The Saccharin and the Profane

By Anthony David Jacques on March 11, 2012 | Discuss

I was on a walk with my three year old daughter when she heard one of her favorite sounds; a train’s whistle. In the evenings you can hear the whistle of the local line if you’re in the right spot and things are otherwise quiet. My daughter has taken quite a liking to these trains and it’s not uncommon for us to stop when walking near the tracks and wait for the Sprinter Line to go by on our way to the beach.

She looked up to me, brimming with excitement, and asked, “Train, daddy? Train, daddy?”

“Yeah, sweetie-pie,” I replied, “that’s the train.”

With her excited tone dropping, however, she then said, “No. No train.”

“Why not?”

She stopped walking and thought for a moment, looking up and down the street with her hands stretched out, and she said, very matter of fact, “No tracks. No train.”

I was stunned. She was looking for evidence and didn’t see any.

“No tracks, daddy,” she reiterated. “No tracks. No train.”

At three, my daughter already understands the very basic necessity of evidence for the formation of a belief. I did take a moment to explain that the tracks are only a mile away, which is why we can hear the whistle even though we can’t see the train, but I had to commend her on her desire for proof. Continue reading…

Heavy Metal Bible

By Anthony David Jacques on March 4, 2012 | Discuss

This is a new series of short posts that will be based on little Atheist “factoids” that I’ve also posted on a new tumblr site called …you might be an Atheist. This is an experiment in memetics, among other things.

Some will be funny, some will be serious, but the goal is that all of these ought to be thought-provoking conversation starters for people of all stripes. This first one touches on a topic with which I’ve always been fascinated. If you wish to pass it along on tumblr, just click on the graphic itself. Otherwise, feel free to link this article to facebook, twitter, or your social networking portal of choice.

Let’s get the conversation going.

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Did you know that Metallica’s song “Creeping Death” is a specifically about the Biblical tenth plague, when God killed the firstborn child of every household in Egypt?

Continue reading…

Suffer the Little Children : Witch Hunters in the 21st Century

By Anthony David Jacques on February 26, 2012 | Discuss

Helen Ukpabio is a Christian fundamentalist and Biblical literalist who incites torture, violence, and persecution against alleged witches and wizards, citing Exodus 22:18 as a primary justification and foundation for her methods: ”Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Based on this and quite a few more Old Testament scriptures, Ukpabio and many other witch hunters in several African countries put children, the elderly and the mentally infirm at serious risk.

Ukpabio’s ministry is based at Nigeria’s Liberty Gospel Church, but she is coming to Houston, Texas in the middle of March at the invitation of Glorious Praise Ministries, to lead a conference on witch-hunting.

The oddly upbeat tagline for her conference is: “12 days of battling with the spirit of freedom” but don’t be fooled. Read a little further and you find that attendants should expect to be delivered from: Bad dreams, witchcraft attack, possession by mermaid spirits or other evil spirits, lack of promotion in work, and quite a lot more.

While I can’t speak for my fellow contributors, I’d like her to be banned from entering the US in a few weeks due to her notorious support of violence and torture. There is already a petition to this effect in progress if you are interested.

But first, consider the recent death of 15 year-old Kristy Bamu last Christmas.

Continue reading…

OMG Richard Dawkins!

By Anthony David Jacques on February 24, 2012 | Discuss

Aren’t words funny? Really, they’re just symbols we’ve come up with to represent our ideas and communicate them with one another, yet they really can get us into trouble. Take Richard Dawkins, who has recently come under fire for fatally uttering those two words which prove any Atheist is really a closeted believer; “Oh God.”

Of course, were this logic to be broadly applied, that would mean Sir Mix A Lot’s Baby Got Back is a Christian song. After all, the opening line is, “Oh my God, Becky. Look at her butt. It is so big.”

I might be content to suggest that everyone with a brain and a pulse knows that merely saying the words, “Oh God” doesn’t prove one believes in God any more than saying, “Holy crap” proves one finds their bowel movements somehow divine.

And yet, the subtle nuance of language, of words and the ideas we attach to them, urges me onward.

Consider that a great many Catholics profess to believe that when a priest blesses a communion cracker, and they ingest it, the cracker becomes the literal body of Christ. This is the Doctrine of Transubstantiation, composed of mere words, and yet look at the consequences. Not only is this one step short of ritual cannibalism, such a stance tacitly acknowledges that after eight to ten hours of digestion, the believer then excretes the nutritionally useless parts of the body of Christ into the toilet.

