One Reason Why I Am Anti-Religion

In the jargon of the blogosphere, PZ Myers nails it.

From Will we ever stop running away from the source of the problem? by PZ Myers:

This story about the struggles of a high school biology teacher in Florida is depressing. David Campbell, the teacher, is a hero — but it's the kind of hero sent off to suffer and fail in a misplaced struggle, who dutifully falls in battle, a victim of bad leadership and poor strategy. It's the same old tactics the educational bureaucracy has been pushing for 50 years or more: tip-toe gently about the subject of religion, never challenge the idiocy students bring into the classroom with them, always strain to allow them to accommodate science to their personal superstitions…which means pretending that science doesn't directly contradict their cherished myths. It doesn't work and has never worked, and the problem gets worse and worse every year.

Throughout the story, the teacher is striving to be respectful to religion (he's an Anglican himself) while the students are being arrogant dumbasses who refuse to listen to this evolution stuff. There is a villain here, but the article doesn't point a finger directly, nor does David Campbell place the blame: but the willfully anti-science students are victims of church and dogma. It's gotten so bad that it's not just parents and students who are opposing good science education, it's some of the teachers themselves. One of Campbell's fellow biology teachers is busily inculcating students with stupidity, too.

Animals do adapt to their environments, Ms. Yancey tells her students, but evolution alone can hardly account for the appearance of wholly different life forms. She leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusions. But when pressed, she tells them, "I think God did it."

Mr. Campbell was well aware of her opinion. "I don't think we have this great massive change over time where we go from fish to amphibians, from monkeys to man," she once told him. "We see lizards with different-shaped tails, we don't see blizzards—the lizard bird."

That that woman is a public school science teacher is an indictment of the educational system in this country. We can tell right away what has made her stupid, though: I think God did it. She's been infected with religion.

Read the rest here.

Religion, by definition, stomps on the smoldering embers of critical, factual thinking of the youngest among us until the embers are dead. It is not always possible to ignite them again, and most of those among us spend their lives in the dark. They become “sheep” following some of the most insane “shepherds” the world has to offer.

Why does this trouble me? Because I must live in this world with them. They undermine our educational system, as PZ Myers points out. Also, they are responsible for violent leaders like George W. Bush coming to power. How many atheists do you suppose voted for Bush? My guess would be none.

Religion is a dangerous disease.

Oil Money Flows

From The Corrupting Influence Of Oil Money:

Since 2001, gasoline prices have more than doubled, and oil companies have made more than half a trillion dollars in profits. The price of oil has surged from below $30 a barrel to over $125, a fourfold increase. The Big Five oil companies could make a "projected $168 billion in profits" this year alone. The United States has only two percent of the world's oil reserves but consumes 25 percent of the world's oil. "At current oil prices," conservative oil man T. Boone Pickens argued, "we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone." If we continue on the same path for the next ten years, "the cost will be $10 trillion -- it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind," he added.

We Are CNN And We Are The News

How lame is this? CNN tries to make itself part of the news.

From CNN forces Obama to release VP pick early by Mark Preston:

Barack Obama planned to name Joe Biden as his running mate by text message at 8 a.m. ET Saturday morning, but was forced to move up the announcement when CNN broke the story after midnight, a senior Obama official said.

Read the rest here.

Atheism Rules

No matter how many times some people say that communism equals atheism; atheism is not the same thing as communism.

“1.3 billion people under atheist rule.” How bogus can you get? Is this an example of the liberal media? Since when did atheism become a form of government? I thought that China was still a communist country. Or perhaps more accurately it is a socialist republic. What a load of bull crap from KWTX.

From Foreign Missionaries Defy Ban During Olympics:

Christian groups including Southern Baptists that ignored a Chinese ban on foreign missionaries say their underground evangelism during the Olympic games was a success.

Drawn to a nation of 1.3 billion people under atheist rule, the groups prepared for years for what the Southern Baptists once called "a spiritual harvest unlike any other."

Missionary Mark Taylor of Awaken Generation says 115 people from 12 countries gathered in Thailand for orientation before scattering throughout China.

He said they "did see some conversions."

Read the rest here.

How christian is it to be so deceptive?

