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After a while of debating or arguing with creationists its inevitable to start hearing the same old tired arguments, and the same old tired questions, the only thing they prove is ignorance towards the opposition's set of beliefs or arguments. I'm writing up this small list of 10 questions i hear the most, they are in no particular order, they are all equally annoying.

Atheism is just like religion, don't you guys worship Darwin (or science)?


No, atheism is not an organized group of people that promotes false hope, asks for money, doesn't pay taxes, advertises door to door, pushes their beliefs into others, wears funny clothes and hats, kills in the name of god or flies planes into buildings thinking they'll get virgins after they die.

So i had a birthday party for a cousin on my house yesterday and things are kinda tight so i'm gonna have to bump the article till tomorrow, on the meantime i'll leave you with Richard Dawkin's latest documentary about Faith Schools, its divided in 4 parts, enjoy!.

Why isn't she saluting the flag?, why isn't she singing the anthemn?, -she's a witness- A witness?, like from the government?, -no you idiot, a Jehovah's witness-

I recall having that short conversation with a friend when i was around 9 years of age, i knew about Witnesses before i knew about atheists, a few blocks south of my house there was a Mormon temple and a Jehovah's witnesses kingdom hall. I have a troubled cousin that had drug problems who got converted to JW and she is heavily criticized by my mostly Christian family because she can't come to birthday parties because she isn't allowed to do so by her church, and by that i mean, if she's spotted by a fellow witness, she could be denounced and brought up to her church's elder to face some form of punishment, but my family doesn't understand that, because they know very little about the whole religion, so to make it easy for them, i'll show you what Witnesses actually believe...

Irreducible complexity is the term creationists use to point out that something as complex as the human eye could not have come from natural selection, but only from a designer, they ignore the fact that in the animal kingdom there are eyes far more developed that the human eye, and a lot of underdeveloped eyes. In the UK there's a TV show called "Bang Goes the Theory" and they featured Richard Dawkins on one of their episodes, he explains the different types of eyes, how they work and how they easily evolved, it really is something worth watching.

On a little side note, i realize there's a lot of new viewers on the blog who might be wondering why i just wrote something very short and posted a video, i write a new article every monday, wednesday and friday, every other day i post news or videos that i find interesting, with that being said, here's Dawkins explaining the eye...

Judging from the recent survey that indicates 50% of Americans don't know what the Koran is, i think its pretty safe to guess that most people think Scientology is a celebrity club, celebrities like John Travolta, Tom Cruise and even Danny Masterson are profiting members of the church of Scientology. Why?, what is scientology?.

I have a couple of news you might be interested in, currently i'm working on tomorrow's article, one that everyone can enjoy, it's about a certain celebrity cult that believes in aliens and god like powers, here's an article from the BBC about it...

In 2007, while investigating the Church of Scientology for Panorama, reporter John Sweeney had a dramatic on-camera confrontation with a church spokesman named Tommy Davis. The church was accusing the reporter of bias and it attempted to stop the documentary from being broadcast - a campaign backed by Scientology A-lister John Travolta. Sweeney has returned to investigate the church again.

Tomorrow you'll read my take on Scientology and why i believe there should be more documentaries and more public demonstrations against it and why i think there aren't. There's just something about Scientology that makes me think when people stop believing in Jesus, they'll turn to Scientology, lets hope i don't get abducted between today and tomorrow.

Here's an interesting article, according to a recent study, atheists and agnostics are more knowledgeable about religion than muslims, christians and jews...

A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn't identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, according to the survey, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Four in 10 Catholics misunderstood the meaning of their church's central ritual, incorrectly saying that the bread and wine used in Holy Communion are intended to merely symbolize the body and blood of Christ, not actually become them.

And also...For comparison purposes, the survey also asked some questions about general knowledge, which yielded the scariest finding: 4% of Americans believe that Stephen King, not Herman Melville, wrote "Moby Dick."


God Bless America!

Thanks to the awesome comments on the last entry, Gambling For Salvation, it came to me that i had to give out an explanation of what atheism and being and atheist means to me, of course the word atheism means "without gods" and any atheist is considered someone who rejects the idea of a creator god. But it isn't a religion or an organization, it doesn't have a set of rules, you don't need to go somewhere once a week to reinforce your atheism, there are no atheist pastors that guide you whenever you are having problems.

To me being an atheist doesn't just mean i don't believe in god, it is much more than that, even though the correct term would be a critical thinker, i rather say that i'm atheist, its a stronger word, stigmatized maybe by popular misconceptions, hell, atheists are the least trusted people in america. Whenever i say i'm an atheist, i mean i don't believe in god, demons, ghosts, exorcisms, homeopathy, and pretty much every other unfounded belief in the world, a true skeptic, a doubter, a non-believer, a naturalist, a rationalist. Anyone that spends more than 30 minutes with me during the day can easily notice it, i'm the guy that doesn't go with the flow whenever someone makes an unbelievable claim, of course to be like that you need a bit of a sense of humor so you don't come out as a complete ass, people are very touchy when you call them out on their bullshit.

FeedBurner is a google service that allows you to place an rss image like the one on my sidebar so your readers can easily subscribe to your blog and follow it thrugh a feed reader or get updates via e-mail, the best part of using FeedBurner is that you can set up google AdSense on it so you can make extra money from it aside from your blog.

To create a feedburner account simply go to http://feedburner.google.com, accsess with the same email you have your blog registered on, and the system will automatically detect your blog, follow the instructions and you are done, now, here's when the tricky part begins, you now need to utilize every tool FeedBurner gives you, when you are done setting up FB for your blog, you'll see this screen:

You are at a table playing blackjack with a king and a nine on your hand, chances are that if you ask for another card, you will go over and lose it all, so your best bet is to keep what you have and play it smart, stay safe, no need to risk it, you don't even have to think about it, to ask the dealer to hit you would be stupid, suicidal, you would lose it all, so, you do what's best for you. Blaise Pascal understood this perfectly.

