Jesus fixed my hard drive..

Here's an amusing little story for a cloudy Wednesday morning, the Australian chap in the picture above is Jesus, yes the real Jesus of Nazareth! Former IT specialist Alan John Miller, or "AJ" as he prefers to be known, runs a Christian cult known as the Divine Truth from his home near the small town of Kingaroy in the state of Queensland, Australia and claims to be Jesus reincarnated. I watched his video and he seems to be sincere enough, lots of talk of love and human solidarity (especially "love", if you know what I mean), references to Bible characters and insider anecdotes about things like who was at the crucifixion and performing miracles; I guess no one can prove him wrong. He also claims to have visited the "spirit world" and talked to Plato and Socrates, personally I would have gone for Darwin and Alexander the great but "AJ" is clearly a dedicated Brazilian football fan.

For me, what's more amusing than this all too familiar cultist in-group, out-group mind trick is the huffing and puffing going on in blogs and news articles from Christians demanding "proof" that this person is in fact Jesus reincarnated, don't they understand, it's not about proof, it's about faith... After all, the only difference between a cult and a religion is that in a religion the person who knows its all a scam is dead.

Tipping points

Practically every interview I've seen of survivors of the recent tornado in Oklahoma have mentioned their "God" at some point in the dialogue, it doesn't bother me in the slightest of course however I must confess after a while it does sound a little contrived to my ears, perhaps it's the accent. BUT, never mind all that, here's something refreshing and something you don't see everyday, a regular person in mid-western America happy to let the world know that they are an atheist ON TV!. The woman in this interview was asked a completely dumb insensitive question by this facile TV presenter, he asked if she had "thanked the lord" (presumably for being spared), she replied, " no, because I'm an atheist" - good on'ya lady! Significant for two reasons, firstly it shows that belief in Yahweh or any other Deity has sweet FA to do with whether your house collapses on your head and secondly LOOK AMERICA a perfectly decent and nice person with a cute baby (not being eaten) who survives F5 tornadoes and doesn't need Jayzus to be her personal savior.

Although when you think about it the more interesting question for the followers of Jayzus in Oklahoma is why did he send the tornado to kill an innocent bunch of school children in the first place?... or maybe they're all just all praying to the wrong God?

Right direction

Released today here are the results of the 2011 census in the section about religion, Christians down 12%, Muslims up 2% and atheists up 10%, it would be easy to extrapolate the trend and calculate the year when Muslims will outnumber Christians as the largest religious group in England and Wales although I'm sure it won't be that simple, certainly not if the Daily Mail get wind of it.

Optical Illusion

Oh we humans are so easily deceived..

Human misery

In the many strata of human scum in our world there must be a particularly viscous layer reserved for clairvoyants who profit from the grief of others, particularly of the TV celebrity kind.

In the US today we learn of the discovery of three incredibly unfortunate and brave women who endured 10 years of captivity in what sounds like the hands of inhuman criminals for what purpose we can only imagine in our worst nightmares. This is bad enough but what shouldn't be forgotten is the message (supposedly from the "other side") given to the Mother of one of these women just before she died by a fraudulent old hag called Sylvia Brown, a so called TV clairvoyant who told her that her daughter was dead. Where ever Sylvia Brown is today (in jail with any luck) I hope she is feeling the deep shame she deserves.

PS. This isn't a picture of Sylvia Brown but I wanted a suitable image of a clairvoyant so I laid out several pictures of well known woo woo practitioners, closed my eyes and concentrated hard on a mental image of a fresh steaming turd; once the image was clear I let my hand be guided by my spirit helper (Pinocchio) to a particular photo and the star spangled image of Sally Morgan rose up from the pile.

Cryptozoology

I learnt a new word today, Cryptozoology, apparently it means the study of "hidden" animals, like the Loch-Ness monster, Abominable Snowmen or Bigfoot etc. I'm a firm believer in such creatures, it would be so cool if they existed that I don't want to handle the intellectual and emotional disappointment if it were shown they don't, so clearly they do! Fortunately you don't just need to take my word for it, we see the evidence of crypto-creatures all around us, you just need to have an open mind. Take the picture accidentally snapped by the Google street view camera for example (above), it clearly shows an entirely unknown (to science) species of cat! Those pedantic scientists don't know everything you know, after all, what's the point of human existence if you can't make stuff up and convince other people to believe it too, the endorphin rush that I get by feeling part of an in-group is so.. social, I'm not a whole person without it.

