Cody, our most recent Xian visitor proudly claims that he loves debate because it provides opportunity to “test his faith”. What is it with Christians having to “test their faith” repeatedly? Could it possibly have something to do with their fantasy god belief being difficult for even themselves to believe? They must force themselves to believe things that they know deep down is absurd and illogical, blind “faith.”

Of course, some Christians of the fundamentalist variety will say that it’s the “devil” testing them, while God stands by and watches as a voyeur to see the outcome (when he supposedly already knows how things will turn out).

Tom Brown of Tom Brown Ministries writes:

Trials come to test your faith. This means that trials BATTLE your faith. And if your faith is not fighting back, you are not winning.

If your not winning, you’re not becoming stronger. God wants us to become stronger by resisting the devil who sent the trial.

Now why would a loving God want to put his special creations through such ordeals? This is a weird and sadistic god to force his beloved followers to keep in line and follow the straight and narrow.

I do not need to test my husband’s, children’s, parents’, grandparent’s and friends’ love for me, nor do I need to test my love for them. I don’t need to put them through terrible trials and tribulations in order that they believe that I exist, and vice-versa. I would not want to cause them any sort of suffering, and they would not want me to have to endure suffering just to prove that I love and care about them. I do not need to be made more faithful to my husband or loyal to my friends via resisting temptations and “battling my faith” in them.

We do become stronger because of the experiences we have gone through, the difficulties and hard times that living brings to most people at one time or another. But it’s not some sort of “trial”, no sort of “test” that intentionally is some sort of “battle” to win. It’s just life, it’s how things are. Good things happen, bad things happen and how we deal with these things shows our character, our will, our determination, our desire to survive sometimes against all odds.

Embedding is disabled on this video…

Click on the pic…

It’s pretty cool…

It’s neurological shit…

Awesome neurological coolness…

Comments on humans…

Well, I hope that the text has justified the pic…

Man, this shit cracked me up…

Wow, it almost seems like Scott should be classified as a “Xian Terrorist”…

Accused Killer of Abortion Doctor Could Be Down By Law With a Kansas Jury

As he prepares for a court hearing tomorrow, Scott Roeder, the man accused of shooting Dr. George Tiller in the foyer of his church in June, says he’s full of “relief and joy” over the murder of the Wichita abortion provider. In interviews with the Kansas City Star, Roeder, who is in a Sedgwick County, Kansas, lockup, said he’d been thinking about killing abortion doctors since 1992. He praised Paul Hill, who shot and killed an abortion provider in Pensacola, Florida, in 1994 and was executed in for the murder in 2003, and he described several visits to Shelley Shannon, the woman who shot and wounded Tiller back in 1993 and is currently serving 20 years for a series of abortion clinic bombings and arsons. Roeder believes that these acts qualify as justifiable homicide, explaining to Star reporter Judy Thomas: “When a policeman shoots somebody on the street, for example, and stops somebody from taking the life of innocent people, that’s violence, and everybody’s fine with that,” he said. Since the murder of Dr. Tiller, he said, “I’ve heard that three women have actually changed their minds and had their babies because there’s no availability here,” he said. “Wichita has been abortion-free since that time.” He added, “That’s total elation.” Scott Roeder stops short of stating that he is the man responsible for what he considers the heroic act of killing Dr. Tiller, instead saying that “For the man accused of this, things fell together for that day,” and the shooting “would have been earlier if things had panned out.” Such almost coyly circumspect statements can hardly help Roeder’s case, and his attorney, Steve Osburn, would make no comment on his client’s defense strategy. But Roeder himself raised the possibility of introducing “jury nullification,” which holds that if a jury concludes the law is wrong, it can take matters into its own hands, overriding instructions from the judge, to deliver its own version of justice.

“We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking to the stars” – Oscar Wilde

Man is the creature who gazes upwards. We view the expansive sky with wonder as well as trepidation. When Nature flails upon us, we flinch. When the sun shines upon us, we smile. When the sun sets, small motes of light fill that grand expanse, and all of these elements combined with pareidolia inspired (or frightened) our ancestors into wild tales.

And sadly, we have not yet outgrown this as a species.

I stumbled upon the phrase ‘Astrotheology’ recently at a discussion over at Pharyngula, and dipped briefly in the well. It proves to be a drink of various divers’ woo.

From the FAQ:

Does Jordan believe in God?

(Presuppositional spoiler alert! You guess it!)

Yes, most certainly!   Jordan has always believed in the presence of God.  But he is also well-aware, through years of study, that man-made religions are the product of "The Powers That Be."   Jordan sees no problem whatsoever with the words and teachings attributed to Jesus in the Bible’s New Testament.  

