The Times Are Changing

Scientists say survival of the Kindest…not the Fittest.
Scientists at UC Berkeley are saying that we humans are not necessarily hardwired to be selfish, but kind and compassionate, and they have a growing body of evidence to back it up…we are evolving

 Fundamentalists Starting To Agree With Me…No Adam and Eve
“Let’s go back to the beginning — all the way to Adam and Eve, and to the question: Did they exist, and did all of humanity descend from that single pair?

But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.””

Hey, doesn’t the Venema guy have some connection to the BioLogos Christian blog?

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The Rapture on May 21st.

Have you kind people been preparing for the Rapture?  Have you told all your relatives and friends to not fly or take a road trip on this coming Saturday, May 21^st.?  Have you made arrangements for some pagan to come and care for your pet dog or cat or whatever?

I’ve been trying to get some rapture believers to sign over the deeds on their houses and any prime real estate they own, but have been so far unable to persuade them that they should.  I suspect/think they really don’t believe the rapture will happen. Imagine that…doubting their own prophecies.

So far I have put up new sandbags around the old bomb shelter, restocked 50cal. Ammo for the machine guns, laid in a year’s worth of food and water and first aid supplies, finally picked up that short wave radio and put in the burglar alarm system I have been procrastinating about.  The neighbors are looking at me kind of funny lately…I don’t know why.  NOT  🙂

I hear that there are thousands of “Rapture Parties” planned all across America…personally I think this is the appropriate response to this really stupid display of how ignorant much of the American Christian community is.  Men and women of the Christian persuasion have been predicting the “end times” for 2000 years now and all of us pagans get to laugh at them when the date just flies by with not a burp or bump to signify anything.  Hell, even Jesus himself predicted the end of the world in his own time…just shows you how much that supposed Man/God knows.

Well if you look at the Christian record of things they have been pretty bad prognosticators about much of what they believe in.  They can’t seem to come up with any real evidence to back up most their claims about God and Jesus and end times. They revere a 1700 year old book like it is the be all and end all of human existence…totally ignoring what we have learned in those 1700 years as humans.

One of the Christians champion debaters (W.L. Craig) has recently said it is alright to kill children if “God tells you too.”  They believe that it’s O.K. to kill people for things the Bible rails against such as: disrespect to parents, mixing crops in a field, mixing two different fabrics together,  adultery, homosexuality, masturbation…hell,  just about anything to do with sex, except married couples in a missionary position.

The believers are hoping that come May 21^st. they will be looking down from heaven at us poor souls and laughing their heads off…I suspect I will be looking at those poor silly confused people…laughing MY head off come that day
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If Pregnant Don’t Go To A Catholic Hospital

“Would you ask someone else to die for your religious beliefs? A new proposal moving through Congress makes clear that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops apparently expects everyone to die for theirs. The same members of Congress who last week attempted to dial back the definition of rape to the nineteenth century now propose another change to federal law that is just as shocking: in a move long sought by the political arm of the Catholic clergy, hospitals would be permitted to refuse to treat women with life-threatening emergencies.”  Nancy Northup/HuffPo

If your pregnant and are having problems with your pregnancy, do not, under any circumstances, go to a Catholic hospital.  If you are the husband of a pregnant woman having problems, do not take her to a Catholic hospital.

And:

Last week Sierra Vista Hospital, in rural Southeast Arizona, abandoned its affiliation with the Catholic Carondelet Health Systems. One year into a 2-year trial period, reality apparently hit home. The hospital board could no longer ignore daily picketing by concerned citizens, growing discontent of physicians barred from delivering high quality medical care and mounting evidence that strict doctrinal enforcement undermines a community’s trust in its medical provider.
Barbara Coombs/HuffPo

It needs to be said again; if pregnant and having problems with that pregnancy…do not, under any circumstances, check into a Catholic hospital.  They dispense their medical care by reference to the Catholic Dogma…and the mother is a very second class person in case of problems.  Just like in the Church, the woman doesn’t count.

Remember, to the Catholics it’s Church dogma over Science and womanhood.
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Jesus Was/Is A Myth

If one follows the many earth sciences closely enough you are presented with facts that if followed deeply enough and cogitated about long enough, reveals to you that all is not as it seems.

