This is a week old, but I haven’t gotten around to it. It doesn’t feel entirely necessary to document every stupid thing uttered by the Christian right because there are so many and it’s too easy to take them on, like shooting Jesus fish in a barrel. Ha ha – is that original? Checking, no: …
Dan Savage is fighting the good fight. This can’t be said often enough. It’s not fundamentalism that’s the problem, it’s selective fundamentalism. If people were required to follow every law of the Bible, they’d stop being religious. The Old Testament is germane. Anti-gay Christian hypocrites—and not all Christians are anti-gay; not all Christians are hypocrites—are …
Finally saw “Religulous,” which is streaming on Netflix. Maher spends a lot of time arguing with people not worth arguing with. Believers who aren’t going to respond at all to facts – it’s like telling a kid there’s no Santa Claus. Worse, because the kid might actually believe you, but the adults will find any …
This just gets crazier, and more entertaining… (via)
Stanhope can be an asshole, but he’s basically right. If people truly believed in heaven, they’d welcome death – rather than merely use it as a way to feel better when someone dies. Imagine how many murders and suicides there’d be if we knew with 100% certainty that heaven was real. Who would choose life …
This video isn’t entirely necessary to watch in full, but irritated me as I watched it last night. Bible thumper comes on and says that homosexuality is against the word of God. Elliot Spitzer is very careful, saying things like “I respect your beliefs” but never addressing the obvious: the Bible says that adulterers should …
This won’t end well: Study suggests ‘born-again’ believers have smaller brains – The study, which examined the hippocampus region of the brain, found that Protestants who did not have a “born again” experience had significantly more gray matter than either those who reported a life-changing religious experience, Catholics, or unaffiliated older adults. The study, funded …
Nice documentary, though at times too nice, as the narrator (who made “Trekkies”) is a kind of anti-Bill Maher. His takeaway is that we’re all very similar searching for the same thing. Though it’s a portrait of how colorful the world is, this cynic’s interpretation is how weird it is that so many people believe …
via the Daily Grail: German ‘thought car’ could be driven on Sabbath, Rabbi says Rabbi Dror Fixler, an electro-optics expert from Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, told The Local that the distinction between thought and action could mean that driving on the traditional Jewish day of rest was mutar, or permitted. In October, scientists …
Very fascinating. If you watch anything, watch Hitchens’ opening remarks. Tony Blair’s main idea is that religions do good charitable work – but so do legions of non-faith-based organizations. You don’t need religion to care for the poor. It’s not as though if Jesus didn’t exist to serve as an example, we’d spend all our …