Wednesday, December 17, 2008

United Nations working against atheism

Back in November, CNSNews.com posted a story about the United Nations (UN) drafting a resolution protecting Islam from discrimination. Here's a link to the article:

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=39915&print=on

Now National Public Radio (NPR.org) has reported that the UN will rubber stamp protections against criticism and mockery for religion in general.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98321049

The American Civil Liberties Union treats religion as an equal to atheism.

http://www.aclu.org/religion/govtfunding/index.html

Religion is always about making up quick, cheap excuses for parents who wanted to cover up their own stupidity when their children kept asking them questions about nature. From there, it just went out of control.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

The authority of Santa Claus


You better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I'm telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
Technically, Santa hasn't come to town yet, so as long as he's not around to see you, you're safe. What will happen when he comes to town is left to the imagination. What happens if you pouted before this warning, will you get a reprieve? If the punishment is retroactive it might not matter if you are good from this point forward anyway.

He's making a list,
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out Who's naughty and nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town

He's making a list, but here we see that someone is going to find out. Who exactly will find out who's naughty and nice? Will he have the list made already when he gets here? or is he coming to take a census of naughty and nice people?
He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
This verse indicates that he is the one who knows in advance of your behavior and will tell your parents per the second verse. Your parents are "gonna find out who's naughty and nice."

O! You better watch out!
You better not cry.
Better not pout, I'm telling you why.
Santa Claus is coming to town.
Santa Claus is coming to town.

In conclusion. Santa Claus came to town and told your parents about how you behaved.


Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Nativity scene erected in Illinois Capitol

SPRINGFIELD [Illinois] -- Organizers who put a Christian nativity scene inside the Illinois Capitol Tuesday say they want to see similar religious displays erected in government buildings across the nation.

Full Article at this link:
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2008/12/02/news/doc4935c0cec7821555015975.txt

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Princeton Scientists Discover Proteins that Control Evolution

An article you absolutely must read. Here are some excerpts:

"Princeton scientists investigating a group of proteins that help cells burn energy stumbled across evidence that this is not how evolution works."

"proteins were correcting any imbalance imposed on them through artificial mutations, constantly restoring the chain to working order. A mathematical analysis revealed that these proteins seem to make these minute corrections all the time, steering organisms toward evolutionary changes that make the creature fitter."

"Their work seems to confirm ideas held by Darwin's colleague Alfred Wallace, who co-discovered the theory of evolution."

http://io9.com/5083673/princeton-scientists-discover-proteins-that-control-evolution

Monday, November 24, 2008

Dreams and the Rules of Reality

There are an awful lot of people out there who believe their dreams have meanings. Here's what dreams are: Brain chemistry.

Your brain produces chemicals that allow you to interpret and recognize the things you see every day. You respond to stimuli with a combination of various emotions.

The parts of your brain that didn't fire synaptic neurotransmitters while you awake still need to do so.

During sleep, your body normally becomes mildly paralyzed so you don't flail around. There are many non-obstructive sleep disorders that involve the inability to be still while you sleep (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_disorder)

Then the odd chemistry released triggers emotional responses to stimuli that does not exist. It's still interpreted as stimuli so you think you are actually doing things.

The things you experience in dreams are often physically impossible or utterly absurd because the chemicals released during the day do so at the mercy of the rules of reality, but at night, any combination of chemistry is released.

Like cartoon characters versus characters photographed or filmed, the rules of reality do not apply to dreams. You get to fly, time has no meaning, people who should be thousands of miles apart are together, and so on.

Dreams can be interpreted to the degree that persistence of a particular emotion while dreaming can lead to an area of the brain that is having difficulty due to a tumor, clot, aneurysm or other illness.

I often have dreams of being in a huge house that has rooms, stairs, hallways, and even landscaping from several different homes that I actually visited.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Authority and the Supernatural

Ghosts, If you believe in ghosts, you have simply made anthropomorphic attributions to your optical illusions or hallucinations.

Unexplainable phenomena usually turn out to be caused by pets turning over trash cans, forgetting to do things and thinking you did those things, or doing things and not thinking about them only to find to your surprise that things were done or undone.

