The Harm of Religion

"Hey, let's do something to appease our Lord. We need to rid ourselves of sin."

"I know, let's baptize ourselves. I hear the Lord likes that sort of thing."

"We live in Siberia. It's January, and a bit nippy out."

"Well, then let's chop through the ice, in the shape of a cross of course, then dip our naked children in there. It will take away all of their sins."

"We don't have to take off our coats, do we?"

"No, don't be silly! Just the little children."

"Yes, I hear it's all the rage. I'll get my axe. You get the baby."

And I said, WTF? This is religion at work. In Communist Russia, religion was banned, driven underground. But since the fall of Communism, there has been a resurgence.



All it takes are liberal doses of ignorance and superstition with a dash of confirmation bias, a pinch of cognitive dissonance, and an authoritarian dogma to serve extra portions of indoctrination. And voila! You have people taking their children as young as newborns and dipping them in ice water in January in Siberia.

It's truly barbaric. And it's also dangerous. It can literally shock the heart enough to make it stop, and can cause hypothermia.

There is a popular belief that diving into an ice hole 3 times on Epiphany will erase your sins. But what sins do newborns or small children have? Supposedly, this belief is not endorsed officially by the Orthodox Church.

This has become popular since the 1990's, so it's not an old ritual. Father Yakov Krotov, an Orthodox priest of Moscow said,"This is not going back to our traditions - no, this is just an attempt [by the masses] to create some kind of great past." Whether Father Krotov agrees with it or not, it appears in the video an in other pictures online that there are officials (dressed quite warmly) officiating the abusive treatment.

While my imaginary conversation mentions only children, adults do it too. If they want to freeze their bits off and damage their hearts, that's their business. But it's abusive to make a child do this against their will, or under coercion and indoctrination.

Not to mention, does this give these people license to "sin" throughout the year, knowing all they have to do is get baptized in January to wipe the slate clean? I don't know, but I would think human nature would easily rationalize such behavior.

Epiphany, or Theophany, takes place on January 19 and commemorates Jesus' baptism in the river Jordan. Supposedly the waters are holy on this day.

BBC News

Interesting Thought Provoking Blasphemous Pictures

Hey everyone, I'm sorry I've been so busy with personal stuff I haven't had much of a chance to blog for you guys. My family is arriving today for a long weekend so here are a few pictures to amuse you until I can get back to "normal".

Science vs. Religion - It's simple, really.

 

WTF Fail - LOL!

 

See More with Atheism

 

Sir David Attenborough (from Life on Air, BBC)

"I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old. And I replay and say, "Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful god with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know about the truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing."

 

Calamities of Nature: "It makes one wonder what other amazing discoveries were missed during [the Dark Ages]."

 

Fundamentalist, Cafeterian, Deist, Atheist

Spam For Christ

I found this in my inbox of my Heaving Dead Cats email yesterday and I thought it was so odd I wanted to share it with you. Obviously this person has no idea that I'm a card carrying godless heathen.

I like how he gets so specific about what he wants. I would think beggars shouldn't be so picky. Do you think people will actually do it? I bet they will if they are christians and feeling charitable. Which is sad. People need clean water, healthy food and decent shelter, and then they need education, not god and superstition.

Look where he lives. He says there is hunger and crisis, but their god keeps them fed and safe. Why doesn't god feed everyone? Why does god let so many people suffer? Anyway, here it is, in its entirety. Pretty ballsy, if you ask me!

Dear Friends in Christ,

I greet you out there in Jesus Lovely name. I am the way, the truth and the life, no man cometh to the Father but by me John 14:6. Jesus Christ is our salvation! I was searching for a study material when I came across your email and convinced you are a Christian.

