These links found on The Raving Atheist‘s site, and on the comments pages therein.
It’s terribly amusing.
Enjoy!
Thanks to Jon for pointing this out to me.
Certain local councils are banning hot-cross buns from the school menu for fear of offending Muslims, Jews and, presumably, other non-Christians. A spokesman for London’s Tower Hamlets borough council said, “We can’t risk a similar outcry over Easter like the kind we had on Pancake Day,” adding (seemingly cynically), “We will probably be serving naan breads instead.”
I think this is a terrible shame. Hot-cross buns taste good. Who cares if they have Christian origins? I’m all for taking advantage of the good things that come out of religion. Pancakes are great, as long as you don’t have to take part in the ridiculous fasting that follows. Christmas is a perfect excuse to take time off work, go to lots of parties, get ridiculously drunk and spend lots of money on gifts. I wonder what Islamic, Jewish and Hindu treats I’ve been missing out on?
It’s not like they’re suggesting school-kids go out and slaughter some Muslims on the anniversary of the start of the First Crusade. No-one is commemeratively burning witches. Anyone who got offended by a hot-cross bun would be an idiot, and who cares what idiots think?
A story highlighted by TRA about a boy who was run over by his negligent mother and survived just can’t be ignored. (Unfortunately I can’t seem to link to the original article). She says, “God is watching over this little kid”, which presumably is why she didn’t feel she had to. I’m glad my parents didn’t rely on God to look after me…
I find it odd that whenever something has a happy ending it’s called a “miracle”. What is it called when something bad happens? God is rarely invoked then. Where was God when this, this, this and this happened?
Some Catholics in New York are having their parking tickets cancelled because, after all, it’s just tasteless to give parking tickets to Christians. This kind of thing really makes me cross. It’s not just that these people have been given special treatment because of their religion, it’s the way the article ends with, “it’s unclear whether the agent [who gave out the tickets] would face any disciplinary sanctions”, as if by any concievable logic he should. Why is there such a compulsion to treat people’s idiotic beliefs with so much respect?
The Raving Atheist parodies the article beautifully, and The Third Kind makes some very good points about it, leaving me with little else to add.
For anyone still in doubt, Michael Drosnin’s Bible Code is thoroughly debunked in an article by David E. Thomas.
On a closely related note, here is a review of the book Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The Kiwi Atheist‘s blog looks very promising, with very well thought out and well written articles. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.
I’ve just finished watching Russell T Davies’ two part drama The Second Coming on ITV. It’s a straightforward story about what happens when ordinary Manchester bloke Steve Baxter (not the sci fi author) discovers he’s the son of God. It wasn’t your average ITV fare. Spoilers are ahead if you haven’t seen it yet.
About half-way into the first episode when Baxter was doing his “third testament” speech, I thought it was going to be yet more moralising about family values and loving thy neighbour. Son of God comes to Earth, teaches everybody a lesson, we all live happily ever after in peace and harmony. Amen.
On the way, though, the drama was good enough to keep me watching. Even if the miracles weren’t quite convincing enough to have everybody rioting in the streets the way they were, the surreal style of the production made a bit of un-realism forgivable. What made the scenes good was the conflict. A gay man in a pub confronts the son of God and says, “what about me? Look what it says about gays in the bible.” Steve’s friend Judith in particular argued with him. If he was so omnipotent, why all the pain and suffering and death?
But surely God would win in the end? Wrong. And so this review turns out differently from how I expected it would. The programme makers had the courage to say what needs to be said. We don’t need God. Actually he’s a source of a lot of our problems. If people would just give up on this stupid idea they might realise that they are responsible for what happens in their lives; that they have to make the most of the one life they have because after that there’s nothing.
Who’d have thought it? An ITV programme with a serious message. Not a populist message but a difficult, challenging one. Great stuff!
The Sunday Herald has an interview with writer Russell Davies.
Newsnight tonight featured a story about lobbying to get a phrase acknowledging God as one source of our values in the preamble to the European Union’s constitution. The pope is certainly all for it. I’ve no doubt that God had an important role in shaping the values of those responsible for the Crusades and the Inquisition, but that was hundreds of years ago. Why does God need to be brought into it now? It’s certainly questionable how many people in Europe still believe in him. The chap arguing for the inclusion of god references kept saying that the wording would be inclusive, it wouldn’t leave out the Jews or the Muslims or even the Humanists. It was odd that he didn’t say “atheists”, in fact neither did anyone else. Surely that concept is not still taboo! The lady with the opposite viewpoint stated that highlighting people’s differences at the start of the document was maybe not the best way to go when we should be focusing on what we have in common as a union.
The bottom line is, religion needs to be kept out of government, and government out of religion. Referring to an imaginary being in a serious legal document just doesn’t make sense. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.
Update: The National Secular Society has responded to the proposal.
This news story sounds too good to be true. From the description, it sounds as though Reverend Lee Rayfield told the congregation at a carol service this story, about the scientific impossibility of Santa Claus. Somehow he didn’t realise there were children as young as five in the church. Their parents weren’t too happy about their fairy story being ruined by a man of God. Now they have to explain to their kids that not everything the Reverend says is true.
Perhaps these kids will learn something of critical thinking from the experience. With luck, they’ll start to question other things that Reverend Rayfield and their parents tell them. Maybe they’ll even apply the same scientific reasoning from the Santa story to the nonsense in the Bible. Oh the irony!
Today I came across Martin’s TBN Watch. He does a much better job than I could at conveying just what TBN is like, and with a suitably mocking tone. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the actual articles. “TBN is always dumb but most definitely never boring”, he writes. It is indeed very entertaining, and whenever it is on at work we all stand around laughing at it. Of course, it’s not all harmless amusement for sensible people. From the article on Benny Hinn:
The belief in faith healing, of all of the kooky beliefs fundies tend to hold, is the one that has been shown to have the direst consequences. Recently, a spate of deaths, mostly among young children whose parents chose to pray rather than seek medical attention for illnesses which were not particularly life-threatening in most cases, has made the news, and in at least one incident, one dead child’s parents were charged with outright homicide for their neglect. We can applaud the sagacity of law enforcement for cracking down on this kind of nonsense, but we can only groan at the fact that ludicrous numbers of people still go to see Benny Hinn. For Benny, or anyone, to continue to champion faith healing–and, in Hinn’s case, to make a career out of pretending to do it–when helpless children are dropping like ninepins ought to have the public rioting in the streets. But what is the public doing instead? Lining up to see Benny Hinn, that’s what.
Exposing TV Evangelism also contains articles about religious TV in general. Interestingly, it gets the number one spot on a Google search for “tv evangelism”, above all the pro-TV evangelism sites! This is significant because of the way Google works. Apart from that, there seem to be far too few people pointing out how stupid TV evangelism is. To paraphrase Martin Wagner, TV evangelists are funny, that anyone at all takes them seriously is profoundly sad.