Sorry to post back-to-back YouTubes, but this one deserves attention.

Thanks to Alan at Meet an Atheist for posting this one. Alan states, “Here is another very brave woman living in a suppressive Arab country.” This is very encouraging to see women speaking out against oppression despite the great dangers they put themselves in.

This is for those who claim the bible to be the inerrant word of god, but choose to overlook much of the evil and repulsive stuff that the bible contains.

It’s good we have laws against many of gawd’s commands that are found in his book of horrors, and hopefully it’s more than just the laws of a secular nation keeping people from abiding by all of gawd’s word.

And here comes yet another one…

Dinosaurs, humans coexist in U.S. creation museum

PETERSBURG, Kentucky (Reuters) – Ken Ham’s sprawling creation museum isn’t even open yet, but an expansion is already underway in the state-of-the art lobby, where grunting dinosaurs and animatronic humans coexist in a Biblical paradise. [...] For them, a museum showing Christian schoolchildren and skeptics alike how the earth, animals, dinosaurs and humans were created in a six-day period about 6,000 years ago — not over millions of years, as evolutionary science says — is long overdue. While foreign media and science critics have mostly come to snigger at exhibits explaining how baby dinosaurs fit on Noah’s Ark and Cain married his sister to people the earth, museum spokesman and vice-president Mark Looy said the coverage has done nothing but drum up more interest. “Mocking publicity is free publicity,” Looy said. Besides, U.S. media have been more respectful, mindful perhaps of a 2006 Gallup Poll showing almost half of Americans believe that humans did not evolve, but were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

Oh yes, mocking publicity is definitely free publicity — so you morons can thank me for this post later. (And everyone should be only slightly concerned about that last sentence.)

Rather than force skeptical teachers to debate creation, Ham wants kids to come to his museum, where impassioned experts can make their case that apparently ancient fossils and the Grand Canyon were created just a few thousand years ago in a great flood. [...] “I don’t think it’s going to be forcing any viewpoint on them, but challenging them to think critically about their evolutionary views,” said Manto, who studied classical sculpture before joining the museum.

Dogmatic Evolutionists, Beware! You’ve all met your match…

Definitely been feeling the punch from this one…

Ice storm lashes much of U.S.; 20 dead

Waves of freezing rain, sleet and snow since Friday have caused at least 11 deaths in Oklahoma, six in Missouri, two in Texas and one in New York. Seven adults were killed early Sunday near Elk City, Okla., when the minivan they were in hit a slick spot on Interstate 40, crossed the median and hit a tractor-trailer, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol reported. [...] In Albany, N.Y., a 22-year-old fell about 90 feet from a bridge to a road below after climbing a railing to avoid being hit by a sliding car. He had gotten out of his vehicle around 2 a.m. after a crash.

So, the kid tries to get out of the way of a sliding car and falls 90 feet to his death. I’m sure that family’s gonna have a grand old time this year.

But hey, whatever. We all know the real reasons why these things happen: humans bring all this crap on themselves, it brings people together, he’s in a better place, blah-blah-blah…

Feel the Love of Your Creator, People…FEEL-THAT-LOVE…

Praise Be! Glory!

[*sigh*]

UPDATE:

During the weekend, the cold had frozen water pipes in the Phoenix area and flooded shelters with homeless people.

Nice…

Jimmy Buffett- Fruitcakes
Just for laughs.
“Mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa” LOL!

Lyrics

As a grad student with a family, I’m required to have a few sources of income. Besides teaching and some other work on campus, I also have a part time job I’ve been at for a while that allows me a pretty good degree of flexibility combined with little need to think too much about the actual work, due to its relative simplicity. Ok, you’re probably asking, why do we care about your work situation? Well, I’m just setting a little background for a tale of… religion at work!!! Nameless company that I work for has a moderately high turnover rate due to the interchangeability of most of the employees since only a few of us really need to know what we’re doing to make the place run smoothly. As such, we get quite the spectrum of backgrounds coming through as well as differing ideas about what are appropriate topics of conversation for work, such as asking your coworkers about their religious beliefs.