For example, science tells us that actual humans (Homo-sapiens…us), have walked the earth for near 200,000+-  years. Among scientists this is pretty much an un-disputed fact, Other, almost humans, walked the earth for several million years…some modern day European and Asian people have actual DNA from some of these ancient ancestors, meaning there was inter-breeding and viable, fertile offspring.

DNA and the old bones are telling this story…this is indisputable, non-judgmental,   unbiased science that is narrating the story of our ancestors life, not a book written by goat-herders–millions of years after the real beginning of the tale.

All of the above, and more, leads us to the necessity to re-examine and measure many old tall tales that have been passed off as truth to billions of people…namely the Biblical myths of our earthly Genesis.  Moses nowadays is thought to be pretty much a mythical figure.  His “contribution” to the Bible (The Pentateuch) is probably a product of earnest Jewish scholars of the sixth or seventh century BC …long after the reputed time of Moses…trying to keep a tribe together

We know that the essential stories of Genesis…Adam/Eve, Noah, dispersion of language, slavery of the Hebrews in Egypt, Exodus, exploits of Joshua, etc. are mythical or allegorical tales.  Some people may think this is not a big deal, but some cogitation on the subject proves otherwise.  In fact if these stories are not true, the consequences ricochet through time…to the story of Jesus, and then go even greater lengths to prove the whole chapter–maybe the whole book–is only myth.

Follow this: there was no Adam/Eve as portrayed in the Bible. The Bible gives clues that much of civilization and early technology was miraculously “there” almost as soon as the story got going. This irrevocably puts the stories into the fifth or sixth millennia BC…a time that is extremely well researched and known about by our earth sciences.  The bone evidence and DNA evidence agree in their respective branches that there was never a time when our ancestors only numbered 2 in the case of Adam/Eve, and further out, the 6 mythical procreating members of the mythical Noah’s Ark.

As stated above man/womankind has walked the earth for 200,000 +- years…there was never an Adam/Eve couple six or eight or ten or fifty thousand years ago.  No Adam and Eve mean no “Original Sin” which irrevocably means there was no need for a Jesus to die as “blood atonement” for non-existent sins.  If you think about it God said, before Paul invented Original Sin, that children are not guilty of the sins of the father. Also the blood atonement think is kind of stupid…it’s nothing but theater, a contrivance to batten up a weak plot line.

With that thought in mind we go to some thoughts of people who are, or were, in the front lines of scholarship in matters of the Christian religion.

“It is important to recognize the obvious: The gospel story of Jesus is itself apparently mythic from first to last”…Robert M. Price, professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute

“We can recreate dimensions of the world in which he lived, but outside of the Christian scriptures, we cannot locate him historically within that world”…Gerald A. Larue, The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You to Read.

“The question must also be raised as to whether we have the actual words of Jesus in any Gospel” …Bishop John Shelby Spong.

“According to the declaration of the Second Vatican Council, a faithful account of the actions and words of Jesus is to be found in the Gospels; but it is impossible to reconcile this with the existence in the text of contradictions, improbabilities, things which are materially impossible or statements which run contrary to firmly established reality”…Maurice Bucaille, The Bible The Quran And Science

“Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it”…C. Dennis McKinsey, Bible critic, The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy

“Even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn’t one anymore. All attempts to recover him turn out to be just modern re-mythologizing of Jesus. Every “historical Jesus” is a Christ of faith, of somebody’s faith. So the “historical Jesus” of modern scholarship is no less a fiction”…Robert M. Price, Jesus: Fact or Fiction

“So unreliable were the Gospel accounts that “we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus”…Rudolf Bultmann, University of Marburg

So Prof. Bultmann is saying that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are unreliable, so bad that we can’t be sure about Jesus. Just how much faith can we put in the Gospels?  Let’s see what some other scholars believe…

“We know virtually nothing about the persons who wrote the gospels we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”…Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, The Gnostic Gospels.

“All four gospels are anonymous texts. The familiar attributions of the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from the mid-second century and later and we have no good historical reason to accept these attributions”…Steve Mason, professor of classics, history and religious studies at York University.

