Christian tolerance

This just hurts my eyes, I just can't stop wetting them out of frustration of the stupidity behind this, whats more if you express your feeling of intolerance towards this then you better prepare for something like P.Z. Myers got in his mailbox, which he shows a few snippets of here, for posting his oppinion of the episode here.

I really do not have anything to add to this, just wanted to point this out to people.

N.B. All the christians that I know are tolerant and intelligent people, but of course its like the saying is, "the empty barrel makes the loudest noise" (which is perhaps why no one hears me ;-) ).

Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief

Jonathan Miller made a very thought provoking 3 episode documentery about the history of disbelief in 2005.

This program can be seen on youtube but it is cut up into 19 small videos and so I am going to list the episodes (I don't like to embed videos here on the blog) here for better access for the reader and in hope that the videos will stay there and not be removed by copyright issues or some other reason:

Episode 1 (named Shadows of Doubt): Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.

Episode 2 (named Noughts and Crosses): Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.

Episode 3 (named The Final Hour): Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.

Enjoy this remarkable series.

The Enemies of Reason

Richard Dawkins of whom I am a great admirer hosted a two episode documentary about non-science things like astrology, alternative healing and the like called The Enemies of Reason. The shows are available on google video here: Part 1 and Part 2.

Highly recommended.

Richard Dawkins

I am a great admirer of Richard Dawkins (official homepage here) but when I listened to his talk at the TED conference I was finding myself to disagree with him on his final point of being a more militant atheist. Dawkins is most famous for his anti religion stanz and his fight against creationists and intelligent design which I wholeheartedly agree with but in that talk he said that we atheists should stop being so damn tolerant and be more militant in our views. I interpret that in that way that we should start to be some kind of missionaries for atheism (or agnostic, whichever you want to call it) and try to convert believers into non believers. No thank you very much, I say let the people have their own faith in private. But I do agree in the way that we should not be shy about it, we should talk about our atheism and if people are willing to hear it explain why we don't believe. If we don't then religious people will dominate the discussion and "uninformed" people will hear just the religious point of view which is not good, there has to be a counterweight.

By the way, at TED there are a lot of nice talks (and not so nice, its a matter of personal taste and what you think is interesting), so if you find the spare time, have a look at a few of them.

Brainwashing

I was watching a documentary earlier this evening, its called Jesus Camp and is about how the evangelic christian movement is indoctrinating the children of its members. This is one amazing movie.

It shows how the kids are at a bible camp and how they are exposed to ultra religious believes without anyone to doubt for them. They seem to have been raised to not doubt what the pastors or preachers are telling them (but doubt what all the others are telling them) and so they believe it fully when they hear sentences like "you are the chosen generation", "I believe that you are the generation that will bring forth the second coming of Jesus" and others in the same category. This does scare me since the kids become susceptible to messages like "you are gods warrior", "go fight the good fight" etc etc, how are they supposed to interpret that message? Is there any difference from these teachings and what the people of Taliban teach their children?

I admit that there was nothing in this movie that told straight out to the children, go and kill the enemy, and the only enemy that was mentioned there were liberals that were pro abortion (this documentary was taken as supreme justice Samuel Alito was nominated and later appointed for the supreme court) but that doesn't really matter. The ground work has been done, these kids are susceptible to all kinds of ideas their teachers like to teach them. They are open to anything, they don't question what they hear from their teachers.

Personally I don't mind grown up people wasting their time in stuff like that, but when it comes to kids, there I say stop. Kids should only get their education from moderates, be they religious or not.