The Enlightenment of the Healy

Fuck You, United Nations

2009-02-27T19:58:00.003+11:00

The UN wants to pass a BINDING resolution, which it will urge all member countries to enact, making it illegal to defame religions, particularly Islam.

I haven't posted in a while but this has bought me out. The Islamist gynoxenophobic fuckcake countries managed to force the UN to pass a non-binding resolution against defamation of religion and now it wants to force us all not to blaspheme.

WHAT THE FUCK? It would be illegal to say anything bad about any religion. It would be illegal to even talk about a link between Islam and terrorism. Fuck, it would be illegal to say anything bad about SCIENTOLOGY!

Christians should be worried about this too - sure it will protect them from anything defamatory about Christianity, but they won't be allowed to say anything about any other religion. Does that include saying that Christianity is the only true religion? Maybe - that would be saying that Islam is not the right religion and therefore illegal under the resolution.

Good luck getting America to agree to this, UN. You've become the bitch of the Islamists.

Does anyone have anything to say?

Acid Throwing

2008-12-13T23:19:00.002+11:00

Ah the joys of StumbleUpon. I recently came across an article in Wikipedia titled "Acid Throwing". Yet another reason to hate religious stupidity. And men who don't strictly qualify in the classical sense to be men.

Apparently it's quite prevalent in (surprise surprise) a certain few Islamic countries, already known for their idiocy when it comes to the application of their particular religious fairytale.

According to New York Times reporter Nicholas D. Kristof, acid attacks are at an all time high in Pakistan and increasing every year. The attacks are typically the work of men against their wives who have "dishonored them"

According to a Rand Corporation commentary, hundreds of women in Pakistan, Kashmir, and Afghanistan have been blinded or maimed "when acid was thrown on their unveiled faces by male fanatics who considered them improperly dressed". Attacks or threats of attacks on women who failed to wear hijab or were otherwise "immodestly dressed" have been reported in other countries as well.

These attacks are common in Cambodia,[6] Afganistan,[7] India,[8] Bangladesh,[3][4] Pakistan,[3] and other Asian countries.

As if killing women wasn't enough, weak male pieces of shit need to defend their senses and prevent themselves from sinning by performing disgusting sneak attacks on defenceless women.

For once I agree with something that Iran does. They have a law that states that a man found guilty of an Acid Attack on a woman is punished in the same manner. As they fucking should be. Bangladesh wimps out on inflicting the same excruciating pain and unimaginable horror on perpetrators - they just kill them. Not sure which method I prefer.

Pakistan has a similar law to Iran, which they apparently don't bother enforcing very often.

In South Asia acid is most commonly used as a revenge on women who reject sexual advances. That's right: A segment of the male population there is so unbelievably insecure that rejection of sexual advances is seen as grounds for permanent disfigurement.

Either way, I support Iran (strangely enough) on this one.

Regardless, Muslims should be disgusted at their extremist brethren again and citizens of those other countries need to hang their heads in shame. What the fuck is wrong with a country that lets this sort of thing happen?

Proposition 8: The Musical

2008-12-04T15:32:00.003+11:00

Jack Black plays Jesus and makes some incredibly embarrassing remarks regarding gutless Christians who like to pick and choose the parts of the bible they want to adhere to. Jack isn't the only celebrity supporting the fight against Christian ignorance and homophobia.

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Horrible Fundamentalist Toilet Literature

2008-11-11T17:19:00.009+11:00

Here are a few terrible terrible pieces of propaganda I've found on my various trips to the toilets at the Belmont McDonald's. They're usually stuffed in the space between the toilet roll holder and the wall, or stuck to the wall itself.

Please note that I am quoting these pamphlets word-for-word. There is no embellishment whatsoever, nor do I correct any grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes, punctuation, nothing. The whole lot is [sic]'ed. Also note that there are a couple I collected but have since lost. Also also note that most of these unashamed pieces of shit end up where pieces of shit are supposed to end up.

Enjoy.

What Does A Lost Eternity Mean?
A lost eternity simply means all People who refuse the claims of "Jesus Christ" as Saviour of this fallen sinful world; will end up in a Place called hell. The Bible makes this perfectly clear. The only escape from such a dreadful place ( where their worm e.g. Soul Dies not) is to acknowledge 'jesus Christ' as your sin bearer, and Saviour. The scriptures are 100% clear, where God Himself says; I have no pleasure in the destruction of the wicked. That means you and me. Jesus said, I died for your Sin.

(And on the reverse...)

For Distribution Only
(Reg) 2/271371
Created and Written?
For Missions
23-1-08
F.B.
Ps 53:1
the Fool Has Said In His Heart There Is No God...
Its Appointed For Man To Die Once, But After ThisThe Judgement. Heb 9: 27

Okay so that one? Not so bad. Not really.
THE BIBLE YOUR SCIENCE BOOK
The Bible is scientifically accurate. The God of the Bible is the God who created the universe. True science and scripture will always agree-they both have the same author! no statement in the scripture \s is scientifically incorrect. Science can tabulate the what, analyze the how. And probe the why, but it can't tell the where from, nor the reason for which the universe exists. It can't say who you are, or why you are here. It can tell us what we're able to do, but not what we ought to do. At the same time the Bible was written, people thought the world was flat, not round, and held up by 3 elephants. This belief comes from over 2500 years ago. it was Columbus who discovered the world was round some 500 years ago. Have you not known? have you not heard? have you not understood from the foundations of the earth It is He hat sits on the circle of the earth. ( Isaiah 40:21-22) Who told Isiah the earth was round? "He stretches out the north over empty space, and hangs the earth on nothing." ( Job 26: 7) There are many other astounding scientific facts Scripture presented centuries before it became part of man's "knowledge". The Lord God says, >>>

And over on the next page...

"Prove me now-I am the Lord...I will speak, and the word that I speak shall come to pass." In the brief Life of Jesus we see over 300 fulfilled prophecies. The odds that these would coincide by accident in one person are laughable. There's not one mathematician alive that has come even close to figuring out the odds of this being fulfilled in one person. Ivan Panin the Great Russian mathematician took 50 years of intense bible study to prove the accuracy of the Bible numerically. He concluded that it would have taken 1,000 years to write the first chapter of the book of Mathew concerning Genialities and fulfilled prophecy alone Note: all the early manuscripts are written in Hebrew & Greek with numeric value to each consonant and valve. Its conclusive said Panin a divine mind must have been behind the compiling of both old and new testament writings. Hundreds of prophecies are currently coming to pass, including weather predictions, also the middle east phenomena concerning Israel etc. Do you have Salvation ?
Panin became a believer in Jesus Christ
I BELIEVE THE HUMAN RACE IS NOW AT THE CROSS ROADS
ROMANS 10: 9. That if you will confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and shall believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead you will be saved. (Do you believe in life after death ? )

Now I don't care what you say, nor do I care how crazily fundamentalist you are regarding the innerancy of the bible: a large amount of what that particular pamphlet goes on about is total bullshit. Take for example the part where Columbus discovered that the earth was round: a commonly held misconception and one that fundamentalist Christians are usually the first to point out as such to provide a defence against claims that religious persons of the past believed in a flat earth. What about where they said that the belief in a flat earth held up by elephants is from 2500 years ago? Is that when they're saying the Old Testament was written? So when during the events of the Old Testament are they saying that the bible was given to humanity "by God" ? How is it that these people take a line like "circle of the earth" and translate that to mean that the bible says the earth is a sphere? Last time I checked, circles were 2-Dimensional objects and spheres are 3-Dimensional. All this ignores completely the statement that not only is God the "author" of science, but that nothing in the bible is scientifically incorrect. Funnily enough, this is the second worst pamphlet I have collected from these people - it's just a shame that the number one position is held by a scrap of paper that I have since lost.
Does God Exist?
# Over 2000 prophecies have been fulfilled to date as recorded in the Bible.
# Jesus Christ was seen alive for 40 days by over 500 people after His crucifixion.
# Its accurately recorded in the Bible that He raised people from the dead.
# His claim of coming into this world to save mankind from his sin has never been proven to be false. In fact all who received Him and believed in Him found great peace. The deaf, blind, demon possessed, cripples from birth, all received perfect wholeness. There been none to equal Him. He claimed to be the light of the world.
# Jesus Christ Had power over the elements. He spoke to the raging storm and brought immediate calm.
# Jesus knew the thoughts of all men, but never boasted.
# He spoke of a heaven, and a hell, and said no human could be saved from hell without Him. Jesus warned the human race against hell.

And once again; over the page.

THE BIBLE ISN'T LIKE ANY OTHER BOOK THAT'S EVER BEEN WRITTEN...
The claims of the Bible are unlike any other book- its not a human book! God called His word living. But unless you have a rock solid commitment to truth, the Bible won't change you life. On the other hand if you have a desire to know the truth you will find it. Many of the eastern thought forms use Scripture. They use it to capture peoples hearts. That's because the bible is so powerful you can't ignore it. God has built life into his word, and all of the strong cults rip it off. They steal bits out of the Bible and use it to try to justify the lies they tell. Schools tell students we humans eveolved out of some slimy substance millions of years ago. What a lie! Plain common sense will argue against such rubbish. Read the Genesis of creation in the bible. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, Gen 1: 1. If there is one thing the Bible dares to do; that no other book in the world does, it's to accurately predict the future. All keen Bible students know we are fast approaching judgement. The middle east speaks loud and clear of pending judgement. Where do you stand. Jesus Christ said; "I am the way the truth and the life no man comes to the Father but by me" ... F. B.

And there you have it. Those are the three pamphlets I currently have in my possession and they are all encumbered by a few unavoidable truths: the people who wrote them are desperate, stupid and gullible.

I won't be going through each of these pointing out the problems - there are far too many for me to be bothered wasting my time with. Talk about the problems you find in the comments if you like and I'll join in. Should be interesting... if anyone actually reads this far. :)

Short Question: Why Is Time So Important?

2008-10-08T14:46:00.003+11:00

I recently visited the Sydney Anglican Heretics blog for some twisted reason and saw in the comments the following:

The question of 'time' is an interesting one, and the disjunct produced between God's creating and its eventuating in theistic evolution is strongly linked, in my mind to the embarrasement at the physical in gnosticism that results in the 'demiurge'. For SADists, I think that the simple physical attribute of 'time' has become a demiurge that separates God from creation. This is entirely contrary to the Bible, which, at every turn has the language of immediacy in relation to God and creation.

The immediacy strikes an important theological note, IMO, putting us in a close, not a distant relation to God and making the relationship intimate, not cool. If something stands between us and God in the genealogy of creation (to which Scripture is opposed, I might add), then we are not from God's hand and breath, but from something else, some sort of 'machine' that made us as a mere 'output' and not in an act of fellowship and love.

What I would like to ask is this: why is there such a huge aversion amongst Young Earth Creationists to the idea that humans weren't made instantly? There seems to be a huge fear that if God didn't make us in our current form sometime within the last 10,000 years, then he mustn't love us as much.

Tell me this, married Young-Earth-Creationists: does your partner love you any less because they met you later in life then they would if they had met you when you were born? I doubt it. Why then should time have any impact on the level to which your God loves you? If he loves you, what difference does it make whether you evolved or he made you out of dirt?

What, specifically, is wrong with the Congo?

2008-09-16T11:48:00.003+10:00

What is it about the Congo that makes its inhabitants so blatantly stupid, so over-the-top insane with what could most likely be termed religious-based mental inhibition? Please note that in this case I'm not blaming Christianity. But another Witchcraft related death in the Congo? It's starting to get a little cliche.

This time, it was a soccer riot. An all too common occurence apparently in many less-well-off countries. Maybe because they literally have nothing better to do.

The soccer riot was allegedly caused when police (or military?) personnel fired into the air in an effort to calm the rioting crowd. Panic ensued, causing the deaths of 13 people - most of them children.

What sparked the riot, you ask? Well, maybe you didn't ask. Which, given the overarching theme of this blog, doesn't matter - because you're getting told anyway.

KINSHASA, Congo (AP) — Accusations that a soccer player was using witchcraft during a match in eastern Congo sparked a riot that killed 13 people, a U.N.-funded radio station reported Monday.
Most of the victims were between the ages of 11 and 16, Radio Okapi said. They were suffocated as panicked crowds ran for the exits during the mayhem Sunday in Butembo in eastern Congo's North Kivu province.
Radio Okapi said police tried to control the violence at Matokeo stadium by firing into the air to protect their commander, who was hit in the head and wounded by fans.
The two local clubs involved were Socozaki and Nyuki System, the radio said.
Dozens of teenagers marched through Butembo's dirt streets Monday in protest, and the regional governor, Julien Mpaluku, paid a visit to the hospital.
Mpaluku said the government was investigating.
He made no mention of witchcraft, but confirmed that soldiers had fired into the air to calm angry crowds. The shooting prompted panic instead, which became fatal "when the crowds all tried to leave at the same time."
"Most of the dead were children, only two or three were adults," Mpaluku said.
North Kivu has been the epicenter of violence between Congo's army and rebels over the last year which has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

Oh yes, dear reader (google analytics says there's still one of you that checks daily: Hi!). Once again, lives have been lost in the Congo because the stupid, stupid stupid people that live there believe in things like Witchcraft. You might not have read my blogpost months earlier regarding the deaths (and even arrests) of people accused of using black magic to shrink innocent victims' penises. In the Congo. What the fucking McFuck Burger Meal is wrong with that country, and is everyone that lives there as stupid as the associated press makes them out to be?

Probably not, but the fact that this sort of shit happens at all, along with the apparent fact that there are so many willing participants in such mass superstitious lunacy, begs the question: why? Why are so many Congolese so horribly stupid? Wherein lies the blame for their obvious and severe mental deficiencies?

American Abortion Laws: More Bullshit Than Ever

2008-08-23T22:33:00.005+10:00

Those of you who care or who read things like "the news" may know that there are new draft regulations doing the rounds of the American... Congress? Senate? Whatever section their travesty of a so-called democracy refers to in this case, that's where these regulations are doing the rounds. Designed to "protect workers" from having to do things that "go against their beliefs and morals", the regulations are far too broad and will most likely end up having disastrous consequences.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration Thursday announced plans to implement a controversial regulation designed to protect antiabortion healthcare workers from being required to deliver services against their personal beliefs.

The rule empowers federal health officials to pull funding from more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors’ offices and other entities that do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral or religious grounds.

“People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong,” Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said. “Healthcare workers should not be forced to provide services that violate their own conscience.”

So - can anyone think of what is wrong with this? Not yet?

But both supporters and critics said the proposed regulation remained broad enough to protect pharmacists, doctors, nurses and others from having to provide birth control pills, Plan B emergency contraception and other forms of contraception. And both groups said the regulation would explicitly allow workers to withhold information about such services and refuse to refer patients elsewhere.

Leavitt said he requested the new regulation after becoming alarmed by reports that healthcare workers were being pressured to take actions they considered immoral. He cited moves by two doctor organizations that he said might require antiabortion doctors to refer patients to abortion providers.

If you're still acting stupid I'll spell it out for you.

Not only will doctors, nurses, pharmacists and health care workers be allowed to refuse to treat someone in a way they find amoral, they can refuse to provide information or refer them to someone who can provide the required service.

Now the Christians might think this sounds like a fantastic idea. But the problem with it is that the language doesn't say that the health care workers can refuse to give abortions and refuse to give information about them: it's "anything they object to on moral grounds". That language doesn't just apply to abortions: for example, a cleaner can refuse to clean the section of the hospital (or the floor) that abortions are performed in or on and get away with it. Doctors can refuse to give emergency contraception to rape victims, and take a more active role in preventing the patient from getting such contraception. Muslim women doctors can keep their sleeves down and wash just their hands (as opposed to the whole forearm up to the elbow)... The list goes on and on, further than even rampaging Christians should be willing to go.

Sorry to not have blogged in so long but the language and overly-broad nature of this disturbing new Bush administration policy is more than a little disconcerting. The American health care system is failing as it is and most assuredly does not need any more incentive to dissolve into a medieval cesspit.

I'm not even happy that bush is leaving soon - because the world is losing one stupid blind-faith Christian and replacing it with another. It's about time the world's "superpower" got a leader who won't go with what his particular interpretation of a bronze-age nomadic scroll says to go with.

Atheist Debaptism Ceremony

2008-08-04T19:50:00.002+10:00

Saw this on Christian Pwnage. But there are slightly more complex issues.

Obviously the atheists in the post aren't taking their debaptism ceremony seriously in any way. It's all a good bit of fun and, just as with a "real" baptism it's all about the symbolism. It would, for example, be a great way for me to finally show my mother that yes, I am an atheist. She still maintains that I was baptised a Catholic and am therefore a Catholic. Maybe a debaptism would give me the edge, the ability to say "well, as my certificate" (there would obviously be a certificate in my debaptism) "shows, I am no longer baptised and therefore no longer Catholic."

Anyway on to the earlier alluded "more complex issues".

In some parts of the world (*cough splutter cough cough*) LIKE AMERICA when a child is baptised their names and details are entered into a registry and kept permanently. It is either impossible or very difficult for an atheist or convert to get themselves OFF these lists. A debaptism ceremony seems like just the thing to prove your absolute intent to remove yourself from such religious lists.

I think, after all this writing, that I may have erred in calling the issue "more complex" - it's simple. It's also slightly aggravating that such a thing goes on.

Re-Employed

2008-07-23T12:51:00.002+10:00

It was a long road - dusty, winding, bordered on both sides by a thick and foreboding forest said to harbour dark secrets from before the very age of man itself. Curves hiding the scale and length of the thing - stretching back into a seeming infinity of pitfalls and peril.

And Healyhatman was nearing the end.

So I finally have employment. After a long "sabbatical" of listing my occupation as "between jobs" I can now stand firm and bellow forth the mighty words "computer sales and technician". Doesn't sound exciting to you, Mr or Mrs hoighty-toighty fancy-pants? Well fuck off and choke on your food, because I get to work with computers - my number 1 passion on this pale blue dot.

I start tomorrow, 9am sharp. Fantastic.

Which Animals Didn't Get A Ride?

2008-07-15T23:06:00.002+10:00

In the story of Noah's Ark, which animals didn't get to ride on the boat? According to the bible that is - I'm sure there are many references to what sorts of animals aren't allowed in.

Any creationists reading this - step up to the plate please.

Yeah that's all for now.

Mexican Pilgrims Formulate Terrible Arguments

2008-07-10T16:15:00.003+10:00

My sister an mother have some Ecuadorian pilgrims staying over for World Catholic Youth Day. Last night we had a barbeque and, in the spirit of being a good ambassador for Australia, I took them all down to the pub.

We had some beers, played some pool. A few of the female pilgrims are actually kind of hot. Plus they all have accents which doesn't hurt any.

Eventually through processes unknown we came around to the topic of why I don't believe in their God. The Mexican guy whose name I can't this very second remember came up with some arguments - "very simple to prove God" he says. Some of the others put their 2 pesos in as well. Here they are. Please remember the bulk of these are in a fair approximation of English and spoken with a heavy accent.

1) "If you deny God it's because he exists, otherwise you couldn't deny him."
1.a I countered by denying that he was purple and that a green fairy-dragon was standing next to me. Neither of those two things actually occurred.
2) *Places some pool balls on the pool table*. "Let's wait and see if it turns into life"
2.a They're non-reacting inorganic solids. What's more they're sheltered inside in the air. Of course they're not going to magically turn into life otherwise you couldn't own anything physical for more than a few months it'd all turn to goo. Scientists most assuredly don't claim that life arose from inert and solid objects sitting in the open air.
3) "Who made this table? An intelligent being! etc etc etc! So something intelligent must have made you! etc etc etc!"
3.a Standard theistic/creationist argument. If you don't know how to counter it yet you should - the table is a non-living entity. It doesn't breed, it doesn't reproduce, it doesn't grow from a tiny little embryo into a big grown-up pool table. Comparing such an object to a living organism is like comparing apples and metal oranges painted pink.
4) "What about the miracles? People all the time get cured of cancer..."
4.a What about the amputees? Why don't we hear hundreds of stories about amputees regenerating lost limbs?
4.1 "They probably didn't have enough faith"
4.1.a Pretty easy to call bullshit on that one.

At the end of it all when it was time to go, one of the girls said it was God's will that they had come tonight and talked to me and that I would now have doubts about the non-existence of God and would start to believe. Aside from the fact that their arguments were woeful (I don't think they've ever really talked to atheists before or at least not debated with them) what does God making them come to the pub and making me take them say about their (and my) much- and oft-vaunted free will?

Death Threats For NOT Eating a Cracker

2008-07-10T16:04:00.004+10:00

In America (of course) a university student recently protested the use of student funds to support on-campus Church Services went to mass, received the Eucharist - and proceeded not to eat it.

Death threats and rage have allegedly poured in from Catholics around the world.

From irReligion.org, the Richard Dawkins website, Christian Pwnage... all sorts of places.

A University of Central Florida student, upset religious groups hold church services on public campuses, is holding hostage the Eucharist, an object so sacred to Catholics they call it the Body of Christ.

Church officials say UCF Student Senator Webster Cook was disruptive and disrespectful when he attended Mass held on campus Sunday June 29. It was during that Mass where Cook admits he obtained the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is a small bread wafer blessed by a priest. According to Catholics, the wafer becomes the Body of Christ once blessed and is to be consumed immediately after a minister passes it out to churchgoers.

Cook claims he planned to consume it, but first wanted to show it to a fellow student senator he brought to Mass who was curious about the Catholic faith.

“When I received the Eucharist, my intention was to bring it back to my seat to show him,” Cook said. “I took about three steps from the woman distributing the Eucharist and someone grabbed the inside of my elbow and blocked the path in front of me. At that point I put it in my mouth so they’d leave me alone and I went back to my seat and I removed it from my mouth.”

A church leader was watching, confronted Cook and tried to recover the sacred bread. Cook said she crossed the line and that’s why he brought it home with him.

“She came up behind me, grabbed my wrist with her right hand, with her left hand grabbed my fingers and was trying to pry them open to get the Eucharist out of my hand,” Cook said, adding she wouldn’t immediately take her hands off him despite several requests.

If it wasn't bad enough that he was nominally assaulted by an over-zealous church leader:

“We don’t know 100% what Mr. Cooks motivation was,” said Susan Fani a spokesperson with the local Catholic diocese. “However, if anything were to qualify as a hate crime, to us this seems like this might be it.”

We just expect the University to take this seriously,” she added “To send a message to not just Mr. Cook but the whole community that this kind of really complete sacrilege will not be tolerated.”

Now, some Christians might not see what is wrong with that statement, but remove your emotional response to it for a while and put it like this: this person classifies a hate crime as "taking a bread wafer and not eating it".

Killing Jews is a hate crime. Hanging black people is a hate crime. Petrol-bombing stores owned by Arabs and Asians is a hate crime. Taking a wafer and not eating it? Not exactly on the same level.

Sending this guy death threats because he didn't eat their sacred bread circle? Hate crime.

WYD: Defying the Law

2008-07-04T13:13:00.002+10:00

Well if I can manage it I fully plan on being at the protests wearing an offensive slogan on my t-shirt, holding up an annoying banner. I'm currently googling around looking for specifics on organisations I can join up with. Anyone know of any, anyone planning on going as well?

Why protest, why not leave them alone in their faith? Several reasons.

The new laws governing how you can protest that have been enacted are too broad, too draconian, too easy to abuse. They desecrate the concept and implementation of free speech, freedom of association.
The catholic church has a lot to answer for - why are paedophile clergymen shifted around parishes where they can sexually abuse a whole new set of children instead of being dismissed from the church? Why did the catholic pope back in the day support Hitler? Why weren't more Nazi war criminals excommunicated and why were some of them even given help escaping? Why does the pope continue to lie about condoms, which could be saving millions in Africa from contracting Aids?
I'm an atheist - the idea that my country has spent millions on a religious event and is inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of citizens for some worshippers offends me. It's not like the church isn't fucking rich or anything of course.

