November 2009

What do these two things have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing at all as far as I can tell, except for that fact that I’ve chosen to speak about both of them in this post! November 24, 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of perhaps the most important book ever written—Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species Or the Preservation of Favoured Races In the Struggle For Life (usually—for obvious reasons—just referred to as The Origin of Species). I think it is fair to say that no other single book has done more to advance our knowledge of our true place in nature and time.

Also, with just a month to go until Christmas, I thought I should update my Amazon wish list, seeing as everything I put up initially has already been purchased—thank you again to everyone who sent me gifts (especially John, who was very generous indeed!). Even though I am a Godless heathen (and I suspect the vast majority of my readers are too), it seems that most secular people still like to celebrate Christmas in a non-religious way, and still enjoy purchasing gifts for their friends and loved ones. As I’ve stated previously, I think this is okay, as long as it is what people actually want to do, rather than what they feel obliged to do. So if you want to buy something for me for Christmas, please feel free to do so. But if you don’t want to, please do not feel any obligation to do so either.

As an outspoken atheist who also happens to be a female nude model with big tits, the email I get from religious types is perhaps a little different to what most men who speak out about atheism get. Instead of simply cursing me as an evil sinner, they often want to “save my soul” (presumably in the hope that they can have a relationship with me in either this world or the next), and indeed often tell me about how I lead them into sin. My standard response to this is: “If God didn’t want you to look at my tits/naked body, then why did he make you enjoy it so much? Does he want to torture you or something?” Their standard response to this is that God gave them the free will to do evil things, and that they just can’t help themselves committing the sin of looking at my tits/naked body. Hence it seems to me that we should take a good, long, hard look at this “free will” concept, as it is crucial to the credibility of religion—without it, they cannot explain how a perfect, all-loving, all-seeing and all-knowing God can allow evil, sin, pain and suffering in the world he is supposed to have created. Quite frankly, the blatantly obvious logical flaws in this argument make it amazing to me that I even have to point them out, but given that millions of people depend on this concept to make sense of how the nature of their supposed creator conflicts with the nature of the world, clearly I must do so. Read the rest of this entry »

Image courtesy of Reuters: Johannes Eisele

November 9 marks the 20th anniversary what must be one of the most joyous and important events in modern history—the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is amazing to think that only 20 years ago the world was still clearly divided into east and west, communism and democracy. I think the Berlin Wall is the ultimate example of how absurd this conflict became—a wall dividing an historic city into two sections at a seemingly arbitrary point, which people could not cross lest they be killed. I heard a story of one young man whose parents lived in east Berlin, but who had just moved all of his things into an apartment in west Berlin the day before construction of the wall began. He spent the night at his parents’ place, and then could no longer get back to his apartment the next day! Well actually, he did try to, and became one of the first people to be killed attempting to cross from east to west.

We must never forget that only in the last 50 years, political ideology allowed such an absurdity to not only happen, but be accepted as commonplace. It is a reminder of how susceptible we are to simple ideologies that give us a sense of certainty and identity. Today, the “red terror” has been replaced with Islamic terrorism, and an extremist response to it—i.e. a resurrection of the centuries old conflict between Muslims and Christians—may lead us into a real war this time, and not just a “cold war” (indeed, to a large extent it already has). We must never allow extremist religious and political ideologies to take us into WWIII; we must use reason to fight the forces of fundamentalism.

We have finally found a couple of billing options we can use for our new project—we now just have to integrate them with our systems. We have also found a third party site we can work with should this prove too difficult, although for the best possible user experience at the lowest possible price, we still want to do it ourselves if we can. We are aiming to get this underway by next month (I hope!).

For now, enjoy this hilarious video from DarkMatter2525, the person who brought us the creation story cartoon I posted previously. I also highly recommend his Let God Sort Them Out video—it is along similar lines to the An Atheist Meets God video I posted a while back, and once again shows the sheer absurdity of the Bible’s statements on who goes to heaven and who doesn’t. I also really like his Epic God Fail video, which lists many of God’s outrageous atrocities, with a great punch line!