Sports and Religion

A common sight is it not? The player pointing to the sky (god lives there you know). The player who crosses himself before an at bat. The group prayer meeting before the game or after a touchdown. What is this?

Hubris.

An over abundance of pride or self importance. You see, the BEST way to draw attention to yourself is to praise god in front of thousands of people. This is a guaranteed way to get them to like you and to, perhaps, overlook your lack of skill.



See what I mean?

To think that the CREATOR OF THE FREAKING UNIVERSE is on YOUR side in a contest about a stupid leather ball is to insult religion which to me is almost un-insultable. So there you go!

Jesus Christ vs. Lou Gehrig

As all baseball fans know, in 1925 the first baseman for the New York Yankees, Wally Pipp, complained of a headache and was replaced in the lineup by a young slugger named Lou Gehrig. Wally Pipp never played first for the Yankees again as Lou then played in 2130 consecutive games. It's a great story and a lesson for all who might let a minor headache keep them from work! Yes a great story indeed.

Except it's not true!

The streak actually started the day before when Gehrig had an at bat against the Senators. Also, three total players were benched that day as the manager was trying to shake things up for what was a pretty rotten year for the Yankees. At the time Pipp was hitting about .160 while everyone knew that Gehrig, while young, could hit the ball a mile. As to the headache, there is no mention of it in the writing at that time. The myth only grew later and who knows from where. Myths are like that. We like to embroider stories around our heroes. There's also the problem of the telling and re-telling of a story and everyone knows how this can twist a story in unpredictable ways. The story of Wally Pipp is only 85 years old. Imagine what kind of embroidery has been done on the life of (light hitting but good glove) Jesus H. Christ over the course of 200o years. You'd think that any story coming from so long ago with such grandiose claims would automatically be taken with a huge grain of salt or two. Instead, the stories are taken as beautiful things. Wonderful things. Miraculous things. An organized religion with all the trappings and ceremony has to declare the stories sacred and therefore untouchable. It has to be a sin to question the stories. The stories then move from mere stories to sacred fact. Unfortunately . . .

They're not true!

Pascal's Wager

I see that the link I put on the sidebar is now defunct and I'll fix that. Later. For now I'll just offer this short version of Pascal's Wager and my take on it. Blaise Pascal (1600's) said that since you can't prove the existence of God you might as well believe in him. If your wrong and God truly doesn't exist you lose nothing but if he does exist you win all with eternal life.

There are many logical refutations on this line of reasoning so I won't go through the whole thing. Personally though I have a couple of ideas.

To accept Pascal's wager to me would seem to be a cowardly way of life. There is something very scary out there that we can't show you but it's really scary so you really should behave in this special way to cover yourself. I think I need a little more than that to truly commit to a particular philosophy. Is it so wrong to ask for a few particulars? You know, people ask way more incisive questions when it comes to buying a car than they do about buying into an entire world view.

My other thought is, ok, I accept the wager. There. I believe in God. Am I covered? Can I go on now with my life as it was before? Do I have to say it out loud? Can I just say it to myself? How many times do I have to say it? Do I have to mean it? How could anyone tell if I mean it or not? If I say but I don't really mean it have I sinned? What if I can say but I just can't make myself mean it? Am I then doomed? That seems mean.

Of course when people say they believe in God they usually mean that they believe AND they partake in the rituals, the giving, and the community of their church. So, is all of that required too or can one just believe?

If there were an all seeing, fire and brimstone type of God I don't think he would be impressed with Pascal's CYA version of belief so you'd be going to hell anyway. Since you're going to go to hell anyway, you might as well NOT believe. So, there's Pascal's Wager stood on its head!

Air Crash Survivor

(CNN) -- Some will see it as divine intervention, others a simple quirk of fate, fortune or physics, but one boy's cheating of death in an air crash in Libya this week adds another name to a small roll call of aviation disaster sole survivors.

I just love this. 60 some people die horribly but one lucky guy lives and they call this divine intervention. What about the dead guys? I've been down this road before but what the hell?

