Why Dont You Blog?

Hmm. After having expressed blogged horror about the women who goaded toddlers to fight, I am a bit disturbed by the way this case is getting reported now.

The women are now getting demonised as representative sub-class trash across all the media. Photographs of them leaving court have all the visual cues that identify them as “scum” to middle England and to the respectable working class - the clothes, the smoking, the visible navel adornments, their facial expressions, the unconscious visual references to the gangs of binge-drinking raucous women that are supposed to be menacing our cities.

I now know much more about their relationships and intelligence and mental health and even suicide attempts than I know about the people who live in my street. Possibly more than I know about myself. Read the rest of this post

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Q. When can something that is not even remotely like something else be considered to be the same as it?
A. When it’s a commercial product and the company that owns it can work out a spurious link that will get it a page on the BBC news site instead of a couple of lines in a technical journal.

The BBC claims that Rio Tinto Zinc found a new mineral that was the same as the fictional kryptonite. Read the rest of this post

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So impressed was I by the idea of a top ten Christian blog list together with the idea of Christians pulling stunts to make sure atheists wouldn’t be top that I was forced to google for some evidence of the existence of Christian top ten charts.
This is one top ten I didn’t have patience to look past number one but that was indeed quite interesting. It told me that police in Florida handcuffed and arrested a six-year-old and that this is apparently a normal part of their daily activities. It didn’t seem particularly Christian except for having an intro quote that mentioned God. So disappointment there, when I was looking for comedy ranting.

It even has a post that made a point that I’ve been too cowardly to make here that 500 civilians were killed unremarked in Iraq, when the 33 Virginia Tech deaths were dominating the world’s media….

OK, maybe there’s a fundamentalist top ten that I can rant about? Oh bugger. A Google for top ten fundamenatlist blogs produces a page of links that reference “top ten signs you’re a fundamentalist Christian” which can best be described as self-satirising when it’s referenced by Christians. Read the rest of this post

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You really need to checkout this “blogging Monk”: http://monkallover.blogspot.com/

Stunning.

He seems to advocate vote rigging:

DON’T LET AN ATHEIST, ANTI-RELIGION BLOG
STAY AMONG THE TOP TEN RUNNING FOR
FIRST PLACE AS “BEST RELIGION BLOG”
Go, sign up, and vote for Catholic blogs—
especially the ones in the top ten!
Perhaps we can succeed in getting that atheistic, anti-religion blog knocked down.
You may vote for as many blogs as you want, but only once for each blog.

So I suspect that is a few more Hail Mary’s for cubicle 10…

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I am somewhat saddened that I came across Dinesh D’Souza’s blog at a time when I have very little spare time to make my own posts. The things D’Souza says are stunning in the bigoted idiocy they demonstrate. If I didn’t know better I would have thought it was one big joke blog written by some teenagers laughing to themselves. Sadly, this wingnut appears to be a real person.

Looking over his blog today, I stumbled upon a post titled “Good Heavens, No More Limbo?” which is another fine example of his, erm, thinking. Basically, this is a post reporting that the Catholic Church has decided to do away with the concept of Limbo (where babies went if they died before being baptised) and from now on, all babies who die go to Heaven.

Seriously. Read the rest of this post

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Well there is a rant brewing, but sadly here in the Ivory Why Dont You Towers we are short on spare time so I can not do justice to a video posted by what seems to be the single most objectionable person I have ever had the misfortune to see. PZ Myers has posted on Pharyngula about it and pretty much says everything which needs to be said. Check it out for the full details.

In a nutshell, this snotty, arrogant kid called Kelly Tripplehorn (snope entry for background) has posted a video in which he claims his “corporation” will offer US$1000 to anyone who can solve the philosophical problem of Induction. Yeah, that is correct. $1000. Wow. Alfred Nobel, eat your heart out. Barely enough to buy a low end laptop to solve one of the major philosophical problems.

To crown things off, the nutcase Tripplehorn goes on about how “he” solves the problem by invoking God. What absolute madness. He demands a reasonable, self consistent, internally logical argument from Atheists but not his own reasoning.