There are plenty of us around who feel this way, take the Christians who teach the ACE (Accelerated Christian Education) curriculum to children. As they point out, evolution can't be true since the Loch Ness monster exists and as for those whining secularists who nit-pick about "evidence" they're just not seeing the big picture, after all, it's only a few thousand kids we're talking about so what does it matter if they don't get a decent education, we need uncritical thinkers to host chat shows and write newspaper columns. The British Government even support such open-mindedness by providing positive OFSTED reports and limited funding to at least 5 ACE schools in Britain, Carmel Christian School, Bristol along with Excellence Christian School, Tower Hamlets, Redemption Academy, Stevenage, Kings Kids Christian School, New Cross, and The Lambs Christian School, Birmingham so it must be right?

Obvious solutions

Here is a horrific story, a five year old boy in Kentucky, USA was given (as a gift) a real gun; he then promptly shot his 2 year old sister dead.

Clearly the solution to this problem, as recommended by the pro-gun lobby in the USA, is to buy guns for ALL your children at the same time.

Heaven and Hell... the board game

Looks like the right place for such ideas to me and as usual this spiky but funny concept comes from Crispian Jago

Click the image to see a full sized view.

Frequency of miracles

Obvious really...

Undesirable side-effects of faith

Faith, or in other words believing things without evidence or against all evidence often leads otherwise intelligent people to do really strange and sometimes insanely inhumane things. Take these 4 morons in Chile for example, they belonged to some kind of quasi-religious personality cult and believed in their own imaginary crap (grounded in Bible crap) so intently that they took a young baby they believed to be the anti-Christ and burnt her alive. The interesting part of this story for me was nothing to do with the pathetic actions of the feeble minded end-timers themselves but the fact that everyone in the sect had university degrees!

I guess you can lead a horse to water etc..

Why do I need Warsi?

Baroness Warsi (the person in the photo who most resembles Liza Tarbuck) is our (unelected) "minister for faith and communities", she recently attended and spoke at a meeting of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) an organisation that has previously hosted some highly undesirable characters including people who openly support suicide bombing, one of the three people said to have inspired the 9/11 attacks and many other extremists. Warsi's own party (and the Lib Dems) boycott this organisation and condemn it as "failing to fully challenge terrorist and extremist ideology" so its rather surprising that the Baroness chose to speak there and also that her talk was rather apologetically on the subject of media demonisation of Islamic students, something which given the evidence and history of late is a pointless question with a rather obvious answer.

Warsi is famously anti-secular, and from the point of view of her efficacy and qualification to govern hides behind her superstitions; she is after all a token (middle class) Muslim in a Government keen to tow an apologetic line. Like a lot of religious politicians she seems keen to fight aggressively for a level playing field for religion when it comes to hand-outs and access to political power and yet demands special privileges for them against the cultural and political forces of equality, secularism and reason. For me she represents one of the most objectionable faces of religion today, the sickly sweet façade of respectability and liberal reasonableness that attacks hard won secular values (like freedom of speech) from the comfort and security of enlightenment institutions.

We don't need to scratch very hard to expose the true colour of metal below the surface of Warsi, its the same old privileged arrogance that pays lip service to the truth of religion and faith and really just rides the audience, utility and influence that it delivers. No contradiction illustrates this better than Warsi's own position, in this BBC report she comments on how Islam is perfectly compatible with "British values" and visits an Islamic centre in the North West. Like most TV reports of this ilk the images carefully depict Women visiting the centre but if you look closely you can read the sign above the door, it says "Women's entrance". With such glaring cognitive dissonance regarding her own position and the attitude toward Women and free speech of the tradition she defends it's very difficult to take Warsi seriously, in fact I would question why in a modern, secular country like ours we need a "minister for faith" at all?

Double standards

I read with fascination and a sense of utter incredulity that some bloke called James McCormick has recently been convicted of fraud for selling fake bomb detectors to the Government for £27,000 a piece when they consisted of nothing more than a novelty golf ball finder normally sold for $13. My disbelief stems not from the conviction but the fact that he was able to get away with it for so long and make millions of pounds selling utter trash packaged up as something miraculous to otherwise intelligent people.

This story made me think of the strange double standard at work in our society, i.e. how come we can convict someone like McCormick for selling fake bomb detectors but embrace Homoeopathy into our state funded health service? The parallels seem excruciatingly similar to me, false security in potentially life threatening situations, extortion of unreasonably large amounts of money for unproven and unskilled products and services and a complete disregard for normal processes of testing and validation.

The more you think about this case and the wider implications of it the more you realise that our society is riddled with similar situations, in fact you could say this predator-prey state is the norm and not the exception. From greedy bankers exploiting unrealistic aspirational borrowing, unscrupulous doctors seeding future measles epidemics via scaremongering media moguls selling newspapers through to handicapped people paying thousands of pounds to travel to Lourdes hoping for a miracle, only to catch a water-born parasite from drinking polluted "blessed water" from a communal font.