Holy crap, indeed.

Further, this casts the Great White Throne Judgement in the book of Revelation in a new light. With this in mind it seems only fitting this is where we find Jesus seated at the end of the world, as his believers have been routinely depositing him in their tiny white thrones for centuries now.

All in all, this supports my argument that the best proof against religious belief is often the beliefs themselves.

So why don’t we make a deal? How about we agree to let Dawkins off the hook for mistakenly uttering those two fateful words, and we’ll just look the other way as believers (either literally or symbolically) cannibalize their lord and savior and then flush him down the toilet.

Not Quite One Million Moms Don’t Want it to Get Better

By Anthony David Jacques on February 23, 2012 | Discuss

A group of about 40,000 conservative women, calling themselves One Million Moms, is protesting the It Gets Better Project.

It Gets Better is a campaign that seeks to support young homosexuals who face harassment, intolerance or hatred in their schooling or personal lives and is a response to a wave of suicides among LGBTQ youth.

One Million Moms believes supporting these vulnerable youth is somehow dangerous to society. Their website says nothing short of this:

A new commercial airing for the website itgetsbetter.org, powered by Google Chrome, is targeting the “It Gets Better” campaign to teens and young adults. The campaign tells them it is ok to be gay, and that their life will get better. The commercial shows homosexual couples with children and promotes open homosexual unions. This is dangerous to our society for many reasons.

The site is for homosexual teens so they can feel better, get stronger in their sexual choice, and know it gets better with time. This is a false statement and harmful to America’s youth. This is not the way to help reduce suicide rates when, in fact, statistics have shown there is a higher rate of suicide among teens who chooses homosexuality as their lifestyle. Not to mention the health risks involved with a higher rate of contracting a disease and other forms of illness or harm. Homosexuals are more likely to molest children and are at a higher risk for depression and substance abuse.

The nonsense factor in this article only gets better as you read on, but I must point out one glaring bit of nonsense you may not already know: Among lesbian couples, STD rates are the lowest in the country, in some studies approaching almost zero.

Anyway, to read more, click here.

To learn about or support the It Gets Better Project, click here.

An Open Letter to Religious Conservatives

By Anthony David Jacques on February 19, 2012 | Discuss

To whom it may concern,

We, the People of the United States of America, understand that many of you don’t like the idea of same-sex marriage. We only wish you would realize that you are free to not get one. You are free to marry whoever you wish, or no one at all. You are also free to not recognize same-sex marriages in your church. You are free to count no gay couples among your friends and shun those who may happen to be part of your family tree. This is your choice, and we see no reason to deprive you of it.

However, please do not confuse your failed attempts toward limiting the rights of those outside your religious community with your own rights being somehow limited.

Likewise, if you don’t wish contraception to be a part of your family planning, you are free to not use it. You are free to not offer such services through your organizations. You are free to encourage those who are within your sphere of influence to abstain from such preventative measures, and you may freely dictate that members of your religious community must abstain from contraception or find community elsewhere.

But please don’t confuse your freedom to limit your own life choices, and the choices of those within your community, with your misguided desire to place limits on the lives of those people who choose to live outside your religious community.

Gays getting married does not trample your religious freedoms. If you don’t like the idea, then such marriages will take place in more welcoming churches. The gay community does no harm to you by making such choices, and their basic civil rights, as defined by the Supreme Court of the United States, should never be subject to a popular vote.

Women having access to birth control does not trample your rights. If you don’t like it, then those women who see the need to avail themselves of birth control may freely choose to attend church elsewhere. They do no harm to you by making such choices, and their basic rights should likewise never be subject to a popular vote.

These basic rights are inherent to what it means to be a human member of our society. They have the same guarantee as the rights you hold dear.

This country should no sooner pass a law banning the consumption of bacon or insisting that all women wear burkhas because other religious groups observe such rules than should we make any of your religious observances into law because you wish to make everyone live the way you do.

We are all Americans, but we have not all chosen to be a part of your religious community.

No one is insisting you marry someone of the same gender. No one is insisting you use birth control. No one is trying to trample your freedoms in these ways, and simply repeating these lies over and over hoping that they become your version of the truth will not work.

The sooner you realize this, the sooner our government can get back to focusing on more pressing matters instead of mitigating attempts to make your religious opinions into law.

Regards,

Anthony David Jacques, et al

(P.S. Feel free to add your name to this letter and circulate it wherever you like.)

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