2009

Today is the National Day of Reason. To explain what it is about, here is a quote from their web site:

Many who value the separation of religion and government have sought an appropriate response to the federally-supported National Day of Prayer, an annual abuse of the constitution. Nontheistic Americans (including freethinkers, humanists, atheists, agnostics, and deists), along with many traditionally religious allies, view such government-sanctioned sectarianism as unduly exclusionary.

A consortium of leaders from within the community of reason endorsed the idea of a National Day of Reason. This observance is held in parallel with the National Day of Prayer, on the first Thursday in May each year (May 7th in 2009). The goal of this effort is to celebrate reason-a concept all Americans can support-and to raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty posed by government intrusion into the private sphere of worship.

Sounds like something worth supporting to me! This is a great opportunity for my American readers to show their support of the secular values that America was founded on—not Christian values is as commonly thought. I find it highly offensive and very misleading that the National Day of Prayer web site uses what looks like a characterisation of George Washington kneeling in prayer in their banner.

As my last post was a bit on the heavy side (and I’ve been dying to post this since it was sent to me—thanks Doug!), I thought I would share this great video. It’s taken from Australian comedian John Safran’s TV series John Safran vs. God, and turns the tables on Mormons in hilarious style! I think he actually does a pretty good job of selling atheism—I particularly like the part where he talks about cognitive dissonance. Perhaps this is another reason atheists are very often happier than theists?

As most of you probably know by now, I am happy to be living in Australia. Although it does restrict my career opportunities, it is a great environment, and the people are very friendly and genuine for the most part. It is also the most multicultural place I’ve ever been, in as much as different races and cultures mix here very freely, and there’s lots of wonderful multicultural events. Like everywhere though, there’s still an undercurrent of racism here, and that was probably never more apparent than during the “Tampa election” of 2001. John Howard, faced with electoral annihilation in the wake of his immensely unpopular GST (goods and services tax), decided to tap into the one issue that he thought might be explosive enough to make people forget about the GST: he played the “race card”. He ordered the navy to stop a Norwegian cargo vessel carrying Afghani asylum seekers (MV Tampa) from entering Australian waters, so they couldn’t land on Australian shores and have their claims for asylum processed here. Shortly after that, September 11 happened, and the anti-Muslim sentiment precipitated the biggest turn around in the polls in Australia’s history. Just like fellow conservative George W. Bush in the US, fear of terrorism turned a deeply unpopular leader into a hero overnight.

Never mind the fact that these actions were completely illegal under international law, and showed an astonishing lack of humanity toward everyone onboard MV Tampa (including its Norwegian crew). But John Howard, being the utterly ruthless and totally immoral and unprincipled politician that he was, didn’t care about international law or compassion. He only cared about winning elections, so he milked the incident for all it was worth. He hastily cobbled together the so-called “Pacific solution” for processing asylum seekers offshore, in this case on the tiny island nation of Nauru. It turned out to be a hugely expensive farce, as almost all these asylum seekers turned out to have a legitimate claim, and many were resettled in Australia (as well as New Zealand). But that didn’t come out until well after the election, and Howard didn’t care how much money he had to spend to win either. He ran TV and radio ads and had posters and billboards with his photo, proclaiming “we decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come”. And he used all other asylum seekers who tried to land here as political pawns as well. This lead to the infamous “children overboard” affair immediately before the election, when John Howard claimed that asylum seekers threw their children overboard, so he could say “these aren’t the kind of people I want entering Australia”. But not only was this claim totally untrue, an Australian Senate Select Committee found that he knew it was false before the election. He clearly just wanted to demonise asylum seekers so he could win the election. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t have time for a full post this week, so I thought I’d post this interesting little graph I was told about (thanks OldiesLover!). With Gods like this, who needs Satan? Is Satan actually the good guy?

Joe Biden on guns—horrifying for many Americans, but common sense for the rest of the civilised world

I see we had yet another gun massacre in the US on Friday, with 14 people killed in an immigration office in New York. This comes after the shooting rampage in Alabama last month, leaving 10 dead. And of course, there have been many, many more before that. Vice President Joe Biden says “we’ve got to figure a way to deal with this senseless, senseless violence”. Well I’m afraid there’s only one way, and I think Joe already knows what that is: gun control. What will it take for the US to have real gun control laws like the rest of the civilised world?

