The Good Atheist

Apparently the Home Office in Great Britain has money to burn, as they’ve just given the Christian Police Association £10,000 (or about $16,000) to help their campaign aimed at getting the public to pray to help prevent crime. They are already claiming that the program, which they’ve already initiated, is having some major success:

In one particular area, an officer was investigating an incident but he had not been able to apprehend a suspect. He encouraged a church to pray for him and within days a suspect had been arrested and charged.

In another area, an officer encouraged churches to pray about domestic burglary and over the year it came down by 30 per cent. We do not discount good police work, which is why we call it circumstantial evidence.

You have to love the faithful; any time there’s a study done that proves that prayer does exactly jack-shit (and jack left town), they completely ignore it, no matter what the evidence is. It’s plainly obvious to everyone else that talking to your invisible friend doesn’t do more than bring a sense of comfort for the delusional, let alone “solve crime”. Could the 30 percent reduction is domestic burglary be possibly related to the crime rate falling in the UK for the past few years (the government reports a simultaneous increase in illicit drug use; am I to assume using their logic that using drugs prevents crime?) Where did these clowns graduate from: Police Academy 5?

Is it too much to as that governments not spend their taxpayers hard-earned money on nonsense?

Yes, I’m aware that her youtube name is actually ZOMGitsCriss, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it (also, the intro song is actually a little bit terrible, but in a cute way). Here her latest video explaining why evolution is true. She provides extensive examples of transitional fossils for the doubters who apparently can’t be bothered to do a bit of research themselves (presumably out of fear of being proved wrong). I think I can safely speak for all TGA readers when I say “we love you, girl. Don’t ever change!”

It’s now official; parents need to stay the fuck out of the educational system. How else are we supposed to react when one of these people gets the expanded version of Anne Frank’s Diary banned for containing a short passage making reference to the vagina?

There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!

Originally Anne’s father had taken out some of her passages from the diary, presumably out of fear that Anne’s frankness (is this considered a tasteless pun?) would be too much for students to handle. I guess he was right, since it took only one complaint for school officials to cave.

Hey, I get it; when you have kids, your brain gets a little bit rattled (in fact, during the late stages of pregnancy, a woman’s brain will temporarily shrink for a little while). It doesn’t help that these defenseless whelps need your constant attention not to die. Eventually, however, you have to accept the fact that the wider world is out there for them to explore, and losing your shit every time a sexual organ is being discussed is a serious over-reaction on the part of parents with bigger hearts than brains.

Jim Allen, the director of instruction at Culpeper County public school had this to say about the situation:

“I’m happy when parents get involved with these things because it lets me know that they are really looking and have their kids’ best interest (in mind). And that’s where good parenting and good teaching comes in.”

Does good parenting involve banning books because of innocent references to private parts? How is this good teaching as well? It’s quite literally the opposite of that, moron.

(props to Lucy for the find)

Here is the Center for Inquiry’s lecture held in the later part of 2009. The speeches actually start at the 10 minute mark, so if you want to avoid all the regular “boring” introduction stuff, skip ahead. If you’re at work and can listen to things in the background, there’s no real slideshow, so enjoy it in the background.  The speakers are William Lobdell, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and Marilyn Mehr.

(props to Groman88 for the link)

In Daniel Radosh’s funny and memorable book “Rapture Ready“, the author talks extensively about Christian literature and the willingness of evangelicals to buy their specialty products, no matter how shoddy or terrible they are. Hilariously enough, retailers that cater to Christian pop culture seem to be fully aware of just how tacky and terrible their own products are, so much so that they refer to the vast majority of their merchandise as “Jesus Junk”.

On the list of terrible Jesus Junk is the “Left Behind” series: the most successful yet terrible novels to ever grace this green earth. Even reading it out of curiosity is not recommended, although there are quite a few sites that can help you gain a little perspective if you’re fortunate enough never to have read these aweful books.

It turns out that the success of the series prompted all kinds of ancillary products bearing the Left Behind moniker. Four years ago, the PC world was treated to the video game adaptation of the novel, a steaming pile of bugs and glitches that allows players to help convert unbelievers, thus saving their souls. Some notable “enemies” the player must face are secular college students armed with deadly logic, and rock musicians with saucy lyrics. Now, because evangelical pop culture takes care of their own, the game actually did surprisingly well considering how awful it was, and now the company responsible for this monstrosity wants to make the game available on the console markets. Yep, in a few months you might be able to enjoy saving souls on your very own Xbox 360!

The thought of it sends shivers down my spine…

(props to James for the find)

Hey parents, can I ask you something? Do you ever fear that the degree to which you wish to protect your children from any kind of harm makes you absolutely batshit insane sometimes? The rest of us childless folks have to wonder what kind of effect having offspring has on your brain, because your behavior can often be described as utterly mental. Take this story involving parents banning the 6th edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary at Southern California elementary school because it has a definition for “oral sex”.

The disappointing thing here is that it took just one parent to complain before the school board freaked out, and you just know it was the parents of the kid who just needed to know what oral sex was. So rather than have to deal honestly with that question, their response was to have the dictionary banned. Now I realize that the idiotic things parents do is usually motivated by the love they have for their children, but it doesn’t absolve them from their insanity. Can you all chill the fuck out and relax already? Anyone with kids that thinks banning a dictionary will somehow prevent them from learning about the world outside the boundaries they’ve delineate is both naive and stupid. Can you all stop banning or burning books that you think will “warp” their minds? I assure you that the only thing you achieve is looking both insane and out of touch with reality.