If it was divine intervention. . . how does it work? Why this kid? If it was divine intervention why did he have to have multiple breaks in his legs? Why not just have him walk away. I know. . .the lord do work in mysterious ways.

I'm so sick of all of this.

Prediction

Still reading, Why Evolution is True and I'll have a final summary post about the book. For now just this one brief thought.

One of the hallmarks of a robust and working theory is that allows for predictions that can be checked. Over and over again in the book the author asks what would you expect to see IF there was such a thing as evolution. Observations and experiments ensue that support evolution. Asking that same question with Intelligent Design doesn't even lead you to a possible answer. What would you predict if God had made everything? What experiment could you predict the results of and then check? ID is (as the judges ruled in Pennsylvania) a thinly veiled attempt to get religion into the public school. That is ALL it is. No serious working scientist works in the pretend field of Intelligent Design because THERE IS NOTHING TO DO! ID is nothing more than a fundamentalist's statement of faith. . . blind faith if you will in the old testament.

I'm obviously not a man of faith but I could imagine that if you were one how you would have to be willing to adjust that faith in the light of new knowledge. You'd somehow have to back off from the old testament and somehow think that what they really meant in Genesis was about the big bang or about evolution.

Well then. . .

IF IT'S THE WORD OF GOD WHY DIDN'T HE WRITE IT CORRECTLY IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Either your faith is wrongly placed or God decided to write in really obscure metaphor. Why would he do that? To enjoy the thousands of years of confusion that have ensued? Or you have to imagine that all the scientists working in all the countries of the world are part of a vast conspiracy to rid the planet of God. Yeah maybe that's it. That sounds workable.

Why Evolution is True - part 5

There are two kinds of islands - Oceanic and Continental. Oceanic islands have always been islands. Hawaii is an example. It sticks up in the middle of the ocean and is volcanic in nature. Continental islands used to be connected to land but broke off during plate tectonics.

Now, lets look at the critters that live on oceanic islands. Better yet let's look at the critters that are NOT on oceanic islands. No fresh water fish, no mammals, no amphibians and no reptiles. On the other hand you do have such species on the continental islands.

What you do find on oceanic islands are species of birds and insects that are similar to their counterparts on the nearest continental land.

An idea from intelligent design is that creatures were designed exactly for their environment. So, you might think that somehow the oceanic islands are not appropriate for the critters that are not 'designed' for there. One might predict that when introduced into those environments the outsiders would perish. But the opposite is true. Goats and rats introduced to Hawaii thrived due to no natural predators. So. . .

Isn't it more reasonable that birds and insects were able to make the journey to an oceanic island and then proceed to evolve and broaden into a variety of species? Mammals, reptiles, and amphibians are too large to make the journey to a far off oceanic island. Birds can make it with favorable winds and carry insects with them. Seeds can float or be carried by the wind as well.

Why would a creator put animals on oceanic islands (but not all) and then have them look like counterparts on the continents unless he wanted us to think that evolution was happening?

Why Evolution is True Part 4

I'm about half way through the book now and one recurring theme that I'm liking is that the author (Jerry Coyne) will ask, "What would we expect things to look like if life evolved from earlier forms?" When you ask this you often find that the answer is exactly as things are now! Some examples...

We'd expect to find that earlier, extinct forms of life to occur before later forms in the fossil record and we do.

We'd expect to see 'imperfections' in design or outright bad design as evolution has to deal with the current model as minor changes are made. Things that are not needed and other bad designs would continue to show up. This is exactly what we see with numerous examples.

We might not expect this one but how else to explain the fact that many embryos display the forms of their very early forms. Humans embryos go through a 'fish stage' with gills and all. And interestingly all mammals go through a fish stage but no fish go through a mammal stage. Why? Because we descended from fish, the first vertebrae, and not the other way around.

You can also ask what would you expect to see if everything were created at once and is as is and has not evolved.

