Atheism

Catchup #2: Catholic Church supports Pedophilia.

The catholic church is reeling at the moment from a disaster of their own making.  For centuries now it has been well known that the catholic church has pedophiles in its ranks.  It has been well known that they often just move priests around rather than booting them out.  This is all starting to catch up with them now as people are coming out left right and centre all around the world telling their stories.

The catholic church are pulling out any and all stocks to try and quieten this down.  Blaming anyone and everyone they can from atheists to secularism, technology, homosexuals, and even the jews.  They’re behaving like a little child “It wasn’t me, it was dolly”.  They’re pleading for people to not be so upset, to give them a break, let them handle it internally.  They’re calling these vile rumours.  They’re not. Continue reading →

Scientology exposition.

The cult of scientology just can’t get a break, and to be honest it doesn’t deserve one. They’ve been lampooned and exposed on South Park, received a lot of publicity for people they’ve directly or indirectly killed, had tom cruise make an arse of himself, had the online circlejerk known as anonymous go after it, and we’re losing count of the number of people who have managed to escape to tell their tale.

Yet somehow despite all the bad publicity, they still somehow manage to grow.  Apparently the cult are on the verge of another surge here in Australia.

The current affairs show Today Tonight decided to follow up on their numerous stories on the cult of scientology, and managed to get an interview with one of their upper cult members as well as a tour of their Californian offices.  The videos are after the jump. Continue reading →

Kent Hovind is a friend of mine.

(post title taken from here).  Kent Hovind has found a way to get back in to the public’s attention again, and as always it isn’t for a good reason.  If he isn’t making a laughing stock of himself, it seems he’s making a laughing stock of himse … wait.  Ok, so maybe there’s only one thing he’s good at.

If you don’t know who he is, he is most famous for being a bible literalist and young earth creationist.  He’s a self proclaimed doctor through an unaccredited “university” (read: diploma mill) as well as a self proclaimed science teacher (though his employment history does not reflect this).

His doctorial dissertation has been kept exceedingly secret.  This is odd as the standard practise for universities globally is to make such dissertations publicly available.  Both he and his “university” has consistently refused to allow it to be made public despite numerous requests  for reprints or scholarly inquiry.  That is until now.

The fine folk over at WikiLeaks.Org have managed to get their hands on it.  The popularity of wikileaks though means this file is extremely slow to download.  Despite coming in at a mere 2.1MB it still took me close to an hour to download it, so I have decided to mirror it here and here. Continue reading →

NSW schools to get ethics as an alternative to religion.

Right now, public schools across Australia generally have religious education classes.  Thanks to the high involvement and lack of seperation between church and state in this country, generally if someone does not wish their kid to be indoctrinated in these classes, the childs only option is to sit out and do, well, nothing.

The Humanist Society of Victoria have been pushing for a number of years to have an alternative so that kids who sit out of these classes have something productive to do other than sit in a small room with no books and nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs.  This has always been rejected by the religious right and their influences though as it may give these kids an upper hand, allowing them an opportunity to get educated in something the other kids cannot.  They fail every time to see the irony here, they are essentially saying their own course on religion is useless and does not contribute to ones education.

What the Humanist Society of Victoria have been pushing for the strongest, is an ethics class as an alternative.  More irony to the religious right, they are essentially saying the kids who attend religion class won’t learn about ethics.  A quick look at the bible seems to confirm this.

After that very long introduction though, I am finally getting to my point.  It would appear the NSW government has beaten Victoria to the punch.  Out of almost nowhere, the NSW Premier Nathan Reese has announced today that schools across the state of NSW will be getting ethics classes as an alternative to religion. Continue reading →

Redefinition of words.

(This was also posted at YoungAusSkeptics.com)

One of the great things about the way language evolves is that words change their meaning all the time. The main reason this happens is due to the way in which we generally learn words. How many of you upon hearing a new word actually go to the effort to pick up a dictionary or go to an online one and look up the words meaning? I am sure a few of you do, but the majority of people (myself included) don’t.

Instead we look at the context the word was used in, the sentence it is in and those surrounding, and from there we use our intuition and past experience to decide our own definition of the word. If we get it wrong, we continue to get it wrong until such a time as we are corrected. We may easily decide to start using that word, incorrectly of course, in our conversations with others. They then pick up on this incorrect meaning and maybe even apply their own meaning to it which is different again. As the word spreads and is picked up, the meaning changes. Dictionaries have in the past and continue today to change the official meaning of a word based upon common usage. Continue reading →

Does being a skeptic mean someone is an atheist?

