Christians set to prove existence of God on national TV

April 30th, 2007 • 3 comments atheism, christianity, debate

Last week, Hemant got word that the guys from the banana video would be pitted against two Atheists for a live death match on ABC. Well, I wish it was a death match but instead it’s just a vocal debate.

Well, Digg finally caught up with the rest of the world and someone posted this. I’ve been planning to watch the online simulcast of the debate which should prove to be interesting from the Christian side for sure, I’m going to relish the insane things they say. I love this quota from Ray Comfort:

The Christian writer also noted that there is a genuine attack against Christian beliefs, more than other religions.

Gee, now why would that be? It might not be because Christian fundies make it their life-long goal to attack, demean, belittle, and otherwise hate upon those of other religions would it? It wouldn’t be because they make it an endeavour to convert people of other religions to Christianity by vehemently attacking the people’s original religion would it?

I foresee the end of this debate with the Atheists laughing and Comfort and Cameron hanging their heads in shame.

Mojoey sure went through hell for Hemant’s book

April 29th, 2007 • atheism, chatter, intolerance

Hemant‘s book I Sold My Soul on eBay was released recently and generally, reviews are positive. However, his eye was caught — as was mine — by Mojoey’s interesting day at the airport while in possession of Hemant’s book. Hemant gleefully outlines the rather bizarre day Mojoey recounts.

Funny what happens to a guy with an Atheist book but people keep quiet (believe me) when you walk around with books emblazoned with the words “The Devil”, “Satan”, “Lucifer”, or “occult”. I do get the occasional odd stare but no one ever outright asks “Are you a Satanist?” so I could come up with some witty retort. It makes me wonder why people are seemingly more afraid of those who outright state “there is no God” than people who seek to destroy that God and their religion completely. Maybe the “great” Satanism scare of the 1980s was too much for the masses?

The words of a spiteful God in comics

April 29th, 2007 • 1 comment beards, christianity

There are a number of good sites that produce comics based on atheistic views such as Saint Gasoline and Dan Harlow. I just found a new one in my Google Reader tonight and it’s called lolgod or would that be LOL god? I’m not really sure. This one in particular caught my eye about hating men with long hair (Jesus included). However, 1 Cor. 11:14 words it a bit more kindly:

1 Corinthians 11:14
Doth not even nature herself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?

So are we to truly shame those men who bear long hair? Even Jesus? Granted, we do not truly know if Jesus had long hair during his proselytising days but we all know he is portrayed as having long hair. If the word of God is to be infallible, why is his most beloved messenger and son portrayed in such a way that would have Christians shame and demean him? And if this were true, we would hold the same against his 12 disciples since we are led to believe they too had quaffs of shoulder length — or longer — hair. If I were a person of the Christian faith, I’d be outraged that our saviour is portrayed in such a way that we are to shun and shame him. How does this even make sense?

Christian Science?

April 25th, 2007 • christianity, oddity

So I was randomly looking up Akkadian, doxology, and liturgy tonight and decided to do a quick bit of research on The Church of Christ, Scientist. This lead me to the foundation of Christian Science. As I’m reading over it, I start asking myself “Where’s the science in this? Shouldn’t there be something scientific in this? I thought science and Christianity mixed like oil and water.” I come to find out that Christian Science is completely devoid of science. How does this factor into their bizarre beliefs? I have absolutely no clue. Their faith is solely based on the premise of prayer fixes anything. If that’s science, I think a whole lot of scientists are “doing it wrong”.

Books update!

April 23rd, 2007 • education, reading

I finally received my latest batch of books on Friday! I’m still wading my way through The Devil: Perceptions… but I’ve just received three more books in the mail. One is the much anticipated Satan: The Early Christian Tradition which is the second volume of four of the same topic. I also received The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner and Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — And Doesn’t by Stephen Prothero.

I’m anxious to read the latter two as I’ve heard good things about Prothero’s book and Turner’s book should be interesting given her previous job as an editor at Playboy.