So yes. Any details from people who are going, thinking of going, know who best to contact about going - leave them in the comments thanks.

World Youth Day Laws

2008-07-04T13:04:00.002+10:00

... are a complete and utter travesty against democracy. As has been said over and over the last few days, these laws are overly broad and turn a civil matter into a criminal one. I am beyond words in describing how ridiculous these laws are, beyond words describing how ridiculous the thought that the rumour going around, that the laws might be made permanent, could be true.

Where were these laws when the Dalai Llama came for a visit? Where were the police cracking down on Chinese protesters trying to drown out the leader's meditation classes?

But suddenly the leader of a Christian faith comes calling and the government falls over itself in the excitement - throwing money at it, making up bullshit laws, sucking papal dick, anything to let in the homophobic anti-condom bastard that looks a little too like Vader's Dark-Side teach, Darth scaryface. Or like the uncle from Adam's Family.

Saudi Arabia: Land of the Paedophiles

2008-06-30T09:40:00.004+10:00

As an anti-religious blogger there's not much in the news that can beat the regular disgusting insanity gushing forth from Saudi Arabia like a metaphysical wave of madness and terror.

A Saudi marriage officiant has stated the following in an interview:

It Is Allowed to Marry a Girl at the Age of One, If Sex Is postponed. The Prophet Muhammad, Whose Model We Follow, Married 'Aisha When She Was Six and Had Sex with Her When She Was Nine.

Say fucking WHAT now? Personally guys I don't give a flying rat-like fuck if sex is postponed - you're locking a baby who hasn't yet the mental faculty to talk into a life-long contract with a man who will probably be at least 30 by the time she hits 16. That is, of course, hoping fervently that sex really is postponed that long.

And what is this about Mohammed having sex with a 9 year old girl? Why have I never heard of this? Is it a joke, a falsification tossed about by Saudi's as an excuse for fucking pre-teen children? If Mohammed had sex with a kid hey, it's alright for all of us!

The officiant says that marriage is just a contract indicating consent. Of course, since women are possessions in Saudi Arabia it's indicating consent of the father not of the baby who can't do more than gurgle happily, blissfully unaware she's already been sold off like a pig to market. Consider the following:

People find themselves in all kinds of circumstances. Take, for example, a man who has two, three, or four daughters. He does not have any wives, but he needs to go on a trip. Isn't it better to marry his daughter to a man, who will protect and sustain her, and when she reaches the proper age, he will have sex with her? Who says all men are ferocious wolves?

Excuse me sir... If the father needs to go for a trip? What exactly does that have to do with selling your daughters; is it to pay for the trip or so you don't have to look after them while you're off enjoying yourself?

All this from a country that has a law banning women from driving, that executes women accused of witchcraft, that allows arranged marriages between first cousins and now the country that condones paedophilia.

America should be ashamed of dealing with these disgusting pigs and yet - they have oil in Saudi Arabia so they're "allies".

New Look, New Template

2008-06-27T17:25:00.005+10:00

From the Blogger Templates blog I got myself a new snazzy-looking template for this blog.

The help file and a bunch of internal code snippets are in Spanish which makes things a little difficult and there are a few bugs here and there, like at the bottom of each post it just says "comment" instead of showing "[number] comments". I'm working through it to decide on a final layout regarding things like placement of ads and other layout components.

It also took a fair amount of wrangling to get the tag cloud approaching a semblance or usability and the expandable posts meant I had to scour the interwebs for the right code (everywhere was just giving ones that open in a new window).

The RSS subscription button works which is handy and pretty for those poor fools still not using fire fox.

Until then, what are your thoughts? Comment on any major bugs you see!

Known Problems after the jump.

The blogger NavBar doesn't show.

The quick edit button doesn't show.

The number of comments isn't displayed before the "Comment" link.

When clicking on a full post, the comments are displayed underneath but some of them are manky - displaying black text on a black background with only a few being black text on a white.

Sometimes there's a gap between the 3 columns at the top (blogroll, profile, poll) and the blog posts. Sometimes there isn't. What the hell.

Worse Than Young Earth Creationists Are...

2008-06-26T00:06:00.006+10:00

Geocentrists! That's right - the crazy people who used to think the Earth was at the centre of the universe with all the other objects in space orbiting the Earth. The Sun, the planets, all of the stars in the milky way, all of the other galaxies, all of it just centred on Earth.

Can you imagine such arrogance? The whole of existence, the entirety of the Universe itself, rotating about them because God thinks they're way cool?

Thankfully, it gets worse.

Geocentricity.com is a fairly boring website - there really is about as much to this website as there is plausibility to the "theory". I quite honestly still haven't made up my mind on it - serious site, or satirical site? Can these people be for real?

Well there's one thing they can be - terrible fucking point makers. Just check out the link under "point" - a paper about how humanist societies violate the second law of thermodynamics.

I'll make this one simple.

"If it violates the second law of thermodynamics, why the fuck are there humanist societies?" Don't believe that there are? That's your problem buddy look it up.

The link under "fucking" is even worse. It's a rambling, poorly worded and scientifically-void piece of shit about how evolution violates the second law. How? Well, sure it's an open system (energy comes in) but! Entropy used to be defined as heat, heat is a form of energy... so if you add energy to a system, you're really adding heat which is an increase in entropy and, therefore, evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.

Fantastic job guys you've completely and utterly converted me. I totally believe, due to the influence of that piece of "literature", that evolution and in fact every single open system in the universe whereby something gets more ordered actually violates the second law because entropy and energy are both heat.

Like for example an organism growing up. Clearly, growing up violates the second law of thermodynamics and is therefore a satanist lie. As is pregnancy.

Damn you, Satan.

These people are worse than plain YECs - they're YECs with extra crazy.
Not quite so bad, obviously, as the previously-blogged-about flat-earth proponents but they're pretty fucking close. They may even be a step ahead due to sheer blind arrogance.

From the front page of Geocentricity:

This site is devoted to the historical relationship between the Bible and astronomy. It assumes that whenever the two are at variance, it is always astronomy—that is, our "reading" of the "Book of Nature," not our reading of the Holy Bible—that is wrong. History bears consistent witness to the truth of that stance.

I invite all 5 readers to take a look and if you discover it's all a bad dream, a hoax, a fabrication bought forth from the darkest depths of a drunken Irish lesbians worst nightmare;

Let me know.

My Sister Is In Hospital

2008-06-19T01:42:00.007+10:00

FINAL: She's now home as of last night Tuesday Night), which is great. I haven't seen her yet but I'll get onto it when I can. Thanks to all the Christians who prayed for her - I don't believe in prayer and find it a complete waste of time similar to writing letters to Santa, but I do appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.

MORE UPDATE: As of late last night she can also move her legs. Crisis mostly avoided, she can shuffle around. She'll be at the hospital till Monday anyway just checking the rest of the tests done to try figure out what happened and see what can be done to prevent it in the future.

UPDATE: She can now move her arms, move herself using them and can move one toe. She is going in for another MRI at some point "hopefully in the next 2-3 days" and she was supposed to have a Lumbar Puncture today but they were unable to insert what I assume to be a big giant fucking needle into the right place so they're going for a "fluoroscopy" tomorrow which I understand is where they will attempt to insert the needle whilst performing an X-Ray.

She did not enjoy the attempted lumbar puncture and I did not enjoy sitting there watching her go through it.

ORIGINAL STORY:
My eldest sister is currently in hospital and has been since approximately 4:30am on what is now yesterday morning suffering paralysis.

I'll spare the events preceding, but the ambulance and rescue services were called because she lost all feeling below the neck and then completely lost the ability to move.

It was not until maybe 5pm that she was able to move her fingers, move one wrist and feel sensation on her left leg above the knee and on her upper arms. When I left at 11:30pm that was the extent of her recovery.

Originally she had a neck brace due to obvious fears of injury but an MRI scan dismissed those particular fears, and a neurologist is going to see her tomorrow. There has also been talk of a lumbar puncture.

Obviously we're worried about her given that if there's a problem she can't press a call button or elevate herself if she needs to vomit.

The fact though that she has sensation returning is a good sign, as is the ability to at least move her fingers. Hopefully it's not permanent. I'll probably update this when I find out.

My sister's 40 by the way, two children. One still living with her. We haven't told the other because he's now living in far north QLD and just started a new job and the family decided not to ring and freak him out unless actually necessary.

First Bra Unhook

2008-06-17T02:12:00.002+10:00

An extremely non-religious question for the guys.

What was your first experience of unhooking your female significant others' bra like? Were you freaking out and how long did it take you, you poor bastard?

Me? BAM! Done, one hand and the boobies were free.

Why you ask? I'm watching "Best Of The Glass House" and there was a segment about bra-removal.

A Creationist Blog Invitation

2008-06-16T13:15:00.003+10:00

I was recently invited to go over to Sydney Anglican Heretics, with hilarious results.

John invited me over after trying to be insulting, telling me to come over when ready for "serious discussion". Apparently he hasn't read the comments sections of a significant number of my posts, or the comments over at Craig's Blog, where there is all manner of serious conversation.

So, over I went. Imagine, dear readers, my joy at finding out it's a creationist blog! I've always wanted to stumble across an Australian Creationists' blog, and John went and handed it to me.

There's a lot of crap on there. That of course goes without saying - it is after all by Young Earth Creationist, biblical-literalists. These are the Christians other Christians love to hate (so it seems) There's good reason - YECs are amongst the most willfully stupid people on the planet.

For those inexplicably out of the know, Young Earth Creationists believe that the Earth (and usually they include the Universe) was created in 6 24-hour days, sometime roughly 6,000 to 12,000 years ago. They usually explain away scientific evidence (such as, say, age of the universe) with things like "White Hole Cosmology". Their beliefs on dinosaurs is quite simply hilarious. Geology gets even better, attempting to explain everything the modern world knows with a laughable concept called "Flood Geology". It doesn't matter what evidence is shown - they jsut don't get it, nor do they appear to want to get it. Radio-isotope dating, the fact that there are stars more than 6,000 light years away, fossils, the whole lot - they just ignore it in favour of a Bronze-Age book written by nomads.

These particular YECs appear to be of the belief that the Word of God as shown in the bible should be put above the "Word of the World", that is, everything humans say about the way the world works and was formed.

That's not to say, however, they're completely stupid. They at least know their bible.
I asked (in a rather insulting manner) how Genesis 30, the story of the man breeding coloured goats by making white goats look at coloured sticks, meshed with their perception of reality. Unfortunately for me I hadn't read on beyond that, when God tells what's-his-face that the whole thing was a trick and coloured goats were "leaping upon" the white. Oh well. I admitted the mistake and awarded the creationist the point in that particular argument.

Don't make the mistake of refusing to admit mistakes - it makes you look even more stupid. You've already been defeated, why keep rolling around in the defeat like a pig in mud, happily ignoring the fact that you're covering yourself in filth?

However, this still leaves the apparent age of the earth, the universe, fossils, canopy of water in the flood story... a whole bunch of crap that can only be explained away with magic.

Do drop over in any case. Some of the things they say about the bible and other people who don't hold to their Young Earth views is enlightening and humorous. Some of the things they have to say that show their lack of understanding of modern science might also help you to understand why they are the way they are.

For any of the Sydney Anglican Heretics on here: I find your interpretation of your religion down-right hilarious. Your ability to accept, on blind faith, a book thousands of years old over the knowledge gained through modern science is amazing. Your ability to reject science and material knowledge on the sole premise of it disagreeing with your bibles is even more so.

Please refer to the following as an education on your lack of intelligence and reasoning with a smattering of satire thrown in the mix.

Why Do People Laugh At Creationists? by Thunderfoot

Also by Thunderfoot

Lastly, consider most of the videos by cdk007

This blogger admits that he sometimes makes mistakes. However, this blogger would like to point out that he learns from them and that when presented with the facts is more than willing to adapt and change. Unlike those of the YEC variety, who keep on keeping on in spite of the universe itself being against them.

Fo Sheezy, My Jeezy!

2008-06-10T23:34:00.001+10:00

So many lolz.

Scone, NSW, Australia : Has Stupid People

2008-06-10T22:03:00.003+10:00

So. I went on a huge drive to "wherever" with my girlfriend on... Saturday. No, Sunday. Whatever. But the point is that there were several interesting sights. And one particularly stupid one.

We saw hills, cows, horses. There was a lamb on the side of the road at one point om-nom-nom-ing on some grass. We saw rain, clouds coming down hills like an avalanche of snow. We saw roads that just went on and on and on.

And, in Scone (about an hour and a half or so out of Newcastle in NSW) we saw some signage, obviously put up by concerned locals.

"Say NO to coal!" one proclaimed. "It destroys our rivers!"

Hmm. It can, at that.

"If we could EAT coal, we'd be laughing!"

Umm, okay if you say so... I'd think you'd sell it and buy food but whatever floats your sense of humour's boat.

"Say NO to Wind Farms! Save our landscape!"

Okay... There are how many people looking at that landscape? Not many. You don't want a coal mine, but you also don't want the only viable alternative for your area (Scone rests between hills - not much sun) for producing electricity.

Then came the final straw that broke the camel's back and skull-fucked it:

"Say NO to Wind Farms! SAVE OUR ENVIRONMENT!"

Say "no" to wind farms because WHAT?

That is all.

Poll Results at Craig's Blog

2008-06-06T09:53:00.002+10:00

A week ago I asked Craig to put up a poll on his blog. He gets far more visitors than I do and I wanted to know how Australian Christians feel about putting creationism or Intelligent Design (which I rightly consider to be the same thing) in science class.

The results?

27% : Yes
60% : No

The remainder where for "I don't know" and maybe one or two for "I don't care"

Now I must say I was worried by this one. How many Christians would think it was acceptable to inject their religious beliefs into science classes for children? Of Craig's voters about 10 or so.

I am incredibly pleased though that most of his readers, even Craig himself, think that only science should be in science class, not religion. Which is how it should be - science is for science, religious studies is for religion. Wasting students time on myths in science class is a waste of their education potential and of the taxpayer's money (or parents' tuition fees).

I didn't report on the poll on here until now because I didn't want to pollute the poll with too many atheists, was more after the Christian viewpoint.

I won't go into why I think those 10 people who voted "yes" are stupid and need an education - I've done that plenty of times. Suffice to say, 10 people, why should your religious viewpoint be pushed into science class? To be fair wouldn't we have to put everyone's religious beliefs in SCIENCE classes, and what time then would be left over for actual science? You people disgust me.

Thank you again for the majority of voters, who used their reason instead of jumping straight for the "MOAR JESUS!" button.

Cancer, Old Age, Selfishness, War and Greed - No Scientific Solution

2008-06-01T19:44:00.009+10:00

Thanks to Craig for linking to this blog post. It started off well enough, regardless of the fact that I don't agree with yet another "environmentalism is a religion" or "there's nothing wrong with our planet" post. But it was in the comments that I saw something interesting in its lack of intelligence.

Brendan Hurley
Hi Tony
Thanks for your article, very intriguing food for
thought.
The great tragedy I see that comes from secular religion especially
environmentalism is how it lacks the ability to solve the greatest and deepest
problems of life. I mean even if we save the world from global warming, how can
environmentalism save the world from sin and death? Cancer, old age,
selfishness, war and greed will not be addressed and fixed by a scientific
solution but by a change of the heart. Whilst Environmentalism is followed like
a religion its followers don’t realise this world will pass away.
Environmentalism is a band aid solution. It will protect us for a while but
eventually will be seen as ineffective, will fall off and be thrown out. We
should be careful and wise stewards of our world, that is important but our
world has a much greater problem of sin and death which needs to be our focus.
Thanks be to God that through the Lord Jesus we have a solution for our greatest
problem of all!
Soli Deo Gloria

Non-religious readers will understand which parts are reminscent of an asylum, but there's one sentence that needs to be pointed at specifically. It's the following:

Cancer, old age, selfishness, war and greed will not be addressed and fixed
by a scientific solution but by a change of the heart.

Now, war and greed might not have scientific solutions. Selfishness might not be solved by science. Even old age might be a tricky one to combat, but I do think it's possible.

But cancer will not be solved by science? CANCER solutions require a "change of heart" instead of science? Does this particular crazy person understand what science even is, due to a lack of education or an over-application of the bible, or are they really just that stupid.

Sin and death, says the above commenter, are the greatest threats this planet faces. And environmentalism apparently is useless because, well, this planet will disappear one day.

Ah ha! I knew there were Christians that don't want to be bothered with the environement because of Jesus. What the above commenter is basically saying is we shouldn't bother with the environment because, well, Jesus is going to come down and take us all away soon! We won't be needing the planet much longer because we'll be partying with Jess so we can let the whole thing go to shit. He doesn't seem to realise that every year someone claims that this year, this year, this is when the rapture is coming. For centuries I bet there have been people convinced themselves, and managing to convince others, that they're going to see the apocalypse within the next few months. Now I think most of the websites aren't run by true believers but by people looking to sell books or merchandise, or to try and convert the stray unbeliever to Christianity. What, commenter, will happen if the rapture doesn't come within your lifetime? Or the lifetime of your (Cthulu forbid) children? Grandchildren? What if the rapture keeps on not occuring for the next 10,000 years? What if it never fucking comes at all? No rapture, and humanity living on floating settlements amidst a sea of toxic waste because people like you didn't want to do anything for the environment under the mistaken belief that Jesus was going to come down any day soon and take you away.

Not to pay too much attention to the fact that a toxic earth or a planet with reduced land mass and/or agricultural capability will result in a whole mess of "death".

Another example in the comment that lets you know this particular person is a fucking idiot is his Ben Stein treatment of environmentalism. Because environmentalism might save the environment, but it won't save the world from problems that are completely unrelated! This misunderstanding of what science is and what it is supposed to do is completely mystifying to me, but apparently it's the bread-and-butter of certain types of person.

One final analysis of the comment though is the following:

The great tragedy I see that comes from secular religion...

Secular religion? So, according to the definition of secularity that would be a religion that is seperate from religion. According to the definition of "oxymoron" that would be... an oxymoron.

We'll leave it at that but I'll go ahead and ask the question - how many readers are of the same set of specific beliefs, or know someone who is?

That is, how many believe we shouldn't worry too much about the environment because Jesus is going to come down and wipe it all away anyway? How many think cancer won't be solved by science but by "a change of heart" ?

George Bush: Superstar of the Energy World

2008-05-30T23:29:00.003+10:00

So, some people (most notably over at Craig's Blog) think that George Bush is a good US president. Whilst I don't have any idea as to why, hopefully this reasoned list of 25 energy-related policies put into place by the Bush administration might help to change their minds. This reasoned list of 25 policies, some of which seem almost unintelligently designed to push the price of oil to the levels it's at today.

Link here, Bizzatches.

Please note that I realise that if something were unintelligently designed to serve a purpose, it stands to reason that such a thing would fail. But I am of the belief that Bush is stupid, his administration is stupid and thus everything he and said administration produced, although "designed" in a sense, it is most certainly done so with utter stupidity at its base.

Garret Means Tests Solar Industry, McCain For President

2008-05-30T22:36:00.004+10:00

Peter Garret, our so-called Environment Minister or whatever he calls himself these days, decided in the budget to means-test the rebate for installing solar panels onto residential homes. You can ignore pretty much everything he says in that link, which is only there as proof of my claim regarding his actions.

You, sir, are a dickhead.

According to the solar industry, they've lost up to 75% of their orders through cancellations in the week after the budget was released.

So what is the issue about? Well if you buy and install a set of solar panels on your home to reduce your grid energy usage, or to even give energy back to the grid, you can apply for a rebate of up to $8,000. Well, sort of. Now, if your household's combined income is over $100,000 (which isn't really that much for two people between them) you get nothing.

How is it that a government who had environmentalism as a major selling point for its campaign justify such a decision? How is it that Labour, who promised to be so much more "green" than the (rather useless) previous, Howard government and still justify this decision?

Apparently, they're getting too many requests for rebates. Their poor accounting staff can't handle it. Why, it was over 450 requests a WEEK!

Fuck that, the poor bastards who work in data entry in the soulless cubicles for the banks handle several hundred cheques they have to check and verify and process every day. Another excuse was that they didn't want to hurt the solar panel industry. You see, if everyone gets solar panels too soon, why, the solar industry would collapse because no one would need the panels any more!
Bullshit. The other problem is that it's the people who have the money to pay for part of the solar upgrade but not the full amount that are leading the charge. With the rising cost of living, there's a large hefty chunk of people who might earn over $100,000 a year combined with their partners', but that doesn't necessarily mean that those same people can actually afford to fork out a full $20,000 for solar panels on the house.

Peter Garret has gone and shown he's nothing more than a bald, funny-looking singer. Another example of why politicians shouldn't get to make these kinds of decisions, fucking scientists and/or people with a related University Degree should. How much better would it be if the person in charge of the environment had an actual degree in a related field, instead of being an environmentally concerned bald-headed singer? The fact that he's been an environmental activist for many years makes no fucking difference. Why? Because now that he's actually in a position to act on his activism, he goes and fucks it up. Bad form, baldy, bad form.

An additional note. This isn't his first fuck up. Aside from pussing out on his former environmental and political views to be a "team player" in the Labour party, he also supports the Pulp Mill in environmentally sensitive Tasmania and he's approved a plan to dredge a particular bay near Melbourne, a move that could have disastrous consequences for the local marine life and water health. If it hasn't already.

Peter Garret is a sell-out and, through his actions and soft-centred environmental views, clearly not qualified for the position.

Finally, a nice picture I saw. A potent campaign portrait for John McCain. Simple but true.

Do Christians Preach At Schoolies?

2008-05-30T15:17:00.004+10:00

Just a question, without any attached loaded meanings.

Do groups of Christians either adult or otherwise prowl around during schoolies week, preaching and handing out pamphlets? Do gangs of teenagers roam the crowded streets of beach-side Queensland telling people not to have sex, or drink, or somesuch? I've never seen it on the news but does it happen? Do Christian groups walk around holding up banners with catchy or more probably witless slogans?

Be interesting to see what kind of reception "don't have sex! Don't drink!" would actually get at schoolies. Or even better, Christian groups chanting, holding up signs saying "Go Home and Party With JESUS!"

ArchLord: A Review In Comparison

2008-05-28T18:37:00.010+10:00

UPDATE: This is, as at 26/June/2008, my most popular article in terms of singular page-views. Fun times.

On the weekend I started playing a free MMORPG called "ArchLord" by Codemasters. Why? Because I'm still in my "bored with Anarchy Online" phase, and most likely will be until they release the 17.9 patch.

So I thought I'd compare the two. How does Archlord, a free MMO supplemented by microtransactions, stack up against Anarchy Online, a free Science Fiction MMO supplemented by microtransactions (with no bearing on game play) and by subscriptions to the expansions (which are like an entirely different game added on).

I do of course subscribe to Anarchy Online and have all the expansions. So, let the comparison begin!

Graphics
Anarchy Online is nearly 8 years old and it shows. The graphics do not run at their optimum on newer hardware, as it's based mainly on Direct X 7. Textures are fairly low-res and player models are a little bit average. Effects in the game are interesting enough.
Archlord does look better than Anarchy. There aren't too many effects though. Plus AO is going to experience a graphics engine overhaul so we will have to see if the balance remains tipped in that direction.

However! Anarchy is a lot better for larger monitors, because it supports widescreen resolutions. I for example play AO in windowed mode at 1680x1050 (my monitors max) and it looks like all sorts of fun.

ArchLord however has a max resolution of 1280x1024. It has AntiAliasing, sure. But only 1280x1024 pixels worth of AA.

Chat Interface
Anarchy slaughters ArchLord in this regard. The chat interface for AL is unchangeable - it's a little box on the left and that's it. It requires that you press enter before typing anything, and then you have to type which channel you want to talk in (/s is a shout, /g for guild, /w to whisper or send a tell, /p for party [team]). You often have to backspace to remove the tag and put the new tag in and it gets worse after you send a tell to someone because you have to delete the tag and the name of the person you whispered to.

