RCimT: Catchup Sunday

I’ve let this “regular feature” backslide from a weekly occurrence all the way to monthly, though for hopefully understandable reasons as of late. However, even with the Too Many Tabs extension, Firefox is starting to explode at the seams, so it’s time to catch up. Allons-y!

Roger Ebert has finally broken down and written a geniunely heart-rending post explicitly discussing his lack of religion and acknowledgement that his time is coming to a close, despite having started his blog figuring he’d leave religion off-limits. It’s funny, because believe it or not, so did I. At least until the Crime Of Great Import was perpetrated by a young student looking for a souvenier in a campus church that his tuition helped subsidize, then I just had to get in on the fight.

I somehow stumbled upon a great paper on Isaac Newton’s religious views, and how calling him either a Christian or a deist falls far short of his actual position. Granted, the author of this paper is unabashedly inclined toward theism, but it is plain that those in the theism/atheism debate who try to recruit Newton posthumously into their arguments are deluded at best and outright wrong at worst.

One thing I’ve always had to laugh about, when it comes to serious theological analysis of any dogmatic doctrines, is the virtual blind eye that is turned to the very sexual passages. I don’t pretend to have any special insight into the Bible, its authors or their proclivities, nor do I take a position on whether it should be read literally or allegorically, but I can tell you that the authors of the Bible were every bit as human and as sex-obsessed as every other human being that has ever walked the face of this fine planet. And this post makes an interesting assertion — that the “rib” wasn’t a rib, since contemporary medicine would likely have known that men are not missing a rib compared with women — but that men are, in fact, missing the penis bone that some other mammals possess.

Another thing I’ve had to laugh about Bible-thumpers specifically, is that they are dead certain that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God (TM), despite it being rife with self-contradiction to the point where there are whole fields of theologians devoted to the topic of “apologizing away” all the plot holes.

Here’s a great poem showing the flip side of faith in an omnipresent omnibenevolent deity.

And here’s a book review of another new addition to my to-read list, titled The God Virus. It looks to be a fascinating exploration of the “religion as mental parasite” that I’ve discussed in the past at great length. I really need to read Dawkins’ The Selfish Meme first though, as it is obviously the progenitor of this line of argumentation.

Tacoma Atheists discuss the deplorable waste of resources that is sending solar-powered talking Bibles to Haiti, when Doctors Without Borders has been struggling to even land their planes. Elsewhere, the question is raised — did God cause the earthquake in Haiti in the first place? Sure would put a damper on the proselytization!

David Beckham likes tattoos. That’s fine. He’s in the spotlight, he’s popular, and he feeds off the attention, I get that. Hell, I even have a tattoo myself, and I’m a meek and mawkish nerd. I have to question his choice of flesh-markings though — you know, considering Leviticus 19:28.

Shh! Don’t pipe up during service, please! Especially if you plan on doing this one particular thing that the church really doesn’t like.

What’s this? Has Greg Laden joined the Dark Side? He apparently thinks he has proof that God exists! What’s worse is, it’s not a bad argument, either.

The next time someone says humans are intelligently designed, show them this picture.

The National Secular Society deplores the recent trend toward including religious versions of common jobs in order to kowtow to specific religions, rather than keeping these public functions secular. So do I.

117 Russians were hospitalized for drinking holy water. Hey, wasn’t there a passage about this — Mark 16:17-18 I believe?

Muslims evidently don’t like full body security scanners at airports due to it being a violation of their modesty. Yeah, like that’s going to help with the whole racial profiling issue.

Speaking of Muslims being hoisted by their own petard! In order to keep men from uncontrollable lust, Muslim women are made to wear all manner of figure-hiding and face-hiding clothing, such that oftentimes you barely know what a woman’s eyes look like before you get to marry them. An Arab ambassador accidentally married a cross-eyed, bearded woman because he had no way of checking the lady out (out of fear of the uncontrollable lust he would have been subjected to!). So now he’s crying foul and demanding an annulment. I say, let’s annul the shackles Muslim women are made to wear, and often even inculcated to like!

That’s made some inroads on my tabs. I’ll put up another post finishing the rest of them off tomorrow, though, as I’m not quite done yet.