The topic on the link of atheism and skepticism comes up all the time in skeptic circles.  The general questions tend to hover around the topics of whether skeptics should be atheists, should skeptics cover atheistic topics and fights, can theists be skeptics, is theism a subject we should make taboo or not, and recently whether atheism is in fact skepticism as well.

For starters, atheism isn’t necessarily the skeptical stance when it comes to theism.  You see, there’s generally two paths that lead to atheism.  One being the Acharya S and Zeitgeist path which is full of conspiracy theories. It claims that christianity stole most if not all of its aspects from other religions etc.  The evidence put forward is full of examples where prior religions had similar traditions, symbols and mythology therefore christianity stole it.

Pagans for example celebrated winter solstice at or around the end of December, christians have christmas then, therefore christians stole that from pagans and/or used it to crush paganism.  The problem here is that it confuses correlation for causation.  Just because two things are similar does not mean one caused the other.  This is a logical fallacy often argued against by sceptics in all manner of topics.  This form of atheism is in no way shape or form sceptical. Continue reading →

Scientology offering refunds?

A few days ago in Australia, independent senator Nick Xenophon gave a little speech about the cult of scientology accusing them of being a criminal organisation.  Podblack does some nice coverage of it if you would like to read more.

This has put the media in to a spin and the cult of scientology in to damage control overdrive.  As yet we have not seen their usual tactic of digging or manufacturing dirt on the person to discredit and ruin them personally, however there have been a number of interviews.

The Channel 7 morning program Sunrise had a representative on from the cult of scientology this morning, and she had some interesting things to say.  The most surprising of these, is that if people are unsatisfied or leave the cult, they offer full refunds.  Audio here. (Right-click, save as)

That is right everyone.  After the hundreds of horror stories of people losing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cult, going broke, being ostracised and having their lives destroyed, it appears the cult now offers refunds, in full!

This spokesperson has just opened the cult of scientology up to a barrage of compensation claims, and I certainly hope they come thick, fast, and most importantly publicly.  I would love to see just how many (if any) of these requests they honour.  I am expecting the number to be somewhere in the realm of between zero and none.   The methods they use to weasel out of these request for compensation will be highly amusing to say the very least.

No good without god?

Atheist Bus 001Of the claims that come forth from religious people, there is one that is probably the most commonly used, and it is the one the majority of theists have in common despite their highly splintered sects.  Whether fundamentalist or name-only, whether christian or pagan, there is one area they generally (not always, but generally) tend to agree.  That area, that argument, is that one cannot be good without god.

It doesn’t seem that offensive a statement, does it?  Really though, it is a horribly offensive and rude thing for them to say.  Essentially they are saying that those who do not have a positive belief in a god or gods are evil people, amoral, completely unable to be good, deceptive, rude, backstabbing, conniving.  How would you feel if someone were to say that to you?

But do morals really come from a god or gods? Continue reading →

Free Tibet? Take a closer look first.

Dalai LamaLike most people, if someone was to ask me about Tibet and the events that took place there I would have spoken of beautiful monasteries, gentle people who only wanted to spread peace, who were invaded and brutally slaughtered by the Chinese in the mid 1900’s.  This is the picture we are most often subjected to, so it may be surprising to many to hear that this is picture is a deceptive one, and that the “Free Tibet” people you may often run across on the city streets should be taken with a grain of salt.

This post is inspired by an article I read at smuh this morning.  I tweeted my disgruntledness (if that is even a word?), which turned in to a conversation with @Flawedprefect who was confused as to my disapproval. Continue reading →

On trolling, hypocrisy and vandalism.

Thank-youIKEA1024Earlier this evening I was introduced to the Jesus: All About Life Facebook page.  A quick look through the page showed it was a legitimate page made by the people behind the campaign, but 16 hours earlier Atheists and non-christians had also discovered it and were trolling quite badly.

Earlier today while browsing through my usual sites I came across a post at Pharyngula about someone who was arrested for defacing a poster for an alpha.org advertising campaign.

I decided to also check out jesusallaboutlife.com – a parody site set up when it was discovered the JAAL people only registered the .com.au domain, not the .com one, and saw on the front page this particular article.

Seriously guys, trolling and vandalism is NEVER acceptable. Continue reading →