Anarchy however has a customisable chat interface. You can assign the different channels to different chat windows, you can type a tag and then add a message to a specific channel (without pressing enter first) or you can select a channel to chat to every time you press enter to open the chat input. So you can just hit /o [message] to talk in your organisation, /t [message] for team chat, or just hit (/ [message]) for vicinity. The chat interface is more intuitive, powerful and far more efficient.

Another problem AL has is that to send a whisper to someone you have to type their full name exactly as it is. So to whisper to my character you have to press enter, delete the previous channel tag and type in /w Healyhatman [message]. In anarchy it's enough to just type /tell healyhatman [message]. All of AL's character names start with a capital and it's a little annoying to have to put in that capital every time. Worse than that small niggle though? ALs character names can include non-standard characters. Like I's with accents over them, or German "o"s. So to send a whisper to that character you have to figure out the Alt+Number combination for that particular text.

In AO, you can pick up an item from your inventory and drop it in a chat box, so people can see the item you are talking about. In AL if you want to show someone something you have to team them, open a trade window and put your item in the window. Slow and frustrating.

Again in AO you can select the text in a chat window, copy it, paste it. You can customise what output goes where, or if it appears at all. It tells you what damage you do, your pets do, it can (if you want) get the damage done by people near you. No such luck in AL.

There are also a range of emotes available in AL. Some of them though don't do anything. There's a /smile emote for example that the tips at the top tell you about. "Use the /smile emote to make your character smile". Except it doesn't do anything.

There is also a lot of gold-selling spam in the city areas. And since the chat box is so small, you can't really catch if a real person says something. So what you say, just put the spammer on ignore? HA! You wish. There's an ignore window (press N) that you can add people to. This feature, being able to see who you have ignored, would be great if it worked. Put a character on ignore and it seems it doesn't even do anything. I've added and re-added spammers time and again to the ignore list, checking spelling each time, to no effect. It seems that it doesn't take effect until you relog. AO? /ignore [charname]. Done.

GUI
AL has a slightly prettier interface, but it's a lot less customisable and a lot less powerful. It's also riddled with bugs. Annoying bugs, bugs that seem to be the result of a child getting in and mashing the keyboard and hitting "compile". Click on a character and a menu button appears next to their name, allowing you to invite them to a party, send them a tell, trade with them.... The problem? The fucking thing fades out. Click it, the menu will appear and almost immediately fade away. You have to click upwards of fifteen times until the menu stays long enough to click on it. Their are tips that constantly appear at the top of the screen - some of them are too long so you can only see part of the tip, with no way to see the rest of it. Some are completely wrong. For example a tip says to "Press N to open the map". The button is actually M. Which would be okay, if the game wasn't two years old. And would be okay, if the minimap wasn't a useless piece of shit and if the planetmap wasn't little better.

A few examples of the customisation available in AO?

Move the health/nano/xp/AIxp bars to where you want them.
Move the compass, target indicators, hot bar, where you want to. The hotbar can also be set vertically.
Move the map, equipment window, mini map, status window, team window... Any of the windows can go anywhere, can be shown or not, opened or minimised, attached to the sidebar (which you can scroll through).
Third-Party planet maps with more detail can be downloaded and selected.
User-generated themes can be downloaded and applied.
You can MOVE the map (mini or planet). You can even set the planetmap to auto-follow your position.

AO has a slightly uglier interface, but by Cthulu it's so much less annoying. It's easier to use, more customisable, more useful. AO wins again.

Oh and you can shift+click on an object to get more information, or highlight a character and press T to get detailed information about them. Awesome.

Gameplay
Again, AL loses. Gameplay in AL is a matter of how many health potions you have and what size. You are able to adjust a slider on the Health and Mana bars so that when either falls below the marker, your character will automatically drink a health or Mana potion. Combat is basically stand there and press "3" and see if your health potions are up to the task. Or you run around double-clicking on enemies to gather a few behind you, run, use an Area of Effect skill, run the other way, use an AoE skill.... All of it determined by how useful your health potions are and how many of them you can buy. AO is a fair bit more involved and most situations will require a team.

Teamplay is also completely useless in AL, while we're on the subject. If it wasn't for one particular bullshit addition there'd be almost no reason for a team in the first place. None of the classes that I've seen so far have buffs (beneficial spells) that you can cast on another person - they're all self only. So you don't get to have teams form up with required classes so you can tackle an objective together. Basically people team up and go their seperate ways.

That problem I mentioned, the reason why people in AL team up? Auto loot. If you are not in a team and you kill a monster, all the loot drops on the ground. The items, the gold, everything. On the ground. And you have to pick up that loot one piece at a time. Or you can hold space bar and it does it for you... One piece at a time. It's incredibly time consuming. Being in a team means the loot goes straight to the inventory instead of the ground.

Sure in AO you also have to pick up loot. You kill a monster, right click on its corpse and a loot window appears detailing what that mob has on it. The thing is though, you get the credits automatically when you open the loot and most monsters don't have loot you need to bother with. So in most cases you can just ignore it and move on to killing the next thing. Even when a mob does drop a few things and say you want them all, just click on them all and they go straight into your inventory. As opposed to AL where there's a delay of maybe 2 seconds between each thing you are able to pick up - kill enough monsters at once and you'll get to watch your loot disappear.

So AO has better combat and much more incentive to get a team together and make some friends. What about movement?

Movement in AL is painful. You can either click to the location you want your character to go to, or you can use the WASD keys. You can also select a character, hit the menu button 10 times, and then hit follow. In anarchy you select the character and type /follow and hit enter. Or you can follow a monster. Sure AO only has the WASD option for movement but it's a lot better than AL.

Why? Two reasons. The first is lag - you can barely use WASD in AL for the lag - your character runs in strange and unexplainable directions, requiring constant readjustment. And you have to hold the direction down. In AO lag is a lot less of a problem with regards to movement. Also you can press a direction, hold shift, let go of the direction button and then let go of shift and you will continue running in that direction until the servers go down or you cross into another zone. Or die.

Click movement is the main way you will encounter the second problem in AL - you get fucking STUCK IN SHIT. If you click somewhere and your straight-line path intersects with, say, a tree, your character will walk into that tree and get stuck there. To get out, you have to move BACK to get out of the object and then with a series of clicks move around it. Trying to move in any other direction does nothing - your character runs a few metres and turns aroud to stand inside the tree again. This occurs frequently. No such bullshit in AO.

If you die in AL you lose 3% of your gained XP, which is shown as a friendly percentage at the bottom left. You can't go below 0.00% thankfully. However when you die you return to the last city you visited, which means you have to run all the way back to where you want to be, which can take some time when you have to avoid trees and rocks. You can use a portal to get to certain locations that also have portals, but it costs gold every time you want to do such a thing, and the locations with portals available are not always entirely useful.

In AO when you die you return to the last Insurance Terminal you saved at (there are literally hundreds, scattered all across the planet, and one in every Garden and Sanctuary in the shadowlands. You "lose" the XP you gained since you last saved, but it goes into a pool which you regain part of every time you gain more XP. Alien Experience you lose a chunk of every time you die, though. It used to be, a few years ago, that everything in your inventory disappeared when you died and you had to wait 4 minutes until it reappeared in "Reclaim Terminals" and then you'd have to move every item one at a time into your inventory. Thankfully, that bullshit has been coded out and you still have everything with you when you respawn. However you dohave to suffer "Resurrection Sickness" when you die, whereby all your abilities are reduced, slowly moving back up to full. Takes maybe 5 minutes.

The point is, if you die in AL you can have a 5 minute run to get anywhere. If you die in AO, as long as you saved in a decent location, you can get back to where you want to be a lot faster and by more than one route (usually).

Finally on Gameplay, there are set places you go when you are a certain level. You can't really go anywhere else at all or you'll die. Anarchy you can go pretty much anywhere you want on the planet via a range of very fast travel options and there are multiple places to go and many many more things to do at any time, at any level. You're not stuck in one place killing the same thing over and over. Well unless you're in the Shadowlands killing Hecklers, but you can still take breaks at certain levels and go off and do a dungeon or a quest (that actually has a purpose with a decent reward usually).

Community
There's a lot less reason to form teams in AL, and when you do no requirement for any sort of actual team play so there's no chance for forming useful relationships within the game. Plus it's so frustrating using the chat interface so you probably won't talk as much anyway.
The people in the cities are generally unhelpful. Shout a question and if someone notices it amongst the spam more often than not you won't get a response. When you do get a response, good for you. There are some helpful people but in AO if I ask a question in one of the cities, it gets answered almost immediately by upwards of 3-6 people at once. There's a much greater sense of community in Anarchy centred around whether you join the Clans, Omni or remain Neutral. There's also a reason to join an Organisation in AO - if you have the Alien Invasion expansion and your org has a city, you get benefits depending on what buildings your city has. There's also no limit to guild size - in AL there's a max of 50 people in a guild, which can be upgraded eventually. It's also difficult to leave a guild in AL. When you hit the leave button, you have to wait 24 hours for it to actually occur.

Character Classes.
This is where AL pisses me off. You have 3 races: Orcs, Humans, Moon Elves. Which is fine. Humans have 3 classes, Orcs have 3 and Moon Elves have 2. So 7 classes. The problem is, that for each class there appears to be only one gender. All moon elf models are female (and wearing lingerie), all human mages are female, Orc shamans (or whatever the orc spellcaster is) are female. Everything else appears to be only male.

In AO there are 4 "breeds": Solitus, Opifex, Nanomage, Atrox. The first 3 can be either male or female (Atrox is Neuter). You can pick from a range of faces, customise size and weight. The breed you choose has an actual effect regarding health, nano, base abilities. Gender has no effect.

Then you get to pick a class.
Agent, Keeper, Shade, Doctor, Trader, Bureaucrat, Meta-Physicist, Nano-Technician, Enforcer, Soldier, Martial Artist, Adventurer, Fixer, Engineer. All with different abilities, strengths and weaknesses. A huge selection, in comparison.

On to skills: In AO, there are something like 75 different abilities. You get a certain number of "improvement points" per level, and you can spend those on any skill you want. If you want to be a Martial Artist who wields an assault rifle, go ahead. Doctor who uses his fists? Sure why not. Agent with pistols? If you say so. Of course certain classes do much better with certain weapons (agents use rifles, soldiers use assault rifle, fixers usually use SMGs) but the point is you can do whatever you want. You also spend Improvement Points on basic things like Computer Literacy, basic abilities (Strength, Stamina, Agility, Psychic, Intelligence, Sense). You also have to up your "nano skills" in order to upload and cast nano-programs, the equivalent of magic spells in other games. You can buy the lower nanos, or do missions for them and some of them drop from "boss" monsters. Others are quest-reward-only, still others need to be bought in the Shadowlands or with Victory Points earned in the PvP Battle Station.

In AL, you get a single improvement point per level, you get to spend it on one skill and each class has specific skills. You also have to pay gold to upgrade each skill which is a bit of a drain. And some of the skills are useless. With such a limited skill set, it's kind of stupid to have skills that are not worth using.

For clarification, AL "skills" are the equivalent of AOs "nanos". The skills you upgrade in AO are more like "stats" in other games.

Character Customisation and Looks:
Aside from being able to actually choose your gender, Anarchy has a huge range of "social" clothing. Clothing that serves no purpose other than to look cool. There's also a new feature included with a recent patch that lets you put clothing or armour into a "social tab" so you can have your difficult-to-get-on PvM/PvP armour on and still look flash.

Even without social clothes though, you don't spend much time noticing other people in AL anyway. If you did though you'd see that most classes look the same regardless of level. Armor doesn't really have much bearing. My moon elf? Put different armour on her and her skirt and fucking G STRING might change colour. Put different armour on my Doctor in AO and you'll actually notice. You can usually tell certain classes by what they're wearing, or you could before the social tab.

Item Trading and Selling
Selling an item to players and buying items from players is one of the (very) few aspects in which ArchLord actually beats Anarchy Online.

In AO, if you have an item you wish to sell to players you can either shout about it in the cities or, if you have the Alien Invasion expansion and your Organisation has a city you can put the item in a shop terminal inside your player city. In the main ("normal") cities, such as Tir, Omni-Trade, Old Athens, Borealis... pretty much every major city there are "Item Search Terminals". You open it up (you need AI), search for your item. When you find it, you have to go to the city to get the item. This can take a rather long time, depending on how far the player city is from transport options (grid, ShadowLands jump-off points, fixer grid, whompahs). This means that people generally pay more for an item if it's at a city that is easier to get to. With only a set number of plots available for cities if your org has a hard-to-reach city, your items better be well priced.

In ArchLord though, your inventory screen has a "Sell Item" button. You drop the item in and set the price. In the towns there is an NPC called "Item Trader". Open a chat dialog with him, hit the Buy Items button, and you get a screen with all the items sorted into categories. You can't sort the items though, so it can take a while to find the right one. However when you do, click the item, agree to the purchase, and it appears in your inventory. Easy.

There are a lot more items you can get on Anarchy Online though so you can limit the search to certain quality levels or prices and you can sort them by any of those categories. AL also has a 10 item limit whereas you can sell as many things as you want on the AO terminals.

Another aspect where AL beats Anarchy is in trading items directly between players. In AO you have to be in front of the intended trade recipient, right click them, trade the items etc etc...

In AL, if you're nowhere near the character just hit P to open the party window. Add them to your party, click their name, click menu (again, 10+ times) and hit trade. The ability to do this remotely is useful but does not exactly save the game.

Servers:
There are 3 AL servers. And they go down every single day. For "daily maintenance". Sure it's for 15 minutes, and once a week for an hour.
There are 4 AO servers. Rimor, Atlantean, Die Nu Weil (I don't know, something German) and the test server (for players to beta test new patch content).

Conclusions and Winners
Graphics: ArchLord, for now. Will have to see when the AO gets the engine upgrade.
Chat Interface: Anarchy Online. Absolutely and completely Anarchy Online.
GUI: Anarchy.
Team Play: Anarchy.
Community: ANARCHY.
Character Choices: Anarchy.
Item Trades and Sales: Surprisingly, Arch Lord.

If you're looking for shallow meaningless fantasy play where you almost never have to talk to another person and you can put up with a horrible interface, frustrating controls and constant lag of varying degrees, for fucks sake play a single player game. If you must have a fantasy MMO and can't handle Science Fiction, ArchLord might be for you. If you don't have a problem with badly coded interface elements, don't care that they couldn't even get the help text right, go ahead and download ArchLord. But have a look around for other things first.

For depth, team play, community and aliens, you can't go too far wrong with Anarchy. It might not be as big as WoW but I hear it's a lot more in-depth. You can also play Anarchy without the expansions for free.

EDIT: It has come to my attention, through discussions with players in game, that the ignore function is even worse than I thought.

In ArchLord, it is not the case that you have to relog for the ignore function to work. It doesn't work at all. It will stop the ignored character from whispering you (sending you a tell), you can set it not to be able to trade with you, to not be able to send you party invites. But you can't block text the character shouts! So there's nothing you can do to stop the incessant flood of credit-selling spam that happens in every city. You just have to try and sift through it for responses from real characters.
Bullshit.

Anarchy Online
ArchLord

My Friend...

2008-05-23T15:00:00.003+10:00

... doesn't believe in God (with a more agnostic stance than atheist) but does believe the Universe has purpose.

What would you label such a belief?

Are These The End Times?

2008-05-22T16:17:00.004+10:00

I came across another "we will see the apocalypse this year" website yesterday. This one was set up more professionally than the others I had seen. It also had a lot of bible passages it was drawing on as supposed proof that we will see the Rapture occur in the next 5 to 10 years, as opposed to "it's happening because Jesus is Lord and he told me". But I saw one thing that was especially strange.

Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure. (Isa. 46: 9-10)

These words are clear and direct. They are not cloaked in some cryptic imagery.

If this is what Christian doom-speakers call "clear and direct" I would dearly hate to see the collection of words they call "cloaked in some cryptic imagery". Now the words might have the prescribed meaning, sure, but that's after interpretation. They are by no means "clear" nor are they "direct".

Then again it might be one of things Paul was telling me, that I can't see how clear and direct they are because I don't have the Holy Spirit in me.

Jake Gyllenhaal crowned 'Prince of Persia'

2008-05-22T01:42:00.004+10:00

Can news get more awesome then finding out there's a Prince of Persia movie in the works that isn't directed by Uwe Boll?

No, I don't think it can. Not for a few weeks at least.

The news of a Bioshock movie being directed by the guy who did the Pirates of the Caribbean movies was fairly sweet as well, but I did like The Sands of Time. And I think I agree with the choice of actor, at least based on the similarities between the actor and his soon-to-be character.

Global Distribution of the World's Water

2008-05-22T00:04:00.002+10:00

A rather fantastic picture showing how all our planetary water is partitioned. This should be a bit of a wake-up call to people who don't think we need to worry about water - because there's, you know, "heaps of it".

Google Webmasters Tools...

2008-05-21T13:43:00.003+10:00

...are fairly cool and have a small amount of information not included with Google Analytics.

For a start, not only does it show the number of people subscribing to the site feed via iGoogle/Reader it also has a handy function showing

The top 20 queries in which your site appeared, and the percentage of the top 20 queries represented by each search.

# 1	% 53%	Query venomfangx	Position 16
2	9%	tooked	7
3	7%	p3n1s	3
4	4%	evident	13
5	3%	supernatural answers	9
6	2%	"vapid retard"	1
7	2%	venomfangx idiot	7
8	2%	florida heaven jesus killing	10
9	1%	do people actually believe this	4
10	1%	rats are ticklish	7
11	1%	arabia fuck	8
12	1%	cyperland	8
13	1%	free saudi arabia fuck	8
14	1%	hh baby blog	8
15	1%	anarchy online tree of enlightenment	18
16	1%	gynophobic	26
17	1%	enlightenment and christian education	30
18	1%	"one movie you loved when you were a child"	34
19	1%	"the enlightenment" science god	35
20	1%	enlightenment

I went and tried it out with "vapid retard". Sure enough, typing "vapid retard" (with the quotes) into Google nets you my blog page about Ben Stein as the first result.

Awesome.

Subscribe To Mah Feed!

2008-05-21T13:33:00.005+10:00

Fantastic! Over there on the right you should see the standard symbol for RSS. If you don't know what that is, don't worry everything will be okay.

If you don't have firefox and are instead reading this on Internet Explorer then please leave we don't want your kind here. Leave, get firefox, then return.

So you can click the button and if you have firefox I recommend the "XML" option. Then just choose a place for the feed to go on your toolbar and Hey Presto! Whenever I update the blog, a little link will appear at the top of that RSS folder. So you don't have to come here to check up on the action every whatever number of weeks you people take between visits.

Now whilst I am sure there is an easier way to subscribe to a feed of this blog, I'm not really feeling the Blogger love right now, plus I'm tired so if you figure out there's another button sitting on the page somewhere that's even easier please: let me know.

EDIT: Well according to Google Webmaster Tools 3 people are subscribing to this via Google products (such as iGoogle, Google Reader...). I'd like to think that one of them is Craig and one is TCA, but I'm not sure and I have no idea who the third would be. Maybe JPJ or Dave, they're nice enough.

Then again it could be DJP, Giraffe Pen and that guy I blogged about near Earth Hour - the ugly guy whose kids had to be the ones to set the example for him.

Denial?

2008-05-21T13:17:00.003+10:00

In a recent one-sided argument I was, I believe, in a very roundabout way accused of being in denial. Or maybe it was that I said that atheists aren't in denial and a certain someone made the point that if I was in denial, I would hardly admit to it.

So: are atheists in denial about believing in God/Jesus? Do we really believe He exists, and just pretend to to attempt to get out of our heavenly responsibility? Do we really believe, but say we don't in an attempt to claim at the end of days, "well God I didn't believe in you that's why I didn't worship, so be a sport and let me in" ?

The problem with that of course is that if you were to believe in an all-knowing all-powerful supernatural entity, you should also believe that this all-knowing deity knows your thoughts. So you should believe that He can see straight through your professed atheism, see that you believe, see that you're just trying to scrimp on the worship and in to the fiery lake you go.

Obviously this is all a little ridiculous, but then again so is the claim that atheists are merely Christians in denial. Are Hindus really Christians in denial? After all, they don't believe in God, maybe they're just worshipping Vishnu to get out of their Judaic responsibilities? Do atheists in Muslim countries really believe in Allah, but simply want an excuse to get out of praying so many times a day? Maybe atheists in Buddhist areas are really Buddhists in denial? Maybe everyone in the world regardless of professed religion is really just a Thor-worshipper? They're just in denial.

Atheists, DJP, are just like Christians. We're both good, we're both bad, stupid and intelligent, angry, sad, happy. We both say stupid things, comment before reading, we both ask questions - and we both have a 'lack of belief' in several hundred Gods. We're in denial about our belief in Thor as much as Christians are in denial about their belief in Ra. Atheists just believe in one less God than do Christians.

How Do Christians...

2008-05-19T23:54:00.003+10:00

... justify their faith in Jesus and his saving grace, in light of Matthew 15:22-26?

A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terribly from demon-possession." Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, "Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us." He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." The woman came and knelt before him. "Lord, help me!" she said. He replied, "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs."

I'm sure there are other more relevant passages in the New Testament that tell them that they don't need to be from Israel to be saved, but the passage is fairly unambiguous.

And how do Christians reconcile their view of an all-loving Jesus with the above passage? Clearly Jesus doesn't love everyone and isn't going to save everyone: Just the Israelites. Even his apostles acted like bastards. Not "please help her Lord" but "send her away, her bitching is getting on our nerves".

Sure in the end he eventually helped her - after she grovelled and worshipped. Not after calling her and her people dogs though just to rub it in. If she hadn't have grovelled though? If she had given up in despair? How many others came and cried to Jesus for healing but were rejected, with only this one specific story showing his apparent mercy? I've heard this passage read out as some fantastic example of Jesus' everlasting mercy, but it doesn't read that way. It reads like he ignored her, called her a dog, made her beg and grovel and then did the healing. Quite clearly, a bit of a racist. The point seems to be that if you are from Israel it's a lot easier to find help and salvation from your good pal Jesus, everyone else has to crawl like worms.

And I have asked before what kind of God it is that Christians worship that commands them to kill disobedient children. The response has been along the lines that that command doesn't count any more because Jesus made new laws and new traditions and only the New Testament counts today.

Mathew, 15:4

Some Guy - Why I'm Not a Christian

2008-05-19T19:05:00.002+10:00

Shamelessly yanked from Christian Pwnage is this rather decent post from some guy I've never heard of giving his case for why he's not a Christian.

It's fairly good stuff and, whilst I'm certain Christians can find a lot to whinge about, there are some really good logical problems with Christianity in there.

Readx0rz.

MORE Baby Bunnies!

2008-05-16T19:53:00.002+10:00

So imagine my surprise this morning when going down to check on the rabbits, when I open up Girl Bunny's cage to see a large mound of fur in the corner.

Knowing what I would find I put my hand in it anyway and yep, sure enough, there was squirming and wriggling and squeaky noises.

I didn't even realise she was pregnant and now I have an extra EIGHT baby rabbits.

Yes, 8. Pictures tomorrow maybe.

The Greatest Video Ever Made.

2008-05-14T02:01:00.000+10:00

Ever. Quite seriously I've watched this 7 or more times, and I've been making everyone I know watch it too. Best cartoon I've ever seen.

Rats Are Ticklish

2008-05-14T01:56:00.002+10:00

Easily the greatest scientific discovery for the last one hundred years.
Link to where I originally got the news
Youtube video:

Craig's Movie "Meme"

2008-05-13T19:07:00.002+10:00

Not sure this really qualifies as a meme (it's certainly not lolcats material) but it looked fun so:

1. One movie that made you laugh
A Night at the Roxburys

2. One movie that made you cry
I almost got a bit teary at I think it was A Walk To Remember

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
Aladdin. I still love it.