"John McCain was a POW with me"

From Why I Will Not Vote for John McCain by Phillip Butler:

As some of you might know, John McCain is a long-time acquaintance of mine that goes way back to our time together at the U.S. Naval Academy and as Prisoners of War in Vietnam. He is a man I respect and admire in some ways. But there are a number of reasons why I will not vote for him for President of the United States.

Read the rest here.

Bible Verse For Sunday 08-24-08

For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.

What the hell?

A Question For The New York Times

Why do you publish Deborah Solomon?

Read The Wild Card first.

Then read Questions and Answers, in No Particular Order.

Joe Biden

From VP choice Biden unpopular in Iraq for autonomy plan by Peter Graff and Khalid al-Ansary:

Senator Joe Biden may be one of the only U.S. politicians that can get Iraq's feuding Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish politicians to agree. But not in a good way.

Across racial and religious boundaries, Iraqi politicians on Saturday bemoaned Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's choice of running mate, known in Iraq as the author of a 2006 plan to divide the country into ethnic and sectarian enclaves.

"This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq," Salih al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters.

"We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time."

Read the rest here.

Oil And Water

From More Americans Question Religion's Role in Politics:

Some Americans are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics. A new survey finds a narrow majority of the public saying that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters. For a decade, majorities of Americans had voiced support for religious institutions speaking out on such issues.

Read the rest here.

God Man And Human Man

God Man & Human Man Team Up

Misgovernment For Profit

From Follow This Dime - Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush's Washington by Thomas Frank:

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president's friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president's former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president's liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are apparently on the take -- our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay -- or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

Read the rest here.

Uninvited And Unwanted

How stupid are politicians? Atheists do vote, you know.

Atheists are treated like second-class citizens, yet according to some we should never express our anger. Screw that! This pisses me off. Exclusion of any kind pisses me off. Interfaith gatherings at political events piss me off. Religious “leaders” (like Rick Warren) involved in politics piss me off. Politicians (like Barack Obama and John McCain) who pander to the religious piss me off. And people telling me I shouldn't be pissed off piss me off most of all.

From Why Weren’t Atheists Invited to the Democratic National Committee’s Interfaith Gathering? by Hemant Mehta:

The Democratic National Convention will open next week with an interfaith gathering. Representatives from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths will be there.

No atheists, though.

We weren’t invited.

The Secular Coalition for America has tried to persuade Convention CEO Leah Daughtry to allow atheists to be a part of the gathering, but to no avail.

Read the rest here.

In China "Free Speech Zones" Are Called "Protest Zones"

From China Nabs Another Gold Medal: Government sets new record for jailing Olympics protesters by Ken Silverstein:

The New York Times reported yesterday that the Chinese government had refused to allow a single demonstration in any of the official “protest zones” it had created for the Olympic games. Now two elderly woman have been sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor” for seeking a permit to demonstrate.

The women, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, had made five visits to the police this month in an effort to get permission to protest what they contended was inadequate compensation for the demolition of their homes in Beijing…Although it is unlikely that women as old as Ms. Wu and Ms. Wang would be forced into hard labor, many of those sentenced to [re-education] often toil in agricultural or factory work and are forced to confess their transgressions.

Two other rights advocates from southern China “have not been heard from since they were seized last week at the Public Security Bureau’s protest application office in Beijing,” the Times reports.

Read the rest here.

Arsenic And Old Water

From Study: Possible diabetes link to arsenic in water:

A new analysis of government data is the first to link low-level arsenic exposure, possibly from drinking water, with type 2 diabetes, researchers say.

The study's limitations make more research necessary. And public water systems were on their way to meeting tougher U.S. arsenic standards as the data were collected.

Still, the analysis of 788 adults' medical tests found a nearly fourfold increase in the risk of diabetes in people with low arsenic concentrations in their urine compared with people with even lower levels.

Research outside the United States has linked high levels of arsenic in drinking water with diabetes. It's the link at low levels that's new.

The findings appear in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Read the rest here.

Hemp Madness

From See No Hemp, Hear No Hemp, Speak No Hemp, Part I by Rand Clifford:

Molders of public opinion work in such insidious ways that their actual methods and means usually go unnoticed. While inculcation of propaganda, lies, and disinformation do much of the shaping, simple omission has profound effect—might even be the favorite because it is, after all, nothing. It’s hard to imagine nothing ever accomplishing so much, but consider that for most people under common awareness manipulation, whatever corporate media (CorpoMedia) omits, to a large extent doesn’t exist.

