1. A Conversation with Expelled's Associate Producer Mark Mathis

Comment #165288 by HumanisticJones on April 21, 2008 at 9:49 am

I have to say, my favorite part involving the discussion about Miller was not where Mathis dismissed him as "not really following what most other Catholics believe", but where he declared that "including Ken Miller would have confused the message of the movie". Couldn't have gotten a better admission of the ignorant ear-plugged prejudice of the creators of this dreck if Mathis had simply dropped his facade and declared "Look, we wanted to say that all evolutionists are atheists and all atheists are Nazis. The evidence of Ken Miller clearly contradicts our dogma, therefor the evidence is wrong and must be ignored!"

Congrats to the SA team for this wonderful interview. This should be linked from the best Expelled website out there.

2. Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!

Comment #150092 by HumanisticJones on March 26, 2008 at 12:57 pm

Happy Birthday Professor Dawkins. Here's to good health, good friends, and good years ahead! Thank you for all you've done for helping people like me to accept life without delusions.

3. Evolution Of New Species Slows Down As Number Of Competitors Increases

Comment #149261 by HumanisticJones on March 25, 2008 at 10:52 am

It does make sense. If there is a pre-existing species filling a niche in the ecosystem already, the statistical chance that another species slightly varied to exploit the same niche would be as well adapted and able to compete for resources.

It really fits in well with punctuated equilibrium where drastic, sudden changes to the ecosystem of the organisms would close old niches down and leave new niches unfilled promoting new species to fill them.

4. Richard Dawkins' US Tour begins this week

Comment #138082 by HumanisticJones on March 3, 2008 at 9:49 pm

I'd really love to see Prof. Dawkin's come to Atlanta. By the time I heard about the event in Alabama a while back it was both too late to request the time off from work to make it in time.

5. Scientists want rewrite of Earth's time line

Comment #117586 by HumanisticJones on January 29, 2008 at 7:06 am

warrant recognition of the Anthropocene by the official geological time lords

Time Lords, not just fighting the Daleks and flying about in police boxes anymore.

6. This Week's Flea

Comment #100686 by HumanisticJones on December 19, 2007 at 5:37 am

This WEEK'S flea...

Seriously, this is starting to get tedious. Too bad rationalism and reason holds a higher standard for publishing, unless every single Atheist starts writing and collaborating on books every hour of every day we can't keep up. The only other way would be to adopt their strategy and just publish any daft drivel that sounds like it relates to the issue at hand.

I do seriously wonder how they keep churning these out at such a pace. One would think that it would eventually start to look like the blatant commercialization of religious fear mongering... oh... wait, it always looked like that.

7. Borders Tags Atheist Book with 'O Come All Ye Faithless' Cards

Comment #100239 by HumanisticJones on December 18, 2007 at 12:14 pm

So let me get this straight.

An off the cuff parody on the title of a Christian song...
used in an advertisement aimed at atheists...
for a book about why atheism is the best logical position to take on the god issue...
is now equivalent in these daft peoples' eyes to me walking into a church during Christmas Services and punching the pastor in the face followed by a good hour of beating random church goers all while shouting "Take this you silly god-believing type person!", "This one's for believing in a messianic figure!", "How dare you have the arrogance to believe in a global flood in your own home!". This is a silly add designed to make atheists giggle and maybe pick up a copy of the God Delusion, not a manifesto on tossing Jesus lovers to the lions.

Oh, trust me, I love the add. But I love it for the same reason that I like the play "Shoggoth on the Roof" by the HPLHS, that I get a kick out of parody, and not for some imagined "beating Christianity in the head". They do that well enough with out our help.

8. Here's an improvement on democracy

Comment #98251 by HumanisticJones on December 13, 2007 at 11:15 am

Reminds me in a way of the phrase "An empty stomach does not make a good political adviser." The US, the country in which I live, has taken the startlingly narrow-sighted view that we can bomb a country into rubble, depose the current ruling party, leave utilities and basic human needs in tatters and then simply expect that the first set of voting will fix it all.

Desperate voters will vote not for the actual best leader but for the candidate that promises them the quickest fix the their ills. We saw that here last year when we elected a majority of Democrats that are largely politically impotent and ineffective. They weren't elected on any other merit than their promise to do away with the mistakes of the Republicans. In a country where the mindset of the people is still that god will provide, the candidate that offers the quickest return to God's graces is going to win out and we'll just end up going from a man that killed because he feared losing his power to a man that will kill because it is his holy duty to do so.

I would be interested to see the results of a surge of secular social thinkers instead of a surge of ground troops in the middle east.