I heard ominous foreshadowing music at the ‘Powers That Be’™ phrase – did you?

Jordan believes that the Bible — both Old and New Testaments — is a profoundly important work of benefit to mankind.   This is especially true of the New Testament story of Jesus.   Jordan believes that the New Testament is a brilliantly conceived story which is in fact an encoded metaphor.   The correct understanding of the metaphor in the New Testament story have been purposely concealed by the Church throughout the ages. 

‘An encoded metaphor’? Where have we heard that term before?

In Jordan’s view, the entire belief system we call Christianity, in all of its various forms and denominations (not the Bible) as it exists in the world today, is a fraud foisted on the unsuspecting peoples of the world.  Overall, the Church is a world-wide money-grubbing criminal conspiracy, owned behind the scenes by "The Powers That Be." In Jordan’s view, it is time for the Christian Establishment world-wide to be seen for what it really is: an enemy of both God and factual Truth.

(Points finger to head, rotates finger, whistles)

Jordan further feels that the entire Christian church in the world today is a creation of the same "Powers That Be" who have given us the corrupt world that we live in.   It is time for the Christian Church to be exposed for the profound evil that it represents in this world.  It is also time for the encoded metaphor, hidden for years, to be brought to light for the benefit of those who recognize that there is nothing of any redeemable value in the Christian church today, and who wish to worship God "in Spirit and in Truth."   In the very near future, Jordan will be presenting the encoded metaphor for the first time here on his website.

“And for only 19.95, I’ll throw in a set of Ginsu knives!” Really, they call it a ‘messianic complex’ for a reason.

In conclusion, Jordan has the highest of respect for the Divine Presence in the universe that men have called "God," and believes that the New Testament is a profound and brilliantly-written metaphor which needs to be explained to those who are sincerely longing and searching for the truth of our existence.   Explaining for the first time the encoded metaphor in the New Testament is surely now "an idea whose time has come."  This hidden encoded story will be presented by Jordan Maxwell on this website very soon.

Because of course, in the 50-odd years of this alleged ‘research’, Maxwell didn’t stop and think that instead of saying ‘god is’, he should’ve asked the question, ‘is god’? An entirely different meaning is acquired via the juxtaposition of this question. (Of course, I don’t know offhand if he has any ‘demons’ – but that should be enough wordplay for one post.)

And of course, Maxwell’s not the only person with this crazy idea in his head – the link leads to yet another preacher who claims to have ‘an amazing message’ cloaked in allegory and dressed up in eyesore fonts and colors.

The video provided is fairly intriguing but has a few major errors in it (crucifixion predates the Romans, for one) – and as such, should not be considered a final say in the matter.

Till the next post, then.

Ireland Outlaws Blasphemy

After some hesitation, Ireland’s president, Mary McAleese, signed into law on Thursday a controversial new measure which makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of up to $35,000, to publish or utter blasphemous statements in the Irish Republic. As The Irish Times explained in April, the new law was crafted after someone noticed that while the country’s constitution clearly calls blasphemy a criminal act, Irish legislators had failed to give the nation’s police force the legal means to hold blasphemers to account. Indeed, Article 40 of the Irish Constitution, which also guarantees freedom of speech, states: The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent material is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law. As of Thursday, Ireland now has such a law on the books. Even before the law was signed, a group of Irish atheists began a campaign “for the repeal of this anachronistic and dangerous blasphemy law, and for a referendum to remove the blasphemy reference from the Irish Constitution.” The group’s first step will be to intentionally break the law by publishing a blasphemous statement and defending their right to blaspheme in court. Michael Nugent, a writer and co-founder of Atheist Ireland, called the new law “both silly and dangerous” in an opinion piece published by The Irish Times this month. According to Mr. Nugent: It is silly because it revives a medieval religious crime in a modern pluralist republic. And it is dangerous because it incentivises religious outrage, by making it the first trigger for defining blasphemy. The problematic behaviour here is the outrage, not the expression of different beliefs. Instead of incentivising outrage, we should be educating people to respond in a more healthy manner than outrage when somebody expresses a belief that they find insulting. The Irish atheists have also proposed amending Ireland’s constitution to remove other references to religious belief, including those deeply embedded in the very first words of its preamble, which begins: In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, We, the people of Eire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ [...] Do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution. While Irish Catholics will no doubt oppose moves to make such sweeping changes to the constitution, one of the curious features of the debate over the new blasphemy law is that, as Padraig Reidy pointed out in The Guardian, there seems to be almost no public support for it among religious leaders in the country.

