An interesting documentary on the origins of Scientology. If you have any doubt as to the dishonesty and underhandedness of the organization, perhaps this will free you to think more clearly. Scientology is a larger pile of steaming, rank bullshit than many other religions.
OMG, it’s Cheesus
A Missouri woman says she has found Jesus in a bag of Cheetos. When Kelly Ramey opened a snack-sized bag of Cheetos, she felt something unusual and checked it out.
Most of her family and friends believe it looks like a mini orange sculpture of Jesus on the cross. Ramey and her husband call it “Cheesus.” Others see something completely different.
A local minister does not see anything theologically special about the Cheeto, but thinks some good could come from it.
Ramey doesn’t plan to sell the Cheeto because it’s bringing a lot of joy into her home. She will keep it in a safe deposit box or put it on display so more people can enjoy it. (Source)
These sightings are a perfect example of the role wishful thinking plays in religious belief. People see what they want to see. Reality viewed through the faith-filter.
Do you tolerate intolerance?
Theists are no more tolerant of those in disagreement with their perceptions than anyone else.
Theists may think they’re something special, beyond human. The rest of us see people as people. I’m a humanist atheist. I like my species. I think on average we’re fairly decent mammals. No matter how fancy you dress us up, we’re still all humans. If we could base our social behavior on the fact of our common humanity, there would be fewer things to be intolerant about.
Intolerance arises when one group of humans wants to be accepted as superior and separate from another group of humans. Religion is one of the many human belief systems that try to impose a false hierarchy on society.
Religions seek to artificially classify some people as blessed and the rest as heathens, and expect society to reflect their arbitrary classification system based on nothing more than their insistence that their interpretation of the wants and needs of the invisible and all powerful “Divine Whatever” are the most right.
Intolerance need not be tolerated. It need not be legislated against or deposed by force. Intolerance will decrease as humanity increases. The more of us there are, the greater the need to be tolerant.
Religions stand in our way. They need to be exposed as ancient, irrelevant attitudes that have outlived their usefulness and certainly don’t contribute anything of value to society that can’t be provided without all the supernatural and superstitious trappings. Once religion has passed into irrelevance humans will still be capable of acts of extreme compassion as well as acts of extreme cruelty. The only difference will be that acts of compassion will stem from our realization of our common humanity and acts of cruelty will have fewer reasons to occur.
Get God, get a gun
This has to be the most bone-headed, ignorant, stupid and potentially disastrous idea I’ve encountered in a while, religious or not. The fact that this was a religious organization makes it even more bizarre. WTF were they thinking? It can only be that they weren’t.
The religious don’t need atheists to point out the stupidity of their beliefs. They do pretty well on their own.
Church Cancels Teen Gun Giveaway
An Oklahoma church canceled a controversial gun giveaway for teenagers at a weekend youth conference.
Windsor Hills Baptist had planned to give away a semiautomatic assault rifle until one of the event’s organizers was unable to attend.
The church’s youth pastor, Bob Ross, said it’s a way of trying to encourage young people to attend the event. The church expected hundreds of teenagers from as far away as Canada.
“I don’t want people thinking ‘My goodness, we’re putting a weapon in the hand of somebody that doesn’t respect it who are then going to go out and kill,’” said Ross. “That’s not at all what we’re trying to do.”
Ross said the conference isn’t all about guns, but rather about teens finding faith.
“You make a lot of new friends down here,” said Vikki Goncharenko, who attended the conference. “You get to meet new people. There’s a bunch of things that are going on. It’s just, you have a wonderful time.”
Friday evening, Ross said the gun giveaway had been canceled. Pastor emeritus Jim Vineyard, who ran the event, injured his foot and wouldn’t be able to attend. The gun giveaway was also removed from the church Web site.
Ross said the church would give the gun away next year instead. He said the church spent $800 buying the gun for the promotion.
Injured his foot and had to cancel the giveaway? A message from god, perhaps? Jim, I think god’s trying to tell you that you’re a moron.
Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection
Courtesy of the New York Times:
A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.
