Barely Human

Disclaimer: Not written by me, but a very good piece of writing and worth sharing. Did some minor editing to make it a blog post instead of a forum thread post.

Once upon a time in 2008 a broke, uninsured, oil-addicted white majority first world warmongering imperialist country elected a charismatic center-right corporate apologist to be President. The twist this time is he’s black as well as a Democrat, and thus right-thinking Americans found themselves with a 4 year license to lose their minds in editorials, blog postings and anywhere comments are enabled. FreeRepublic.com is the gold standard go-to for conservative commentary and nothing but; however, unlike the last time we elected the Antichrist that would put us all in FEMA camps, the Obama regime operates in an age of information, where any boomer worth their Reagan screensaver can and does run a patriotic resistance site complete with e-petition and Tea Party donation button. So enjoy the pre-Palin years as best you can, and escape into a paranoid fantasy world where the President is a Muslim Socialist from Kenya who wants to give the country to the blacks and gays, while millions of white people just like your grandparents foment crotchety, bigoted armed revolution from lawnchairs.

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Transcribed from Bill Maher’s Religulous

Religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge having in key decisions made by religious people. By irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says, “I’m willing, Lord! I’ll do whatever you want me to do!” Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas. And anyone who tells you they know, they just know what happens when you die, I promise you, you don’t.

How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not. The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that’s what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.

This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you comes at a horrible price. If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife, for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers.

If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was. We learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it. That’s it. Grow up or die.

nope

Pretty sure a lot of people were thinking this as well. This showed up on the huffington 4 days ago. It’s an open letter to Bill Maher.

Dear Bill,

Years ago you invited me to appear as a fellow skeptic several times on your ABC show Politically Incorrect, and I have ever since shared your skepticism on so many matters important to both of us: creationism and intelligent design, religious supernaturalism and New Age paranormal piffle, 9/11 “truthers”, Obama “birthers”, and all manner of conspiratorial codswallop. On these matters, and many others, you rightly deserved the Richard Dawkins Award from Richard’s foundation, which promotes reason and science.

However, I believe that when it comes to alternative medicine in general and vaccinations in particular you have fallen prey to the same cognitive biases and conspiratorial thinking that you have so astutely identified in others. In fact, the very principle of how vaccinations work is additional proof (as if we needed more) against the creationists that evolution happened and that natural selection is real: vaccinations work by tricking the body’s immune system into thinking that it has already had the disease for which the vaccination was given. Our immune system “adapts” to the invading pathogens and “evolves” to fight them, such that when it encounters a biologically similar pathogen (which itself may have evolved) it has in its armory the weapons needed to fight it. This is why many of us born in the 1950s and before may already have some immunity against the H1N1 flu because of its genetic similarity to earlier influenza viruses, and why many of those born after really should get vaccinated.

Vaccinations are not 100% effective, nor are they risk free. But the benefits far outweigh the risks, and when communities in the U.S. and the U.K. in recent years have foregone vaccinations in large numbers, herd immunity is lost and communicable diseases have come roaring back. This is yet another example of evolution at work, but in this case it is working against us. (See ScienceBasedMedicine.org for numerous articles answering every one of the objections to vaccinations.)

Vaccination is one of science’s greatest discoveries. It is with considerable irony, then, that as a full-throated opponent of the nonsense that calls itself Intelligent Design, your anti-vaccination stance makes you something of an anti-evolutionist. Since you have been so vocal in your defense of the theory of evolution, I implore you to be consistent in your support of the theory across all domains and to please reconsider your position on vaccinations. It was not unreasonable to be a vaccination skeptic in the 1880s, which the co-discovered of natural selection — Alfred Russel Wallace — was, but we’ve learned a lot over the past century. Evolution explains why vaccinations work. Please stop denying evolution in this special case.

As well, Bill, your comments about not wanting to “trust the government” to inject us with a potentially deadly virus, along with many comments you have made about “big pharma” being in cahoots with the AMA and the CDC to keep us sick in the name of corporate profits is, in every way that matters, indistinguishable from 9/11 conspiracy mongering. Your brilliant line about how we know that the Bush administration did not orchestrate 9/11 (“because it worked”), applies here: the idea that dozens or hundreds pharmaceutical executives, AMA directors, CDC doctors, and corporate CEOs could pull off a conspiracy to keep us all sick in the name of money and power makes about as much sense as believing that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their bureaucratic apparatchiks planted explosive devices in the World Trade Center and flew remote controlled planes into the buildings.

Finally, Bill, please consider the odd juxtaposition of your enthusiastic support for health care reform and government intervention into this aspect of our medical lives, with your skepticism that these same people — when it comes to vaccinations and disease prevention — suddenly lose their sense of morality along with their medical training. You excoriate the political right for not trusting the government with our health, and then in the next breath you inadvertently join their chorus when you denounce vaccinations, thereby adding fodder for their ideological cannons. Please remember that it’s the same people administrating both health care and vaccination programs.

One of the most remarkable features of science is that it often leads its practitioners to change their minds and to say “I was wrong.” Perhaps we don’t do it enough, as our own blinders and egos can get in the way, but it does happen, and it certainly happens a lot more in science than it does in religion or politics. I’ve done it. I used to be a global warming skeptic, but I reconsidered the evidence and announced in Scientific American that I was wrong. Please reconsider both the evidence for vaccinations, as well as the inconsistencies in your position, and think about doing one of the bravest and most honorable things any critical thinker can do, and that is to publicly state, “I changed my mind. I was wrong.”

