Whoa. Found this at The Amboy Times.
Excerpts from “The List of Things that Offend Muslims.”
Sharia law demands submission not only from Muslims, but from non-Muslims as well. This makes respectful coexistence nearly impossible with Muslims in Infidel lands. The examples below serve as reminder that submitting to one complaint or another only emboldens Muslims to seek to further their ultimate goal of establishing sharia.
Ten seconds in the door and I’m over by the Apollo 11 Command Module, lines of moisture running down my face. I stand there looking at it, touching the transparent case it rests in, for a good ten minutes.
I’m overcome by just how magnificent an accomplishment this thing represents. In an era when Washington seems a fount of lies and stupidity, this was something done by MY people, the people of learning and reason and courage. Men sat in this thing, and traveled to the Moon! And came back alive!
Maybe I can’t match the feat, but I can recognize the magnitude of it. In my atheist heart, I reserve reverence for true achievement.
This, the real thing, kindles bright sparks inside me, and sets off tears.
Remember Jim? Jim of “Jim and Tammy Faye”? The Heritage USA televangelist who diverted millions in donations from hapless Christian faithful to his own wallet? For which he was convicted and spent five years in prison?
He’s risen again to swindle a whole new generation of victims with the same old god-game scam. And here’s the corker: His victims from before have returned, convinced that the whole thing was a mean-spirited plot against poor misguided Brother Jim.
Doesn’t stop him from scamming them for donations, though.
Jim Bakker waits 41 minutes into his one-hour show to make his plea.
He begins by noting they have been off the air for six weeks.
“We have really gotten behind financially,” he says, fingering a crease in his khakis. “So we really need a miracle. The cost of moving, just to get the stuff you need — and we needed to get a few more microphones, we didn’t even have enough time to get the bugs worked out of things. It just takes a lot of money.”
He is talking directly to the camera now. He says he has a music CD for “a love gift of $30” and a DVD about marriage for a $55 donation. He decides to offer a recording of his sermon about prison, just $20.
I just got back from a day trip to our nation’s capitol.
Whew. Impressive place. I got to see the Air & Space Museum, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Natural History Museum, and the White House.
Standing in front of the White House, I talked to some of the young guards while I took pictures. Nice kids. I asked one of them “Is it okay for me to take your picture?” and he answered in good humor, “I can’t stop you, but I’m not going to pose for you.”
I was expecting squads of uniformed gunnies tooling around in armored Humvees, but I walked around all day and saw very few armed presences. There were a LOT of people with earphones on, though, and I wondered if some of them were plain-clothes cops only posing as iPod drones.
I walked around wearing my Harmless Idiot Field, and nobody so much as looked at me all day. Considering that I have a telephoto lens big enough to conceal a baby bazooka, that was unexpected.
Fitness pretty much went out the window during this trip. I did walk about 10 miles around the National Mall, but I also ate junk food the whole time I was there.
I know it’s bad of me, but as long as Dick Cheney sits in the White House, I will think of it as Castle Greyskull.
I’m comfortably below 180 now. I got out of the shower a few days ago and glanced down at my legs and was amazed at how GOOD they look, muscle-wise. And I can’t get over how when I touch my belly, there’s noticeably less of it.
Still, I’m coming up on a month at this. I kinda wish it was going faster.
One thing I do know, my on-scale weight is actually a poor indicator of the changes going on inside me. I almost wish I’d been able to do one of those underwater weighing things so I could know just how much fat I’m losing. Obviously, if my arms and legs are solider and more muscular, whatever that extra muscle weighs has replaced an equal weight of fat — beyond that shown on the scale.
And is muscle denser than fat? I think it must be. Which means the volume of the replaced fat is greater than that of the new muscle. Even though I’ve lost only 11 pounds or so on the scale, the fat overcoat I’ve been wearing over my whole body is significantly thinner. I feel like I’ve probably lost a good 15 to 18 in actual fat.