4. One movie you've seen more than once
From Dusk Till Dawn

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it
I'll admit to anything. But I love Gilmore Girls and am frequently taunted about such. Not a movie but there you have it.

6. One movie you hated
The Rabbit Proof Fence. Saw it as part of a school excursion. Apparently if you think a movie about Aboriginals is boring you're a racist.

7. One movie that scared you
They

8. One movie that bored you
Memoirs of a Geisha

9. One movie that made you happy
Doom

10. One movie that made you miserable
Fern Gully. Those poor fucking trees. When I saw it (when I was little) I was so upset by the quote at the end I even wrote (with the help of mum) to whoever in Government was in charge of rainforests and got a standardised bullshit reply back.

11. One movie you weren't brave enough to see
Epic Movie. But I eventually saw it anyway and it was more painful than I ever imagined.

12. One movie character you've fallen in love with
The engineer chick (I always forget her name) from Serenity.

13. The last movie you saw
Slow Burn

14. The next movie you hope to see
Not sure I haven't checked recently

15. Now tag five people: I have 4 readers, so 'tag'

Again: Why are we saving these people?

2008-05-13T12:04:00.004+10:00

Sure, some might say we're not "saving" the people of Iraq, more just stealing their oil. I'm one of them, America and it's foreign policies are shockingly unintelligent. After all, America is the one who put the Taleban AND Sadam in power and now we saved the Iraqi people (again!) from the bad bad men.

But why don't we just nuke the place and be done with it? Evacuate the women and children and BAM! move on.

I've blogged (maybe) about the story of a 17 year old girl in Iraq who (apparently) fell in love with a British soldier. Not 'had sex with' or 'kissed' just 'fell in love'. So she was strangled, beaten and then stabbed to death by her father. When her mother screamed forthe girl's brothers to save her, they rushed in, listened to what their father had to say - then helped him kill her.

It gets worse though. He was arrested, but release after two hours. Because he has friends in the government (male friends) who say he did the right thing. He has friends in the new-trained police (male friends) who said he did the right thing. All the (male) members of his family congratulated him, and the dead girls uncles joined in spitting on the makeshift graft the body was thrown into.

The mother had her arm broken when she said she was leaving the "husband", and they send her letters and notes every day saying she's a prostitute, they're going to kill her, she should go back home and live "like a blessed muslim woman".

What would you do if you were her? "Oh sure doesn't matter that you brutally murdered my 17 year old daughter because you're a male in a violently male-dominated violence-centered theocracy".

Here's a link - all the ridiculous details are right here.

So why (other than oil) are we trying to bring democracy t0 a country where the law allows the murder of innocent people, guilty of being gay, of not being a muslim, shaving their beard (seriously), being a female outside of the house without a male family member as escort, being a female and not having sex with your husband when he tells you to, all sorts of bullshit. That's not a democracy - they're just going from one dictatorship to another. What else other than "dictatorship" would you call a brutal theocracy that allows men to do what they please to women without fear or reprisal? I dream of seeing such so-called "men" suffer the same as they have put women through for years.

One other point - with this sort of thing happening, it's funny just what western feminists bitch about, is it not?

Can Chance Produce Information?

2008-05-09T20:17:00.002+10:00

The question was asked on Hayes' blog, TheCrazyAustralian. It was one I had seen before, one that was in many settings answered well. My answers seemed to invite more, varied and increasingly vague criticisms, so I put it to AskTheAtheist.

For those of you who are confused, "chance can't produce information" is a common criticism levelled against evolution. It's a fairly inane and rather silly question, which unfortunately is the norm.

Question:
Can chance produce information? Is the question a Christian asked on his blog. I know I've seen it before and it's a poor argument but unfortunately he keeps inventing reasons and extra additions to show information can't come from chance. The whole argument and his question is here: http://www.thecrazyaustralian.com/can-chance-produce-information/ A definitive answer to throw back would be greatly appreciated.
Atheist Answer
It's been a little while, and the Crazy Australian has in fact conceded that chance can at least produce something which we recognise as information. This Australian says, good on him.

This question is a common creationist approach. The application there is that information in a genome is not seen to increase after random recombinations. The response is that new information can take the form of a decrease in data as well as an increase (my usual example is that the valuable information each week on Big Brother is who will leave the house) so a recombination, which is partly both, is definitely an increase in information.

Completely random threads of information would indeed be unlikely to come to anything meaningful. Consider that, by the way: information, as defined in a computational sense by those who wish to manipulate, compress and optimise it, need not be meaningful in any sense other than representing the data of which it is comprised.

A bit of real-world pressure makes all the difference; this is the very core of natural selection. Changes to a genome which are harmful, ambiguous or negligible tend to die out when the living beings carrying them are outbred by beings carrying directly beneficial changes. It doesn't matter what the information in the genome means as such. Only survival value is of importance, and as it happens, information coherent enough to represent blueprints for complex structures like wings and stomach acid has substantial survival value.

You know, the real answer to this question is really extremely simple. Yes, chance can produce information, if there is such a thing as information. Chance can produce anything, given the right conditions. That's what chance means.

Applied to anything real, though, the true question is, "Can chance consistently produce information?" That's a little hairier, but it's moot when applied to evolution. Natural selection is not a chance process. It mines the random element of mutation for new genetic material, but the selection itself is the original Survival of the Fittest.

It's like rolling fifty dice and only picking out the fours, fives and sixes. You're guaranteed a fairly high average score per selected die. The game of evolution is rigged in favour of life.

- SmartLX

Unfortunate News Titles: Great Tits Cope Well

2008-05-09T20:07:00.003+10:00

So, as I usually do, I opened up (in firefox) the RSS feed folder for BBC news. What am I confronted with?

Great tits cope well with warming.

They do? Fantastic. If you are, of course, a member of that sad and lonely group that doesn't realise the humour in the above news title, if you are a person who might not recognise that 'tit' is a slang term for "breast" or "bosom" than you do now.

Juvenile, yet chuckles were produced.

Poll Results: Ben Stein.

2008-05-02T17:00:00.002+10:00

Visionary	0 (0%)
Crusader For Science	0 (0%)
Crusader For Free Speech	1 (20%)
Vapid Retard Abusing His Jewish Heritage for Cheap Anti-Darwin Points	3 (60%)
Needs A Violent Education In Basic Science	3 (60%)

5 people voted. (FIVE. Fuckers. I KNOW there are more readers than 5. Give me a break vote in the fucking poll please).

2 voted for both "vapid retard" and "Needs a violent re-education". 2 more voted, one for each of those two same options.

The last voter, put Benny down for the "free speech" award.

Let's get this straight - those people that "lost their jobs" in the movie, they didn't lose them over Intelligent Design. Most didn't even have said jobs to begin with. He's not crusading for free speech - there's no law against talking about Intelligent Design. There are, however, rules about the scientific process that everyone has to follow. It's simply that the Intelligent Design crowd aren't following them.

It's not about religion. There are thousands of religious scientists. However unlike the ID people, they don't let their religion affect their professionalism. They don't throw away years of dedication to the scientific method because their BFF InvisiMan tells them to. Simple as that, fuckfacevoter.

School Bomber: Wants To Go To Heaven, Kill Jesus

2008-05-02T16:55:00.002+10:00

Fantastic times, these. Especially for those of you silly enough to live in America, of all places.
This kid had a plot to blow up the school and, presumably, himself. He, thankfully, didn't succeed in his 'mission' and was instead arrested.

He told the arresting officers that he:

...wanted to die, go to heaven, and kill Jesus.

Another case not of religious people being insane, but rather insane religious people who don't agree with the rest of their brethren on the basic tenets of their faith. He should have known suicide is a no-no for most Christian religions. And that if he was going to kill a large amount of people with a bomb and kill himself in the process, he doesn't get to Heaven. No 75 temporary virgins either. But hey, at least it was a plan right?

Why ID Isn't Science: A List

2008-04-29T00:30:00.003+10:00

A list of reasons why Intelligent Design is not, can not, and will not be science, now or ever. I'll number and sub-number each point in case some poor fool wants to try and debate with me.

So if you have a particular problem with a particular point, add a comment and don't forget to say which specific point you're having kittens over. Consider the list incomplete - there's always new evidence coming to light about this farce that calls itself science.

1) ID proponents posit one of two things:

A supernatural entity. In other words, magic, in other words, untestable.
Non-supernatural, super-advanced entities. Currently untestable, yet even if proven calls into question the nature of those super-advanced designers. If they also were intelligently designed, you either end up with the above point, or this one. If you end up at this one, you have to make the choice again, either infinitely or until you say "magic".

This is the single biggest failing of ID in regards to its scientific merit. The supernatural is not a consideration of science for a reason. ID proponents try to claim that science should be changed to accommodate them, yet that is not how science works.

2) ID Makes no useful predictions. Since life on Earth was created by magic, you can't predict anything with regards to biology. The supernatural entity could make creatures change over time to appear to be the work of evolution, or could just as easily make an elephant give birth to a purple Giraffe.

3) The key purpose of ID is to attack evolution, with minimal time given over to useful research. However, even if evolution was disproven, Intelligent Design does not automatically become true. Not in itself a proof that ID is not science, just a proof that ID proponents do not properly comprehend the way science works.

4) ID proponents sometimes claim ID is actually about "design detection". However the main and possibly only way they perform this "design detection" is by attempting to find holes in evolutionary theory and claim that those holes prove Intelligent Design. Unfortunately evolution is a theory, not a Law, which in scientific terms means that although there are large bodies of evidence, there is still much to be learnt. Gravity cannot currently be linked to Quantum Mechanics with any complete surety, but this hole does not mean either theory is invalid - it simply means there is more to be discovered. In other words, a hole in a theory does not prove the theory wrong - that's why it's called a theory - because there is work yet to be done.

Should design be detected in a provable and completely accurate way, you are left with the very first point. Who designed the designers? Infinitely regressing teams of designers (illogical) or supernatural deity (not scientific)?

5) Intelligent Design is literally rebranded creationism. It started out being called creationism, was called Creation Science, then CDesign and eventually Intelligent Design. The roots of a "theory" (I apply the colloquial terminology to ID) of course do not detract from the accuracy of what a theory becomes, yet see point 1.

6) Intelligent Design has no evidence. What it sometimes uses as evidence, namely Irreducible Complexity (and a range of other so-called bodies of evidence) are in most if not all cases proven both weak and false. The notion of Irreducible Complexity in particular is consistently shown to be false.

Claiming "I believe this process is too complex to happen, therefore [supernatural entity]" is likewise not scientific. The fact that you personally do not believe something does not make it false. Neither does the fact that the knowledge of a subject may be incomplete justify the belief in the falsity of a particular theory.

7) ID claims an intelligent designer created life on this planet. What it doesn't explain however:

Existence of vestigial organs.
Existence of poorly-designed aspects of an organism, for example the human sinuses.
Similarities in DNA between closely-related species, especially in sections of the genome that are non-coding ["junk" DNA].
Existence of virally-introduced segments of the genome that can be traced between closely related species
The fossil record. Why the prediction of evolution, that organisms throughout the fossil record would get more complex [at least in the earliest time periods], is borne out by the evidence. Unless the Intelligent Designer was experimenting, but why would a supernatural entity have need of such?

The big one in this case is the 3rd sub-point. Why would an Intelligent Designer make [what evolution and the evidence tell us are closely related] species with the same code fragments in the same parts of the genome, especially in cases where that code fragment served no purpose? Unless the intent was to introduce doubt in a bid to make faith somehow more important.

8) Intelligent Design is a top-down "theory". It begins with the answer and works backwards, looking for evidence to support itself while conveniently ignoring conflicting evidence. Science does not work this way - it works [in extremely basic form] via the following.

Look at the evidence, formulate a hypothesis to explain the evidence. Then look at more evidence. If the evidence supports the hypothesis, continue looking at evidence. If the evidence conflicts, change the hypothesis. Repeat.

Intelligent Design skips the evidence, skips the hypothesis and skips the theory. Whilst evolution has changed over the near-150 years in an attempt to better explain emerging research, Intelligent Design will never change. ID has started with their answer ("God Did It") and worked at picking and choosing the evidence to suit. They have decided their answer is the only true one, and gone on from there, instead of formulating a new hypothesis to match the evidence. There is no doubt this is all out of purely religious motives.

9) ID is not based on multiple observations, usually required to be in the form of controlled and repeated experiments. The fact that there can be no experiments on the existence of a supernatural entity weigh heavily against Intelligent Design in this regard.

10) ID is not "provisional" or "tentative". A scientific theory must be open to experimental checking, and cannot claim to be the one and only possible explanation. It is the unchanging statement that a supernatural entity made everything and no amount of evidence will change that statement. It also asserts that the supernatural entity made everything, and that that is the only valid conclusion. Evolution on the other hand is constantly being refined and changed in light of new evidence. And evolutionary biologists do not ignore evidence that contradicts evolution - they actively seek it out, in order to better refine the theory.

11) ID is not correctable - it does not change in light of new evidence - the key claim that an SE created life is unchanging. The only thing that changes in ID is which evidence is accepted and which is rejected.

12) All major ID proponents are religious, have stated that they believe the designer is the Christian God and have stated that the purpose of Intelligent Design is not expanding human knowledge but specifically to inject religion into both science and schools. In messages to both congregations and in internal documents (particularly the Wedge Document) it has been stated that the entirety of the purpose behind Intelligent Design is replacing the modern Scientific Method and especially naturalistic explanations with supernatural explanations. The specifically stated objectives of the Intelligent Design movement are not "expand human knowledge" or "better explain the origin of species". The objectives are:

Inject religion back into schools to "bring people closer to Christ"
Dismantle current, naturalistic, science and replace it with metaphysical and supernatural explanations
Gain public support for the reintroduction of the Christian religion into schools, courts, the media - all areas.

These objectives are not just in the Wedge Document - they are present in a number of books published by leading Intelligent Design advocates.

COMMON ARGUMENTS AGAINST:

Point 5: ID proponents (all of them overtly religious and unanimously unversed in evolutionary theory) claim that ID is real science, without anything to do with religion. The unfortunate fact (for them) is that it is literally creationism. Without going into too much detail personally, check this link.

Point 7.5: Maybe the SE [Supernatural Entity] did experiment, either through need or for the heck of it. Maybe the SE did start with easy creatures and move on to bigger and more complex organisms, using the transitional forms seen in the fossil record as the SE "upgraded" the creations, much as humans possibly will when we begin creating life forms. However, first see point 1, then prove or scientifically deduce that they were in fact created. Then see point 1 again. The point of this specific refutation is that not only can you not scientifically prove the existence of a God, you cannot scientifically prove the motivations for such phenomena.

Point 7.1: Vestigial organs are called as such not because they're useless, or biologists don't know their function. They're called that because they've lost all or most of their original function. In many cases, scientists do know what that original function was. For example, blind species of mole. They are blind, yet they still have eyes. Another example is hip bones in whales, left over from their land-dwelling ancestors. The genetic code for legs in whales is still there, as evolution predicts it is. And, as evolution predicts, there are whales sometimes born with vestigial legs, just as there are sometimes humans born with tails.

Point 12: Some people believe it doesn't matter that all ID proponents are religious. They also believe that leading ID proponents saying ID is all about religion doesn't negate from the scientific value of Intelligent Design. Such people are, unfortunately, beyond help.

As stated, this list is in no way considered complete. I will periodically add additional refutations as I recall or discover them. Additionally, since my mind is NOT unchanging and set, any successful refutations made by commentors will be incorporated. Any errors I have made will be both acknowledged and changed, in that order. Please, by all means, choose a point and argue against it.

Zomg, They Tooked And Shrunkeded Ma P3n1s!

2008-04-26T20:16:00.003+10:00

Ahh, Africa. Land of wild savannas, dangerous jungles, open plains.

Land of stupid, stupid people. Just take a look at this.

Apparently, there is a mass panic in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bands of renegade black-magic magicians have been terrorising the male community, casting their terrible magic. To what effect you ask? I'll tell you.

They have been stealing and in some cases simply shrinking penises. Yes that's right - they sit in taxis wearing gold rings, shrinking the penises of their male passengers.

Oh. My. Cthulu.

And there have been men who literally exposed themselves, pointed to their flaccid members, and shouted "See! They shrunk my penis!" Here's a particularly gruesome quote.

"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

Did they think that maybe the silly bastard was just born with a small penis? Or it was cold? Does he think he'll get a free penis enlargement procedure to fix his minuscule member if he testifies?

I've reported before on the rampant religious stupidity plaguing sections of Africa, but this one really takes the cake - and eats the ever-loving shit out of it.

Ben Stein - Knows Less About Science Than I Thought He Did

2008-04-22T19:34:00.004+10:00

ID Proponents and those of you who planning to watch Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please please watch the following. I will explain why after you do.

Go on, watch it.

Okay, now why did you have to watch it? I'll tell you, I will!

Hopefully if you were paying attention you will have noticed a lot of rather stupid shit coming out of Stein's overrated noise-hole. Special notice should have been paid to the last minute and a half, where Stein explains why Evolution is such a poor theory. For those of you who didn't watch it because you're lazy or scared to have you faith in Ben Stein or Intelligent Design damaged, I'll spell it out for you. It goes a little like this.

Ben Stein:

But Darwinism explains so little. It doesn't explain how life began. It doesn't explain how Gravity works, how it keeps the planets in their orbits. It doesn't explain how thermodynamics works. It doesn't explain how physics of the Laws of motion work...

And so on. It should be obvious to anyone with an IQ above 80 that Stein is a complete and utter retard when it comes to matters of Science. No, Evolution doesn't explain how life began - that's Abiogenesis. Of course it doesn't explain how gravity works, that's for Newton and Einstein to talk about. Of course it doesn't explain thermodynamics, or physics or the Laws of Motion. Those are theories and concepts that have nothing to do with Biology.

So, who among you think that evolution is wrong because it doesn't explain the origin of Gravity (another thing Stein uses to attack evolution). If so, why? Why should a theory concerning biology explain physics principles? Should we say that General and Special Relativity are useless theories because they don't explain biology? Should Quantum Mechanics be discarded because it doesn't tell us where life began? Should we do away with Gravity and start jumping off of buildings, convinced we can fly, because the theories regarding Gravity don't explain all of physics and biology?

Evolution, Stein you piece of shit, is not a "Theory of Everything" that seeks to explain the intricacies of the Universe. Evolution has nothing to do with any of those other things you whined about. It has a passing attachment to the origin of life, but is not a theory about the origin of life. It's a theory regarding the origin of species. A theory is not to be discarded because it doesn't explain more than it's supposed to.

Comments are welcome. Do you agree with Stein, should evolution be discarded because it doesn't explain the origin of gravity? Or is Stein a fool who should stick to his own areas of expertise, mainly appearing in rather crap game shows and having extremely minor roles in movies?

Abstinence-Only Leads To Mass Sexual Incompetence

2008-04-12T02:13:00.004+10:00

Just as both myself and thousands upon thousands of intelligently-minded individuals and groups have tried to tell Christians Abstinence-Only supporters. As we have consistently tried to tell them, vainly.

What have we tried to tell them? Quite simply that kids have sex. It's just something that happens these days. Is it right? Not always. But that doesn't mean they're not doing it.

Consider then the futility of the abstinence-only groups. The ones who have, in many locales, forced schools to teach only about abstinence in sexual education. No condoms, no pill, no Dam, no safe sex of any kind - only sex of the does not make baby Jesus cry kind, which is to say none at all...

And yet despite their efforts to teach kids that sex is evil and will instantly and unavoidably rot away your penis and give your anus an unhealthy dose of aids, kids are still having sex. And in some cases, apparently, taking their religiously-forced ignorance of safe sexual practices and applying it to their sex lives. In a manner we lucky few who were taught about safe sex recognise as a bizarre lack of common sense.

Take, for example, this. Too lazy to click the link? Here you go.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Florida teens who believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy have prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.

Another myth is that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana will prevent a person from getting pregnant, Local 6 reported.State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida's abstinence-only sex education, Local 6 reported.They are proposing a bill that would require a more comprehensive approach, the report said.It would still require teaching abstinence but students would also learn about condoms and other methods of birth control and disease prevention.The bill just passed its first vote in a committee, Local 6 reported.Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.

So this is what the children of one American state have come to, now that their fragile sexual minds have been crippled by religious oppression. Notice the state apparently ONLY teaches abstinence as the way to prevent disease - and yet, the kids have sex anyway. They don't know of any methods to prevent it, they are taught in schools that only abstaining can save them. But they're kids - they get out there and fuck anyway.

ABSTINENCE BASED SEXUAL EDUCATION
DOES NOT WORK

"Non-Religious ID"

2008-04-09T15:23:00.003+10:00

Link.

These people are a little bit funny. Claiming they're non-religious and yet here they are, proponents of Intelligent Design, a theists' "alternative" to evolution whereby everything was made by an invisible magic being instead of natural processes. How can they claim to be non-religious and still adhere to the belief that a supernatural entity created everything?

Oh that's right - ID proponents got sick of everyone sneering at their religious debasement of science and so are trying to prove that God has nothing to do with it. I'm not claiming these non-religious types are actually conservative American Christians with a vested interest in seeing their religious views dispersed among public schools.... Oh but wait, that's exactly what I'm claiming isn't it?

ID proponents consistently use "dodgy" and at times un-American-Constitutional efforts to push their religious views into schools - see "The Wedge Document". Skimming through this ridiculous blog it's easy to see hallmarks of The Discovery Institute plastered all over it. From their declaration at the bottom to the way they disparage evolution. It's all very old, very familiar.

But maybe they are non-religious? Hang on while I google the term. Ah.

A non practising theist. That makes perfect sense. So maybe they're not flat-out lying, but I dare say they're being extremely dishonest. I largely suspect that if they are what they say they are, they're still Christians. Probably just don't go to church. After all it doesn't say "Atheist Intelligent Design" it says non-religious.

Still I'm rather of the belief they're just another sneaky attempt to gain credibility for their "science" that has been repeatedly and viciously struck down in the courts as rebranded creationism. Read "Of Pandas And People" where they did just that - did a find and replace, switching the word "Creationism" with "CDesign" and following on with "Intelligent Design".

I see through their bullshit, but will ID Proponents? They're already stupid enough to accept "God did it" as science, what won't they believe?

Drunk on a Monday Night - Here Comes the Fun

2008-04-07T20:57:00.003+10:00

Okay so, with the girlfriend gone I'm a little bit lonely and tonight I've had some beers and a bunch of foul home-made concoctions. Made from Solo, Bacardi Rum, Angostura (the bitter stuff you make "Lemon Lime 'n Bitters from), Grenadine and... something else. Point is I made them quite strong.

So, I have nothing better to do sitting here alone so I will post and analyse the links I've most recently come across.

First, to the anti-abortionist people.

Link.
All those against abortions should read this. Pay extra attention to the part where the woman says her "boyfriend will not allow her to use contraceptive." Contraceptions are a form of taboo not just with that poor woman's retard boyfriend, but in large tracts of India. Women are not allowed copntraception, usually because their husbands won't allow it. It's not a matter of choice - these women have no power over their bodies or even over their own lives. It's not cushy and clean like we privileged people get to enjoy.

Then pay attention to the part where the woman in the linked news story tells you how much she earns. See how much she earns? Imagine trying to feed yourself, let alone a child, on that amount of money. These women have nothing and they earn nothing trying to keep it. You religious types really want to force a woman to have a child in those circumstances? Don't even bother harping on about adoption. How many people do you think, in the poorest parts of the world, have unwanted children? Now try to calculate how many adoption agencies there would be in those places - places where NO ONE can afford to raise children, let alone 500 of someone else's children. Have a little compassion maybe.

