Spontaneous Analogy That I Had to Write Down

I was thinking about this particular Comfortian argument: 

If you go before a judge, convicted of a crime and you say to the judge, jusdge, I know I have been found guilty but since you are a good and fair judge, I believe you should let me go, being that you are so good and fair. What do you suppose that judge would say to you? They might give a slight chuckle but they would likely say, "because I am a good and fair judge, I cannot let you go free. I must see that justice is served and if I let you go free it would show me to be corrupt."

And thought to myself: How would a Christian argue that analogy if one added this line?

"But your honor, during your last campaign I brought you thousands of votes through my campaign contributions and my faith in your capacity to judge, as well as my understanding of how much you sacrifice for justice!"

How should the judge reply?

The Brick Testament

The Brick Testament has reached an all time high with its 4 newest stories.

This guy is a lego genius.

Absurdities in Genesis: Close But Not Quite

This one kinda hurts my head, but more because its so close to having a semblance of truth to it, then it just fails miserably. Sadly it demonstrates an absolute zero understanding of what argument from incredulity is. The pictured "evolutionist," were he anything but a poor caricature would point out that given enough time and possibilities the potential for our evolution becomes far less improbable, and becomes much more about how we evolved, not about the probability of whether we evolved.

Of course, that's why argument from incredulity is a fallacy. If i roll a 1 billion sided die, every result has a 1 in a billion chance, but when I roll a 426,325,201 I just beat 1 in a billion odds of rolling that. If we know something happened against probabiliy we want to know how. We already know whether it happened or not.

As an aside, their artist has a really weird obsession with those lame ass fish that people put on their cars. I mean just in the last month we've had the one above, as well as this one, and just this year so far there's those plus this, this, this, this, and this. I mean really they do about one a week, and almost half of them for the year feature those stupid things.

When Writer's Block Sucks...

I bring you Fashion S.W.A.T!

Mostly I find it amusing to see them glibly mock the teabaggers.

A Bit About Me

I realized when i wrote my reveiew of ginG chapter 11 that I pretty much never talk about who I am here, but I guess i probably should, to give everyone an idea of where I'm coming from when it comes to atheism and religion.

For the basics I was raised, as I have stated previously, in a Mormon household. That said, it was not terribly cultic as far as things go. While many of the doctrines were in force our family was overall pretty lax when it came to the prohibitions on caffeiene and such (alcohol was a huge no though). We were a convert family, so its not terribly odd that we were never really perfectly adapted to that lifestyle or the amount of indoctrination that some were.

Anyhow, it was an interesting way growing up. I can honestly say that for quite some time I actually believed pretty much everything that was said about Joseph Smith, the history of the church, and whatnot. It was ironically their intense teenage indoctrination program, which they call "seminary" that broke me of the spell. Seminary was basically 4 years of deep scriptural study with a preapproved church curriculum.

In addition to being a Mormon, I was also a history nut, and too many things in the Book of Mormon just didn't work. The main one that tipped me off was mention of Horses in the Americas B.C.E. From there it was just downhill, andby the time I turned 16 I didn't really believe in all the crap anymore, and shifted away into an agnostic/deist stance for awhile, and "came out" to my parents about my agnosticism the month before I turned 18. Going to university changed my perspective even more, and after a brief stint of disingenous paganism and pantheism I went full on Atheist. Having throughly researched history I'd realized that my pantheism was only half right; religions were all equal, they were just equally false.

From there I somewhat lost interest in religion until I picked up The God Delusion last November, and since then the entire subject of positive atheism and active, "out" atheism has drawn me in, and I've been going ever since. And now we're here.

I know, pretty dull stuff, but if anyone has any quesitons about mormonism or anything else up here, feel free to ask!

Buona Pasqua?

I realize there's alot that could be said about today's particular religious trappings and history, but each time I try and write something it seems trite and insignificant next to the body of work on the subject. That said, I'd just like to wish all my fellow skeptics and atheists a Happy Zombie Jesus day. Hopefully I'll be able to think of something really worth saying tonight. 

Playing With Matches Around a Straw Man

Ok... what part of this is satire, and not just blatantly idiotic?It lacks understanding of the scientific method and how peer review works. Satire exposes something and is either ironic or sarcastic. This is just sarcastic hyperbole.

"Please note that this evidence is conclusive because it is going to be published in a scientific journal which is always 100% accurate."

Seriously? You think we believe that scientific journals are 100% accurate all the time? Hate to break it to you, but we all know very well that science makes mistakes. So let's try this from the reverse perspective, simply because I think we know which case is stronger.

I found a dinosaur bone. After long hours of analysis, fact checking, and reading my bible I came up with some fascinating conclusions!