9. The empty myths peddled by evangelists of unbelief

Comment #97082 by HumanisticJones on December 11, 2007 at 11:25 am

In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins argues passionately for the Darwinian view that the human species is a product of natural selection: humans are "gene machines" programmed by evolution to replicate themselves. Yet in the same book he declares: "We, alone on Earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." From where does Dawkins derive this faith in human freedom?

I'd have to say observational evidence. Behold my central heating and air and constructed shelter removing the need for me to be selected for or against based on my ability to adapt to the heat and cold. Marvel upon out contraceptive devices that allow humans to enjoy sexual intercourse with no reproduction or swapping of genetic material. Stand in awe of hair dyes, colored contacts, botox, face lifts, plastic surgery and cosmetic devices that allow us to alter our phenotype to ones more visually appealing than our own.

It's nothing to do with some intrinsic privilege that we can do it, its that our evolutionary branch happened to angle towards tool building, society constructing, language development, and environment tuning. No longer do our genes have to tune us to the environment, we now tune the environment to our genes. When another species on the planet demonstrates a persistent ability to do the same, I'm certain that Prof. Dawkins would revise that line to read "Only two rare specimens, humans and *species here*, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." After all, scientist gladly correct old mistakes, unlike religion that would have us believe that people 2000 years ago never got anything wrong about human nature and how the universe works.

10. A Rational Universe Implies a Creator, Science points towards Theism

Comment #82497 by HumanisticJones on October 26, 2007 at 1:15 pm

As I understand it, Scientific "Laws" are really nothing more than general case statements for how things should work in a particular reference. Could we not benefit maybe from changing from the Law of Gravity to The General Case of Gravity?

11. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #82495 by HumanisticJones on October 26, 2007 at 1:12 pm

I think this would be a good one to see a rebuttal too since anytime a theist brings it up, there is never a challenge given. The last place I saw it was on a short clip with a Jesuit monk and a physicist discussing the universe. The monk held up a physics book and said the following...

"This science book is only 10 years old and is already out of date. However, the Bible is over 2000 years old and is still relevant today."

This seems similar to the other theistic sticking point of "Science changes all the time, but Christianity stays the same." Said like this is some kind of virtue for their point. I'd just like to see an atheist in debate with someone that uses this ask for direct examples as to how the bible is still relevant today and how a 10 year old physics book apparently isn't.

12. Help Counter the New Atheist Crusade to 'Evangelize' America!

Comment #79685 by HumanisticJones on October 18, 2007 at 6:49 am

dogooder... I live in Atlanta where this guy runs his church... maybe I should go and question him... repeatedly.

13. Atheists arise: Dawkins spreads the A-word among America's unbelievers

Comment #74936 by HumanisticJones on October 1, 2007 at 7:06 am

It is like Daniel going into the lions' den, though Professor Richard Dawkins might not appreciate the biblical comparison.

I don't see why he'd be hesitant to accept the comparison to heroic story from a book of legends. At least the allusion was to one of the good parts.

14. There Go The Dinosaurs

Comment #73762 by HumanisticJones on September 26, 2007 at 5:09 am

Peter Griffin: Teacher, why did all the dinosaurs die out?
Teacher: Because you touch yourself at night!

15. Talking Action Figure Jesus

Comment #73494 by HumanisticJones on September 25, 2007 at 5:27 am

I'm suddenly hearing the 'You Don't Know Jack' skit/commercial for Bible Action Figures...

Mother: Come on kids its time for Sunday School.
Kids: Aw mom, do we have to?
God: Why the long faces?
Girl: Wow it's God!
Boy: God we wanna learn about the bible and stuff, but Sunday school is so booring.
God: I bet it wouldn't be so boring if you brought along some BIBLE ACTION FIGURES!
Son: Bible Action Figures?
God: That's right Timmy, now you can help Jesus carry his cross with his awesome Kung-fu action grip!

16. Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

Comment #72129 by HumanisticJones on September 20, 2007 at 11:59 am

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the version of TGD that I read was a book about addressing the assertion "God exists" not addressing the various flavors of said god (ie Theology). I'm certain everyone that read TGD for theology critiques found it quite short in that regard... not because Prof. Dawkins is ill-suited to it, but because he didn't write that book about theology.

17. Some stars and planets in scale

Comment #18640 by HumanisticJones on January 22, 2007 at 7:20 am

I actually recieved an email from my family (seemingly incurably religious and prone to applying it to everything) that contained similar pictures to this video. It wasn't screen shots from this, but similarly scaled pictures of the planets and stars. Their immediate mindset was to apply God to it and claim that this was all the proof anyone needed that the Christian god could do all things.

I feel my lovely partner was more astute when she saw the first bit of the email and proclaimed, "If there was ever anything that would blow religion out of the water, its this."