Inside the mind of a British Atheist

21 Facts that evolutionists can't answer - Response

2012-03-01T11:05:00.000Z

There is a list of 21 questions floating around in cyberspace directed at Atheists and evolutionists. It is attributed to the Discovery Institute for Creationist research, but somehow I doubt they would be this stupid.

The questions are more out of sheer ignorance than clever arguments.

1. Why are the planets round?

I'm not sure why this question is purely for non-creationists, but I will humour them anyway.

The gravity pulling in from the centre of the planet causes equal force to be acted upon all sides of the planet. This is as the planet is forming, so the surface complies accordingly. If you push with equal force on all sides of something then you get a sphere.

This can be demonstrated by water forming spheres in zero gravity.

2. Go to the zoo and tell me, why doesn't a chimpanzee give birth to a man?

Because we never came from chimpanzees. We share a common ancestor with them, as we do with all life. This means both us and chimpanzees evolved from the same species many millions of years ago.

3. Have you ever seen a mountain form?

No, but neither have you. Leaving us both in a pickle by your thinking.

4. Why doesn't new life shoe up in a jar of peanut butter?

Because life is thought to have arisen from complex, energy charged reactions over many tens of millions of years. To expect life to appear in a sealed jar of processed protein and salt within our lifetime is quite absurd.

5. If the Big Bang started as a singularity, who held up the singularity?

Really? I mean really? Is your basic grasp of science really that bad? You might as well ask who makes the sun come back in the morning? Or, who is holding up the planets? No-one was holding it up because there was no centre of gravity to pull it towards anything.

6. A painting had a painter, therefore the universe had a maker.

Ahhhhh the first cause argument. Nostalgia from covering this only a few days ago. So if everything that exists needs a creator then the universe must have a creator. But since that creator exists to create the universe (something which also exists) then that creator must also have a creator.

You have complicated the answer instead of making it simpler by introducing a god.

7. How can you explain gravity?

8. If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

The most common question to evolutionists. We didn't come from monkeys. We are apes and we share a common ancestor with all the monkeys and apes we see today. There was no point where a modern monkey gave birth to a human, or anything like that.

9. If the world is millions of years old, why is it only 2008?

Wow. I am now completely sure that this didn't come from the Discovery institute. It is only 2008 because humans have only been able to keep track of the years for around 10,000 years. It is 2008 because the calender dates switched 2008 years ago to start from fresh.

10. If I throw dirt up in the air, what are the odds it will fall into the formation of a living man?

Zero. But that bears no resemblance to abiogenesis or evolution.

11. Can you see electricity?

I feel like I am being used to fill in the gaps in the authors science education. Yes you can see electricity. Lightening is one example, and strong static charges can often discharge visibly.

12. Science changes. The book of Genesis is perfect.

The book of Genesis is not perfect, it is wrong. Very wrong. Science changes because new things are constantly being discovered, new evidence is coming to light and new hypotheses are created to test. Science is always testing itself to make sure it has the correct answers. The book of genesis has been known to be false for a very long time, but it won't change because no-one is bothered about it having the right answers.

13. The holy bible is the truth, because the bible says it's the truth.

I don't even feel that I need to answer this one. Any educated reader can fill in the answer for themselves.

14. Evolution is a religion, and science leads to killing people.

What utter nonsense. Evolution is not a religion. It is a theory based on mountains of evidence.
Science does not lead to killing people. People lead to killing people. Science leads to better educations, medicine and the ability for you to pose these ignorant questions.

15. Scientists around the world are all jointly involved in a conspiracy against God!

If they are then God should probably let everyone know right?

16. Bananas are perfectly designed for the human hand.

The bananas you buy from the store are heavily modified and have been for at least 4,000 years.

Here is a wild banana -

17. Millions of years for a monkey to turn into a man? Monkeys don't live that long.

I am starting to doubt the sanity or lucidity of the author. Obviously, the populations carried on and those millions of years contained millions of generations.

18. Why would a man want to have sex with a monkey?

....are you joking?

Why would priests want to have sex with little boys?

19. Archaeologists always remove the human remains first when they find a dinosaur, so they can continue the LIE.

It seems hard to believe, but I have talked to people who actually think like this. Even if they did find dinosaur remains with human remains, there could be plausible explanations and dating methods would show a difference in age. But so far this hasn't happened.

20. If a monkey gave birth to a man, who would he (or she) mate with?

Let's gloss over the idiocy and look at the real point here. Who did the first proper human mate with? Well, that human would have barely been different from the other human-like creatures around him/her, so would have no problem mating with them. Evolution is something that occurs in populations, so he/she would have had company in evolving.

It is like asking who the first english speaker spoke to.

Now you will notice that there is no number 21. This is because on the list they missed out number 7, therefore only having 20 'facts'.

Ouch, my IQ

Also, another point worth mentioning is that my book is going to be released again in a week or two, after a few formatting problems. I suggest you buy it immediately.

Depending how well it is recieved (the old formatted version did pretty well considering it was only available for a day or two) I am very interested in doing the who Atheist circuit. Apply to be on The Atheist Experience in Texas, try and get into some speaking events etc.

If that does become reality and you see me there, then say you read my blog and I will buy you a drink.

Rewards of Science and Religion compared.

2012-02-29T11:41:00.000Z

I have always wanted to investigate how the benefits of modern science and religion stack up.

Bear in mind that modern science hasn't been around for nearly as long as religion (almost 200 years compared to around 4,000 years for religion).

So here we go...

Modern Science.

Theory of Evolution.
Vaccines.
Genetically enhanced crops.
Water filtration systems.
Genetic engineering.
Genome sequencing of viruses.
Germ theory.
Space travel.
Modern Pasteurization (heating liquids to reduce the number of pathogens).
Tripled life expectancy.
Cures for Diphtheria, Invasive H. flu, Malaria, Measles, Pertussis, Pneumococcal disease, Polio, Tetanus, Typhoid Fever, Yellow Fever, Small pox and many others.
Chemotherapy.
Modern complex surgery.
Nuclear power.
Polymer materials.
Everything in the computer you are using now.
Fibre-optics.
X-rays.
Electrocardiography.
Penicillin.
Antibiotics in general.
Radio.
The knowledge that the universe is expanding.
General relativity.
Hubbles Law.
The Big Bang model.
Abiogenesis.
Time travel (using general relativity we know that mass and speed slows down time slightly).
Discovery of the Cosmic microwave background.
The internal combustion engine.
Fossil fuels.
Air travel.
The laser guided bombs currently fighting your enemies.
The Pharmacutical industry.
Stem cell research (resulting in bone marrow transplants, treatment for Alymphocytosis, treatments for paralysed spines, treatments for liver disease, regeneration of knee cartilage and possibly saving animals in the future from extinction).
Human genome sequencing to look for genetic diseases.
A biotech industry worth more than $50 billion in 2005.

The list continues, but I have made my point.

Now let's look at the rewards we have collected from religion over its long lifetime.

Religion.

False hope.

Argument from design.

2012-02-29T10:55:00.000Z

This argument comes in various forms, but as I understand it the argument is to prove that God exists by showing how certain things look designed.

This argument can also be called the 'Watchmaker argument' where you are asked to imagine walking along a beach, you see a watch and notice immediately that it is designed. You therefore know that it had a designer, as the universe must have.

This argument falls apart for several reasons.

Firstly, it assumes that because something is complex it must have a designer or creator. So this cell looks complex, therefore it must have a designer. But the designer of a complex item must, by definition, be more complex. So if the designer is more complex than the item in need of a designer, then that complexity demands a designer even more than the item in question.

It's almost like the first cause argument, where the point of blame is moved backwards one step only to beg where the next step comes from.

Secondly, if you were walking along a beach and saw a watch you would recognise that it is designed because there are no trees growing watches. Watches do not occur in nature, and you have been told all of your life that certain humans make watches from man-made materials.

You could demonstrate by making something simple with materials known to be man-made. If someone left a small ball of plastic on the pavement I would say that it was made by a human, because as far as I know plastic doesn't occur naturally.

This first point can be further expanded by noticing the fact that the person is arguing that everything we see has a designer. Therefore it should be as evident as knowing that the watch has a designer. This worldview is comparable to walking along a beach made of watches, next a sea made of watches and lying under a tree made of watches. If this really was the case then the watch would be barely distinguishable from the rest of the 'designed' world they say we live in.

In other words, if they are arguing that both the watch and the beach have a designer, then why is it so easy to distinguish between them?

The point is self refuting if we notice design by contrast to the naturally occurring, because it implies that the natural environment around it does not appear designed.

This argument also requires self-design to be impossible. Which we know to be false (hint - Evolution through natural selection).

LASTLY! Even if this argument was any good it would imply no specific intelligent designer. I could propagate that it was Santa Claus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other bullshit creation of the mind, without running into any logical problems. They would all be as equally likely as the God these people have chosen to believe in.

I could go on about this for a while, but I'm crazy busy.

Also, I won't be posting on 1st-4th March because I'm in Amsterdam :P

Sherri Shepard : I don't believe in science

2012-02-28T10:21:00.000Z

So I stumbled across this video in one of my many Youtube adventures.

It's a clip from 'The View', an American show which I have never watched (and probably never will watch). Words aren't sufficient to describe the stupidity you are about to witness. I would give all of my money to have been there when both episodes of stupidity occurred, because no-one seems to correct either of the women sufficiently.

Evolution is a myth. Even Darwin himself....

I am guessing that she was going to say that Darwin didn't believe in evolution. What utter bullshit! Go read 'Origin of Species' and see how dedicated he was to his theory.
There is a bit where he said that to support evolution more fossils would need to be found. Creationists often wave this in my face and say "See! Darwin said that you would need fossils and there aren't any!"

What do you think natural history museums are full of?

There are literally millions upon millions of fossils, and many more that have yet to be found. Most of these were found after Darwin, and they all count in someway towards evolution.

Also, even if there wasn't any fossils the genetic evidence alone would be sufficient. Of course, Darwin didn't know that when he was around.

Then why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?

*FACE PALM!*

No matter how many times I watch this clip I can't get over the stupidity. The utter ignorance of science is mind boggeling.

We didn't come from monkeys. We are Apes. So don't imagine the modern day monkeys evolving into humans, we are just related. A few million years ago there was a thing that looked like a monkey and like a human. It split off into two genetic branches. One branch became us, and the other evolved into the other apes you see today.

You will never see a monkey giving birth to a human. So stop babbling on about it.

The ladies watching the clip then start talking and the woman in the middle drops a bomb shell.

I still say scientists have not found a missing link.

The missing link for humans has been found over and over again. I remember seeing at least 3 headlines in the newspaper that scientists have found 'The Missing Link'. There is no missing link. We have a very good knowledge, and comprehensive fossil record of human evolution.

The last thing they had was a chimpanzee called Lucy.

AL-288-1 (better known as Lucy) was found in 1974 in Ethiopia. The reason Lucy is so well known is because of her knee. It may sound strange, but it made scientists realise that Lucy was bipedal even 3.2 million years ago. This meant that walking on two feet predated the increase in brain size which came later.

Because Lucy looks very much like a Chimpanzee, except for a few defining characteristics, it would be easy for a non-scientist to mix them up.

She was just a human, she wasn't a missing link.

Again, the term 'missing link' is a bit incorrect, but she certainly isn't human. 3.2 million years old, 1.1m tall, longer femur ratio and a smaller brain are only some of the characteristics that set her apart from humans.

They have not proved [evolution].

Oh they haven't? Oh well in that case I will just pack all of my biology books into a box and light them on fire. Thank you for pointing out that one of the main premises of science has not been proved.

Sarcasm may be wasted on that empty head of hers. But nevertheless I have to vent the stupidity somehow.

Evolution is a fact. Whether you like it or not, it is a fact. You can do a little research yourself with this marvelous thing called 'Google' and 'Wikipedia'.

You have to have faith on both sides.

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No faith needed when there is evidence. If scientists needed faith to believe in evolution then they wouldn't believe it.

I hate it when people who know nothing about a subject decide to argue about it. No evidence or good ideas of any kind are being exchanged, but somehow they think it a good idea to continue.

Collatz Conjecture

2012-02-27T17:01:00.000Z

Stumbling through Wikipedia I discovered something called the Collatz Conjecture.

You start with a random number of your choice.

If it's an odd number you multiply it by 3 and add 1.

If it's an even number you divide it by 2.

Whatever number it is, you will eventually end up with 1.

I will demonstrate -

Let's start with 10

10
5
16
8
4
2
1

Here's a longer one -

101
304
152
76
38
19
58
29
88
44
22
11
34
17
52
26
13
40
20
10
5
16
8
4
2
1

The Collatz Conjecture is still a mathematical difficulty. Despite being validated up to the number 6 trillion, there might be some massive number that violates the rule.

There is a $500 reward to the person who validates it.

Why Atheism makes NO sense! - Response

2012-02-27T11:38:00.000Z

I haven't done a video response for ages, so here's a good one.

Video and logical fallacies courtesy of 'TheCameraEye11' -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLY-eeLLp38&feature=related

Unfortunately the little Youtube video thing won't let me put the actual video on this post, so I will tell you what he says and if you want to watch the actual video then click on the link above and follow me along.

Atheists want christians to prove that God exists.

This seems like a fair statement. If you are going to assert the existence of something then you are going to need to back it up with some evidence. If I went around telling people I had a pet dragon then they would be correct in doubting me until I provided evidence to back up my claim.

75 to 80% of the people on the planet believe in a god. Whether it's the Christian God whatever, they believe in a God.

The distinction between Gods should probably be more important for a Christian, since the majority of the Old Testament and ten commandments are warnings about what will happen if you acknowledge, accept, allow people to believe in or worship other Gods.
And the number of people that believe something have no bearing on how true it is. Once upon a time everyone believed that lightening was Thor throwing his lightening bolts down onto earth.
Everyone believed it, so it must have been right?

No you moron. The amount of people that believe something has no influence on the truth of the idea.

You have to prove to the world that God doesn't exist.

No.....just no. If you are asserting a positive claim to knowledge, then you have the burden of proof. Until you provide evidence that your god exists there will always be a growing number of Atheists.
Atheism is just the rejection of a claim, and you are an Atheist too in your own sense. You are an Atheist in regards to every other God except yours. Does that mean that you have to prove to them that their Gods don't exist?

Jesus Christ didn't enslave anybody.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ. (Ephesians 6:5 NLT)

Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed. If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful. You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts. Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them. (1 Timothy 6:1-2 NLT)

The servant will be severely punished, for though he knew his duty, he refused to do it. "But people who are not aware that they are doing wrong will be punished only lightly. Much is required from those to whom much is given, and much more is required from those to whom much more is given." (Luke 12:47-48 NLT)

Yeah, he seems really anti-slavery.

Atheists defend Islam.

WHAT! I dislike Islam as much as I dislike Christianity. I recently read 'The End of Faith' by Sam Harris, which is pretty much all about Islam. I don't like to defend any religion, but I have before when they have been attacked with straw man arguments.

You as an Atheist believe that Islam was hijacked by the terrorists.

No, I don't. I believe that the majority of Muslims are moderate Muslims and ignore the bits in the Quran that say to kill people etc. But some people are moderate and then go a bit further to believe the instructions to kill infidels etc. This happens in Christianity as well, but they sure as hell aren't being hijacked.

The difference, which you don't know, is that Islam actually teaches the enslavement of the unbeliever.

Sure, but the Bible teaches to KILL unbelievers.

They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman. (2 Chronicles 15:12-13 NAB)

I cannot prove that God exists at this second. You cannot prove that God does not exist at this second. You believe that there isn't a God just as much as I believe there is a God.

Actually most Atheists will admit that they don't know whether a God exists, just like they don't know whether fairies, unicorns and pixies exist. But I would have to be a massive retard to live my life as if they existed, just because I cannot prove that they don't.

What was the cause of the Big Bang? What was the cause behind the cause of the Big Bang?

No-one knows. Maybe we will never know. But to postulate a God and shove him into the gaps (God of the gaps argument) does nothing but to stunt our intellectual growth.

There is no way that anything complex and designed could come from the chaotic Big Bang (paraphrased).

This is an argument from ignorance. "I don't see how this could have happened, so God must have done it." It's embarrasing for everyone involved, so I won't linger on it.

He repeats the same argument for the human brain.

It's obvious that an intelligent being exists.

Oh sorry, was that your evidence? I was still waiting for the argument for the existence of a God other than an argument from ignorance.

If Jesus walked into an Atheist bedroom, they still wouldn't believe.

Well no I wouldn't believe in a God if a man walked into my bedroom. For several reasons.

1. What the hell is this guy doing in my bedroom?

2. I might be dreaming.

3. I might be hallucinating.

4. There are dream-like states which cause you to dream while semi-awake. This is commonly mistaken as a divine experience.

5. Could be a ghost? I don't believe in ghosts, but that hypothesis seems much more likely than the son of God walking into my bedroom.

Their lifestyles in most cases are contrary to what the Bible says.

What an assertion. I am an Atheist, and I will now demonstrate how many of the ten commandments I break.

1. “Do not worship any other gods besides me.” - Nope, I don't worship any gods.

2. “Do not make idols of any kind…” - Nope.
3. “Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God…” - Don't do that either.
4. “Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy…” - I always rest on a Sunday.
5. “Honor your father and mother…” - Yep, I do that.
6. “Do not murder.” - Never murdered.
7. “Do not commit adultery.” - Haven't done that.
8. “Do not steal.” - Don't steal.
9. “Do not testify falsely against your neighbor.” - I don't lie about my neighbours.
10. “Do not covet your neighbor’s house. Do not covet your neighbor’s wife…” - Don't do that.

I don't break any of the 10 commandments.

Also, nearly any modern lifestyle is contrary to the Bible because it was written so long ago. Wearing modern fabrics, modern farming, modern medicine, modern laws and courts, all break what the Bible says.

In fact, countries that are mostly atheist e.g. Sweden, Germany, United Kingdom, have much lower crime rates than the USA, a majority Christian country.

What if we knew nothing?

2012-02-25T12:17:00.000Z

So it seems like once again I have abandoned the blog for a week or two, only to return with a million posts in one day.

Oh well. I felt bad about leaving the last post as the last chapter of my little story. So here is some atheism related mumblings.

Religious people are always asking atheists what their explanation for natural things are.

How did the universe begin?
How did life begin?
How did the world form?
Can you explain the embryonic stages?
Can you explain *insert evidence for noahs flood, adam and eve, mount Sinai sacrifice*?

Two things worth mentioning.

Firstly, atheism is not tied to how people answer these questions. There are many religious people who accept the naturalistic explanations to these questions and there are atheists who don't accept abiogenesis etc.
People don't become atheists when they realise that fetal development doesn't coincide with certain verses in the Quran.

Secondly, What if we didn't know?

A religious person asks me how life began and I reply with 'I don't know.' What then?
They will probably celebrate victory, but why? They haven't put forward any sort of claim with any backing that says they know how life began. They also don't know how life began. Let's compare the thought processes.

Atheist - I don't know how life began, so I will wait for scientists to work at it and conclusively discover the answer.

Theist - I don't know how life began, so I will assume that an omnipotent god created it out of nothing.

The difference is worrying.

Even if no-one knew the answer to any of those questions it would not make the possibility of a god more probable.

The man and the bathtub - Chapter 9

2012-02-25T12:01:00.000Z

Chapter 9.

Wailton and Doctors hands were free from the binding of the rope and pushed into their new small cell. It consisted of nothing more than some hastily constructed metal fencing creating a box around a stone castle wall. It was only a few meters across, but most of it was taken up by a large puddle caused by a leak in the ceiling. Wailton took a seat on the hard stone floor by the wall so he could lean his back against it. Doctor sat near the fence and rested his head against the bars. Moments passed with nothing but the periodic drip of water to keep them company.
“I hope you’re happy” stated Wailton, grimacing slightly.

