Doubting Timmy

Here’s a weird story.

In Sweden a group of software pirates has been trying to get their “church” recognized as an official religion and thus immune to laws against file sharing and software piracy.

The church of Kopimism (copy me, get it?) was recently denied official recognition by Swedish authorities.

Church founder, Isak Gerson said,

“One thing is certain though. We will continue meeting, believing in copying, deepen our faith and church, and fight politically for a world where copying is not only accepted by encouraged. We know that this is not only our dream and cause, but our calling.”

Link here.

Happy belated New Year everyone. Sorry for the lack of posts of late, but I’ve been extremely busy with other projects and I hope to begin more regular posting soon.

Anyway, on to the topic that’s got the atheists on Twitter hopping — Bill O’Reilly’s interview with David Silverman of American Atheists.

In the piece, Bill is confronting David about atheist billboards, which in Bill’s mind, are insulting to Christians and other believers.

One of the billboards that has Bill’s undies in a bunch reads, “You Know They’re All Scams,” referring to religions. Bill then goes on to say why, in his opinion, religions are not scams.

Ready?

Tides.

Yep. Tide goes in, tide goes out, and we (atheists) can’t explain how that happens. Therefore, God.

I was disappointed that David didn’t call Bill on this. In fact, he pretty much fumbled the ball here by saying that we don’t have to explain it, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he was probably just as baffled by that argument as I am.

I’m no scientist, but I know how to use Google, and here’s what I came up with when searching for tides.

Tide-generating forces (TGF) are a result of the gravitational attraction between the earth, the sun, and the moon and the centrifugal force due to the relative motions of the moon around the earth, and the earth around the sun.

That was on the first page after a search that took about a second. And it doesn’t say anything about a magic entity living in outer space.

Really, Bill? This is the best argument you can come up with for the existence of a magic man in the sky? Did your Catholic education fail to teach you basic science? Can you not use a search engine? You couldn’t have thrown out dark matter or anti-matter or even what existed before the Big Bang?

And the sad part is that I imagine that a significant number of Bill’s audience shouted, “Yeah! What about that, Mr. Atheist?” at their TV screens. “Woo hoo! Score one for our side!” (Come on, you know that happened.)

If ignorance is bliss, then Bill O’Reilly must be one of the happiest guys on the planet.

There’s an old saying, “Nothing fails like prayer.” And when a prayer fails, the results are generally inconsequential. You prayed that your team would win and they didn’t. You prayed for sun and it rained. You prayed that you would get a promotion and it went to one of your coworkers.

But there are times when the results of failed prayer are deadly, and it’s usually in the case of a person who is ill and chooses to rely on prayer as opposed to medical treatment. I genuinely don’t have a problem when an adult opts to rely on divine healing over proven medical techniques, but when adults make that decision for a child, I get angry.

Herbert and Catherine Schaible, a fundamentalist Christian couple from Philadelphia, PA, were recently convicted and could face up to 10-years in prison for the death of their  2-year old son, Kent, who was stricken with pneumonia.

The Schaible’s attend First Century Gospel Church, which believes that God is better at healing than the medical community.

According the the church’s pastor, Nelson A. Clark, “The legal community is trying to force our church group to put them in the hands of this flawed medical system, when they have chosen to put them in the hands of a perfect God, who does not make mistakes.”

I’m trying to wrap my head around this logic. If your god wants your child dead then what harm would it be to take said child to a doctor?

Source.

You may have heard that Ark Encounter LLC, and Answers in Genesis, are joining forces to build a $150 million theme park in Kentucky based around the Noah’s Ark story found in the Bible.

According to the story, the theme park will include a full-size replica of the ark, a Tower of Babel, a 14-acre walled city, and a play area for kids. Admission to the park will be $45 for adults and $20 for kids, however a burnt offering will get your whole crew in for free.

Okay. I made that last part up.

Now, far be it from me to pass judgment, (oh, who am I kidding, I LOVE passing judgment) but it seems that the $24.5 million needed to build the ark (expected to be paid for by donations) could feed a lot of hungry children all over the world.

You might be thinking that I’m going to go off on a rant about how the millions of dollars needed to build this monument to willful ignorance could feed an awful lot of starving children around the world, and how the people intending to build said monument pride themselves on following a man who said, “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor,” but no, I’m not going to make that argument.

I’m arguing for the children. No, not the starving children, but the children who are going to be forced by their religious bat shit parents to waste a good vacation in this insipid theme park.

Think of those poor kids , like poor little Bobby, who have to go back to school after summer vacation and face the cool kids who got to go to places like Cedar Point or Disneyland.

