God's guilt.

My new obsession is reading Ray Comfort's blog, because I am addicted to watching train wrecks of logic. But I found myself agreeing with Ray on one point. God is not guilty of murder.

I would not find God guilty of murder in the case of Noah's flood. According to the Bible, God kills everyone in a giant flood, knowing full well in advance that it would not rid the world of wickedness. Women, children and old men all drowned. But God isn't guilt, because the flood never happened. There is no evidence of the crime.

Also God isn't guilty of killing all of the first born in all of Egypt, when nearly all of the first borns came from families that had no authority to release the Israelites, because there is no proof that it happened.

And in Leviticus 10:1-6, when God kills Aaron's two sons, and then commands Aaron not to morn or else 'Yahweh's wrath will come upon the whole community.' Again, there is no proof that any of these people are real.

Or when in Joshua 7:24 when the Israelites stone Achan's sons and daughters because their father had contraband. God can not be found at fault, because we don't have hard evidence that He ordered the hit.

Or the countless genocides God seems to order in the old testament should not be held against Him. I could say that the boogey-man made me kill all of those people, but would that make the boogey-man guilty of murder?

Or the countless people who have been executed in the name of God for reasons as varied as not being a virgin, to being a witch, to disobeying a man, and to simply having a slightly different notion of who Jesus was. God's followers are guilty and not God himself.

God's innocence rests solely on His non-existence. To call God a murderer is as inane as calling Jason from the Friday the 13th movies series a murderer.

But if He is real, then He has a lot to answer for. For every starving child, He could poof a loaf of bread into existence. For every gun fired in anger, He could turn the bullet into a butterfly. He could quell earthquakes and dispatch hurricanes with a single thought. But He doesn't. It may not be murder, but it is surely negligent homicide.

Dem Muslem's want our holidays.

Tyson replaces Labor Day with Muslim Eid al-Fitr

Run for dem hills..... It's the end of the world!

Ok, it's not the end of the world. It's just fear mongering. The majority of the works, 700 of 1200 preferred to have this day off rather than labor day. Isn't the will of the majority a central theme to democracy?

The low point of the article comes in the comment - "This is America, founded by the blood of our forefathers and should not be challenged by Somalians, Hispanics, or any other immigrants. If they come to America, they need to learn our language and our ways. They can practice their culture in private if they so please, but not shove it down our throats."

Why isn't this comment in Navajo? I am willing to bet that that comments ancestors weren't on the Mayflower. More than likely they probably didn't come to this country until after the civil war. The commenter also speaks english well. Challenged = Changed.

Why I don't believe.

I know I have not been updating this blog regularly, but it doesn't matter, since no one reads it. This is yet another worthless page in the sea of crap that is the internet.

Speaking of worthless crap on the internet, Ray Comfort's blog is worth a read. Not because it is a brilliant piece of Christian apologetics, but it is quite the opposite. He’ll argue that dinosaurs were heavier than whales, while in his post giving the weighs of both, showing that the whale is heavier. Then, he won’t admit to being wrong, and blame it on the atheist.

In a recent post, he postulated that all atheists are atheists because they hate god. (I am not sure why he thinks that. If a person really hated god, they wouldn’t be an atheist, just an angry theist.) However, as ill-formed and childish as that post was, it lead me to ask a simple question, “Why am I an atheist?”

Let me start of with a simple contradiction, I have not always been an atheist, but I don’t think I ever really believed in God. I say this because although for the most part of my life I would have considered myself a Christian, but looking back on it now, I never really believed. My lips moved during the psalms, but my heart never moved. No matter how much I tried, and I did try, I could never get myself to swallow the kool aid.

I grew up in a liberal Lutheran church, and I even taught Sunday school. It was the kind of church where for 18 or so years that I can remember, there was never a single sermon on the sins of homosexuality. Not one sermon about the impending apocalypse. I can remember the one sermon I liked the most was when the minister spoke out for the separation of church and state. And I can say with all honesty, it was this liberal theology that kept me a theist for a long time. I wanted to know a God that was forgiving, compassionate and loving.

