As of 5:16 PM EST I am now the proud owner of three atheistic masterpieces. This will be my first divergence into atheistic literature (actual, not internet based or whatever) and my first divergence into actual books in several years.
I quite expect to enjoy them. I think I’ll either read God Delusion first or End of Faith and put Hitchens book in the middle of them. I’m hopeful it will ignite a flame for reading books and I will start reading again. I used to a lot, but it sort of faded, so yeah.
But it goes without saying: nothing is sacred. These are not my “holy” books. They’re just books that support my position and therefore I wish to give them a spin. I may like them and I may not.
After much time of procrastinating, I bought three books today! With mom’s permission (dad doesn’t know – yet) I bought some books by my favorite authors of recent times:
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
I know I end up saying much on the subject regarding every supposed ex-atheist I can find, but it’s a subject that just keeps on giving. Just once I would like to find a now-Creationist and ex-atheist who actually understands evolution.
Since Darwin put forth his original theory, scientists have sought fossil evidence indicating past organic transitions. Nearly 150 years later, there has been no evidence of evolutionary transition found thus far in the fossil record. In Darwin’s own words, if his theory of “macro-evolution” were true, we would see a vast number of fossils at intermediate stages of biological development. In fact, based on standard mathematical models, we would see far more transitional forms in the fossil record than complete specimens. However, we see none — not one true transitional specimen has ever been found.
On FSTDT, we have our own saying that we took from futurama. When a fundie explains evolution or the big bang wrong, as not a single one of them has gotten it right, we say that or a variation thereof. For instance: the big bang does not work that way!
Evolution explains something observed in nature: species are not fixed. Through different environments in nature, species adapt over time into completely new types of animal. Or just die out, but the ones we care about are the ones that adapted.
Anyway, evolution seems to be a pretty simple concept, yes? Well, groups like Answers in Gensis have been fighting it since like the 1980s and still don’t have a firm grasp on it.
I shall write peace upon your wings, and you shall fly around the world so that children will no longer have to die this way.
It’s been 63 years now since attacks on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and still the entire world mourns. The quote is attributed to twelve year old Sadako Sasaki, who died as a result of the attack on Hiroshima.
Let us remember all of those who lost their lives on that fateful day in 1945, as well as ensuing years, and use all of the power we have to be sure that nothing of the sort happens ever again.
A few days ago I linked to the video for Beware the Believers, thinking it could possibly be a viral video for Expelled. Our Newsflash of the day… it is. Michael Edmondson, owner of Float On Films, created Beware the Believers to promote expelled.
I created (and danced) the “Richard Dawkins: Beware The Believers” viral ad for “Expelled : No Intelligence Allowed” found here:
The viral ad received 200, 000 views on the web during the three weeks prior to the (Expelled) release. I also have a visual effects credit for the film Expelled.
I love this video, and if it’s propaganda for Expelled (as many have speculated over a period of many months), it’s no doubt a hundred times better than Expelled could have ever been.
The elite here is comprised of: Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, Daniel Dennett, Charles Darwin, PZ Myers, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.
My personal favorite character is Sam Harris, I think the grillz are funny. But Dennett is funny in anything like this, because he looks like Santa but most religious would tell you he embodies Satan instead. Also, when he comes out of nowhere and says “YEAH!”, I laughed hard. Of course, that particular “YEAH!” is seemingly taken from the Anthrax song I’m The Man. I could be wrong, though.
William Dembski is one of the IDiots and one of its most notable, public, etc. proponents. ID is a pseudo-science that claims life is too complex to have arisen at random. That means, apparently, that it must have been designed. Sound like anything you’ve heard of prior to discovering ID? Thought so.
In other words, life couldn’t evolve, so god did it. But thanks to a 1987 court ruling on creation science, any mention of god or creation is completely forbidden, so they had to think of a new way to get creationism into class. So they took a creation science textbook, later known as Of Pandas and People, and put the buzz words “intelligent design” in the place of all mentions of creation, creationism, etc.
In the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial, early editions of this textbook were released that show, in the IDeist community’s own words, that creationism is the same as ID. They changed no definitions, just words: creation to intelligent design, creationism to intelligent design, creationists to design proponents.
At 8 PM everything resets and a new day begins on WordPress dot com. But all is most certainly not lost! For instance, there’s a cache forever saved on the WordPress site that records all of the number ones, the number one blog posts, number one blogs, etc. for certain days.
Today, I happen to be number one in one category. On the Blogs of the Day page, you’ll see that I’m in the number one spot.
That’s right. Thanks to one PZ Myers I racked in the top spot on WordPress dot com for yesterday in a mere nine hours. Want to know the final number of hits? Do you? Huh? I received 12,867 unique hits over a nine hour period. For comparison, my four month total (March – July) was only abou 3,500. That means I got over three times my total blogging traffic from four months of work in just nine hours. Quite incredible!
I owe it all, yet again, to my biology friendly hero PZ Myers, who gave me this epic shoutout. You can see his worship of me at this location.
More than being impressed with anything else, I found two things intriguing: the fact that PZ did notice me (he must get plenty of email like mine!) and the fact that he has so much traffic.
Thanks everyone for making this a very special day. I feel like a band that has just had a number one single and a number three album debut on the billboard 200! OK, lame comparison, but it feels good. The best thing is knowing that my hero did notice me ❤
The Seeker 