Other inexplicable events occur as a result of optical, auditory, or olfactory illusions or hallucinations. When I have free time I'd like to research the boundaries between illusions and hallucinations in the field of vision.

Illusions are created by the limitations and fallibility of our physical perception structure, while hallucinations are the product of incoming stimulus and our cognitive construct whether that be neurological development or conditioning and learning, but usually a combination.

If the authorities can't directly use the threat of "believe or die," they can use junk science and speculation that lends credence to the supernatural.

Faked photographs of ghosts, photographs with optical illusions in them that easily mislead the gullible and videotape of an aircraft or military aerial flairs are some of the culprits that mislead a very large constituency of fools.

As a veteran I've been in combat training exercises and taught to recognize things hurtling through the air, even at night. But, I also learned astronomy growing up, and I had to explain to some of my shipmates standing lookout, that the U.F.O. they thought they were seeing was actually the planet Venus.

On television years later, I saw videotape of aerial flairs that were accidentally launched over a town in Arizona or New Mexico, and the narrator expressing shock and fear, speculating about alien aircraft.

Magic is the best way to keep people somewhat fearful of the world around them, and even more terrified of the unknown.

I keep saying "the authorities," in this case I'm talking about those who are capable of broadcasting deceptive messages to millions of viewers and/or listeners. As long as there are people who insist they had experiences with ghosts, they can still be influenced by religious or spiritual authority of some kind.

People have related to me in the past that they and at least one other witness experienced some sort of ghostly phenomenon. The witness is usually someone who won't disagree, but will play along to maintain a friendship. Or they could be organizations who wish to gather together and profit from hallucinators.

People should be ashamed of themselves for playing along and contributing to the perpetuity of someone's hallucinations. To that end, so too should be ashamed, the Unitarians and the Bahai.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Marriage Part II: Double Standard



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PokR1GQ0zJo

Also consider the role marriage plays triggering this kind of behavior.

Friday, October 31, 2008

Marriage

Marriage is a religious institution. Therefore any regulation, privilege or penalty mandated by any branch of the U.S. Government regarding marriage is a violation of the First Amendment.

Any private industry that bestows privileges or penalties on a person because of marital status should be required by law to disclose such treatment to their customers.

Since marriage is a religious institution, any government mandating treatment of its citizens differently because of marital status can only be referred to as a theocracy and not a democracy.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Atheist Censored from Facebook


Facebook kicked me off and didn't explain why, so I'm just going to assume that it was for censorship reasons. I didn't go trolling for people who didn't ask to be friends and the only thing anyone would find offensive would be the truth. I'm college educated so I don't need to use vulgar expletives or name-calling.

We must do what we can to keep getting the word out, but you might be wasting your time on Facebook.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Where have I been?

I haven't been posting here much because I've been focusing on my Facebook and MySpace accounts. The network continues to grow and there are new friends every day, some with hundreds of other friends of their own on MySpace or Facebook.

On the creative front we have a growing list of comedians, artists, filmmakers and animators who bring out the full flavor of truth and irony.

I've been very busy at work, but the machine of the Atheist Insurgency is chugging along. Everyone has plenty to say about religion on MySpace and Facebook.

Oh, and don't miss Bill Maher's "RELIGULOUS"

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Church to make posthumous apology to Charles Darwin

Well, it's been a long time. The article also mentions a little something about Galileo too. You'll just have to read it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/2958018/Church-to-make-posthumous-apology-to-Charles-Darwin.html

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Website updates

I made some changes to my website. I'm getting quite blunt with my perspective. I said some things that some people may take offense to, but that doesn't mean that I have no respect to alternative lifestyles.

The truth is that sexuality is as Masters and Johnson discovered. A scale of propensity for attraction subdivided into seven categories of attraction between heterosexuality and homosexuality.

The scale for is fluid. It just depends on the situation, but in the end it boils down to simple gratification. "Come on and Do it! Do it 'til your satisfied!"

Sunday, August 10, 2008

The Greatest Story Ever Told

I don't know if you saw this already, but it's a nice tidy summary of religion presented at YouTube in three parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koK1z1YnBIQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFQlV6pdJ78
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_82kd0UAYHA

PART I


PART II


PART III


... AND THERE'S YOUR RELIGION.