You would expect to see wild varieties of creatures with few if any common features. But you don't.

You'd not expect to find extinct creatures that are clearly earlier forms of the current version Why would you? But you do.

You'd not expect to see examples of 'bad design' of which there are many but you do. (As Robin Williams put it - "Intelligent design? You've got a sewage treatment plant right next to an amusement park!")

The stages that the human fetus goes through is especially interesting. Two examples: At about 6 months along the fetus grows a complete coat of hair called lanugo giving evidence of our close kinship to the rest of the monkeys. This hair is shed about a month before birth. Chimpanzees grow hair at nearly the same stage but they keep it. Also, a brand new infant will strongly grasp your finger if you gently stroke its palm. This is a remnant of our past as infant monkeys have to be able to hang on to their mother's fur. Humans (with very few exceptions) have no need to grasp their mother's fur but the hard wired behavior remains.

Finally, for today, a recurring ID argument for all this 'bad design' stuff is that the creator created things that way for maybe artistic reasons or for reasons that we cannot fathom. But the only thing that makes any sense of these bad designs is if things evolved from earlier forms. This means that the creator must have had in mind to fool legions of biologists just for fun. Not to mention the fact that the "the lord works in mysterious ways" argument is getting a little tired I think.

Why Evolution is True part 3. . . 'theoretically'

Creationists (including good old Ronald Reagan) are fond of saying that Evolution is "just a theory". This they feel gives them the opportunity and the right to put forward any other theory as if they were then on equal ground. They're not.

Part of the problem lies in the various uses of the word, theory. This from dictionary.reference

1. a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity.

2. a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.

3. Mathematics. a body of principles, theorems, or the like, belonging to one subject: number theory.

4. the branch of a science or art that deals with its principles or methods, as distinguished from its practice: music theory.

5. a particular conception or view of something to be done or of the method of doing it; a system of rules or principles.

6. contemplation or speculation.

7. guess or conjecture.

The problem that people confuse numbers 1 and 6 or 7. The example they give, Einstein's theory of relativity, is a good one. There is NO question about this 'theory'. In this case theory means as it says in #1. It is coherent, it covers a wide variety of cases, it has been verified in the laboratory millions of times. For example, the GPS satellites are so accurate that they have to compensate for the slight fluctuations in time caused by general relativity. Relativity is not theoretical and we don't speak of it any longer as 'in theory'. It has moved to well established theory.

But language is funny and varied. We can also use the word thus: "In theory I could play in the NBA", or "Theoretically, I could get a date with a super model". Creationist like to cherry pick and use THIS form of the word theory when in fact it is not at all connected to Darwinism. The entire book, Why Evolution is True, goes on to give many concrete pieces of evidence that are the foundation, and proof of Evolution. It is a theory but it's not "just a theory".

Interesting that of all the well founded theories in science (gravity, DNA, the atom, etc.) creationist only have a problem with one of them - Evolution. I have a piece about that in an earlier post that may be of interest here.

Why Evolution is True - part 2

Continuing my notes as I read Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne.

There are creationist and then there are the 10,000 Year-Old-Earth-Creationists. It's one thing to deny such a well established theory as Darwinian evolution it's really another level of denial- ism to deny radioactive dating.

To me to say that radioactive dating is somehow wrong would mean that we don't fully understand the nucleus. That would mean that machines based on our understanding wouldn't work. Things like hydrogen bombs, nuclear power plants, MRI, etc. But those machines DO work so what the hell?

10,000 year old earth creationist have a neat way out of this. The claim is that we are miss-lead in our calculating the age of things via Carbon 14 or U235 dating because we assume the half-life of these unstable isotopes is the same now as it was then. They claim that it was different 'then' and leads to scientists grossly over calculating the age of things.

Two comments: 1. Can you show some factors that affect the half-life of an isotope? Such things as temperature, pressure, humidity? Answer: No. There are no separate experiments that suggest that half-life of an isotope depends on anything. 2. From 1 then, this is backwards thinking like a lot of creationist logic. They are starting with the earth is 10,000 years old as fact and then adjusting the half-life accordingly instead of just asking, 'How old is the earth?'.