If we want to examine the true cost of credulity then we don't need a case like this, we need only look around, it seems to be part of our nature.

Vapid chumminess

For those people of a nervous religious disposition, whatever you do don't click on the play button, you may just be offended to your core by this piece of foul-mouthed, subversive and blasphemous church bashing. Seriously though, how the hell did the BBC end up pulling this little sketch from the iPlayer, what has our pluralistic and supposedly enlightened nation come to when on the same (charity) show jokes about disabled people are fine but jokes about elite, privileged members of the establishment are censored.

“Foul-mouthed” is the wrong phrase, Rowan Atkinson’s offence was simply being accurate, perfectly characterising the cheerfully vapid chumminess of a thoroughly liberal Christian leader. That’s what got people upset, he didn’t just dis religion, he showed the objectors what they looked like through our eyes, and it was so close to how the believers see them too it was a palpable smack in the chops!

Spirit of the dance

Love this Christian advice...

The most unbelievable part is that you'd actually want to dance to "Christian rock"...

Blood non-relativism

Here's a rather odd story, apparently some Jewish Rabbi/leader has decreed that in the case of an accident, orthodox Jewish males should not receive blood from Jewish women unless it's a matter of life and death and even then the donor needs to be married and not single. Receiving blood from a non-Jew is strictly verboten in all cases and blood may not be taken from males and females at the same time or in a synagogue ... obviously. It's not clear who female orthodox Jews can receive blood from, maybe women don't actually get healthcare in this religious sect, who knows. It all sounds like a lot of making stuff up as you go along in order to exert control over the lives of ordinary people to me.

In other Orthodox Jew related health news today I noticed that some bloke has produced the first ever sex manual for Orthodox Jews, good for him! Although why this is different from the countless other sex manuals already out there is a slightly strange concept to grapple with. What with all the prohibitions this particular group has on food, behaviour, clothing, healthcare and human interaction a less natural state of affairs for a group of people seems hard to imagine, maybe that's the point?

CofE cool wall

More class humor from Crispian Jago, click the image to see it full size.

Beatriz's choice

Imagine being told that your unborn foetus is suffering from Anencephaly (which means it's developing without a brain and will die, see above) and in addition to that it may just take you with it. That's exactly what is facing a Woman in El Salvador right now as medical services try desperately to help her.

If this isn't traumatic enough, imagine also being told that if you abort the foetus chances are you'll recover but then you'll go to jail because you live in a country that has a government so backward that it enshrines in its law an interpretation of an ancient myth from the Middle East, delivered to its shores in the 16th century by Spaniards (who no longer bake these religious interpretations into their legal system) at a time when the medical remedy for most things was thought to be a bucket of leeches.

People often ask the question, why do atheists care about religion when they don't believe in God, it's simple, atheists are also human beings and have empathy, we can't help it we're just wired that way. A more relevant question in my view would be why aren't Catholics?

Islamophobia

This says it all really...

Chatting up geeks

Dealing with geeks must be hell for most normal people, particularly geeks who are also computer programmers. These folks lives are dominated by precision and a desire to eliminate ambiguity yet they often lack the social skills flexibility to be able to switch into the normal fuzzy, egocentric, ambiguous imprecise communication mode that most non-geeks are comfortable with. I sometimes think that anyone observing a typical geek conversation would think it torturous, strained and mostly unnecessary or not to the point.

To illustrate what I mean, here is an imagined conversation between a geek boy and a non-geek girl he wants to ask out for a date (it would be initiated by the girl obviously)

-Girl: so why should I go out with you?
-Geek: because I think I might like you and you might like me
-Girl: you don't seem too sure, let me ask you some questions..
-Geek: ok
-Girl: do you own a BMW?
-Geek: no
-Girl: do you have your own flat?
-Geek: no
-Girl: do you have a good salary?
-Geek: no
-Girl: ok, let me think about it, see you later.
-Geek: great, email me

Conversation ends..

Later the geek thinks to himself,

- I don't understand why she wouldn't go out with me, I own a software company worth 50 million, a house in the London, a house in France and a house in California, I pay myself £250,000 a year through dividends and I don't see why the hell I need a BMW since I already have 2 Mercedes, 2 motor bikes, a speedboat and a jeep for weekends?

It's all about the detail..

Real wonder

Great imagery from the ISS (International Space Station) - it's fun to try and pick out the countries and land-marks as they whizz by below.

From way up there you can get a sense of our place in the enormity of the universe, IMO we should send our politicians and especially that twit from North Korea up there for a few weeks so that they might gain some perspective and perhaps even humility.