Doctor smiled, and almost laughed.
“I’m not. I’m starting to think that world domination won’t bring about the Utopia I thought it would.”
“If we live through the next twelve hours then maybe you can act on those new thoughts” said Wailton, watching another drop of water plummet from the ceiling before making its resulting ripples reverberate through the puddle.

The walls were thick enough so that they couldn’t hear anything. The lack of windows took away any aspect of time, although the location of the sun as they had descended down the castle stairs and a rough estimation of the time passed allowed them to guess that it was morning by the time their guard returned.
He strode over to their cell with a equally angry looking companion. The door to the cell was opened and they were both ordered out. Their hands were bound by rope once again, and they were both led waddling up the stairs again.

Indeed it was morning and the once their eyes adjusted to the immediate sunlight they could scarcely believe the sight they saw before them.
The square was filled with people. A massive crowd stood in the centre of the square. All of them were jeering and cheering at the top of their lungs. Each face was as grubby and fearsome as the faces of our captors. The crowd spilled out onto the balconies of the walls. Men, women and children cheered and made rude gestures through the windows.
Wailton and Doctor were escorted through the crowd towards a large wooden structure in the centre of the square.

It was a large wooden gallows. They were about to be hung.
Wailton gulped loudly and looked at Doctor. He had a remarkably calm look on his face, as if he was simply going for a stroll in a park and had not noticed the gallows of which he was now approaching.
The climbing of the stairs onto the gallows platform gave Wailton a much better view over the crowd baying for his blood, but not much more can be found to be positive after that. The crowd was made up of hundreds of people, and the noise was almost unbearable as they cried for him and Doctor to die.

They were both led to the two hanging nooses, hung over two trap doors. The thoughts that had once been buzzing through Wailtons head were now silent. When faced with his own mortality his brain had seized up. Unable to think of any possible escape routes.
Doctor and Wailton were both stopped over the trap doors.
“Any last words?” A man grunted from somewhere behind them, barely audible over the screaming crowd.

They both remained silent. The nooses were fitted and tightened around their necks. The rope stank of dirt and the many necks it had probably been tied around before Wailton. There was a short pause and out of the corner of his eye Wailton saw a man pull hard on a large lever. He felt a falling sensation. He was going to fall, the rope would tighten and he would die.
But he couldn’t feel the rope any more, and he was still falling. Wailton had his eyes closed, but opened them tentatively. Everything was dark around him.
Then he realised what was happening. He was being taken back in time by the Parallax Perambulator! The distinct smell of popcorn and the colours appearing from nowhere confirmed his suspicions.

Wailton laughed as loud as his lungs would allow. The time limit on their time travel had kicked in just when they needed it to the most. He assumed Doctor was also in the same situation.
Dr Wailton was lying on another floor, this time it was a little more familiar. He and Doctor were back in the stately home in the sky. The giant tower in the middle of London, with which he was now quite fond.
The fire crackled away in the corner as he and Doctor stood up. Doctor was wiping dirt and dust from his now ruined suit.

“I left my jacket in the desert,” he mumbled with an air of annoyance. Clearly he had chosen to ignore how close they had been to death. Wailton was about to bring their narrow escape from the clutches of death to Doctors attention, but decided against it at the last moment. He knew that the Doctor knew, whether he chose to recognise the violent future he had created or not.
“You don’t have much longer here,” said Doctor looking up at Dr Wailton. “We have been gone for a day. The machine should take you back to your time soon.”

Wailton nodded and thought hard. Then it hit him! There was still something he had to do.
Dr Wailton reached into his back pocket and produced the newspaper he had found in the abandoned house. He tore off the headline from the front page. He knew he had seen that piece of paper before. It was the same one found in his bathroom shortly before his excursion through time. Wailton brought this to Doctors attention.

“So it must have been you that left the piece of paper there!” He exclaimed, showing more emotion than he had through their entire trip.
“And it was probably you that caused yourself to travel through time!”
“What?” asked Wailton, this was going to need some explaining.
“Don’t worry. Just take this and the piece of newspaper and leave them both in your bathroom,” Said Doctor whilst handing him the Parallax Perambulator.
The glazed look of a confused man swept over Dr Wailtons face. But it didn’t last long as he suddenly felt himself plummeting through darkness. It was becoming all too familiar. He anticipated the aroma of popcorn and the magical show of colours.

There was an enormous splash as he landed back in his bath. Water spilled out in all directions, but it didn’t bother him. Dr Wailton had work to do.

He set his portable time machine for ten minutes in the past. He plummeted, sniffed and wowed his way through time once more and found himself sitting in his bath again.
But this time the bath was empty and the light was off. He was in the past!
Leaping to his feet he quickly started running the bath, while turning on the bathroom light. He also changed the timer on the Parallax Perambulator so that it would send him back to the present after a minute.

The water streamed into the bath and it was filling quickly.
Wailton threw the piece of newspaper from his pocket onto the other side of the bathroom. He found that one side of the Parallax Perambulator was stick and he got on his knees and stuck it to the underside of his bath. It would go off when someone moved the bath.
The water had reached the top of the bathtub and he stopped the tap. He was falling again. He enjoyed the darkness, as it would probably be the last time saw it from time travel. The smell of popcorn was easily replicable, so he doubted he would miss that. The colours came and went, and he was sitting drenched in his bath again.

He looked around. He was back in the present. The door was still open from where he had entered the room just moments ago and started the entire adventure. But he had to go now.
Dr Wailton had some very important predictions to make.
　THE END

P.S. Fuck Paradoxes.

The man and the bathtub - Chapter 8

2012-02-25T12:00:00.000Z

Chapter 8.

Wailton and Doctor were stampeding as fast as they could into the desert as the bullets slammed into the ground around them. The voices were getting louder as the trucks got closer. They were running into the desert, but for little gain. In front of them was nothing but more desert. No shelter, no cover, no protection and no hiding places.

Or so they thought.

Wailton suddenly felt himself falling and then landing hard on concrete. Doctor fell too and managed to land much softer than Wailton. Dr Wailton groaned loudly and tried to catch his breath. Looking around they saw that they had fallen into a large sewer pipe that had been covered by a sheet, which they had fallen through. The sounds of the trucks were still getting closer and they decided to crawl down the sewer pipe.

The engine noise stopped as the trucks came to halt somewhere above them. The sound of feet hitting the desert floor caused Dr Wailton and Doctor to crawl along the pipe faster. The pipe was empty. There probably hadn’t been a functioning sewage system since the bombing, then there were no more people to use it.
Their hands and knees scrambled along the dusty concrete as frantically as their bodies would allow. The gunmen fired some random shots into the pipe and the noise of bullets smashing against the concrete reverberated down the pipe.

Wailton couldn’t help but imagine the bullets smashing into something different. His organs. He imagined his broken body collapsing to the floor. How quickly would he die in this hot, dusty pipe? Would Doctor help him? He would probably have to leave him if the gunmen got closer. He would almost certainly die alone. Bleed to death on the concrete.
It was these thoughts and these thoughts alone that kept him moving even after his knees and hands started hurting. He would not give in to these savages. Wailton kicked himself for using his future selfs word. They were not savages, and he was not going to become an evil dictator.

More bullets, but this time they weren’t random. The gunmen had seen them crawling down the pipe and the bullets exploded against the concrete around them. Why were they crawling, thought Wailton. They were now crawling along an open-top pipe when their attackers could just walk along the side of the pipe and shoot down at them. Pointless.
It all became too much for Dr Wailton. He was tired, annoyed, scared and his hands hurt. He stopped and the Doctor stopped behind him.
“Why have you stopped?” asked Doctor. “Get moving!”

Wailton refused. The boots of the gunmen could be heard approaching them from above the pipe.
The sheet was pulled back from above the pipe and the sun appeared like a camera flash in the face. They both shielded their face as they looked up at their attackers. Wailton raised his hands in surrender and Doctor copied him.

They couldn’t see their attackers faces, just four silhouettes outlined by the sun. A single hairy hand was stretched out and Wailton took it. Both Doctor and Wailton were pulled out of the pipe and sat on the back of a pickup truck. Their hands had been tied behind them with rope and Wailton tried to wriggle free as the truck bounced over the rocky desert. It was impossible, the rope was too tight. The sun burnt the back of Wailtons neck and he couldn’t do anything to protect it.

Their new friends didn’t look as friendly as the Americans. Other than the less friendly atmosphere, they did look remarkably similar though. The same abundance of baldness, tattoos and machine guns. Wailton was sure that one of them introduced himself as ‘Wretch’, but he couldn’t be sure over the noise of the truck speeding through the desert.
Wretch seemed like an appropriate name for someone who smelled much worse than the sewer pipe Wailton now wished he hadn’t left. He was rivalling the pot of human remains quite well for stink as well. The nose ring he wore made him look like a bull, and the size of his arms meant he could probably rival that bull for strength.

His machine gun lay across his lap. Every few moments, if the truck hit the right angle whilst driving along the desert, the sunlight would reflect off the gun into Wailtons eyes. He squinted and looked at Doctor. Doctor was almost motionless, staring at the floor of the truck whilst his head bounced almost limply with the movement of the truck.
Wailton worried, but not much. He figured that they would soon be dead anyway. Although they had been allowed through the incident in the sewage tunnel, it did little to quell Wailtons gut feeling that they would die soon. Being a scientist Wailton didn’t like going on his gut feeling. He liked evidence. And what did the evidence show in this situation?
Some men had just tried to kill him. He was now at the mercy and will of those same men.

It didn’t take a PhD (of which Dr Wailton was) to add everything together.
They bumped along with their captors for another hour. By the time they reached their destination Dr Wailtons neck was red raw with sunburn.
Their destination turned out to be an old castle perched on a rock surrounded by desert. Wailton didn’t remember there being a castle anywhere outside of Europe and this sight puzzled him. The peeling blue roofs of the huge white towers itched a memory in his mind. There was something familiar about the enormous minarets and the decaying drawbridge. Then it hit Wailton. He had seen this castle before. In Disney land! They had been taken to a Disney land near New York. In 2012 the new theme park was just a concept, but now it appeared that it had been built and fallen in disrepair around the time that everyone had been killed. But that was just a theory.
They were driven up a large wooden ramp, over the drawbridge and into the interior of the castle. The high walls loomed all around them, with armed men patrolling everywhere.

There wasn’t much time to enjoy their new surrounding though, as Wailton and Doctor were unloaded from the truck and dragged by their captors down some stairs. At the bottom of the spiral stone staircase they arrived at a makeshift prison. Wailton muttered something about always ending up in jail when he travelled through time.

The man and the bathtub - Chapter 7

2012-02-25T11:58:00.000Z

Chapter 7.

Wailton gagged and put his hand over his mouth as he stared down into the pot. Doctor had joined him and gagged before turning away in disgust.

In the bubbling frothy liquid of the pot was a human head. More specifically it was the head of a young man, no older than 25 years old. He was bald and had a shocked expression on his face. His mouth was limply open and his eyes were only half closed. The putrid stench of his flesh filled the tent and made Wailton feel weak. He had never seen death before his incident with the bath, but since then he had seen death at least several time. Looking down at his next meal, time travel had long since lost its charm.

With the Americans looking eagerly on, Wailton dipped the spoon into the pot and fished out some liquid. A single index finger revealed itself as he poured it into his bowl. It was too much to take. Thoughts were buzzing through his mind. Would they be next? How had this man been killed? Was it really necessary to resort to cannibalism? What does human taste like?
He was shaking as he took a tiny sip from his soup. Strangely it didn’t taste at all bad. The Americans cheered him on as he took another sip. Doctor had now joined him in the soup tasting. They would probably die in the desert without the Americans, so it was best to stay on their good side.

It was in this moment that the moment took hold of Wailton. He had completely forgotten about the stray finger sitting at the bottom of his bowl, like a nauseating log of flesh. He tilted the bowl up high, consuming the entire contents of the bowl.
He then realised what he had done. He gagged again as the Americans laughed. Doctor had finished his bowl as well.
It was the most disgusting thing Wailton had ever done, and he felt slightly ashamed of himself. But at least they had earned the respect of their new friends. In fact, the Americans were still laughing and cheering even louder than before. They slapped their sides and slammed their fists into the ground as they roared with laughter.
“I knew they would do it!” Shouted one of them, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes.

Wailton and Doctor looked on as the Americans put the pot of human remains away, and produced bread and fruit. Wailton and Doctor didn’t think the joke was as funny as the Americans appeared to find it. They must have been waited ages to pull that on some unsuspecting travellers. Wailton started to dislike the Americans again, as he pulled a piece of human skin from his teeth.
The night passed uneventfully, with everyone sleeping on soft mats on the floor. The morning came quickly and violently. Literally.

Wailton and Doctor awoke to the sound of gunshots and panic. The Americans were running around and grabbing their weapons. Wailton watched as a bullet whizzed through one piece of tent fabric and then out the other side, right above his head. They both jumped to their feet and ran out of the tent.
The sun blinded them for a moment, but they both ran over to the truck where the Americans were shooting into the desert from.
“What’s happening?” shouted Wailton over the sound of gunfire. An American turned to face him.
“Someone’s shooting at us. Bandits probably. You ought to make a run for it, this is going to get worse before it gets better.” He yelled ominously before turning around to fire a burst of bullets towards an invisible attacker.

Wailton and Doctor looked at each other and ran away from the truck. With bullets whizzing over their heads they ran towards the horizon with the sun following them light a natural spot light wherever they went.
The desert appeared completely flat, but suddenly there was a small cliff which neither of them saw. They screamed helplessly as they slipped down the rocky slope and rolled out onto the desert again. Wailton lay motionless for a while before coughing, standing up and helping Doctor to his feet. Despite hating him for destroying Britain, Wailton couldn’t help but smile when he saw his own face looking back at him.
Soon though his common sense returned.
“See what sort of world you have created! This is all your doing!” Shouted Wailton angrily, wiping dirt from his trousers.
“Me? How is this my fault?”
“If you hadn’t been so bent on world domination then you wouldn’t have destroyed New York! If you hadn’t destroyed New York then we could be enjoying some 23^rd century burgers right now!”

Doctor looked insulted, but Wailton stood his ground. They stared at each other angrily until Doctor starting walking into the desert again in a huff and muttering something about his dislike for burgers under his breath.
They still had another 24 hours in the futuristic oven-like arid waste land before they would be zapped back to the 22^nd century. Wailton couldn’t decide which time was worse. The one where he gets shot at, cooked alive and tricked into cannibalism, or the time when his future self has enslaved the entire country and is about to start a third world war.

They trudged along for a while longer in awkward silence. Wailton soon found it difficult to drag his dirty feet along the desert floor. They scraped loudly against the rock, and he stared at them as he walked. BANG! He had walked straight into a huge metal object.
Wailton shouted obscenities as he rubbed his head. He looked up at the object obscuring his path. Taking a few steps back him and Doctor observed that it was an enormous missile. It had landed at an angle and was embedded in the ground. The huge, bare metallic end was sticking out of the ground and cast a shadow over both of them.
The visible section was about twenty feet long and covered in dark burns, areas of rust and a few bullet holes. But most noticeable was the giant lettering along the side.
Hail the Doctor!Wailton turned to Doctor, but didn’t say anything. He was still staring intently at the missile, his missile.

One of the many missiles he had fired to destroy America, although he hadn’t yet ordered it.
“This isn’t quite the Utopia I imagined.” He said, still staring at the missile.
“I bet that London is a desert as well.” Responded Wailton, trying to push his anti-war mantra onto Doctor. It looked like it was working as he stared at the missile and then looked around at the dustbowl that used to be covered by a vibrant city filled with people.

Suddenly the eerie silence was broken. It was engines again, and Wailton assumed the Americans were coming to pick them up after their gun fight with the bandits.
He was wrong. As the noise got closer they observed two vehicles coming a ridge a few hundred meters in the distance. They turned out to be trucks with men in the back shouting and hollering loudly. They didn’t look as friendly as the Americans and they had already started to walk backwards away from the incoming vehicles.

Suddenly there was a flash and gunshots started whizzing around the pair. They broke into a full blown sprint. Wailton noticed that Doctor could run very well despite being more than 80 years old. Along with no visible signs of aging, these were the rewards of Britain’s technological progress.
But the result of Britain’s technological progress was also chasing them both down while firing bullets at them, so it was hard to reconcile the benefits at that moment.

The man and the bathtub - Chapter 6

2012-02-25T11:57:00.000Z

Chapter 6.

Doctor returned a few minutes later flanked by two guards. They didn’t have batons this time, but had exchanged them for machine guns. They were an intimidating sight, and Wailton took a few steps back as they entered the room.
Doctor was holding a small device no bigger than a toaster. It was a silver metal box with various knobs and switches on it. There was a small screen displaying the year and it felt weird for Wailton to look at it. It was wrong, it should read 2012. But no, it’s more than 60 years off, yet still correct.

Doctor piped up to explain the device.
“Right, the Parallax Perambulator is very complicated and we need to be careful. This knob is turned to determine the year we want to go to, and then this button will send whatever or whoever is touching it to that year.”
“That doesn’t sound very complicated.” Said Wailton with a slight snigger.
Doctor threw him an evil glare and returned to his machine. He let out a long noise to let Wailton know he was thinking and twisted one of the knobs so that the screen read 2200, which was easily far enough into the future to judge whether the world domination was a success.

Without so much as a word of warning Doctor slammed his finger down onto the button on the machine and grabbed Dr Wailtons hand. Wailton knew what was coming this time. Everything dropped away and suddenly they were both plummeting through darkness. Once again the smell of popcorn filled the air and colours attacked them from all sides.

Darkness filled their vision and they found themselves waking up on the floor.
Dr Wailtons eyelids ached as they opened like creaky garage doors. The ground was dusty and after a bit of observation they found themselves lying in a large arid desert.
The sun was beating down, and made a startling difference to the grey clouds of 2076. Standing up and brushing himself down, Wailton could see that the desert was almost completely flawless. In the distance there was a collection of brick buildings and seemed like the only place to get any shade.
“Quite a world you have created” quipped Dr Wailton as they both started walking towards the buildings. Doctor said nothing, his face remained emotionless.
The heat was rendering Doctors jacket a burden and he dropped it onto the desert floor. The layer of dust on the brown rock surface was so fine that when dropped the jacket caused dust to explode outwards from every direction.

They eventually reached the buildings. There were no doors or windows, but it looked like they might have once been a collection of shops and a police station. Indeed there was an old metal sign of some sort of shield still hanging from one of the roofs, although it was brown from rust now.
A thought occurred to Wailton.
“How are we going to get back to your time?” he asked, worrying that this trip might have been a one way affair and also interested how he was going to get back to 2012.
“Don’t worry. The Parallax Perambulator has a return button, and sends us back automatically after 48 hours anyway.” Explained Doctor, kicking at an old dusty piece of metal on the floor.
Wailton was relieved. He had no intention of being stuck in this future or his partners future.
There wasn’t much in any of the buildings. They were very much abandoned and everything worth taking had been taken. But then something recognisable caught Wailtons eye. There was a large slab of paper in the corner of the room. Closer inspection revealed it to be a stack of newspapers.

He picked one up and read the headline.
WAR IS COMING!It was the same headline from his bathroom in 2012! He unfolded it and read on.
War now seems inevitable as the forces of the Civilization Advancement Party gather along the American east coast. The President has released a statement saying that any act of aggression from the United Kingdom Dictatorship ‘will be met with unrivalled retaliation’.
The world has watched nervously as the newly closed country of the United Kingdom has soared ahead of its rivals in both economic and military strength. It’s clear mission statement from it’s leader ‘The Doctor’ has made no bones about their mission to conquer the world to destroy the ‘savages’.
British nuclear warships and aircraft carriers starting patrolling the eastern Atlantic ocean last Saturday, only days after British cruise missiles hit Madrid and Paris in the first phase of the dictators ‘European Campaign‘.
Wailton wanted to read more but it was at that moment that an unlikely noise filled the air. Doctor looked up as well and glanced at Wailton with a puzzled expression.
It was the noise of an engine.
Peering through the hole in the wall where a window used to be, Wailton could see a large black truck tearing through the desert towards them. It was followed by a huge plume of dust from the desert floor and it must have been driving quite fast.
Wailton was torn between his suspicion that they might be bad people and his need for water. Moments later his decision was made for him.

