2010

Possibly my favourite article on this blog so far is the Religion and Morality post. I was originally intending to conclude that article with some statistics on how atheists and theists compare on the sorts of issues people normally use to judge morality, but as the article was very lengthy already, I thought I should save it for another post. So here it is.

Before theists trot out their usual arguments that the greatest mass murderers in history were atheists—or that the communism is an example of how atheism leads to unhealthy societies—please read my Religion and Morality article, which covers these misconceptions thoroughly. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, check out the results of Vision of Humanity’s Global Peace Index. As is graphically represented in this Epiphenom article, the most atheist countries are the most peaceful—and the most religious countries are the most violent. These results may not mean religion makes people more violent though—it could mean violence makes people more religious. So to make these comparisons as meaningful as possible, we have to eliminate socio-economic factors as much as possible. Hence, it is most instructive to compare the US—which is by far the most religious western country—with other western countries. As can be seen when we do this, the US rates alongside such countries as China, and is behind (often well behind) other western countries. Read the rest of this entry »

While I ponder what to do about YouTube censoring all my sexy Bible reading videos, I thought you might enjoy some comic relief. As ever, DarkMatter2525 has posted some great videos since I last featured him, such as the one above, which I think is a truly brilliant illustration of the absurdity and immorality of the central concept of Christianity (Jesus dying for our sins). I also love its absolutely hilarious sequel, Everyone’s a Sinner—I’m sure I’ve provoked this kind of sin many times in my life!

I also recently discovered a great new video series, Messed-Up Bible Stories, which are some of the funniest Bible satires I’ve seen yet, and demonstrate the absurdity and cruelty of the Bible superbly.

As today is my birthday, I thought I should post my latest Bible reading, as the members’ version features me playing a brand new piano piece—in only my birthday suit! I am currently working on several piano pieces for… well, hopefully you will see soon enough! Oh, and if you would like to send me a birthday present, check out my Amazon wish list.

UPDATE: YouTube has decided to wish me a happy birthday by suspending my YouTube account, even though my videos did not breach their guidelines at all (this is similar to what they did to my Blasphemy Challenge video). This is totally outrageous censorship of atheists’ right to free speech!

Today marks two years since we launched this blog! Those of you who have been around since then will know that my own birthday is also coming up soon, so I’ve updated my Amazon wish list for the occasion. I was never able to find out how to contact the person who sent me the first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I am very grateful to them, as I really love this show, and want to see the rest of the series. I also want to once again thank everyone else who sent me stuff from last year’s list—especially John, who was exceedingly generous!

I guess some of you are wondering what happened to my long promised health and beauty book. We did consider self publishing it, or just sending it to publishers overseas. However, the whole idea of this book was to expand my media presence, so simply self publishing kind of defeated the purpose of it. And since I wrote about this last time, we have come up with an interesting new business idea which I think could really give me tremendous exposure. We want to explore this, but it requires a lot of groundwork and a lot of investment. However, I have just recently made some progress toward this goal. It will still require a lot of work yet, but I believe the results will be worth it. Stay tuned!

Okay, so I’m not entirely sure what “refudiate” means (as the word doesn’t exist), but as it seems she meant repudiate, I’m pretty sure I’m using it correctly! Sarah Palin’s difficulties with the English language are of course now legendary, and a favourite subject for commedians. It is however very disturbing that some one whose native language is English can be considered a credible presidential candidate, when they have so much difficulty speaking it correctly. I am far from a perfect English speaker myself, as I learned it as an adult—I would never dare to publish my unedited text here. But Sarah clearly has no problem with doing this, and even likens herself to Shakespeare! Still, a native English speaker who is a potential president should be able to publish their unedited text—the fact that she can’t should be an embarrassment to all American conservatives. The fact that it isn’t says just as much about them as it does about her, and is deeply disturbing. In essence, they celebrate poor education, stupidity and ignorance. This isn’t about right or left—this is about right and wrong.

