Category Archives: Atheism

Miscellanea: Fluids, Dogs and Balloon Fetishes

Posted on by

Corey Watches the Cat

photograph by my mom and posted on her blog.


“You know who would have done a great job covering such a stately Beltway funeral? Tim Russert.”

Ouch. The Onion stings!

My Next 2 T-Shirts

This is apparently going to be the Summer of Too Many Cotton Shirts, as I’m on the verge of ordering these two (thanks, Will!):

Dog Update From Mom

If one were to write a movie script about the dogs in my parents’ house, Grizzly would be the slow, dim-witted one while Corey would be the quick, smart, evil one. He’s the nice dog, she’s the mean dog. He just wants to be loved, she just wants to make trouble. But she’s still a dog, and she still protects her family and lies around a lot.

My mother illustrates Corey’s nature in a series of blog posts (and photographs) that you can see here, here and here.

Why is This Guy Famous?

I had never heard of this Spencer chap until I saw him on Letterman, and I’m still not entirely sure why anybody cares about him. i don’t like it when morons like Spencer prance their styled little bodies onto the chair next to him and start trying to banter. They’re not funny, despite what their insipid little clubkid friends always tell them.

Dave ably cuts him down to size in this video.

Stay Off My Side, Bill

Bill Maher has a new documentary coming out. It’s about religion. He’s an atheist, but he’s also a misogynist and a mean-spirited, holier-than-everybody snob. Bill and I agree at least on the first thing, so I find him slightly less intolerable when he’s talking about that particular subject. Even so, I don’t like the idea of watching his horribly stretched face and lizard-slick hair make fun of people in this movie. He’s easier to understand if you realize that he does not accept the idea that anything worthwhile exists between the east and west seaboard.

You can see him in all his gross douchebaggery in the trailer for his movie here.

Applicationize Your Websites

I first heard about this program on Lifehacker.com, but then it seemed like I was hearing about it everywhere. I figured I should try it, so I did. This functionality is going to be a part of the next version of Safari (Apple’s web browser), supposedly. But we have it now, with a program called Fluid.

In order to access a website, you have to open your web browser and navigate to the page you want. This is great for sites that you glance at or whatever, but that’s no longer convenient – there are a few sites that are meant to stay open all the time, like Facebook and Gmail. The interaction between your operating system and your website all has to go through a central arbiter, the web browser. Fluid breaks those sites out of that middleman and lets you and your operating system access them as separate entities.

You point this little application, Fluid, to the site you want to applicationize – Gmail, for instance. Lo and behold, you can alt-tab to it at your leisure. You can see it at work, in my little workspace.

The Japanese people continue to vex me:

A Brief History of Easter

Posted on by

I don’t believe in God or Jesus. I’m willing to accept that Jesus, the person, existed, but I don’t hink he had magical powers. Jesus was the David Blaine of his time, except with a motivational message.

That’s part of the reason why I’m not a Christian, the other part being a deft command of my powers of reason.

What gets me is that Christianity is ultimately very, very silly. I find it amusing when Christians make fun of other religions for the same crime.

Christianity is a radical offshoot of a much older religion. The parent religion has a whole library of stories about a big, scary baby in space who manipulates humans into doing his work and then pays them back by destroying their enemies. There’s also a lot of stuff about killing babies and burning foliage.

Most religions have an end. That is, the book has a last chapter where the world ends. Norse types called it Ragnorok.

The Jews had an end of the world cenario: God sends the Messiah. Right around the year 0, some dude shows up at the temple, declares himself the son of God and suddenly everybody’s supposed to stop going to temple and start going to church. Chrsitianity is the post-apocalypse belief system, the Mad Max of religions. Christianity is what happens when the religious nuts crack themsleves open and reveal that there’s nothing inside.

The end of the world happened and life goes on. The Christians think that the Jews are misguided fools because the Messiah came to earth already. The Jews don’t think that’s true, that the messiah hasn’t come back yet at al, and that the Christians are misguided fools for believing that David Blaine actually can tie his shoelaces without touching them.