But this argument from the creationist keeps re-appearing. In "Why Evolution is True" we have a wonderful way to knock all of this down. What if there was an independent way to show the age of something separate from radioactivity that then agreed with what radioactivity predicted? That would not only nail down the age of that thing but also show that the half-life is a constant and did not have different values at an earlier time.

There is a type of coral that radioactive dating puts at 380 million years ago. However, this coral also keeps its own calendar independently of this. We know the earth spins around ever slower due to the friction of the tides. In other words are days are getting longer at the rate of about 2 seconds every 100,000 years. Doing the math you find that 380 million years ago the day would have been much shorter and that there would have been 396 days in a year since the earth goes around the sun at a constant rate making all the years the same length of time. Now, these corals leave a yearly ring just like trees do but they also leave a daily ring. All you have to do is look at these fossils closely and count how many daily rings there are between two yearly rings. What do you get? About 400 putting the age of the corals at around 380 million years just as the radioactive data predicted.

Slam dunk.

Why Evolution is True

This is the title of the book I'm currently reading by Jerry A. Coyne. It is a wonderful book and rather than write a review after I'm done I think I'll jot down some of the more interesting things as I read them. Helps me to understand too.

First some depressing facts from the introduction:

"Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." To this statement only 40% of Americans said it was true. The only country to do worse was Turkey with 25%. Turkey is rife with fundamentalism as is America. Europe in general answers about 80% true as they do in Japan.

1 in 6 US teachers believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form with the last 10,000 years.

Classification and the watch fallacy.

The watch fallacy from the 18th century Englishman, William Paley, is an old argument that goes like this: Let's say you're walking along the beach and you come across a pocket watch. Upon inspection (you take the back off) you find that it is finely crafted and perfect in every way for what it does. Clearly this was designed by some intelligence - a master craftsman - and didn't just pop up from prehistoric ooze. The observation that many animals are perfectly crafted for their environment suggests a master craftsman designing them and us.

Long before Darwin, scientist were busy classifying the flowers, trees, and animals. Many different civilizations did this and yet they all came up with basically the same classifications. You have things with backbones and things without. Inside the back bone guys you have things with fur or things with scales. Etc and so on. In other words there is a natural logic to the classification that is obvious to anyone doing the classifying.

If each creature were designed to be perfect for their environment then why are there so many common features between dissimilar animals and dissimilar environments? If each thing were a design separate from the other then the animals would be like a collection of matchbooks (the author's example). You might be able to classify the matchbooks by color, or size, or from where they came but all of these classifications are equal to each other and suggest no real logic.

On the other hand if we ask the question: What would you expect the classification of animals to look like IF animals evolved from earlier forms of animals? - you would get something exactly as we find it! This is true with the animal kingdom as we find it and continues to be true and is further supported by the fossil record of earlier forms of a variety of animals.

Not to mention, not all of the 'designs' are so perfect. Evolution has to work with what came before. It might be helpful for a turtle to have 6 flippers instead of 4 but evolution is stuck with making improvements on the quadruped now and doesn't start all over with every mutation. Why do men have breasts? Why do we have appendixes? Men's testes start up in their abdomens and move down through a tube at the age of a few months. This trip weakens that area of the body and is exactly why men are prone to hernias. This is a compromise. Keeping the testes cooler outside the body makes for more sperm production at the expense of making us susceptible to hernias. What master craftsman would make such a design?

So What?

This just in from CNN:


-- The two most senior leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq have been killed in a joint Iraqi-U.S. operation, officials announced Monday.

So what? Guess how much skill it takes to be a big shot in al Qaeda (hey, how about a 'u' in there?)? Guess how much education? All you need is to be zeolot for Muslim fundamentalism. This story is no big deal as the next knuckle head in line will take over and nothing will change.

