides down the path of defining this “First Cause” with human descriptors and emotions:
The First Cause of limitless space must be infinite.
The First Cause of endless time must be eternal.
The First Cause of boundless energy must be omnipotent.
The First Cause of universal interrelationships must be omnipresent.
The First Cause of infinite complexity must be omniscient.
The First Cause of spiritual values must be spiritual.
The First Cause of human responsibility must be volitional.
The First Cause of human integrity must be truthful.
The First Cause of human love must be loving.
The First Cause of life must be living.
Basically, the ICR is trying to charactarize the “First Cause” according to what was produced (the universe and humankind). If we are going to follow this logic and define the “First Cause” (FC) by what it caused into being (let’s give them the benifit of the doubt for a moment), then we have to consider the entirety of what was caused.
Lets go piece by piece. Energy, ENDLESS Time and Space are the three existant things that are attributed to the FC. The FC is said to be omnipotent, infinate and eternal because the FC created these three things. All three of these deductions are baseless and without proof, however the ENDLESS TIME example is the most out of order. In the “Time, Space, and Matter” portion of the argument, the ICR claims that the FC created time. Moreover, they say that:
Time is not eternal, but created. To ask what happened in time before time was created is to create a false paradox without meaning.
The self contradition alone is enough. In the first part of your arguement you cannot say “A is not B, but C” and then later on say “B is A therefore D.”
The next three FC premises about omni- offer no logical proof or deduction. The most obvious one to pick apart is ” The First Cause of spiritual values must be spiritual”. Considering the ICR claims to be scientific, they do not offer any law of spiritual values. Where did these values come from? Are they universal? How do we know they are spiritual? There are many assumptions made that are not explained because there simply is no explaination that could hold water.
The next three speak to the human characteristics of the FC:
The First Cause of human responsibility must be volitional.
The First Cause of human integrity must be truthful.
The First Cause of human love
These three only cover the positives of humanity. If we accept the blanket argument that the FC is a reflection of the charactaristics of it’s creation, then we cannot stop with the positives. We must continue on:
The FC of human violence must be filled with malace.
The FC of human hatred must be angry.
The FC of human greed must be selfish.
The list could go on and on… and much of it would be supported by verses in the Christian bible where the god of abraham kills over 2 million people through the course of the “good book”, is described as a jealous god, and we constantly hear about the “rath of God”.
The last ICR claim is the kicker:
The First Cause of life must be living.
That is akin to saying “the cause of death must be dead”. As we see in the physical world, many things cause something else that does not share the same property to itself. For example lets examine a fire buring from wood. The wood is the first cause and the fire is the life. Pretend for a moment that you are in a hypothetical world that cannot perceive the existance of wood, but you can perceive the flame and heat from the fire when the wood burns. Through your observations, you deduce that the flame seems to be coming out of nowhere, there fore the cause of the fire must be fire. The logic is full of holes. Things are not always as they seem:
In the ICR “Time, Space and Matter” we encounter first a few of the flawed proofs I address in the two privious posts. After this, they continue with:
Many scientists today conduct their research based on their presupposition or belief that nothing exists beyond the natural world—that which can be seen around us—and thus they do not accept that any ultimate Cause exists.
That is correct. However, ICR seeks to scew this position in order to later justify themselves as scientists. Objective science seeks to understand how the universe works without inserting an agenda. Science finds proof and presents it to speak for itself. Today there is no way to know how the bounds outside our physical universe operate. Scientists do not assume that nothing exists outside of the universe, however it does assume that nothing we know of exists outside of or acts upon our physical universe. There simply is no evidence to suggest there is an outside force manipulating the physical universe and we have no way to go outside of it to look. Therefor, science says “we don’t know until we know” and leaves it at that. Religion comes along and fills in the gaps with a supernatural being without evidence. let’s continue…
Scientists at ICR hold to the presupposition that the “uncaused First Cause” is the Creator who exists outside of the physical creation He made. Time is not eternal, but created. To ask what happened in time before time was created is to create a false paradox without meaning. There was no “before” prior to the creation of the triune universe of time, space, and mass/energy.
A true scientist does not hold presuppositions. Scientists have “givens” (things that have been previously scientifically proven as true) and conduct observations and experiements to find the answer to the one “not given” in an equation or question. “Physicists have long struggled to understand what time really is. In fact, they are not even sure it exists at all. In their quest for deeper theories of the universe, some researchers increasingly suspect that time is not a fundamental feature of nature, but rather an artefact of our perception.1” In A Brief History of Time and elsewhere, Hawking says that even if time did not begin with the Big Bang and there were another time frame before the Big Bang, no information from events then would be accessible to us, and nothing that happened then would have any effect upon the present time-frame. Einstein presented the argument that space and time are entangled as space-time. Time is just one of 13+ dimensions of the universe that we can perceieve.
Finally, the proof takes a giant leap without proof:
Yet even more amazing (and the universe is amazing) is the historic fact that the Creator-God, after purposefully creating the time-space-matter universe, chose to enter it in the God-human person of Jesus Christ—for the sole purpose of providing a means by which humanity could have a personal relationship with the Creator.
1. Just because something is amazing does not default it to unknowable. We used to worship the sun and moon because they were amazing and mysterious to us.
2. Jumping from saying there must have been a “First Cause” to saying that we know for a fact that that first cause PURPOSEFULLY started the universe, still cares about it, is a MALE, and wants to have a personal relationship with the one species out of trillions on a tiny planet out of billions in a tiny solar system out of billions is a very LARGE assumption to be making without repeatable evidence.
