Author: Don

Vote against religious discrimination in the US military

Stories of discrimination against non-believers in the US military are rampant.  There are big ones that make national news like the “spiritual fitness” requirements, or the sponsorship of blatantly proselytizing on-base festivals, or the faith-based training for nuclear missile operators and the Air Force Academy’s attempt to pretend the subsequent orders to suspend specific religious elements of all training maybe didn’t apply to them; and there are the smaller, personal stories, like the one recently shared about the marine who was arrested for not attending church services.

There’s a new attempt to draw attention to these problems.  The White House has added a petition system to its web site; any petition that gets a significant number of signatures (either 5,000 or 25,000 – there’s a bit of confusion about the numbers right now) within 30 days will get an official response.  So if you’d like to help drag this issue into the political spotlight, head on over to the White House’s “We the People” page and add your name to this petition:

End the Military’s Discrimination against Non-Religious Service Members

If you’ve experienced discrimination in the military for not being a believer, or not being the right kind of believer, please go share your stories with the folks at Rock Beyond Belief.  The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is another good resource.  The kind of religious coercion that goes on in military environments is not just unconstitutional, it’s unconscionable.  People who have volunteered to put their lives on the line in defense of our national ideals never deserve to be told they’re not fit to do so because they have the wrong opinion about about the magic invisible man in the sky.

 

Pat Robertson opens his mouth again

Good old Pat is always good for a laugh – if you can avoid, for a moment, thinking about how many people take him seriously – but it seems to me that over the last year or so he’s ramped up the frequency of Newsworthy Stupidity.

Robertson, eager to move on from the divorce is just fine as long as your wife has Alzheimer’s brouhaha, decided to carry us into October by dusting off an old meme:  “Halloween is Satan’s night”.

“We don’t believe” in ghosts and spirits, but be afraid of them, be very afraid!  It turns out, you see, that Pat’s network has engaged in investigative journalism to discover that:

“[M]ost of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches,” Daniels wrote. “I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.”

I’m curious whether Pat approves of dressing up in scary costumes and playing spooky noises in dimly lit areas so long as it’s done with the express purpose of traumatizing children into Christianity?

Is it too much to hope he’s planning to retire soon, and these are just his efforts to squeeze out a little bit extra of the crazy in the hopes of going out at the top of his game?

(10/5 edit – forgot a link!)

I Is Risen

I’m back again… again. Maybe for real this time – who knows?

I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging a bit, but somehow got so into the habit of not blogging that I just couldn’t bring myself to get re-started. But driven by the combined inspirations of watching FreeThoughtBlogs come together, the desire to get myself writing again in general, and the nagging feeling that the monthly hosting fee I pay for this site is going to waste if I don’t actually use it for something, I’ve decided to blow the dust off this place and start spewing forth more collections of words onto the Interwebz. So now that I’ve publicly said I’m going to do it, I have to come up with at least one post with a little more content than “I’m going to post something.”

There are a few unrelated internet-based projects that have been bouncing around in my head for a while that I’m going to force myself to start working on as well, and to facilitate those I’m in the process of looking for a different hosting setup. That means this blog will be moving soon, to a new host, a more recent version of the WordPress software, and maybe even a new theme if I get really crazy. This will be done as transparently as I can manage – hopefully any links to existing material here will continue to work.

Psst! A secret message to my fellow conspirators

Just wanted to discreetly pass along a suggestion to my fellow Militant Atheist, War-on-Christmas types. Let’s keep this just between us… it won’t work if the public gets wind of it.

A bunch of the Christians seem to think their Second Coming thing is happening on May 21 of this year. Even among those who don’t accept this as an exact date, many expect it to be in the not-too-distant future.

So here’s my idea:

On May 21, without having told anyone what you’re planning, get up early, gather the clothes you’d normally wear for the day, and pile them on your doorstep. Then hide in your basement all day. Fresh clothing optional.

On May 22, enjoy the turmoil as they try to explain why millions of atheists were raptured away…

You disappoint me, Internet!

Okay, somebody dredged up video of Christine O’Donnell, my local professional talk show guest and occasional Republican nomination for various national offices, making the claim that scientists have created mice with “fully functioning human brains”. Now, to me the appropriate response to this was so obvious I expected people with much better Photoshop skills than mine to post images by the dozen. Here we are about a week later, though, and three to five memes further into the exchange of nonsense we call election season, and still… nothing.

So I’ve taken it upon myself to fire up Paint.net and fill this gap in our political discourse before the chance is gone entirely:


(Click for larger size)

Curiously, there was no editing required to make Brain look like Newt Gingrich.

Is it doomsday again already?

End of the World predictions come and go, and the doomsayers just keep revising their predictions… check out the history of the Seventh Day Adventists for a fun example. So it occurred to me after seeing pictures of this sign show up on a number of sites:

… that technology might provide a more elegant, efficient means of re-predicting The End:

The new science of Geopornography

A Muslim cleric announced the other day that the recent spat of earthquakes are happening not because of shifting tectonic plates, but, rather, because women around the world have apparently not been dressing with sufficient modesty.

To test this theory, Blag Hag has called for a grand scientific experiment: April 26th has been declared Boobquake Day! Women everywhere are being called on to wear revealing tops to see if there is in fact a geological impact. Sure, it could cause earthquakes, but most likely those will happen in places where not many people have accepted into their hearts. And yes, sure, there might be a higher incidence of fender-benders on that day, but that seems a small price to pay for opening up a whole new realm of science.

Besides, think of the massive victory this would be for women’s rights everywhere! Abused and oppressed women the world over could simply say, “leave me alone or I’ll walk outside in a thong and destroy you all!”

I asked Jesus about Boobquake Day and he seemed to approve:

Alive and coding

Yeah, I’m still around… haven’t posted in so long (again) that not posting has become sort of a habit.

Just dropping by to post a link somebody somewhere might find useful.

If you’re using a tool like Media Companion to gather metadata for a library of DVDs you’ve ripped to disk for eventual use on a uPnP/DLNA streaming media server you’ve rigged up in your basement (and c’mon, how many of us aren’t doing that?) and want a way to do bulk renaming of files & folders in your collection based on data from the XBMC-style /NFO files, I’ve crufted together a VBScript over the last couple of nights that might be of use to you. It worked for me, at least.

nfonamer

(Is ‘crufted’ even a real word?)