Next we have... An Atheist On Judgement Day. I quite liked this story but I can see why a lot of you Christians won't.

Following that we find ourselves mired in What About Abstinence? A cushy bullshit story from a bastard Christian website. The story might warm the cockles of a few Christian hearts but it's crap.

The thing that makes it crap is that it not only disregards, completely, the usefulness of preventative sexual education (in the form of condoms and the like) it also makes the case that any type of intimate contact will give a person a disease. Apparently, according to this story, everyone who has sex, kisses, hugs or even shakes hands ever will get a disease - it doesn't matter what protection you have, it doesn't matter whether or not you've both been checked for infections - if you partake in sinful affection of any form, BAM you've automatically got a disease. Fucking idiots.

Then we have the reasons why one particular atheist is angry. There's some good things in there that Christians and other religious groups should pay attention to. Some of it is crap, but some of it includes things that make ME angry as well.

After that we have another reason why Saudi Arabia is a nation full to its eyeballs with shit. Take this story - an 11 year old marries his 10 year old cousin. Disgusting yes? Well not to these animals. Apparently this sort of bullshit is acceptable under Muslim Sharia law. Personally I think the people who allowedm the people who think this sort of application of their religious text is acceptable... These people should be boiled alive until their skin peels off. Not just because they are two cousins marrying, but because of their age. In a civilised society if this marriage was allowed to go ahead those children would be in state care before those paedophilic bastards could blink. And as soon as those pieces of shit were finished with their blinking they'd be off to the slammer.

Lastly, take a look at this. The more intelligent among you will read it and realise how stupid these people are. I'm more than simply certain that a fair few religious types will read it and cry "Exactly!" but I'm willing to discount those few as pretty fucking stupid and thus not worthy of my attention. Let's take one of the "proofs" of God's existence shall we? Yes, yes we shall.

Man has an idea of an infinite and perfect being. Existence is a necessary part of perfection. (Therefore) an infinite and perfect being exists, since the very concept of perfection requires existence (The Ontological Argument, proponents- Anselm).

Okay so this person, as "proof" that God exists, claims that since humans can conceive a perfect being, well then that perfect being MUST exist. Why? Because if you think of something perfect, it must exist. Can anyone here please tell me what the fuck?

So because you can think of something perfect, it exists. It exists because to be perfect it must exist. Can you see the failure of logic there? No? Let my alcohol-fuelled brain take you through it.

Imagine if you will the perfect Unicorn. You know what a Unicorn is? A magical horse with a horn on its head (a myth bought about by washed-up Narwhal horns). Now that you've imagined a perfect unicorn, go and find it. Oh, you can't? It doesn't exist? I see.

Imagine then a perfect sunset. Easy, you say? Well go and find it. Prove that the sunset you claim to be perfect isn't replaced tomorrow by an even more perfect sunset. Prove it's not made obsolete by a string of sunsets, each more perfect than the last. Fuck it, prove your perfect sunset is not only the perfect sunset for everyone, but that it's also the most perfect sunset ever, that yesterdays sunset wasn't better. Or that it's better and more perfect than the sunset on countless extra-solar planets scattered throughout the universe.

I could go on, making up things and imagining them if they were perfect and knowing that they don't exist, thereby rendering this particular proof bullshit. But I will finish it with "Imagine a perfect Carboogleflugenflargenkinestinewitchfuckstillian burger". No such thing exists fuckers, I just typed random crap. It doesn't exist, even though I imagine a perfect one. Therefore it's bullshit. It's all fucking bullshit.

And shall that do for now? Yes, yes it fucking shall.

How To Actually Talk To An Atheist

2008-04-06T12:12:00.004+10:00

Came across this fantastic post last night regarding how Christians running around trying to convert atheists should actually go about it. It raises some fantastic points and some Christians should probably read it regardless of whether or not they're the stand-on-corners-witnessing-for-Jesus type.

Here's the link.

And here's an excerpt:

You know what's great?

Unicorns.

In fact, unicorns are freakin' AWESOME. And you know why? Because once you accept one into your life, they provide you with a lifetime membership into the Beer, Massage, Chocolate and Steak club. Have you not heard about the beer, massage and steak club? Well, let me tell you all about it - it doesn't matter if you don't like beer, or steak, or chocolate, or massages - whichever one you like, you get 24 hours a day for the rest of your life. And if you like all four or any combination of them, well... You're in luck! Because That's what the rest of your eternity will be - massages (happy ending or not, your choice), steak cooked just the way you want it, chocolate of any sort coated in any topping (or as a topping on anything you want), and any beer ever made or ever conceptualized, always on tap and never flat. And to get all of this, all you have to do is accept a unicorn into your life.

What? You don't believe in unicorns? Well, I assure you that they are very real! And I know this because I've accepted a unicorn into my life, and I trust that it will one day gain me admittance into the BMCS Club. How could I have accepted it into my life? Well, I just believe in them. And I trust they exist, because there are texts available to me that discuss them, as well as people available to teach me all about them. I mean, after all, with such great eternal rewards, why wouldn't you believe?

Okay, fine, don't believe in them - you're going to end up in the Pushups For Eternity club. That's where you have to do knuckle pushups on mounds of broken glass with Rush Limbaugh sitting on your back for all eternity. All because you won't accept a unicorn into your life.

Pretty silly, right? Well, my dear Christian friends, that's exactly how you sound to an Atheist.

HA! Proof of readership! "The Crazy Australian" linked to the same article, crediting me as the person he discovered it through. Then Craig linked to Hayes - I wonder who linked to the article via reading Craig's blog? Anyway it's proof that people still read this so that's fantastic.

Sad Tidings and WhatNot.

2008-04-06T12:08:00.003+10:00

Well the girlfriend had a huge argument with my mother and it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Or the mouse that sunk the boat. Or whatever the point is my mum was a bitch and now Ashley has moved home. Fun times? Not really. Still together which is... fine but it'll probably be a little hard over the coming weeks until we find our own affordable place that doesn't smell like mould or have dangerous fire-hazard wiring.

The point is posts may get more or less frequent, I'm not sure been busy the past few days.

Poll Results: Earth Hour Was

2008-04-06T12:05:00.003+10:00

Well there you have it. Plenty of visitors according to Google Analytics, yet only 3 votes (not including myself and my brother that is).

Important Awareness Tool	3 (60%)
Unhelpful tokenism	2 (40%)
Minor Inconvenience	0 (0%)
Major Inconvenience	0 (0%)
Earth Hour?	0 (0%)
Not As Important As Reading The Bible To Your Children That Night	0 (0%)
Satanist Propoganda To Lure People Away From Jesus	0 (0%)
Completely Useless In Every Aspect	0 (0%)

More Bunny Pictures!

2008-04-06T11:47:00.004+10:00

So the baby rabbits opened their eyes about three days ago now and I've just gotten around to taking some pictures.

Earth Hour: Little to No Power Saving For Newcastle Area

2008-04-01T18:09:00.002+11:00

Just saw something on the news Craig should enjoy... Apparently only 1 power substation in the Newcastle area showed a drop in power consumption during Earth Hour, and over the entire hunter area there was a drop of 4% (saving 24 tonnes of CO2).

Not surprising really - I saw a few houses with their lights off, no businesses (in Kotara at least where I was hiring some videos) but what I saw most were people who thought they were being clever, leaving their lights on but closing their curtains.

Hopefully the results were better elsewhere, because I'm fucking ashamed of you, Newcastle.

If There Is One Religion That Needs Be Destroyed...

2008-03-31T09:42:00.004+11:00

It is most fucking assuredly this one. These people are not human beings - they are filthy pieces of shit that need to be buried with a slice of ham in their mouths.

This link is of course to the short film Jitna, one Muslims around the world are already screaming murder about. And why shouldn't they, it shows extremists for the sacks of shit they are. Of course the film insults Islam - but only because it shows what they are already doing to insult it. Maybe if they weren't the way they are, movies about them wouldn't need to be made.

Watch the movie please, and try to understand how viciously we must defend against "people" like those. I get angry about Christians and their bullshit religion often enough, but this is simply disgusting. Their Islam isn't even a religion, it's just an excuse for men to run around torturing people and forcing everyone to do what they say. Personally I hope Hell is real for them, and they are sent to get anally raped by pigs for a very long time.

Just so we're clear - Extremists? Fuck you, fuck your bullshit religion of death, and fuck your Allah.

Pictures : Easter Bunnies

2008-03-30T17:27:00.006+11:00

I call them Easter Bunnies because they were born on Easter Sunday, or Monday - not entirely sure which as I didn't check on the doe for two days - not to worry there was plenty (plenty) of both food and water available.

There they are in amongst the shredded paper and the fur the mother pulled from her abdomen - down in the bottom right hand corner.

Holding for size comparison.

Aww they is sleepings and hasing cuddles!

And here's a video of them snuffling around.

Poll Results: When We Should Care For The Environment

2008-03-30T03:04:00.003+11:00

Right away - it's the only planet we have	6 (100%)
When it's profitible	0 (0%)
When it won't harm the economy	0 (0%)
After we've prayed to God	0 (0%)
Never - worshipping God is more important	0 (0%)
Never - God will fix it	0 (0%)
Never - I'm going to Heaven so it's not my problem	0 (0%)

As usual a disappointing turn-out at the poll this week. However not one anti-environmental zombie fuck came from the "Earth Hour is Satan" brigade which is either great, or upsetting because they don't know how low my opinion of them is.

New poll up shortly.

Retard's Children Are Smarter Than Him

2008-03-30T02:41:00.004+11:00

Some people combine their ugliness with sheer wilful stupidity. Take the following from Gordon Cheng's blog - about his planned Illumination Hour. What a fucking moron - and of course Giraffe Pen follows right on with the proverbial dick-sucking, fawning over pretty much anyone who writes anything anti-environmental. Here's a choice comment from Giraffe on the above-linked blog:

I spoke to Craig the other day and he made a really good point about the ridicularity of the SSS. He said that observing Earth Hour gives people the false impression that they're making a big difference to the environment by doing it.

Giraffe, if you're reading this: Both you and Craig are fucking stupid. Of course Earth Hour doesn't make a physical difference. It's not about saving energy - an hour's worth out of a year. Only you and others like you are stupid enough to think that. It's about symbolism and awareness. Not that it matters to you lot - anything against the environment and you're on board faster than shit starts to stink.

Back to the main issue though - this Gordon Cheng fuckstick was part of the "Illumination Hour" movement - a bunch of petty whiney bastards unhappy with the environment getting more attention then Jesus (or whatever grievance they have against the planet) so they thought instead of turning off their lights for an hour, they'd be heroes and turn on more lights, showing not just a lack of environmental compassion, understanding or care but also a concerted attempt to piss people off. It doesn't help when you load up Cheng's blog and your eyes drift to his horrible picture - the guy certainlyneeds some form of miracle - but their actions are like those of a small child in a shopping centre. They're not getting enough attention so they fall down, kicking the floor and thumping with their fists, screaming like little cunts.

So, Cheng thought he'd be a big man and turn on all his lights - until his children forced him out of it. How does it feel Cheng, to have your own children forced to set the good example for their dumb-as-fuckery father? Too harsh? Too bad. You should be ashamed that your children had to be the ones to talk sense into you - you're supposed to be their father not the punk kid behind the school dealing cigarettes and other bullshit.

Now he does talk about symbolism, with the following line - see if you can spot the stupid.

We even had to take our Christmas lights down at last.

And, it was too dark to do my usual Bible reading with the girls.

This symbolism is killing me.

So apparently to Cheng, raising environmental awareness stops him reading the Bible to his unfortunate children. Environmental awareness, apparently, is the devil. All those hippies and their support for Earth Hour? Yeah, bible-burning nazi-demons from the 12th layer of Hell itself, bent on stopping good Christians from reading the bible in the name of their Lord and Dark Master Satan. You poor bastards.

To all the Christians out there who are against the environment, against Earth Hour: a few things.

It's not about the immediate physical difference - it's environmental awareness.
This planet? It's the only one we have. You believe God gave the planet as a gift for human stewardship, why the FUCK does it fill you with so much joy to defile it, so much glee to try and dissuade others from protecting it? Are you insane or just stupid?
Turning on extra lights to make a "statement" isn't like in High School - being a rebel doesn't really make the girls want you in this regard. It makes you look like a fucking arsehole.
You pray all the time, worshipping your BFF InvisiMan. You can't take one hour away from reading the bible? You could have spent the hour reflecting on God's Creation, praying for our leaders to fix it, praying for strength to help fix it yourself, praying for something environmental instead of encouraging others to follow your lead and say "Fuck you God - fuck you AND your shitty planet".
I hope you all choke on your fucking food. You cunts.

To all the atheists against the environment?

What's your fucking excuse dickhead?

So, that's that rant over. Maybe next year you could try not being prissy little cunts in need of a good beating? Maybe teach your kids about the environment, pray to your BFF InvisiMan for the planet, do something that doesn't involve being little bitches?

Maybe you could give a shit about the planet, instead of crying about Jesus needing to come first and how it's inconvenient to your Bible readings to turn lights off for an hour?

Maybe you could die and leave the planet for the rest of us who want to leave something habitable for our grandchildren?

Impending Success! Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene!

2008-03-28T22:03:00.002+11:00

Ahh tables have turned it seems. No longer will Christians be the ones to push to have their gay members forced into anti-homosexual "bible treatment" camps to "pray away the gay". Their days are numbered. Thank the Great Cthulu for gay scientists!

New Baby Bunnies

2008-03-25T15:14:00.002+11:00

Sometime either last night or the night before, my female Rabbit gave birth to five kits.
I went to do my daily check (which I missed yesterday) and looked in the small foam dog-house I gave her as a burrow (I put it inside the cage and covered it with straw) and saw a pile of hair she had pulled out, making a nest.

Placing my hand inside, I felt a few warm things move under my hand! Exciting.

So I took them all upstairs (since her cage is outside, and the boy rabbit was inside) and checked out the babies (mum helped since her father bred rabbits and she might remember some of the specifics). One had died previously and one was weak and hadn't eaten and died later. There are currently 3 healthy newborn rabbit kits though and hopefully they'll be fine over the next few weeks.

Pictures to come when I find batteries for the camera.

New Poll Up: The Environment

2008-03-22T10:12:00.002+11:00

This poll is a result of someone over at Craig's blog saying the following:

I'd also like to say that although some of my friends wish to observe Earth Hour I think no less of them if they do. For Christians the more significant matters, like the cross, are important. The environment is definately important- don't get me wrong!- but I think there are more significant issues at stake.

I'd hate all this pro-environment banter to take precendence over people loving one another and worshipping God instead of the creator. I think there's a very big risk in taking the environmental agenda too far. Having said that I think Christians need to be mindful of the environment: Genesis 1-3 says that man is God's steward over creation and that he must take proper care of it. However the creation must NEVER be worshipped above the creator who made it. The needs of humans must never be put behind the needs of the environment.

Environmental responsibility is important but I doubt the effectiveness of Earth Hour and people shouldn't feel guilty if they don't observe it. Being a media project I'm not sure how far EH should be taken.

I've honestly been waiting and hoping (praying?) for a Christian to give me this - their rationale for not partaking of environmental reforms, based on their BFF InvisiMan.

A summary for those not wishing to read all of that - "God and prayer is more important to the environment". I would appreciate the comments (and votes) of Christians as to at what point environmentalism becomes "worshipping the planet".

EXPELLED: No Atheist Bloggers Allowed. But Dawkins is Fine.

2008-03-22T09:56:00.003+11:00

Well done, retards. So apparently, there was a free showing of the purported-to-be-horrible "movie" Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in America. Somewhere. And a blogger, featured in the movie, was told by police he wasn't allowed in - the producers or some such had specifically told police to bar him. But they didn't bother checking his guests it appears, seeing as they let his buddy for the day Richard Dawkins in. If you somehow don't know who Dawkins is then you've got no chance of understanding just how badly those producers have fucked up.

Comparison? Going to the toilet and eating your own shit, but making sure to wash your hands.

The movie is starting to get bad reviews already, shoddy camera work, horrible acting from Stein - the movie has been categorised as boring. I'll watch at least part of it once it's leaked to the net and post up a full review of my own but honestly people I'm not really expecting a fucking moving or inspirational or even potentially thought-provoking film. Then again, it's sub-titled "No Intelligence Allowed" so I guess I'm already disqualified from the proper creationist appreciation the movie "deserves".

WHAT the fuck... Stupid Asian Catholics.

2008-03-20T21:07:00.004+11:00

Alright, I like to call Christians stupid, especially Young Earthers and ID proponents. But there is a new level of insanity and this time Catholics are doing it. Specifically Catholics in the Philippines.

So apparently, every year, a bunch of these mentally impaired Asians decide to take their Easter repentance one thousand steps too far. A bunch of them strip bare to the waist and whip themselves until their backs are shredded and bleeding. Something to do with the way Jesus was supposedly whipped and bloodied.

Then, not content with that display of stupid, some of them get themselves nailed to crosses. That's right - nailed, as in bars of steel driven through their hands and feet. Unfortunately none of them get speared in the side, nor are they left there to die.

The health service has apparently decided they're not going to be able to stop them (obviously the government doesn't try very hard over there) so instead they issue warnings about using clean whips and give people tetanus shots before they go and mutilate themselves.

Silly Christians - you think you're making an effort to repent this Easter?

Poll Results - Evolution Is:

2008-03-20T17:28:00.002+11:00

Bit disappointed in my readers... I know I have readers, Google Analytics tells me so. However, maybe some of them don't realise there's a new poll going every week for their viewing pleasure.

This week's poll was about evolution and even though all 4 people who voted (including myself) chose the right answer, it doesn't excuse the fact that there were only 4 votes. I am interested in seeing the opinion of all my many many few readers. I'll forgive you for now, but please, everyone:

VOTE IN THE POLLS!

Okay, now that's out of the way onto the results:

Evolution Is:

The best scientific explanation for the origin of species	4 (100%)
A tool used by Satan to damn everyone to Hell	0 (0%)
A tool used to destroy Jesus and the Bible	0 (0%)
Just plain evil	0 (0%)
An unscientific bullshit theory	0 (0%)
Completely false because it contradicts the bible	0 (0%)
Something else negative	0 (0%)
Something else positive	0 (0%)

There was an obvious bias there - I was rather tired so I couldn't think of other positive ways to describe evolution that didn't make me cringe. Hence the option "something else positive".

New poll shortly, vote in it ffs.

Earth Hour and Other Environmental Issues

2008-03-20T17:08:00.006+11:00

What is it about the environment that offends some Christians so much? Take Craig - doesn't believe in Global Warming or any form of climate change. Doesn't understand it either, which doesn't help, but it's like he doesn't want to even try which, considering the way he carries on about other environmental issues, is not entirely surprising.

Doesn't think there's a problem with plastic bags - thought himself a big cool man because he's now going to ask for a plastic bag for everything, including bubble gum, and then just throw all those bags away. Good for you, Craig, good for you.

Appears not to believe in peak oil - a belief shared amongst him, a whole lot of other Christians around the world, and a couple of "experts". Now to say Oil is going to run out in 5 years is a bit too alarmist. Same with 10 years - probably. Maybe. But to simply not believe it will ever run out, or to decide that alternatives don't need to be found and we can go on using as much of it as we want - that's fucking stupid. Very fucking stupid. Oil - read carefully, especially young earthers - is a fossil fuel. It doesn't get magically reproduced in the ground constantly, it will run out.

And who cares if it runs out a hundred years from now instead of 30? Getting it out of the ground damages the local environment, damages the oceans when the tankers crash and the shit spills everywhere, it damages the planet when it's burned. Most uses of it as a fuel are horribly and criminally inefficient, it's fucking dirty. What the hell is wrong, anti-environmentalists, with wanting an alternative? Some of us like the look of Alaska and Antarctica as they are.

And then there are the light bulbs. Nothing is more stupid than Craig and a select few of his buddies trying to be reverse-emo and make a statement with light globes. That statement being, of course, "I don't care that incandescent globes consume more energy and fail more frequently than CFLs thus costing more in the long term - I have money and I'm going to burn it on lightglobes - FUCK yeah!"

Craigs excuse when I first challenged him is that CFLs give off "yucky" light. Yucky. Boo-fucking-hoo you bunch of pansies. You're just upset, like a lot of Christians get, because the light is different. You don't like difference, you don't like change do you? It's scary.

The light? You don't notice it after a few hours.

So we have people trying to make some form of statement - instead of idiot teenagers rebelling against authority or the man it's supposedly adult men (and a few women) rebelling against, of all things, the fucking environment.

All that rebelliousness is going to come to some form of head during Earth Hour - when everyone else is turning off their lights as a symbolic gesture that they either think about or know of the environmental issues facing the planet... instead of that they're going to rebel. Unlike us conformists they're going to gleefully throw in their 100W light globes and leave them on. Hooray for you - how old did you claim to be again sorry? What!? You're sure it's a double-digit number?

Of course Craig and Co. will probably throw out some spin about being ironic, or facetious, or something about how it was a "joke" but really, it's not that funny. If they're being facetious, well that's lying and isn't there something in the bible about that? If they're being ironic... Does that mean again they're lying and that they really aren't going to collect plastic bags and toss them in the ocean, placing bets on who kills the most marine life?

So go ahead anti-Environmental-Christians - if you're the sort who, like Craig and Co., doesn't care about environmental issues, doesn't worry about plastic bags or the price of oil or what happens to the planet we all have to share with you... If you don't give a shit about it, comment. Tell me why you don't care - is it because you get to go up with Jesus and so this life and the things in it aren't as important to you? Well why don't you all just kill yourselves and piss off there? I look forward to your comments, I really do.

I look forward even more to the comments from Christians who do give a shit about the planet they're on, who don't share stupid points-of-view like "plastic bags are awesome". Do you care about the environment because you know it's the right thing to do or because you believe God gave the Earth to humans and to destroy that gift is like spitting in His face?

EDIT: Craig apparently can't use the new funky efficient globes - apparently his house is "really old" - but I'm going to go ahead and do some research on that when he gets back to me regarding the type of fitting used. "Candle-shaped" doesn't really help much.

One Minute of Science Per 5 Hours of Cable News

2008-03-18T23:25:00.002+11:00

Well, America. That certainly explains a lot doesn't it?

No wonder 1 in 5 of you think the Sun orbits the Earth.

Atheism Stupid, InvisiMan Self-Evident

2008-03-18T22:26:00.002+11:00

So over at Craig's Blog he recently stated that atheism is stupid because hi BFF InvisiMan is self-evident. First things first I'm going to grab a definition of "self-evident".The following is stolen from Wikipedia.

"In epistemology (theory of knowledge), a self-evident proposition is one that is known to be true by understanding its meaning without proof."

Right. Not really what I was going for. The "common usage" is probably closer to Craig's understanding of self-evident.

In informal speech, self-evident often merely means obvious, but the epistemological definition is more strict.

So let's go with that.
So, according to Craig, God is self-evident, He is obvious. The problem of course is that he is not obvious. That's kind of the point really isn't? Invisible guy you apparently get to meet after you die?

Unfortunately God is not like a tree - you can't touch God or smell God or burn God or blow on God's leaves and make them move. It is obvious when looking at a tree that a tree exists. It is NOT obvious when looking at nothing that God exists.

So maybe he meant that it is self-evident that God exists because the Universe does? Well Craig maybe a few thousand years ago when people didn't know any better. These days we have this wonderful thing called science - things that used to be obviously made or caused by God can now be explained. This means that the existence of God, while "obvious" to some, is getting less and less so to everyone else. That is, of course, a problem for theists.

Back to the main issue at hand - why is it that this particular Christian thinks atheism is stupid in light of the apparent self-evidenting God? What about his God is obvious? What, to him and all the rest of the Christians who believe that the existence of God is self-evident, makes their God obvious? What aspects? An answer please Craig if you're reading - an answer from the rest of any Christians reading would be nice too.

