Time flies when interests change

Three years since the last post on this blog – for no good reason.

I think I need to return simply to practice my writing skills (weak as they may be)

From this date, I will attempt at least one post a day, some will be wordy and some less verbose.  The ones with fewer words will be mostly links and quotes from other sites I find interesting.

Blake

I became an atheist for incredibly stupid reasons.

PZ Myers has been running a series of postings by his readers explaining why they became atheists.  My headline today comes from the most recent one posted by Sarah Otto Marxhausen

I became an atheist for incredibly stupid reasons. To be fair, I was ten years old.

As soon as I started reading well at about age four, my parents started throwing books at me. Anything I showed the slightest interest in, I was allowed to read, and I tore through everything. When I was nine, I was given a huge ton of books to call my own after a family friend died and everyone decided that a lot of his books were appropriate for me. It was the complete Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, plus some of the Lang fairy books, plus a lot of books about mythology:Greek, Norse, etc.

I read them passionately; I still believe to this day that a lot of those fairy tales are really genuinely cool stories. My family is and was very religious — my father is a minister — and so I was also well-versed in Christian mythology. I slowly started realizing that the supernatural forces in the stories I was reading were gods just like the god I went to church every Sunday for. And, honestly, a lot of the things the Christian god did were nowhere near as awesome or interesting as the things the non-Christian gods did. And since they were all gods, and worshipping god was the important thing . . .

I took what to me was the most logical step, and made up my own religion. One with really fucking awesome gods. I don’t really want to describe it, because it’s really deeply embarrassing now, as are most “profound” decisions that you make when you’re ten years old. They were awesome at the time, okay?

Go and read the rest of the post on Free Thought Blogs

Holiday Hiatus

See ya in 2012!

My best wishes to all of my readers for the holiday season and hopes for all that 2012 is not only a good year but also an ‘interesting’ one.

Am I slow?

Found the following picture on Chris Rodda’s Freethought blog

So I’m looking at the picture and can see that it is three guys making fun of a Renaissance-era painting but I can’t understand why it is “Blasphemy”. Two – three minutes pass before I get it – am I getting slow? Is my brain not what it once was? Could this be a result of all those ‘fun’ days and nights?

Right wing tolerance

found at Ed Brayton’s place, with original formatting by John Jay

first things first.–

1.)take out the talking head media, and burn the new york times, the los angeles times and the washington post to the ground. draw and quarter the media, and shoot their remains from canons in the four directions of the prevailing winds.

rinse, lather, repeat as needed.

2.)take out all the incumbent leadership of both parties in the congress, and every self avowed socialist and communist in congress. give them all proper muslim burials at sea, just like osama bin laden.

eliminate pensions for congressional service. rinse, lather, repeat as needed.

3.)eliminate the faculty senates at harvard, yale, columbia, nyu and university of california at santa barbara. boil bill ayers, bernie dorhn and angela davis in canola oil, and feed their remains to the fishes.

they are all physical cowards. they should fall into line pretty quickly. repeat every ten years as a prophylactic, on general principle.

and,

4.)now that the “arab spring” has brought enlightenment to the middle east, send all of the muslim immigrants back to their native countries, in boxes or tourist, their choice.

burn all the mosques. period.

just sayin’.

john jay @ 09.26.2011

p.s. burn the editors and contributors to “the daily kos” at the stake. i’ll think of something suitable for hilary clinton. bill, he has to room with jimmy carter in a clapped out pickup & camper on the edge of a southern peanut field, somewhere in arkansas: that’s about as close to a living hell as i can imagine for him.

and, throw all the living governors of new york, california, ohio, illinois, washington, florida and massachusetts into the fiery pits, from which there is no escape. sorry, jeb. but, i think that you were a skull & bones internationalist, too, weren’t you?

No need to say anything – let the fool speak for himself

Hope – stupidity in one direction canceled by stupidity going the other way

Ignorance of history goes a long way in the modern world. Most think history is irrelevant, others know it is important but what they think they know of history is often wrong. Far too often history is used to excuse actions taken in modern society.

MsMaxy74 has some ‘issues’ with the world she lives in, however the responses to her are just as full of crap as her video.

It does seem like there are lots of people who love seeing themselves on the internets, no matter how clueless they come across.

There are some very frightened folks in America

or they are a in serious need of psychiatric help

New York Times now promoting Sharia law

I have no explanation for this other than the old standby – in times of economic crisis, many will blame the innocent for their own failures. And then there’s that whole “fear of the other” that seems to be an innate part of humanity’s genetic makeup.

The Right’s ‘Experts’

For some odd reason, Politico has now put Chuck Norris on their list of writers. The man is an actor. A not very good actor who found a niche and made a living doing the same character, over and over, with different costumes.

Now, he pontificates on something he knows nothing about: international arms control.

He uses recent diplomatic efforts to create a treaty that would work toward reducing cross-border arms trafficking to claim it is simply another effort by the “Kenyan anti-colonialist” to do away with Americans Second Amendment rights. Either he hasn’t bothered to actually read statements made by the Administration or the United Nations or he doesn’t care because he has an agenda.

International Law Expert Chuck Norris Is (Shockingly) Wrong About UN Arms Treaty

The leading contender for the Republican nomination, Rick Perry, has about the same level of ‘knowledge’ concerning climate change and the Theory of Evolution as Chuck has about arms control.

Creationism Hits the Campaign Trail and Exposes Differences in the Field

On climate change, here’s a video link from the Washington Post: Perry, Bachmann highlight the politics of climate change

When the right has so many ‘experts’ who have been exposed as charlatans and ignoramuses on so many subjects, why is anyone still listening to them?

I have upset somebody

Over on one of those “Real Amurrican(TM)” blogs, I had dropped a couple of comments after reading what I thought to be incorrect statements. Evidently pointing out that a world exists outside of his rather insular viewpoint is not to be tolerated on his blog.

Which is fine with me – his blog, his rules – but it does appear to be an indication of fear. Yes, I write “fear” because refusing to listen to those who disagree often comes from a fear of being unable to answer the opponent’s questions and claims.

Anyway, more fun on the internets

kingsjester Says:
August 13, 2011 at 9:22 am | Reply

Dear Troll –
I have been more than magnanimous in my toleration of you proclaiming your Liberal, condescending, self-righteous, self-impressed POV on this blog, upon which I have worked very hard to achieve the modicum of success which it has garnered, thanks to my loyal supporters. You can take your progressive pomposity, and the over-sized vacuous cranium in which it is housed and perform something anatomically impossible with it and disappear. Your 15 minutes of fame are up, Skippy. YOU’RE SPAM. BUH-BYE.

If my comment hasn’t been deleted you may read it at the link provided above

Thought for the day

Don’t know if it was all of the salty air inhaled, the salt water that doused me a ‘couple’ times or some of the other substances encountered – but, unlike what I remember reading as a young one which stated that with age one grows more conservative, I seem to be becoming more radicalised in my political views as I get older – it may simply be that I’m paying more attention these days but I fail to understand the hatred of the ‘other’ that seems to be at the base of modern ‘conservative’ thinking. Then there is the history nerd in me which says, “Wait!, they adulate the 18th C thinkers, yet they refuse to grasp the fact that many of those elders were not thought of as conservative back then – so why do they take the title of Conservative today?”