By now we’ve all heard the news – Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab AKA the Christmas Crotch bomber tried to blow up a plane on the holiday.

Reports of these kind of people make me…well, crotchety. And hopefully, the irony is not lost, that he was some Muslim fanatic who packed his jockstrap with explosives, and his religion is one of many that try to control their slave’s genitalia until their slave is married.

Investigators on both sides of the Atlantic were last night urgently investigating the background of the would-be plane bomber, as international attention turned to al-Qaida’s stronghold in Yemen.

Scotland Yard and MI5 want to establish how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was radicalised and by whom, and whether he had accomplices in the UK or the Arabian peninsula. He has told US officials that he met al-Qaida operatives in Yemen who gave him the device which almost brought down Northwest Airlines flight 253 to Detroit and taught him how to use it.

Yesterday it emerged that after attending university in London, the 23-year-old had dropped out of a postgraduate business course in Dubai, telling his family he had gone to Yemen to study Islam. He then cut off contact with them.

And somehow, wistfully, I wish I could be surprised by these events, but sadly, they’re all too prevalent. Another freak tried to blow up an airplane, this time a Bosnian, but apparently he wasn’t as creative as Umar, so now his fellow Al-Qaida-ian isn’t receiving quite as much press.

And I use the term slave in its purest sense, that is in definitions one and two:

1 : a person held in servitude as the chattel of another
2 : one that is completely subservient to a dominating influence

Because that is for the most part what most religions do. They slap metaphorical shackles on their sheep, and use fear and promises of eternal love (in this case, likely a bevy of ephemeral virgins) to enslave the hearts and minds. And the enslavement becomes multi-layered, an onion of tears and scars that smear the life and keep it pilloried, preventing the individual from living a brief life to its fullest.

And while I’d like to claim that education would be sufficient to level these blind shambling monoliths that wreak havoc and wreck lives, that would be insufficient. There were (and are) many educated Muslims (as well as Christians and Judaists) – education alone is not enough. We cannot blame poverty – the men mentioned were not poor, and the 19 zealots who flew the fateful planes on 9/11 came from well-to-do families. Courteous debates are a fool’s dream, as many here can attest. Courtesy is always misinterpreted as either A. weakness or B. the possibility that the other side’s superstition is getting through. Violence begets endless vendettas, a cycle of blood rivers.

So we are left with logical mockery – we point, we jeer, we mock, and using ridicule and logic, we wage a war of metaphorical and rhetorical attrition, so that someday, some way, critical thought will pierce the thick skulls of the religulous. We can only hope.

Let the double entendres and euphemisms now ensue.

Till the next post then.

Christians love to make up warm and fuzzy sayings and stories about their imaginary friend. I received a religious email today that contained several of these dumbass quotes that are the romanticized inventions of delusional folks who think they are the special pet of an invisible god who controls all that they do, say and think while looking down from “up there”, (wherever “up there” is).

Here are a few from just the one email I received today:

“Whenever God Closes One Door He Always Opens Another, Even Though
Sometimes It’s Hell in the Hallway”

So, we are going along fine in life and this sadistic god slams it closed, tortures the shit out of us only to open another one? This statement just shows how much thought this was given….none.

A coincidence is a small miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous.

No, a coincidence is a coincidence. A miracle is when human beings can’t stand not knowing an answer as to why or how something happened, so they make shit up. No grand cosmic puppetmaster is pulling any strings while playing hide and seek.

How about this one?

All true love is from God, and man receives the divine affection as he himself bestows this love upon his fellows.

Christians choose to disregard the fact that the god of their Bible is a sadistic, evil, destroying bastard. Examples of love and affection come from other human beings. Not from the god who had to create a son for himself to sacrifice (who is also supposedly himself at the same time) to allow to be tortured and murdered (and to commit suicide) in order to appease himself. In addition, many Xians are just nice to other people because they think that will make their god happy and they get extra reward points when they get to Heaven or something.

Here is another one:

“Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe.”

I think the correct word here would be “deluded”, not blessed.

This is a good time to go ahead and get all those ghastly religious emails out of your systems.

Go ahead and vent. After enduring the religious holiday season, I am sure many of you will welcome the opportunity for random venting.

Dobson Unretires: Religious Right Honcho Plans New Radio Show

James Dobson retired back in April, but that didn’t last very long. And though he is ending his radio show in February, he is simply starting up another one.

Now Dobson has announced that instead of puttering around the house and playing golf, he is teaming up with his son, Ryan, to do a daily radio show called “James Dobson on the Family.” Some retirement!