Bobby: “Hey Eric, where’d  you guys go for vacation?”

Eric: “Aw man, we went to Cedar Point. I rode the Magnum XL 200 four times,  the Millennium Force five times, and the water park was awesome.  They also had this massive arcade with, like, a thousand video games. Where’d you guys go?”

Bobby: “We went to Noah’s Ark Land. I got to play in the Tower of Babel. We also sang hymns and learned about Jesus. Are you saved, Eric?”

Do you see where this is headed? Bobby will be shunned by his classmates and probably resort to cutting himself in order to gain attention. Sure, he’ll be the model student in Sunday school, but secretly, he’ll be harboring thoughts about having sex with chickens and stuffing small animals up his ass.

Or maybe not. But do we really want to take the chance?

So, yesterday, a news helicopter captured a missile being fired off the coast of Los Angeles. As of yet, nobody is saying why this missile was launched or who launched it. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Robert Ellsworth, suggested that the launch may have been done to, “demonstrate mainly to Asia that we can do that.”

Fortunately, there’s a more plausible explanation, which is that the missile was in fact a preemptive strike by the United States on Iran. So why did the missile fail to hit its target?

Well, there’s a plausible explanation for that too. And here it is.

This is a rather dated story, but its continuing to make the rounds in the atheist blogosphere, so I thought I’d weigh in.

On a highway in southern Utah, midway between Tropic and Cedar City, a mammoth cross marks the place where, 29 years ago this month, state trooper Lynn Pierson was killed by a car thief. Pierson’s son Clint, a 36-year-old county deputy, sees the stark white memorial every time he takes his kids to the local Wal-Mart. “It’s a huge source of pride,” he says. “As a family, it helped us heal.”

There are 14 such crosses, all of them 12 feet tall, scattered around the state, each bearing the name of a dead trooper and the Utah Highway Patrol insignia. They were erected by the privately funded Utah Highway Patrol Association beginning in 1998, and whether they continue to stand is in the hands of a federal judge in Salt Lake City, who must decide if the crosses are symbols of remembrance or religion. U.S. District Judge David Sam heard arguments earlier this week on both sides of the constitutional debate and has promised to rule soon.

The controversy started in December 2005, when American Atheists Inc. filed suit to have the markers removed, arguing that the cross is a universal symbol of Christianity and, when placed on public property, illegal. The lawsuit sparked outrage from the families of fallen officers, other police officers and legislators. Even some atheists went out of their way to dissociate themselves from the Texas-based group.

American Atheists recently posted on their website that the reason they’re fighting the display of these memorials is because they’re “an affront to the Utah  Constitution and the Constitution of the United States.” They argue — as do many atheists — that the crosses are a Christian symbol and that there are better ways to honor fallen police officers that don’t promote a particular religion.

The courts so far have agreed with this position. In August, 2010, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, “We hold that these memorials have the impermissible effect of conveying to the reasonable observer the message that the state prefers or otherwise endorses a certain religion.

I perfectly understand those points, and on the surface, I agree with them.

However Assistant Attorney General, Thom Roberts, argued in court that the cross — while initially a religious symbol — has evolved into a secular one much in the way Christmas and businesses being closed on Sunday have become secularized. He went on to argue that the cross has become widely recognized as a universal symbol of death having lost much of its Christian connotation.

At this stage in my thinking, I tend to agree with Mr. Roberts. This is only my opinion, mind you, but I think that the cross has lost much of its religious impact in our secular society. When I see the cross displayed on the side of the road where an accident claimed a victim, my immediate thought isn’t that the person was a Christian or that it’s a religious display, but rather that it’s a place where someone died.

Some would argue that, “Well, would you be saying the same thing if it was the Star of David on the side of the road?”

My answer is no because that’s still tied directly to Judaism — it hasn’t been secularized like many Christian symbols and customs have.

I understand that among atheists, I’m probably in the minority on this right now (American Atheists called this position, “astoundingly ridiculous.”) However, I would like to ask those atheists who disagree with me if they still celebrate Christmas. I know many who do and I’ve always found that a little humorous. They’ll fight tooth-and-nail against something like this, but they’ll gladly embrace a holiday that wouldn’t exist without Christianity.

To me, the subject of the crosses as memorials is the same thing. If we atheists can enjoy a Christian holiday like Christmas, then we should be able to see these memorials as simple reminders of a death that occurred rather than an endorsement of a particular religion, which I believe is their intent.

