From Daily Kos comes a nice obit to a great man who passed away recently, Vine Deloria.

I credit Deloria’s Red Earth, White Lies (an attack on the scientific theory of pre-historic North America), (along with Bordewich’s Killing the White Man’s Indian and Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me) with being my first forays into the art of bullshit detection. I’m a freethinker today largely because of these books.

Deloria (bio, bio) is a personal hero of mine. All those with humanitarian leanings would do well to study this man.

The world misses you already, Vine.

I found this beautiful article at Unscrewing the Inscrutable (via The 2% Company). If any one of you religious types would like to know how atheists feel about the world, read this article. It doesn’t bash any particular faith, but will bash “Santaism”.

Well, if you can imagine all that, you know for just a few moments how it feels everyday to be a grown adult surrounded by wishful childish thinkers clinging to nonsensical myths as if they were real and insisting, in fact force feeding, that mythology to you; people who sometimes turn quite violent, get downright nasty if you express the slightest disagreement with their specific version of the Jolly Old Guy; people who happen to wield incredibly powerful arsenals of WMDs and massive traditional military might as well as running everything from the local police department to the IRS; people who are now are reopening torture chambers and gulags with armies of pundits cackling with delight at the very thought of returning to the good ole torture days.

OK, I saw this on BoingBoing, and have nothing to say about it.

But I had to post it.

Sometimes, things are better in translation.

I want one of these.
 
 
 

I pass along a note to GifS from our favorite Xian visitor, Dena:

Hi everybody! It has been awhile since I have posted a thought on any of your threads. I see that Sable is still going strong. Kudos to her for still coming around. You have to give her credit for that, especially with the beatings she receives quite regularly. Anybody else would have run away by now.

A question arose in my head today that I thought I would present to you all. I would really like to get your individual take(s) on this.

What are your thoughts on ones soul? Do you believe that we each have one? Do you believe in spirits? Auras?

Your responses do not have to be posted on your site if you are not comfortable in sharing. I realize that you do not want to give any ammunition to any heretics that may try to use your responses against you. So if you have a moment to respond and would like to email me, please do so.

I hope you are all well.

Dena

I imagine there will be some variance in the answer to this. As atheists, we have to work out the metaphysical (so to speak) details for ourselves.

For my part: No soul; no afterlife; no auras; without God, life is everything. We are biological through and through. But as what the eggheads sometimes call a “non-reductive materialist”, I think that psychological and experiential properties of humans (and probably other beings) can’t and shouldn’t be “defined away” in terms of neurological talk, in spite of the fact that our minds and experiences are realized by those brain states. Instead, psychological and experiential features of human beings are physically realized but real and ineliminable aspects of the world. Materialism of this sort in no way devalues or minimizes the importance of human life and human concerns, but instead sees it as a centrally important to and inseparable from the rest of the natural world.

And then there’s the whole Mirror-World, where I am a Christian Minister, and Hillary is president. But that’s another post.property against loan indialoan payday alaskaloans american airlines100 house loans nzcollege repayment loan 20credit score 400 loansminus loans aloans student act canada Map

Justices won’t review “In God We Trust” dispute

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a ruling that the inscription “In God We Trust” on the front of a government building in North Carolina does not violate church-state separation. [...] Attorneys for the two lawyers asked the justices to set aside the appeals court’s ruling and send the case back for reconsideration in view of the Supreme Court’s decision in June that Kentucky courthouses violated church-state separation by putting copies of the Ten Commandments on display. The high court rejected the appeal without any comment or recorded dissent.

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Newdow is at it again. Of course, he’s absolutely right.

Atheist plans lawsuit challenging motto on U.S. currency

Michael Newdow said Sunday that he planned to file a federal lawsuit this week asking for the removal of the national motto, “In God We Trust,” from U.S. coins and dollar bills. He claims it’s an unconstitutional endorsement of religion and “excludes people who don’t believe in God”….

And once again, opponents act as if the placing of “In God We Trust” on money and its establishment as a “national motto” is as old as the constitution, when it’s partially as result of a “Christian Nation” movement around the time of the Civil War, and partially — like the insertion of “under God” in the pledge — an artifact of the anti-communist 1950’s. (See the U.S. Treasury’s fact sheet on this here, as well as In God We (Don’t) Trust.)

No, it doesn’t.

Archaeologists have recently found a shard of pottery with the name “Goliath” inscribed on it.

The shard dates back to around 950 B.C., within 70 years of when biblical chronology asserts David squared off against Goliath, making it the oldest Philistine inscription ever found, the archaeologists said.

So does that lend any significance to the historical account in the Bible? Let me get my shoehorn outhere. Urrrgghh, that data is hard to force in there!

No. While the finding is incredible, it proves exactly dick when it comes to Biblical chronology.

While the discovery is not definitive evidence of Goliath’s existence, it does support the Bible’s depiction of life at the time the battle was supposed to have occurred, said Dr. Aren Maeir, a professor at Bar-Ilan University and director of the excavation.

No. It proves that the name “Goliath” goes back to 950 B.C. That’s all. Reading anything else into the finding is shoehorning it in to what you want to believe. It’s just not intellectually honest.
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Xtians are Wackos

“Consider one memo highlighted in a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday that Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, sent the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to describe his strategy for protecting the tribe’s gambling business. In plain terms, Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.

“The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees,” Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. “Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them.” The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious “wackos” could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it. ”

There’s a book called What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America which is a nice companion to this article. (if you’ve ever wondered why the red states constantly vote against their own best interests, read this)

So, the next time you’re told that GOP means “God’s Own Party” – remember this e-mail.

And when the next election comes around, think.