Magic tricks aren’t enough by themselves, so Christians upped the ante – our Messiah is super powered because he died and came back from the dead. The Jews didn’t believe it and now they’re all going to hell. No, Really! Straight to hell. Do not pass Gehenna, do not collect 200 shekels. Why the roaster? Because they applied reason. I can’t speak for ancient Jews, but I bet they had a similar reaction to the news that I do: “If the Messiah really did come back, then we would probably know it.” Some stuff would have gone down, Old Testament style.

The Christians agreed, sort of. “Wait, you’re right! Um, a lot of bad stuff should happen when the Messiah comes to earth. So that will totally, absolutely happen. Er, the next time he comes back from the dead. Then you nonbelievers are gonna have a really bad day! Whenever that happens.” And then somebody wrote Revelation and quietly twiddled his thumbs.

So now the radical offshoot is back to going to church while the Jews go to temple and get blamed for everything even though they’ve been minding their own business for pretty much the whole time.

One of the nice things about having an ancient religion with lots of stuff written down about it: you don’t have to revise it all the time.

You know why Jews are cheap? Because it’ a nasty, filthy stereotype, sure, but it comes from somewhere – in the descending years of the Dark Ages, the Catholic church decided that lending money was sinful. Because of rampant anti-Semitism, the Jews were forced out of every business except that the ones that no Christian wanted to do. Usury and other unsavory professions (most of them involving money and the burgeoning idea of capitalism and loans and stuff) became the purview of the Judaic peoples. Therefore, Jews are cheap and rich and will take advantage of you if you let them – and we cut to the late 1930s and the ghettos and you can pretty much take it from there.

Anyway, back to the superheroes.

We were all at home on Sunday, enjoying what might have been a day of rest, because the David Blaine of Jerusalem had buddies who didn’t think he was dead, rolled back the stone and found his grave empty. Hallelujah! He is risen, yadda yadda. Sorry, Jews. Here’s your ticket. Don’t bother packing anything with long sleeves.

The Mormons think that Jesus came to America. The Scientologists believe that thetans make us do bad things. They’re both silly, but so is David Blaine.

Our way of celebrating Easter is pretty cool, though. The bunnies and eggs have nothing to do with Jesus. But bunnies and eggs meant something pretty important to our European ancestors. While they lived in round houses and spiked their hair with lye and became target practice for the professional armies from Italy, they were putting women right up there with thunder, lightning and plagues – Important Stuff that they should probably consider worshipping.

Women are the source of life, after all. Men plant the seed, but women do all the work, and anybody who has ever spent time in the vicinity of rabbits knows that the lady bunnies do an awful lot of it.

Eggs are like that, too. You can eat an egg, and that gives you life. If you have a hen and you feed it regularly, it will feed you. Sometimes, its eggs can create more chickens to feed you, too. And when you get sick of all that egg salad, you can have some chicken salad instead.

When Christ’s Marketing Department started selling its product to the forest-dwelling hairy dudes in western Europe, they needed a hook. After all, Christianity and its parent religion are all about a bunch of swarthy people in the desert a few thousand miles away. So they created the world’s first corporate synergy – by adding some light polytheism and ancestor worship in the form of Patron Saints, and by fudging some of the dates to coincide with holidays the heathens liked best.

We eat candy and eggs on the day of Christ’s resurrection because of an ancient, well-crafted marketing ploy that makes Wal-Mart’s falling prices look like the retarded meanderings of a heavily sedated chimpanzee.

Keep that in mind the next time you start piling hate on Cadbury for commercializing your religion. You’re a Christian now because your dumb ancestors did the Celtic equivalent of licking the frosty filling out of a Creme Egg.

Same shit, different century.

How I Became an Atheist

Posted on by

William Lobdell used to write the religion beat at the LA Times ((Boing Boing showed me the way, at this link)). He doesn’t anymore, because the stories he investigated caught up with him – he couldn’t reconcile the messages from God and the blaring realities of a cold, random universe. By the end, he’s writing words that a budding atheist writes, without actually coming out of the God Closet.

One doesn’t come to atheism through an epiphany. Like any worthwhile belief, a non-belief in God comes from education. Sure, you can have inklings that maybe the jive you hear from religious leaders isn’t any more real than Penthouse Letters, but I find that real, self-declared, proud atheism comes from learning.