New reviews are coming

April 23rd, 2007 • blog, reviews, writing

Many of you probably do not know that I’m a huge metal fan. I love just about any genre I can find from black metal to doom metal to obscure things like pornogrind and horrorcore. I’ve been listening to metal since the ripe age of 12 and aside from abhorring it in my years after that due to immaturity, I’ve come full circle to the brutal music I love. What many of you also do not know is that besides rambling here about things, I also write reviews for metal albums over at Band Names Not Brand Names. I’ve been doing it for about a year with some breaks here and there due to work-related issues but I’m getting back into the swing of things.

My latest reviews have been for Norwegian black metal band Hordagaard and French black ambient master AEP. I’m pretty much positive that none of you have heard of either of these bands before and if you have, that’s awesome! I’m now in the final writing and editing processes for two new reviews for doom/death- and doom-based bands Novembers Doom and Mourning Beloveth respectively. Which discs of each band I won’t reveal just yet but feel free to take a guess. Here’s a kicker if you want to try and guess: I own 5 different Novembers Doom CDs and two Mourning Beloveth CDs to pick from and review. I actually have a sixth Novembers Doom CD on the way and it could potentially be that CD I review!

I’ve been trying to get published in popular metal rags and I’ve emailed a few magazines previously however, I’ve had little luck in trying to just get an “in” in how to get a review or two featured in a magazine. If any of you have tips on how to get published more easily, please let me know.

Finally, hibernation works!

April 22nd, 2007 • linux

So this weekend I took it upon myself to upgrade my aging (but efficient) install of Ubuntu 6.06 to 7.04 and it went without a hitch after I did a custom install since the default one did not work surprisingly.

But now I have two things I was yearning for that without a lot of unruly work: hibernation support and my onboard SD card reader works. The SD card reader would have worked if I’d updated to 2.6.18 or higher (I’m using the generic 2.6.20-15 kernel for now) and I really missed having that function but I was able to live without it since I have another 8-in-1 reader. However, hibernation/suspend support was another story. I’d compiled 2.6.17 by hand and patched in suspend2 support and it sort of worked. I could drop X and manually `sudo hibernate` but it would never restore correctly so I never used it. The kernel was the easy part, getting the actual suspend2 source to work nicely with my system was another ordeal entirely. So now with the upgrade to 7.04 both work flawlessly out of the box. This alone is enough justification for my to have upgraded even though I now have to use the atrocious GNOME desktop environment. I really miss ion3 and its uber efficient keyboard shortcuts.

Oh well, everything works like a charm now and I’m still trying to figure out the stupid workspace switching shortcuts (they’re not very user-friendly unfortunately) but I’ll just end up changing them soon anyway.

Books, books, books!

April 16th, 2007 • education, reading

I started off this year by actually reading a book, it was Gavin Baddeley’s Lucifer Rising which is named after the Kenneth Anger movie of the same name. I read this after I read the stellar book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Michael Moynihan. If you’re looking at getting either, don’t bother with Baddeley’s book, it’s just not worth a read.

Then I started reading Three Books of Occult Philosophy by HC Agrippa and I had to stop due to the text alone. It’s just hard to read. Not hard to comprehend by any means, it’s just physically hard to read a book that was written in 1630. I will pick it up again this year I’m sure.

This week I received The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. I’m only two chapters deep but I’m waiting for Russell to actually get to discussing “The Devil” and evil. So far it’s been what evil means to him “historically” and what a concept is (yes, he explains what concepts are for an entire chapter) and I’m ready to put this book up on the shelf already. I’ve heard that it’s a decent book but so far, I can’t see why or how it would be. I really hope I didn’t waste some money on what could be a pretty interesting read.

Today I received notice from Amazon that my pre-order copy of The Canon: A Whirlgig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science will be shipping earlier than expected! Woo! Early reviews are good for Natalie Angier’s newest book and I’m no stranger to science but it gets me giddy to get a book about it that I’m not required to read!

I’ve got more books on order that I’m eager to read but I have to plow through these others before I can undertake anything else interesting!

Telstra to block Gmail, starts idiot campaign

April 15th, 2007 • computing, email, idiocy, spam

According to The Inquirer, Telstra are starting to block all email from Gmail because of spam originating from the network. On the upside, having dealt with a ton of Telstra customers at my current job, I hear Telstra were a bunch of dolts before this. Having dealt with their customer service, I can confirm it. But that’s a tangent.