Americans don’t seem to realise that not having gun control is actually extremely unusual (perhaps even unique) for a modern civilised country. The people who support the right to bear arms in the US constitution always say that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. On the face of it, that seems to make a lot of sense, except for the fact that in countries with stronger gun laws, there is actually far less gun related violence of all kinds. It seems that, in practice, outlawing guns makes them harder to obtain for everyone, including outlaws. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just found out about this great story from The Feethinker (thanks Joe!). Apparently, in just the last week alone, 1500 people in Britain paid for Certificates of Debaptism from the National Secular Society! Indeed, this has prompted Religious Intelligence to run a poll asking if Anglicanism should provide a service for people to annul their baptism (as Rome already does, apparently)—be sure to cast your vote! The atheist movement really is starting to gather strength across the world, isn’t it?

My next couple of posts on climate change are going to be pretty serious, so I thought I might throw in a bit of humour first. And what better way to do it than to create your own atheist bus slogan? Yes, that’s right: the atheist bus campaign has now set up an atheist bus slogan generator, so you can create your own custom atheist bus slogan! Feel free to create your own, then please post it here.

While Australia’s new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is infinitely greener than John Howard was (Howard simply didn’t care about climate change at all), I am nevertheless disappointed with the fairly weak emissions targets that his government has set, and the push toward alternative energy (particularly solar in what must be the sunniest nation on earth) could be a whole lot stronger. This is especially so when we need grand new projects to create employment; business sees environmentalism as the enemy of profits and jobs, but this is a very shortsighted and overly simplistic view in my opinion.

In the mean time, the Maldives have vowed to become carbon neutral within a decade, by totally eliminating their dependency on fossil fuels, and switching completely to solar and wind energy. Even though the total cost of this plan will be worth more than their entire annual GDP, it will save them a lot of money in the long run: it should pay for itself in ten years, then after that their energy costs will be cut dramatically from what they are now (as they are currently dependent on oil imports to supply their energy needs). Hopefully they won’t be the only country who does such a calculation.

So why is a country of such modest means (and carbon footprint) as the Maldives leading the way in climate change initiatives? Basically because they—like other low-lying island nations—will be the first countries to be seriously effected by global warming, as predicted sea level rises will mean they are threatened with being under water in the not too distant future. They want to set an example that other nations will follow, in the hope that they will be able to avert this threat to their very existence. As we are such selfish and shortsighted creatures, nothing motivates us like our own self-interest. Read the rest of this entry »

Although I’ve written about Twitter before, the recent rumour that Google was looking at buying them—after they’d already rejected an offer of $500 million from Facebook—has prompted me to write another article about the apparently insane market evaluations of these web 2.0 companies.

Now Google was supposed to be interested in Twitter because of their search capabilities, which apparently was the main reason they bought YouTube—Google just wants to control all the different ways people can search for things on the internet, even if they don’t make money in themselves. I guess there’s a logic to that. But in the case of Facebook, we have a massively popular web 2.0 darling that still can’t make money, wanting to buy another massively popular web 2.0 darling that doesn’t have any source of revenue at all, to the tune of $500 million! Yet even though they have no revenue (or even an actual business model), Twitter not only rejected Facebook’s offer, they also managed to raise another $35 million in venture capital!

Surely I can’t be the only person who looks at this and wonders what the hell is going on here? Isn’t the massive investment in these web 2.0 companies that haven’t found a way to make money yet just like the dot.com bubble all over again? And all this at a time when it is so hard for people to get capital for longstanding, legitimate businesses? Something just doesn’t add up here. Is there some rule of doing business on the internet that I’m missing here? If so, I’d really like to know what it is! Read the rest of this entry »

Well I think it’s high time we had a little comic relief, so as I’ve just seen Ghost Town—and I enjoyed The Office and Extras—I thought it would be appropriate to post this video of Ricky Gervais talking about the Bible. The Bible is a very easy target for comedians, as it is just so patently absurd—it is totally unbelievable that any educated adult could accept what it says literally, yet so many do! It’s utterly incredible how people can switch off their normal critical faculties when it comes to religion.