Granted, we should give kudos to those “religious leaders” for agreeing how stupid it is — but, still, damn: could you imagine if our Constitution started like that?

Gives me chills just thinking about it…

Blech…

Lions, are you hungry? It’s been awhile, but Cody’s Black Box has sent you all some food! The Atheist Jew sent me the link to this via email.

Cody writes, “If any of my atheist friends have any responses, I would love to hear them,” which is an invitation that I am sure he will be sorry he has made. Cody is a 22-year-old theology student and one of his favorite things to do is to discuss “evidences for God” (though he fails to provide any of those evidences, of course). In his post titled “Where does reason come from?” Cody writes:

I have been thinking about the “Argument from Reason,” which is similar to TAG (Transcendental Argument for God). I posted a sort of overview of this argument on a previous blog.

This argument seeks to show that if there is no God, there can be no rationality. If only the material world exists, we would not be able to trust our own thoughts, which are simply chemical reactions much like how our livers secrete bile. Why would we not, after all, trust the bile instead of the “thoughts” which our brains seem to secrete? However, if there were a Being which was pure reason and outside of the physical world, a mind above it all, He could choose to place some form of rationality in His creation.

The atheist might respond to this argument (as Richard Dawkins did in a recent discussion with John Lennox) by saying that reason would be the perfect thing for evolution to create in animals because it would help them to respond to their surroundings and thus live long and reproduce. Of course, this is beside the point because evolution cannot think to give any creature anything!

Dawkins does not answer how reason could come to be in an atheistic worldview, but gives natural selection its own rational abilities whereby it could purposefully give reason to animals. This isn’t too far off from how theists argue God possessed reason from the beginning and bestowed it to us! Dawkins cannot help but assume that reason exists before rational creatures (because it does), which is the very viewpoint that Christians hold, but which no atheist can hold and be consistent with his/her worldview.

Now to back up to this question that Cody asks, “Why would we not, after all, trust the bile instead of the “thoughts” which our brains seem to secrete?” Stop and THINK about that question for a minute, Cody. Trusting bile is the same thing as trusting gods, golden idols, lucky rabbits’ feet, etc. You can make up your own mind and invent your own ideas about where you want to put your trust. You simply use your reasoning powers to choose to trust an imaginary friend of human invention. You are exhibiting just how irrational and flawed that reasoning can be in many humans. If a perfect god was the provider of human reasoning, there wouldn’t be so many dumbasses in the world.

Then please think about this statement you made, Cody…

Of course, this is beside the point because evolution cannot think to give any creature anything!

I am embarrassed for you, Cody. You are exhibiting your total lack of knowledge about evolution and how it works. Evolution is a process, not an imaginary supernatural entity like your god, Cody.

Ok folks, burp….Cody wants to hear from you atheists.

Bill Would Require Man’s OK For Abortion

COLUMBUS, Ohio — An Ohio lawmaker has introduced a bill that would prevent a woman from having an abortion unless she gets written consent from the biological father. The proposal by State Rep. John Adams, R-Sidney, has stirred up controversy across the nation, 10TV’s Kevin Landers reported. “What does the father have to say in the abortion of his child? He has nothing to say (under current law),” Adams told 10TV News. In the case where the father isn’t known, House Bill 252 would compel the woman to provide a list of names of people who may be the father in an effort to determine paternity. The bill also would make it a crime for women to lie about who the father is, and make it illegal for doctors to perform abortions without the father’s consent. The bill would force a woman to have a child if the father does not agree to an abortion. “That child should be born, not killed,” Adams said.

Oh yes, making the male responsible for the female’s body — the more things change, the more they stay the same…

“Hey, but it’s his child, too“…

“Child,” eh?…

You stay classy, Ohio…

Guys can be such fucking morons…

God gets His minions to do His dirty work:

Rats kill one baby, bite two toes off another

A baby attacked by rats bled to death in her Louisiana crib while an Ohio infant lost two toes to the vicious rodents in a pair of bizarre attacks. Three people were charged with child endangerment after authorities determined that the six-week-old Ohio baby had been bitten repeatedly by rodents “over a lengthy period of time,” the Pike County sheriff department said. But charges have not yet been filed in the case of the Louisiana child who bled to death last week from hundreds of rat bites, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported. The girl’s father was found screaming outside his home when paramedics arrived and her parents told police they did not hear the three-month-old cry out when she was attacked during her nap time. Neighbors told the Picayune that the children always appeared well-cared for and that the father had recently set out traps for the rats that plagued the area. A funeral was held Thursday.

Ah, God just SO loves those little babies…

I can learn such deep moral lessons from the way the world works, God…

Praise Be! Glory!…