Armageddon a Happy Marriage

A news article came out today on Yahoo News entitled “ Bush: Marriage has gotten better in White House” (read it at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/bush_marriage). It’s all about how the pressures of the presidency have brought W and his wife closer together. Isn’t that peachy keen. We’re fighting a huge made-up war where thousands of Americans have died and tens of thousands of the people we were liberating have died. Our government has alienated almost every country in the world. The Environmental Protection Agency thinks the only environment it should protect is in the board rooms of big corporations, and the American economy is swirling down the bowl before our (increasingly unemployed) eyes. But George W. Bush is fine because he was able to take time away from orchestrating the end of the world as we know it to make his marriage work. Is there a better example of how far up his own ass George W. Bush is?

Peace on Earth and Kill the Atheists

I worked at a retail store the year that Bill O’Reilly started his “War on Christmas” nonsense. Among my regular customers were people that I knew were Jewish. I also had customers from Japan, China, Arab nations, India and a bunch of other places. My first inkling that some Xians were outraged that stores’ employees were saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” was when a very angry looking sixtyish woman came into the store, stomped past the Christmas trees, past the decorations that spelled out “Merry Christmas” and past the inflatable lawn ornaments with “Merry Christmas” printed across them, to the customer service desk, where she demanded to know whether the customer service rep greeted customers with “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”. The CSR responded that she preferred to say “Happy Holidays”, triggering a “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” tirade from the woman before she stormed back out of the store leaving puzzled employees and customers in her wake.
There was no store policy about holiday greetings. Staff members were free to address customers in any civil manner they liked and virtually all of us would respond to a customer’s “Merry Christmas” greeting with something like “and Merry Christmas to you”. It’s just that some of the employees, like me, realized that our customers were not exclusively Christians, and that there were other holidays to celebrate at that time of year. Coincidentally, that year Hanukah began on Dec. 25th. , but some of the employees were obviously Bill O’Reilly fans or attended the same church as fans and “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” discussions occurred in the break room as well as at customer service.
Ultimately, the “Jesus” people were sure that there was some kind of conspiracy to completely remove all reference to Christianity from the month of December and they seemed to feel that Xmas was the one and only legitimate holiday in Dec. The “holiday” people lived in the real world and were aware that other people have a right to exist too.
I don’t know what Bill O’Reilly’s motivation is. He may believe there’s a war on Xmas or he may get off on creating nationwide outrage among conservative Xians. It is clear, however, that conservative Xians, who seem to require an enemy in order to feel fulfilled, believe that their world is under attack from the usual suspects and that they need to gird their arms and join the crusade before society collapses into an orgy of abortions and godless communism. So, the Jesus people get to feel enraged and outraged and persecuted and at war with everyone whose views differ from theirs (and who are therefore EVIL). Of course, if they win the war (oops, I mean when they win, because god is on their side) the world will be a better place because salespeople will say “Merry Christmas” to everyone as they kill each other while fighting over the last got-to-have-it-now-toy, and maybe they’ll say “peace on earth, good will toward mankind” too.

Another Good Reason for Atheism

In a news article: (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/ODD_100_MPH_WRECK?SITE=WCMHTV&SECTION=STRANGE&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-12-01-20-13-17) a man crashed his pickup into a woman’s car. He told police he did it because God told him to. Chances are you’ll never hear an atheist say he committed a crime because his imagination told him to. Oh, and speaking of commitment, the article said that the man would be given a psychological evaluation. Pat Robertson says he speaks to god a lot, can we send him to a mental hospital for a while?

A Man Died But I Got a Great Deal

I was appalled to hear about the temporary employee who died in a Long Island Walmart as a result of being knocked down and trampled by Black Friday shoppers. That shoppers don’t seem to care who dies or gets injured as long as they get a good price on a wide screen TV reinforces my worst opinions of the human race. The mob not only killed the man who was trying to open the door that was ripped off its hinges by the pressing crowd, they also knocked down and stepped on several employees who tried to reach the fallen coworker, and when employees asked people to leave because, due to the death, the store needed to close, shoppers refused to leave because they had waited a long time to get in.
I’ve often observed shoppers being so self-centered that the health and safety of everyone around them were of no consequence so long as the shopper got what they wanted. Fortunately, bumps and bruises were usually the worst result of these interactions, but it looks as though that the occasional death causes no more concern for such persons.
For me, there is absolutely nothing in Walmart that is worth even slightly hurting another individual, but what do I know, I’m an atheist and atheists, I’m told, have no morals. While lately, atheists have been in the news as the cause of everything from bad weather to bad politics, the odds are pretty slim that atheists represented more than a small percentage of the mob, and the odds are very good that the majority of the mob identify themselves as Christians, no news service or pundits would ever suggest that the cause was related to Christianity, even though the whole event was connected to a Christian holiday.

