I’m sure you’ve all heard by now of Christopher Hitchens’ and Richard Dawkins’ push to have the Pope arrested for crimes against humanity, for his multiple cover-ups of priests sexually abusing children. In my opinion, there isn’t any question that he should be—I guess the only real question is, can he? Perhaps we’ll find out soon. If he can’t, that would be a crime against humanity in itself.

Seemingly unable to come up with any genuine criticism of my first Bible reading, Christians mostly responded to it in one of two ways: do the Koran instead, or talk about the “good” stuff in the Bible, such as the ten commandments. So for my second Bible reading, I’ve done exactly that—here’s what the Bible has to say about how to discipline children, so as to comply with the fifth commandment (“honour your father and mother”). I will tackle more commandments in my next few Bible readings.

For this new reading, I’ve also done an extended, topless version for my web site members—this is something I will be doing every month from now on. And even better, so that as many people can see these new videos as possible, I’ve dropped the price of my web site membership to only $9.99 for one month (and $4.99 per month recurring)! Also, so as not to disadvantage anyone who has joined recently, if you joined earlier this year you can claim a $10 credit to use at my online store!

That title may sound like bad news, but actually, I consider it to be a very good news—clearly, it means that atheists are really starting to make an impact in the media and on the population at large. With the recent passing of “Zombie Jesus Day” (thanks Joe!), we have of course had the annual Good Friday sermons from Christian leaders in Australia. Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen took it as an opportunity to spout two old chestnuts: that atheism is as much a religion as Christianity, and that it has resulted in mass murder at the hands of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. I have already responded thoroughly to these claims in my Religion and Morality article, so I won’t repeat myself here. Suffice it to say, I agree with the Australian Atheist Foundation president David Nicholls that this is an act of desperation by the church—here is what else he had to say. I’ve also always found the claim that atheism is a religion in itself to be rather curious anyway—it’s kind of like saying “well okay, we admit that that our belief system is crap, but hey, yours is crap too!”.

I am very sorry about the lack of posts recently, but the reaction to my new sexy Bible readings has been overwhelming! Anyway, I’ve been intending to do a detailed article on the passing of Obama’s health care plan and the reaction to it, but I wanted to get a post up quickly to bring this petition to everyone’s attention: Tell the Republican Party to STOP Inciting Tea Party Racism! The extremism and hatred of the American right in what is supposed to be a civilised country is simply astonishing.

With the International Atheist Convention starting in Melbourne, Australia today (March 12), I felt I had to do something to mark the occasion, seeing as unfortunately I am unable to attend myself. So it seemed like an appropriate occasion to launch a new venture we’ve been planning for some time now: Sachiko’s sexy Bible readings! It does seem that when a lot of people first see me (or at least conservative types), they immediately think “when it comes to brains, she’s got great tits”, simply because I have big tits, and I am a nude model. So I thought it might be fun to really play up to this stereotype, and channel my inner bimbo, as I figured this would be a very funny and effective way to show up the absurdity of a lot of what is written in the Bible, as well as some of the utterly ludicrous contortions of logic people use to defend religious belief. I have to say: it’s really fun to play dumb!

If you can’t view YouTube videos in your country, we also have a locally hosted version, as well as a super high quality version for my web site members.

Just when I thought internet social networking couldn’t possibly get any more inane after Twitter, along comes Chat Roulette. You get a random video chat partner, and you have a next button to move you to another one. To keep your partner with you, you basically have to be more interesting than the next person. What this seems to amount to in practice is basically being as outrageous as possible—there doesn’t seem to be any real communication at all. Is this what people are really after with internet social networking—a freak show? Or is this a completely separate phenomenon? Is this a valid form of social networking at all? Could it even be called a valid form of entertainment?

Whatever it is, it seems to be taking off in a big way. It’s starting to get a fair bit of media attention, and no doubt it will attract a lot of venture capital—even though they’ll probably never be able to figure out how to make any money out of it. After all this time, Twitter still hasn’t figured out how to.

For quite some time now I’ve been meaning to do an article on why creationism should not be taught in science class, but I think A.C. Grayling covers it very well in this video. I guess the only thing I would add (although he does already touch on this point toward the end of the video) is that the only thing that should be taught in science class is, well, science, and that creationism simply does not fit the true definition of science. That is, not trying to make the facts fit a preconceived notion (as in the case of the Biblical creation story), but rather, looking at the facts objectively, and seeing what conclusions it leads us to, then testing our conclusions through objective, repeatable experiments.

Oh yes: calling creationism “intelligent design” doesn’t make it any more scientific or respectable.

Not only is it Chinese New Year’s Eve tomorrow (the 13th), today is also Darwin Day! Sadly, I’ve only just found out about the petition for President Obama to recognise Darwin Day, and it’s too late to sign it. Oh well, there’s always next year I guess, and it appears it hasn’t worked this year anyway. How sad that it is so politically dangerous for the US President to openly support one of the most well supported theories in all of science, and possibly the most important idea by anyone ever.

Oh yes—apparently there’s something called Valentine’s Day on the 14th as well. It appears to be some kind of cynical commercial exercise to force us to spend money on stuff that none of us need.

The case against carbon trading—but is it a fair assessment?

It seems the debate over carbon trading just won’t stay out of the headlines at the moment. The opposition party in Australia—in their usual blatant political opportunism—have decided this week to unveil an alternative climate change policy to carbon trading. However, in spite of calling carbon trading “a great big fat tax”, they have yet to specify how their own policy will be funded—and even worse, it will basically mean business as usual for big polluters anyway. So it’s basically a climate change policy for those who don’t believe in climate change, and for those who think profits for big business should always take precedence over everything else. They want to appear as though they are doing something without actually doing anything useful, while incurring costs to the consumer and pretending it won’t cost them anything. This is hardly surprising, given their present leadership. Read the rest of this entry »

This just a quick post to let everyone know that my private web cam service is finally beginning at midday today (Australian Eastern Standard Time)! After feedback from my fans, we’ve decided to use Skype exclusively for my web cams and chat, to allow for everything from simple text and audio chat, all the way to two way video chat. I hope this unique new service will have been worth the wait!

Oh yes: I’ve also extended my working hours to start two hours earlier, which I hope will be helpful to those of you in a different time zone—which I’d say accounts for almost all of my fans, actually.