The truck stopped a few meters from the building. It was an old pickup truck with rusting wheels and no windows. Two men had been sitting in the back and they now jumped out. They both looked like they had pulled themselves from the depths of hell. Both were heavily tattooed and were wearing leather jackets. Wailton thought they looked like they had been pulled out of the film ‘Grease’. But there were a few features that set them apart from the musical.

Firstly, they were both holding large machine guns and were wearing bandoliers filled with bullets around their bodies. Scars ran down their arms and they had both definitely seen some serious action. Large knives adorned their belts, and Wailton hoped that at least one of them would say ‘That’s not a knife, this is a knife!’ But alas those words never came.
Film references sternly pushed out of his mind, Wailton saw Doctor exit the building and approach the two men. He rushed out after him.
The two large men were surprised to see that there were people inside the building, and smiled at each other.
“Hello there.” said Doctor with a worryingly large smile on his face. He must have known something Wailton didn’t. “I am Doctor Wailton, and this is my friend…err.”

He motioned to Wailton and they got the idea. There was no point explaining the whole Dr Wailton issue.
“Anyway, could you perhaps tell us where we are?” He asked, trying to stop any sound of desperation.
The two men laughed a little and then muttered a few words between themselves.
“You’re in New York mate” chuckled one of the men with a strong American accent.
Dr Wailton had never felt so aware of his quaint British accent than at that point. More alarmingly they had somehow ended up several thousand miles away from London, in another country no less. Although this did explain the American newspaper Wailton had found.
“New York? What happened here?” inquired Doctor, completely dumbfounded and unaware of the fact that he had caused this.
“It was the bloody British. They tried to invade, and when they realised they couldn’t they just dropped a load of bombs and levelled the whole country.”

This information was a bit startling for Doctor, although Wailton had already come to suspect it from the old newspaper.
“You guys look hungry, do you want some food?” asked the American who hadn’t spoke yet. His expression made him look a little kinder than the other one, and Wailton almost wanted to trust him.
Doctor also made this decision for them both.
“We would love some food” he said, with no worry about the motivation of the two rough looking men.
They grinned and set up a large tent with the two other men who had now emerged from the truck. They looked just as rough as their two companions. Wailton couldn’t help but think they looked how Bruce Willis would if he became a tramp and carried around a machine gun.
The massive red tent sheltered them from the heat as a large cooking pot was brought over and rested on a newly made fire.

Maybe these guys weren’t so bad, thought Wailton as he sipped from his cup of water. They were like Red Neck Nomads wandering the desert. The men made small talk. One of the Americans asked if either of them had been to Glasgow because his wife had come from there. Wailton immediately started praising Glasgow and the famous beauty of its women, although in truth he had never been there.
The pot was heated up and stirred, although neither Wailton could see the contents.
“Okay, come and get it” announced one of the dirty looking Americans.

Wailton walked over to the pot with his bowl in hand. The lid was lifted up to reveal something more disgusting than he could have possibly anticipated.

The man and the bathtub - Chapter 5

2012-02-25T11:55:00.000Z

Chapter 5.
There was a smell of flowers in the air as Dr Wailton awoke from his compulsory slumber. His head was ringing and his ear was bleeding. His eyes opened to find another peculiar sight. He was lying on the carpet of a stately home. The carpet was dark red and smelled fantastic. A chandelier adorned the ceiling.
A fireplace crackled near some chairs and a large wooden door was at the far side of the room. Wailton managed to struggle to his feet. Holding his head he soaked in his surroundings. There was a large window opposite the fireplace. Gazing out of it he saw that he wasn’t in a stately home. It appeared that he was in the tower he had tried to walk to almost 24 hours ago. It towered over all other buildings which stood stacked like Lego bricks stretched out to the horizon.

Wailton wondered how long he had been unconscious. Probably not too long as his head still hurt from the fall.
The wooden door at the far end of the room creaked open. Wailton wondered why such old fashioned surroundings were allowed so far in the otherwise technology focused future.

His questions would have to take a back seat as it appeared a mirror had just walked into the room.
Wailton couldn’t quite explain it, but he found himself staring at a mirror. It was only when he moved and looked closer that he realised what was going on. The man now facing him that had just entered the room was almost identical to Dr Wailton in every way. Even down to the little white beard and the greying hair.
The man was wearing a blue suit with a white shirt, and was smiling. He also didn’t have a bruise on his face or a bleeding ear.

Wailton moved about and noticed that this apparent reflection didn’t copy his movements. Instead they both stared at each other and Wailton wondered when this strange mirage would end.
A good thirty seconds passed as Dr Wailton stared at this identical copy of himself. And then, it spoke.
“Hello Dr Wailton” the man said with a cocky smile.
Wailton was too stunned to speak. An identical copy of himself had just greeted him, what was the social protocol at this point?
“Hello” croaked Wailton, still partially speechless. How had they managed to clone him? Was this even a clone? What the hell was going on?
“I suppose you are wondering what is going on” the stranger said with a permanent smile. Wailton had never seen himself smile so much in his entire life. His clone appeared to be much happier than he was.
“I am the Doctor. Well, we are the Doctor” stated the man, lifting a glass of whiskey to his lips.

More silence followed as the big brain of Wailton struggled to process what was happening. The Doctor that had been talked about in the prison cell, Jens apartment and on the notice board was him?
“Okay, I can see that this is going to take some explaining.”
Wailton nodded. “Yes please.”
“I am you. I am just a future version of you. You have travelled forward in time and met your future self, me.”
Wailton was with him so far.
“So why am I here? Well, on my 41^st birthday I felt quite lonely so I attended a political rally in London. There I met some very influential people. They really understood my vision of the future and what I was trying to portray with my studying.”
He took another sip of his whiskey as he spoke.
“I joined the Civilization Advancement Party and soon became their leader. This is the new and improved Britain” he almost shouted with a demonic smile across his face. He gestured out the window.
“Everything is designed to be as efficient as possible to help Britain progress into a Utopian society.”
Wailton suddenly woke up and was angry.
“You think this is a Utopia? What happened to London? You have created the most disgusting city and filled it with fear! I saw how people are treated in your prisons and how the law is enforced!” Wailton yelled across the room at himself.

His future self chuckled.
“Sacrifice is necessary to achieve greatness. We have stopped aging and destroyed disease. If it requires a few lives along the way then so be it!”
Wailtons future self had gotten angrier. His face had barked like a Pit-bull and his eyes burned right through Wailtons confidence.
“Soon we will be strong enough to bring scientific advancement to the entire world!” He shouted with religious enthusiasm. He was clearly mad, and Wailton didn’t know what to do.
“You shouldn’t fight this. I know you agree with me that this is better, because we are the same person.”
Wailton shook his head while wiping away some blood from his ear.
“I don’t know what happened to you in those years, but we are not the same person.”

Wailton thought back to the slip of newspaper from the year 2138 in his bathroom.
WAR IS COMING!War was coming, and it was Wailtons future self that was bringing it. Dr Wailton thought hard about a way to turn the situation around. Then he realised that he could get inside his future selfs head, they were the same person after all.
“Say Wailton, quick question.”
“Yes?” answered his future self.
“You say that your technology has advanced a lot.”
His future self snorted in disgust.
“Advanced a lot? It has soared past what we thought possible.”
“So what about….time travel?” Inquired Wailton.
The was a brief pause as they stared intently into each other eyes.
“Of course we have time travel machines!” Future Wailton stated. “We are very proud of them, although they are quite dangerous. We have a device called ‘The Parallax Perambulator‘, which creates a quantum sized singularity, breaks down the laws of physics and thereby allows time travel.”
Wailton smiled. He knew himself too well. He knew that he would be unable to stop from bragging about his achievements, because that’s exactly what he would do. He knew that he would also be unable to deny a challenge.
“So what a little investigation then?”

His future self looked interested.
“What sort of investigation?”
“Well, let’s say we both use The Parallax Perambulator to travel into the future. We see what sort of world you have created through your world domination and if it looks okay then I will help you achieve it.”
Wailtons future self looked very intrigued. He looked deep in thought and then nodded.
“Fine, if it turns out that I have created a good world then you will help me achieve it.”
“Yes” Said Wailton, half regretting his decision. His master plan had evaporated from his scheming mind once the notion of time travel had been realised.
“But first things first, what shall I call you?” Asked Wailton.

His future self looked confused.
“Just called me Doctor Wailton” he said, looking vaguely unimpressed.
“But that’s my name. We can’t both be called Doctor Wailton, it will get too confusing.”
“Fine, then just call me Doctor. Everyone else here does” agreed future Wailton.
There was a mutual nod and Doctor left the room through the same large wooden doors he had used to enter.　

The man and the bathtub - Chapter 4

2012-02-25T11:54:00.000Z

Chapter 4.

Wailton scrambled around the room like a deranged dog. He didn’t have much experience hiding from the police, which had always felt like a good thing but not today.

He yanked open a wardrobe and jumped inside.
With his ear pressed against the wardrobe door he could hear the police and Jen talking.
A robotic voice was assumed to be the policeman, unless Jen had turned into a Darlek.
“An unidentified male was seen on the street earlier, have you seen him?” demanded the policeman.
“No I haven’t,” said Jen. Wailton was thankful she had lied. A criminal record wouldn’t look very good when he next submitted a paper.
There was a long pause and Wailton wondered whether Jen had left the apartment.
Suddenly a voice whispered through the wardrobe door.
“You can come out now.”
Wailton opened the doors and saw Jen standing there with a grin.
“We need to get you out of here” She said, “It’s not safe.”

Dr Wailton was in no position to argue and followed her through the door into the hallway again. They carefully tiptoed to the door at the end of the hallway and the door opened. Before he had time to speak Dr Wailton was thrust through the doorway into the street and heard the door close behind him.
The last thing he heard from Jen was a few words of encouragement.
“Have fun and avoid the police” she muttered, before having thoroughly washed her hands of him.
Back on the street again, he thought. Wailton felt like a stray dog that no-one wanted to be caught with. It probably was a good idea to avoid the police though, especially if they thought he was committing sabotage by not being at work. The story about travelling through time in a bath tub probably wouldn’t hold much water.

While Wailton laughed at his own unintentional joke he rounded the corner of one of the buildings. There was yet more rows upon rows of grey skyscrapers, but in the distance there was something different.
Towering above the other skyscrapers was one enormous cylindrical monolith. It looked like a Pringles packet turned into an enormous tower.

It seemed like a good landmark to head for, so Dr Wailton started walking. He figured that he had a while before he got to the bizarre building, so pondered over what Jen had said in his mind.
Had the United Kingdom really been turned into a futuristic dictatorship under this mysterious man, the Doctor. As he strolled along surrounded by these strange surroundings, it sure sounded plausible.
After a while Dr Wailton found it hard to tell if he was making progress. The tower didn’t seem to be getting closer, and the buildings all looked the same.

Wailton had managed to walk for a good hour without passing anything of interest. If this really was the future, then it was extremely boring.
Wailtons thoughts didn’t manage to progress any further than that before he received a heavy blow to the head and passed out.
The next few hours were a blur of batons, handcuffs, the back of some sort of vehicle and eventually his face pressed against the floor again.
When Dr Wailton eventually regained full consciousness he found himself, once again, in peculiar surroundings‘.

He was lying on the floor of a large circular white room. Along one side of the room was a bench running along the wall. Going through the middle of the room was a large fence which reached the ceiling. There was one door, guarded by a large man holding a baton. He was wearing what appeared to be a black suit of armour. A gun was sitting in its holster against his thigh. Wailton stared at it, wondering how often it was used.

He sat up and gazed around again. He wasn’t alone in his cell. The whole bench was taken up by at least thirty other prisoners. Each one was wearing the same clothes as Jen had been wearing. A long line of grey gowns and grey tops.
More alarmingly each prisoner looks severely beaten. Each one had bruises all over their face and hands. Some had bloody noses, and a few had faces still stained with tears.
There was a screen against the wall with green writing constantly running along it.
It read ‘Crimes and Punishments’.

It then went on to list each crime and the resulting punishment. It didn’t make for very promising reading.
Crimes and PunishmentsMurder - Death
Manslaughter - Death
Theft - Death
Burglary - Death
Vandalism - Death
Treason - Death
Economic sabotage - Death
Lack of permit - Death
Hail the Doctor
Instilled with this new confidence about his fate Dr Wailton took the risk of standing up. One of the other prisoners tried to signal him.
“Psst!”
Wailton turned to face him. He was a small and weedy man. His glasses were broken, but still being held on his nose by nothing but will power. His face was heavily bruised and his black hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks.
“What did you do?” He asked, glancing between Wailton and the guards.
Wailton thought for a while.
“I didn’t have my permit on me” he stated. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. Mentioning time travel in a bath tub wasn’t going to get him anywhere.
“Bad luck” the man muttered.

After that interesting social interlude Dr Wailton resumed sitting on the ground and waited for his fate.
The room was bright white with no windows. The guards would change every few hours or so, and that was the only way of keeping track of time.
Wailton estimated that it had been at least 18 hours before he was summoned by the guard to exit the cell. The door was opened by the menacing black knight look-alike and Wailton stepped through it.
He was led down a bright white hallway into a side room. The room was empty except for a table and a small glass screen lying on the table. Wailton was led over to it and his hand pressed down onto the glass by the guard.

There was a loud dull beep as a red light flashed somewhere on the wall. There was a pause as the guard released Wailtons hand. He glanced up at the guard, who was still staring at the red light on the wall. A radio appeared from his pocket and a few quiet words were exchanged with the person on the other end.
Soon another guard arrived and Wailton was once more led down the corridor. The florescent lights on the ceiling were starting to hurt his eyes after 18 hours of being stuck in the white washed hell that was that prison. If you had been awake for long enough and stared at the wall for long enough then you could almost hallucinate.

Maybe that’s what it all was, a hallucination. Maybe after a while Wailton would wake up in his bath tub having only bumped his head. It was unlikely, but it was the best he could hope for.
The tightening grip of the guards hurt Wailtons arms, and quickly destroyed any ideas of a potential hallucination.

Eventually they reached a larger room, and Wailton was abandoned in it. The door was firmly locked. It looked like any other room in that building. White walls, white ceiling, and a table in the middle. Dr Wailton had long since lost any possible romantic notion about time travel. The lack of sleep and confusion about what was going on was more than enough to plunge him into a dementia fuelled coma. Instead he opted to pace around the room and think about what had happened.
He thought about his many hours in the communal cell. He had seen many prisoners come and go. Some turned up in worse shape than others. At least two prisoners had arrived unconscious and motionless, only to not move a muscle and be dragged out of the cell by guards a few hours later. They might have been dead for all he knew. Some were dragged out of the cell kicking and screaming. Some cried.

This was certainly not part of any future that Wailton had tried to predict in his papers. Where were the tubes for transport and the floating cars. He certainly hadn’t seen any rabbits though.
At one point he remembered a failed attempt to defend another prisoner from a guard. Wailton had received a punch to the eye as a reward. He nursed the bruise as he paced his new waiting room. This was no place for a 40 year old scientist to be.

After some hours the door opened. The guards were still there, but this time they were accompanied by a slim man in a grey suit. His flattened black hair gave the impression that his head was shaped like a box. It was a military style haircut and he had an expression stern enough to scare a lion. Wailton wanted to run from this new enemy, but couldn’t.
“Who are you?” barked the man with the box-like head.
Wailton thought for a moment. Should he lie? What would be the point? Would they know if he was lying?
“Doctor Wailton” he said, trying to stand up a little straighter as if it would repair some of his dignity.
The man stared at him for a while. He turned to one of the guards and said something. Dr Wailtons hearing had never been good, and since hitting middle age it had only gotten worse.

The man left and the door was closed again. Wailton wondered if he had given the right answer. Had he just condemned himself to death? Everything seemed worthy of death in this strange new land he found himself in. He longed after the London that had fish and chip shops, old architecture and bumper to bumper traffic. The streets were now empty, with every building demolished to make way for efficiently made towers. He wondered if anyone had put up a fight when the tower of London had been demolished. Had people wept when the beautiful cathedral-like Saint Pancreas station had been demolished? It would probably be a mystery for the rest of his life, however long that would be. It might not be much longer before his demise.

A guard entered the room holding a cup of water. Wailton stared at the cup. He hadn’t had water in many hours. It might be poisoned. Wailton didn’t care. He needed water.
The liquid disappeared down his throat in a matter of seconds.
But suddenly a strange feeling came over Dr Wailton. He was feeling tired, very tired. His eyelids were closing involuntarily. Something had been in that water. As he blacked out, Wailton almost didn’t feel the pain of his head smacking against the floor.

The man and the bathtub - Chapter 3

2012-02-25T11:51:00.000Z

Chapter 3.

The sight before Dr Wailton was something that no-one could ever prepare for. He was lying on a road, that much was clear. But there were no buildings, or not buildings as we would perceive them. At the side of the roads, where the buildings would normally be, were huge grey concrete boxes. Each one was about a hundred feet across and rose at least a thousand feet high. They looked like massive dominos, but made into buildings with no visible windows or doors.

Dr Wailton stood up and brushed himself down. The brown jumper and dirty jeans he was wearing were now completely dry, and his bathtub was nowhere to be seen. Looking around, Wailton could only see these enormous concrete slabs protruding from the ground as far as the eye could see. Row after row of them stretching far into the distance. If it wasn’t for the clothes he was wearing, Wailton might have been justified in believing he had gone colour blind. Everything visible was grey, even the sky.

Swallowing his fear, he decided to investigate one of the ‘buildings’. Wailton slowly approached the side of grey slab and saw, to his surprise, a notice board covered in sheets of paper. There was no pavement, no benches, no street lamps and no sign at all that pedestrians would ever be present, but here was a notice board.

The large wooden board was completely covered with dozens of sheets of paper and Wailton had trouble deciding which one to read first. He eventually decided on one of the shorter pieces. It read -

Public order notice - New Curfew - 19^th November 2076The new curfew will commence from the date mentioned above and dictates that all residents must be in their homes between 9pm and 6am. It has been decided by the Council of Public Wellbeing and Labour that for targets to be met each person must get enough rest to achieve their tasks and help defeat the savages.
Anyone found breaking the curfew or inciting others to break the curfew will be severely punished.
Hail the Doctor
Dr Waleton paused and pondered. A curfew? Where exactly was he? Why did it say the year was 2076? Who was the Doctor? What was his doctorate in? Which university did he get it from?
All of these questions, some useful and some not, ran through his mind. He wondered if he was breaking the curfew now. It was hard to tell what time it was with the grey clouds overhead, but it was almost certainly daytime. The curfew being in place would explain the lack of people, and living organisms in general, on the streets. He moved on to the next notice on the board.
　
　
Public order notice - New Weather timetable - 1^st November 2076The Council of Climate has changed the hours of sunlight for Saturdays and Sundays. There will now be 4 hours of sunlight each day instead of the usual 6.
This is to save resources for the war against the savages.
Hail the Doctor
There was that word again, ‘savages’. Who were these savages and why did they need defeating? How was the Council of Climate controlling the weather?
A million more questions filled Dr Wailtons head, and more mention of the Doctor made him more curious as to his identity.
There was then a noise. A whisper. Dr Wailton looked around, he was certain that he heard something.

There it was again. It was definitely a human noise.
“Get inside!” whispered the panicked voice from some intangible location.
“How?” Dr Wailton asked, not being able to see a door.
A hidden door then slid open almost silently. Wailton warily stepped into the darkness and the door slid shut behind him. So once again Wailton was stood in his brown jumper and tatty jeans in a dark and unfamiliar place with no idea what was going on.

