Got this one from Pharyngula…

One “John Scalzi” went to the Creation Museum for us thinking folk, and reported back for us.

I’m tellin’ ya, this guy cracks me up:

Here’s how to understand the Creation Museum:

Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit. The kind of load of horseshit that has accreted over decades and has developed its own sort of ecosystem, from the flyblown chunks at the perimeter, down into the heated and decomposing center, generating explosive levels of methane as bacteria feast merrily on vintage, liquified crap. This is a Herculean load of horseshit, friends, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Augeas. And you look at it and you say, “Wow, what a load of horseshit.” [...] And this is, in sum, the Creation Museum. $27 million has purchased the very best monument to an enormous load of horseshit that you could possibly ever hope to see.

Hey, and there’s even a photo-log!

WARNING: Don’t drink anything when you see any of this stuff.

Enjoy…

I love these wacky stories I find in Odd News of Yahoo and other places. It boggles my mind that nutty and absurd religious beliefs of all kinds still abound in the year 2007.

Some Hindus think that by marrying a dog this man is going to undo the horrible act of stoning two other dogs to death. He married the dog in order to save himself from a lifelong curse he believes was placed on him by his imaginary friends as punishment for those actions. It’s just like others who think that by simply believing and saying some magic words that all the bad they ever do is forgiven by some invisible man who never, ever shows himself except in their own minds.

Religion relieves guilt, and that is not a good thing, as far as I am concerned. If one believes that no matter what they do, that their imaginary friend will still love them and forgive them, they will keep on doing those things with the assumption that they can perform a magical ritual, utter some magic words to some magical being and all the bad things they have done, all the poor choices, all the hurtful deeds they have done are simply “washed away.”

There are just some things we do in life that might be so awful that we can never forgive ourselves. That doesn’t mean that life can’t go on or that we should beat ourselves up every day for those errors in judgment or spontaneous acts we commit in heated moments. We can admit we did a bad or cruel thing and feel remorseful, but we can’t undo whatever has already been said or done. We can only realize our mistakes and bad choices and correct our behavior and never allow ourselves to make those choices or do those bad things again. Magical rituals, wishful prayers and believing in a magical being who forgives every bad thing we do is silly superstitious thinking.

This is just another example of how religion messes people up psychologically.Maybe this dude is truly remorseful, but it appears to me that the only reason this man wants “atonement” is to help rid HIMSELF of a curse he believes his supernatural overlords put on him because of his cruel actions. If he really wants to “atone” for his crime, it would be better to build shelters for stray animals, help to feed them, have them neutered, or something that would actually do some good.

I feel sorry for the dog.

Man in India Marries Dog for Atonement

NEW DELHI – A man in southern India married a female dog in a traditional Hindu ceremony as an attempt to atone for stoning two other dogs to death — an act he believes cursed him — a newspaper reported Tuesday.

P. Selvakumar married the sari-draped former stray named Selvi, chosen by family members and then bathed and clothed for the ceremony Sunday at a Hindu temple in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, the Hindustan Times newspaper said.

Selvakumar, 33, told the paper he had been suffering since he stoned two dogs to death and hung their bodies from a tree 15 years ago.

“After that my legs and hands got paralyzed and I lost hearing in one ear,” he said in the report.

The paper said an astrologer had told Selvakumar the wedding was the only way he could cure the maladies. It did not say whether his situation had improved.

Deeply superstitious people in rural India sometimes organize weddings to dogs and other animals, believing it can ward off certain curses.

The paper showed a picture of Selvakumar sitting next to the dog, which was wearing an orange sari and a flower garland.

The paper said the groom and his family then had a feast, while the dog got a bun.

Government Seeks to Redefine Privacy

WASHINGTON – A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy. Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, a deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people’s private communications and financial information. Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act. Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S. The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans’ privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.

So, “privacy” should now mean “government safeguarding my information.”

All for my “protection,” of course.

Nice.

Saw this cartoon in The New Yorker. Good for them.

And if you have a second, go check out the Carnival of the Godless.

Looks to be some pretty good stuff there…
[*scanning-looking, scanning-looking*]

Hey! Our own Vjack is in there! And he’s there to tell us why God Hates Yeast:

The infamous passage in Leviticus does indeed state that male homosexuality is wrong (and that men who engage in homosexual must be killed), and yet, this is embedded among so many other laws given to humanity that it hardly stands out. It is fascinating that Christians obsess about the couple brief mentions this receives while completely ignoring the call for blood sacrifices, the clear requirement of stoning for minor crimes, and the multitude of references to the evils of yeast.

Kinda changes the whole “give us this day our daily bread” thingy for me…

Congrats, Vjack!

“Castles in the sand, must fall into the sea, eventually” - Jimi Hendrix.

I realize that I’ve gone off on a tangent on this before - but the utter weirdness the religious invest in is somewhere between addled and insane.

Take this particular hoary old chestnut – “Gwad wuvs you THIS MUCH” (aka the old ‘unconditional love’ gambit).

