When I got home this evening, my wife was all happy because she had made a CD for a work colleague’s parents. They had to be conferenced in on a call so they could play a sample to find out who a song was by, they liked it so much. Whereas I had been writing the misanthropic anti-religious rant below. Sometimes I am such a miserable git. So I’ve put a strike through the post - and am listening to the CD, and its making me happy.

When others do stupid things in computing people say RTFM - read the fucking manual. For some people the bible is their manual but they clearly haven’t read it.

More on the Timothy fund on Terry Toledo:

Religious Right Discovers Investment Activism

More evidence that religion in America is a potentially dangerous disease:

“Today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society”

“From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in

“Haderer published a 40-page book titled, The Life of Jesus. The book contained a cartoon of Jesus, depicting him as

…a binge-drinking friend of Jimi Hendrix and naked surfer high on cannabis.

Unbeknownst to him, the book was published in Greece. He found out when he received a summons to appear in court in Athens in January, having been charged with blasphemy.”

Of course there is absolutely no resemblance between Jesus and a pot smoking hippy.

Cartoonist Faces Jail in Greece Over Jesus Cartoon - TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime

There is a difference between blasphemy and the worship of false prophets. Islam fobids images of Muhammad, lest the images themselves become icons, taking away from the real person or idea. The religion supports iconoclasm by definition. A cartoon is designed to be just that, an iconoclastic image, so it is hardly likely to encourage worship of false prophets.

The cartoon issue is blasphemy enhanced by a general taboo of figurative images. A similar kind of taboo, for example, would mean that if you were brought up in a ‘Judeo-Christian’ environment the idea of a manual depicting someone like Moses or Jesus performing various sex acts, which would be acceptable in less prudish Asian religions, would shock you. In fact it may even make reading the above statement slightly irritate you. I suspect that the irritation that is felt by people who inherit the Muslim meme is the same but much larger.

The equivalent situation to the outrage over the prophet cartoons in a secular society would be if it were considered a similar affront to be messing around with an image that represents a country i.e. flag burning - and in many countries that is illegal.

Image:Jyllands-Posten Muhammad drawings.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The UK is trying to enact a very stupid and logically farcical law, which guarantees to increase religious hatred by outlawing it.

The problem is that religion is not without its own hatred.

Religion is also not based upon the same logic as the secular law, being based upon belief rather than reason, so good people ignore the passages in religious texts that include incitement to hatred. The law would prevent this loose interpretation.

Under the proposed law almost any practitioner of any of the word’s major religions could be charged with religious hatred, either for threatening infidels with the ultimate torture, an eternity of hellfire, or for explicit threats within respective texts.

Laws within a tolerant society are based upon logically consistent arguments, such as the existing UK laws against race hatred, which protect groups such as Sikhs and Jews not because of their ideology or belief, but because of who they are.

Changes to the proposed law include making it illegal to explicitly threaten violence against religion, which begs the question what has religion got to do with this? Current laws against violent acts protect society from what people do, there may an argument for extending this to what they threaten to do.

A law that protects religion would have to define what constituted a religion:

If a religion is a ‘commonly held belief system’, then potentially any type of belief system or ideology like Nazism could potentially be protected by law.

If it isn’t all commonly held belief systems, then the law is discriminatory itself.

If it is any commonly held belief system that doesn’t itself promote discrimination, then Judaism, Christianity and Islam would be excluded, if tested under current legal arguments.

In other words, you get both Christians and Nazis or a law which manages to break itself. A candidate for the legal equivalent of the Darwin awards.

The reality of this sleepwalk into chaos is that the reason people tolerate each other, who have different beliefs, is often by finding common ground and empathy while ignoring the logical inconsistencies between their beliefs. These inconsistencies are not obscure theological arcana, but whopping great Fuck Yous - such as be ne of us or go to hell. This law will bring these ‘inconsistencies’ to the surface and result in inevitable persecution.