Please do not be angry at this letter and undermine me because I am reaching you through the internet. God led me to your email and I know I’m blessed having to know you. I am a member of Living Faith Church. By His grace I’m a believer born again and blood bought( blood of Jesus). I am married with six children. I have a great passion doing the work of the master especially now I work on my own having not to be disturbed like when I was working 10 hours in the clerk office work.. I am not rich in this wordly riches but rich spiritually in Christ. I came to know Christ in 1984 and since then serve Him with commitment. I live in an area where there is much hunger and crisis but the Lord keeps us from them all. Our church is a small church with about thirty people. I am the church secretary as well as Adult Sunday school teacher. As you can see I can speak and understand English well as we are British colonised country.

The Afterlife and Sentient Rocks

Last night our local group of heathens and extended friends had our Winter Solstice/Festivus/FSM Holiday/Christmas/Hanukkah party. It was fun. The conversation was very interesting and incredibly diverse. Here are two topics I discussed.

I was talking to a Buddhist physicist who works for NASA part time. He started talking about how the earth and rocks have sentience. I disagreed, of course. He had this weird logic that was completely flawed. He said something about how humans are sentient, and we need the sun and the earth so they are sentient too. Um, what? And he works for NASA?

My friend Eric works for NASA. He went to his office christmas party where they prayed at the beginning "in jesus name".

This is fascinating and disturbing. I had this idea that people in places like NASA are rational and critical thinkers. But I guess you can be smart in one area and compartmentalize your beliefs and faith in the supernatural in another, and blithely eschew critical thinking. I think early and lifelong indoctrination is definitely a factor. It is disheartening, though.

~

One of my friends, Jim, is a grief counselor so he and I ended up talking about death and the afterlife. Cheery, huh?

We both agreed that as atheists, there is no fear of death. Being dead is natural. It's the end. For about 14 billion years before you were born you didn't exist. Now you do. Eventually (hopefully later rather than sooner, after a rewarding and wonderful life) you will die. We all die.

Where I have problems with death is the actual act of dying. I really don't want to suffer. I don't like pain. I don't want to lose all of my dignity. As Jim said, though, we are really working on that.

Anyway, if you're religious, you are led to believe that there is an afterlife. Well, some religions anyway. Apparently the jews don't hold to that notion. So if you're a muslim and you do good deeds like kill a bunch of innocent infidels you and 72 members of your family go to heaven where you get 72 virgins (see inside label for details).

If you're a christian, you get two choices (well, catholics get purgatory, too). You're going to hell unless you get saved and accept jesus as your savior (rules and restrictions may differ for your denomination. See insert). Then you get to go to heaven to worship god for all eternity.

Neil C. Reinhardt Shows His True Colors

When someone sends me spam, I figure the information sent to me is fair game. Remember the guy who sent me the email about noni juice? I blogged about it twice: (here and here).

In the second post, I went through his email line by line and stated the logical fallacy. I made no personal attacks (except one, I'm only human after all). When I published the post, I removed his name. I wasn't trying to attack the spammer personally. I just thought it was an excellent exercise for us.

What I didn't do, is write back to the guy. As I said, it seemed like spam, and I didn't want to get into it with him. I figured I'd never hear from him again. I heard from him 5 times this evening. Oh, lucky me, I just got another one from him. That makes 6.

When he sent the first ones, he apparently hadn't seen the articles. In the first email of the evening he wrote:

"P.S. FYI The odds of you ever knowing, and/or ever meeting, anyone who is MORE truthful than I am is zero!"

To which I replied, "In my experience when someone starts out saying how [insert noble quality such as honesty, fidelity, etc. here] they usually prove to be either self-delusional or outright liars."

He didn't like that. He said later that my experience was limited. Which I have to say, he's right. My data pool is not immense. But it's a good rule of thumb in my experience. When someone tells me, "I'm so honest, I'm so faithful, I never lie, I'll always do this behavior" I will remember that. It's usually a huge red flag that they will fail in that exact respect sooner rather than later.