A thin light flickered to life on the ceiling. It revealed a long white hallway. In the hallway stood a woman. She adjusted her glasses and stroked her long dark hair. She had a nice face and was probably around her mid-thirties, had Dr Wailton gathered the courage to ask her. Her clothes looked strange. She was wearing a long grey gown with a grey shirt and grey trousers. Wailton wasn’t much of a fashion expert, but she looked like she belonged in a North Korean victory parade.

She smiled and gestured for him to follow her. She led him down the worryingly clean hallway. Wailton wasn’t very sure why the cleanliness of the hallway worried him. Maybe it was because a freshly cleaned hallway means that something involving a mess happened there. The cleanliness was almost a sign of guilt, the intentional covering up of some unfortunate event.
He compared it in his mind to wiping your internet history. If someone takes a look at your computer and sees that you have deleted all of your internet history then they are going to assume that you were looking at something they don’t want you to see. Whereas a little muck here and there sends out the ‘we have nothing to hide’ vibes. Wailton wished this was the reason his apartment was so messy, but it wasn’t. He was just lazy.

Dr Wailton followed the mysterious woman down the corridor until they stopped at one of the doors. It was number 8 and Wailton took note of that. The lady didn’t use a key, she just pressed her hand against the door and a red light traced its outline. The light finished the outline and turned green, causing the door to open. They both stepped inside as Wailton discussed in his head how the biometric scanner must use complex algorithms to compare the candidate fingerprint with a stored template. How very interesting, he thought.

Inside, the room looked just like a normal apartment. There was white walls, a sofa facing a screen embedded in the wall, and a few tables dotted around. There were some pictures in frames scattered around of trees and grass, two things he hadn’t seen since his arrival in his strange new surroundings.

The woman now turned around and spoke in a commanding tone.
“First things first, where did you get those clothes?” She said pointed at his general apparel.
“Primark” muttered Wailton, making a mental note not to choose clothes from the bargain bin again. The woman had a puzzled look on her face, but it quickly faded.
“What are you doing not at work?” she demanded before turning around and taking a seat.
Dr Wailton wasn’t sure whether he could answer that question, because he had not reason. Instead he opted to ask a question of his own.
“Where am I? And what year is this?” he asked while sitting in the chair opposite.
The puzzled expression returned to her face and she looked down at the floor in deep thought.
“What year do you think it is?”
“Well last time I checked it was 2012, and I was in London.”
She looked up with a face of pure bewilderment.
“2012?” She asked.
“November 2012”

She sighed and look more agitated than confused.
“The good news is that you’re still in London. But it’s not 2012, it’s 2076.”
There was a pause as Dr Wailton allowed his brain to absorb this information. It was hard to swallow, but highly probable. Giant concrete skyscrapers weren’t very abundant, even in 2012 London. Somehow he had managed to travel forward in time by a good 64 years.
“What has happened here?” inquired Wailton, not being able to think of any intelligent questions.
“You really don’t know?” She replied, trying to probe out any potential prank that was being committed.

Dr Wailton shook his head.
“Okay, well where to begin? In 2020 the Civilization Advancement Party came into power in the United Kingdom. Their main goal was scientific progress and to make the United Kingdom an economic superpower once again. At first they were good and we loved them. They boosted funding for the sciences and as a result we prospered. Our technology was advancing so fact that soon we were at the forefront of science. To keep the rate of advancement going the government started employing more and more people in the scientific sectors. Laws were made and buildings were built, which were designed to be as efficient as possible. Therefore making the economy and scientific progress as rapid as possible. This has escalated and now, 56 years later, everything is fine-tuned to be as efficient as possible and nearly everyone is employed in a certain field of science.”

After this rather rapid monologue of barely comprehensible information, Dr Wailton nodded. As a scientist himself he didn’t see anything wrong with that.
“That doesn’t sound so bad” he murmured, almost rethinking his phrasing while he said it.
Her face turned red with rage.
“Not bad? Not bad! It’s hell! Our lives are strictly controlled because anything resembling fun or entertainment could be seen as adversely effecting your work progress. Nothing is more important than the progress of the country. If you miss a day at work it is seen as sabotage. The police will come in the night and take you.”

Dr Wailton had regretted speaking as the woman continued her rant.
“There are no more shops because the government has decided what we need for an ‘efficient’ life that will benefit the country. We are made to worship the Doctor, who might not even exist.”
She paused for breath and motioned at the ceiling. Dr Wailton hadn’t noticed it at first, but on the ceiling was ‘Hail the Doctor’ in huge black lettering.
“Won’t you get in trouble with someone for saying this?” Wailton asked, still staring at the ceiling.
“No” she said, shaking her head. “Free speech is encouraged. We are allowed to say whatever we want. It is free actions they don’t like so much. Anyway, they need us if they want to defeat the savages.”
There was that word again.
“Savages?”
“The outside world. We are at the head of the pack and all of the other countries have descended into a cesspool of corruption and famine. We are needed to cleanse them and bring them up to our level of greatness.”

Her face and voice had changed dramatically. She almost sung her last sentence and she seemed happiest when talking about the other countries failures. There was a look of religiosity in her eyes and Wailton could tell that she really believed what she had just said.
Another period of silence descended upon them. Wailton thought of something to say.
“So why aren’t you at work? Oh, and what’s your name?”
She smiled and produced a card from her trouser pocket.
“My name is Jen and I have a day off, this is my clearance card.”
Dr Wailton took the card, studied it and gave it back.
“What is your name, you poorly dressed time traveller” she said before letting out a quiet laugh.
“My name is Doctor Wailton, pleased to meet you.” He chuckled, tugging at his clothes.
Jen looked deep in thought for a moment, almost confused. It was if she recognised the name but couldn’t place it.

Suddenly there was a thud at the door. They both jumped up in terror.
“Quick! It’s the police. Hide!” she tried to yell without making it too loud.

The man and the bathtub - Chapter 2

2012-02-25T11:49:00.000Z

Chapter 2.

Wailton walked slowly around his apartment. Each footstep made more nose than he wished. The air was silent except for the faint noise of sirens in the distance and a domestic dispute a few floors above. Despite his concentration on the safety of his home Dr Wailton could easily follow the noisy argument and managed to work out that Margret had been wronged by her new man Terry.

Putting his worries about how Terry and Margret will ever get over their intrinsic differences and make the relationship work, Wailton entered the last room of the flat that had yet to be checked.
It was the bathroom. The greying door with the peeling paint was the only barrier between Dr Wailton and the suspected intruder. Wailton thought over the coming events in his mind. He suspected that he would open the door to see a tall, muscular skin-head rooting through his bathroom cabinet, which consisted of a toothbrush and a half empty tube of toothpaste. He had intended to buy some more toothpaste, but being rejected from newspapers all over the world was almost a full time job. The anticipated fight worried Dr Wailton. He was not a muscular man, in fact he was almost the complete opposite. It was presumed that he had muscles or else he wouldn’t be able to move, but there wasn’t much evidence for their existence past that. He looked like a slightly thickened stick figure, or a poorly stuffed effigy ready for the flames. If the intruder weighed much more than a thumb tack then he would have the advantage.

The only fight Wailton had ever been in was in fifth grade, and consisted of nothing more than getting smacked in the face by a stray elbow, crying to a teacher, crying to the head master, crying to his parents and then failing to finish the whole event with some dignity by crying some more.
Dr Wailton felt like crying now as his hand reached for the door knob. He winced as the door creaked loudly open. His face peered through the growing gap between the door and door frame. He saw no-one. The room was empty.

But wait.

The light was on. Had Wailton left the light on? His mind traced itself back to the morning. He remembered pulling the light switch, but was unclear whether anything had happened. Then he remembered. He hadn’t turned the light on because the electricity bill hadn’t been paid. Confusion stuck Dr Wailton like a ton of bricks or a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick. The confusion only escalated when he saw that the bath had been run and was now full to its brim. This was most certainly strange and puzzled Dr Wailtons otherwise intelligent mind.

The bathtub was quite elegant and was possibly the most valuable item in the entire apartment. It was styled like an old Elizabethan bathtub, being raised slightly above the ground and standing on its own metal legs. With a bit of imagination and possibly some illegal substances you could almost imagine it coming to life and galloping off into the distance to find a new life as a sideshow attraction in America. It looked old and possibly like an antique, but judging by the craftsmanship it was almost certainly made in a back alley workshop by some guy named Steve who worked part time as a window cleaner and had a criminal record that could fill a novel. Dr Wailton could almost picture Steve in his denim vest top and baggy jeans. His facial hair that was undecided between an intentional beard and just messy stubble. But these thoughts of Steves back-story were put out of Dr Wailtons mind for later, there were more important things to think about.

He had definitely not run a bath and had not turned on the light, so who had? He peered over the edge of the bath to gaze into the water, hoping for some sort of clue. All he got in return was a reminder of how unsightly he looked as he found himself eye to eye with a reflection of his own face.
A stroke of his beard did nothing to unravel the situation. But then there was a clue. As he turned around to have his back to the bath Dr Wailton saw something lying on the floor against the wall. A puzzled Dr Wailton decided to investigate.

Crumpled on the floor of his bathroom was a piece of paper. Wailton bent over and retrieved it. Unfolding it he found it to be a piece of a newspaper. Specifically it as the top section of a newspaper headline. The headline was in massive bold lettering and read - WAR IS COMING!
The title seemed rather alarmist for Dr Wailtons journalistic taste and he assumed it was an exaggeration. Other than the disturbing headline there was another strange thing about that newspaper. The date on the top right of the slip of paper Dr Waleton had was wrong. Not only was it wrong, but it was very wrong. The date was November 2012, but the newspaper had obviously had some sort of misprint. Their date claimed it was July 2138. Ignoring these minor details Dr Wailton was now studying the newspaper for clues.

Why would an intruder leave a piece of a novelty newspaper with a false date and a false title in his bathroom. Furthermore, why would the intruder then run a bath and leave?
These questions buzzed around Dr Wailtons head as he took a step back in the first part of an attempt to sit on the edge of the bath. His plan never got that far, for at that very moment his foot met with a small puddle of water. It made a squeaking noise as it slid forward as if kicking for an imaginary football. Dr Wailton tumbled backwards, still grasping the piece of newspaper. He splashed hard into the water and found himself sitting in his bath. Wailtons clothing floated around in the water like the appendages of a fabric octopus. He let out another long sigh, longer than the one he had indulged in that morning. But this wasn’t the end of his troubles.

Dr Wailton was about to attempt heaving himself out of the water when he heard a distinctive bleeping noise. It was coming from under the bathtub along with a green flashing light that he could see reflected against the wall.
The world around him then erupted into chaos. Everything around him turned to darkness and it felt as if the bathtub was falling through space. He compared it to freefalling in an elevator or being thrown off a cliff. The wind was rushing through his hair as the bathtub continued to descend through the unending void. Suddenly there was no longer darkness, but a kaleidoscope of colours violently whizzing past Dr Wailtons face. They were joined with the undeniable smell of popcorn. That smell you only get in the cinema but was now filling his nostrils as he plunged down a conceptual cavern in his bathtub.

Then there was nothing. Dr Wailton was unsure whether he had passed out, he had reached his intended destination, or had hit the bottom of the pit and was now dead.

He was lying on his back. Dr Wailton opened his eyes and looked cautiously around. What he saw was the most ungodly sight he had ever laid eyes on.

The man and the bathtub - Chapter 1.

2012-02-25T11:47:00.000Z

I decided to try and write a book a few weeks ago. After 3 days I got bored and just tied up the ending as fast as I could. The word document is just sitting on my computer, so I thought I would share it with you guys a chapter at a time.

Enjoy :)

Chapter 1.

The rosy cheeked school boy rose to his feet in the classroom. He was applauding with an emphatic passion and he was soon joined by his class mates. At the front of the class stood Dr Wailton. Dr Wailton was a tall man in his forties, with a long brown coat and thin rimmed spectacles which gave him an air of wisdom. Despite being only in his forties he already had long greying hair and a thin, white beard.

Rumour was that he dyed it white to look more intelligent, but nobody was really sure. Dr Wailton took a long bow in front of his adoring pupils, behind him was a large black board covered in various algorithms and formulas. Dr Wailton was a scientist and had committed his life to accurately predicting the future.
And now, in this moment, he had succeeded. He gazed into the eyes of every student and saw a look of admiration and love for his academic prowess. What stood before him? Fame and fortune? Probably not, because at that very moment Dr Wailton woke up.

He was back in his small, inner city apartment with the damp, brown walls and the cat which had yet to be named either because Dr Wailton was too busy to bother giving it a name, or because the cat spent more time wandering around the back alleys of London than in his flat. The reason for the absent cat was clear. Dr Wailtons apartment stank. Cleaning was not high on his agenda and this was evident by the large piles of newspapers and rubbish adorning any spare chair, floor space or table top.

When asked why his apartment was so messy he would simply reply, “It’s not messy. Everything is on display, like a museum”. This fooled no-one, because no-one had ever seen a stack of magazines drenched in an unidentified liquid that smelled suspiciously like petrol in the Louvre. Dr Wailton dragged himself out of bed and staggered to the bathroom in nothing but his boxers. He couldn’t afford Pyjamas.
He couldn’t afford anything really.
His hand pulled the cord for the light switch but nothing happened. The electricity bill hadn’t been paid, again. Dr Wailton let out a long sigh and tugged at his beard. After brushing his teeth in the dark and managing to rummage through a pile of unidentifiable objects long enough to find some clothes that weren’t covered in a mysterious black liquid. An hour later and Dr Wailton was sitting down in his office in London South Bank University. It might be the lowest ranking university in the country, but it had accepted Wailton and that was enough for him. On the desk of his cluttered office was a stack of papers.

He thumbed through some of them and sat back in his chair with disgust. Another set of rejected papers. This time they were entitled ‘Transport in the future.’ He had spent many pages outlining how he predicted that cars will float using magnets in the future, and how people will zip along in long glass tubes to get places. Previously rejected papers included, ‘How robots will run our lives’, ‘The future of medicine’ and the most apocalyptic of his writings ‘Will rabbits exist in the future?’ The dangerously worrying thought that the rabbits breeding behaviour might one day just stop as the males either get tired of the constant fornication or the population gets too crowded and overpopulated, causing an unprecedented housing problem in the rabbit world.

Each one had been sent off to respectable magazine and promptly returned with a letter of rejection attached.
Suddenly a man burst into the office. He was a short, fat man with a receding hairline and a purple jacket, an item of clothing so ghastly that had anyone from Vogue seen it they would have been duty bound to burn the jacket before burying it.

It was Ronald, the head of the Science department to which Dr Wailton owe allegiance.
“Have you heard about the pay cuts?” Asked Ronald while his eyes studied the mess of an office. It looked as though a tornado had made its way through the cramped building.

Dr Wailton gazed upwards from his semi-conscious stare and managed a reply.
“I have heard” Wailton murmured, his hands fumbling through some papers.
There was a short moment of silence as Ronald thought of something to say before he left and Wailton tried to look busy so that Ronald would leave. Ronald opened his mouth as if to say something, but he decided against it at the last moment and left.
Wailton let out a long sigh and tapped a few buttons on his computer. His emails revealed that the article he had submitted to an online science magazine had been rejected once again.
He wasn’t sure why his articles and papers kept getting rejected. They were forward-thinking and as accurate to a prediction of future technology as he could manage. But from what he heard as feedback they were seen as weird and eccentric. Wailton was used to the politeness of the rejection, it was almost as if they wanted to make you feel happy about not being good enough to get in their magazine.

Dr Wailton managed to toil through his tedious day of not doing anything of any real importance. He slumped his way through his noisy front door back into his cramped, messy apartment.
His eyes scanned the room and his belongings. The distinct gut feeling that someone had broken into his flat flowed through him. But how could he tell? The way you usually tell if someone has broken into your house is by the mess they leave as they root around in your belongings looking for something valuable. But in Dr Wailtons apartment any attempt to make a mess would almost certainly end up making the place tidier.

My 'debate' with a Priest.

2012-02-25T11:39:00.000Z

So my alternate Facebook account got deleted a while ago. This meant that I could waste my daylight hours debating with Theists on the internet.
I thought I would be okay, but soon the withdrawal symptoms started to kick in. Shouting "TROLL!" at my neighbours, and lecturing my housemates about the Flying Spaghetti Monster eventually got quite tiresome.
Fortunately I live in a town with quite a few churches. So after a bit of Google and hotmail I had emailed at least five local priests/vicars/reverends (whatever you want to call them).
Only two replied.
I will paraphrase the first conversation because I can't be bothered to tinker with screenshots on paint.

Me -
Hi,
I live in (town name) and I was wondering if you want (or know someone would would) want to have an email conversation/debate about god.

Cheers

Priest 1 -
Hi,
I am happy to do this
(guys name)
Me -
Awesome.
So I am an Atheist.
Why do you think a God exists?
Priest 1 -
Well I reckon that God exists because the world is such an amazingly beautiful place with so many different creatures and because we humans have an instinct to love and care.
There are many things that go wrong and there are also many things that are not good but I do believe that good overcomes bad and that love can be stronger than death.

Me -
But we have naturalistic explanations for everything in the world with no God needed. Everything we see can be explained with evidence and rationality, rather than claiming god did it which is nothing further than an assertion. (I do agree that the world is a beautiful place though)

Why do you believe that good overcomes bad and that love can be stronger than death?

Our basic instinct to love and care is easily explained by evolutionary psychology.
And that was the end of our conversation.

I waited about 24 hours and sent another email prompting for a reply, but alas no luck.
Luckily I got replied to by another priest. This time a bit more open minded to an argument.
Priest 2 - dear Tom, Thank you for your message, it sounds as if you have some questions and are searching? What kind of God/god are you either rejecting or seeking to find?
Me -
Priest 2 - Dear Tom, thank you, in the light of your response I think it might be more helpful in the first instance to refer you to the website Well I'm an Atheist, and I was wondering why you believe a God exists.
Seeing as I am an Atheist I reject all gods. Including the Abrahamic God I am guessing you believe in.www.rejesus.co.uk
Me - I read through the majority of that website as instructed. I still found little or no reason to think that a God exists.
The 'Science vs Faith' section seemed promising, and it even included an interview with Francis Collins (of who I am a fan). But even there I found that they gave the flimsiest reasons for a belief in god. Moral absolutes, frozen waterfalls, a supposedly finely-tuned universe are not reasons to believe a God exists.

The idea that God and Science are compatible is also incorrect. It is no coincidence that in the USA only 7% of the top scientists are religious, compared to 80% in the general population.

Also, the entire site is about Jesus. A figure of which an argument can be made for his existence either way.

I am guessing that I missed the reason you sent me there to find. But, Why do you believe there is a God?Priest 2 - Dear Tom, Rather than a prolonged discussion with you on the internet, you would be most welcome to come along to day services ,
Me - Maybe I will. If I do come, can I have a free bible? :)
Priest 2 - dear Tom, Do come, and I'm sure we can find you a Bible!.
We then arranged the time that I would come down and ended our conversation.
His church turned out to be about three miles away, so bright and early on a Sunday morning I walked across town to the church.

The church in question (taken on my Iphone)

It was a big, beautiful old church on its own field next to a large country house. I had passed a few churches on the walk down, and this was by far the best looking. I am not adverse to churches, they are a big part of the England’s history. I waited outside for the Sunday service to finish. Soon enough the singing stopped and people started filing out of the large wooden doors. I made my way inside and saw that it was still packed with people. An official looking person in religious garments walked past me and I asked where the vicar was. He asked if I was the guy who had been emailing and I said that I was.