Firstly, of course, I wanted to date the bones to find out how old the fossils I was dealing with are. Well, I ran some tests, and wow, guess what? The dating method said the fossils were at least 65 million years old. But then i thought to myself, no way. That's not possible. The earth is only 6 thousand years old, so I revised the dates, and decided there must have been something in the great flood that caused the apparent age to be much greater. So with estimates modified, i found the fossil was still amazingly about 5800 years old! Fantastic, its almost as old as the Garden of Eden!

Secondly, I examined the DNA of the fossil to analyze it further and found that it had DNA remarkably similar to our own! Clear proof that God designed all his creatures from a similar base. That makes total sense. So much more than common descent!

Finally, looking at the bones i couldn't determine a cause of death. I found this perplexing, but then realized it must have died in the flood. How fortuitous to find such amazing proof of the deluge. Why else would it be bured like that? No possible way could it have been because of thousands of years of sediment and tectonics andbuilding layers on layers. That's absurd.

Also, please note that this is all completely reliable because it fits within biblical interpretations of reality. I even got it posted on AiG! Also, don't worry. If any parts of the bible are contradictory its ok, because God is infallible and there has to be a reasonable explanation why it doesn't fit with actual history.

Wow. Isn't building straw men fun?

PZ Scarred My Brain

with this.

I'm tempted to see about getting a copy of this, just to see how bad it is.

Opine Silence

Interesting how quiet Opine Editorials has been about the whole Iowa deal. They must still be in a state of shock. I know -I'm- terribly amused by their silence.

Just a link this time

PZ Myers, still full of win.

Rambling Thoughts

Sometimes I'm really not sure what's up with this insane country I live in. There's alot to like, there really is. We have some of the best basic rights of any country on the planet, and have been exttremely successful despite the relative youth of the nation. We survived revolution, civil war, and 2 world wars. We survived political scandal and economic depression.

But now?

I'm really not sure the people are willing to do what it takes. We are currently national experiment on Keynsian economics, and I'm really wondering whether it will work. I hope it will, I really do, but I'm not unsure as to whether there was a right choice to make here. And the economy is of course the biggest problem our country is facing right now, but that's far from the only one.

We have delusional members of the right wing who have convinced themselves that Obama is not elligible to be the President of the United States. Now, I would say criticising this is a bit of hypocrisy considering the beginning of Bush II's first term. But I would also argue that Obama actually had a clear victory in his election as opposed to the dubious Supreme court decision that put Bush in power. The divisiveness is becoming a severe albatross around the necks of the nation, and while I believe firmly that dissent is patriotic, stupidity and ignorance are not.

We have two wars going on, of which one (Iraq) was based on lies and misinformation, and one (Afghanistan) which is of dubious current merit.

We let religious religious groups constantly challenge science education and be taken seriously by idiotic legislatures. These same groups want to fight against the rights of homosexuals to marry. Fiddling while Rome burns indeed.

Can we make headway on this? Yes. Will we? I hope so. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and its going to take alot of compromise from all sides of the playing field. Hopefully people will start to do so sooner rather than later, but the "wackaloons" only seem to get louder. And the lowest common denominator tends to hear loud really well.

Totally worth posting

Chick Tract Hitler

Thanks Marty from Rational Wiki

Thanks PZ

Taken From Pharyngula

Seriously. Electronic prayer. Could there be anything worse that scammers might put out there to rip-off the religious? I find this concept interesting, but no less corrupt. I mean, does anybody in their right mind believe, even if god were real that he wouldn't give a hearty "WTF mate?" to digitized prayer. I'll give points for ingenuity and comedy value here, but nothing else.

Some changes

I made a few minor edits to the layout and side content. Any suggestions are of course welcome, as are opinions of the current setup. I'd like to make it as generally pleasant to look at as possible as well as (hopefully) providing quality content.

Random Tangent

Maybe I'm the only one, but I'm fairly disappointed that The Brick Testament hasn't updated in 4 months.

Stalking Pharyngula

I was over reading on PZ Myers' blog and saw this lengthy bit on whether a fertilized egg is a member of the species it could one day represent. I'm curious what others' thoughts on this might be.

I agree with the assessment of life being continuous. It spawns anew, and while death for an organism is inevitable, the act of recombinant procreation is clearly a continuation of 2 seperate organisms' partial genetic code. At no point did it become not alive, even when the individual gamete contains only half of the necessary chromosomes for reproduction.

So, here's what I don't get. By the definition of life, most "pro-life" advocates want to say that human life begins at conception. But this isn't really true since the life (as far as biology is concerned) never "started" but was, as PZ says, continuous. I think, if we're arguing about this, its an important distinction between life and cognizance. Otherwise we might as well argue that ovulation is murder and male masturbation mass murder.

I'm really not an expert on this. Thoughts?

On a Pharyngula trip today I guess.

PZ Meyers is liveblogging his stay in a blizzard. I am far too easily amused by this. Only at Pharyngula