Monday, July 14, 2008

MSNBC.COM: 86 secular Turks charged in alleged coup plot

Turkey needs help returning to reason

ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANKARA, Turkey - Prosecutors indicted 86 hardline secular Turks Monday on terrorism charges for their alleged involvement in plots to topple the Islamic-rooted government, a chief prosecutor said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25670277/

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Leaps of Faith and Jumping to Conclusions

I started loading up my groceries on the belt behind the little plastic divider. A salad from the deli, four bottles of salad dressing, two boxes of crackers, a bottle of ketchup, orange juice, and a box of chocolate covered cream-filled doughnuts.

I bought vegetables a couple of days prior. I began to wonder what the woman in front of me thought of my strange collection of dressings, crackers and doughnuts. I wondered if she would draw a simple conclusion about me based on what I purchased.

The thought of her or anyone jumping to conclusions made me think about the phrase “leap of faith.” There is little difference between the two, except that people are usually asked to make leaps of faith. Jumping to conclusion appears to be automatic.

I began to wonder if jumping to conclusions is neurological or psychological. Most of the time we take the easy path and learn from our mistakes, or we can choose to spend extra time deciding which path to take, and lessen the frequency of our mistakes.

How many times were we told things, then we asked “why?” and the response was “because I said so?”

My parents were the children of the great Depression. Up until 1967 or so, parents were the “because I told you so” generation. They felt they didn’t have to explain anything because of their overriding authority. “Honor thy father” and what-not. But they couldn’t understand why their children ignored them, hated them, or ran away from home.

They were the parents that were raised in tight-knit communities surrounding the local church as the center of decision-making. They were taught never to question, for fear of something bad happening.

Originally, that “something bad” was being burned at the stake. The actual punishments have faded over the centuries, but the tertium-quid emotional responses were carried forward to condition future generations. This is a product of process fluency, and operant conditioning. The best example of which can found in the book “World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men” by Rebecca Lemov.

So, we jump to conclusions and make leaps of faith.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Democratic Social Engineering

What follows should floor you.

It is totally blowing my mind:

Excerpt from William Graebner’s book The Engineering of Consent: Democracy and Authority in Twentieth Century America, pages 9 and 10.


Convinced that morality and religion could no longer serve as the foundation for a stable and productive social order, the founding fathers institutionalized democratic authority. The doctrine of consent was thus politicized - transferred to the arena of politics and stripped of religious meaning. As the nineteenth century wore on, more and more Americans would give their consent by voting for their representative.

Yet this democratization of authority was carried out with great caution. Fearful of majority rule, the founding fathers decentralized power, placing it in the states rather than the national government. A system of checks and balances ensured that the whims of the majority would have to run a gauntlet of Senate, president, and judiciary before having the force of law. To buttress this written Constitution, James Madison developed a theory of "factions" that advocated the dispersion of power over a wide geographical area in order to prevent conglomerations of influence inimical to order and stability.

The problem, as Sheldon Wolin has put it, "was to secure a steady and continuous flow of legitimacy from the people without promoting steady and continuous interference by the people.

" In the nineteenth century democratic state, this was accomplished through John Locke's "thin theory of legitimacy." Under Locke's theory, the people granted their consent to government only in periodic elections while at the same time- in the same act - relinquishing control of administrative and decision-making functions. Superior, perhaps, to Thomas Hobbes's notion that consent could be given by "a single act of consent registered in one moment of time," Locke's idea of legitimacy nonetheless did not allow for extensive citizen participation in the workings of government.

Yet there was something radical in the very idea of consent, for once its theoretical legitimacy had been granted it was difficult to circumscribe its applications. If consent by the vote was essential to political legitimacy, why might not other forms of consent -administrative consent, for example -also be justifiable? Similarly, if voting was so vital, then perhaps all persons-women, blacks, and the poor as well as white males with property -should have the suffrage." In short, the logic of consent led to wholly new realms of consent and, therefore, to efforts to coopt or contain that consent.