My nice new Bible

He was very nice and gave me my Bible. I don’t know his name, but if I ever went back I would like to argue with him next. I met the guy I had been emailing. He couldn’t have looked more typically vicar-like. Slightly balding, grey hair and soft facial features. He looked like an ideal granddad, but I wasn’t there to replace my relatives, I was there to argue.

We sat down in the pews a few meters from his congregation, who were chatting amongst themselves. I prepared myself. For the entire walk down to the church I had been preparing my arguments and deciding the ways I would counter any replies.
It started off by him asking about my ‘story’. How had I arrived at atheism. I told him that my parents were both atheists, but the rest of my family were quite religious so I had been exposed to the views.
He said that he had respect for my dedication to one extreme position, and I thanked him. I think it was meant as a slight knock, but it didn’t occur to me at the time that he had also adopted an extreme position.

He then told me that he didn’t take the bible literally, and I asked why he didn’t. I asked where he got the information from that had led him to believe only part of the bible. He mumbled a bit and then said that it was because most of it wasn’t applicable today.
He then said something which really ticked me off. He said that faith was the highest virtue and said it was a gift. He said that even I have faith in something. I asked what else other than religion he needed faith for.

There was silence.

He stared at me and I smugly celebrated in my head. Deciding that I was going to remain silent and not help him out, I waited.

“You have trust in people.” Was the reply. I laughed a bit and said that trust wasn’t the same as faith. We argued over that for a bit, but I soon realised that the conversation wasn’t going anywhere.
The ‘argument’ broke down into him comparing belief in god to being in love, and me explaining that faith was the excuse people gave when they don’t have a good reason to believe in something.

He said he had to go. I asked if I could sit in on the baptism which was going to happen in a few minutes. He said that I was welcome to, but that the people coming would most likely just be dragged along and not actual Christians.

I then joked. “I won’t quiz them then”.

The mood changed. I don’t want to sound like I am exaggerating, but it really did feel like I had insulted him somehow.

His expression changed and he gave me a stern look.

“I think that would be grossly inappropriate.”

Me and my new Bible made a swift exit.

So it turns out that despite being the earthly representatives for God, priests aren't very good at defending their belief of his existence.

On the way home I saw a sign which caught my attention.

I think I know who I will be emailing for a debate next.

An Atheist Reading the Bible - Ruth

2012-02-25T10:43:00.000Z

Ruth is probably the shortest book in the Bible.

In Israel there wasn’t enough food to eat. Naomi was a widow with two sons. Her two sons married two women, Ruth and Orpah. But then her two sons died. Hearing that there was food, Naomi and her sons wives moved to Judah. On the way to Judah Naomi told her sons two wives that they should return to their hometowns. Orpah left, but Ruth refused to leave so they both went to Judah together.
Ruth and Naomi lived on a farm, which is where Ruth met her new husband Boaz. Who was also her Uncle….

What a boring book.

More to come :)

Adventure travel - Elephant & Polar Bear Meat.

2012-02-17T06:21:00.000Z

Feeling hungry? Bored of crisps and hot dogs? Well fret no more dear reader!

Elephant Meat.

At the south border of Chobe National Park, Botswana there is Mababe village. Now whereas most people have never even seen an elephant, let alone eaten one, these villagers are actually getting bored with eating elephant.

It's so commonly eaten that it has become part of their staple diet.

An elephant is killed and the villagers gather round to skin it. A van selling cold beers pulls up, anticipating the feast. Happily there is a lot to go around, and you are likely to be offered some if you are in the vicinity.

Polar Bear Meat.

As with elephants, there is only one place you are likely to find them being eaten. This is in the town of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway where Polar bears that have been killed in self-defence are sold and eaten.

At least 4 restaurants serve Polar Bear if it is available in the town of 2,000 residents. The most popular of these being 'Huset'. Due to the rarity of the meat it attracts quite a premium. Expect to pay £230 a kilo, but don't eat too much. The meat is actually quite bad for you in high doses.

And whatever you do, DON'T EAT THE LIVER! Polar Bear Livers contain enormous amounts of Vitamin A. So eating a Polar Bear liver (or part of one) will literally cause you to have a Vitamin A overdose.

This is much more serious than it sounds and leads to symptoms such as headaches, bone aches, peeling skin and eventually death.

Why isn't evolution a law?

2012-02-10T21:06:00.001Z

It's fairly common for creationists to claim that evolution isn't valid because it is a theory and not a law.

I even saw one creationist mention it in front of the cameras in a documentary about the Dover trial.

A scientific theory is an explanation backed by large amounts of evidence, whereas a law is a set of ideas that can be expressed mathematically.

Laws also tend to be more about what will happen, whereas theories are more about why it will happen.
E=MC2 is a law.
Heliocentricity is a theory.

The fact that evolution is not a law doesn't have any bearing on its truth value.

Hope that helps a bit :)

My Rational Library.

2012-02-05T21:59:00.000Z

So a while ago, shortly before Christmas, there was a big trend of Atheists taking pictures of them and their rationality related books. There wasn't a name attached to this trend, so I have named it the 'rational library'.

Below is a picture of my rational library on the floor of my university room. I would have included myself but I have just returned from a 20th birthday party in Cardiff and I am looking a bit worse for wear as a result.

My other purpose for doing this post was to inform you that I am super busy at the moment so posts will not be as often as I would wish them to be. I have just started another semester at University and am writing two books at the same time.

If you haven't read my first book then the link to buy it is on the right. It is in Kindle form, but if you don't have a Kindle then there are methods of accessing it via Apple apps, Android apps, online etc.

Failing that, if enough people email me then I will work out a way of getting it into a hard copy. :)

An Atheist Reading the Bible - Judges

2012-02-02T14:24:00.000Z

Judges is one of the more brutal books of the bible

After Joshua had died the Israelites asked for another leader. They were still in a state of war with the Canaanites and needed someone to direct them in battle. The tribes of Judah and Simeon teamed up to slaughter 10,000 Canaanites and Perrizites. They then cut off the toes and thumbs of the King. The people of Judah then attacked Jerusalem, burnt the city and killed its residents. The people of Judah then attacked
a selection of other cities, but somehow leaving no mark for historians to pick up on.

God then sent an angel telling them not to be friends with their enemies because they don’t worship the right god, thereby killing any opportunity for peace. As time went on the Israelites started misbehaving again, worshipping false gods and the like, so God punishes them by sending their enemies.
Joshua had let some of the tribes live in the land around the Israelites. God didn’t like this and took hold of a man called Othneil to lead the Israelites against their enemies. They killed 10,000 Moabites and at least 600 Philistines.

But soon enough the Israelites were back to their old sinning ways. God punished them by making them the servants of the Canaanites. God then told a lady prophet, Deborah, to gather 10,000 men and attack the Canaanite army at the Kishon river. She did exactly what she was told and did not leave a single Canaanite soldier alive.

Once again the Israelites forgot about god and went back to their old party animal ways. God sent the Midianites to attack them. The Midianites won and ruled Israel for 7 years. The Midianites ruled the Israelites very harshly and soon they cried out for God to help them. Once more God sent an angel to choose someone to lead the Israelites to freedom. A man called Gideon was chosen. He took 300 men and used trumpets to confuse the enemy troops. Then some other tribes challenged him because he hadn’t asked for their help to defeat his enemies, so he killed them too.

Gideons son, Abimelech, didn’t want his father to be the ruler of Israel. So he paid mercenaries to execute his 70 brothers, his fathers sons, on one rock. Only the youngest son survived this mass murder. Abimelech made himself king of Israel and his brother ran away to stop from being killed. Abimelech ruled for 3 years. One time the population tried to rise up against him, but he slaughtered 1,000 of the rebels, burnt down the city and covered the land with salt.
While Abimelech and his men were attacking a building a woman dropped a heavy stone on his head. He was going to die, but didn’t want to be killed by a woman so he got his men to kill him with their swords.

The Israelites were then ruled over by their enemies for 18 more years. A man called Jephthah gathered a small group of men and decided to push the occupying forces off Israel. He knew he didn’t have much chance of winning so he made a promise to God. He said that if God allowed him to win the battle against his enemies then he would sacrifice whatever the first thing is to come through the door of my house. I will kill it and give it to you.

Jephthah won the fight and destroyed 20 enemy towns. He went home and his daughter ran out to meet him. He suddenly realised that he had to kill his daughter. His daughter said it was ok because he had made a promise to god, so she went into the woods for 2 months because she was a virgin, came back and he killed her.

So wait a minute. What an incredibly stupid promise to make. If I was him I would have never picked a door that my family members are very likely to walk through at least several times a day therefore increasing the possibility that I would have to kill them. I would have chosen a strangers house, or better yet an abandoned house which massively decreases the possibility of having to murder family members. And all this time God, being omniscient, knew that his daughter was going to come through the door and didn’t tell him. He could have said “No no no, choose another door because your daughter is going to come through that one.” You think he would have done something like that, also being Omni benevolent.
The tribes around Israel then tried to gang up on the Israelites, but were fought off. Killing 42,000 of them in the process.

Some time later and the Israelites have once again fallen into disrepair. The Philistines conquered Israel and ruled over it for 40 years. A boy named Samson was born and had great strength because he had been blessed by God. He saw a lion attacking a young woman and he tore it to pieces with his bare hands. He realised he had great strength and went to a town. In this town he killed 30 Philistines and stole all of their belongings. He then murdered 1,000 Philistines with nothing but a donkey bone. The Israelites gathered round him and he led Israel for 20 years.

One day Samson went to Gaza to have sex with the women there (I’m not kidding, read 16:1), and some of the people decided to ambush him at dawn when the city gates would be open. But in the middle of the night he tore the gates from their hinges and walked out of the city. He was eventually captured by the
Philistines when they ambushed him at a ladies’ house. He was brought to a square and said “Let me die with the Philistines”. He then pushed over a massive building which killed him and many Philistines.
Israel then had no king and the Danites were looking for a place to live. 5 Danite scouts looked around Israel, came back and said that it would be easy to invade. So 600 Danite soldiers went into Israel and destroyed the city of Laish. The Danites rebuilt the city and lived there. They called it Dan (quite a mundane name for a city).

At this time a family had some friends over for a meal. Some bad men came to the house and demanded they hand over their male guest so that they could rape him. Instead the host offered them his young virgin daughter. They raped her all night (19:25) and she collapsed dead at the door of her home. The fathers version of grief was to cut her body up into 12 pieces and send them to the 12 tribes of Israel (bet that was a surprise in the mail).

400,000 Israelite soldiers gathered to push their enemies off their land. 40,000 Israelites died and 75,000 enemy soldiers died. The Israelites had won, and celebrated by burning all the towns they could find.
But after the battle they found that a certain Israelite tribe hadn’t helped out. The tribe from Jabesh Gilead had not contributed to the war effort. So 12,000 Israelites went down there and killed every man and every married woman (21:11). They also took 400 virgin girls for their pleasure.

Very moral….

An Atheist Reading the Bible - Joshua

2012-02-01T14:17:00.000Z

Now that Moses was dead it was time for Joshua to take over. Joshua sent two scouts into the land to see what it was like. They stayed in a lady’s house, the King of Jericho found out and sent for them. But the woman hid them and helped them escape before the soldiers got there.

The two scouts told Joshua what had happened, so the Israelites crossed the river Jordan and set up camp. Joshua then selected 40,000 soldiers to attack Jericho with. But before that, God told him that everyone needed to be circumcised because they hadn’t been.

They arrived at Jericho and an almighty challenge loomed before them. The gates were shut.
Suitably stumped Joshua turned to God and God said that if he walked around Jericho blowing a trumpet once a day for 6 days and then seven times on the 7^th day, then he would give him Jericho.

They did so and on the 7^th day the walls of Jericho collapsed. Joshua and his 40,000 men celebrated by killing every living thing within the former city walls. Exodus 6:21 says that they killed men and women, young and old people, cows, sheep and other animals. They then stole everything of value from the now dead citizens. Another moral lesson from the Bible.

After this the Israelites attacked another group of people. This time 36 Israelites died and Joshua showed his mood by ripping his shirt and putting dirt on his head. That’s what I do when I’m sad as well.
Joshua decided to retaliate. He chose 30,000 of his best men and attacked their city at night. They killed all 12,000 inhabitants and only left the King alive. They decided to hang him from a tree and left his body there until the evening. They then cut the body down and left it in front of the city covered in stones.

Joshua got word that the combined tribes that lived near them had gathered their troops to fight the Israelites. Joshua gathered all of his men and fought them. As they fought God dropped rocks on their enemies and apparently killed more men than the Israelis did. To prolong this fight God made the Sun stay up for a whole day so they could keep fighting.

The tribes ran away and Joshua hung the five tribal Kings from trees. He then cut down the bodies and dumped them in the hole they had been found hiding in. Joshua then attacked Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, Sidon, Hazor, Misrephoth Maim, Mizpah, Goyim and Tirzah, killing everyone in sight.

Joshua then split up the land and gave it to different tribes and makes them all make promises to God. After this, Joshua died at the ripe old age of 110. Which compared to Noah and the people in the earlier OT is pretty young.

It is also worth mentioning that the Book of Joshua is considered one of the most historically inaccurate books of the Bible. It is not considered a factual historical account and is not considered to have been written by Joshua. It is suspected that it had various authors and was written much later than suspected (well after the fall of Jerusalem in 586). Most of the cities mentioned have no evidence of ever being occupied at the time.

'A Pocket Guide to...A Young Earth - Reviewed

2012-01-31T11:38:00.000Z

There are a number of creationist books out there at the moment, and I wanted to review one that was short enough to fit in between the ongoing bible series.
‘A Pocket Guide To A Young Earth’ is a short book of only 96 pages and is split up into 10 sections written by 6 different authors.
The main author is Andrew Snelling, an Australian Geologist who works for the Institute of Creation Research. Despite having a degree and a PHD in geology he has made some rather glaring mistakes, but we will come to that later.

Let’s dive right in.

The introduction has already annoyed me. It says briefly that the age of the earth is a hotly debated subject. This is incorrect. There is no doubt about the age of the earth in the consensus of scientists in the appropriate fields. It has been a solid fact for many decades now that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. The only debates going on are between old earth creationists and young earth creationists trying to wrestle between their faith and the facts.

The first chapter is fairly interesting. It is one of the best explanations of carbon dating that I have ever read. It is unfortunately irrelevant since C-14 only works up to a maximum age of 60,000 years, so applying this to the age of the earth would be useless. But Mr Snelling knows this and goes on to explain the more relevant method of radiometric dating.

But chapter 2 is where the criticism starts. He attempts to poke holes in radiometric dating, saying that it is unreliable because scientists weren’t there when the rock was formed. He seems to imply that the rock might have aged really fast over the past few thousand years and then slowed down just before we have been able to observe it.
Mr Snelling cites several sources…..but they are all either from creationism websites or from his own writing. And his examples that attempt to show the unreliability of Radiometric dating are terrible.
He has the example that in 1986 a rock that had been observed to form by lava was ‘dated’ at 350,000 years old, thereby showing a massive error. I did a bit of research and found that the team used the K-Ar dating method and sent the samples off for analysis. It was found that the method of aging was completely inappropriate for a rock they knew was recently formed to be aged using a method which is only supposed to be used on rocks of 2 million years old or more. It is the teams error, not the dating methods. The head of the team later admitted his mistake.

The fact that he has a degree in the subject makes me think that he knows the lies he is selling, and knows how wrong the things he writes are.

He then criticizes the margin of error that is inherent with radiometric dating methods. Although slightly exaggerated the margins are still quite small. He claims that Rubidium-strontium has a margin of error of 7.3%, but for the margin of error to allow for a 6,000 year old earth it would need to be around 1,370%. Also, many radiometric dating methods have been found to be very accurate, especially Uranium-Lead dating which is accurate to 2% if not less.

There is a very telling paragraph on page 33 which shows you the way these nutty creationists think.

“When a scientists interpretation of data does not match the clear meaning of the text in the Bible, we should never reinterpret the Bible. God knows just what he meant to say, and his understanding of science is infallible, whereas ours in fallible.”

How very telling. The Bible can never be questioned, but science/clear facts can be disregarded.
Another glaring mistake is the statement that the earths magnetic field has always been decreasing, therefore refuting Carbon-14 dating.

This is a pretty massive error. The earths magnetic field is known to have varied in intensity and reversed polarisation over the earths lifetime. This is expected and predicted using conventional models and geophysics. Measurements show that the field has shown little or no change from 1590 to 1840. The variation in the magnetic field is fairly recent, indicating that the polarity might switch again soon.
There is a very short mention of the flood in Genesis. This is too obviously wrong to worth delving into. Anyway I have refuted and mentioned this claim several times. I am fairly sure that if I am asked about Noahs flood again I am going to have a stress induced haematoma.
After a good few pages about the history of the aging of the earth there is a diagram worth mentioning.

I managed to track down the picture they use on Google Images. The only difference is that in the book the writing on the islands have just been replaced by ‘Evolution’ and ‘Creation’. This is just obvious slander against evolution, saying that it leads to ‘bad things’ like racism and family break ups. If the studies have shown us anything they have shown us that all an understanding of evolution leads to is a generally higher IQ. At least it appears that our castle is winning.
Also, What the fuck is wrong with porn?

One chapter attempts to assert that zircons retain too much helium for an old earth. Since I am not an expert I will borrow one of ‘Talk Origins’ answers to this.
“Subsurface pressure and temperature conditions affect how quickly the helium diffuses out of zircons. D. R. Humphreys et al. selected a rock core sample from the Fenton Hill site, which Los Alamos National Laboratory evaluated in the 1970s for geothermal energy production. The area is within a few kilometers of the Valles Caldera, which has gone through several periods of faulting and volcanism. The rocks of the Fenton Hill core have been fractured, brecciated, and intruded by hydrothermal veins. Excess helium is present in the rocks of the Valles Caldera (Goff and Gardner 1994). The helium may have contaminated the gneiss that Humphreys et al. studied. In short, the entire region has had a very complex thermal history. Based on oil industry experience, it is essentially impossible to make accurate statements about the helium-diffusion history of such a system.”
The final chapter tries to persuade the simpler Christian over to their way of thinking by presenting a table of 35 other people who think the earth is young as well. Is this convincing? No, it just shows that there are at least 35 other people equally as stupid as the authors. Although that might be a bit unfair since 25 of the 35 people mentioned lived before the 1800’s and therefore didn’t have the best technology available.

I want to leave you with the books final word.

“The Bible can be trusted in every area it addresses, including its scientific and historical truth. It is Gods book, which means what it says in a plain, forthright manner. While the Bibles revealed insights about science and history glorify the Creator and help us to know Him better, its main purpose is to convey to people, like you and me, our need of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Gods desire for us to live a fulfilled, joyus life with Him.”

WHAT! So God really gave Moses skin disease for marrying an Ethiopian woman, killed 14,700 Israelites because someone complained about him, killed 24,000 people for the sexual deviance of a few, actively sought out genocide of rival tribes and allowed the rape of tens of thousands of women? And that is only the Book of Numbers, one of the shorter and tamer books in the Bible.
All in all an okay book, if you’re not too worried about the facts.

An Atheist Reading the Bible - Deuteronomy

2012-01-31T10:26:00.002Z

Deuteronomy picks up the tail end of the Moses story. It begins in the final year of the Israelites journey through the desert. An event we know almost definitely never happened. They arrive at the river Jordan and Moses proclaims that all the land before them is theirs. He chooses some wise men and sends out some people to scout the land ahead of them.

Moses then reminisces about the last 40 years of pretty pointless wandering from place to place, when their god could have pointed them in the right direction in the first place rather than requiring them to murder thousands of people and perform ritualistic sacrifices.
God and Moses then spend a considerable amount of time running over the ten commandments again, just in case someone had forgotten them.

Not content with this mindless babble Moses then spend the rest of the book summarising the rules God had laid during their wanderings. We have already covered these rules, and you are probably familiar with them already. Including a considerable section making sure that believers in God are happy when non-believers are killed by God.