If you lie or trick your kids about the stupid shit (like sex education), how will they ever believe you about the stuff that really matters?

I just finished helping my mom move, so you’ll all have to wait until tomorrow for the podcast and blog posts to go up. I’m exhausted and all I want to do is chill the fuck out. Enjoy your Tuesday everybody!

NOTE: I’m actually sick as a dog today, and it’s taken me everything just to put up a notice that I need another day of rest before I am better. Two days without content; hopefully none of you go mad…

I hate football. I know that’s not a popular opinion to have, especially when about 70% of my visitors are Americans, but considering the average 3 hour game only has a total of about 11 minutes of actual play time, I find it both incredibly dull and utterly pointless. I can’t, however, deny that there is something about the way it’s put together. They’ve even managed to make showing commercials something that people look forward to (which in an average game accounts for 60 minutes of ads; no wonder it’s “America’s sport”), although CBS’s recent decision to air an anti-abortion commercial staring Florida Quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother Pam might change that.

Focus on the Family, the nutjob institution that thinks gays are trying to ruin “traditional marriage”, is going to air the pair in a 30 second advert. You see, back in 1987, Pam Tebow became pregnant, but severe complications threatened both her life and that of the baby, so doctors recommended that she terminate the pregnancy. She refused, and later fell into a coma for a while; the pregnancy was so hard that she was completely bedridden almost the entire time. She decided to take a huge risk and keep the child, and that baby was Florida quarterback Tim Tebow. Now, you can imagine how they want to spin this fucking yarn.

Of course, the fact that both Pam and Tim survived and are both healthy is a bit of a rarity, and it definitely sends the wrong message concerning the real risks some women face during  difficult pregnancies. The fact that they are both alive is a testament to the power of medical science, not God. I doubt very much that the ad will put much focus on just how serious her medical problems were in the 30 seconds they have to play with. Besides, it’s like trying to prove that smoking isn’t harmful by finding a 90 year old that smokes three packs a day. Yes, We EXPECT that there will always be a few exceptions out there, but flaunting them is both dishonest and dangerous (read a great summary of the arguments here).

CBS used to have a policy of neutrality when it came to advertising during the Super Bowl, but inexplicably they’ve decided to break this rule. Are they going to leave out the fact that Pam had the OPTION not to terminate her pregnancy? I don’t know what the ad will say, but people should be aware that Focus on the Family’s real agenda is to make ALL abortions illegal, regardless of the consequence to the mother. When is America finally going to stand by the idea of freedom of choice when it comes to abortion? The fact that this is still an issue is an embarrassment to a country that prides itself on being free.

Looks like John Travolta is a man of his word; a few days ago he was talking about flying a bunch of his weirdos in yellow shirts to the devastated country, and a news report has come out stating that a “private donor” has sent 80 volunteer (along with 50 real doctors) down there.

The problem right now is that the huge influx of volunteers in the country has actually slowed down aid relief. Some are just showing up without a plan, and simply end up having to leech off aid that would otherwise be going to Haitians. They need fucking money, not volunteers (especially not the proselytizing kind).

Right now the only thing they’ve done is gone around “touching” people, claiming this has healing properties. This bullshit practice is so ludicrisly stupid, I’ll have to let one of their zombies describe it for me:

“We’re trained as volunteer ministers, we use a process called ‘assist’ to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication,” she said.

“When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch.”

You know, Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world; the last thing they need is a “religion” that charges exorbitant amount of monies to become “clear” of thetans. The 400,000 it costs to send these clowns down there could have been better spent on food and water, honestly. When are people going to learn that sometimes, the best way to help is to get the fuck out of the way?

(props to James for the find)

If you’re not a regular visitor to randi.org (that’s famous skeptic James Randi’s website), you might not know about their fight against dangerous quackery; more specifically, their attempts to expose bogus “bomb detectors” that are nothing more than dowsing devices. The device in question, called the ADE-651, has no electronic components to speak of and has a rather unimpressive looking antenna on it. This didn’t stop the Iraqi military from dishing out a massive $85m dollars on the piece of junk. If you’re wondering how they could spend such an exorbitant amount of cash on a handle with a TV antenna on it, it’s because each device costs about $40,000.

I can’t imagine how many people have died as a result of using this expensive piece of shit. Not only does it fare not better than random chance at detecting anything (the only thing I would venture to say it detects is complete gullibility), it’s based entirely on dowsing “principles”. You might remember dowsers as the old foggies who run around with a stick thinking it leads to water that you used to point at and laugh as a child. Well, laugh no more, as its use has put hundreds and thousands of people lives at risk. There’s no telling what kind of damage this thing has done, or how many deaths can literally be attributed to it.

The CEO of ATSC who produces the ADE 651 was recently arrested on suspicion of fraud, but he continues to defend his product, claiming that the only reason people don’t like it is that it looks crude:

Mr McCormick told The Times that his device was being criticised because of its crude appearance.
He added: “We have been dealing with doubters for ten years. One of the problems we have is that the machine does look a little primitive. We are working on a new model that has flashing lights.”

Is this fucking guy for real? No, we don’t need flashing lights on your piece of junk; we need you to give all the money back, followed immediately by your long incarceration, where I hope you’ll be beaten senseless on an almost daily basis for the terrible pain you’ve inflicted, fuckface.

(props to Kevin for the find)