Not realizing, of course, that the thought rarely (if ever) matches the ‘deed’.

So here we have a quantitatively HUGE amount of supplicants (read: beggars) asking for some form of pittance from on high.

What does their book say about this?

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receives; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. [Matthew 7:7-8].”

One can, with a little dishonesty, play the ‘translation changes the message’ game – but the aforementioned quote is not only open-ended, but fairly clear. Every Christian is considered the ‘favored child’. And regardless as to whether the mendicant gets his/her request granted, it’s always the fail-safe: “It was meant to be.”

And then there’s this ‘unconditional love’ nonsense. I contend there is no such thing among us mortals: even a mother’s love for her child is conditional. Andrea Yates springs immediately to mind. Or Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac, for another. Or Medea, for that matter (albeit that last example is mythological. In fact, the one prior is as well).

Let’s dissect this little ditty, with one of my favorite points: the Glurge story. Snopes.com defines this as

“Think of it as chicken soup with several cups of sugar mixed in: It’s supposed to be a method of delivering a remedy for what ails you by adding sweetening to make the cure more appealing, but the result is more often a sickly-sweet concoction that induces hyperglycemic fits.”

As an example, the famous Internet hooey about how a young woman prayed, and spared a rape, has darker undertones. Not only is the tale sparse on details (names, locations, times), the fact is, that while this young woman was (allegedly) spared a horrible experience, someone else was not ’passed over’. Along these same lines, a missionary is spared a robbing and murder because of ‘guardian angels’. Again, sparse on details, time-constraints are asynchronous, an unverifiable story. As opposed to, say, this one? Or perhaps these women were less than favored? Or perhaps these five?

So, in fact, Gwad plays favorites. For every wish granted like some genie in a bottle, there’s at least a thousand (perhaps more: likely in the millions) where the aforementioned promise is broken. Where the door’s unopened: the question, unanswered: the sought, never found. And no doubt, some are found more worthy of others (these of course, are items that would’ve sorted themselves, without pleading to the deaf sky).

So, in short, knee-mail is free mail. It lacks postage, and the address is non-existent. So it goes nowhere fast, and lands in fantasy Neverland - or, to put a different spin on the whole shebang, if a prayer is uttered and there is no divine ear to hear it, does it make an impact?

Obviously not.

And the mental masturbation continues.

And to top off the tank, a quote from one of my favorite skeptics:

Pray, v.  To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

Till the next post, then.

And here we go again…

Judge: Druggists may withhold “morning-after” pill

A federal judge has suspended controversial state rules requiring pharmacies to dispense so-called “Plan B” emergency contraceptives, saying the rules appear to unconstitutionally violate pharmacists’ freedom of religion. The rules appear to force pharmacists to choose between their own religious beliefs and their livelihood, Judge Ronald B. Leighton of the U.S. District Court in Tacoma wrote Thursday. [...] “Whether or not Plan B … terminates a pregnancy, to those who believe that life begins at conception, the drug is designed to terminate a life,” the judge wrote in a 27-page order granting a preliminary injunction. Thus, Leighton said, the current rules “appear designed to impose a Hobson’s choice for the majority of pharmacists who object to Plan B: dispense a drug that ends a life as defined by their religious teachings, or leave their present positions in the state of Washington.” Under Leighton’s order, pharmacists may now refuse to dispense the medication but must refer a patient to “the nearest” or “a nearby” source for the drug.

I’ve talked about this so many times — as have others — that it gets frustrating.

The illogic of such decision-making explodes my brain.

Why is it, Mr. Leighton, that conflicts of interest involving religious beliefs are judged differently from other areas?

For my job, Sir, I have to sign a document that tells my employer that I have no conflicts of interest. If I don’t sign, I don’t teach — and no one seems to be worried about that.

(By the way, I’ve placed this under “Bad God!” primarily due to the external circumstances of needing the prescription, i.e., situations that would involve rape and such — a further reason why this injunction makes no sense.)

Sorry, just had to post this. Man, some of these really cracked me up…

Book-a-Minute Classics

The Confessions of St. Augustine

St. Augustine
I was a bad boy. Damn, was I a bad boy. Not anymore, though.

THE END

Crime and Punishment

Raskolnikov
I’m so extraordinary, I can commit crimes. (kills some people)

Sonia
I’m the spiritual side of Raskolnikov.

Porfiry
I’m the intellectual side of Raskolnikov.

Raskolnikov
I have reconciled the two sides of my personality, represented so well by Sonia and Porfiry. (confesses)

THE END

I confess, Sean’s political attitude can get the better of me at times, and I prefer to post something like this. Nothing about religion, to be sure, but still important in any case.

Olbermann’s Special Comment

It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush. [...] Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth. Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn’t a problem if you don’t care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them. If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared. If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn’t interrupt. If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution, Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist? He’ll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you “flew” onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you’d won in Iraq. Now if that’s what this is all about, you tortured not because you’re so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you’re smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction — well, then, you’re going to need all the lawyers you can find … because that crime wouldn’t just mean impeachment, would it?