Just to give you an idea of how gruesome and violence obsesses God is, the book of Deuteronomy uses the word ’kill’ 94 times. Quite the peaceful character.

The Israelites then sing a song about Moses, which is still pretty violent and seems to be about how powerful Israelites are and how they will kill their enemies. Reminded me of a North Korean song about destroying ‘Imperialist America’. In fact there are a lot of similarities to be drawn between Christianity and North Korea in its present state.

Then, in the last chapter of Deuteronomy Moses climbs Mount Nebo and dies at the age of 120 years old.

An Atheist Reading the Bible - Numbers

2012-01-30T10:18:00.000Z

Numbers is just what it says on the tin. The majority of the beginning of Numbers is just about counting the various tribes and then assigning jobs to them. There is also a bit about making a trumpet, and when an enemy is attacking the Israelites the trumpet can be blown so God is alerted of their distress. So much for god being omnipresent.

At Numbers 11 God gets annoyed with all of the people complaining about their trouble, so he sets fire to their camp. Moses manages to calm him down through prayer, and God cools down. Later God hears two people talking bad about Moses because he married an Ethiopian woman. God flips out again and gives one of them skin disease, makes her father spit in her face and banishes her from the camp for 7 days. Is it me or does God need to take an anger management class.

The Israelites want to expand their territory and try to attack a city called Canaan. They lost badly and returned to their camp. They return to find a man gathering wood on the Sabbath. They took him outside the camp and stoned him to death.
Four of the Israelite leaders gathered 250 men and decided to turn against Moses. God noticed and made the ground open up and swallow them. The ground also swallowed their families and everything they owned.

The next day all of the Israelites complained about Moses and Aaron getting the lords men killed. God got angry and infected the people with a terrible sickness. Aaron told them that if they prayed then the sickness would stop. But 14,700 people had died from the sickness before he could save them.
God requires that all first born children and animals must be killed and sacrificed to him (Numbers 18:15).

The Israelites have been wandering the desert all of this time, and eventually Aaron dies. Afterwards they decide to attack the Canaanites again. This time God helps them win and destroy all of their cities. Moses then defeats a few more people and slaughters all of their armies, until the Israelites are very powerful.
Moses was with his priests when he noticed an Israelite man with a local woman. One of the priests followed the couple into their tent with a spear and murdered them both. Then God gave the Israelites a sickness as a punishment for their sexual deviance, and 24,000 people died from it.

A while later Moses was told by God that he needed to kill the Midianites and then he would die. If I was Moses I would avoid killing the Midianites at all costs, because I would know that as long as the Midianites are alive I am ok. But Moses doesn’t do this. He gathers 12,000 of his men and slaughter all of the Midianite men. Moses arrives and is very angry, but not for the reason you would suspect.
“Why did you let the women live?” he asks in Number 31:15. So the soldiers kill all of the women who were not virgins and all of the young boys. The virgin women were kept as a prize for the soldiers. In total they took 675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys and 32,000 women. 32 women were sacrificed to God, and Moses took half of everything taken.

At Numbers 35:32 God says that if a murderer escapes to an Israelite city then he must stay there until the High priest dies.

An Atheist Reading the Bible - Leviticus

2012-01-29T13:37:00.000Z

Leviticus starts with Moses sacrificing a young bull for god. The blood is splashed around the alter and the animal is skinned. The flesh is then cooked and offered as a gift to God. This is repeated with a goat and then a bird. Grain is then given to god, as well as some more animals. God seems to really enjoy sacrifices.

God then lays down some rules about accidentally sinning against god. These are dull, tedious and almost always result in a sacrifice of some kind.
Moses decides to appoint some priests. This inevitably included several sacrifices. First a bull, then a ram and then a second ram. The blood of these animals were spread around the holy tent and mixed with anointing oil. This bizarre mixture of oil and blood was then sprinkled on Aarons sons to make them priests. Strangely this was one of the few bible traditions that didn’t catch on.

Leviticus 9 includes more sacrifices. Aaron kills a bull, a ram, a goat, a calf and a lamb to make up for any accidental sins his sons may have committed. Two of Aarons sons then made a mistake during the proceedings. They made the relatively small error of lighting an incense with the wrong fire. How did god react? Badly. He killed them both right there and then. Aaron did not react, because if he had then he would have been killed as well.
Moses then lays down a few more rules. Anything that doesn’t have scales or fins and lives in the sea shouldn’t be eaten. More than that, the very thought of such an animal should make you sick. So I guess that’s muscles, squids and octopus off the menu then.

More rules are announced about everything from food, skin disease, mildew and genital discharge.
Aaron then sacrifices a load of animals to god to make up for his children screwing up and getting killed. Doesn’t really sound fair, but who am I to judge Gods morals.
God then says that you must not have sex with your father, mother, sister, granddaughter, aunt, daughter, neighbours wife, another man or any animal. While I agree, I would have also added in cousins and grandparents.

One day an Egyptian man and Israelite woman’s son in the camp. The little boy started fighting, cursing god and generally pissing people off. The people detained him and took him to Moses. God reacts quite badly. He gets everyone who heard the child swear to stone him to death.
Leviticus 25 is pretty damning evidence that God is all for slavery. Once again a set of rules are described about slavery and how to trade slaves. And then Leviticus 26 is essentially one huge threat about what would happen if you disobey god.

An Atheist Reading the Bible - Exodus

2012-01-28T10:50:00.000Z

This the third part in our bible series. If you have missed the last two posts then either scroll down or click on the 'Mega Awesome Bible series' tag link on the right side of the screen.

Time passed and the new King of Egypt hadn’t heard of Joseph. The King was worried about the amount of Israelites in Egypt and decided to enslave them. If the Israelite women had a baby boy the soldiers would kill him, if the baby was a girl then she was allowed to live. He later said that baby boys should be thrown in the river to drown.

So this is what happened to one baby boy. He was put down the river in a basket, but was picked up by the Pharaohs daughter. The King paid the baby’s mother to look after the baby. The baby was named Moses. Moses grew up and saw an Egyptian hitting an Israelite. Moses murders the Egyptian and buries his body (seriously? Is no-one listening to what god said in Genesis?).
The Pharaoh then tried to kill Moses so he ran away. One day Moses sees a bush on fire. The bush starts speaking and tells him to go rescue the Israelites from Egypt. Moses happily agrees, because in those times you don’t question your sanity when a bush starts talking to you, you obey the bush.

Moses and his brother Aaron went to talk to the Pharaoh. They asked him to let the Israelites go, but he refused and started treating them even worse. God contacted Moses again and told him to try a second time to convince the Pharaoh.. Moses and Aaron go back and this time Moses tries to impress the Pharaoh by throwing his stick to the ground and it turning into a snake. The magicians in the Pharaohs entourage then do the same thing, so the Pharaoh just puts it down to magic.

Moses goes back and tries a third time, this time his party trick is that all of the water turns to blood. A nasty side effect of this is that all of the fish die. The Pharaoh was still unimpressed. After a few more magic tricks including lots of frogs, gnats, flies, animals becoming ill and dying, people having painful boils, pieces of ice falling from the sky, locusts, the sun disappearing and the death of every first born son in Egypt. Everything but appearing to the Pharaoh like he did to Moses. God would rather kill every innocent first born son in Egypt than interrupt his busy schedule to visit the Pharaoh.
Eventually the Israelites are allowed to go free. God also took this time to say that a foreign person can enjoy a Passover meal, but has to be circumcised first. He also said that all first born sons must be sacrificed to him, unless an animal first born is born first. Yes, he loved the Israelites so much that he wants the first born sons to be killed for him. It is also worth mentioning that the Israelites numbered 600,000, and no evidence has ever been found that they were ever enslaved or roamed the desert.

The Pharaoh had had a change of heart and sent 600 of his best chariots to get the Israelites back. As the chariots approach, Moses parts the Red sea and the Israelites crossed the sea. When the Egyptians try to cross god gets their chariots stuck in the sand so when the water returned they all drowned. The Red sea is around 200 miles wide and 490 meters deep, so the idea that the Israelites could walk along it is laughable. And once again, the rule about killing people in Genesis has been forgotten.
They wander the desert for 40 years. One day they are attacked by the Amalekites, and god says that the Israelites will only win if Moses holds up his hand for the duration of the battle. Moses does so, and the Israelites won.

Three months after leaving Egypt the Israelites arrive at Mount Sinai. God tells Moses that he is the only one allowed near the mountain. He says if anyone touches the mountain must be stoned to death (Ex 12-13). Moses goes up the mountain and receives the 10 commandments.
1. No other gods except the true god.
2. Make no false gods.
3. Do not curse the name of god.
4. Keep the Sabbath holy.
5. Be kind to your parents.
6. Don’t murder anyone.
7. No adultery.
8. Don’t steal.
9. Don’t lie about your neighbours.
10. Do not lust after your neighbours possessions.
Then in classic god style, he demands an animal sacrifice.
But god doesn’t stop there with the laws. He spends half of Exodus 21 laying down the rules for keeping slaves. Some shocking quotes include “the master must push the sharp point of a tool through the slave’s ear. Then he will always be his master’s slave.” “Perhaps a man may sell his daughter as a slave. She is not free to leave her master.”
God then sent an angel to help the Israelites battle their enemies. Then in Exodus 23:23 the angel goes on a bit of a killing spree. He kills all of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites and the Jebusites. So what was the reason for this mass destruction? They were worshiping false gods. God could have warned them and made them worship him, but he decided to outsource the job to an angel who went bat shit crazy with his powers of destruction.
The Israelites then have a little angel guided DIY course. They make an Ark, table, alter, lamp, clothes and olive oil.

Moses is spending a lot of time up Mount Sinai, and while he is away his brother Aaron makes a calf out of gold. The Israelites seem to have already forgotten about god who rescued them from Egypt and provided food for them in the desert, and start worshipping the golden calf. Moses finds out and goes ape shit. He melts the statue in a fire and then befriends the Levites. He orders the Levites to kill 3,000 of the Israelites, and they do so.

Moses and the Israelites celebrate this self-inflicted mass murder by going on another streak of DIY madness. They makes some clothes, an ephod, an alter, table, an ark, lampstand and a tabernacle.
Then God goes onto listing all the crimes punishable by death. This includes, cursing your mother of father, hitting your slave if it dies but not if the slaves lives for a few days and hurting a child. If the master hurts his slaves eye, then he must destroy the eye. If a mans animal kills someone then the man and the animal must be stoned to death.
You must also kill any magicians, people who commit bestiality or has a false god.

GOD EXISTS, ATHEISTS!!! I'll prove it SCIENTIFICALLY!! - Response

2012-01-27T15:32:00.000Z

Another video response today, as well as the second part of the Bible series which was posted earlier.

'ooga2012' posted this video.

This is essentially just the first cause argument, which I have previously described as kindergarden theology.

It is just pushing back the load of explanation and calling it god.

Nothing can't come from nothing and energy can't be created.

But god would have had to make that energy, therefore violating the law of thermodynamics you fought so hard to press into our rules.

The short answer is that we don't know what came before the big bang. Whether it was an eternal string of time reaching into the void, or some quantum related creation of 'stuff' is up to the scientists to discover.

In the mean time it has no benefit to speculate because it might have been a giant pink fairy that created the big bang and all of the universes energy with it. But it's hard to get any evidence for that.

£1m 'Temple for Atheists' being built in London.

2012-01-27T15:24:00.000Z

Plans to build a £1 million 'temple for atheists' in London is splitting non-believers.

Alain de Botton has proposed building a 115ft tower among the City of London banks and churches to celebrate 'new atheism'. He sees this as the antidote to Richard Dawkins 'destructive' approach.

Rather than destroy religions Alain want's to copy their strengths and make Atheism into another religion.

Dawkins struck back at Alain, saying "There are better things to spend this money on. Atheists don't need temples. If you are going to spend money on atheism then it should be spent on secular education".

Each centimetre of the towers interior has been designed to represent a million years and a narrow golden band will show how little time humans have been on the earth. The exterior would be inscribed with with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.

The temple features a single door for visitors and is likened to an art instillation. Fossils and geologically interesting rocks might be attached to the walls.

Humanists are also against the plans, saying that atheists don't need temples to probe the meaning of life.

An Atheist Reading the Bible - Genesis Part 2

2012-01-27T10:56:00.000Z

I have decided to do this bible series daily, otherwise it will take forever.

Isaac became very rich in Gerar. He became so rich that the locals hated him. Every time he dug a well the locals would fill it in again. So Isaac moved out, but wasn’t welcome in the valleys either. He created a town where he eventually found water, called Beersheba. I looked this town up and it actually exists. It’s now a city of 200,000 people, but probably wasn’t started by Isaac.

Isaac got two more wives, which annoyed his other two wives. Isaac was old and going blind. He called his eldest son Esau to get him some food so that he could give him his blessing. His son goes out to do so, but his other son Jacob overhears this and decides to pretend to be Esau so he can get the blessing. Jacob does this and gets his father to bless him. Afterwards Esau goes into the tent with the food and Isaac realises what Jacob has done.
Isaac couldn’t take away the blessing from Jacob and couldn’t bless Esau. Jacob felt the tension and left.

He met up with some relatives and fell in love with his cousin Rachel. He worked for 7 years to earn Rachel, but got tricked into marrying his other cousin Leah. His Uncle who had tricked him had a change of heart and gave him Rachel as well. So now he is married to two of his cousins and was set up by his Uncle. I have yet to see any morals from this book.
Not satisfied with his two cousins/wives Jacob then had two sons by his servant Bilhah (Gen 30:4). He then did the same with another servant Zilpah. Jacob decided it was time for him to leave, so he ran away. But his Uncle didn’t like him leaving and found him again. Jacob justified his actions by saying that God would always be looking after the family he was running away from. They all ate a meal together and then Jacob left again but with his family this time.

Jacob sent a message to his brother Esau to see if it was cool for him to come back or if he was still angry with him. The messenger came back and said that his brother and 400 men were coming to meet him. Jacob tried to sent animals to his brother as a gift. That night a man attacked Jacob while he was alone. They fight until morning when it turns out that Jacob is fighting God. God breaks Jacobs hip and leaves, but not before making Jacob bless him. Why did God attack Jacob? Weird.
Esau arrived with his 400 men and wasn’t angry. He had forgiven Jacob for stealing his blessing.

The son of the local King (there seem to be a lot of kings) raped Jacobs daughter. He told his father to get her as his wife. The King came to Jacob and asked to buy his daughter. Jacob said that he would sell his daughter on the condition that all of the men under his control would get circumcised. They agreed and 3 days after being circumcised the men were still in a lot of pain. Jacobs sons took this opportunity and attacked the city, and killed all of the men. They then took everything of value from the city including the women and livestock (Gen 34:29).
God then destroyed all of the cities around Jacobs family. The bible doesn’t give a reason, but does God really need a reason to kill a bunch of people?

Jacobs wife was dying in childbirth and with her last breath named her new born son Ben-Oli. Jacob didn’t like this name, so dumped on his wifes memory by renaming him Benjamin.
Jacob then died at age 180 (apparently god isn’t very good at enforcing his rules).
Jacob had a favourite son, Joseph. His other sons knew that he was the favourite, they all hated Joseph. One day Joseph was called out into one of the field and his brothers planed to kill him. One of the brothers Reuben talked them out of it, so they just threw Joseph into a dry well. They then saw some traders on camels and sold Joseph to them.
The brothers covered Josephs coat in goat blood and took it to Jacob. Jacob assumed that he had been killed by a wild animal. One of the brother, Judah, got married and had 3 sons. His eldest son was killed by God for being bad and Judah’s other son Onan was forced to marry his dead brothers wife.

But Onan didn’t want to have a child with his wife because he was still sad about his brother. So he had sex with her but made his seed (some careful biblical language) go on the ground. God was annoyed and killed him (bit harsh). The resulting widow was upset that she wasn’t pregnant yet, so she came up with a plan. Judah was in another town shopping, so she covered herself in a veil and pretended to be a prostitute. Judah saw her and didn’t realise she was his daughter. He paid her for sex with a goat and got her pregnant.
3 months later Jacob found out that he had impregnated his daughter. What was his first reaction? He ordered her and the baby inside her to be burnt to death! (Gen 38:24) Fortunately he changed his mind, but only because she had incriminating evidence against him. She had two sons, Perez and Zerah.

The traders who had bought Joseph took him to Egypt and sold him as a slave. He worked in the house of Potiphar and became his favourite slave. Potiphars wife tried to seduce Joseph and took his coat. He refused to sleep with her and ran out the house. Potiphar came home and saw his wife with Josephs coat. She said he tried to rape her, so Joseph was put in prison.
Two years later the Egyptian Pharaoh had a strange dream and called for Joseph to tell him what it meant. Joseph told him that his dream meant there would be 7 years of good crops and then 7 years of famine.

The pharaoh was impressed and Joseph became his special servant. The prediction came true and there was 7 years of lots of food and then 7 years of famine, but because they had saved food they were all ok.
Jacob heard that there was food in Egypt so sent his sons to buy some food. Joseph recognised his brothers, but they did not recognise him. He accused them of being spies and put them in prison for 3 days. He then let the go with some food, but said they could only come back if they brought their missing brother.

A while later they had to return for more food, they left with more food, but not before eating with Joseph. As they were leaving one of the slaves ran up to them and accused them of stealing a silver cup. They searched their bags and found the silver cup. Once back in Egypt they begged Joseph not to kill them for stealing it. Joseph broke down and revealed himself as their brother. Jacob and all of his sons moved to Egypt to be with Joseph.

Then Jacob died, and later Joseph dies at 110 years old.

An Atheist reading the Bible - Genesis Part 1

2012-01-26T10:29:00.000Z

So as promised here is the first part of the new bible series.

It is mainly for people, both atheist and theists, who haven't read the bible.

So here we go. I forgot how long the book of Genesis is, so I've split it up into two parts.

So god creates the earth and everything on it in 6 days. He doesn't mention creating the sun, he just says 'light'. Doesn't mention the moon either, but let's move on anyway.

On the last day he creates people, yes people. As in plural. No mention of Adam and Eve, an actual multiple quantity of people (Gen 1:27).
Genesis 2 repeats Gen 1 a little bit. In Genesis 2:7 God forgets that he has already created people, and makes Adam. He makes the garden of Eden and puts two trees in it. One tree lets you live forever, the other is the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
God tells Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge or he will die (Gen 2:17). Adam names all the animals (yes all 5 million species, possibly including the tens of millions that are now extinct), and god creates Eve from Adams rib while he was sleeping.

God tells Eve that if she touches the fruit from the tree of knowledge then she will die. But the evil snake tells her that she will become like God if she eats the fruit. So Adam and Eve eat some fruit and become ashamed, which makes me wonder if this story was real and they hadn't eaten the fruit would we all be naked?
When god turns up Adam and Eve try to hide behind a tree (forgetting that he is omnipresent), and god asks 'Where are you?' (maybe he isn't omnipresent).
Long story short, God gets really pissed. He curses the snake so that he can only move across the ground on his stomach (not really a punishment for a snake) and has to eat dust (?).

For Eve he creates pain in childbirth, and for Adam he created mortality, thorns and makes it so that plants take a long time to grow.
In Gen 3:20, God reiterates that all humans come from Adam and Eve. Should we remind him that he created other people earlier, before Adam and Eve?
God then tells Adam and Eve not to eat of the other tree. The tree that allows them to live forever, and this time they obey him. Really? They obeyed the snake when it might have killed them, but when it lets them live forever they are suddenly too good for the fruit. Idiots.

Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. God much prefers Abel. Cain gets jealous, lures Abel out to a field (what's the point when god is omnipresent and there are no other people around?), and kills him.
God curses Cain so that he has to travel from place to place to grow crops.
Gen 5 is just describing Adam and Eves family tree all the way down to Noah.
God then limits the lifetime of humans to 120 years because the global population is growing. But then people began to think about bad things, hurt and kill eachother. So god decides that instead of a verbal warning, he will flood the earth and kill all humans and animals. He tells Noah to build a boat 150m long, which isn't nearly big enough to hold 2 of every animal.

