More lies for Jesus

christwire.org have outed my real identity.

According to them, I am “a Jewish Philadelphia-based reporter for Fox rival ABC”, real name James Goldman. I was arrested “On June 18, 2006, [ … ] by the New York City Police Department in Manhattan for soliciting a transvestite prostitute.”

I also appear to be in my early 60s with grey hair. Which is fascinating!

OK, so—I get it. Super funny. The “joke” being that someone somewhere at christwire either doesn’t realise the Glenn Beck rape and murder parody is a satirical commentary on the methods Beck uses to stir racial hatred and political extremism OR it is the single funniest be-like-them-to-laugh-at-them site I’ve ever seen.

I have to say my alternate future self does look quite dashing with his silver tash. And although I would dearly love to provide chirstwire with a scoop, I’m afraid I have to insist they print a clarification on this one (my comment) before all my usual man bitches start getting jealous and raise their prices.

EDIT: Atheist Nexus seem to think christwire is a genuine religious hate speech site http://www.atheistnexus.org/forum/topics/christwire-1

EDIT: From the comments below and on reddit it would appear the self-styled “investigative journalist” Stephenson Billings, who made the above accusations of me, doesn’t realise christwire is a parody site. Either that or christwire isn’t supposed to be a parody site but it is regularly usurped by bloggers with a satirical genius who’ve made it one. This just keeps getting better, but DAMN YOU POE’S LAW!!

This is the level Answers In Genesis have stooped to

EDIT: 20th June 2009. It would appear this billboard is not as it first appears. A number of you have pointed out that it looks Photoshopped. I will not be removing this post in the interest of clarity, but I would like to make it clear that, upon further examination, I no longer personally believe it to be part of a genuine ad campaign, from the people who brought us the creation science museum. Please read comments for more.

Update: Andrew McKenzie, from answersingenesis, has verified that this is indeed a Photoshopped picture, in a detailed comment below.

http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Poe’s_Law

Does prayer show a lack of faith?

I’ve been having a series of back and forth tweets with Christians on prayer. I was struck by how many contradictions people who believe in intercessionary prayer are able to turn a blind eye to.

For example, the belief that God is omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent means that He is always going to do whatever He feels is in your benefit and that, as a person of faith in Him, despite that these ways might not immediately seem to be stacked in your favour, you should accept that He knows what is best and accept whatever is thrown at you, safe in the knowledge that the big guy is taking care of it.

Praying that He change these meticulously planned events in your life, just at the moment your puny brain realises you’re being screwed, seems like an awful lack of faith to me. It’s tantamount to politely reminding God that He’s been standing on your foot for the last 20 years, without wanting to sound ungrateful for the reinforced shoes.

Prayer also seems to assume that God is absentminded, with regard to events in your life which are important to you. The idea that He will somehow forget what you want in your life, during that important job interview, flat out contradicts the idea that He, “knows every hair on your head”.

Of course, a good test of prayer would be for the believer to try not praying at all, previous to an important event and then see if it turns out exactly as they would have hoped it would, regardless. Of course this too would be interpreted as His guiding influence, no matter what the outcome, such is the hermetically sealed faith in faith which we’ve talked about at length elsewhere on this blog–but I struggle to think of a better way to demonstrate to someone who is caught within this kind of non-thinking, just how close minded they have become, while believing they are acting in the complete opposite.

There’s no polite way to say this, but the objectivity which would be necessary for the believer to truly view their own spirituality as the misnomer for intuitive superstition that it is, is asking a little too much of the average Christian, but only in the same way it would be difficult to be confident of your results were you to ask for the same separation between influence and inspiration of an artist, or the difference between drive and passion in an athlete, for example.

These are merely labels we give to emotions; facets of our personality where the line of demarkation is our ego and our protective self interest. Prayer seems to float above these projections of our inner cinema, like a conduit between the projectionist and the actors in the movie. Prayer is the illusion of being in control of something for which there is, in reality, no control whatsoever, despite a wish so strong that this were not the case, that this very disconnectedness between our ego and the outside world, becomes an article of faith by which the believer reinforces their biases towards what is, in fact, a completely unrealistic set of expectations.

EDIT: I made a short animation on this topic. I’m teaching myself Motion 3D

Last Day Dream

A 250 million year old fossilised tree stump in the grounds of a church

In the grounds of St. Thomas the Apostle Church, in the beautiful village of Stanhope, Country Durham, in the North East of England, stands this grand fossilised tree stump, with a plaque that reads:

Fossil Tree Sigillaria SP
This great tree grew in a forest of the middle carboniferous period (about 250 million years ago) near Edmundbyers Cross, now 1550 feet above sea level.