Telstra are set to block the world 3rd largest email provider because they’re too ignorant to implement proper spam filters on their network infrastructure. Gmail sending out spam is nothing new and before them, Yahoo! and Hotmail have been doing it for years with Hotmail being one of the worst free email solutions I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. Welcome to the 21st century, Telstra. Every free email service known to man can have spam sent to and from it without any intervention from the provider. With spam techniques changing almost daily, this will never stop until there’s something to supplant and replace our current — and pathetic — mail infrastructure as a whole. I receive spam from Gmail on my own Gmail accounts but this doesn’t make me implement filters to stop it, I understand that it happens and I don’t see why Telstra should be any different. All big email providers end up on blacklists from time to time and that’s the nature of email so why doesn’t Telstra implement the various RBLs in place that are widely used by everyone else is certainly beyond my feeble understanding.

But it seems Telstra are in the forefront of spam technology along with Verizon: block entire services. It’s my assumption that this is the wave of the future and will stop all spam immediately. This will ultimately stop all that direct spam, backscatter spam, sender domain/envelope spoofed spam and all that Cialis spam that we all love. Actions like this will require no need for innovation in spam blocking techniques or appliances because soon enough, Telstra customers will only be able to receive emails from Telstra/Bigpond customers so they’ll know it’s all legit.

I applaud you, Telstra, for your mighty foresight and innovation in keeping your network “usable” for your customers. You should get awards.

Update on Michigan’s iPod idea/scandal

April 15th, 2007 • education, idiocy

Over the past week since the idea was proposed, people have been muckracking about not only the state’s hapless financial problems but now they’ve got something else to bitch and moan about: Apple paid for part of the trip for the Senators pushing the bill .

Wow. Big freakin’ deal. I guess most people think companies wanting to land big customers never do things like this…ever. Or perhaps all of these people are just being naive. In the past, I’ve had companies buy me lunches (amongst things) to help sway me to their product and this is no different. Albeit a bit more pricy than a nice steak luncheon, it’s still in the same ball park of “Buy my product not that other guy’s.” Duke University did nearly the same thing two years ago and they’re not the only ones. Apple’s education program has many suitors to its courtships each year, whether they’re educational institutions or not. Fortunately for most of the education institutions, their meetings always bear successful fruit. And in the reverse, many companies out there actually pay other companies to come hawk their wares to them. In the end, the company selling the products not only gets a free plane ride, they probably sell some goods and make more money. So why is this such a big deal?

I have no idea but a lot of people are up-in-arms about it. Last year, Cisco came to my old job in this big fancy van to show off some VOIP products and their ability to converge with our existing network infrastructure. Monetarily how did this come about? Well, they paid us for them to come and gave us some free gadgets in the process. They spoke ad nauseum about their fancy IP phones and other sundries that most of us didn’t pay attention because we were too busy thinking “Just how in the hell am I going to teach end users how to use a $6,000 IP phone that can microwave meals?” but no one in our fair University was pointing fingers at us for trying to land a fish too big for our initiative. And this is where the Michigan deal is no different. Apparently, their school system is in pretty horrid shape and the state’s too poor — generally speaking — to do much about it. Now they bring about a new bill that, while costing a pretty $40M, could enhance the educational aspect of K-12 schooling. Starting at the toddler level, this would engrain a wonderful ideal into the children that these shiny iPods can actually serve a useful purpose other than blasting MP3s and syncing podcasts.

Unfortunately, most people are outside the realm of education and still think it’s their place to lambaste this (and most of them are NOT in Michigan so their thoughts should immediately be nullified). All the current commenters about this on TechDirt are people mostly under the age of voting and still want to spout off about how useless this endeavour is. From a simplistic standpoint, I don’t know too many kids that would be utterly unthrilled about receiving a free $300 device for their own personal use. When students get “free” laptops from their schools, many of them are overjoyed and end up actually using them for school work. What most — if not nearly all — people fail to realize in this bill, the iPod simply replaces the laptop but the educational value does not diminish.

Moral of the story? A big company wants you to buy a lot of their product from them so they fly you out for exclusive and personalized promotion of it. When this chance arrives, take it whether you go with their product or not. Why? This is an accepted business tactic regardless of what all the pundits may say to you.