Dominic Buettner for The New York TimesWhen David Jeselsohn bought an ancient tablet, above, he was unaware of its significance.
If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.
The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.
It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.
Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.
“Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,” Mr. Boyarin said.
Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.
“I couldn’t make much out of it when I got it,” said David Jeselsohn, the owner, who is himself an expert in antiquities. “I didn’t realize how significant it was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who specializes in Hebrew writing, a few years ago. She was overwhelmed. ‘You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,’ she told me.”
Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai.
It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the stone, which Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur dubbed “Gabriel’s Revelation,” also the title of their article. Mr. Knohl posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But his theory did not shake the world of Christology as he had hoped, partly because he had no textual evidence from before Jesus.
When he read “Gabriel’s Revelation,” he said, he believed he saw what he needed to solidify his thesis, and he has published his argument in the latest issue of The Journal of Religion.
Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.
Obama reminds us he’s a politician
As I listened to NPR this afternoon I caught the end of a story about a speech given by Obama today. I didn’t hear who the audience was or what the topic was. All I heard was him saying, “…they’re usually working to help people of all faiths or of no faith at all.”
Wow, I thought. Almost brave of him to allude to non-believers, atheists and humanists. He nearly put us on equal footing with the theists. Don’t piss off the religious, Barack. Rationalists are far more forgiving and understanding. Unfortunately we’re also in the minority and represent too few votes to make a huge impact on the candidates or the party and their platform. So we’re safer to ignore than the faithful.
Non-believers are concerned with the issues that will affect all of humanity or that attempt to enslave the public forum to the rules and regulations (prejudices, phobias and myths) of a particular sect of theism.
You can trust a non-believer to give you straight information regarding issues of finance, foreign relations and military policy. Issues that require reasoning, logic and good old common sense best be left to those who determine their own agendas, rather than those who wish to inflict the agenda of their personal imaginary friend on the entire country.
In short, go ahead and pander to the religious to get their votes. But once you’re elected and if you are seriously concerned for not just the people of the country you now lead but for humanity everywhere, you would be well advised to seek council from those who do not put their allegiance to this country below their allegiance to a “higher power”.
So I got home a little while ago and thought I should blog about this and give the man a little credit.
First, though, I wanted to check out the whole story for some background.
July 1 (Bloomberg) — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he would spend at least $500 million a year to promote community aid programs run by faith-based groups.
The proposal would expand an initiative put in place by President George W. Bush to aid religious organizations performing social service work, which Obama said “never fully completed its mission or fulfilled its promise.”
Obama, a former community organizer in Chicago, would create a new White House office for the President’s Council for Faith- Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Among other things, the council would help train faith-based groups on how to apply for federal grants and set up a program to provide summer educational opportunities for 1 million low-income children.
“While these groups are often made up of folks who’ve come together around a common faith, they’re usually working to help people of all faiths or of no faith at all,” Obama said today in Zanesville, Ohio. “Change comes not from the top down, but from the bottom up, and few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Damnit, Barack. Here I had all these positive thoughts about what I perceived as a small nod to the “community” of non-believers and I find out that your significant comment wasn’t exciting or brave. No one is grateful to the man who smuggles Cuban cigars by packing them in piles of manure.
Supporting faith-based programs with our tax dollars is a violation of the Constitution you want to swear to uphold. And if the requirements are written such that our money can’t be used in any way to pay for purely religious activities (no “busing people to mass in order to earn a dinner” type homeless shelters, for example), then why should faith even be a criteria? Why not use everyone’s money to support worthwhile social outreaches regardless of their motivation? Rev. Phelps is a faith-based organization. Can he apply for federal money to pay off his well-earned bankruptcy?
Barack, you’ve pissed me off. If I voted you’d be in danger of losing mine. As Carlin explains, since I don’t vote, I have every right to complain when our government, its representatives or its policies head toward the abyss of stupidity, illegality and/or theocracy.
I take back all the nice things I wrote above the quote.
Radical Atheist is…
Jack (Jeber) Carlson
I think I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god - in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously.
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