I would like to go on record, having noted his only requirement is “without invoking God” to say the problem is solved, and the universe is logical and ordered because it is the will of Freya. She is neither the Abrahamic God Tripplehorn talks about, nor a generic “God” (as she is a Goddess…).

I await the US$1000. Hopefully I can use it to buy a new SatNav…

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Following on from the previous post, where it seemed the Archbishop of York was a strong contender for Idiot of the Year award, I have stumbled upon a post by Dinesh D’Souza (via Nullifidian’s blog once more) and Oh My Thor, if we don’t have an even stronger contender. Two wingnuts in one weekend. Loki must be having a field day!

In a post titled “Unbelief as a Form of Payback” Dinesh D’Souza rants on about Atheism (as he has done a few times previously, see Nullifidians blog for more links) and how it basically has nothing to offer the bereaved after an incident like the Virginia Tech shooting. He writes: Read the rest of this post

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It seems we have a strong contender for the Department of the Stupid’s annual award for gross stupidity. (Thanks to Nullifidian for the heads up on this)

It seems the esteemed John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, has some completely off the rails ideas about what makes a “believer.” This is excerpt of interest:

Twenty-seven years ago I was chaplain to a young offenders remand centre, Latchmere House. Every inmate was asked to declare his religious affiliation, and four young men were registered as having no religion. One Sunday, all the inmates were offered the chance to go to worship. The four young men with no religion declined the offer, while their fellow inmates on the A wing took up the offer. The prison officer, not wanting the four men to remain locked up in their cells, asked them to clean the toilets on the wing. The following Sunday, our four non-religious young men took up the offer to go to worship. The prison officer was puzzled why they had opted in this week. “Why are you going to chapel?” he asked. The four replied, “Sir, we didn’t like the ‘No Religion’ place of worship”. Crudely as they put it, those four young men were saying in their naivety that we are all essentially religious. The question is not whether we worship, but rather one of who or what do we worship.

Blimey. What in Toutatis’ name was going through his mind when he first made this “conclusion” let alone repeated it? I am almost lost for words at the crass idiocy it demonstrates.

“Crudely as they put it” the four young men were saying that we humans all essentially avoid punishments. If I was given the choice between sitting in a church for a few hours or scrubbing the toilets, I am pretty sure I would be happy to pretend that the invisible sky elf existed. I suspect any sane person would be.

For the truly “devout” (note comment about sane people in previous paragraph) this may seem strange, as people with faith in whatever incarnation of the flying spaghetti monster appeals to them are notoriously stubborn. They will suffer all manner of injustices because of their loose grip on reality, and I suspect if given the choice of sit in a Mosque or scrub toilets the Archbishop of York would take the loo every time. This does not make it a rational choice and here Atheists really do have an advantage.

It really is mind boggling that the Archbishop of York could honestly come to the conclusion that because these four convicts chose to sit through a sermon rather than scrub ****, it means we are all basically theists. It is also interesting to note that the implication of what Sentamu Ebor says is that the vast majority of prisoners are Christians… So much for religion being the source of morality…

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Is anyone else having problems with the Atheist Blogroll? For some reason the code include doesn’t seem to be showing updated blogs (it used to mark them as “**new”), even though I have the rolling code set up. This is not a critical error really, although it is giving a lot of exposure to the 25 blogs currently showing , but it is annoying as I used to use this to give me leads as to which blogs were updated and worth visiting.

It is possible that Blogrolling has finally bit the bullet, and it seems MoJoey is already looking at alternatives, and I suspect they cant come soon enough…

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Following a somewhat off the rails comment made on a previous post by someone calling themselves “Atheists Don’t Get It,” Nullifidian made an excellent response. As lots of people miss the comments here, and the original post was quite old, I felt it would be worthwhile repeating Null’s comment - especially as he has cited the original sufficiently for anyone to work out the nonsense Atheists Don’t Get It was spouting. You can read a related, equally good, post on Null’s blog where he talks about the crazy website which this lunatic is trying to promote.

Nullifidian’s comment reads as follows: Read the rest of this post

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