Atheist Barbie
April 10th, 2010
In plenty of time for Christmas!
Well done, blaghag.
Archive
Archive for the ‘Atheism’ Category
Bay Area Church Goes CRAZY!!
April 4th, 2010
This is the real undoctored web site
Deals to Good to Be True! But, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch…
Millions in prizes at Corpus Christi church this Easter, but at a price.
“The Ultimate Giveaway” sounds like a promotion at a car dealership or a department store, not a contemporary, non-denominational church, but that is (in fact) the name of the Easter service series at Corpus Christi’s Bay Area Fellowship, where they’ll award $2 million to $3 million in prizes this weekend. It’s meant to sound worldly and materialistic so that they can draw in local unchurched populations, Cornelius insists. The church says it has only heard complaints over the campaign from fellow Christians. Well, you can officially register my complaint. Organized religion is already distasteful enough. If the promise of everlasting life doesn’t do it, just give away cars!
The “twist” is that the real Ultimate Giveaway was John 3:16:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.
– John 3:16 (New American Bible)
Ugh… please. This mythology is so old and tired. The story is fraught with so many issues, and using Easter as a marketing opportunity is giving plenty of people heartburn. The price of course is the cheapening of everything. Being a good Christian is now something people need to be tricked into… wait a second. I guess things really haven’t changed, they are just more up front about it now.
Stop the madness… and don’t even get me started on the mess the Catholics have gotten themselves into.
Good without God
February 20th, 2010
I love this book. You need it. No matter who you are. Go read the first chapter. It’s posted for free and in PDF format on Amazon. You can check it out on Amazon (Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe) or just direct download the PDF.
One of my favorite passages from Chapter 1:
If you ever meet anyone who tells you his or her religion can offer all the answers, run for the hills. Or at least hide your wallet.
…
We are all part of an amazing story in that, as Swimme and Berry put it, “every living being of Earth is cousin to every other being.” Our history began with the Big Bang, a “primordial flaring forth”; it continued with this galaxy’s first star, which appeared five billion years later, and the Milky Way’s birthing of our sun five billion years ago. With the formation of Earth a billion years later came the first living cell, and then two billion years after that came new kinds of cells that “invented” both sexual reproduction and the predator-prey relationship. These twin developments led to an ever-quickening spiral of change: from the first multicellular animals, to mammals who could sense their environment and feel emotion, to human self-awareness and the ability to stand upright and use tools, to the domestication of fire and the human creation of myth, agriculture, villages, religion, culture, cities, and eventually to the three universalist religions (Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam), mass migration, liberal democracy, the multinational corporation, and American Idol.
Greg M. Epstein is the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University.
Holy Church of Starbucks!
February 4th, 2010
I am in a Starbucks trying to get some work done, and I never blog from a freakin’ Starbucks, but HOLY SHIT, there are more churches having meetings here! What the hell? It’s sooo weird. Every single “group” of people in here is doing a bible study or religious proselytizing… ok, in fairness, they are only planning their proselytizing to be inflicted later. They are talking about an “angel collection” — please see if you can find little angels around town or at home and bring them Sunday. Why?
The table closest to me has made off with the other three chairs from my table and is running at full tilt to figure out how to partner with area churches to “mission” to the unsaved in our area. Shame… all they had to do was look over their shoulder. Although, technically I was “saved” about 30 years ago.
They are talking about recruiting high schoolers from the sports teams en masse to participate in various events. They are handing out brochures of events in the area and thinking about how they can promote fund-raisers and fun runs to raise money for all sorts of shit. Didn’t hear Haiti mentioned, or AIDS, or any other social problem. Just getting the word out… that was the chief concern. So annoying. If the average belief/non-belief split in the US is about 85/15, it’s got to be 98/2 in my neighborhood. We have got to move soon. I cannot relate to these people.
Holy Jackass
February 3rd, 2010
Pat Robertson: Is God punishing Haiti?
The Week – Talking Points
Friday, January 22, 2010
As news broke of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Pat Robertson said on his TV show that Haitians themselves were to blame because of a pact Haiti’s founders made with the devil.
“It’s no secret that the Rev. Pat Robertson is a yammering fool,” said Carl Hiaasen in The Miami Herald, “but last week he hit a new low.” As news broke of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Robertson explained to the million-strong audience of his syndicated TV show, The 700 Club, that Haitians themselves were to blame. In the late 18th century, he said, Haiti’s founders “swore a pact to the devil” in return for being freed from their French colonial masters. Robertson’s remark was not only heartless, said Peter Wehner in National Review Online. It failed to “correspond with any serious understanding of Christianity.” The Christian faith, at its heart, is about mercy in this world and redemption in the next. Only in Robertson’s distorted imagination would an angry Christian God dish out misery to an island full of innocents, to punish them for the supposed heresy of their great-great-great-grandfathers.
Or, maybe, religion is the imagined myths of our ancestors and is just as absurd as the voodoo believed by the Haitians. Wouldn’t this all be so much simpler without weird superstitions polluting the issue?
Robertson’s interpretation of events was admittedly “obnoxious,” said Elizabeth McAlister in Forbes.com, but interpreting the unfathomable is a preacher’s job. The purpose of religion is “to make sense out of chaos,” to discern and reveal “the unseen forces that cause things to be the way they are.”
What a shame. Science, not religion, has been explaining the majority of the “unseen forces” that were formerly the purview of religion exclusively… say about 400 years ago. Science and reason have been steadily capturing ground ever since. It goes even farther back if we consider some of the great thinkers of Greece, Rome, China, India, Iran, etc.
The great irony here is that while Robertson’s remarks have outraged people here in the States, many Haitians have long suspected that there are supernatural underpinnings to the island’s horrible run of bad luck. And according to mainstream Haitian lore, said Eric Metaxas in FoxNews.com, the country’s founders really did hold a voodoo ceremony at which they slaughtered a pig and “made a pact with the devil.” No one knows whether or not the myth is true, of course, but is it so outrageous of Pat Robertson to suggest that “starting a nation this way might not be the best approach?”
No one knows if the myth about the voodoo myth is true??? And then a jackass preacher comes along with his own Christian myths to explain why the earthquake happened in the first place?? Really??? Is this how collectively enlightened we are in 2010? Holy fuck.
That we are even “having this conversation is ridiculous,” said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. We long ago learned that earthquakes are caused not by vengeful deities but by the shifting of Earth’s tectonic plates, and they bear no “malice toward any particular man, woman, or child.”
Thank you, Kathleen!
Don’t tell that to Robertson, who said 9/11 was God’s punishment of a sinful America, said Michael Rowe in HuffingtonPost.com. Through such bile, Robertson solicits millions in donations from his spellbound flock, and shelters those ill-gotten gains behind his religious tax exemption. Who is it really, Rev. Robertson, “who’s made a pact with the devil”?
And thank you, The Week, for telling it like it is.
And the people replied…