No different than when a pope dies. Next guy takes over. No real skill involved (but probably a lot of back room politics in both cases).

4 shot in Chicago

Four people including 2 kids shot to death this morning in Chicago. . .

The suspect had been arrested in Madison last fall for allegedly beating Thompson, according to records. Just last week, Thompson filed a paternity case against the suspect, records show.
And in recent days, Thompson said the suspect had been fighting because he wanted her to dress in Muslim garb, but she refused, according to Shirina Thompson, the older sister of Twanda Thompson.

The suspect had also been acting strangely, talking about "going to Allah," she said. A law enforcement source said the suspect believed Allah wanted him to bring his family to Allah.

There you go. There's crazy and then there's RELIGION crazy. Scary.

Evolution and the Afterlife

I think I get it. I think I get why some religious people are such vehement evolution deniers. To accept the well founded theory of evolution you have to give up human's special place on the earth. To wit we have souls and animals don't. I got that right from my Lutheran minister's mouth when I asked if old Shep was going to heaven.

NO!

To accept evolution (which is like accepting gravity) is to then ask the question, at what point did we also evolve souls? If we are separate from the animal kingdom how do you explain all the similarities with the animals? For example our DNA is 95% similar to chimp DNA. If we always had souls does that mean that there are Australopithecans in heaven? Java man? Lemurs? Fish? Where does the evolved soul begin? Maybe there are levels of heaven for levels of evolution? If Cro-Magnon man had souls how sinful were they to be extincted!?

And another thing. .. .I am so sick of people decrying evolution because they don't like the idea of us evolving from monkeys. WE DIDN'T EVOLVE FROM MONKEYS! We evolved from earlier versions of US and so did monkeys evolve from earlier forms of monkeys. Us and monkeys have a similar common ancestor way back in the evolutionary tree but we did not come from monkeys so stop saying that!

This speaks to the larger idea of throwing out ideas and theories because you don't like them or they go against what you already thought. To find truth you have to first have a truly open mind. That can be hard to do but to just dig in and deny, deny, deny is, well, boring and leads you nowhere. It is also the kind of thinking that leads a civilization nowhere.

Hutaree

News recently of the arrest of several members of a 'christian militia' called the Hutaree. What the hell? I went to their website and sure enough there's a bible quote at the top right above a picture of a bunch of dumb asses in military garb. So if you're inclined to believe fundamentalist crazy talk you might be susceptible to falling into an organization like this. If you're a person who doesn't care for facts. If you're a person who likes tough talk. If you're a person who is under-educated.

I'm thinking, what would it take to get me to join some para-military group and go after policemen as these guys were planning to do. . . . (thinking) . . . There's no WAY! Without some nut spouting crazy as stuff from the bible to the susceptible there's no way to get people to join up for this sort of thing. You simply couldn't put a group of skeptics together in any kind of group this way. Skeptics ask too many annoying questions!

Would the world be a saner, safer and more peaceful place without religion? HELL YEAH!

Uneducated

One of the qualities of the uneducated is holding on to beliefs that have no basis in fact. Or, holding on to a belief even after it has been shown to be untrue. I run into this commonly when trying to teach Newton's laws of motion. Nature tends to give us false clues as to what is fundamentally going on.

For example, it seems pretty obvious that it takes a force to keep something moving. If you stop peddling your bike the bike stops moving. If you take your foot of the gas the car stops. And yet, when I take away all frictional forces (on an air table for example) and ask, "What force keeps the puck moving?", consternation ensues. Words and hypothesis are bandied about until it finally dawns (as it did for Galileo and Newton) that once put in motion things keep going UNLESS a force stops them. It's our experience to almost always have some friction around that causes us to 'believe' in a different law.

To believe that all things naturally come to rest is to be slightly uneducated in physics. No big harm there but still it is what it is. To hang on to such a law in the face of examples to the contrary is to be ridiculously stubborn.

