Moving

I've decided to restart this blog, but at another location. http://atheiststoday.com/blogs/Incongruous

Atheists Today

With the selling of the atheists.com domain this month, a solid community of atheists were cast off into the intertubes. After calling the old admin and confirming that he had in fact sold off the domain to a party in Turkey, I decided to buy a new domain and hosting plan to try to make up for this loss.

Please go to:

Atheists Today

Any and all former members of atheists.com are welcome as are any other atheists who would like to build a new atheist community from the ground up.

Pig people

These type of people make me physically ill. Read some comments posted by the freepers, (I won't link to that site, but I will tell you it's probably the most popular site for the far right conservatives), these comments were posted in response to an article about the TN UU Church shooting on Monday.


LightBeam says:
An early report I saw indicated that the man who died may have been shielding the children.

Just shielding someone from attack doesn't gain you entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven.

I hope the people in this "church" will use this wake-up-call as a way to get closer to the Lord Jesus Christ and reject their secular humanism.

They actually argued over whether or not the hero of the day would go to heaven. *gag*

reg45 says:
What place does "Annie" have in a worship service?

It was probably a mini-rally for The Obamassiah and they were singing "The sun will come out tomorrow ....". Otherwise, a musical about a poor orphan (Annie) who is befriended by a rich capitalist (Daddy Warbucks), doesn't really fit the UU agenda. Now maybe, if there were a lesbian relationship between Annie and Mommy Warbucks or Annie got pregnant and had to get raise money for an abortion, that would be truly a part of the UU world view.

Ben Reyes says:
“Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religion with Jewish-Christian roots. It has no creed. It affirms the worth of human beings, advocates freedom of belief and the search for advancing truth, and tries to provide a warm, open, supportive community for people who believe that ethical living is the supreme witness of religion.”

In other words, a NEW AGE church.

What do you expect? God is NOT in the center of this church. Human beings are.


Gopher Broke says:
The Mainstream Media is spinning this story as a “hate crime” against this church because of their liberal, pro-homosexual beliefs.....

In this case "spinning"= truth, moron.

At least there was one or two, who if I guess correctly, are not regular members but visitors like myself to see how they react to this type of story.

NautiNurse says:
Your synopsis of the Unitarian Church has absolutely nothing to do with the murders that occurred today. No different than an analogy between Larry Craig and all Republicans having gay sex in airport bathrooms.

Just because you have access to a keyboard and the internet, does not mean you have the sense to use your public opinion depository wisely.

Pig people stink.

Tainted Science

Boredom sucks. This weekend was quite boring, and when I wasn't working on my website, I was mindlessly clicking bookmarks. I have tons of bookmarks. Some of these deal with atheism, some with politics, some are humorous sites and some are religious.

One of my many religious bookmarks is an almost innocuous sounding place, science-spirit.org. Today, while reading posts in alt.atheism, my memory was jogged regarding something I skimmed over this weekend.

In the Beginning: An Interview with Olivera Petrovich

Young children see the world with fresh minds that embrace both scientific causality and metaphysical speculation, and their conceptions show striking similiarities across widely differing cultures, says Oxford psychologist Olivera Petrovich.

by Rebecca Bryant


Please read the interview before continuing, I'll wait.

After I finished, something she said at the beginning stood out.

Petrovich:

My approach to this is very strictly empirical.

That sounds great! I'm thinking you're looking at this without bias...super!

But that one sentence is the only time I have this thought. In the same paragraph, she tells us that,

I’m interested in children’s spirituality as it develops in their encounter with the physical world, not through the teaching they may receive in bible classes and so on. I’m not at all looking at the cultural transmission of spirituality.

I'm sorry, but that last sentence really did me in. Is there any other way for a child to learn spirituality? Any?

Looking at her study, and granted I'm sure the interview doesn't include the entire process, I'm very curious as to how she draws her conclusions. Also, by putting so much emphasis on the Japanese angle to her "cross-culture" studies, she seems to think we'll just follow along and nod our heads.

This is absolutely extraordinary when you think that Japanese religion — Shinto — doesn’t include creation as an aspect of God’s activity at all. So where do these children get the idea that creation is in God’s hands?

Um...I dunno, maybe they learned it somewhere else??

It’s an example of a natural inference that they form on the basis of their own experience.

It's a natural response to someone who has been told about "God". If you take a young child who has never been indoctrinated into a religion, or has been exposed to any religion whatsoever and asked the same questions and received the same replies then yes, I would believe you were on to something.

And then to compare children and adults really isn't necessary. Adults know more words to describe "God" than children, but it's basically the same ideas. What a breakthrough.

Something else about this struck a nerve,

There’s also a lot of research showing that very young children are quite good at handling temporarily hidden objects.

I've read up on child psychology in the years past, and I remember quite well that this isn't true. Hidden objects play hell on young children, they don't understand the concept that the object is still there, it's just not seen. Peek-a-boo anyone?


From what I took away from this interview, the researcher is skewing her results to match her own ideology. She talks like it's all science, but it just doesn't make too much sense to me. I've been wrong before. If anyone at all ever sees this, please point out where I'm going astray.

The Great Desecration

Click HERE for the story. Profound enlightenment.

Enemy of the State

I saw a picture this week that just won't go away. It was taken to show the "security" measures being used to transport an American citizen, in an American military confinement facility, on American soil.



His vision and hearing were both restricted with darkened googles and earphones. Everytime he left his cell. Every time. It didn't matter whether he was leaving the facility or not. Every time he left his cell, he had these devices placed on him. In essence, his solitary confinement followed him everywhere.

He is of course, Jose Padilla. Arrested in 2002, on charges of attempting to enter the U.S. in order to detonate a 'dirty bomb'. He was held in solitary confinement and was subject to psycological torture, until earlier this year, when he was finally charged and moved to Florida. He was cleared of any conspiracy or involvement in the 'dirty bomb' conspiracy, and charged with different terror related conspiracy charges. With the new charges, I've read that the total time he could spend in prison wouldn't be more than 15 years.

Which, if you're Jose Padilla, wouldn't sound too bad. Considering. The only problem now is his lawyers are claiming the years in solitary and the mental abuse he endured have greatly affected his ability to tell who is on his side, much less help in his own defense.

I would just like you to remember, he is an American citizen, arrested on American soil, held in solitary for almost 4 years on a complaint that was proven false.

The New American Justice.

Pictures by a friend

I was recently in contact with an old friend, on YahooIM, who had joined the military and ended up in San Jose,CA. Tonight I asked if he had any photos, meaning of him, but he sent me a link of some pictures he had taken around the San Francisco area awhile back. After clearing it up and getting a couple of recent pics of him, I spent some time looking at his other pictures.

Here is a picture taken at the Japanese Tea Garden in the Golden Gate Park:














The angle of the Sun (midmorning/late afternoon?) really makes this a nice study in contrasts.

My other favorite from his picture page is one of the Golden Gate Bridge, taken from the Southwest.















There is so much in this photo. The clouds, the wide expanse of beach, the surf, the bridge itself. These pictures are really best seen in a larger format.

Please feel free to visit HERE to see these and more of Jasons pictures.