Darwin Day is an international celebration of science and humanity held on or around February 12, the day that Charles Darwin was born on in 1809. Specifically, it celebrates the discoveries and life of Charles Darwin — the man who first described biological evolution via natural selection with scientific rigor. More generally, Darwin Day expresses gratitude for the enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, has contributed to the advancement of humanity.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. —Charles Darwin
Thanks to the fantastic Carl Buell, paleontological and natural history illustrator, for the pic above — a self-portrait (of Carl) raising a bottle to Darwin with one of our ancestors. And then there’s this birthday card he did for Mr. Darwin a year or so back.
… And happy Lincoln’s birthday too!
Here’s a NYT story: The Bible as Graphic Novel, With a Samurai Stranger Called Christ — about the Bible presented as a Japanese-style graphic novel.
It seems obvious to me that the enlistment of new media for spreading holy stories de-mythologizes the message. Yes, you get wider exposure, but it becomes progressively more shallow. Eventually, religion becomes just another product, just another fad. God as chewing gum, or sports shoes.
Once you throw religion onto the same market as other entertainments, you open it up to even greater competitive pressure. On any particular Sunday, if SuperJesus has to compete with TV, YouTube, iPod, Sprint, Wii and Digg, the market share of religion has to take a serious whack.
Interesting too to think that the Internet, with readily available sermons and religious readings, might be killing churches. Just as a lot of “bricks” businesses are being out-sold by their “clicks” competitors, the profit of physical churches has to be suffering due to all the online availability of churchy stuff. Watching churches consolidate and close in my local area, I have to believe it’s something like this.
Finally, the story of Anonymous vs. Scientology went viral and had what I believe to be a worldwide impact. I’d be surprised if 50 million people didn’t hear the story, and I think Scientology will take a substantial hit in membership and income, as more and more people find out just how nutty they are.
I see this as the seed of a greater recognition that ALL religion suffers from irrational and cultish elements. First L. Ron Hubbard, tomorrow Pope Palpatine!
Dang, I wish I could take credit for this idea. It’s something I just came across last week, and I finally got around to posting on it.
The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person’s worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person’s worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.
Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person’s opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.
If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet–in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums–your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time.
Warning: The following post is long, and may contains insults to French people. And Christians. And probably frogs.
(Also, it underwent a slight editing, with some additional material, on Feb. 11.)
______________________________
I’d like to propose to you a daring hypothesis.
You may be surprised by it. You may be stunned. You might even be shocked. Because this is such a daring idea, some of you reading this right now may actually be horrified. There’s even the possibility – distant, but real, so I have to warn you – that one or more people about to read the following hypothesis will suffer deep psychological damage and end up under permanent psychiatric care, or possibly even comatose.
I don’t really want to just spring it on you suddenly. This is something so new, so different, so deeply significant, that I feel very strongly that it should have its own screen. It’s just not something I feel okay with plopping down in a sea of insignificant words, as if it were one common grain of sand on a vast beach.
This is something so special it demands treatment you’d immediately consider … unusual.
So. If you think you’re ready for it, brace yourself and look below the break. Here it comes:
This is a bit of a discussion I’m having with another blog commenter over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, a nice Christian who seems sometimes open-minded, sometimes not, but always quite a bit not, if you get my meaning. I’m posting it here because the discussion that my reply evolves into is something I want to have heard in more than that one place.
He says:
The whole thing of Darwinian evolution, to me now it is a non-issue. The development of the physical world, whether through the eons of cosmology or a magical “Poof!” make no difference.
And I answer:
And there’s yet another way in which we differ.
Rich, in this and some of your other comments, I’ve noticed that you have that typical religious “doorstop” in your head. You’re willing to have the door swing so far – say in accepting “microevolution” – but no farther.
Yet I begin to wonder if the underlying real reason you’re here is that you, too, realize it, and you’re searching for some reason to let it go, and accept that some of the stuff in your head is useless and counterproductive … and FALSE.