I can trace the seed of my atheism to one event in my life. It was the day that my brother David told me that there was no such thing as Santa Claus.

My mom was washing the floor of the powder room. Dreading her answer, I asked the question anyway: “Mom, is there such thing as Santa Claus?”

She was apologetic and truthful – “No, honey. There isn’t.”

In my mind, Santa and God occupy the same branch on the Tree of Delusions – they give you stuff when you’re good and they punish you when you’re bad. They gather intelligence about you through some magical means of eavesdropping. The kids of other religions don’t believe in either one – Santa and Christianity are inextricably linked. They’re both inaccessible, but somehow know your desires.

Finding out that there was no Santa was a click of a cog in my mind. It made sense, and it confirmed my deepest suspicion. Rather than defiantly stating that I was going to continue to believe in Santa despite the knowledge that the Terror Drome ((it’s maybe the most awesome toy ever dreamed by men)) was gifted to me by my parents, who bought it with real, actual money, I accepted the obvious fact and discontinued my belief. I also suspected, in the way of a lawyer’s son, that it was highly unlikely that Hasbro would have given a fat dude’s elves the ability to give away the very objects that they were trying to sell ((that’s a lie)).

I continued upon this treacherous, uncharted path of thought, though without much to go on. it wasn’t until the death of my grandfather that I realized how my mental struggle was not unique to me.

He was a bona-fide Great Man. He was a physician, a civil war historian and a student of all branches of science. He was a professional amateur, a renaissance man with a hundred hobbies. His name was James Cummins Hazlett – I’m James Hazlett Foreman. In one of those happy genetic accidents, his namesake also happened to look a great deal like him – my mother claims I even have his voice.

When he died, his extensive library became suddenly available to his descendants. My mother got most of his science texts, including a well-worn, first edition of every book written by Carl Sagan ((Sagan’s wikipedia entry is here)).

I had a cantering interest in science myself, spurred into a gallop by Star Trek and Bladerunner. The sudden overflow of books in our house meant that some of them were stored in my bedroom – I happened to pick Broca’s Brain ((you should buy it for yourself, or borrow a copy at your local library)) out of the shelf. That book marks my last attempt to reconcile my dim faith with the bright light of science. I was never the same. I could finally see that though the universe is cold and dangerous, there was still beauty and wonder in it.

The cog clicked again, and that started moving other cogs. I could no longer imagine a world in which an omniscient, omnipotent intelligence held sway over the universe. God was pushed more and more into the margins of my world view until I found that he didn’t need to be there at all.

I don’t know if Dr. Hazlett had the same misgivings that I did. I don’t know that he ever made the cognitive leap from belief to nonbelief. Sadly, I was not old enough and he was not young enough for our paths to cross as intellectual beings. But knowing what I know about him, and having been given the gift of science and critical thinking by him, I know that he was probably thinking about it. I don’t need my grandfather to have been an atheist like me in order to respect and admire him.

I don’t know if Mr. Lobdell is an atheist now, but I imagine he’s well on his way. I wish Mr. Lobdell well on finally getting his own cogs to click. Once you start them, they’re pretty damn hard to stop.

There are no fat, magical men in the North Pole – it’s a cold, dangerous place.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful.

Maybe There’s Something Under That Big Hat

Posted on by

The Pope actually had something intelligent to say today regarding the collision of creationism and evolution:

“This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such ((quoted from msnbc.com)).”

Personally, I’ve always found Catholics to be the least irksome kind of devout Christian. There’s a solid grounding of scholarship and, well, research built right into the bones of Catholicism, things that don’t really exist in the lighter versions of Christianity.

I use the word devout for a reason – most people who self-identify as Christians don’t even enter my mind as being of a certain religion. In other words, I don’t think of most people in terms of their religion. That is, unless they strongly identify with their organized belief system, in which case they usually sling the arrows at me first.

The above statements by the pontiff don’t overshadow other things about Catholicism that I disagree with like celibate clergy, the outlawing of birth control of any kind and the institutional degradation of women. But I think it’s a good thing that the Catholic church is almost making up for past mistakes ((like the abhorrent treatment of Galileo)).