The other thing the far right celebrates, of course, is bigotry, which as this video says, should be getting as much attention as Sarah’s choice of words. The outrage over the building of a mosque two blocks away from “ground zero” effectively equates all Muslims with the perpetrators of September 11, as that is the only way a simple mosque can be considered “stabbing the heart” of the American heartland. Yet at the same time, they claim not to be anti-Muslim, and Palin even calls on peaceful Muslims to support her! Why should they? If they are peaceful, then there is nothing wrong with this mosque (or rather, there isn’t anything more wrong with it than any other place of religious worship).

With Julia Gillard about to announce her new climate change policy (which I am sure will have to be better than the opposition’s!)—after last weekend setting a date for the next Australian election on August the 21st—I thought it would be appropriate to talk about the upcoming Australian election here, and Julia’s performance so far. If I could sum up her style of politics in one word, I would call it “pragmatic”. Unlike Kevin Rudd, she certainly isn’t over promising, which I think was his downfall: I still believe he was sincere in his stated intent, but when circumstances didn’t allow him to deliver on some of his promises, he was perceived as dishonest. Julia certainly isn’t falling into that trap—she has been very cautious indeed with her promises.

July 23 update: Well Julia has just announced her climate change policy, and while it certainly is better than the opposition’s, I think she’s taken the pragmatism a little too far this time, to the point where it looks like a bit of a cop-out. I’d really like to see her work together with the Greens (who will no doubt hold the balance of power after the election) to take decisive action on climate change.

Many people have dismissed Julia’s pragmatism as “backing down” and “not standing for anything”, but quite frankly, I think it is a good thing. This is politics after all: deals have to be struck and compromises have to be made to get anything done at all. As I’ve said here before, I often feel left wing/progressive voters are too idealistic—unless our leaders do a perfect job, we often don’t vote for them. But we have to face the reality that the nature of politics makes this virtually impossible. And it opens the way for conservative politicians to get into power, as conservative voters usually aren’t critical at all: they just believe what they want to believe (the facts be damned), and believe their politicians deliver on it, seemingly no matter what. We have to accept less than ideal solutions in the short term, so that more ideal solutions can be arrived at later. Otherwise, we are simply allowing the conservatives to turn back the clock. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been performing some major updates to my blog over the past week, so as I haven’t been able to post for so long, this post will be a bit of a grab bag. First of all, I’ve just posted my latest Bible reading. Secondly, as I mentioned we’ve performed some major updates to our blog software to bring it up to date, and we’ve made a few refinements to the design of the site at the same time—we want it to be the cleanest and most elegant blog on the net! And last—but certainly not least—I wanted to bring your attention to GodBlock (thanks to Joe Miller for the tip!). It has always amused me how hysterical people get about “protecting” children from pornography, when I am not aware of a single scientific study that shows it harms children at all—certainly, it is very difficult to understand how nudity could do any harm to children anyway. It seems to me that this widely held assumption is yet another form of sexual suppression brought to us by religion—which ironically, actually has been shown to have done serious psychological damage to children in many cases. So GodBlock turns the usual internet filter on its head, by protecting children from what could really harm them: religion.

When I first heard that the Australian Labor party had ousted Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, I wasn’t happy. Labor wasn’t doing that badly in the polls, so I just felt they were panicking too much; indeed, I feel they’ve been doing this for some time now, which I think is the main reason why they ended up doing so badly in the polls in the first place. I think they’ve actually done a pretty god job of running the country under very difficult circumstances—for example, Australia survived the global financial crisis better than any other first world country. Yes, they’ve made some mistakes, but I feel their mistakes are vastly outweighed by their achievements. The problem is that their mistakes have all come in the last few months (with an election looming), and the electorate has a very short memory. Read the rest of this entry »

When I read about this story, I just had to do a post on it! The infamous 62-foot tall statue of Jesus outside Solid Rock Church (yes, that really is the name of the church!) in Monroe, Ohio has burned to the ground—after being struck by lightning! The statue is known by the amusing nicknames “big butter Jesus” (apparently a reference to its colour) or more commonly “touchdown Jesus” (referring to its rather absurd pose, which looks a lot like the touchdown signal given by referees in American football). Although it was destroyed—in the words of the insurance company—by an “act of God”, a giant Hustler Hollywood store across the road was untouched! Yes, the humour in this story may be endless, but this kind of incident really does pose some very serious questions for theists, such as: Read the rest of this entry »