“The gospels are so anonymous that their titles, all second-century guesses, are all four wrong”…Randel M. Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels?

“But even if it could be proved that John’s Gospel had been the first of the four to be written down, there would still be considerable confusion as to who “John” was. For the various styles of the New Testament texts ascribed to John- The Gospel, the letters, and the Book of Revelations– are each so different in their style that it is extremely unlikely that they had been written by one person”…John Romer, archeologist & Bible scholar, Testament.

“Paul did not write the letters to Timothy to Titus or several others published under his name; and it is unlikely that the apostles Matthew, James, Jude, Peter and John had anything to do with the canonical books ascribed to them”…Michael D. Coogan, Professor of religious studies at Stonehill College.

“Yet today, there are few Biblical scholars– from liberal skeptics to conservative evangelicals- who believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually wrote the Gospels. Nowhere do the writers of the texts identify themselves by name or claim unambiguously to have known or traveled with Jesus”… Jeffery L. Sheler, The Four Gospels

“The bottom line is we really don’t know for sure who wrote the Gospels”…Jerome Neyrey, Weston School of Theology, Cambridge, Mass.

“The world has been for a long time engaged in writing lives of Jesus… The library of such books has grown since then. But when we come to examine them, one startling fact confronts us: all of these books relate to a personage concerning whom there does not exist a single scrap of contemporary information — not one! By accepted tradition he was born in the reign of Augustus, the great literary age of the nation of which he was a subject. In the Augustan age historians flourished; poets, orators, critics and travelers abounded. Yet not one mentions the name of Jesus Christ, much less any incident in his life”…Moncure D. Conway, Modern Thought

Some really bad press for a few people from the Christian religion. They keep saying there is all this evidence that their religion is the true one.  I’m wondering where it is.

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Religion Takes Over House of Reps.

Well congratulations to the evangelical fundamentalist Christians, they have apparently taken over the House of Representatives…I can see lots of religiously inspired legislation heading our way again.  Maybe the Democrat controlled Senate will be able to tone them down some.

The Republican party needs to change their name to the “Fundamentalist Religion Party”.

At least Christine O’Donnell lost in Delaware, so those folks inclined to masturbate can breath a sigh of relief…federal SS troops won’t be going after them anytime soon.

I can see federal funding for “abstinence only” training starting up again.
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California Universities VS Religious Schools

Hey guys, do you remember a few years ago I wrote a post about some Christian fundamentalist schools suing the State of California’s university system for denying entrance to those Christian students because the High Schools science programs were bogus and taught “Creation science” instead of real science?

Well the California universities won their case, but the Christian schools appealed and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court.  On October 12^th of this year the Supreme Court refused to review the case, thus effectively ending the Christian schools suit, thereby denying students of Christian schools, whose curriculum teaches that magic was used to create stuff in this world, access to universities run by the state.

Those darn religious fundamentalists just keep up their crazy attempts to ride roughshod over real truths.  They keep trying to replace sanity and logic with religious dogma, and so far we have been lucky enough to have intelligent people see what is going on…and stop it.
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End of the Monsoon Season

Gathering Monsoon clouds over the mountains.
Our Monsoon season ended here this past week and we are finally getting some cooler, dryer atmosphere again. Pretty good one this past year;  it lasted a few weeks longer than usual.  Monsoon is pretty important to Southern Arizona as we depend on it filling up our ground water reservoirs for another year, and cooling off those 100 degree plus days of our summer.

We returned from a conference at the Mayo clinic in Scottsdale, AZ not long ago and  thoroughly enjoyed it.  The weather was great and there was finally a (very small) hint of fall in the air .  Phoenix and the surrounding cities of Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe, Peoria, and whatever other burgs there are snuggling up against it makes a humongous metropolitan area now.  It has grown like  Los Angeles did in its early years…city after city incorporating and blending in with the surrounding cities. Writer Edward Abbey has called it “the blob that is eating Arizona,”  Population of the whole area is said to be close to 5 million now; and it is the fifth largest city in the US, and the second fastest-growing Metro area in the US…..Glad I don’t live there.

