Reconciling the Trinity, and Other Nonsense

It’s been a while, I know. Please enjoy this video, as a token of my sincerest apologies. Work has been trying to kill me!

Bill Nye the Anti-Creationism Guy

Watch the video. Trust me.

Here’s a synopsis:

• Evolution denial is mostly unique to the United States, among the more technologically innovative nations.
• When a portion of the population doesn’t believe in evolution (science), it holds the whole nation back.
• Life science is strictly incomplete without evolution. Without evolution, explaining life becomes fantastically complicated. Without the idea of billion-year timescales, the universe itself is untenable.
• Don’t indoctrinate your kids with creationism – we need scientific children to grow up and support our nation.
• In a couple of centuries, Bill is confident that worldview won’t exist, because there’s no evidence for it.

I have to say, he manages to say this in a much friendlier manner than I can. Evolution deniers really anger me.

Religion as Tradition

Discover Magazine has posted a blog called “Why Science Can’t Replace Religion“.

It’s a foray into a common topic in the atheist world: is it really practical to abolish religion altogether?

Taken at face value, it is difficult for me to reach any conclusion aside from “no”. Aside from theories that religion has its origins in evolution, it is undeniably a salve for the weakness inherent to the human mind. If it disappeared, it seems likely that something equally irrational would take its place.

For my part, I seek to eliminate religious, spiritual and mystical impact on government, law and social morality. I feel this is still an impossible goal, but at least a more appropriate one, and one that could be more fully accomplished.

Anyway – check out the article. It’s a short read.

P.S. Again, my apologies for my relative silence. I am wading through an exceptionally busy period at my job. Once that clears up, I should be posting more often.

Mr. Deity Discusses Marriage

So, I love Mr. Deity, and I love this latest video. It’s no secret that LGBT rights are near and dear to my heart, and I feel strongly support of atheism in part because I know one can’t logically support bigotry.

Enjoy it, and check out his other videos!

Religion’s Greatest Ally: Death

What is the purpose of religion? By what virtue does it survive?

This (incredibly soft-spoken) video addresses one of the most common thoughts I’ve had about religion: it exists because we die, and as conscious beings, we have a very hard time comprehending an end to what we are.

And how do we respond to something we don’t understand? Fear.

The video considers one of the most fundamental conflicts of denying death via religion: other religions force you to question your own. When that happens, it causes anger, confusion, doubt – all of which lead to the kinds of atrocities we see committed by religion on a daily basis.

It’s a great watch, check it out!

The Logistics of Noah’s Ark

You know, I had honestly never considered this. Aside even from the sheer number of creatures you’d have to get on a single boat (under the assumption that species don’t evolve and branch off), there’s also a lot of awkwardness to the logistics:

• Many creatures eat or kill other creatures.
• Many creatures have significant climate requirements.
• Parasites, viruses, bacteria, etc.. are all, in a sense, “creatures”.
• Bees die when they sting you.

Anyway, this entire video is pretty hilarious. There’s a part 2, as well.

Relativistic Baseball (xkcd.com)

XKCD has started up an awesome new “comic” called “What If?”. The first post answers a question that we’ve all wondered at one point or another: What would happen if I threw a baseball at 90% of the speed of light?

It’s a hilarious read; informative, too. I’m confident I’ll be enjoying this new XKCD format.

Chick-fil-a’s Hypocrisy

This is an excellent summary / rant of why Chick-fil-a is wrong.

The Star Nearest Us

If you go outside at night, and it’s dark enough, you will see a seemingly endless number of twinkles in the sky. It’s easy for us to think that those twinkles have no relation to the sun. After all, the sun is a large, ever-present and hugely impactful part of our lives. We owe liquid water and most likely life on our planet itself, purely to its existence.

The truth is, the sun is just another twinkle when you look from any other position in the universe (the speed of light not withstanding). Furthermore, the sun isn’t even that interesting of a star. While it may be 110x the diameter of the Earth, it is more than 1,000x smaller than the largest stars we know of. It’s even too small to explode or form a black hole.

So, what does make our Sun special? It harbors us, and we, as Carl Sagan so eloquently put it, “are a way the universe can know itself”.

I encourage everyone to consider that our sun is one among approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe. We should all seek to have an appreciation of it as a link to the cosmic scale. Aside from the Earth we live on, it is by far the most imposing and obvious component of the universe from our perspective.

It’s difficult not to marvel at the sheer scope of reality. Even acknowledging that the universe is incomprehensibly large, and that a quark is incomprehensibly small.. is incredibly humbling. Here’s a jumpstart for you:

We Are Not a Christian Nation

The constitution guarantees freedom of religion and freedom from religion.

So I was browsing through my RSS feeds and ran across this gem: Texas State Rep: Avoid School Prayer Ban By Reading Christian Proverbs To Students via Think Progress. A Texan representative, Debbie Riddle, has decided that while it may not be ok to read the Bible at large, in classrooms, it’s certainly not harmful to read proverbs. Apparently Debbie is unaware that proverbs is a book within the Bible.

This is part of an ongoing trend of the Christian political machine to find any means possible to circumvent the separation of church and state, defined in  the first amendment of the constitution, as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Now, it’s not at all unusual to find Christians trying to indoctrinate children, but this political maneuvering around the first amendment strikes me as a remarkable hypocrisy, and I’m not the only one whose noticed. The delusional “tea party”, an almost comically extremist sect of the republican party, is heavily associated with religion and religious values. In addition, they claim to support the constitution as the document by which our country should be governed.

Enter the hypocrisy: the tea party advocates actions like the one Debbie proposes – and ignores that they are unconstitutional! It drives them absolutely mad that the founders of the constitution (who weren’t at all like the radical christian right of today) built in protection against religious indoctrination in our schools.

And this is only the most recent example: classroom prayer, creationism, bible readings.. these issues seem to sprout up without end.

Christians say they are being attacked on matters like this, and you know what? They are absolutely right (pun definitely intended). These behaviors should be attacked. They are unconstitutional for a reason – we are not a Christian country. If you want evidence of that, take a look at what Mr. John Adams (a “founding father”) had to say on the matter:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..

There it is – in addition to the first amendment. Read it and weep, ye who would seek to turn the United States into a theocracy.

All this hypocrisy has to stop. If you’re going to use constitution to defend your right to practice your religion, we’re going to use it defend our right to keep the government secular.