Even in college, I associated myself with Christians. I went to a Christian student group. I think it was there when I started to become aware that I could never be like them. I was dumb struck the first time some one told me that she believed in creationism. She was a smart woman, and yet she spouted half truth and lies. She thought it was possible that dinosaurs and people lived together. There were others too. Very smart people were saying very stupid things, about abortion, homosexuals and biology. I started looking up the facts and arguments they were making. Flash frozen mammoths, DNA being a code, all gays being pedophiles – all turned out to be lies. Not only lies, but they were lies that have been refuted for ten, twenty, even fifty years. Christians were lying to me in the name of Christ.

I started to notice something else. Conservatives believed that God was conservative and was concerned most about conservative issues, like homosexuality and abortion. Liberals had a liberal God, who cared about the environment and justice. God had a different face for everyone. And yet no where was the hand of God evident. God didn’t close all of the abortion clinics and create loving families for all of the children. Nor did God stop the rain forest from being chopped and burnt to the ground. Everyone said He cared about his or her issues, but God did nothing.

By my senior year, I stopped trying to believe. I slipped back into my natural state. God wasn’t there. I wasn’t actively saying He didn’t exist, but I could no longer believe He did. God was like a friend's Canadian girlfriend. Sure he had pictures and letters, but I knew she wasn't real. It was simply easier to let him believe that I believed.

After college I went on to grad school. I became obsessed with creationist and the religious right. My roommate called me the most devote atheist after she caught me watching a Christian cartoon. It was a fascinating mixture of con artist, idiots and believers. Greedy men like Tom Delay and Trent Lott praised Jesus with one breath and said that tax cuts for the wealthy is exactly what Jesus would have wanted with the next. And people believed them. Not because they offered proof, but because they mentioned Jesus. Time and time again, televangelists and evangelists were cheating on their wives or income taxes. I got to be to the point where I figured the more moral one appeared in public, the slimier one was in person.

Where was God? Why would an omnipotent God, allow people to lie and steal in His name? Nearly every single right wing and left wing Christian that became famous turned out to be a moral hypocrite. How could everyone have there only personal messiah, who cared and loved them so, but was willing to send everyone else to hell? Where was the hand of God? The only logical conclusion was that God either did not intervene because He simply wasn’t there.

The sure fire way to get rid of ghosts.

It’s Halloween again; time to dope up little kids on sugar. Why not start the diabetes young? Has eating a few pounds of candy corn ever hurt anyone? (The answer is yes)

It’s also time for ghost stories and for haunted houses. Personally, I am a big fan of haunted houses and ghost stories. Give me a story about a legless axe murder around a camp fire any night. But that is all they are amusement and stories, and nothing more.

However, some people believe in real haunted houses. On CNN’s website, it gives helpful hints on what to do if you house is haunted. The first and most important, is that if you hear weird sounds, look for natural causes first. Then the advice goes down hill from there. "Get ghost hunter to investigate," but " Avoid those who dabble in magic or offer 'magical cleansing'" Also get a reliable "either a professional medium, psychic, or someone who is sensitive to spirits." The word oxymoron pops into mind. Although, it could be ghosts putting those thoughts into my mind.

But CNN does not go far enough with the advise. What can you do for those really tricky ghosts . Since physics are phony, mediums are mediocre and ghost hunters are delusional, there is only one time tested method of getting rid of unwanted ghosts. You simply need to burn the house down. The house can not be haunted if it isn’t a house anymore. Has anyone heard of a haunted pile of ash? No more unexplained creaking sounds. No more cold drafts. Can a physic enter the basement and tell you that a horrible murder has taken place, if there is no basement? Of course not.

Yes, while the Ghost busters could bust a ghost even if they tired, a little be of gasoline and a match while cure any house of its hauntings.

Logic and Atheism

I've read and seen in a few places the following statement. Naturalist believe in only things that the can touched, seen or smelt. Logic can not be touch seen or smelt, therefor naturalist can not use logic.