Flag-draped coffins streaming home in the dead of night from our war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan are under media blackout, and so mean as little to most Americans as the actual reasons for the invasions, or even the hideous war crimes themselves. By its nature, omission is all but limitless; its application by CorpoMedia has grown to enormous proportions as celebrities and sports overpower hard news. So this article focuses on omission of—the calculated disappearing of a single thing that for thousands of years has profoundly benefitted the health and well-being of people all over the world, and today offers so much more: Cannabis hemp.

To the stupendous misfortune of virtually everything but Big Oil, the chemurgy movement was stifled by Big Oil. A new National Energy Program was the subject of many bills in Congress, focused on utilizing part of Americas vast agricultural capacity for production of alcohol fuels. Big Oil responded with withering lobby power, including slogans such as the government’s proposed energy program "robbing taxpayers to make farmers rich". Then, as now, whatever Big Oil wants, Big Oil gets. Ford’s vision of cheap, clean and renewable biofuels spooked early oil barons into keeping oil prices in the range between $1 and $4 per barrel—prices so low that no other energy sources could compete. But once they were sure the competition had been killed off, the price of oil began to soar. They were not only able to eliminate competition from alcohol fuels...but were instrumental in diddling government into effectively banning hemp cultivation—an incredible robbing of the people to protect entrenched corporate profits that still endures.

Read more here.

The Wall Tumbles Down

With each passing day I become more and more disappointed with Barack Obama. Why did he agree to this interview with Rick Warren? Can we please get the religion out of politics? Especially the evangelical kind!

If only I could vote for none of the above. We need better candidates!

From Faithiness For President? by Susan Jacoby:

What does it mean to you to trust in Jesus Christ? What is your greatest moral failing? A Martian tuning in to the broadcast Saturday night from Pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Church might be forgiven for concluding that Senators Barack Obama and John McCain were interviewing for a job as assistant pastor rather than running for the presidency of the United States. Obama apologized once again for his teenage drug use. McCain apologized for the failure of his first marriage. Confronted by one of God's televangelists, both candidates sounded like naughty, penitent little boys. Do you think that this event will set a precedent and that future presidential candidates will feel the need to subject themselves to a "faith test" administered by self-appointed representatives of religion?

Read the rest here.

How Many Village Idiots?

From How Anti-Intellectualism Is Destroying America by Terrence McNally:

"It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant." Barack Obama finally said it.

Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right's stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them -- and us -- unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.

American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes "the jury is still out" on evolution.

Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on "The Colbert Report." Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn't actually list the commandments.

This stuff would be funny if it weren't so dangerous.

Read the rest here.

The Cone Of Silence

From McCain protests NBC coverage by Mike Allen:

Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) campaign manager Rick Davis asked Sunday for a meeting with Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, to protest what the campaign called signs that the network is "abandoning non-partisan coverage of the presidential race."

Davis made the request Sunday in a letter that is part of an aggressive effort by McCain to counter news coverage he considers critical.

In this case, the campaign is objecting to a statement by NBC's Andrea Mitchell on "Meet the Press" questioning whether McCain might have gotten a heads-up on some of the questions that were asked of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who was the first candidate to be interviewed Saturday night by Pastor Rick Warren at a presidential forum on faith.

Warren told the audience that McCain was being held in "a cone of silence" so he wouldn't hear the questions, which were similar for both candidates.

Warren referred again to "the cone of silence" when McCain came onstage, and the senator joked: "I was trying to hear through the wall."

Mitchell reported that some "Obama people" were suggesting "that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared."

Read the rest here.

A Cross In The Dirt

From McCain Cross Story Raises Eyebrows:

John McCain won major points on Saturday for his story about a POW prison guard drawing a cross in the dirt, but the tale has bloggers crying foul. Apparently the details of the story have changed over the years, and lately they bear more than a passing resemblance to the memories of Russian novelist and gulag survivor Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Read the rest here.

Bible Verse For Sunday 08-17-08

And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you.

If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the Lord of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart.

Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it.

What the hell?