Noah builds the boat and takes 7 of every clean animal, and 2 of every unclean animal. He takes more clean animals so he can sacrifice them to god. He also takes his family (wife and 3 sons). Over 7 days all of the animals arrive at the Ark, and then it rains for 40 days and 40 nights.
The world is flooded, and the water is 20 feet above the highest mountain (bollocks). The water stays there for 150 days (killing all the plants as well I guess, so what do the animals eat when they get back?).
The flood ends and Noah sacrifices some of the clean animals. God smelled the offering and was happy (sadist). As a reward God makes all living creatures food for humans (poison dart frogs, pufferfish etc?).

God also makes a few rules. Men must not kill men. If a man kills another man, then kill the man (Gen 9:6). Noah throws a killer party to celebrate surviving the flood. He gets drunk, naked and falls asleep in his tent. His son Ham saw his father naked. Noah finds out, gets angry and curses Hams son, Canaan to be the slave of everyone else. What! So Ham see's his dad naked, so he curses Hams son?Noahs 3 sons split up into different tribes. The sons of Japheth become the Japhethites, and had multiple languages. Hams sons became the Hamites. Shems sons became the Semites. At this time there was only one language (contradicts with Gen 10:5), so they try to build the tower of babel. They think the tower will reach heaven, but gods doesn’t want them to reach heaven so confuses them with different languages.

God tells Abram to leave his home with his wife and nephew, Lot. Oh and their slaves and servants, because God loves having slaves. They arrive in Egypt and the local Pharaoh took Abrams wife. In return he gives him slaves and donkeys (a fair trade in my opinion). But the Pharaoh and everyone in the palace get very ill because of his wife (Sexually transmitted disease?), so send them out of Egypt.

Lot split up from Abram and went towards Jordan, while Abram went to Hebron. There was lots of war in Hebron and one day Abram was told that Lot had been taken by the King. He gathered up 318 men to fight the king (already forgotten gods commandment in Gen 9:6). The King of Sodom lets Abrams men pillage his city as a reward (Gen 14:24).

Abram wanted a son, but god said for him to get a son that he must sacrifice a young cow, a goat and male sheep. Abram doesn’t just kill them, he goes a bit Damien Hirst and cuts each one in half and puts each half opposite each other. Abram wants a son, but can’t have one with his wife so he gets a girl Hagar pregnant and she gives birth to a son Ishmael.

God then tells Abram (who has just been renamed Abraham) that he, all of his children, all men who are not his children and his slaves must be circumcised. Genesis 18 made me laugh a bit because there a bit of an awkward moment between Abrahams wife (now renamed Sarah). Sarah laughs at god, and god is like ‘Did you just laugh at me?’ Sarah says, ‘I did not laugh’, but god totally calls her on it and says ‘Yes, you did laugh’ (Gen 18:15). I can imagine a lengthy silence and maybe some tumbleweed.

So God and Abraham are walking along when God looks down at Sodom and Gomorrah. He says he wants to destroy it. Abraham tries to calm him down by saying ‘Will you destroy it even if there are 50 people who are good?’ God says he won’t, but Abraham lowers the number a few times to see what it would take before God would destroy the city. He gets down to 10 good people in the city and God still says he won’t destroy it.

Lot (who is living in Sodom and Gomorrah) is visited by 2 angels. The men of the city come to Lots house and ask to have sex with the angels. Instead he offers them his two virgin daughters. The crowd is not happy so tries to break into the house, but suddenly all go blind. Lot and his family leave the city before God destroys it. God makes it rain sulphur to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Lots wife looks back at the city and is turned into a pillar of salt (just because she turned around?).

But God doesn’t stop there. He decides he like destroying cities, so starts destroying every city of the land. He brought Abraham and Lot out of their cities so that he could destroy them. Lot lived in a cave with his two daughters. They decide to get him drunk and have sex with him. He is so drunk he doesn’t notice them having sex with him and even gets them pregnant (not sure the male anatomy works that way).

Abraham moved to the land of Negev. The King of the city of Gerar saw Abrahams wife, and thought she was hot. But God appeared in his sleep and said “You are a dead man. This is because of the women you have taken”.
But the King said “I haven’t taken her yet”.
God said “Oh…..I knew that. So take this as a warning, don’t take her.”
(Genesis 20)

Sarah then gave birth to a son, Isaac. Yes this is the bit where God asks Abraham to sacrifice is son Isaac, but then gets stopped by an angel. I have already talked about how incredibly immoral this story is a few times, so I will move on.

Abrahams wife Sarah then dies at 127 years old (what happened to ‘humans will not live longer than 120 years’?). Abraham gets a bit lonely and makes his slave touch his thigh (Gen 24:9), honestly it’s in there. Abraham then died at 175 years old, much longer than god had set the limit age limit.

Isaac had two wives, Rebekah and Keturah. Rebekah became pregnant and the babies were literally fighting inside of her. She asked why this was happening and God said that her children would split into two groups of powerful people. The two sons were called Jacob and Esau.

End of Part 1 of Genesis.
Part 2 on Saturday.

New series.

2012-01-25T11:48:00.000Z

So if you read this blog often you will notice that I delve in and out of little mini-series.

First it was Religious Arguments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Then it was Adventure Travel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

And finally it was the unfinished Debunking 9/11 Theories 1, 2, 3

Not including the informal mini-series like answering Youtube videos and the 'How to:' section.

But beginning tomorrow I will be starting a much much longer series.

Every two days I will be summing up a book in the bible and then giving my commentary on it.

This should be helpful for a number of reasons.

Firstly, a lot of atheists who like debating lack the bible knowledge because they have never been motivated to read it.

Secondly, the bible will be a lot easier to remember when it is summed up in normal english rather than the way the bible is written.

It should contribute to your debating knowledge so that when a Theist tries to trump you with bible knowledge, rather than telling them to shut up, you can whip out a good/evil bible verse. The Theist will be in awe that you actually know stuff and will run away with his vestigial tail between his legs.

12 Epic Questions for Atheists!.....really?

2012-01-24T16:20:00.000Z

So I got emailed these questions a while ago, but hadn't got around to answering them.

I did a bit of googling and found that they are copied from a list of questions online.

1. What would you need in order to become a believer?

I would need undeniable, unquestionable evidence of your god specifically. Something akin to the evidence that the holocaust happened, or that evolution occurs.

2. Why are you an atheist?

I am an atheist because the claim that a god exists hasn't met its burden of proof. Until these claims have evidence to support them, it is stupid to believe in them.

3. Why do you think a belief in deity has permeated almost every society and culture since the dawn of mankind.

Because it is nice to think that there is a higher power looking over you. All societies began with the same difficult, violent origins. In these times it was very important to have a belief that after death you would be going somewhere better. Now that life expectancy has increased and we know more about how the world works, we realise how irrational the idea of a god is.
God was also an answer for things we didn't have an answer to. Back when we didn't have a germ theory or know how earthquakes happened, attributing it to god seemed rational. But now god is being pushed back further and further, until he is explaining the most obscure parts of quantum theory.

4. Why does existentialism make sense to you.

Never said I did.

5. Of either faith, Islam or Christianity
Which of these two makes the most sense to you? You must pick one.

Islam makes more sense to me than Christianity, because I like the whole several wives part, the charity attitude, the beautiful language etc. Most Muslims act Muslims, but most Christians do not act Christ-like.

6. Have you ever, even for a moment, believed in a God(s)?

I did as a kid for a while, but only because I went to a school where religion was enforced and children have impressionable minds.

7. If you die as an atheist Are you prepared to go to hell?

I don't believe in hell, but if there is a god and he chooses to send me there, then there is not much I can do about that.

8. Morality seems to change with the times in the atheist community Why are morals so subjective within the atheist community.

It's not that morals are subjective in the atheist community. It's that the source and nature of morals changes depending on who you ask. I would argue that morals are better in atheist communities, which is why more atheistic countries have much lower crime rates.

9. Why if you are an atheist do you spend so much time speaking about religion especially the Christian faith.

Because your beliefs inform your actions, so if the majority of people have skewed beliefs based on no evidence then they will act different to people without those beliefs. We see this in religious wars, creationism being pushed into schools etc. Atheists don't like this and want it to stop, by stopping the irrational belief at its core.

10. why does so many of your interests (art, and entertainment) center around human suffering and tragedy . Does this reflect an inner turmoil because of the absence of God.

I am not sure where this information is coming from. Where are you finding that atheists like violence more than Christians. If this were true then why was the film 'Hostel 2' banned in Germany (53% atheist), while making $35 million in the United States.

11. If Jesus were physically alive today and preaching the same message as he did before would you accept his teaching as being valid and viable to our community and your own personal life.
I have nothing against Jesus. He was mostly preaching being nice to each other and I find that to be fine. I don't like the immoral idea of original sin, but putting that aside. If he was here today then I would be a fan, despite the fact I don't think we need him.

12. Considering all the opinions you express about the dangers of religion and the worlds problems, why don't you offer any solutions to the problems on a. specific level?

I do. My solution to religion based problems is to get rid of religion. But a first step towards a better world would be taxing churches in the US. Also making Iran and the United States economically reliant on each other would probably discourage any looming wars.

2 Religious Youtube Videos Answered.

2012-01-24T15:25:00.000Z

I thought I would deal with two videos at the same time.

'Dataloreforever' asks -

Question 1 can be dealt with fairly easily. The big bang doesn't claim that something came from nothing, neither does Abiogenesis. Evolution is not directly linked with Abiogenesis. Evolution explains the diversity of life, whilst abiogenesis explains it's origins.
I do not believe there is a higher intelligence because I have never seen any evidence for one.

Hahaha, did aliens seed the planet? There is a theory along these lines called 'panspermia', where life came down in bacterial form from outer space. It's a very interesting idea for a few reasons. Firstly, the early earth had very little atmosphere and was hit by asteroids very often, making it quite plausible. Secondly, we know that Mars once held liquid water and therefore might have held life. We also know that many tonnes of mars rock came down onto earth at that time.
But this is not regarded as highly as abiogenesis for explaining life, and doesn't effect evolution at all.

Next question from 'Chudogg' -

Do I believe in aliens?

I find it impossible to believe that we are the only life in the universe when there are so many trillions of planets out there. If we were the only life in the universe then the scientists looking for how life started should probably stop, since the key to life would be so incredibly rare that it would be almost impossible to find.

But I don't believe that aliens have travelled billions of miles to our planet, just to squash patterns into crops and kidnap a few people.

UK - 15 year old boy murdered by sister for 'witchcraft'.

2012-01-24T14:25:00.000Z

Kristy Bamu was found dead in his sisters house in East London on Christmas day 2010.

He had suffered 101 injuries and had died from being hit in the head with a metal bar and then drowned.

He had been staying with his sister Magalie Bamu and her boyfriend Eric Bikubi, both devout Christians from the Congo. During the stay he had been accused of using witchcraft to adversely effect another child.

The attack continued over several days. He begged to die after being attacked with sticks, pliers, a metal bar, hammer, chisel and other weapons.

The couple tried to admit being guilty of manslaughter in court, but the judge threw the charge out saying it was 'a very deliberate murder'.

The Bible - The story of god screwing up over and over again.

2012-01-24T11:19:00.000Z

I wrote this as a text yesterday and sent it to my brother. He thought it was pretty funny, so I thought I would share it.

It's the bible summed up from God's point of view.

I created everybody on the planet. I’m just gona start with two. And they screwed up, so I said I was going to kill them but let’s not kill them. I’ll just kick them out of the garden and we’ll keep on going. Wow, things aren’t getting better they’re getting worse. People are murdering each other and whole…OK screw it, I’m going to flood this place and save just the best family. Which one of you’s is the the best family? Oh you, the sorry drunk with three sons. Go and build yourself a boat and we’ll save you and your family and screw everybody else. So we flood everything and start over. Hit the planets reboot button.
Ok now that that’s over with I want you guys to go and populate the earth again, like the first group that I…Oh no don’t curse one of your sons to be a slave to all the rest of them.! What are you thinking?
And then a little while later some of them have built this tower. How arrogant of them to think they can reach me. Let’s confuse all their languages, and just pick my favourite tribe to worship me. Hey you guys, you guys are mine. Hey you got enslaved? Oh well alright, then I’ll do a whole bunch of miracles and lead you guys out. Oh and by the way, you yeah you, come to the top of this mountain I want to talk to you for a minute. Here’s some rules I thought would be pretty good. Are they worshipping another god already?
What is wrong with you people! Why can’t I do anything right!
I know what I will do. I love blood sacrifices. I will sacrifice myself to myself. Genius!

5 questions for atheists - Response (300th post)

2012-01-23T14:43:00.000Z

Post 300!!

These are so fun to do, and if you are a bit of an eager atheist like me then it's fun to watch these videos and think how you would respond.

Todays comes from Youtube user 'silvermage87'.

I'm not going to mock this guy like I might have done in some of my other posts, because it would be too easy and everything I could say you are probably thinking already.

So question number 1.

What problems do I see with religion? I will keep it general like he asks.

I would say that deliberately going out and indoctrinating children with 1st century guesswork and things we now know to be flat out wrong is pretty high on my immorality scale. These imams and priests are imposing their beliefs on children too young to defend themselves, and poisoning their brain potentially forever. This may not seem like such a big deal when it is a moderate Muslim or moderate Christian. But moderate religious people are sometimes not so moderate, and commit crimes based on their imposed beliefs.

The fact that personal beliefs decided inside ones own head without any evidence of query can be imposed on school systems is disgusting. People trying to get anti-scientific creationism into schools or not allowing Harry Potter in Saudi Arabia because it contains magic.

I could go on forever, but there are 5 questions to get through.

Do I have problems with Christians or Christianity?

I have problems with both. I have problems with Nigerian Christians torturing and burning children alive because they are suspected of being witches, and I have a problem with Christianity for allowing this to happen. Christians are directly influenced by Christianity so they are not mutually exclusive.

Question number three has actually been amended in the notes under the Youtube video, and has been changed to 'How did life and the universe come into being?'

Whilst this is not related to atheism I will still answer it.

The furthest we can look back into the universes past is to the Big Bang. This does not actually explain the beginning of the universe, it just explains the ongoing expansion of the universe in its current state. So essentially, we don't know how the universe began.

As for life, I am fairly convinced by Abiogenesis although I could be better informed on the subject. We have shown many times since the Miller-Urey experiments that naturally occurring proteins (the building blocks of life) can occur from non-life. So it probably happened that way, although it didn't have to.

Question 4! Do I believe in a soul?

No.
And I don't believe in ghosts either. No need to go into detail, since this is a fairly good example of Hitchens Razor.

Why is atheism better than theism?

Why is being sober better than being drunk? It gives you a much clearer picture of the world, and allows your brain to fully appreciate the wonders of nature whilst giving you the freedom to be yourself without worrying about hell or damnation.

I am finding this hard to put into words so I will give you a scenario.

You are told that you have a year to live. I have never been in this situation and hopefully never will be, but I imagine that you would try to squeeze as much life as possible out of that one year. You would see the world, be with the people you love and the little things like a walk in the park would become a beautiful experience. This is because the less you have of something, the more precious it becomes, like diamonds or gold. If gold and diamonds were abundant then they wouldn't be so expensive or precious.

On the flip side, You are told you have one year to live, but as you leave the doctors office an old man whispers to you that if you eat a bag of tea leaves every day you will live for another ten years. You don't have any evidence to back this up, but the prospect of not dying is too good to let down. But every day you worry whether it is true or not, are you eating the right brand of tea leaves, are you eating enough etc. Then you die after one year having wasted your life eating tea leaves.

What a shit analogy.

So being drunk (religious) is fine, but it pisses sober (atheist) people off when you start talking to plants (praying) and vomiting (?) in the sink.

Gay Priest is suing Church of England.

2012-01-23T11:18:00.001Z

Jeffrey John, a priest in Bedford, was prevented from becoming a Bishop because he is openly gay.

He was elected for the position in 2003, but it caused such uproar in the Anglican community that he had the title taken away.

As a result he is going to file a law suit against his employer for discrimination. Although this may be a bit pointless, because there is an exception in the equality act that allows Churches to deny membership on theological grounds.

Attendance for the Church of England has been dropping by around 2% a year, and many in the church see the need to progress into the 21st Century. At least 95 churches have said that they would allow civil partnerships if the CofE allowed it.

There have been many opinions on this action by Jeffrey John, The most prominent of which is on the Christian Today website and is written by Rob James.

He says he has spent many hours studying the bible to try and understand why Christians want openly gay relationships. I wonder if he made it to the part in Leviticus where it says to kill homosexuals.

Rob even quotes Paul in Corinthians, when he says that one believer cannot go to a secular court to complain about another believer. And eventually condemns the law suit.

The 1 Question All Atheists Fear! - Response.

2012-01-22T12:44:00.000Z

Yep, sorry. Another post responding to a video on Youtube asking Atheists a question. Apparently I am supposed to fear this question, and I was pretty intrigued as to what it would be.

It comes from Youtube user '333dvd2'.

He spends the first two minutes crying about how his old documents (the bible etc) don't count as evidence. I don't want to linger on this because I want to get to the question, but the reason they don't count as evidence is the same reason why documents about Hercules don't make us believe Hercules existed, UFO abduction testimonies, Big foot sightings etc. They are so fallible and easily faked or manipulated. When I did psychology I read paper after paper on how easily the human memory can be changed and persuaded to accept false claims when they were actually at the event.

So no, not evidence. But thanks for trying.

So here's the question.

Show me the evidence you have that god doesn't exist.

I must admit that I let out a bit of a giggle when I got to that bit, because all the way through the video I was assuming that I would be faced with some monumental question that would make me think and maybe even panic a little.

But no. Just another ill-informed theist trying to shift the burden of proof.

If you are making a positive claim to knowledge (e.g. I know that god exists) it is your responsibility to demonstrate that your claim is correct. If you can't do that then the person you are trying to convince is either confined to the default position (not believing your claim) or if they are a bit gullible they might believe you on faith.

Atheism is a response to a claim that god exists, it is not a positive claim to knowledge.

UK Muslims demand homosexuals 'turn or burn'.

2012-01-22T11:33:00.000Z

Five Muslims men have been arrested in Derby, United Kingdom for distributing hundreds of leaflets with anti-gay slogans.

Four different types of leaflets were produced ahead of a gay pride parade in Derby.

With titles like 'Turn or Burn', 'God abhors you' and 'The Death Penalty?', all demand the death penalty to be brought in for homosexuality, warn of 'severe punishment' for homosexuals and those who 'remain silent about the evil'.

One leaflet suggested methods for carrying out the death penalty on homosexuals. The suggested methods included stoning and hanging.

Another leaflet was found by police described homosexuals as a "vile, ugly, cancerous disease" and asked the question "Gay Today, Paedophile Tomorrow?"

These leaflets were handed out on the street, outside a mosque and put through letter boxes, much to the disgust of local residents.

If found guilty they will be the first people to be prosecuted under the new hate crime act that has only included hate against homosexuals since 2010.

Jesus Myth Theory.

2012-01-21T11:43:00.000Z

You may remember that in 2011 I had a run at trying to work out whether Jesus actually existed. I would like to think that I have greatly improved my religious knowledge since then, so I am going to have a second attempt at it.

The definition of myth (that we need) is - "tales believed as true, usually sacred, set in the distant past or other worlds or parts of the world, with extra-human, inhuman or heroic characters".

With this definition the story of Jesus would certainly be labelled a myth, but is there enough evidence to suggest that this story isn't just myth, but that elusive thing called 'fact'.

This is a hotly debated topic between atheists. Some believe Jesus existed as a man, some don't and some just plain don't care. I myself don't really care and fail to see how Jesus is that important at all to Christians, seeing as he is contained in a largely immoral story.