The problem is that there is nothing obvious about an invisible deity who doesn't intervene in reality in a provable, conspicuous or overt manner. There's nothing obvious about an invisible deity who left no lasting mark of his supposedly obvious existence. Nothing obvious about an invisible deity who is so completely not obvious that there are hundreds of religions, not all of which pertain to Him.

How is it that atheists are stupid because God is self-evident, yet Christians can't even agree on the basic interpretation of their ancient texts? If God is so obvious, why are there so many other religions? If it's obvious, shouldn't it be obvious to everyone? Why isn't it?

Summary: God isn't self-evident. Belief in God requires Faith in the absence of reason and of proof - not because proof isn't required, but because it doesn't exist.

Comments welcome - anyone else been told that God is obvious? Have YOU told someone your BFF InvisiMan is self-evident? Why, what makes it so?

Do People ACTUALLY Believe in God?

2008-03-16T22:42:00.002+11:00

Came across a fantastic post about belief. I personally believe in pretty much all of what it says.

People who claim to believe the bible is inerrant, who claim everything in the bible is literally true, don't appear to actually practise that belief. They don't stone unruly children, or bring the sword to places with low levels of Christian adherence - they, as the article states, act differently at funerals or other situations - differently to what their professed beliefs are.

I recommend a bit of a read - it's good stuff.

50 Stupid Indians Go Blind Looking At Sun

2008-03-13T23:29:00.002+11:00

Ahh the religious... Just when one thinks one can't find anything more amusing for a particular day, one is pleasantly surprised.

And here we are.

I don't know how it happened. There were a bunch of stupid people at some guy's house because his statues of the Virgin Mary were crying blood and oil or some such bullshit - and it somehow got around that the image of Mary had appeared in the sun. So what did they do? Why they ignored common sense and their own health and safety and STARED AT THE SUN!

So 50 of them (at least) are now blind, and the local government (or doctors or whatever) have had to put up signs warning people not to stare into the sun.

Seriously - 50 stupid (religious) people - blind from staring at the sun looking for Mary.

This is worse than the Mary on the grilled cheese sandwich, because looking at that isn't so obviously dangerous.

I am constantly amazed at the seemingly limitless idiocy of religious people the world over.

Has any one else got a good story of where THEY saw a particular religious icon? If so, do tell.

Poll Results: Masturbation

2008-03-13T14:47:00.003+11:00

Well the results for this week are in - it was a disappointing turn out, with only 3 other people voting (excluding my brother). Without further ado here is the run-down of the results.

Awesome	3 (60%)
Natural	3 (60%)
Unnatural	0 (0%)
Evil	0 (0%)
Abomonation	1 (20%)

Votes so far: 5

Brother and I agree it is both awesome AND natural. One person thinks it's just awesome, 1 that it's just natural, and one guy thinks it's an abomination.

Might I ask, Mr. One Guy, or Ms One Girl, what is so abominable about the act of self-love? Or can I simply predict the future and guess that it's something to do with wasting sperm and having a good time when you should be bottling your sperm inside and living a harsh and joyless existence?

I'm tired so I'll just throw together a poll about evolution for this week.

Why Do People Laugh At Creationists (pt 19)

2008-03-11T10:00:00.003+11:00

Fantastic - another video from the great series "why do people laugh at creationists" is up, part 19.

This one pretty much destroys all the bullshit the creationist video featured vomits forth. Recommended viewing for anyone - especially scum of the earth creationists.

Vote!

2008-03-11T01:44:00.001+11:00

Come on there have been 38 unique views in what... 5 days? And the only people who have voted are myself and my brother! Now chopchop get to voting.

YesNoGod

2008-03-07T14:03:00.003+11:00

Stumbleupon is quite simply the best Firefox plugin ever made.

YesNoGod is a site where you either vote yes or no for whether or not you believe in God. Simple. The fun part is that it also makes a note of which country you're in and adds it to the tally for that country, giving a breakdown of how the people of a particular country believe [or not] along with a more concise breakdown of belief by region and finally the overall tally.

Have a click, have a vote, have a cry if you feel the urge after seeing the numbers. It's all in good fun for me at least.

McCain, African Retards, Rapture2008 Fucker

2008-03-07T12:20:00.003+11:00

In order then.

John McCain, the guy the most religious wackos love... doesn't believe in vaccinations. As usual he claims some bullshit about how they cause Autism. This might not sound so bad except that there are a lot of religious types who for varying reasons want to do away with vaccinations. Such reasons obviously include the apparent "fact" that vaccinations are an evil sin against God or that if their Children are faithful enough their BFF InvisiMan will come down from on high and cure their ailments for them.

But that's okay McCain, I trust you. I mean, it's not as if you're ignoring the millions of lives saved since the invention of vaccinations. Not as if you're forgetting the increases in life expectancy, or the eradication of things like polio, not to mention the billions of dollars saved for the economy that would disappear if these people had to go to a doctor or one of your witch-priests instead of working and earning money. As long as you're not forgetting everything that vaccinations do for us, I'm happy to sit by and let you shit on them.

Also according to that article he's not only religious - he's superstitious. Both words usually mean the same thing but here the old weirdo takes it further - from which side of the bed to get up on to what he needs to do before a poll is counted. The guy is a freak.

Next up? Well I've lost the link but I'll give you the short version.
In Africa, millions of people have AIDS. Not just the non-religious either. Not just the gays and lesbians, the feminists, the abortionists. Everyone. The women have it, the men have it, children get born with it. MILLIONS of people.

A lot of those millions require specific cocktails of antibiotics and other drugs and treatment programs to simply stay alive. They need to be taught about and given condoms so they don't infect others, who have children with AIDS, who infect others because THEY don't know about protection. You try telling a couple hundred million people to simply not have sex, see where it gets you - fucking nowhere.

It should come as no surprise to the enlightened among us however that some religious groups and religious leaders in Africa don't agree with the need for sexual education and protection. They feel that keeping people from spreading or receiving AIDS is less important than telling them about how Sex is a sin. Google it up since I've lost the links... Several churches in Africa refuse to distribute condoms at all, as it "promotes pre-marital sex". The atheists understand why this is shocking and disgusting for the church to do this, but for the rest of you it goes like this.

People have sex. They do it. They fuck. They also do it before they are married - it happens and there is nothing you or anyone else can fucking well do about about it. Oh sure you might stop a couple, even most of them, but there will still be people who do it. In Africa, chances are at least one of those people have AIDS. Understand yet? They may not even know they or their sexual partner HAS it, but it's there all the same. And the churches are denying these people protection, denying them a longer safer life, because of their religious beliefs. Beliefs that allow thousands upon thousands to die or to infect and be infected.

It gets worse though, thanks to the religious landscape in Africa. for example only just now are more and more religious groups shying away from the stance they previously had - that AIDS is not a disease as we know it - it is simply a punishment, direct from God, bought on to the non-righteous. Of course the facts that children are born with it didn't help the religious cause, nor did the fact that no amount of praying helped, the same as being a religious person didn't immunise you from it - it struck everyone. There are still religious groups holding on to the idea though - the more stupid ones.

Speaking of immunisations, another thing - the African leaders are a bunch of stupid cunts. One in particular, who decided to tell his people not to take the life-saving drugs, treatments or immunisations - for any illness, but especially not to use treatment for AIDS and related illnesses. His reason? Part religious, part "It's a conspiracy by the West to make all African men impotent and thus wipe us out" the bastard says. As if we'd want his stupid fucking country anyway.

I've talked before about the disgusting and primitive practices of the African religious groups. If not, Google for [witches Africa Christian] or something along those lines and unless you believe in witches and that children are witches if their parents can't pay to have them cleansed, and that such children should be shot, stabbed, burned alive or fed to actual literal dogs, prepare to be horrified.

Lastly we have this years Rapture website. Aren't these GREAT? Every year without fail, a new book or website (or both) is released claiming that this is the year - THIS is the year Jesus returns. The 2008Rapture website for this year is a funny one. It's poorly made and presented for a start, and doesn't offer much in the way of "proof". It's a poor attempt, but it gets better (for an atheist anyway). Hit the link "I can prove that God Exists" and you get treated to a fantastic series of proofs for the existence of this guy's BFF InvisiMan. You might guess it from reading, but I'll tell you anyway - this guy is from Texas. Says so at the bottom.

So! For those of you too lazy to read? I'll post his proofs in quotes and my responses below each one.

God's intervention proves His existence!

What intervention? If there is intervention, how do you know it's your God and not somebody else's?

There is a Bible because God exists.

There is a Koran because Allah exists. There is a FSM Handbook and a Unicorn Handbook because Flying Spaghetti Monster and The Invisible Pink Unicorn exists. There are Buddhists texts because Nirvahna exists. There are Hindu texts because Vishnu exists.

There are Christians because God exists.

There are atheists because he doesn't.

Who came up with the idea of a Tabernacle?

Who came up with the idea of clothes, of robes, of a building, of putting two sticks together? People you wanker.

God did.

No, no he didn't.

Who told John to write the book of Revelation?

Jesus did

No he didn't. Research a bit more - maybe read the book of revelations. Jesus was dead when the book is thought to have been written, and it wasn't written by John as he sat listening to Jesus - it was written by "John" (see the quotation marks?) as a series of letters as he apparently sat there hallucinating.

If there were no traces of God in History, we could question His existence.

Lo and behold there aren't, and we do.

The Bible proves God's existence since it is full of His very own words and His actions

This... this is... What words can I use to describe how stupid this is? God exists because the Bible says he does? Sounds like a perverse twisting of words to change the meaning of "I think, therefore I am" into a horrible "I read, therefore He is". The Wheel of Time is filled with the "very own" words and actions of Rand al'Thor, I don't see this guy preaching about the Dragon reborn. Just.. it's just... it's jsut fucking stupid and I can't begin to adequately explain to you few who don't understand exactly WHY it is so stupid. Google it.

I am asking you to consider this fact and to believe in Jesus Christ.

Last one... What facts? You've shown shit-all in the realm of facts or of even useful written English. You crazy fucking Texan.

Poll Results: Creation Science

2008-03-05T19:46:00.004+11:00

This one saddens me - either a few people thought the poll beneath them, or my usual readers have disappeared. *sad*

One must move on however, so here are this weeks results.

Creation Science:
Pathetic Attempt: 3
Serious Science: 1

So, 3 people know what's what, and yet somehow ONE FUCKER IS STILL A FUCKER.

Whoever voted for Creation Science - comment here and tell me how it is you think that Creation Science is real science? What, to you, makes tailoring, picking and choosing only the evidence that supports a literally biblical version of events a real science? How is it that you don't understand that science starts with the evidence and THEN comes to a conclusion - not the other way around.

If you can manage to wrestle from the depths of your near-comatose brain a proper command of the english language, your comments would be appreciated.

Next poll should be fun - I read recently here about how evil masturbation is along with a bunch of rather humorous tips for overcoming the evils therein. Fun times.

NOTE: You can select multiple answers in this poll

Poll Results: Intelligent Design

2008-02-27T00:15:00.002+11:00

Quick one this one wasn't it? A mere 6 days. Here are the results:

Intelligent Design is:
Religiously Motivated Pseudo-Science: 9
Real Science, Religiously Motivated: 0
Real Science Without Religion: 1

So 9 people (including myself and my brother) realise that Intelligent Design is religious bullshit.

1 poor bastard though seems to think it's real science with no religious agenda behind it whatsoever. Who you are person, find my post on Intelligent Design. Read it. Read what the definition of science is. Read the Wedge Document. Open your eyes.

New poll after I think about what to make it up as.

Peer Reviewed Creation Science Research!

2008-02-26T23:55:00.002+11:00

Praise InvisiMan, there is now a Peer Review journal for "cutting-edge creationist research"!
One of the biggest criticisms levelled against Creation Science proponents is that no research has been submitted to the peer-review process that real science has to go through.

This is no longer the case. Enter Answers Research Journal

Finally, there is now a place for Creation Science researchers to publish their papers to the peer review process, thanks to our good friends Answers In Genesis. Praise InvisiMan!

You may have realised the sarcasm by now.

Anyone who knows anything about what science means should already be prepared to dismiss out of hand the shit that goes on over there. Here's a taste though:

ARJ will disseminate research conducted by creationist experts in theology, history, archaeology, anthropology, biology, geology, astronomy, and other disciplines of science by providing scientists, students, and supporters the results of cutting-edge research that demonstrates the validity of the young-earth model, the global Flood, the non-evolutionary origin of “created kinds,” and other evidences that are consistent with the biblical account of origins.

This is not a real peer-review journal - anyone who thinks this qualifies as scientific needs to read up and discover what science is, then they need to read the outline of the whole messy shitty deal. One writer summarised it quite nicely:

Here the goal is not to ensure that research meets academic standards of scientific inquiry, but rather to ensure that the scholar’s conclusions conform to a literal interpretation of the Bible.

And that is absolutely correct: There's a copy of the criteria for peer-review on the journal here
. Pay particular attention to things like the requirement for proper referencing of bible passages and the like. There's also the fact that people here can choose who reviews their work - again, not how it works in the scientific world.

Now some may ask - what's the point? The point is this - if a creationist rambles on about some scientific study they say conforms to the Bible, ask them what scientific journals the work was published in. If they answer with "Answers Research Journal" then laugh in their face and walk away, because whether or not they know it you've already won the argument.

I'll state it again - Creation Science is not science. It's pseudo-science - the mere fact that in order to qualify as science to these people doesn't require scientific evidence so much as Bible conformity and referenced passages should scream "bullshit" to the rational mind.
Real science doesn't water itself down, pander to or modify itself to a rigid literal interpretation of an ancient religious text. It doesn't preclude evidence or ignore scientific standards simply because it goes against what the bible says.

Make no mistake - Creation Science is a fucking disgusting raping of the word science, and there absolutely should be a law banning them from using the term in their name. If they were to be called Creation Science they should at least conform to scien-fucking-tific principles. Personally I hope they all fucking die choking on their Bibles.

Kidding, right? Earth is flat in the 21st century?

2008-02-23T23:32:00.006+11:00

Yes people it's still "Healy hates [bad] Islam" week. Now tonight I've got a treat for you! Now you Christians either hear or put forth the lie that your Bible is full of scientific facts... Tired of being called fools, or stupid, or having people smarter than you tell you why your claims are lies aren't you? Well rejoice you poor bastards, Islamic people do it too!
Check it:

If this is serious - that this guy has seen photos from space and still denies them - then I really am without words. Of course I don't speak whatever language he's talking so the captions could be a fabrication.

Do you believe the Earth is flat? Better yet are you not this stupid, yet know someone who is? I'm sure some of you remember the Sherri Sheppard incident - the woman on "The View" who "didn't know" the Earth was round, it just "wasn't something she thinks about". She's smarter than this retard, who thinks he's read the science and just denies it because it's not in the Koran. But still, I'm sure there are people you know or people who know people you know... who are flat-earthers. Disabuse them of that notion hard and fast.

Tell me if you can dear peoples. Anyone. Tell me if you can...

What is the worst part about that video!?

Nothing? Anyone guess? The worst part of this, the part that shows that religion in that person's country has completely ass-raped their brains, is the debate is on TV. Think about it - most people over here KNOW the Earth is spherical, there's no way in Hell some network exec would okay a TV debate about how the Earth is flat. It just wouldn't happen - they'd be the laughingstock of the country. And yet that guy? He's there on TV, saying that if it's not in the Koran it's not true. That's what he says specifically by the way - if it's not in the Koran it's a lie. Then he should take off his synthetic fibre clothes, his plastic framed glasses, he should just die really because modern medicine is what's probably keeping him alive.

Of course the entire video could be a fabrication, or the old bastard could really be translated as saying what the captions allege.

Apparently the Koran has a scientific fact on this - the Earth is described as spread out like a carpet and according to one apologetic retard this is true and before its time, long before geologists knew the Earth was round... How? Because you can lay a carpet out on a sphere. Yessums, since you can lay out a carpet on a sphere the passage that allegedly says the Earth is laid out like a carpet is correct in a scientific sense and therefore! The Koran is direct from Allah.

When was the last time you laid a fucking carpet out in any way other than flat? You might have a long carpet you laid to go down a set of stairs, but since when do you go around laying down carpet anything other than flat?

He then goes on to say some shit about how the word for carpet used to be the word for egg, therefore it's still true because the world is shaped like an egg... Well no, no it isn't, it's shaped like a slightly squashed sphere.

Fuck you all, seriously. If the religious scripture was truly from a God or whatnot it would have just said "lo and behold I have shapethed the Earth like a slightly squashed sphere" and leave it at that, let future generations figure it out. But no it's all flat this and carpet that and whatnot.

That's one example of religious apologetics trying vainly to prove their particular religious text is infallible and filled to the brim with scientific facts totally predicted by that text.

Problem? None of those so called "predictions" or "facts" in the religious texts are explicit. That is, we can interpret the text in such a way to make it appear to be talking about what we want to talk about, but none of the verses these people interpret simply come out and say "it is this way" - they don't for example say "and God saideth unto him: The Earth is shaped like a ball, has a solid core surrounded by liquid hot burny magma" it says shit like "the earth is round" or "as a circle". And even if they are explicit they're so blindingly obvious that to have said anything different at the time would have bought ridicule and derision upon the fledgling religion.

The Jews do it too though, not just nutjob muslims and freak Christians. Here's a great example.
How Scientific is Torah? - Torah & Science

There's all sorts of bullshit in there - it's great stuff.

Alrighty this post has rambled on long enough. Just please do something for me.

STOP trying to interpret your religious text to conform to a known scientific fact, claim it shows your text to be inerrant Word of InvisiMan, then go and ignore all the shit for which no alternate interpretation makes after-the-fact scientific sense. Do that or burn yourself alive, because I'm sick of apologetics and their antics.

Extra Islam Addendum

2008-02-21T16:25:00.004+11:00

Wow, lot's of posts today! I need a job instead of posting so often...

Once again we journey to the fun and joyous lands of Islam - Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Violations of 'Islamic teachings' take deadly toll on Iraqi women - CNN.com

This is what happens in an Islamic country full of Gynophobic homosexual radical muslims. It is also what happens when you invade a country, destroy the (admittedly terrible) government, play around for a while and then fucking leave. America got us into this mess, Britain helped in this specific area, now they leave and the gynophobic extremists pounce, torturing women to death for such horrific crimes as not wearing a head scarf. What in kitty hell is the world coming to when women wear makeup and ignore the totally normal law requiring them to be completely covered so as not to give offence to the male shia muslims suffering from their gynophobia!
Oh that's right - the world's coming to a place where women aren't tortured to death because of gynophobic male-biased tiny-dick-swinging "laws" dictated to them by the interpretation of a religious text. Fuck you Shia muslims. Fuck you in the ass all the way to your own special level of hell.

Saudi Cops Grab U.S. Woman In Starbucks, Kingdom's Religious Police Take Her To Jail For Sitting With Man In Coffee Shop - CBS News

Saudi Arabia is still fun this time of year... Those poor gynophobic bastards with their tea-towels for hats!

Honestly what IS it with radical or ultra-conservative Islam? I hear all the time that Islam is all about peace and love and equality... Just as often as you hear this sort of thing. It might be because of the Christian bias in the media, but why don't I hear about women being tortured to death by Christians for some gynophobic law? Fuck you also Saudi Arabia.

If you read that news item I linked to you can also see the following:

The newspaper said the woman had received a visit from officials at the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia. A U.S. official told The Times that it was being treated as “an internal Saudi matter” and refused to comment on her case.

US Officials: Get your heads out of your asses. Stop being such pussies - if the woman was treated this way in a country that DIDN'T have oil you'd be chomping at the fucking bit to condemn it... A practise that doesn't actually achieve anything by the way. I can say I condemn the US' "efforts" regarding Darfur, that doesn't mean they're going to pick up their game.

Point of it all: Muslims who ascribe to these interpretations are nothing but closet homosexuals suffering from sever Gynophobia who need to be either re-educated or when that inevitably fails: destroyed. Anti religion you say? Aww I'm sorry, I'll just go tell those women over there being beheaded, strangled and burned alive that I can't do anything about it because it will offend the followers of Islam.

Check back here periodically, I'll try to add extra attacks on the filth that is radical Islam to this post during the week instead of making more new ones.

Clarification: Gynophobia is the irrational fear of women, a fear that seems to be prevalent amongst followers of many interpretations of Islam.
Clarification: Just like with Christians, I don't believe all Muslims to be scum. My girlfriend's boss follows Islam for example and he's an alright guy. Just like with my anti-Christianity, I'm against Islam when it allows such shit as you see above, when it fosters extremism, when it advocates abuse, intolerance, death, torture or anything else we in a modern society find to be insane. So the "fuck you Islam your prophet had sex with children" is directed at those members of the religion that deserve it... The rest of you are fine.

The Argument From Oranges

2008-02-21T16:16:00.006+11:00

Okay before you start: I KNOW this has been all over the interweb but I simply couldn't take the chance that some of you hadn't seen it.

This preachy bastard is stupid, as is the person who cries out "amen!" during his sermon. Please, if you're an atheist, if you're an evolutionist or theist - if you're a human watch this video and learn how bad it gets when a religious person doesn't understand evolution and uses his religion to decry the apparent problems with it.

You smug old bastard - at least we know you can't have long left to live.

P.S. Holy crap listen to what he says happens at 2:40. Listen and discover - discover what it truly means to be a creationist speaking about evolution when you don't know anything about it.

Clarification: OF COURSE those Oranges are related to pets and humans. They're not first cousins or parents though - they are related by a common ancestor millions upon million of years ago. This poor bastard who claims to have read about evolution though doesn't understand that. Or maybe, like most evolution denying theists, he simply doesn't want to understand because it undermines his imagined worth as a special loved entity whom his BFF InvisiMan made for a specific purpose. Boo-hoo you wanker.

Spoke too soon didn't I Florida?

2008-02-21T11:04:00.004+11:00

Down a few posts in "Why do mothers only have two hands" I celebrated the fact that Florida added evolution to the curriculum. I was even more happy with "scientific theory" as surely that would enable students to learn what a scientific theory actually means as opposed to a religious pseudo-scientific "theory" like the one put forth by Intelligent Design. It seems however that my happy fuzzy feeling was misplaced.

Florida will teach evolution but only as theory | Science | Reuters

So they're going to teach it as a scientific theory, but "only as theory". That is, there will be the insinuation that evolution lacks evidence, or that it's most likely wrong since it's just a "guess".
Apparently the original wording of the new curriculum said the following about evolution:

Evolution is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.

Which it is. However:

Bending to pressure from religious conservatives, the State Board of Education on a 4-3 vote included the "theory" language as part of a retooling of the state's science standards for public school education.

Pressure from religious conservatives. Why is it that fucking SCIENCE FUCKING STANDARDS can be dictated and changed by RELIGIOUS FUCKING CONSERVATIVES. What in the 9 levels of kitty fucking hell would religious conservatives have to say that could possibly have any relevance to the teaching of evolution in science schools.

What indeed:

Some religious groups believe that evolution conflicts with the Biblical account of creation, though others contend there is no conflict.

You read that correctly. The basis upon which the school board bowed to pressure, the basis on which they changed evolution from "fundamental biology" to "only a theory that is yet to be conclusively proven"... The basis on which those useless bastards copped out with regards to the scientific education of the children.... is partly to blame on religious conservatives bitching that evolution conflicts with the bible.

These people need to be taught - keep your Bible in your religious class and out of science. The bible was written thousands of years ago - things have changed since then: we know a lot more about the way things work. Stop using it as a fucking sword to batter your way into science.

At the very least though, the new measures call for children in lower grades to be taught about the scientific method, scientific principles, what makes a theory a scientific one... All in all it's still a victory for science, but it should have been better. There was no reason that a science curriculum should have been impacted upon in any way by religious conservatives.... Florida is in America not fucking Iran.