So the other day, one of our newest employees was working, on company time no less, on a program for her church/mosque. I’m not sure which because after looking at it, it was hard to tell what the religion was because it seemed to combine Nation of Islam beliefs about history with a belief in Jeebus. Anyway, the point is this person was effectively stealing from the company by working on personal business while her other duties were going ignored, not that religious people being hypocrites is anything new. Not being a supervisor and knowing that her contributions are effectively useless anyway I ignored it. Later, while I was working on something else, a copy of her church’s program or manifesto or whatever the hell it was was left lying around. Like a moth drawn to a flame, I had to see what was inside with the same morbid curiosity that leads me to read every Chick tract I find lying around. Well, using her witnessdar, my intrepid coworker of unknown faith system appeared as if out of nowhere right next to me. “Oh, you’re reading that?” she asked. “Well it was lying here and I had no idea what it was,” I told her trying to change the subject. “Would you like to learn more about it?” she asked. Oh crap, I thought. “No.” “King Retard, are you religious?” she asked. “Not at all” I answered too quickly. “Well… you DO believe in gawd, don’t you?” she followed up with.

Now here was the dilemna, like Stardust in her New Year’s column discusses, I’m generally an “out” atheist. I don’t force it on people but I don’t take any pains to hide it. That said, I truly believe that work is no place for religion unless you’re in a religious line of work. I really wanted to let her know exactly what I don’t believe in due to the smug way she assumed that I MUST believe in gawd; however, for job reasons, since telling her that I’m an atheist would have undoubtedly caused her to see herself as being persecuted, even though I was the one being harassed, I simply told her that this was a conversation that was inappropriate for work. After all, Hell hath no fury like a religious nut scorned. I still feel like I took the wimpy way out. So how do you deal with religion at work?

I am nearly finished with Sam Harris’ excellent little book, Letter to a Christian Nation. Here is an excerpt from the section titled Are Atheists Evil? This is in response to those who have made comments about atheists causing as much harm to humankind as religious folks:

“. . . Do members of the atheist organizations in the United States commit more than their fair share of violent crimes? Do members of the National Academy of Sciences, 93 percent of whom do not accept the idea of God, lie and cheat and steal with abandon? We can be reasonably confident that these groups are at least as well-behaved as the general population. And yet, atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States. Polls indicate that being an atheist is a perfect impediment to running for high office in our country (while being black, Muslim, or homosexual is not). Recently crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world — burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people — in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper. When was the last atheist riot? Is there a newspaper anywhere on this earth that would hesitate to print cartoons about atheism for fear that its editors would be kidnapped or killed in reprisal?

Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Li Sung spring from the womb of atheism. While it is true that such men are sometimes enemies of organized religion, they are never especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements are often delusional: on subjects such as diverse as race, economics, national identity, the march of history, and the moral dangers of intellectualism. The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance. There is a difference between propaganda and the honest dissemination of information that we (generally) expect from a liberal democracy. Tyrants who orchestrate genocides, or who happily preside over the starvation of their own people, also tend to be profoundly idiosyncratic men, not champions of reason. Kim Il Sung, for instance, demanded that his beds at his various dwellings be situated precisely five hundred meters above sea level. His duvets had to be filled with the softest down imaginable. What is the softest down imaginable? It apparently comes from the chin of a sparrow. Seven hundred thousand sparrows were required to fill a single duvet. Given the profundity of his esoteric concerns, we might wonder how reasonable a man Kim Il actually was.

Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continuted presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominantly secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide.

Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that the Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea.

The problem with religion — as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology — is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became to desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.”

(Sam Harris Letter to a Christian Nation Knopf, 2006)

This short video by Why God Won’t Heal Amputees.com adds to recent discussions we’ve had about xian delusional beliefs.

“If you are a Christian, you are about to begin a fascinating journey. In the next ten minutes it will become clear to you that your belief in God is delusional.

The goal of this short video is to help you look in a mirror and understand the delusion of Christianity. Once you can see what is going on, the hope is that you will be able to start healing your delusion. With each healing, we make our world a better place.”