What a load of crap. First of all logic is based on real world observations. Whether it is used to study arguments and states or the foundation of math. Logic and symbolic logic such as math are just ways in which humans use to interpret the world around us.

When we state that a=a, we don't do that because logic dictates it. We say it because the accumulation of observations have shown a = a. We use logic as a short hand to understand things we have observed thousands of times. It is universal, because something equaling itself, is independent of human observation. Just like in all cultures, 1 + 1 = 2. We don't need the hand of God to insure that a = a.

Also informal logic is just the study of arguments. Once again this is based on observation. We know that an Ad populum argument is a fallacy, because we can find cases were the majority have been wrong. Once again, these conclusions are universal. Again there is no need for the supernatural.

Athiest, Naturalist and or whatever you want to call them do limit themselves to saying that material events have material causes. It does not exclude interpeting said events using human constructs, such as logic. It just implies that the human constructs don't actually affect the physical world. Has logic ever moved a mountain?

The sky is falling. Dirty Commies

Fox News is the Chicken Little of conservative news. Tonight in Georgetown, there were protests against IMF. If you were to listen and watch the local fox news you would think that all hell is breaking lose. The “Chaos on the Street.” “Two groups of protesters, one peaceful and one violent.” , “IMF protest turns violent.”

To recap the whole story, the group of protesters marched in Georgetown. At one intersection, two windows were broken and a brick was thrown and unfortunately hit a woman. That’s it. A peaceful protest, but a couple of yahoos break a couple of windows, and a woman gets injured. The protest continued peacefully. When police officers decide to break up the protest, they did so peacefully.

But the Fox reporter kept talking about the violence and the chaos. It was unreal. At one point in time, the reporter was talking about how the protesters were taking advantage of the police, and on the bottom of the screen there was the words “Chaos on the Street.” But the live video was of a bunch of cops standing around. Not one protester was in the picture. Not one of the cops in the picture looked threatened. They were just milling around, doing nothing and looking all bored. They were cops in desperate need of donuts. It was so violent there that "Dozens of tourists are hanging out in the area, watching the workers board up store windows and asking when the protesters will arrive."

Oh well, I wonder, if the true violence was perpetrated by one of the 150 lesbian gangs in the D.C. area.

There was a very good reason why I had to stab the nun.

I love George W. Bush. I really love him. He amazes me every time. I love low expectations. And, Baby, does he deliver. However, as sub par as he is in nearly every field, there is a field that he excels in -- being a hypocritical asshole. Every time I think the chimp-in-chief can't do anything more assholish, he surprises me yet again. This time he vetoed "The Support for Injured Servicemembers Act" and "The Military Family Job Protection Act." This comes from a man who thinks that name calling a four star general hurts the moral of the troops. Well, I know you can kiss your job good-bye as I extend you're stay in Iraq by three months. But look on the bright side, we got them good for calling general Petraeus names.

When I saw that he vetoed both bills, all I could say was "What an asshole! I don't think he can out do himself now!"

Oh, boy was I wrong. You see the real reason he vetoed the bill was no because he hates the troops. It wasn't because he just felt like being a dick. He vetoed the bill because it contained health insurance for poor children. That right, the commander and chief spit on the troops, just so that he could shit on the children. Next we'll catch him jacking off in the apple pie.


Evilution: Mr. President, why did you stab the nun in the back?

Mr. President: That's simplified answer, I had gots too.

Evilution: Huh?!! Why did you have too stab the nun?!

Mr. President: Well she was protectifying the orphan I want to shot in the face!

Evilution: That's the most evil thing I've ever heard of.

Mr. President (Eying a child holding a lollipop in a stroller): Look, a childrens with a lollipop!

Evilution: Don't tell me you're going to steal that baby's candy.

Mr. President: No, no, stealing are unmoral. I'm going to push the stroller down that hill over yonder. If the baby happens to drops the lolli then so be it.

Evilution: Jesus Chirst!! You're insane.

Mr. President (Angry):How dare you take the name of the lord in vain. You unmoral atheist. You must really hate the troops and America.

At this point the Evilutionist turns around and looks back at his once great country and turns into a pillar of salt.