As its vegitable matter decayed this was replaced by sand which has formed a perfect cast in hard Ganister. The roots (stigmaria) show their characteristic form.

The tree was brought to Stanhope and erected here in 1962 by Mr. J G Beaston.

Not only is Stanhope’s Sigillaria a truly amazing relic from our planet’s ancient past, but that it stands in the grounds of a church whose patron, Saint Thomas, was noted for his doubting in the resurrection of Christ, is a poignant reminder that not all Christians are young-Earth creationists, wilfully in denial of the facts.

For example, when this tree was still growing, Tetrapods, the common ancestor of all modern amphibians, walked alongside other freshwater and lagoon invertebrates, bivalve molluscs and crustaceans.

That we can absolutely categorically without question prove that this is true, not just from the fossil record, but from the entirely independent evidence contained in the genes which we humans have in common with those simpler forms of life, as they themselves do with all life on Earth, says everything you could want to say about the weight of evidence which is stacked up against those who simply wish that supernatural causation showed even the slightest thumbprint in the forensics of truth.

But what struck me most, as I stood in the formidable presence of this ancient signal from our Earth’s past was the lack of a legalese disclaimer, at the foot of the inscription. No pandering to the deluded infinitesimally small minority, who might attend the church believing in a literal interpretation of scripture, which insists there is a contradiction inherent in anything which predates the accumulated ages of the prophets in the old testament.

Instead, just an honest description of what the tree tells us about time and space and our feeble first steps into a true understanding of not just Earth, but the whole universe.

“Atheism is a religion without a deity” and other fundamentally wrong assertions

One thing I read a lot, is the assertion that atheists are just as religious as the religious, but their faith is in science, not God. This also takes the form of “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” and “Atheists believe nothing created everything” as well as other neat little roadside placards which at first seem rather more intellectually considered than further scrutiny would reveal.

Twitter user @my_level observed: “EVERY belief system has some supporting text. Theists=religions w/ deities, atheists=religions w/o deities, agnostic=beliefs based in logic & reason. Agnosticism says that due to lack of evidence some features of our systems can’t be disproved hence it can’t be dismissed.”

If you want to play semantics with words like belief and faith you can show that many atheists arrived at an irreligious world-view, through reason and logic and that, therefore, the supporting text @my_level references would be books like ‘On the origin of species’.

Of course there is also the work of Steven Pinker, who shows that there is a link between physical and therefore subjective brain activity and the belief that religious experiences come from outside of the mind and are not subject to personal influences and experiences as, in fact, he has proven they are.

If this is a kind of ‘faith’ that atheists have in everyone from Darwin to Pinker, then so be it. But I don’t think faith in the methodological process of scientific enquiry can be equated to the same kind of faith Christians place in a book plagiarised from Egyptian folklore and Pagan astrology.

I think these are two very different kinds of demands upon our trust. One claims authority through an assertion that without faith you are offering your physical self and your spiritual soul up for a whole slew of moral, social and psychological pronouncements, based upon the diktat of scriptural literalism.

The other asserts its authority based upon mutually supportive, but nonetheless independently acquired evidence, that descriptions of natural phenomena are as factually accurate as it is possible to be, until a better description of those processes becomes available through repeated observance, hypothesise, testing, and theorised reasoning.

The immediate demand from within certain apologetics, at this point, is that scientific methodology itself is in some way flawed precisely for the reasons given above because the procedural mechanism excludes observations which can’t be described by natural means, i.e., supernatural causation.

I’ve written extensively on why this is the ultimate appeal to special treatment and to be dismissed for some very sound reasons, but as I’ve said before, the ability of the believer to believe without a reasonable basis upon which to build their reasons to believe is not in question.

So I disagree that you need the same kind of faith to be a believer in falsifiable evidence as you do to be a Judeo-Christian follower of Yahweh—or indeed any of the proof of concept gods who preceded Him in ancient allegory and oral tradition. Nor do I garner any useful philosophy from the albeit cleverly self-contained word games with definitions of ‘belief’, which Christian apologists will play to score some moot point on the gaps which do exist in our scientific knowledge at the bleeding edge of neuroscience, cosmology, genetics and every other methodological pursuit of the truth.

Therefore atheism is no more my religion than not being a stamp collector is my hobby. I am not defined by a concept of that which I reject.