Weather I’m waiting for.
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Atheists are Smart :-)

A new Pew Forum poll on religion in America has found that Atheists/agnostics, Jews, and Mormons…in that order…know the most about religion. We out-did Protestants and Roman Catholics in knowledge about major religions and the basic knowledge and tenets of their own religion.

Forty five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Holy Communion becomes the actual body and blood of Jesus. Catholics call it transubstantiation.  If this were a real phenomenon it would be magic.  We should all know by now…there is no magic…never was.

Less than fifty percent of Protestants knew that the Catholic priest and theologian, Martin Luther, was the person who started the Protestants Reformation which led to their own faith.

You can read all about it HERE

They could have just asked me or the hundreds (maybe thousands) of other atheists who have sites on the internet and we could have told them this. Although I do get many very smart religious folks commenting here, the majority do not know much about their own religions.  Most Christians who reply are using very outdated apologetics; the same refuted, many times over, answers put forth as proofs of their sects.
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The Problem With Religious Morality

“The problem with religious morality is that it often causes people to care about the wrong things, leading them to make choices that needlessly perpetuate human suffering. Consider the Catholic Church: This is an institution that excommunicates women who want to become priests, but it does not excommunicate male priests who rape children. The Church is more concerned about stopping contraception than stopping genocide. It is more worried about gay marriage than about nuclear proliferation. When we realize that morality relates to questions of human and animal well-being, we can see that the Catholic Church is as confused about morality as it is about cosmology. It is not offering an alternative moral framework; it is offering a false one.” Sam Harris

I just have to say it again…how is it that the Catholic Church survives?  It is clearly immoral and unable to absolve anyone of their sins because of their own unresolved sinfulness. They care more about their dogma than the sustainability of our earth, and the health of it’s inhabitants.

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Logical Religion

Among all the religions that have contradictory Gods…only One or None can be right.  It is just as likely that none are right or that some other god with entirely different characteristics or that multiple gods with different characteristics exists. We have no irrefutable proofs of any kind that any proposed god exists.  All we have (or have ever had) is personal anecdotal attestations of belief.  As far as the Abrahamic religions go, two thirds of the world doesn’t think this  God exists.

Muslims believe in a god who is utterly transcendent, non-anthropomorphic, and to whom we humans are required to submit in total obedience.  The Christian god, however is partially transcendent, three persons in one, anthropomorphic, and whom we are supposed to show love.  The Jewish God is less transcendent, has a special role for the Jewish tribes, and they are singled out from all of humanity.  The Hindu God or gods are so alien to my Western way of thought that I can’t even go there yet.

All religions except possibly some small sects in India do not account for all the proven hundreds of thousands of years man has been on earth. Most all Jews, Christians and Muslims (the Abrahamic religions) believe life began on earth 10,000 years ago, or less, and this is despite all the fundamentalists’ claims provably false.  Some of the Christian denominations of late are recognizing that science is actually right on the long ages, and evolution and accepting this, but have so-far not fully integrated these facts into their dogma.  If you are a fundamentalist; Where do you think this god was for 190,000 +- years?

How is it rational for anyone to believe in something with logically contradictory characteristics?  It is not rational to believe in something that is defined one way…when the alleged same thing is defined in a different way down the street in another Temple/Church/Synagogue.

Christians maintain that serving their God is what gives them purpose and that all their morality comes from this God, seemingly disregarding the fact that billions of other people can find purpose to living and loving and can act with morality, all without belief in a transcendent being.

Albert Einstein denied the existence of the traditional monotheistic God and refused to believe that said God could even be moral if He and the religionist’s claims about Him were true.  If this God was omniscient and omnipresent as Christianity claims, He would be ultimately responsible for all of the suffering of humanity down through the ages.  Gods that reflect human frailty are not moral or real gods.

Some Christian sects/denominations define God as being so powerful that free-will is nonexistent, that who we are and what we do is entirely up to Gods interference.  Others will define god as one who gives us tremendous freedoms/free-will and hardly ever, or never, interferes.

A person looking at all these differences would be justified in just staying away from all of them.  After all only one or none of them could possibly be right, and us mere humans could not possibly pick the right one…if there even was a right one.

“While 40 million people died of starvation in the last decade, churches spent $10 billion on campuses.” Steve McSwain
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