The best thing to do about religion is to ignore it and focus on good. The best thing to do about this future law in the UK is to provoke a showdown by taking religion itself to court.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Religious hatred plan is defended

We wait till people reach maturity before we allow them to choose their political affinity and vote based upon it. As Dawkins points out, labelling a small child a neo-marxist is absurd. So why don’t we let people choose their own religion when they grow up?

Religion is traditionally passed from adults to children.

The second part of Dawkin’s documentary on religion was shown in the UK last night - thankfully torrent files are already available.

This tackled the dirty little secret of all religion - that it requires people in a vulnerable state of mind to infect. Of course the best place to find vulnerable minds, as a matter of course, among the healthy is in schools. The program suggested, perfectly reasonably, that religious teaching in schools is a form of child abuse.

In the UK:

“The number of faith schools is increasing. More than half the Government’s proposed City Academies will be run by religious organisations and there’s a growing number of private evangelical Christian schools. ACE: Accelerated Christian Education has developed a curriculum which includes a mention of God or Jesus on every page of its science text book.”

For people who would like to see a world of both reason and understanding, then the best thing to do is to teach young children to have an open mind, to enjoy mysteries and fiction but to question and discover the wonder of the world around them - to teach children atheism, as I will teach my children.

Channel 4 - Can you believe it? - The Real Exorcists

Channel 4 - The Root of All Evil

Evolution fight puts suburb in spotlight

Evolution controversy in this comfortable Atlanta suburb began with one boy’s fascination with dinosaurs.

“He was really into ‘Jurassic Park’”, his mother recalled. The trouble was, “we kept reading over and over that ‘millions and millions of years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth”, Marjorie Rogers continued. “And that’s where I said, ‘Hmm — wait a second”.

Like others who adhere to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, Rogers, a lawyer, believes that the Earth is several thousand years old.

I find it hard to find decent videos on the open web, so have been drilling through sites like Youtube and Google Video with a view to providing a wists list of good stuff to stream.

Youtube is 99.9% crap and 0.1% memes that have been around for years, or commercials.

Google Video is also mostly crap snippets, but I did manage to find some good programming - stuff on Evolution, and Science and interviews with good people like John Maynard Smith and Steven Pinker.

After searching for practically every architecture, design and science name I know, I kept getting the same content so realized that there is hardly anything in Google video longer than 3 minutes.

When I actually looked at the science stuff, something strange became obvious - a large percentage of it was funded by Intelligent Design groups or religious organizations.

If people are frightened about young people’s minds being corrupted by porn on the Internet, they should also check out what the god squad are pushing.

Perhaps the Internet is for all the things you shouldn’t talk about over dinner, after all - sex, politics and religion.

My google video wist list

Sam Harris’ Atheist Manifesto.

Most of what he says is reasonable, however, the editor suggests that Harris argues that religious toleration is a menace - this is not a defensible argument since it empirically leads to persecution.

Its true that there is not a single ideology that is truly tolerant of other ideologies, therefore an anti-ideology like atheism can be more tolerant by making no absolute claims of its own but adaptable guidelines based upon evidence and reason.

One should not be intolerant of belief itself but unreasonable acts based upon it. However, since ideological dogma, of which religious dogma is a subset, is not based upon reason - its acts are very often unreasonable and intolerant.

A consistent maxim for an atheist would be to be tolerant of religious faith, but intolerant of intolerance itself.

This is not a nihilist view, but a defense of moral relativism. Its also the basis of American democracy. What makes the constitution its foundation is that, unlike the bible, the teachings of Chairman Mao or the divine mandate of an unelected monarch, it is allowed to be challenged and amended.

Surely on this basis, one could argue that anyone who is against moral relativism is against constitutional amendment and therefore un-American? This charge, however, is usually the other way around.

All of this may be missing the point. The central problem with Sam Harris’ atheist manifesto or any atheist manifesto, or anything I write here is that reason may be a vaccine against blind faith but it is not a cure, and it is not clear what is.