With respect,
Michael Shermer

Hello my neighbours to the south, I am writing this letter in the friendly spirit in our over a century of brotherly love. And don’t take this as the typical “Fuck yall” that Americans get a lot from international people. Honestly, I think if you are reading something written by an admitted Marxist, Atheist, and Anarchist that you are probably smart enough to know how much status the Americans have in the greater international stage.

So let’s face the facts; through various historical means and brute violence, you are now pretty much the overlords of the Earth. If anyone does something you really don’t like you have no issues with stopping it through legal or illegal means. I mean I know the shadow of the Bush years are something you want to put behind you, but your country’s attempts to turn the cradle of civilization into a giant graveyard is a good testament to this. You don’t need to delve into wacko conspiracy theories to establish that at this moment, through economic, political, and violent means the United States has been crowned king of the world.

I’d like to ask you more learned Americans if you could please try to keep your idiots in check. I am a Canadian and a Canadian citizen, why do I know about Glenn Beck’s army of the Dumb? Why do I know that in Missippi you can say you are a member of a white supremacist group without landing in hot water? Why can I see a fanatical jingoism even in the most modest of proud Americans?

I know there are some smart people in there and really, this post didn’t turn out as fair to you as I’d like but damn this recent stuff is really pissing me off. Maybe I will make more sense next post.

One of the things I have noticed in the sea of people blogging about the big things I found a lot of things I wanted to talk about, and this is a blog format I had abandoned that I can definitely extrapolate on. I have found too many people on Youtube and int he blogosphere can’t see the sick perverse shit that happens in this world without either ignoring it or falling off the deep end with paranoid delusions.

Even the sceptic groups are either deeply infected with Libertarian rhetoric or becoming far too full of archons and celebrities to make me comfortable.

So here is my restart. I’m going to give my take on things in a relatively regular basis. I will try to make some good stuff here and hopefully earn myself a little bit of respect and maybe people will take in the new voice. I just hope you stick around for it.

had to make a couple changes to the RSS in the last couple days but it should be working 100% now. hopefully I can hear back from iTunes and get in the store.

Thanks for the support guys.

Here is a list of all the podiobooks I want to subscribe to and I’ll keep this updated. If you can recommend one just send me a comment.

Reading:
Antithesis Book 1: Predestination and Other Games of Chance
The Arwen
Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword
The Rookie
Black Shadow
Nina Kimberly the Merciless
Eden
Making the Cut
Contagious
South Coast
Weather Child
Heaven (Again)
Lessons from a Geek Fu Master
Voices: New Media Fiction

To Read:
Double Share
7th Son Book One: Descent
Nocturnal
Chasing the Bard
Playing for Keeps (again)
Weaver’s Web
Crescent
Heaven Season 2
Space Casey (Again)
Brave Men Run
Spiral
Crusade
War Machine
Dark Matter
MOREVI
Murder at Avedon Hill
Fractured Horizon
8810
Max Quick 1

This episode is a basic outline on what I’m doing and what I plan for the podcast to be.

Music Credits:
Eden Will Burn

Promo:
TruthSeeker’s Podcast

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This is simply a sign of the times. As out species first evolved into a state of early civilization. We knew very little about how the world actually worked, and turned to mysticism to explain what we could not understand. We had gods for lightning, thunder, fire, water, everything.

As we grew and learned more about how the world worked these largely faded until the new face came of the Abrahamic religions. These carried a policy of “believe what we believe or we kill you” which proved rather effective. It took us from a fading Roman empire and turned our philosophical, moral, artistic, and scientific progress back a huge step and we entered the time where everyone believed in god and Jesus as lord, the time historians call the dark ages.

In the Dark Ages or the Medieval age we saw little in the way of scientific or social progress as the church dominated much of Europe with an iron fist. Anyone suspected of not believing Jesus as lord was promptly killed. Bloody wars over worthless desert real-estate killed thousands as the Caliphs and the Kings serving the pope threw soldiers at each other in the names of their magical masters.

It was only when the rationalists, and people who sought to challenge the christian dogma came around did we ascend into the renaissance. The one domineering church began to lose influence in a major way. Christianity facing scientific progress and new philosophies shattered into fragments like dropping a mirror.

It was only when scientific progress began to uncover the things that directly challenged the dogma of Christianity did real interesting change occur. After discoveries in Biology and Astronomy, and Physics showed that there was no need to invoke the supernatural to explain the universe the few believers got mad. Existential thinking further split the believers into hardcore fundamentalists, pick and choose believers clinging to the supernatural, and a growing movement of non-belief.

Now as we enter the modern and Postmodern age. The Bush years exposed the hatred and intolerance of religion and pointed most of these large evangelicals as simple men of greed and arrogance. Books like the God Delusion and the End of Faith have taken the ability to use ignorance to control their dwindling flock.

Reality and religion have become almost completely incompatible, and over time as we learn more and educate more people, the connection will sever entirely.

This is the beginning of the end for god, no matter what names, or stories, or biases you attribute to him. The age of reason is coming and we can finally socially evolve past pointing at the dark corners of our understanding and screaming “Magic!”