People used to think that when it lightninged and thundered that the gods were mad at them - that they were being punished for being sinful. As the work of reasonable investigators (Franklin, et. al.) proceeded, people slowly learned that lightning was a natural phenomena and disconnected from any godly intent. Well, most did.

To ignore the bushels of data and experiments that put lightning in the larger context of electrical phenomena and hang on to a godly explanation would be silly and one would just be showing their ignorance or their stubbornness.

So, how is it different when one chooses to ignore the bushels of data and experiments that confirm the general paradigm of evolution? How is this not considered just being silly and uneducated? Well it is considered just that by about anyone who has read a book about such things WITH AN OPEN MIND. If you have a personal ax to grind from the get go, well then no, you cannot be educated to see a bigger idea. You will remain uneducated.

And forced to live in Texas.

Now the closed minded theist will say that my belief in the experiment is just another religion. I choose to believe in science and he chooses to believe in a higher power. We all believe in something, right? There is a fatal flaw in that kind of thinking. The theist has no way to prove any of his assertions. His are truly pure belief or if you prefer, faith. I can have an idea and test it and people completely disconnected from me could run the same test. A theist could do it with the same results. A computer could analyze the data. When the results keep coming up the same no matter who runs the test then I think we've got something that is real and independent of whether I believe in it or not.

Mixing the two has always produced failure for the theist. Controlled test of prayer. Miracles at Lourdes. Mind readers. I could go on. More importantly, it seems for most theists conducting a rational experiment with, let's say prayer, sort of 'ruins' it. They might have a feeling in the back of their minds that 'this ain't going to work'. They know that prayer is not 'of the laboratory' and yet they desperately want it to somehow work too! This is the slippery slope that all believers in magical things have to walk. On one hand you want your beliefs to be of a higher plane than this old regular, boring world. On the other hand you want your magic to actually intersect this world when it suits you. That seems unthinking to me at the best and disingenuous at the worst.

If you pray because it gets you through the night or helps you get through tough times, well ok. But please try to not take that next step where you start thinking that what works for you should work for everyone or that it should be taught in school!

Death Sentence for Sorcery

Guess the country. . . CORRECT! Saudi Arabia. Our oil friends. Apparently some schmo used to have a TV show where he would predict the future for people. He got arrested by the 'religious police' for this act.

To get released the guy pictured above is going to have to cut him a break. That's King Abdullah. Does he look like he goes around passing out breaks?

From CNN: Ali Hussain Sibat, former host of a popular call-in show that aired on Sheherazade, a Beirut based satellite TV channel.

According to his lawyer, Sibat, who is 48 and has five children, would predict the future on his show and give out advice to his audience.

He gets death for this? Wow. As an appeal why not have him do a controlled test and see if he really can predict the future. If he can't (and I'm guessing he can't do any better than random chance) then his verdict should be reversed. You're not practicing sorcery if it doesn't work are you? Funny, you CAN be a practicing Christian even though praying as been proven to not work.

Well, I don't suppose anyone in the 'religious police' could ever stoop to testing things in a reasonable way. They'd be out of work!

The Devil Makes us Do It

From CNN, Father Gabriele (Gabe) Amworth is the top exorcist in the holy roman church. Follow the link to the whole (short) article. Some excerpts follow with my sarcastic (but witty) comments.

"It's not my opinion: I'm saying that if you believe in the Gospels, you believe in the existence of the devil, in the devil's power to possess people," he said in an interview with CNN.

Hey, hold on, believing in the Gospels is in itself an opinion so belief in the devil is too. Nice try!

Amorth, the founder of the International Association of Exorcists, has performed more than 70,000 exorcisms in his career, he estimates.

Ok, first off I want to attend one of their conventions. What kind of wacky things do they do at the hotel after the meetings? They already have the crazy hats to wear. What booths are set up to sell things - Holy water squirt guns? Vomit proof vestments?