Ghosts Can’t Exist, Because I Said So

One area where my views are at odds with most of the other atheist bloggers and forum participants whose writings I have read is on the subject of ghosts. Atheists tend to be skeptical and only believe in things for which they see evidence, and that pretty much describes me too. But where I diverge from the majority is that I have seen the evidence of ghosts. That being said, I have no way of presenting evidence of what I believe to be true.
As you are probably aware, my belief in ghosts actually put me at odds with lots and lots of theists also. There are plenty of good reasons to be skeptical about this subject; the paucity of evidence, the persuasive arguments of doubters, the long history of charlatans in the paranormal field, and fear of the unknown. The only people I have a problem with are those who flatly refuse to consider the possibility that ghosts are real.
Among atheists it is fairly common to believe that if there is no deity and religion is invalid, then there is no afterlife. Obviously, if there is no afterlife, the spirits of dead people can’t be running around. Then there are some Christians who believe that all people go to heaven or hell, so anyone still hanging around must be demons (personally, I’ve never seen any evidence to suggest that ghosts are demons). Other people have never seen evidence, have always associated paranormal claims with side-shows, hippies and magic acts and can’t believe anyone could take such things seriously, and lots of people have lots of other reasons that I either don’t remember or never heard. The thing is all the people who refuse to consider the possibility of ghosts could summarize their attitude as: Ghosts don’t exist because I say so.
What the heck, I can’t even convince some people that sushi is good so I can’t be surprised that I can’t sway them about ghosts, but I’m frustrated that the those insistent that ghosts don’t exist shut down all conversation on the subject. What I really want is to start a dialog with other open minded skeptics about possible explanations for this phenomenon that may lead to a greater understanding of nature, but refusal to consider the possibility pretty much kills that discussion.

Is It Sometimes OK for Christians to Lie?

I posted this in the Rational Responders Forum, but if anyone blunders onto this blog, please leave a comment here:
I hope some of the theists out there can enlighten me on this matter: I was recently loaned a copy of "The Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel and as I read, I checked the footnotes. What I found was that every single quote from a credible scientific source that I checked in the first three chapters (I gave up after that) was taken out of context and/or a misrepresentation of the source material. Strobel gave quotes from scientists as examples of evolution text books advocating atheism, when the quotes were actually from articles written about atheism, not evolution, and not included in any text book. He edited quotes so they appeared to say the opposite of their original meanings, he read things into analogies that were never intended, and he farmed quotes from other ID books rather than going to the primary sources. Furthermore he interviewed “open-minded scientists” (his term for ones that are open to a possibility of a creator) who all actually come from the Discovery Institute where the main goal is to promote creationism, and who published Strobel’s book. That doesn’t sound open-minded or unbiased to me. Don’t take my word for it, check for yourself.
Over the years, several creationist Christians have loaned me books that argued against evolution and all the books have followed the same pattern. I don’t blame the readers, they have no reason to assume that the authors are intentionally deceptive, but as one who has read the sources that are being quoted, the lies are blatant. Also, if Strobel read the source material he quoted, then he knows that misrepresentation was his intention. So, my question is: Do Christians think that lying is acceptable, as long as it helps them reinforce their religious doctrine? Do the Ten Commandments only apply when truth helps you win an argument?
I ask this partly because atheists like me, are often told that without religion they have no morality, yet I don’t need the threat of eternal damnation to know lying is immoral. So why do the producers of books (and articles and videos and websites) written by Christians, published by Christians and marketed primarily to Christians think this is acceptable and within the framework of good Christianity? By the way, can anyone direct me to an honest creationist book?

Beware: Dangerous Stupid People

Barack Obama has received an unprecedented number of death threats since winning the election. Some of these, as expected, come from racists, but there are a bunch of other crazies lining up as well. Some of the biblical end-times people have decided that Obama is the Anti-Christ, which they aim to prove by selectively cherry-picking the book of Revelations and to further back up with infinitely misinterpretable (and nonbiblical) quatrains of Nostradamus. Then there are the people who think Obama is a socialist and think that socialist and Stalinist are synonymous terms. Next are the ultra-conservatives who think that any Democrat, or just about anyone else who disagrees with them, is a blight on the land and should be eradicated. There are a bunch of other types I could list, but the scariest ones are just dangerous stupid people.
Dangerous stupid people listen to pundits like Shawn Hanity or Bill O’Reilly, who say everyone should be scared of Barack Obama because there’s no telling what he might do. Dangerous stupid people don’t stop and think that pundits like Shawn Hanity or Bill O’Reilly are self-serving egomaniacs who only care about high Nielson Ratings and don’t give a damn whether their inane blather is misinterpreted as suggesting that that the President-elect of the US is a threat to the American way of life.
Pundits like Shawn Hanity or Bill O’Reilly don’t care if their inflammatory, hate-filled rhetoric incites dangerous stupid people to kill a man who could prove to be a great President, just because the pundits’ job is to criticize Democrats, but they have nothing to criticize yet (because Bush is still the President!). Instead, pundits like Shawn Hanity or Bill O’Reilly choose to play on the fears of dangerous stupid people who haven’t the mental capacity to differentiate between the verbal masturbatory spew of pompous sociopathic blowhards and genuine warnings of impending disaster. So if anything bad happens to the President-elect, the pundits need to be imprisoned as accessories to murder.