The late-nineteenth-century emergence of democratic social engineering might, on the one hand, be understood as the working out of this "logic of consent" or, on the other hand, as an effort to locate authority outside the more threatening sphere of democratic politics. In any event, democratic social engineering involved, in part, a two-stage historical process through which the device of political consent was applied in new and nonpolitical spheres. In the first stage, the doctrine of consent was applied to the larger entity of "society"; that is, society itself was conceptualized as the critical mechanism of order and stability. In the second stage, the locus of consent was shifted from society to the family and other small groups, social microcosms that functioned, in a way, as surrogates for the whole society.

Although this transfer of authority to the social realm would take place with dramatic speed in the late nineteenth century, the idea of an essentially nonpolitical, social authority had been understood for some time. Within political philosophy, Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jeremy Bentham had all argued that society could be understood as distinct from political arrangements and yet be invested with an effective authority.

Opinion, reputation, private groups- these forms of society, for Locke, were the stuff of authority; rather than risk disapproval, people would conform. Rousseau's contribution was in part to develop the Lockean notion of social authority into a principle of openness. In Rousseau's ideal society, every act would be viable and open to scrutiny. Transgressors would not be punished but prevented from wrongdoing by an overarching, social system of observation.


This book is like "taking the red pill." to use a metaphor from The Matrix.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Letting your emotions get in the way

When you let your emotions get in the way, did you believe the story that Muqtada al-Sadr was in league with Iran?

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Human Decency is Natural

When I see televangelists preach, they almost have me convinced that I need to sit within their aura to maintain my moral ground. If I am almost convinced, it means there are a lot of people out there who must believe in a "moral flat earth" with a very small circumference.

On CNN recently there was a question posed by one of their Personalities; "Do you think atheists are morally bankrupt because they have no beliefs?" This appears to be a convention that journalists need to maintain their inventory of material for publishing. For them, everything must be a conflict, or there's just no story.

I found that human empathy is genetically predisposed in the majority of us. We have what scientists call “mirror neurons.” We can almost feel what other people are experiencing. That’s how we learn to do things, and learn to respect the feelings of others as a basic survival skill.

Most of us grow out of our selfishness eventually, we can be taught to respect others before we naturally develop the skill through trial and error, but we don’t have to be told we will spend an eternity in searing flames if we do ill toward others.

Atheism enhances the perceived value of life and the need to respect the feelings of others because there is no justice in an afterlife, no afterlife, and no invisible shield of protection by a deity through life.

Most of us are not born with fear or hate. We are not born into sin. There is no evil inheritance called "the sins of the father" unless you prefer to judge a person by the behavior of his or her parents.

The trick of the Bible is the blending of what is alleged to be history with magic. Believers like to toss around the words "truth" and "Bible" in the same breath, I would have preferred "X-Men" and "truth," but we can't always get what we want.

El Ron Hubbard blended psychology with scientology to create the book Dianetics. It's not a stretch to assume that he was writing a critical satire of the Bible, too bad for those whacko scientologists who took it literally.

Just remember that decency, respect, and empathy are a part of human nature, and that separatism, superiority, or righteous thinking is a learned trait that creates fear and hate.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

GroupThink

Religion is all important for maintaining barriers between groups of people. The study of GroupThink is very important for understanding cults and religion. Browse the links below and you begin to uderstand the infrastructure of religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

http://www.cedu.niu.edu/~fulmer/groupthink.htm

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_12_02_a_snl.htm

http://www.psysr.org/groupthink%20overview.htm

Monday, January 28, 2008

A Warning to Temporary Employees in the state of Illinois

In Illinois, if you are a temporary employee with an agency like X Personnel Service and you are assigned to work at say, a large insurance company, you can be harassed for your beliefs (or especially the lack of beliefs) by Insurance Company employees with impunity, and even have your temp assignment terminated because of your beliefs.

They can simply say you were "too slow" and "had a bad attitude" never having directly confronted you with any issues.

But, because you are NOT actually employed by the insurance company, but by X Personnel Service, the Illinois Human Rights Commission cannot do anything for you because you were not technically directly an employee of those who harassed you and caused you financial injury by having your assignment terminated.

They call it a "Juristdictional Issue."