Frank the Financially Savvy Atheist - The F.S.A.

“If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”-Thomas Szasz

Thanks to Aaron over at Kill the AfterLife for the quote. Much appreciated.

"The heights by great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden fight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night." – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

How humbling.

This is great. It's just great. It's an article about Behe's 15th century science. Just beautiful.
http://ydr.com/story/mike/90330/

"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense."
- Chapman Cohen

the newly discovered organism seems to be in the process of endosymbiosis -- in which one creature incorporates another, creating a new form of life

Will this be proof enough for IDers and Creationists? My bet is no.
Click
[Ed] Sorry the link for the news story is right here. Sorry about that, I'm retarded.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/12/AR2005101202111.html
The L.A. Archdiocese has released files on clergy sex abuse that have been going for decades! WTF! The incredulity doesn't end there:

What we have here is a church that is embarrassed, that is contrite, that is ashamed of what happened in the past and is committed to reforming it to the extent that it is humanly possible to do so,

J. Michael Hennigan, lead attorney for the archdiocese.
Embarrased! These people are only embarrassed! Oh, they're also ashamed. "Sorry for f*cking up your life little Timmy, but remember, Jesus said to forgive one another and to turn the other [ass] cheek".
Hennigan continues with the following:

The lesson to be learned from the documents, Hennigan said, is that church leaders from the 1950s to the present were 'not terribly far behind, nor ahead' of society as a whole in understanding pedophilia.

What is there to understand? It's illegal you sick, perverted sacks of crap. God damn it. God damn them!
Ok. I am not going about this in a constructive manner. Let me just calm down and attempt to make some sense of this situation.

What we have here, is a group of people who have decided to become clergy-men. In fact, they have been "called" by "God" himself to become men of the cloth. In doing so, they have taken a vow of celibacy. However, being human beings they naturally had/have sexual urges. This left them in a bit of a quandary: Should I have sex with a woman to quell these urges? But then I will no longer be a priest. Should I masturbate? But that's expressly forbidden because it's a sin. Hmmm, you know what I can do is have butt sex with under-aged male children? That's not expressly forbidden. I think I might be on to something here.

To quote The Matrix, "To deny or own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human". The quote generalizes, but the gist of it is correct. Taken to the extreme it implies that we should do whatever the hell we want whenever we want. However, we each give up some freedom in exchange for security from our government. That is tangential from our original topic, so I will attempt to get back on track.

The priest set themselves up for failure by denying their natural urges. In a sense, they forgot their own humanity. I am not saying that we should always give in to our urges. However, the choices we make have consequences. Not in the ethereal fictional after-life, but in the here and now. You've taken the innocence of children who's only "sin" was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You have violated laws expressely forbidding such behavior (but unfortunately the statue has run out for many victims). Any decent human being knows that what those priests did was wrong. Why is it that the supposedly highest of men were unable to recognize that same fact? The answer my friend is simply religion.

http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4488706
Interesting article in the Economist about ID. I particulraly liked this quote:

It is the kind of story [the lawsuit in Dover] about America that makes secular Europeans chortle smugly before turning to the horoscope page.

Funny and insightful.

Michael Reynolds over at The Mighty Middle (see blogroll) posted a comment here that I had to copy over in full, it was just that brilliant:

Sorry I didn't get in earlier, I'm on the road. I'm currently sitting in a freezing cold hotel room in Roanoke, VA, about half toasted on bourbon, and regretting that cheesecake, so God knows (hah) if I'll make any sense.

I read the piece in the Huffington Post. His main thrust is the "evil in the world" argument and, as someone pointed out, it applies almost exclusively to a modern, Judeo-Christian version of God, a moral God.

My argument for atheism is the simpler, less angry one: there is no evidence to suggest that God exists, and I make it a practice not to go around believing things for no good reason. If there was evidence of God I'd certainly want to take a look at it, just as I would be fascinated by evidence of the existence of elves. But there is no such evidence. None. So, I don't profess belief in elves, or consider myself an agnostic on the subject of elves, I'm pretty well forced to be an atheist when it comes to elves. Likewise God.

It is not a difficult conclusion for me to reach. In fact it seems self-evident.
The truth is I think pretty much everyone secretly agrees with me on this. Oh, I know 90 plus percent of Americans profess belief in God, but I think they're lying -- to themselves, primarily. I think religion is a vast conspiracy of self-deception. People know perfectly well there's no God, and their behavior demonstrates this fact.

Almost everyone behaves as if God does not exist, and almost no one behaves as though God does exist. You know what people do believe in? Walls. Follow me on this: everyone says they believe in both God and the solidity of walls. Almost everyone acts as though there is no God, but I've yet to meet a person who casually ignores the existence of walls. God is forever being disobeyed or ignored. Walls on the other hand, seem to command universal respect. No one ignores walls. People doubt God. They don't doubt walls. Why? Because walls are real. God is not. And we all know it.

Deep down everyone believes exactly what I believe: that God is a fairy story and the afterlife an absurdity. The difference is that they lie to themselves. They think life (and death) will be too scary without a magical parent figure in the story. So they bullshit themselves, and demand that others play along, always living in fear of the blunt little boy from the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes.

Of course they're right: life is scary. And as for death, well, while you have no good reason to be scared of your own (you won't be there,) the death of a loved one can be painful beyond enduring. Facing death, humiliation, disease, loss, pain, all the various terrors of life, people tell themselves it's all a sort of illusion: the real world isn't real, the end isn't the end, what we see is only a part of a much more reassuring story.