I have no doubt that there are plenty who think that I’m way off base on this, and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that I hadn’t thought something completely through. So please, if you have a good case to make, let me know your thoughts.

Is the cross still tied directly to Christianity or has it lost much of its religious trappings much like Christmas? And, as an atheist, how do you choose which Christian (or any religious) customs to embrace and which to fight against?

As you all know, the subject of UFOs — or more specifically — aliens from outer space, is something in which I’ve had varying degrees of interest since I was a kid.

I have no idea if there are advanced civilizations in other galaxies or if they have the means to visit us on a regular basis (the physics say, probably no), but there are plenty of people who think that these beings are doing just that.

Why are they coming here? Some speculate that they’re coming here to keep tabs on our development and use of nuclear weapons.

A story appeared today on Wired.com in which several retired Air Force officers held a press conference, put together by Robert Hastings,  to detail their encounters with unidentified crafts and talk about how they may have been monitoring our nuclear weapons programs.

According to the story:

Charles Halt, a retired colonel, didn’t know if he was going to be probed or abducted when he saw something that “looked like a large eye, red in color, moving through the trees” in an English forest near a Suffolk base called Bentwaters. But suddenly it “exploded” into “five white objects” that sped away into the night sky without harming him.

Robert Jamison was a young lieutenant working as a Minuteman targeting officer on Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1967. “My main job was to point the missiles in right direction,” he joked. But one night in March, all ten of his missiles, known as a flight, suddenly went off alert status — right as rumors of a UFO visit circulated through Malmstrom. While he never himself saw any aliens, he heard about a UFO landing in a “deep ravine” nearby and interviewed a security guard who described “two small red lights off at a distance” that began to close in; the guard broke down and cried at the recollection. Jamison believes the encounter was an incident that’s come to be known as the Belt, Montana UFO sighting.

I have heard and read many stories from reputable people about mysterious happenings around nuclear arsenals, and while I can understand why another civilization might want to keep tabs on the primitives, they whole idea sounds too much like the plot from The Day The Earth Stood Still (the original) for my tastes.

The striking thing about these stories is that most of the people reporting them are highly trained military personnel. That’s not to say that they aren’t prone to making mistakes, but the believers say that their expertise makes them more credible eyewitnesses than the average Joe.

Maybe so, but one can only wonder if these advanced aliens had the technology to make our missiles inoperable, why wouldn’t they just leave them in that state instead of returning them to normal status once they completed their visit.

It’s also curious as to why these aliens — if they indeed want us to stop our nuclear proliferation — wouldn’t pick a less ambiguous way of letting us know. That’s one of the big problems that I have with the concept of gods or aliens communicating with us humans — why all the ambiguity? Why leave it to us stupid apes to try and figure out what you’re trying to tell us?

If it’s easy enough for me to write up a grocery list clear enough to ensure that a friend comes back with the right kind of Pop Tarts, surely a super-intelligent being (or beings) can deliver a clear message that we can understand.

I will agree, however, that getting us to give up nuclear weapons would probably be higher on the aliens’ list of priorities than sticking things in our bottoms or making pretty designs in wheat fields.

Source.

Christians have a long history of touting miraculous cures handed down from heaven above, either from God directly, or through the intervention of a saint.

Now a Portsmouth, RI company called Daniel Chapter One is in trouble with the FTC  for selling herbal cancer cures.

According to the company’s owner, James Fiejo, “Radiation, drugs, vaccines, antibiotics, chemotherapy – that’s of the devil. That’s of the anti-christ.”

Daniel Chapter One is a Christian ministry and uses the angle of “God-given herbs and nutrients” to sell their natural remedies and glorify Jesus Christ.

James and his wife, Patricia, were ordered by the FTC to stop advertising their products as cures for cancer because of the lack of scientific evidence to support their claims.

During a 2009 hearing before an administrative law judge at FTC headquarters in Washington, the Fiejos sought to submit customer testimonials as proof of their claims that their products work as advertised, however the judge disallowed these testimonials on the grounds that the scientific community doesn’t regard testimonials as good evidence to support a claim.

The Fiejos are arguing that they’re a religious ministry that’s operating for charitable purposes and that fact should take them out of the jurisdiction of the FTC.

Source.

Sorry I’ve been away from updating for so long, but sometimes life gets in the way, and, truth be told, while there’s plenty going on in the news, I really haven’t felt compelled to write about any of it.

It’s a damned good thing that I’m not getting paid to do this otherwise I’d have been in the unemployment line a long time ago.

Anyway, my plan is to try to find some motivation over the coming weekend and get back to regular posting starting next week.