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Short Stack #4

“Faith” is the belief in something for which there is no evidence. Breach the protective barrier in your mind, the barrier that keeps you from believing stuff just because somebody tells you to, or just because you want to, and all sorts of ugly side effects begin to take place. The first is that you become a sucker for the next 50 con men able to convince you of THEIR seductive lie.

When there’s evidence, nobody talks about faith. Faith only comes into it when we want to replace evidence with blind belief. Continue reading “Short Stack #4”

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You’re All Going to Die and Burn In Hell. Again.

Woe, I say woe unto you, heathen masses! Your time has, I say your time has come!

Deferred Doomsday Due Friday — Or Not

On May 22, an obviously shocked [Harold] Camping emerged from his home to say he was “flabbergasted” that the Rapture stood him up. But then, a couple of days later, like all good doomsday prophets, he had an answer: May 21 was just the beginning; the Rapture would take a lot longer; the real Rapture will happen five months later on Oct. 21.

“What really happened this past May 21st?” Camping asks on his Family Radio website. “What really happened is that God accomplished exactly what He wanted to happen. That was to warn the whole world that on May 21 God’s salvation program would be finished on that day.”

Basically, “Applications for Salvation” closed on May 21. You see, even the Office of God has red tape.

 

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Life-Changing but Not World-Changing

This Reuters piece on a milestone in malaria research — not an excited  shriek of earth-shaking revelation, but the somber celebration of a respectable bit of progress — strikes just the right note in reporting science.

(Oh, yeah … maybe I should tell you the Weekly World News pic is here to show the OTHER type of reporting.)

Malaria scientist celebrates success after 24 years

“There were many ups and downs, and moments over the years when we thought ‘Can we do it? Should we continue? Or is it really just too tough?,” he told Reuters, as data showing the success of his RTS,S vaccine were unveiled at an international conference on malaria.

“But today I feel fabulous. This is a dream of any scientist — to see your life’s work actually translated into a medicine … that can have this great impact on peoples’ lives. How lucky am I?”

Final stage clinical trial data on RTS,S, also known as Mosquirix, showed it halved the risk of African children getting malaria, making it likely to become the world’s first successful vaccine against the deadly disease.

The piece ends with an appropriate counterpoint to the too-fantastic tabloid stories we so often see.

He was also careful to underline that this was a first step, as well as a world first. GSK, MVI and several other research groups and drug firms are already working on next generation vaccines and on other ways of making malaria shots they hope will better the roughly 50 percent success rate of RTS,S.

“The work is not over, that is for sure,” Cohen said.

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Blue Collar Atheist: Three Posts

What follows (below, in posts time-stamped earlier than this one so they’re stacked 1, 2, 3 down the page) is two chapters of my book, Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods & Faith.

I’m posting this lead-in and these two chapters so you’ll have a better idea of the tone and something of the content. Yes, I’m selling them, and yes, I hope you’ll buy one.

Just below is the first chapter, Introduction: Who Is This Guy? — which is of course about me, and how I came to write the book, and below that is the Foreword: Saying Goodbye to Gods, which is about what I like to think of as the “journey” of atheism. Continue reading “Blue Collar Atheist: Three Posts”

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Blue Collar Atheist: Introduction — Who is this guy?

I grew up in Texas with a bunch of rodeo cowboys.

I wanted to become a veterinarian, a horse doctor, but it didn’t pan out. Instead, I ended up working as a carpenter, driving a dump truck and then a soda delivery truck, being foreman of a roofing company, and a lot of other stuff in that same vein.

I moved away to the mountains in the west when I was about 21 and got a job at a pack station (a ranch, sort of) on the edge of the wilderness, where I worked with horses and mules. I was also a teamster for eight years, a real one, driving hitches of huge Belgian and Percheron draft horses on hay rides and sleigh rides in a little resort town. Continue reading “Blue Collar Atheist: Introduction — Who is this guy?”

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Blue Collar Atheist: Foreword — Saying Goodbye To Gods

My dog died.

Don’t sweat it – it was more than a decade ago now, and I’m (mostly) over it.

Can’t tell you how much I loved the old beast.

His official name was Woodacres Ranger, and he was from a line of champion German shepherd show dogs. But I never even bothered to register him. To me, he was Ranger the Valiant Warrior, my best friend for more than 12 years, and we romped through the heart of the world together.

For most of his life, we lived in California’s Eastern Sierra, in a small town at about 8,000 feet above sea level. The trails are rocky, the water is crystal clear and ice cold year-round, and the wildlands thereabouts are filled with black bears, coyotes, uncatchably quick mountain bunnies, and all manner of smells and sights to delight an energetic dog. Continue reading “Blue Collar Atheist: Foreword — Saying Goodbye To Gods”

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Milestones

Sometime today Blue Collar Atheist will reach 100,000 reader hits. I know other bloggers here will smile indulgently at that number — PZ probably gets that many an HOUR — but to me it’s something special.

From my first post on Aug. 24 — just 55 days ago — I’ve written 133 posts, received 940 comments (Thank you!), and gotten approximately 30 billion bits of spam — mostly about penis enlargement. (I try not to take it personally.)

My best day ever, Sept. 17, I posted “Amish Men Saved From Burning in Hell” and got 7,222 hits.

My worst day (after the formal rollout, anyway) was Oct. 6, with 1,150 hits. I think that might have been the day I posted the Narwhal Song, the Badger Badger Badger animation, and pictures of Bill O’Reilly in a thong.

So far, none of the comments have included the phrases “You suck!” or “I hope you burn in hell!”, and there have been zero death threats, proposals of marriage or offers of gratuitous sex.

I have also, thus far, failed to attract my first Christian troll. But I suppose that’s why the Sweet Baby Jesus made tomorrows.

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Thank you, Occupy Wall Street

I lived through the Vietnam Era.

Just a few of the consequences of that war:

It killed 58,220 U.S. soldiers. More than 150,000 were wounded, at least 21,000 were permanently disabled, and 830,000 suffered symptoms of PTSD. In addition, about 50,000 American servicemen deserted, and an estimated 125,000 U.S. citizens of military draft age fled to Canada.

Besides that, about 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides were sprayed over Southeast Asia, resulting in more than 4 million human victims of dioxin poisoning, and uncountable numbers of non-human ones. Continue reading “Thank you, Occupy Wall Street”

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My bad.

Okay, that’s the last time I do that.

I thought I’d try posting all eight parts of Grizzly’s Gamble at once, but it turns out that wasn’t a good idea.

The site stats appear to show that a significant number of people are reading part 8 first, which is totally my fault. It IS stacked at the top of the screen, above the other parts.

The bad part, from both the readers’ and writer’s viewpoint, is that it dilutes the impact of the piece. It’s like giving away the ending of the movie before viewers watch the first part. “Oh, so Bruce Willis is dead, huh? And the gimmick is that Haley Joel Osment is the only one who can see him? Huh. I don’t know, what else is on?” And sure enough, some of the readers of part 8 didn’t read any farther.

Heck.