Let’s visit Flatland with Dr. Quantum to get an idea of how dimensions like space-time can be limiting on the human perception and may just be an illusion:
Here is the arguement of the Effect Problem:
1. There is no new mass/energy coming into existence anywhere in the universe, and every bit of that original mass/energy is still here.
2. Every time something happens (an event takes place), some of the energy becomes unavailable.
The First Law tells us that matter (mass/energy) can be changed, but can neither be created nor destroyed. The Second Law tells us that all phenomena (mass/energy) continually proceed to lower levels of usefulness.
In simple terms, every cause must be at least as great as the effect that it produces—and will, in reality, produce an effect that is less than the cause. That is, any effect must have a greater cause.
When this universal law is traced backwards, one is faced again with the possibility that there is an ongoing chain of ever-decreasing effects, resulting from an infinite chain of nonprimary ever-increasing causes. However, what appears more probable is the existence of an uncaused Source, an omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, and Primary, First Cause.
Yet again, they jump from provable science Laws to labeling that which set the physical universe in motion. In the “Everything Has a cause” proof, they deduced that there is only two answers to the problem of causality. In this proof, they jump from saying there is only two choices to saying ‘they obvious choice is a singular First Cause’. Saying that there is an ever-decreasing chain of effects since the beginning of the universe tells you nothing about HOW it was caused. That simply tells you how much energy it had when it began and the rate of decay of energy in the system. Just because we cannot wrap our minds around how the universe started does not default it to being an “omnipotent, omniscient, eternal and Primary First Cause.”
To quote Dawkins in “The God Delusion“:
Omniscience and onmipotence are mutually incompatable. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history (miracles, answered prayers) using his onmipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.
This is the first in a series of posts addressing the issues with Institute for Creation Research (ICR) “proofs” offered on their website. This post deals with the “Everything Has a Cause” proof.
The line of reasoning they offer is very short and in a nutshell, they argue that because everything has a cause (cause and effect), all that exists harkens back to the “First Cause”.
Eventually, we must face the question of the original cause—and uncaused First Cause. … Science in the modern sense would be altogether impossible if cause and effect should cease.
At this point, they are logically correct and in line with science. So far what we have been able to assertain through scientific research is that the big bang was a singularity where all the energy and matter in our universe today that comprises all the elements, dark matter, solar systems and tiny planets like earth were all compacted into that singularity. Science so far has not been able to answer the question of what came before that singularity “burst” into our expanding universe. This is where they go awry:
This law inevitably leads to a choice between two alternatives: (1) an infinite chain of nonprimary causes (nothing ultimately responsible for all observable causes and effects); or (2) an uncaused primary Cause of all causes (the One absolute Cause that initiated everything).
Basically they are saying that either one thing caused the big bang or the universe is perpetual and no one thing caused the universe to be set in motion. What they do not provide is how we get from saying we know the universe had a starting point to saying there are only two options for its beginning.
Why does the law of causality lead to a choice between only two alternatives? There could be multiple events or things that caused the universe to begin, not just one. It is possible that whatever caused the universe no longer exists or perished in the prosess of the birth of the universe. It is also probably that outside of our physical universe bound by certain laws of physics and causality, these laws do not hold true or other laws might exist. There are many more probably theories on what existed before the start of the universe:
Hartle–Hawking state
Brane cosmology
Chaotic Inflation theory
Mulitverse
There is currently no way of knowing that which is outside of our physical universe and how the “outside” operates. Also, conjuring up causality and then saying “here are your only two possibilities” does not defunct the answer to the option that offers singularity.
Congressman John Shimkus’s (R-Ill) introductory remarks at a House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing beginning of April 2009.
In this clip, the congressman concludes his inane questioning of British climate change denier Christopher Monckton (and past advocate of forcibly quarantining all people with AIDS for life), by implying that climate change is not a threat because God has already said in the bible that ”the Earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”
He May think that God decides when the earth will end, but if we keep recking it, there won’t be any of US around to enjoy it until it does end.
taken from ForceChange
In preparation to his upcoming trip to Africa, Pope Benedict talked about HIV/AIDS, saying “AIDS is a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, and that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems.”
Does anyone see the irony in taking advice on how to deal with sexual issues and sexually transmitted deseases from a religious leader who has taken a vow of celebacy? The equivilant to taking tips on visiting a third world country from a guy who has never ventured outside his town of birth EVER in his life.
Lets get the facts straight. Science has proven that condoms do not prevent transmission of STDs. They can prevent some, sometimes, but not all STDs all the time. What condoms CAN do in places like Africa where HIV/AIDS is rampant is prevent pregnancies where the child in the womb contracts the disease from the mother. The Pope would have these people simply abstain like himself to solve the problem, but we have billions of years of evolution and the drive to pass on our genes sending a stronger message. We have seen in America the “abstanance only education” largely funded by the Bush admistration was a failure in preventing teen pregnancy. Teens need to be informed on safe sex methods, not told to ignore all those feelings and the boner in their pants. In the end, nature wins and its best that they know how to be safe and responsible than clueless and end up pregnant.
In the end it is about education. Knowledge is power. When the church talks about their “flock” the irony lies with them. The sheeple do what they are told. Using your critical thinking skills is not something promoted in churches as they would loose their “flock” left and right. The catholic church is the biggest promoter of spoon-fed misinformation.
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