I'm not a psychologist but it seems to me that that there are two things going on. Either you're lying to yourself when you say such a thing, or you're lying to whoever you say it to. Or some combination thereof.

Anyway, I started to reply to this guy's email. I wanted to make it very clear that I didn't want his juice and I didn't want to argue with him. The way he talked about James Randi was another red flag I should have heeded.

He sent a long email of glowing reviews from other people. (I gather he is on a forum or something). This is anecdotal and irrelevant to me.

Another email was vague and I have no idea what it was about.

Then the kicker. Obviously he visited HDC. If you don't want to read strong language, skip this. It's exactly as he sent it in its entirety. Notice I do not do the courtesy of removing his name this time:

Starting To See Moral Relativism As Clearly Flawed

Most people don't think much about morality, in my observation. They are given their morals from their parents, pastors, teachers, and peers, etc. They don't need to know terms like "moral relativism". I have done just fine for 41 years without ever thinking about the definition of the term.

I think even once you eschew God and the bible, unless someone challenges you, you'll still rely on your basic moral code which you got when you were younger (and probably indoctrinated). A lot of that might evolve into what "feels" like the right thing to do, more than what the bible said.

Then there are those who think about this sort of thing all the time. I'm not one of those people, normally. I don't like philosophy very much. I prefer science and testable claims to pontificating about things that can't really ever be known. But as I venture on my Quest for Knowledge, lately I've run into philosophy more often.

I've even subjected you to it, such as the whole Free Will vs Determinism argument (which I still have plans to continue).

I think we are best served with examining our ethical code and reevaluating what's in there and why. I did that some time ago with my personal Principles. It was a challenging but rewarding exercise.

Side Note: The Rationally Speaking podcast recently interviewed Joshua Knobe about his new field of Experimental Philosophy (x-phi), which was fascinating. Joshua even made them (and me) gasp with the results of one study that was very surprising! Here's a link to the episode.

The book club I'm in, as I've mentioned, is going to be reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. I lost interest in our current book, so I've started in on this one and so far Sam Harris is speaking my language, that science can determine values for conscious beings.

The following excerpt from the book shows what moral relativism basically is (the woman in it is definitely a moral relativist), and why it's clearly flawed. This is an anecdotal story from Sam. But I think it's quite important to share:

Excerpt from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris. - Highlight Location 765-83 (chapter 1)

We already have good reason to believe that certain cultures are less suited to maximizing well-being than others. I cited the ruthless misogyny and religious bamboozlement of the Taliban as an example of a worldview that seems less than perfectly conducive to human flourishing.

Disturbingly Accurate Portrayal of Indoctrination

I just found this on Facebook and had to share it with you:



I don't know who the artist is, but it's pretty obvious they understand the way indoctrination works.

Here are some other comics and images to amuse you:

Philosophy Airlines:

Jerusalem is Populating a Biblical Zoo

And I said, WTF? Then I remembered, people in Jerusalem are there because they believe its the promised land, given by God to the Jews. They are just as nutty as the christians, the muslims and all the other religions.

So these zookeepers over in Jerusalem are trying to sort of reconstruct the animals from the bible (old testament, of course) in Israel. They aren't trying to repopulate the area with the biblical predators like bears, but they are trying to bring back vultures, even though Levitucus 11:13 called them detestable. Which makes me wonder why they'd want to nurture and breed them. And why cherry-pick certain animals but not the rest from the bible? But why try to get logical now?

Almost 100 animals were mentioned in the bible, according to the fluffy, credulous HuffPo article where I found this ridiculous story, so of course, I am quite skeptical. I guess that's how Noah was able to get them all on the ark, then. He only had 100 or so to deal with, not the millions found in the world today.

There are nearly 100 different types of animals mentioned in the Bible, many of them key players in well-known stories: the lions in Daniel's den; the dove that scouted for dry land from Noah's ark; the ram that was sacrificed by Abraham to save the life of his son, Isaac.