Now to the numbers. . .70,000? Really? This guy is 85. Let's say he's been doing this for 50 years. That's 1400 a year or 3.8/day EVERY DAY. Wow the devil is really keeping this guy busy! Hardly leaves time to buy candy for the choir boys.

"I have carried out exorcisms on some priests who had been molested by the devil," he said, without going into details.

Now there's a nice twist. The devil molesting priests. He didn't go into details but perhaps he shared the photos.

Well, there you have it. To the faithful, this guy is employed by the church and that means when you drop money in the plate some of that goes to him. Praise the Lord!

See more comics from Calamities of Nature

World Without God

I'd like to ask a reasonable theist this: You are darn sure that there is a God. A supreme being. You have faith that there is someone at the helm shall we say. OK, just for a moment try to imagine a world, a universe, that is devoid of such a creature and ask you what this world would then look like? How it would be different from this God filled world?

Now we're going to have to get around the problem of believing in a God that created the whole world. If you're going to hang on to that then there is no gedanken experiment because then you'll get to argue that to imagine no God is to imagine that the whole universe doesn't exist and then we're done.

So, is there a theist out there who believes in a God of people but understands that this may not be the God of creation and that God and the universe evolved somehow 'naturally'. If so, then I need this theist to just keep the universe evolving naturally but drop the idea about there also being a God of man. OK, let's say Bob is this theist I am imagining.

Bob, if that is your real name, since you believe in a universe with a God, can you imagine what this world would look like without him? Could it perhaps be a world where sometimes bad things happen to good people? Could it be that naturally occurring spectaculars like tornadoes or Oprah sometimes take the righteous as well as the sinful? Would it be a world were people die never to be heard from again? Where the sick are not healed miraculously. A world where greed coaxes people to do awful things and where decent people lend a helping hand without being asked? A world where most parents are good at it and some suck?

I obviously contend that this is already that world so why not just drop the whole God thing and let's get on to problem solving! Bob, where do you see God in this world? What God-thing is there that can't be explained by naturally occurring phenomena? Now, Bob, if you say, 'it's a faith thing', I just get to say, 'what do you get for that'? What actual phenomenon can you point to that is the product of your faith?

Now, if Bob gets peace of mind, a calming effect, a shot of energy or confidence via his faith and praying well I'm ok with that. We don't live all that long and if something gives us peace that's fine. But Bob really shouldn't step over the line and pretend that that good feeling is a 'real thing' and they everyone should be doing it. Bob shouldn't be voting based on his faith. Bob shouldn't raise his kids to somehow adopt what works for him necessarily and certainly he shouldn't present his faith/praying as a real thing to impressionable children. Bob nasn't think that he can be a shit in this life then ask for forgivness and get a reward in eternity. Bob shouldn't be tipped toe around nor should we mistakenly think that he is automatically a good guy for finding a way to calm himself. Faith like meditaion, sensory deprivation, and back rubs should stay in the area of personal, special time and not be moved into the general arena of public opinion, thought, or politics.

C'mon Bob, let me buy you a beer!

Saudi Arabia Haiti Aid

As I suspected, Saudi Arabia, one of the richest countries in the world has sent NO aid to Haiti. Here's an article showing who has and who hasn't. OK, so there's no law that says you have to but I'm suspicious that the response might have been different if the earthquake had affected some Muslim country.

From the LA Times. . .

Saudi King Abdullah, meanwhile, has sent a message of condolence to Haitian President René Préval.



In an unrelated story we find that a 13 year old girl in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 90 lashes for a confrontation (admittedly physical) with her head mistress.

Hey! Saudi Arabia - nice little country you got going there. I was most surprised to read that you were even allowing girls to GO to school. When did that happen?

I guess what really bothers me is how America has to suck up to shit can countries like this and China. Nobody treats their people worse than China (except maybe Mississippi) but we HAVE to play nice because China now builds EVERYTHING that we used to build. Saudi Arabia? We have to suck up to them and not say anything upsetting about their creepy government because we need their oil.

When you 'outsource' so much of our own workforce you weaken the whole country.