Dobson announced on Facebook that he will end the Focus on the Family broadcasts in February and will start broadcasting with Ryan the following month. The Associated Press reported, “He says his new show, which will air in March, will cover many of the same topics, including marriage, child-rearing and national issues.”

In other words, we’ll get the same extremism but on a different channel.

The reason? Rob Boston gives a possible answer:

My guess is that Dobson, who is really unhappy with the political situation right now, never intended to stop popping off about it. After all, gay people can get married in Iowa, abortion is still legal, some people continue to believe in evolution and not everyone is a right-wing, dogmatic fundamentalist Christian. There’s lots of work to do!

Which means that there is still a lot of watchdogging of these nutjobs for us to do. It never ends.

The Great Flood (Christian Flood Myth)
Thanks to The Atheist Jew for this one. OMG, too funny because it’s now in a place where all my Bible literalist friends and relatives can watch it, if their retinas aren’t burned out by the word “atheist” in the title first. Beaj came along and interjected this little gem below in a comment thread under a news article I posted about Hubble capturing the earliest image yet of the universe — just 600 million years after the Big Bang.

LOL! My bet is that they don’t get through five seconds of it before they turn it off and start praying for us. Too funny. But the sad part is that this little cartoon presentation brings up some very good questions to consider before taking the flood myth literally. But sadly, most fundies choose to remain willfully ignorant.

It’s been awhile since there have been any news stories concerning culinary iconography. Seems though that there aren’t any suckers ready to spend money for these holy spuds. Could it be because people are wising up? Nah, people revere these sort of things a lot less when the economy is crappy.

Crosses in potatoes appear to online sellers

IOWA CITY, Iowa – Move over, Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese. Step aside, Fish Stick Jesus. Online bidders may now buy two potatoes containing likenesses of crosses in their centers. One was found by an Iowa family and the other by a police detective in Ohio.

Jim Gross of Marion, Iowa, says his wife was peeling their potato on New Year’s Eve when she found the cross shape. The spud is on sale for eBay, with bids starting at $2.

Dennis Bort of Brunswick, Ohio, says he found the cross shape in his potato on Christmas Day.

Bort listed his spud for $1,000. He hasn’t found any bidders yet.

In the past, collectors have paid big bucks for items deemed to have been blessed by the appearance of a religious symbol, including $28,000 for a partially eaten grilled cheese sandwich with the likeness of the Virgin Mary.

Humanity’s penchant for denial is no exaggeration, as  Stardust’s recent post illustrates. But, as the old X-Files TV show’s motto said, “The truth is out there”, and I’m not talking about left field either.

A ten-year-old study from Harvard illustrates speciation in the E. Coli bacteria, for one example. Ten years later, another study on E. Coli not only verifies this, it lists the mutations as…beneficial. (Collective gasps are heard in the revival tent.)

And along a similar vein, it turns out that bacteria can actually influence speciation in wasps, by repairing damaged sperm. (Shouts of “Blasphemy!” can be heard from the audience.)

And an old hoary chestnut has been roasted on the fire – yes Virginia, there are indeed pre-Cambrian fossils of microbes.

And of course, there are 29+ evidences for ‘macroevolution’ – ranging in scope from morphological intermediates to cetacean atavisms (and human babies with tails). This also extends to vestigial molecular structures. The typical creationist response is that many of these items are predicated on scale, and they scramble desperately to muddy the waters when the evidence is presented.

One of the more amusing stupidities cited by the creationist, is this quote from the Origin of the Species:

Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?
But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?
Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed.
Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.

Darwin was no geologist: relatively little was known about the formation of fossils, how difficult it was to become one, what with scavengers, tectonic plate shifts, highly alkaline soils, erosion, weather, all the variables that prevent ‘insensibly fine gradations’.

And evidence abounds. From genetics to paleontology, from anatomy to geographical distribution, it seems incredible that anyone would raise a fuss about something so fundamentally obvious.

What do you call someone who rejects evidence in favor of warm fuzzy feelings and mythology? Supply a punchline, and discuss amongst yourselves.

Till the next post, then.

The following video was posted by the son of a friend who belongs to a Xian cult down in Arizona. This IDiot spewing out his nonsense in the video isn’t even listening to the words coming out of his mouth. He provides no real argument, no counter evidence, and only mocks science and has no understanding of evolution and science and takes this and that out of context just like they do their Bible. His argument? Goddidit, godmadeit, time is short, Big Bang still hasn’t happened yet…this guy is a total moron and so many people sit in their churches week after week and nod their heads and shout “Amen!” without doing any investigation what-so-ever on their own….and teach their children that their undereducated (or uneducated), superstitious and misinformed pastors know more than teachers and scientists do.

The Age of The Earth Seminar Trailer