There's a blog post attached to the news bulletin that contains an interesting point:

For Florida to go out of its way to label the bedrock of modern biology as the “scientific theory of evolution” is actually quite accurate. But for creationists to consider the phrase a compromise that helps their side is nothing short of amusing.

Science Blog Posts powered by BlogBurst | Reuters.com

These people want NUKES? Oh fucking shit hell piss

2008-02-21T09:10:00.004+11:00

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Row over Ahmadinejad Imam beliefs

So apparently the already insane leader of the insane sub-first-world country Iran.... Believes the country should get ready for the return of some random muslim Imam who "went into hiding 1,000 years ago". Obviously this being a news service item it might not be exactly true - I trust the BBC a little more than that though.
Apparently the president of a country trying to enrich uranium spent millions building a mosque for members of the cult for the "missing imam".
I can think of millions of things that could have used that money more appropriately - things like making the president a little less ugly for example.
This rising cult is all sorts of stupid - this guy they think is going to return after hiding for 1,000 years isn't a magical saviour, he isn't Allah... He's just some leader guy. And yet these stupid bastards believe he's coming back after going into hiding like a pussy. They set an extra set for him at dinner tables, lay a prayer mat for him during prayer times... Insane.

There's worse. For example the supreme leader of Iran is an ugly retard with a huge nose with ridiculous amounts of power - which he retains for life. Ayatollah Khamenei (say his first name, it's funny) gets to decide the head of the courts, the head of the military, the head of radio and TV, he even gets to pick and choose the guy who leads Friday prayers. The worst part? He gets to elect a council who decides which legislation gets in and gets to veto people who want to run for election.
So this piece of shit gets, by proxy, to decide whether or not a particular person can be up for nomination as the country's puppet figurehead. So say someone wants to run for election whose policies lean towards, say, freedom of speech or equality for women. This guy gets the buddies he put into office to reject him.
Kind of like a King, but with more power in our modern world and a lot more stupid looking. That's a lot of power for one old guy to have, especially considering his ultra-conservative outlook.
Let's not get started again on the President, the guy who wants to be able to enrich uranium for "peaceful energy purposes" and who screams "Allah Ahuakbar" (sp?) and carries on about how it's a God-Given-Right for Iran to have nuclear material... I don't recall hearing about an ancient passage of the Qua ran dealing with radioactive material, maybe a muslim can help me out on this one? The ultra-conservative puppet, ultra-conservative mayor of some place or other....

And that will do for now. Isn't "Healy Hates Islam Week" fun?

Islam - The Sexy Religion of Fun!

2008-02-21T02:28:00.003+11:00

I've been accused recently of spending too much time on the Christian faith (including its many different forms) and not enough on "other religions". Well what a coincidence that StumbleUpon yielded unto mine person SEX and Islam, a great resource for some form of Islam (Shari'ah I think) - consisting of what I assume to be people asking questions about what is allowed under their form of Islam with some random preachy scholar guy answering them... You only have to read a few of these to understand how preachy.
For those too lazy to look through the pages of intense and awesome fun that is sexual education under shari'ah Islam I'll have to just go and give some examples of what kind of shit these people dream up.

Muslim jurists are of the opinion that it is lawful for the husband to perform cunnilingus on his wife, or a wife to perform the similar act for her husband (fellatio) and there is no wrong in doing so. But if sucking leads to releasing semen, then it is Makruh (blameworthy), but there is no decisive evidence (to forbid it).

That's just one part of an answer that starts by praising Allah, goes on about how giving head is weird and unlawful but not exactly illegal and then... well it rambles on a bit but it's funny stuff anyway.

From another question, regarding some poor muslim woman whose husband couldn't... well just read.

I got married two and a half months back but still have not consummated the marriage although we have been trying and trying since our first night. The problem is that when my husband tries to enter, after a few tries, he loses the erection, cannot enter, and ends up ejaculating. He does two hours of foreplay where I usually lose interest by then as he massages me and I also massage his private part for a long time because he insists on that. Is it a big problem?

So he has a few thrusts, THEN he loses the erection, THEN he can't get it in... And then he ejaculates!? The poor bastard has it all mixed up... It goes erection, enter, ejaculate then lose erection. That's funny enough, even without following it up with 2 hours of apparently boring foreplay (wtf? FOREplay is suppose to be beFORE) but the suggested cure is even funnier. I won't bother quoting here, suffice to say it includes whispering desires into each other's ears. It then goes on to suggest that the couple have a nice meal, go to bed, wake up half an hour before dawn prayers and then the husband leads the prayers, where they should spend what I assume are inordinate amounts of time praying for poor Floppy Pete Abdul Muhammed to get his penile act together. Then they spend the day being intimate and playful with each other! This suggested to the couple that includes a woman who doesn't enjoy 2 hours of her erectilly-dysfunctional husbands ministrations...
I have a better suggestion - skip the prayers, skip the foreplay - stop being such a pair of prissy prude dickheads and just do it.

There's worse yet in the Land of Insane Sex Advice.

Dear scholars, As-Salamu `alaykum. I have a problem that undoubtedly many others face. It is shaking hands with women, especially relatives who are not mahram to me, such as my cousins, wives of uncles, or sisters-in-law. Many pious Muslims face this problem, particularly on certain occasions such as coming back from travel, recovering from an illness, returning from Hajj or `Umrah, or similar occasions when relatives, in-laws, neighbors, and colleagues usually visit, congratulate each other and shake hands with each other.

Summary: Another islamic wanker-male who can't touch women because he'll instantly want to fuck her - apparently if you touch a woman on the hand you get aroused and have evil impure thoughts. From touching the hand of a woman who, for all intents and purposes, might not even have a face.
Solution: It's okay if there's no chance of getting aroused - such as if the woman is old and barren. Like you could fucking tell.

Problem: Rape
Summary: Bad, punishable by death
Reasons for Rape: license, drugs and alcohol, the impact of the media, pruritic (sic) television and cinema and even seductive women's fashion. (Emphasis added).
An interesting note - a contraceptive hormone dose is allowed in the case of rape - one point in their favour (leaving a few thousand to go before they beat out nearly any other religion).

Problem: Sexual Technique
Answer:

Any manoevre or position that adds to the pleasure of the sexual encounter between husband and wife is permissible and commendable. One exception is anal intercourse, which is forbidden in Islam. A man may get to his wife from her behind, provided the male organ is introduced in the vagina and not in the anus.

And so on and so forth. It goes on a bit, there's a lot of "praise Allah" and whatnot, but it's still a laugh.

Well thus begins a commentary on Islam - have no fear Christians I'll get back to hating your religion soon enough - let another religion have a turn.

There'll be more on the insanity and evil that is Islam as I investigate more into publicly spouted beliefs versus what actually happens in countries where Sharia gets implemented. For a good example down a few posts is a story about Saudi Arabia's impending execution of a "witch", something we here in the real world should find completely batshit fucking insane.

--------------
PS: I feel like I should remind all none of you reading this of something. Funny as this particular interpretation of Islam is, it's just that - one interpretation. There are also the ones I'll be dealing with later, whereby the rape victim gets punished for tempting the man, where people get killed for not having a long enough beard, things like that. I will deal with the dirty Gynophobic bastards soon enough.

Widgets!

2008-02-21T01:20:00.002+11:00

Thanks to CraigS for accidentally pointing this one out for me... He had a widget on his site so you could listen to podcasts of church sermons or some such piffle... The wonders of technology put to such a boring use! I can fall asleep on my bed I don't need extra incentive to fall asleep at the computer.

Anyway as you might see there's a fun scrolling news ticker at the top filled with amazing totally true news stories from around the globe. On the right hand side there's a funky chat widget! The wonders never cease, nor will they for such is their right as wonders!

Right well it's 1:30am and it's smoke and bio time.

"Why do mothers only have two hands?"

2008-02-20T10:07:00.004+11:00

Ahhh People are so funny when they talk about evolution without knowing anything about it!
From the comments of ABC News: Florida Calls Evolution 'Scientific Theory', in amongst all the people praying for the souls of America (seriously, read the comments, there's some that are just one huge paragraph of Lord God do this, everyone find Jesus that) there was one comment I found particularly interesting.

I agree that evolution should only be taught as a theory. Because if evolution was true then why do mothers still only have 2 hands???

I initially thought to myself.... "Huh?" I couldn't figure out what the hell spontaneous addition of hands to only females would have to do with evolution... Ahhh of course, because there's so many things for a mother to do they must need more hands!
...Right. Problem of course being that not only is that not how evolution works, but the addition of extra hands would not confer much of an evolutionary advantage. For a start you need the arms to go with it, the shoulders, then you need the muscles, the nerves, the whole lot. Adding some arms with fully functioning hands that can be moved independently requires a lot of extra visual and spatial processing - and you wouldn't be able to watch what all those hands are doing at the same time so mistakes would be made anyway.
Another problem being that she seems to be thinking evolution should mean she should either get extra arms when she gives birth, or that all of a sudden women should start to be born with extra arms - not how it works honey.

I really don't want to get into this any more than I have - suffice to say this woman doesn't seem to know anything about evolution.

I'll try to find some more fundie quotes on here - top tip news items on evolution or science in general always seems to bring them out of the woodwork if comments are enabled... Let's see what we can find.

Quote:"too much empirical evidence supporting Evolution"
Evidence that does not assume life itself is a miracle?

This one is particularly amusing. What this person seems to be saying in his/her refutation of the evidence for evolution is that evolution is null and void because it doesn't believe that life started as a miracle. Not that the origins of the first life has anything to do with evolution, but an intelligent person can see why the comment is stupid.

Okay this next one is big but seriously, read it.

Evolution is a theory and it is not proven if it is true or not. It is a belief system or a “religion” that was introduced in the school system in America for years. The question is, if the “educators” wants evolution theory as an integral part of the curriculum in the university, why they are not allowing the intelligent design (ID) as an alternative solution for the students to know the basic principles and teachings behind ID. There are so much hatred and against of introducing ID in our school systems in America. Is it about knowing the TRUTH about the true knowledge of the true and living God, the infinite God who created the heavens and the earth that we are not really evolved but we were designed by a designer?Most of the people against ID teaching are so called the “elite group” or the in intelligent community who profess themselves that they are wise that knows everything but have forgotten God. The Bible declares: “ Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a "fool" so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: "He catches the wise in their craftiness"; and again, "The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile (1 Corinthians 3:18-20)."Well, people can say anything they want to say and believe. It is their choice to believe evolution or turn to God, the Creator of heavens and the earth. What matters are the reality and the truth. Where we came from and where we are going? Now it is your choice to make a decision.

BAM! There's a prime example of what is wrong with ID. Early on in the post our religious buddy here says that ID should be taught as an alternative theory to evolution... Not because of the evidence or the science, but because it is "about know the TRUTH about the true knowledge of the true and living God". Fundie then goes on to claim evolution is adhered to by an elitist caste of people who claim to be wise but have really just "forgotten God". I'm not sure this particular fundie realises that there are theists who believe in evolution too.
The point though, is this is just another person who wants ID taught not because they believe it is a proper scientific theory, but they want Jesus bought back into the schools.

God is like the oxygen in the air, we can't see it, feel it or taste it, but it keeps us alive.

Just... Just "lol" at this one. I don't need to refute it, someone else already did:

"God is like the oxygen in the air, we can't see it, feel it or taste it, but it keeps us alive." Interesting, but faulty logic. We can prove that oxygen exists. By using a scientific method. Can't do that with God.

So that will do for now. Just realise my atheistic friends that if you ever need extra incentive to stay atheist and to make sure you don't "catch the stupid" find news articles about almost anything to do with science (especially cosmology, geology or biology) - then read the comments.
You theists should try and do it too, see the worst members of your religion at their most stupid - preaching at people, scraming for ID to be taught to bring children back closer to God and all sorts of other bullshit you really ought to be embarrassed of.

As a bit of a Post Script, the news that Florida is adding evolution to the science standards of the school boards, while not affecting me here in Australia, is interesting. The first time evolution has been specifically worded where before it was simply called "changes over time" it's comforting to read the words "scientific theory of" before the word "evolution". This gives competent science teachers the opportunity to discuss with their students the meaning of scientific theory as opposed to what the general public terms a "theory". Teach the students that theory in a scientific context is much more than a simple guess. Fuck it, teach ID if you must (a rather short lesson really.... "Everything is too complex to figure out therefore God dun did it!") as long as you explain why ID is a public-perception theory based on religion (that is, a guess... even worse a Guess from Ignorance) whereas Evolution is a real scientific theory.

Atheist BlogRoll

2008-02-19T13:16:00.002+11:00

In order to get in on the action of higher probabilities due to increased exposure, The Enlightenment of the Healy is now a part of the Atheist Blog Roll. On the right hand of the screen, just under the normal static links, you'll find a pretty scrolling list of other Atheist blogs.

If you see something you like on it just hold your mouse over the list - it'll stop so you can open up your next dose of non-theistic brainwaves.

If you yourself have an atheist blog hit the pretty coloured logo just above that scrolling list and navigate around a bit - you'll find instructions on adding your own blog to the list.

The IDiots New Clothes

2008-02-19T11:12:00.003+11:00

Adapted from the Hans Christian Anderson classic. It could be better but I just wrote it then in one sitting, so it's going to need some later polish. Obviously.

The IDiots New Clothes
An original adaptation by Healyhatman.

Once upon a time there lived a fundamentalist Christian whose only worry in life was to spread Jesus and push his religious convictions on as many people as possible. He read Bible verses almost every hour and loved to show them off to his people, their people - any people he could.

Word of the Christian's habits spread over his kingdom and beyond. The poor Christian was told he couldn't preach Jesus everywhere because it just wasn't seemly - especially not in the Land of Science, of which he was a citizen.

"This just won't do!" the Christian exclaimed, angered by consistently being rejected by the ruling majority of Science. "There has got to be a way to preach Jesus in the Land of Science!"

The problem for the poor Christian was the Land of Science had laws against religious teaching in their public schools - a pesky document called "The Constitution" that meant he and his followers couldn't preach the bible in Science classes.

The Christian had to find a way for he and his friends to sneak preaching the Bible past the ruling majority of Science and get it past The Constitution. So they hatched a daring plan - a plan to use science against the very scientists who fought to shake it free from religion!

A few scoundrels who had heard of the Christian's dilemma - a few scoundrels who themselves liked to preach the Bible - decided to take advantage of the plan. They introduced themselves at the gates of the Church with a scheme in mind....

"We are some very good scientists and after many years of research we have invented an extraordinary method to weave a theory so light and fine that it looks invisible. The cloth is made of the finest scientific rhetoric, stitched together with glimmering threads of evidence chosen from only the most compatible areas. As a matter of fact it is invisible to anyone who is too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its quality - such as those who believe in Science or The Constitution."

The chief of the guards heard the scoundrel's strange story and sent for the Church pastor. The pastor notified the minister, who ran to the Christian and disclosed the incredible news. The Christian's curiosity got the better of him and he decided to see the scoundrels.

"Besides being invisible, your Highness, this theory will be woven in evidence and science created especially to get past the Constitution, the Scientists and their tricksy peer review process" The Christian gave the men a bag of gold coins in exchange for their promise to begin working on the theory immediately.

"Just tell us what you need to get started and we'll give it to you." The scoundrels asked for a loom, evidence and some science and then pretended to begin working. The Christian thought he had spent his money quite well: in addition to getting a new extraordinary theory, he would finally get the Bible back in the schools. A few days later, he called the old and wise minister, who was considered by everyone as a man with great faith.

"Go and see how the work is proceeding," the Christian told him, "and come back to let me know."

The prime minister was welcomed by the scoundrels.

"We're almost finished, but we need a lot more science to choose from. Here, Excellency! Admire the science, feel the rhetoric!" The old man bent over the loom and tried to see the science or the evidence that was not there. He felt cold sweat on his forehead.

"I can't see anything," he thought. "If I see nothing, that means I'm not a true believer! Or, worse, someone who knows about Science!" If the minister admitted that he didn't see anything, he would be discharged from his office.

"What a marvelous theory, he said then. "I'll certainly tell the Christian." The scoundrels rubbed their hands gleefully. They had almost made it. More science was requested to finish the work.

Finally, the Emperor received the announcement that the tailors had come to take all the measurements needed to sew his new theory.

"Come in," the Christian ordered. Even as they bowed, the scoundrels pretended to be holding large scroll of scientific process and evidence.

"Here it is your Holiness, the result of our labour," the scoundrels said. "We have worked night and day but, at last, the most beautiful theory in the world is ready for you. Look at the science and feel how light it is." Of course the Christian did not see any science and could not feel any evidence between his fingers. He panicked and felt like fainting. But luckily the throne was right behind him and he sat down. But when he realized that no one could know that he did not see the evidence, he felt better. Nobody could find out his theory was not scientific - no one could see it was religious. And the Christian didn't know that everybody else around him thought and did the very same thing.

The farce continued as the scoundrels had foreseen it. Once they had taken the measurements, the two began cutting the air with scissors while sewing with their needles an invisible theory.

"In order to make the very best theory to hold up to scientific scrutiny," they told the Christian, "we must first cut out all the threads of evidence that do not go with your new theory."

"Let it be so," said the Christian. "I want nothing considered that detracts from the validity of my shiny new theory."

"We must also cut from the scientific process anything which denies the theory," the scoundrels said. "Things like the emphasis on observable physical evidence instead of metaphysical and supernatural."

"Whatever needs be done to get my new theory past the Scientists" the Christian declared, waving them away.

And so the scoundrels went, still carrying their invisible science stitched together with their non-existent evidence and, on returning to the Discovery Institute prepared to get to work.

"First," said the first scoundrel, "we must throw away all the evidence that works against the new theory." So they threw away all the evidence in favour of Science and Darwin, keeping the bits that could be interpreted in favour of their new theory.

"Second," said the second, "we need to use science to prove the evidence". Unfortunately they couldn't find any real science as it was too expensive so they settled for pseudo-science instead.

"Third," said the third scoundrel, "we need to stitch it all together." And so the scoundrels took their carefully chosen threads of evidence and stitched together all the pseudo-science they could afford.

Holding the new theory up, they investigated it and found that even though it could help them put the Bible back in schools, they still wouldn't get it past the pesky scientists and their Peer Review process. They thought long and hard on this until the fourth scoundrel, the public relations manager, came up with a brilliant idea.

"Fourth," said the fourth scoundrel, the public relations scoundrel, "we need to start convincing people it's science. Get a good momentum going, make sure all the people in the Land of Science who don't know what science is or who believe in the Bible like we do, make sure all those people hear about our grand new theory and about how scientific it is."

So the remaining scoundrels went off and started preaching about the new theory, about all the science. They also had to make sure to dismiss anyone standing up against the Bible or who claimed that the bible wasn't a scientific book.

After some time, they regrouped in the Discovery Institute to look at their theory. They all agreed that by stitching together carefully selected evidence to join up their exceptional pseudo-science, coupled with Scoundrel Four's public relations campaign, that they had come up with a great new theory. Christian would be very pleased.

And so they returned to the palace, still carrying their invisible theory made from invisible evidence on a cheap bolt of science-fabric.

"Your Holiness, you'll have to stop preaching to change into your new theory." The Christian was not happy at this turn of events, but the scoundrels insisted it was the only way to get the new theory into the schools of Science.

"You must never mention the Bible or God when you are showing off this new theory" they told him. "To do so would expose you"

The Christian agreed and so the scoundrels draped the new theory on him and then held up a mirror. The Christian was embarrassed but since none of his religious friends were, he felt relieved.

"Yes, this is a beautiful theory and it looks very good on me," the Christian said trying to look comfortable. "You've done a fine job."

"Your Holiness," the minister said, "we have a request for you. The people have found out about this extraordinary theory and they are anxious to see you with it." The Christian was doubtful of showing himself naked to the people, showing his religious motivations, but then he abandoned his fears. After all, no one would know about it except the ignorant and the incompetent, or people he could accuse of discriminating on him because of his beliefs or of stifling his freedom of speech.

"All right," he said. "I will grant the people this privilege." He summoned a press conference and the press circuis was formed. A group of dignitaries walked at the very front of the procession and anxiously scrutinized the faces of the people in the street to ensure there were no real scientists hiding amongst the religious. All the people had gathered in the main square, pushing and shoving to get a better look. An applause welcomed the procession. Everyone wanted to know how stupid or incompetent his or her neighbor was but, as the Christian passed, a strange murmur rose from the crowd.

Everyone said, loud enough for the others to hear: "Look at the Christian's new theory. It's beautiful! Praise Jesus!"

"What marvellous Science!"

"And the evidence! The evidence of that beautiful theory! I have never seen anything like it in my life!" All of them made sure to let their neighbours know they thought the theory wonderful. They made sure others around them were sure to hear how much they knew about science.

Everything went well - the Christian showed his theory to the others who believed in his Bible and since no one was willing to admit they didn't understand science, no one seemed to mind.

Once the procession was over, the Christian decided to pay the Discovery Institute a visit to offer his thanks. Opening the door he was greeted by cheering scoundrels, all of them congratulating him on his victory.

"Oh Christian!" they exclaimed, clapping. "All of your friends loved your new theory!"

The Christian was pleased and gave them a bonus.

"I love this new theory so much," said the Christian, "that I think it is time to show everyone else." The clapping slowed before stopping completely.

"Are you sure that's wise?" whispered a coundrel in the Christians ear. "The Scientists might see through the theory."

"Of course it is wise!" boomed the Christian, laughing. "We have the common people of the Land of Science behind us! We have Jesus behind us! How can we fail?"

And so it was that the Christian called together his ministers and friends and sent them around the world to prepare another procession for the Christian to show off his theory.

The procession went much the same as the first - all his religious commoner followers marvelled at the science, gloated over the evidence and gave thanks to the Bible for the new theory.

There arose a strange rumbling sound however, from the distance. Across from the hills it came, shaking the very earth. It was the Scientists! The Christian felt the icy grip of fear - his theory wasn't supposed to be shown to Science yet - not until he got common people interested.

It was too late however. Rushing across the hills came nearly every Scientist in the land - biologists, palaeontologists, geologists, cosmologists, some even carrying a Bible.

And at the head of the thunderous roar kicked up by the approach of the Scientists came the Constitution. The Christian, clothed only in his invisible theory, paled and felt weak.

"The Christian is naked," they boomed.

"Fools!" the Christian cried. "I am wearing science and evidence, things you yourselves wear!"

"Your evidence is weak and carefully tailored to your beliefs," boomed the horde of Science, "and your scientific method is both pointless and cheap."

"You're stepping on my freedom of speech!" cried the Christian, "You can't do this to me - you can't crush a theory just because it goes against what Science says!"

"Your theory does not qualify as Scientific," rumbled Science. "You used cheap pseudo-science without bothering to look up the definition of a theory in a scientific context. Your theory is just another attempt to put Creationism back in our schools."

"You have to let the children decide," quailed the Christian, taking cue from the Fourth Scoundrel (the public relations manager). "Put both in the schools, let parents and children decide!"

Science wasn't swayed.

"It is not the place for mere children to decide matter of Science" the horde refuted. "Science should be debated in the realms of Science, by peer review and publication, by real Scientists."

The Christian had nothing to say. He was defeated - Science and the Constitution had won. He had done his best - he had even used Science to try and get his Bible back into schools. But he had failed.

Science simply stood there, glaring down at the Christian and his failed religious effort. They were content - they thought they had won.

They were wrong.

For just as it seemed the Christian would take his theory and leave, the common people started to mutter amongst themselves. Soon the muttering turned to angry talking, then to shouting and finally - a chant.

"Teach the Controversy!" they chanted, holding aloft their Bibles. "Teach the Controversy! Teach the Controversy!"

The Scientists paused, confused. The Christian however, on hearing the chants and cheers of his bothers and sisters in Christ, stood straight and tall. He should have known, he should not have forgotten.