Today, many of them are gone, hunted to the point of extinction or driven away by ongoing conflict. Of the 10 animals that are listed as acceptable dinner fare in Deuteronomy 14 -- ox, sheep, goat, deer, gazelle, roe deer, wild goat, ibex, antelope and mountain sheep -- only two (the gazelle and the ibex) could still be found in the historical boundaries of Israel in 1960. ...

"... I want to keep the vultures because they were mentioned in the Bible that it was a common animal and that's good enough for me."

Ricky Gervais, Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington Must Be Shared

I just wanted to tell you that Ricky Gervais and his cohorts have a new HBO series that starts up tonight. It's an animated series of his audiobooks (Ricky, Steve Merchant and the infamous Karl Pilkington) and it starts tonight, February 19 at 9pm Eastern. It's called, cleverly enough, The Ricky Gervais Show. Here is a link to the HBO site for it, where you can watch the first episode now.

If you've never heard his podcast or audiobooks, you might find them hilarious. Karl Pilkington will blow your mind away with his unique perspective on everything. But Ricky and Steve's interaction with him is awesome, and mitigates some of the mind-numbing ideas Karl comes up with. Mixed in, Ricky and Steve say some fairly accurate and informative things about anything and everything. It's a real treat.

I also recommend his Ricky Gervais Guides To. They are similar to the podcasts and audiobooks but focus on one topic. You can get them here: Podcasts, Audiobooks and Guides To and through iTunes.

Ricky and Steve are atheists as well, and openly talk about their lack of faith when it's appropriate. Karl? I have no idea. He believes in the bible but has no time for religion because it doesn't offer him anything, like a free toaster. :P

Ricky has a blog too, in case you're interested.

Enjoy! :)

Christmas Tree Nonsense

My friend AJ sent me this picture and I had to share it with you, after my brain stopped fizzling:



What is the reasoning here? "Let's celebrate the birth of our savior, but let's make sure we focus on his crucifixion at the same time? What would easter look like then? Would you have to mix holiday symbols there too?

Update: Here's the news story that explains the above image.

Of course, the bible mentions the "christmas" tree in the old testament, and they aren't too keen on it:

Jeremiah 10:2-4: "Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not."

Why Does God Hate Pigs?

More to the point, why do Jews and Muslims hate pigs, since god doesn't exist. But for the sake of argument, let's look at the bible and quran to see what they say about the other white meat.

Question: Are pigs native to the Middle East, then? If no decent jew or muslim could eat them, why were they raised and by whom?

God seems quite fickle about what were were to eat:

• Adam and Eve are supposed to eat a vegan diet: Genesis 1:29: And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.


• Noah and his sons can eat any living thing, but they have to drain the blood first: Genesis 9:2-4: And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

That didn't last long because in Deuteronomy and Leviticus he gets into all the things that are forbidden. Here I'll highlight the references to swine.

• Leviticus 11:7: And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.


• Deuteronomy 14:8: And the swine, because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you: ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcase.

OhmyGAWD, BECKY!

A secret friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, sent me a message the other day on Facebook with a link to the following video. I finally got a chance to watch it earlier today and I have to say, I am still shaking my head in awe. Either this is a brilliant example of Poe's Law, or this is honest to goodness flat-out crazy bible-thumping madness. I was thinking it MUST be a poe (spoof/fake, see below), but after I watched it, I went to the video's page on youtube and the guy posting it is momentumchurch. If he's faking it, he's going all out. I really think he means what he's singing about. Can you say GLORY AMEN!

Really, give yourself a 4 minute break and watch this. You will crack up in pure horror. Even the baby jesus is mortified. But DAMN, his ring and necklace combo is sexy! It makes me HOLY! HALLELUJAH! LOL!



Poe's Law (fundamentalism): "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing," named after Nathan Poe who formulated it on christianforums.com in 2005. Although it originally referred to creationism, the scope later widened to religious fundamentalism.