They invent God to replace the parents who soothed away their fears and offered what seemed like complete security. They willingly decieve themselves hoping to dispell their fears. But, the fact that their fears never really do go away, and their doubts are never finally assuaged, reveals the truth that there are two kinds of human being: atheists, and atheists who lie about it.

I couldn't have said it better than that. I literally could not have, it's just so well put. I agree 100% with that. It pretty much sums up atheism in a nutshell.

First, let me preface this post by saying that this isn't a real proof, hence the quotation marks. However, I do hope to drive home a point in my "proof" and hopefully it won't be lost on the reader. If I was doing a formal proof, I would call the following a proof by contradiction, because that is the closest type of formal proof this argument represents. So, without further ado:

Assume that "God" exists with the following attributes:

• He is omniscient or all-knowing
• He is omnipotent or all-powerful
• He is omnibenevolent or all-good
• He wants us to believe in his existence, because he created us, and loves us, and he has nothing better to do with his infinite time but mess with his creations collective lives.
  

Since "God" is all-knowing, that means he knows everything about you as an individual. He knows what you've done, he knows what you're doing, and he knows what you will do. Not only the what, but he also knows the how and the why.

As a result, if "God" existed, no one would be an atheist! Hear me out, this will eventually make sense...I hope.

Since "God" knows everything about you, he would know the answer to this question: "What would God have to do to get you to believe he exists?" Since, as we have already defined, he's all-powerful, he would be able to do whatever it would take for you, personally, to believe that he exists. For example, some people have gone to "God" because of some suffering in their life. So for those sets of people, "God" would just need to make them suffer and lo and behold they would believe he exists. Others would just need to grow up in a household that professes belief in him and lo and behold for those sets of people, they would believe that he exists.

Now, others of the more skeptical mind set, would be a little more tricky. But, with the right combination of friends and families professing their beliefs and maybe a dead relative or two, possible some minor miracles along the lines of the "Well, if 'God' exists, ask him to tell you what word I'm thinking about in my head right now" kind of miracles. Minor stuff. But, since he's all knowing and all powerful, he would be able to tweak each and everyone just right so that they would belive that he exists. As a result, there would be no atheist in the world, at least not on a permanent basis.

I can already hear some of the theists out there already: "But we have free-will! Duh, silly atheist" (I paraphrase of course). That doesn't matter. "God" would be able to structure each person's individual experience so that they would willingly believe in his existence. We wouldn't be mindless robots, as we would not be aware that we were being manipulated. However, we would all agree that "God" exists, because that would at least be a start to doing "His" word, or whatever he wants us to do.

Plus, free-will and omniscience are two mutually exclusive concepts. If "God" is omniscient, then we have no free-will. However, that is a topic for another post.

Please cut me some slack if I am rehasing old arguments, I'm relatively new at this atheist thing, so what's new to me, might be old to you

I haven't posted about the ID debate as of yet, because I didn't really see the point. So imagine my surprise when I saw this article: Intelligent Design Can be Tested Scientifically. I thought to myself: "Can it be true? Are they actually trying to use science now?" I couldn't help but take a gander. Here's what I found.

The article starts off with

We can compute the mathematical probabilities of combined events in the real world

Uh oh, this might be trouble. It could just be an old creationist argument dressed up as "proof" for ID. Let's keep reading.

The article then goes on to say

"Intelligent Design" is primarily a concept of philosophy, not of science or religion.

Wait, if that's the case, why teach it in a science class? I mean there are plenty of other philosophies out there, but we don't see a mad rush to teach them in science class? Curious.

It then states

most religions do have a belief in some kind of Intelligent Designer who created the universe at the beginning of time...The religion of Atheism, however, denies that there is any sort of Intelligent Designer, because that would clearly suggest a [g]od

Well, either it was god or some really, really smart aliens. Plus, atheism ins't a religion, but that's besides the point. The reason that we atheist deny that there is any sort of "Intelligent Designer" is simply because there is no proof. But then again, that's what I thought the article was going to do, or at least get the process started. Let's keep reading.

After some rhetorical questions and saying stuff like science is only trying to understand what the aliens have left behind for us, or something like that, the author starts to get into the science.

In Probability [I'm not sure why that is capitalized, but let's work with him on this] if an event iscertain to occur, it has a probability of 1. If it is certain not to occur it has a probability of 0. [so far so good]...the chance of getting a "head" in any coin toss is .5...the chance of tossing five heads in a row is .5*.5*.5*.5*.5, or .03125, or about three percent. [yea, that sounds correct]

Look now at the world, and see if it could possibly all have happened by chance. Look first at the earth itself, with its perfect atmosphere to sustain life [well, not if you're a methane breather, then you'd be in trouble]...The odds that all these things could come together at the same time by chance is about one in a million zillion[is that a scientific term]...it is statistically impossible that our earth simply happened by chance

*Sigh*, I gues I expected too much. It's just the same rehashed argument over again. Nothing new to consider. Plus, that was an impressive intellectual leap there, from the probabilities of a coin toss to the grandiose statement of statistical impossibility. Oh well, I guess these creationist, I mean intelligent designist will just have to try harder next time. Until then, please keep your "philosophies" out of the science classroom. Thanks for playing the science game and better luck next time.