He lived in America - the land of the free. The land of opportunity. But most importantly, the land of the Born Again Christian. His country was dominated by the religious - by people who believe in his Bible, who don't know anything about science or the struggles it went through to distance itself from magic and superstition.

"Teach the Controversy!" he cried with a roar of impending victory, holding aloft his Bible in one hand and his cheap pseudo-scientific invisible theory in the other.

"Teach the Controversy!" they all cried together, their eyes ablaze with religious conviction and their minds dulled by a lack of scientific insight.

The Christian felt a deep satisfaction. They might not have gotten their theory past the Constitution. They might not have convinced real scientists it wasn't religion veiled in a thin coating of science. But they won the most important battle - they convinced the lowest common denominator to back their theory. The Born Agains, the Biblical Literalists, the Fundamentalists. He had convinced them all that the Bible story was real and scientific and the people were too stupid to see past it.

Science paused, considering, then sighed.

It was going to be a long century.

Format War Over!

2008-02-19T10:08:00.003+11:00

Okay this isn't exactly a religious post but it's funny none the less.

It seems, according to several sources (look them up if you don't believe me) that Toshiba has pulled out of the Format Wars.

If you don't know what I'm talking about the format war is between the Sony camp with Blue Ray and the Toshiba camp with HD DVD.

I'd like to take this moment to laugh at Microsoft for backing the wrong camp out of spite of Sony. I'd like to laugh at those poor suckers who invested in or bought aspects of the technology - even though BR has higher capacity than HD DVD did.

This all must be extremely exciting for Sony, considering their defeat in the Betamax / VHS format wars, which probably gave them the extra incentive to aggressively ensure a rival didn't shut them down again.

This should also drive up sales of the PS3, since now consumers know they won't be stuck with a useless hunk of junk if BR lost out to HDDVD.

Congratulations Sony eat shit Toshiba/Microsoft.

Poll Results: Ridiculous Religions

2008-02-19T09:52:00.003+11:00

Young Earth Creationism / ID
4 (33%)
Mormons
3 (25%)
Christianity (normal)
1 (8%)
Islam (normal)
0 (0%)
Islam (conservative/radical)
0 (0%)
Scientology
6 (50%)
Hinduism
0 (0%)
Buddhism
0 (0%)
Judaism
0 (0%)
Tao/Confucian/Shinto/Caoda -ism
0 (0%)
Atheism/Agnosticism
2 (16%)
Humanism
4 (33%)
Pagan
2 (16%)
Votes so far: 12
Poll closed

So, you were told you get 3 votes (some probably didn't realise but whatever) and it's good to see my readership has jumped by FOUR PEOPLE!

From the results it's obvious that Scientology is held as pretty ridiculous. Which it is, good job people.

I'm confused about the vote for humanism - did you people who vote for it actually know what humanism is or vote it in based on the name?

the 2 votes for atheism I can understand - to a heavily theistic individual the idea that someone doesn't believe in your version of InvisiMan must seem ludicrous. And I was really expecting more votes for YEC/ID but I'm not really surprised.

Next poll - I'm interested on how many of you people are under the delusion that ID represents real science, so that's what the next poll will ask.

More ID Fun

2008-02-18T13:02:00.005+11:00

Came across another page today.... StumbleUpon is far and away the best tool for anyone doing anything ever on the internets.

Unintelligent Design Network, Inc.

The premise is both obvious and impossible to deny. ID proponents like to say that everything had to have been made by some form of designer because it's so complex, or some (the especially stupid ones) like to talk about how things are "perfect". Intelligent Design they say doesn't look for the designer, who is like, so totally not God... They ass-rape real science in order to look for evidence of design - while conveniently ignoring the things wrong with the design of numerous creatures including ourselves. Things like the passages of our sinus, all the failed species that have come and gone, things that are like a whole range of other things.

Before Derek comes and gives the line about how even engineers make mistakes, let's maybe put a few questions forward.

1) By saying the designer simply made (rather elementary btw) mistakes, you are by default saying your BFF InvisiMan is both fallible and not perfect. You sure you're comfortable with that? Won't he get prissy and grumpy about such things?
2) Yes engineers make mistakes... But in order to prevent it they do things like planning and what not. And if a mistake still gets made, steps are taken to fix it. You don't just ignore the mistake and hope it goes away.
3) Again with the above point... But with a Software Engineering perspective. If a Software Engineer allows a mistake through to implementation somehow, even after all the planning and analysis and testing... The common thing to do, the good thing to do, is to patch it. I don't see any evidence of an upgrade to humans, unless the ID proponents betray their religious motivations even further and say Noah's Flood was a humanity product recall so the new version could be implemented... Of course there's no evidence for a global flood - but they can ignore that as well just like all the other things they pay no attention to.

Anyway I had just intended to post the link and let it be done but you got a bit of a ramble out of it too. Fun times aren't they?

Oh and of course these videos are fun if you haven't seen them...

Penn & Teller - Lulz

2008-02-18T01:36:00.002+11:00

EDIT: Here's the longer version of the Penn and Teller episode on The Bible.

Suck it down.

Oh and also for shit and giggles...

Islam in Saudi Arabia: Good Times for Women

2008-02-15T13:33:00.005+11:00

Here's a fun article I came across linked to on Richard Dawkins' website:
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Pleas for condemned Saudi 'witch'
Isn't it great when the country is run in the iron-hard fist of a religious sect that actively persecutes women for the crime of having a vagina? Don't you love the way their justice system appears to work when it's run by male religious clerics, followers of a twisted interpretation of Islam?

Think that's bad? You may not have read the following:
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Saudi gang-rape victim is jailed
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Saudis back rape victim sentence

Summary of that one: woman gets gang-raped. Because she was in the presence of an unrelated man she got 90 lashes - which was increased to 200 when the rational world condemned it because they shouldn't "interfere" with Saudi Islamic justice. Now apparently she has confessed to having an affair, which probably means either increased jail time and/or lashes or they could take the religious bumfuckery to the next level and behead her for it.

What else is wrong with the bullshit way Saudi Arabia treats its women because of their sick interpretation of Islam? Besides the fact that the US is a key ally and buys so much oil from them, supplying the filthy bastards with tons of money?

Saudi women aren't allowed to vote or drive.
Saudi women aren't allowed higher education, nor even jobs in some parts of the country
Saudi women are not allowed in public unless COMPLETELY covered in that stupid black dress -- except for the eyes of course which apparently makes it okay
Saudi women aren't allowed in public unless accompanied by a male family member. Their chaperone may even be a child, as long as he has a penis.
Saudi women gets punished for affairs, for being raped, for "illegal mingling" with men
Saudi women apparently get executed for being "witches" - a strange thing in the 21st century.

Of course this information might be out of date - maybe it is. Maybe this sort of shit no longer happens in the lands of one of the US' allies. Maybe the World Police, the land of freedom and opportunity, doesn't say anything not because they're afraiding of losing access to all that oil but because this sort of thing doesn't really happen over there.... If so let me know and I'll look into it. Until then though fuck you Saudi Arabia, fuck you Sharia Islam, fuck you specific interpretation of Islam, fuck you Saudi royalty - fuck you right in the ass. You can all go to your hell and burn for what you're doing to your women. Maybe if your dicks weren't so small and wasted you wouldn't feel so insecure around women.

Some might say that in principle Islam is a good religion... But Islam in practice in Saudi Arabia is a fucking joke - and not a very funny one.

The Name of Insanity

2008-02-15T11:02:00.005+11:00

You may remember the post a bit further down about a certain "fat stupid whore".

That poor example of our species is called Janet Folger and she's a lot worse than I previously thought. Not only is she the narrator in that dreadful series of religious propaganda attacking evolution with baseless claims and her bible, "one of the most scientific books around", she's also in favour of laws to make homosexuality a punishable crime (the so-called "sodomy laws").

Her stupidity runs deeper though - apparently according to this brain-dead simpleton if Hilary is elected, by 2010 it will be illegal to be a Christian. She has written a book about it, she wrote a "Letter From Jail" dated 2010 in which, because Hilary was elected, she ended up being sent to prison to perform hard labour for being religious.

Janet Folger - it's good to have a name for the people you hate isn't it? Before it was hating some random bitch for being a purveyor of insane biblical literalism - now I can hate the bitch herself, Janet Folger, for being both the aforemention purveyor of stupidity, for being a homophobic bigot and for being any number of things I'm sure will burst forth into my brain after a few minutes spent googling her... Which I won't do now, I've had enough of her bullshit for one week.

So that's done with. Now I can move on to the leading members of the Discovery Institute followed by whoever those dickheads running the "Discovery Museum" are. I mean come the fuck on people, Dinosaurs and Humans living together? Too bad the evidence for that is completely lacking hey? Always fun to see how regardless of what fossil evidence tells them they try and put dinosaurs and humans in the same time period.

From a plaque on a dinosaur at Disc. Museum: "This animal lived in the Jurassic period, roughly 4,000 years ago." Yeah nice work there guys.

EDIT: Janet Folger is president of a religious propaganda distribution centre called "Faith2Action" so I hit up their website and found their contact information. Here is the copy of the email I sent requesting that they dispell the "vile rumours" I heard about poor Janet Folger.

To: CONTACT@F2A.ORG
Subject: Janet Folger

I have heard rumours that Janet Folger is a prostitute masquerading as a real Christian. If possible, could you please tell me if there is any truth to these vile talks?

Can you also please assuage my fears that she doesn't know anything about evolutionary science or about science in general and neither do her friends?

I also heard her say that the bible is "one of the most scientific books around" but then I read Genesis chapter 30, in which Jacob gets his sheep and goats to produce coloured and patterned offspring by looking at coloured sticks while they're mating. Is this a scientific fact? Because I don't want my wife to have a coloured baby just because my walls are painted. Should I always fill her with my seed whilst looking at a blank sheet of white paper just to be sure?

I also read that if Hilary gets elected president, Christianity will be outlawed in America - I am scared such a thing might happen here in Australia. What can I help do to ensure a democratic country with constitutional laws against persecution based on religion doesn't pass laws allowing persecution based on religion? Even though a referendum is required to amend the constitution and even though the majority of people in America are religious and even though I've heard some say that Janet Folger is an insane homophobic creationist prostitute I'm still worried that somehow not only will Hilary actually propose such a law, but that the majority population in America (religious) will allow it!

Please help!

P.S. If I could I would become the email version of the girl from The Ring just for this email alone.

Hopefully a response will be forthcoming :)

Why the Religious Hate Evolution

2008-02-15T10:28:00.004+11:00

Recently I've read several articles on the created-by-creationists "controversy" between ID and Evolution, with many of the articles putting forth some good points as to why it is religious types in general can't stomach evolution, points that I agree with.

Basically, the religious like to think that they're special. That everything was created just for them, that they're loved, that the universe is not a cold and uncaring place to live. Evolution tells them that humans are just another animal - even if God guided evolution, it doesn't matter because God doesn't love them so much as he loves his overall creation.

Awww! Poor diddums there, creationists!

So that's also what I believe. They hate evolution not because they simply don't believe in it or because they completely believe in the bible - they hate it because it would mean that they're not the centre of the Universe - they're not special or loved or going to a big playground in the sky: they're just like everything else. A biological machine if you will.

It's that deep-seated fear of no longer being "special" that, it is surmised, drives the needs of ID proponents and Bible-Literalists to bang on about how wrong or even "evil" evolution is. Because if too many people believe in evolution and not in Genesis, then there won't be all these hundreds of millions of people who think they're special too. So they lash out at it - they not only want to think of themselves as special in the Universe, they want other people to think they're special too - it makes them feel better.

So, to those creationists who feel threatened by evolution because it would mean they're just like the rest of the animal kingdom - suck it up. You're supposed to be a big boy/girl now.

Intelligent Design

2008-02-14T14:32:00.007+11:00

I'll leave this as a stub until I collate a bunch of videos showing why Intelligent Design can't claim to be true science.

There are also plenty of scientific definitions I can work you ID proponents through to explain why "God Did It" is anti-science.

Let me first say though: Intelligent Design is a huge threat to real science, partly because it's not a real science - it's merely creationist propaganda. Intelligent Design puts forth no real theories that attempt to further our understanding of the natural world, and their arguments and in fact the entire premise of their so-called science is completely based on a logical fallacy.

That logically fallacious argument in this case is "I can't see how your theory could work, therefore God did it". Except they never say "God" to the press, it's always "some form of intelligence" or "an intelligent designer". This is, however, completely beside the point since the leaders of the ID movement "...have said that the designer is the Christian God." (from wikipedia. The quote has about 4 or 5 references attached to it) so their claim that ID is not to do with their religious beliefs is quite simply a lie. But moving on.

I put it to you that saying "God did it" is fucking useless, people. It allows you to ignore evidence, implications and potential. So you dickheads saying ID is a legitimate science have no problem with, say, Intelligent Geology? The theory that everything in the crust of the planet is so unlikely to have formed there by chance, therefore God Did It? Put every mountain where it is, every grain of sand, every rock? Maybe teach that in a class about geology?

Intelligent Poker? It is highly unlikely that I would have been given this exact hand, therefore God did it? Maybe the theory of Intelligent TV Static, the totally scientific theory that the chances of all the pixels being on your screen the way they are during static is so unlikely, god must have put them there.... Oh I'm sorry, "Intelligent Designer". Those two you can put into Maths classes, give "probability" and "Intelligently Designed Maths" equal consideration, maybe teach the controversy?

Intelligent Design is based on RELIGION not science. Its sole purpose is three-fold: put creationism back in schools, open up children to more readily accept God without question and to debunk evolution. It's not about expanding human knowledge of the natural world. It's not about a valid alternative to evolution.

It's about forcing the teaching of magic into SCIENCE classrooms.

Keep your Intelligent Design where it fucking belongs you creationist pigs - in the religious studies classroom. "God Did It" is NOT a valid basis for a true scientific theory.

It's unfalsifiable (therefore not science) untestable (not science) does not change due to new evidence (not science) does not arise from naturalistic phenomena (not science).

It simply does away with all thought about the formation of life as we see it today, does away with all the pondering and the science and the questioning and replaces it with a single answer to explain everything - "Because God did it"

More on this later when I have time to post videos but a short warning - if you come on here with your comments about how ID is a valid scientific alternative to the theory of evolution you will be verbally (or in this case textually) fucking eviscerated.

Just a quick question though to any potential ID-proponents... How many of you are also atheists? How many of you believe in the story of creation put forth by Genesis? I dare say I will either not be suprised or some of you will be lying.

Back later with references to why ID isn't science with refutations of key ID claims, even though you could get them nearly anywhere else on the web.

Here's the start of it.

Evidence that ID is merely creationist propaganda to push creationism into science
Here are several websites either describing or showing a copy of the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Strategy"
Wedge strategy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wedge Strategy - Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture
Discovery Institute's "Wedge project" Circulates Online
05 Wedge_edited.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Further Evidence?
Look at the Dover trial. Here's the series from the documentary about it...

It's interesting stuff, if a bit long. Basically, Intelligent Design fails, it's religiously motivated, it's not science. The documentary itself isn't so much a refutation of ID in and of itself as it is a tool to show the background and motives of the Intelligent Design movement.

Also, the fact that the court ruled that Intelligent Design is a religious movement and not science must surely mean something? Maybe the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientists are against ID, or that the statistic is even harsher towards ID in the relevant fields?

Recent hypothesis put forth in the comments of this blog

hayesy said...: My Intelligent Design theory:
ID started out as a legitimate group of scientists.
Creationists saw that it was having more success than they were and jumped ships. Unfortunately, ID changed and the creationists did not.
To refute that, here are some websites you can check out regarding the founding of the Intelligent Design movement. You can also view the videos above.
Of Pandas and People - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Intelligent design - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Intelligent Design Movement: Dembski, William A.

intelligent-design.pdf (application/pdf Object)

That should do for now. But you can quite clearly see that yes, the scientists who started the modern movement were in fact scientists. But they were also creationists pushing a creationist agenda - in the 3rd one for example if you look through enough you find that Dembski says things like "As a result, Intelligent Design presupposes neither a creator nor miracles." What they're saying here is that they don't want to be seen as creationists, therefore they claim that ID is only about the detection of design, and not about who designed it and why. That in itself should send up a red flag - they want to prove things were designed... and then stop. So once they prove life is designed their work is done. This is simply because they are unable to answer in a non-religious fashion the question of the nature of the designer, the identity of the designer, or the designer of the designer of the designer (ad infinitum).
It's a cheap cop-out. They know that if they say anything more about a designer, about supernatural intervention in the formation of the biological process, then it becomes instantly obvious that ID is simply repackaged creationism. So they're trying in that piece to sidestep the question completely by claiming that ID is no longer about how species originated, or who created them, or why... Now it's just "ID is about looking for evidence of design". In this they hope to more easily insert themselves into science classrooms. But if ID is all about looking for design and not about the origin of the species, in what way is it an "alternative" to science?: Even worse in that 3rd piece (which I am sceptical as to its authenticity) but mroe importantly in the Wedge document, ID proponents and founders are quoted as saying ID is about removing and dissolving from all aspects of western culture a naturalistic and/or materialistic view of science, to enable science to instead focus on the metaphysical, immaterial, the "spiritual". Clearly destroying evolution for the sake of spirituality and invisible untestable unprovable aspects of theological reality is not a scientific point of view to be having.

Pay particular attention to the number and quality of references used in the wikipedia article on Intelligent Design. Also pay attention the the section entitled "Controversy"

Finally (for now) the best example of why Intelligent Design is neither a scientific alternative to evolution, nor is it even scientific, is because it fails on almost all of the criterion that make a theory an actual scientific one.

A theory, to be scientific, must be the following:

Consistent
Parsimonious (sparing in assumptions [e.g. Occam's Razor])
Useful - which ID certainly is not. It does not seek to explain the natural world beyond "God Did It"
Empirically testable and falsifiable - which it also is not. Show me empirical evidence for an invisible designer or other supernatural entity.
Based on multiple observations - usually in repeatable experiments. I give you micro evolution on the side of evolution, a proven fact, whilst the ID proponents give you.... "Irreducible Complexity", a scientifically debunked myth. And not much else.
Correctable - that is, if new evidence comes up the theory needs to be changeable. What change due to evidence do you see with regards to the theory "InvisiMan did it?" Evolution on the other hand is itself evolving with the advent of new evidence.
Progressive - as in it needs to be a refinement, an improvement over previous theories. In what way is "Intelligent Designer did it" an improvement on "God did it".
Provisional, Tentative - open to experimental checking, does not assert that it is true for its own sake. Which ID is clearly not - for a start how do you PROVE that a certain biological object or function was not designed? What checks can one do to see if it was in fact designed? How could you really honestly tell?

Alrighty bitches that will be all for now. I apologise for both the length of the post and of the shoddy formatting and justification of certain blocks of text - seems that Blogger's posting wizard uses the same sort of auto-guessing for formatting paragraphs as Microsoft Word does.

Got a problem with a specific piece of information above? Point it out I'll have a look. But really you should be at a real scientific website explaining the consequences, the implications, the sheer fucking insanity of allowing ID to be accepted by science.

I'll say one final thing: ID proponents say that children should be given both sides of the story equally. Ignoring for now the fact that ID and evolution are NOT equal, it's important to consider that neither is the reception ID gets outside of school. An impressionable child sits through "science" class and "learns the controversy" then goes home and asks the parents. The parents tell them ID is right, the church tells them ID is right. They go back to school in their religious education class and that teacher says ID is right. A large chunk of the population tells them ID is right, even if only as a way to say Evolution is wrong. That's exactly what ID proponents want - as soon as ID gets taught in schools, a vast swathe of the younger population instantly become adherents to ID and by association, to creationism. Their perception of what science is becomes permanently flawed. They're all little creationists, stifling scientific insight and innovation.

Children already get both sides of the story - one in their science class, and one that gets repeated constantly by their parents, their church, their political leaders (in the case of George Bush). Which is besides the point - you don't take a scientific controversy (even one created by creationists and other ID proponents out of thin air) and hand it over to children to decide - they're children.

Summary: Keep your fucking Intelligent Design bullshit out of the fucking science classrooms you YEC wankers - science is for science, not a "remodelling of the scientific model to do away with naturalism and allow metaphysical and theological points of view".

It is my sincere hope that the Discovery Institute comes out for what it is - a religious organisation with a creationist agenda. Then I hope they all die.

Suck that volume of information down Hayesy.

The Science of the Bible

2008-02-14T10:18:00.004+11:00

I've been reading a lot of comments on youtube videos lately by people who claim that not only is the bible scientifically accurate, but also that "not a single thing in the bible can be refuted by science"

That is, the things in the bible to do with science are completely true and scientifically correct.

Now I won't get into the whole controversy creationists try to stir up when they say "the bible says the earth was a circle, therefore the earth is a sphere, see bible wins!" (emphasis added) however I found this exciting piece of "science" in Genesis 30:38, or 30:40 depending on which of the two sources I checked out you decide to look at.

Douay-Rheims Bible, Book Of Genesis Chapter 30

Now those amongst you who know how genetics and inheritance work, will instantly see what is wrong with the passage describing how Jacob ended up with spotted and coloured sheep or goats. For those too lazy to read it or who don't understand, what Genesis is saying here is that Jacob put spotted and striped sticks in front of his goats and sheep such that when they bred, the offspring came out spotted and striped.

Science? Well yes it was concerning science- animal husbandry, genetic inheritance, things of that nature. Was it real science? Fuck no. Does it actually work that way? Also fuck no. Does science refute that having sex in front of coloured sticks makes coloured babies? Absoloutely.

Bible full of scientific facts that are 100% true and accurate?

If you still believe so, either your bible is different or you're a YEC apologetic hanging on for dear life.

Stupid whore

2008-02-14T01:41:00.005+11:00

Someone needs to stop this stupid bitch... I realise the video and the content contained in it is fairly old, but the crap she's spewing forth from that gaping chasm in the middle of her face... Someone needs to smash it closed. Permanently.

You Creationists probably eat it up, but I'm not interested in anything you have to say anyway.

"The bible is full of scientific facts"
"Do you like being on the cutting edge of knowledge? The bible has always been years ahead of scientists, and is one of the most advanced science books around"

No, no it's not you stupid bitch. You're telling me that if I open up a bible, I'll find information about cell phones, vaccination, advanced physics, nano technology, computers, gene therapy, helioseismology.... If the bible is so far ahead of science, well then we can fire all the scientists of the world and look to our bibles for all our innovations and inventions right? Yeah?

Aww that's right. She's full of shit.

Then the guy after her says that scientists thought there were only 6,000 stars, until the time of Galileo along with some other crap. I find it ironic a creationist dares speak about Galileo, considering the response of the Church to his findings.

The rest of the movie is a great example for atheists as to the insanity of creationists.
Creationists of course have probably either already seen it or, having now seen it, quickly rush off to watch the rest and believe... whatever they want, some crap or other.

I also have a severe problem with her crap about how evolution is an atheist conspiracy to remove God from everything... She also craps on about "evidence" being uncovered "every day" against evolution.

If someone can give me this woman's name, she can be #2 on list of people I hate the most - for surely her stupidity as host of whatever creationist bullshit show she's "starring" in has contaminated the minds of thousands of already-stupid creationists.

Is this blog post coherent? No. Do I care? Not in the least. I just felt the need to state my hatred for her religious demonisation of evolution.

Oh listen to the first part of her words. Apparently evolution is a lie perpetrated by a "minority of scientists".

The fucking camera changes while she's talking are pretty gay as well.

She flip-flops a fair bit. She says the peppered-moths case was a hoax, that evolution is a complete lie. Then later on in one of the other videos she says says the Galapagos Island finches are an example of a "small amount" of natural selection... So which is it fat and ugly? Is it "all evolution, even micro, is a tool of Satan" or is it "I realise there's too much evidence for micro evolution to refute therefore micro evolution is real" make your mind up. Then cut yourself and bleed out.