Pascal's wager is the idea that even though the existence of god can not be proven, a person should wager for his existence because there's a lot to win from it, doing otherwise would mean damnation in the fires of  hell. Pascal thought the safest bet would be to believe in the Judeo-Christian god of the bible, as if an omnipotent being couldn't tell if your belief was sincere or not. I'm not sure how god would react if he finds out you just had faith out of convenience, if you want to be serious about it, thats it for the wager, its over, but if you really want to bury Pascal's gambit, then what if Pascal was waging on the wrong god?.

Thanks to the fantastic response on my last column titled Why Do You Care?, tomorrow i'll be writing something about Agnosticism, my views on it, and why i think it's not the right posture to take on this subject. Today i'm gonna leave you with a couple of news that i thought were interesting.

Italian authorities seized euro23 million ($30 million) from a Vatican bank account Tuesday and said they have begun investigating top officials of the Vatican bank in connection with a money-laundering probe. Yes people, the vatican might be involved in money laundering, so now our good friend Pope Ratzinger not only has to deal with pedophile priests and nazi atheists but now mobster activities inside the church, is the catholic church really going down?, are we close to seeing the end of Catholicism?.

Mother Earth could have parted the Red Sea, hatching the great escape described in the biblical book of Exodus, a new study finds. Carl Drews of the National Center for Atmospheric Research made a study that shows strong winds could easily make the effect that the sea is being parted, of course the study does not pretend to show the bible is true, it shows how it could have happened, it's not saying that it did happen at all, there's absolutely zero evidence for that, no archeological evidence, nothing, already i've seen a couple of article titles that say "SCIENCE PROVES BIBLICAL MIRACLE".


To wrap this thing up, i'll leave you with an awesome video that i just saw last night, it's funny, it's well done, it gets the point across, enjoy it and be sure to come back tomorrow for the article about Agnosticism.

If you've ever dared to express your atheism in any public place, even if its just on a message board, chances are, someone has told you something around the lines of why do you care about what people believe?, live and let die man. Seems a very neutral, logical point of view, it's almost something i would agree with...if the religious weren't out there shoving their beliefs down everyone's throat, claiming that anyone that doesn't believe in what they believe is either a fool or has a "hole" in their life, threatening people left and right with hellfire, damnation and eternal torture in the lake of fire.

Socially, the table is tilted on the religious's favor, they are the good guys, the ones that promote morality, atheists are the godless beings that care for nobody but themselves, take social networks for example, on my personal Facebook as i've stated before, 100% of my family are balls out Christians, most of  them don't believe in evolution because all they know about it is that popular image of the monkey to human scale, so constantly i have to read their posts asking for prayers for another family member or friend who is sick or is going through some tough times, some just love posting bible passages, or the occasional warning about how the end of times is near.

I was planning on writing something for the blog today, but i saw a documentary on one of the facebook pages i'm subscribed to and i was outraged to say the least, it's unimaginable that on this day and age, children are being tortured and burned to death because of religious belief. Please take the time to at least watch the first minutes of the video i'll embed i guarantee you will be as outraged as i am, i'll have the other videos linked below. i will leave you with the intro made by The Atheist Advocate, be sure to check him out.

Christians say they no longer commit acts of violence in the name of their religion. Children in Africa's Niger Delta were being denounced by Christian pastors as witches and wizards, and then killed, tortured or abandoned by their own families. Following the introduction of the Child Rights legislation and an increase in financial support for a British charity providing a refuge for affected youngsters, the program returns to find out what happened to some of the people featured in the first film. This is one of five, if you can stomach it!!!

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5 (Final)

As you may know, the pope was in the UK this weekend, and he made some very serious comments comparing  the nazi movement with the "extremist" modern atheist movement, he warned the crowd saying that godlessness can lead to very terrible things like those done by the nazis. Of course the whole atheist community was outraged by the pope's uneducated claims and this Saturday Richard Dawkins delivered this wonderful speech, a real smack in the back of the head to the whole Vatican. There is no need for me to mention that Hitler referred to god in almost every speech, and that his whole Jew hatred was mostly based on his belief that the Jews had killed Jesus. Just watch the video.

The following is one of my favorite videos on the net, it basically explains why the popular concept of a fiery hell doesn't work because of a few very basic physical and chemical laws, it also discusses why many scientists appear as god believers on surveys and explains why a lot of the old scientists like Newton or Faraday are always shown as believers by the religious apologists. Scroll further down for the whole transcript. This video is not my work.

            
You all know the story, Satan is supposed to be the bad guy, a castaway from god's angels, even though the only reference for this story is a vague bible passage that was, when placed in context, a message for a king, it is interpreted by scholars as the story of how Lucifer was cast away from the heavens and from then on began to wage war against  god's creations. So, the question is always there, if god is omnipotent, why doesn't he get rid of Satan?, and therefore gets rid of most evil in the world, if he can't do it, then he isn't omnipotent, if he doesn't want to, then he is condoning evil.

I wanted a video for today's blog entry but for some reason YouTube hasn't been loading properly if it loads at all, it goes on and off, sometimes i have to refresh the main page a few times until it loads up. Is anyone else having this problem?, any ideas on how to fix it will be much appreciated.


Note: It happens on both firefox and chrome, sometimes it'll even open just fine on one of them but won't open on the other.


Update (11:19 am): Im now getting the infamous 502 error, so it might be a problem on their side from a few specific servers, i'm not sure.






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