Our first indication of the evidence available come from well-known bible scholar L. Michael White. He writes -

"So far as we know, Jesus did not write anything, nor did anyone who had personal knowledge of him. There is no archaeological evidence of his existence. There are no contemporaneous accounts of his life or death: no eyewitness accounts, nor any other kind of first-hand record. All the accounts of Jesus come from decades or centuries later; the gospels themselves all come from later times, though they may contain earlier sources or oral traditions. The earliest writings that survive are the letters of Paul of Tarsus, written 20-30 years after the dates given for Jesus's death. Paul was not a companion of Jesus, nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus before his death."

New Testament Scholar Robert M. Price has layed out three main reasons why he thinks the story of Jesus is just a composite character.

1. There is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources.
2. The Pauline epistles, earlier than the gospels, do not provide evidence of a recent historical Jesus.
3. The story of Jesus shows strong parallels to Middle Eastern religions about dying and rising gods, symbolising the rebirth of the individual as a rite of passage.

They are all good points and I want to talk quickly about two of them.

I am amazed that Christians aren't curious why someone outside of Christianity didn't hear of a God son performing miracles and bother to write it down. Don't you think that that would be something worth writing about. We have a lot of texts from those times and none outside the bible mention Jesus performing miracles. Without the miracles Jesus is just some carpenter who claimed to be the son of god (or god himself depending on your view of the trinity) whilst sporting a rather fetching beard.

As for the parallels to other gods of the time, there were at least 17 'gods' at the time, all of them worryingly similar to the story of Jesus. All of the written into history with the same amount of evidence as Jesus himself.

Richard Dawkins says that a serious case can be made that Jesus never existed, but his own opinion is that Jesus probably existed. This is the amount of wiggle room we have, based on the fact that there is pretty much no evidence.

The Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion started the Jesus Project in December 2007. 20 Scholars from relevant disciplines we to meet up every 9 months for five years to examine the evidence for Jesus's existence. The project was ended in June 2009 when the funding was suspended, and the statement at the time was that the evidence was 'in-conclusive'.

So there we go, in-conclusive. You can choose for yourself whether you think Jesus actually existed, as we have heard that Richard Dawkins thinks he probable existed as a man.

The obsession with Jesus is based on the fact that the Old testament is a pretty nasty piece of work and shows gods evil side. Christians don't like that and like to think that god is more like Jesus.

So when Christians say they get their morals from the Bible, Atheists point out all of the disgusting laws and actions by god in the Old testament, and then Christians say "Oh no, Jesus came and changed all of that. He changed the laws etc".

Except that Jesus says in Matthew 5:17-18,

17 "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. 18 For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.

So the Old testament laws still apply, Jesus only changed the sacrificial laws (laws governing the sacrifice of animal, people, crops, Buick's etc).

Another reason why Jesus should be ignored a bit more than he is, is because the idea of original sin is immoral. Adam and Eve munched on some fruit, so that sin was inherited by ALL HUMANS, and the only way the all powerful god could stop it was by committing a blood sacrifice with his son. But he's god? Seeing as he is all-powerful he could have just forgiven humanity. I guess he just likes the smell of his sons flesh roasting in the Middle Eastern sunlight.

So that was my second attempt at the Story of Jesus. My first attempt is here.

OMG THE EU IS EVIL!!!

2012-01-20T18:54:00.001Z

So I was trawling through a crazy bible/Christian "Oh my god everything is evil!" website, and I found this -

The Apostles have referred to the end-time antichrist and the mark of the beast, or the antichrist and the number 666. This number in the scriptures may be an identifier of the antichrist's government or his personal identification.

I have noted there is a move within the European Union to change the EU's name to become the United States of Europe. It is interesting that "United States of Europe" consists of three words -- each word has 6 letters each, thus "666." As the world moves further into the end times, events provide us with greater understanding of possibilities, however, the Bible teaches us to be cautious in trying to speculate, pinpoint and conclude everything in detail. however, we know the Bible indicates the Antichrist will reign from a revived, European Union of countries in geographical Europe.

Yep, you heard it here first. The 'United States of Europe' is going to end the world....

Ok so the EU is not trying to change its name to the United States of Europe. That name origins from the hypothetical scenario drawn from fiction about the EU becoming a single country.

Additionally, if the EU was to become a single country then it would be the richest country in the world

Just thought I would clear that up.

Feel like reading some crazy babble? Then find the site here.

5 Reasons to watch The Atheist Experience.

2012-01-20T16:58:00.000Z

The Atheist Experience is a weekly cable access television show produced by the Atheist Community of Austin. As far as I am aware, you can only watch it on the TV in Texas, but due to it's popularity through Youtube you can also watch it live or archived online.

Basically, the set up is that two Atheist hosts sit in front of the cameras, talk about a religion related topic and take calls from people around the world.

I have become unhealthily obsessed with The Atheist Experience. All of the episodes are available to watch online and I am working my way through them.

So here are my reasons why you should be watching it too.

5. Idiot-proof Science.

As you would expect from regularly debating Theists, all of the shows hosts have a pretty good grasp of science. There is nothing funnier than a Theist phoning up with a bone to pick with science, only to retreat with their tail between their legs.
Watch this caller assert incorrect claims about the Cambrian explosion. Luckily the science savvy Tracie Harris and Martin Wagner set him right.

4. Brutal Logic.

Logical fallacy will be a phrase you are going to hear a lot of if you watch the Atheist Experience. Logic is very important and the hosts of the show are brimming with it.
Watch Matt and Russell throw some logic grenades in the face of this caller.

3. Christians being very Christan.

The amount of angry Christians phoning the show are too numerous to count, but here is one of the best handled calls.

2. Stupid callers.

Stupid callers are amazing, no question. Every now and again there will be a caller with previously unknown levels of stupidity and the baffled look on the hosts faces are priceless. Also, Jeff Dee is amazing in the this clip (as usual). Once Jeff gains momentum he verbally destroys any theist in his path.

1. The force of nature that is Matt Dillahunty.

Every host on The Atheist Experience is very good at debating Theists, but Matt is the best by a margin. There is no one reason why he excels in destroying religious people. The former aspiring Baptist minister relies on his quick wit, humour, scientific knowledge, logic, fantastic recall ability and mind-blowing bible knowledge. Many Christians have phoned up with a decent understanding of the bible, only to be destroyed by Matts superior knowledge.

Visit The Atheist Experience website here.
Start your obsession with archived episodes here.

The attack on Social Darwinism.

2012-01-20T15:13:00.000Z

The claim that atheism leads to Darwinism and therefore social Darwinism is a common one.

I have largely ignored it until now, just because I have felt no need to respond intelligently to an unintelligent assertion.

The claim that we should be culling disabled people because of the 'survival of the fittest' usually comes paired with some remark about Hitler and Stalin being Atheist.

(The Nazi party actually rejected Darwinism - "...the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism..." Die Bücherei 1935, 279)

So let's set the record straight.

Social Darwinism is the idea that society should try to work out which members are not supporting themselves and not benefiting society, and then dispose of them. It is essentially artificial selection crossed with eugenics.

Despite having 'Darwinism' in the name this idea did not actually come from Darwin. It came from a man called Herbert Spencer, an English Philosopher and biologist in the 1800's.

So does natural selection mean that we should be shipping off the old and disabled people?

No. There are several things wrong with this.

It does not follow that because some members of society view those less able as less worthy they should be rounded up and shot. They are applying their own ideas of what a species strength is, and it is not needed.

Just because Evolution happens doesn't mean that it implies how things ought to be. Evolution describes how things are, not how to live or act.

Evolution shows us that if a species is to survive for a long time then its genetics need to be spread out and greatly varied. Social Darwinism is the deliberate depletion of genetic variability, and therefore reduces the chances of long-term survival in the event of environmental change.

If it was to happen, who would decide who was to go?

Humanities strength is its intelligence and ability to work together. With those combined, people who would have otherwise become outcasts (disabled and ill people) have become normal functioning members of society. Artificial selection under the disguise of Social Darwinism should be something confined to the history books.

In many ways natural selection is still shaping mankind every day, but mainly developing new anti-bodies to fight new strains of illness and disease. Evidence of this is that in the poorer pockets of the African Continent some women have become immune to the AIDS virus.

And lastly. Atheism is in no way linked with evolution. All you have to do to be an atheist is not believe in any gods. Many Christians believe in Evolution.

There, all done. Rant over.

Quran Speed of light prediction DEMOLISHED!

2012-01-19T14:25:00.000Z

I just need to get this down on paper (virtual paper, but paper all the same) to clear my mind. I have just engaged in a series of debates with several Muslims, all of them about the Qurans claim to predict the speed of light.

Basically the claim goes like this -

There is a passage in the Quran....

“He regulates the affair from the heaven to the earth; then shall it ascend to Him in a day the measure of which is a thousand years of what you count..”

That supposedly predicts the speed of light.
What this passage is meant to say is something along the lines of "The distance that light travels in one day is the distance the moon travels in 1,000 years".

Now first things first. I will bet you £1,000 that you can't find the word 'light', 'moon', 'speed', 'heliocentricity', or any other word even vaguely related to the speed of light or moon.

But seeing as Allah is usually rather cryptic in his messages we will let that slide.

So let's see if the sums add up.

Light travels at 299,792.458 km/second.
There are 86,400 seconds in a day.
So in a day light travels 25,902,068,371 km

The distance from the earth to the moon is 384,403 km.
So for the moon to do a full rotation it needs to cover 2,415,273 km.
The moon goes around the earth 12,000 times in 1,000 lunar years so lets multiply that number by 12,000.
In 1,000 years the moon covers 28,983,278,898 km.

Now I don't know if you noticed, evidently many Muslims haven't, but those numbers are different. In fact, they aren't even close.

It's a difference of over 3 BILLION km! This is not a trivial error.
It is the equivalent of me predicting the distance from London to New York, and ending up 90 miles north of Montreal.

Another thing worth pointing out is that both the speed of light and the speed of the moons orbit are flexible.
Light has been slowed down to a sluggish 38 miles per hour, and physics means that the earths rotation is slowing while the moon is getting further away from us.
So even if those calculations were correct 2,000 years ago (and they weren't) they still wouldn't be correct today (by a tiny margin).

Oh and I feel obliged to tell you that this Quran passage was copied from the bible.

For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. Psalm 90:4
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 2 Peter 3:8

Best Footballer cars.

2012-01-18T12:48:00.000Z

Footballers tend to have crap taste in cars, but some are breaking this trend.

Here are some quality footballer cars.

Wayne Rooneys Mercedes CLK DTM AMG.

Cristiano Ronaldo representing the Italians with his Ferrari 599 GTB.

Nicklas Bendtner pretending to be James Bond in an Aston Martin DBS.

Christiano Ronaldo in his Bentley Continental GT Speed.

El-Hadji Diouf with his £300k Mercedes SLR.

Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 with its proud owner, Obafemi Martins.

The errors of a first cause argument.

2012-01-17T19:25:00.000Z

I'm going to warn you now. The next blog post I do is going to be another reply to a religious video or something, because I enjoy doing them.

When I am debating theists they often resort to a first cause argument.

"Well what created the universe then?" Is often what they shout abruptly, while watching William lane Craig and hugging a bible.

This is quite simply, Kindergarden theology. It's running out of logical arguments (or never having them from the beginning) and just shouting what comes into your head.

It's an argument from ignorance, as well as a contradiction with their own belief.

Firstly, the theist will deem the possibility for matter to be eternal or be created, impossible. No science knowledge or degree in Physics needed, just flat out impossible. Thanks helpful Internet stranger!

This all melts down to the fact that theists can't understand one simple phrase.
When we say "We don't know", a very logical and sensible thing to admit if science really doesn't have a conclusive answer, theists hear "We will never know, so god probably did it".

The contradiction they are committing with throwing away the two options they conceive (universe came from nothing or universe is eternal) is that they believe that their god created the universe from nothing, and that the very god just mentioned must either be eternal or have come from nothing.

It is worth mentioning, just in case, that the big bang may or may not have been the beginning of the universe. All that the big bang explains is the cause of the rapid expansion of the universe about 13.7 billion years ago. Whether there was anything before that is still very much up for debate.
The big bang may have been the latest in a long sequence of contractions and expansions. The universe may have begun many trillions of years before the big bang, on the flip side the universe may have started only a few seconds before the big bang. It really is an unanswered question. But hopefully not for much longer.

Difference between militant Religious and militant Atheist.

2012-01-16T12:45:00.000Z

This term 'militant atheist' gets thrown around a lot. Fox news reports on 'The rise of Militant Atheism', while the Pope recently spoke out in Britain against militant atheism.

So what exactly do you have to do to become a militant atheist?

Have I missed something? Have I been behind on the news lately? Because the last time I looked there wasn't an insurgency of atheists trying to instill a secular government by brandishing AK-47's and blowing up buses.

Nope, Apparently all you have to do to become branded a militant atheist is write a book or talk to people on the TV or radio about atheism.

Richard Dawkins, for example, would be in the category of militant atheism. What has he done to earn this prestigious title? He has written one book about religion, spoken a few times on TV and made a TV series about the dangers of religion. Has he killed or threatened to kill anyone? No, not even close.

With the same logic we can easily label the Pope a Militant Catholic, Bill O'Reilly a Militant Christian and the Dalai Lama a Militant Buddhist.

Whereas in real life it would be crazy to label someone 'militant' because they used words. The things we require someone to do to earn the label 'militant' include murder, kidnap and attempted murder. I doubt Osama Bin Laden would have ever been labelled a Militant Muslim for just writing a book or preaching at his local Mosque.

Richard Dawkins celebrates victory over creationists.

2012-01-15T10:51:00.001Z

Bring out the party hats and free booze, we have a reason to celebrate!

Richard Dawkins and other leading British scientists are claiming a victory after the British government decides to enforce a law preventing anti-evolutionary groups from teaching creationism in science classrooms.

Schools that fail to do this will lose their government funding if they claim that creationism includes "evidence-based views or theories".

The British Humanist Association has been leading a campaign against creationism, and calls this 'highly significant'. Richard Dawkins said "I welcome all moves to ensure that creationism is not taught as fact in schools. Government rules on this are extremely welcome, but they need to be properly enforced."

The schools targeted by this new rule are the faith schools. These are state funded, but run by private organisations so don't need to follow the national curriculum. Some creationists have exploited this freedom to pollute the minds of children with Bronze age nonsense, but thankfully not anymore.

Explain this to me Atheist - Response.

2012-01-14T17:01:00.000Z

I know, I'm sorry. I couldn't resist doing another one of these posts where I respond to questions for atheists. They are just so fun to watch and write that I will probably do quite a few more of them when I'm bored.
I hope you enjoy these sorts of posts. If not then drop me an email and I will stop doing them.

Today's question comes from a Youtube user 'cjae2631'.

Now as you have probably noticed, this question is in no way related to Atheism. To qualify as an Atheist you just need to not believe that a god exists. There is no implication about the universe (other than it didn't come from a god) and is not related to Darwinism (despite the amount of religious people who call me a 'Darwinist').

So where did the universe come from?

Cosmologists have traced the origin of the universes current state back 14.5 billion years ago to an event called the Big Bang. The name 'Big Bang' was actually formulated to make fun of the theory by people who thought it was false. But the name has stuck and the Big Bang theory has been generally accepted as fact since 1965.

Beginning with a gravitational singularity (a single point packed with matter and energy where the laws of physics begin to break down) it expanded like a balloon at an astonishing rate, and eventually into the universe we see today. I will summarise the story really quick. The universe was full of matter which was clumped together by gravity. These formed stars which lived and died, creating the heavier elements. Those heavier elements formed accretion disks which became the planets and stars we see today.
I apologise to any scientists out there if I didn't do the story justice, but I only have so much patience with people who ask questions but don't do their own research.

But let us contemplate for a minute.

What if us atheists had no idea how the universe began? We knew how the earth came about, but not the universe.
Would this make the idea of a creator god any more likely? Of course not! That is an argument from ignorance. "I don't see how the universe could have began on its own, therefore a god was needed".

No......just no.

But why?

He asks this with a look in his eyes of a man who once picked up a science book, started reading it, got bored and summed up the rest of the book with "God did it".

There is no why! Questions beginning with 'why' have no place in this area of science. For there to be a why there would need to be something to which the 'why' was applicable, in this case a anthropomorphic driver of creation. But there isn't, so there is no need to ask 'why'.

If pressed for an answer I would reply with, "Because the laws of physics allowed it to happen."

I love the next bit of the video.

Either matter has always existed, which is impossible.
Or a being has always existed, which is impossible.
Or matter created itself from nothing, which is impossible.
Or a higher power created matter from nothing, which is also impossible.

I don't know who died and made him King of the Scientists, but he must know a lot if he can discredit all of these options in the blink of an eye.

These are questions for scientists to work out in a combined effort. Not for a Youtube user to dump on because he considers them impossible with little to no thought put into considering them.

And finally he makes another fatal error.

Atheists are not angry with god. Just because someone won't throw away their rationality to believe in something doesn't mean that they hate or dislike it.
Does he hate Unicorns? Loch Ness Monster? Allah? Krishna? etc etc

Anyway, fun video....don't quit your day job.

12 more crazy Christians!

2012-01-14T10:00:00.000Z

Another few examples of how crazy Christians can be when they get hyped up over something they disagree with.

These comments are about 16 year old Jessica Alhquist managing to take legal action and get a prayer banner taken down in her school.

If you are a Christian reading this and you are shrugging it off as just a few vocal bad apples then you are wrong. We see this nearly every week. Where Christians will drop their religions most basic premise just to shout at and abuse someone who doesn't conform with their doctrine.

Weirdest Religions.

2012-01-13T22:34:00.000Z

Not content with the normal crazy religions, some people have taken it upon themselves to invent even crazier ways of brainwashing people into their way of thinking.

Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.

No I didn't make a spelling mistake, that is literally what this strange church is called.
The TOPY was founded in 1981 by various individuals from Psychic TV. The religion promotes 'guitless sexuality', magic and the worship of various gods. It is essentially a modern, artistic paganism.

Apparently TOPY has been influential in the underground chaos magic scene (didn't know there was one).

Nation of Yahweh.

The nation of yahweh is a mainly African-American religious group, founded in 1979. Their goal is to return African-Americans to Israel, as they think they are the true Israelites. They have been accused of being a black supremesist group and have faced many legal problems. People claim the group has a divine mission to 'vanish whites'.

Church of all worlds.

Another neo-pagan religion inspired into creation by the fictional religion of the same name in the science fiction novel 'Stranger in a strange land'. They worship 'Gaea' the earth mother goddess as well as the Father god. They recently founded a school called The grey school of Wizardry.....yes, basically a shitty Hogwarts.

Universe People.

Universe People is a Czech religion based around the belief that aliens communicate through their members. According to these mediums these aliens are orbiting the earth in their spaceships and help the good while watching over us. They also incorporate conspiracy theories into their doctarine, such as the government wanting to put microchips into every ones brains.

Church of the SubGenius.

The Church of the SubGenius is a satire religion making fun of religion, conspiracy theories and popular culture. Claiming to have been founded in the 1950's, the church has been predicting an alien invasion since 1998. The member of the church responsible for this faux pas was tarred and feathered.

Nuwaubianism.

Nuwaubianism is an umbrella term used to refer to the doctrines and teachings of the followers of Dwight York. They originated as a black muslim group in New York in the 1970's. The leader is now in prison having been convicted with child molestation charges. Pulled from various new age movements, white people are said to be in one Nuwaubianism myth as a race of killers to serve black people as a slave army, but this plan went wrong.

Here is a list of unsual Nuwaubianism beliefs -

1. It is important to bury the afterbirth so that Satan does not use it to make a duplicate of the recently-born child
2. Furthermore, some aborted fetuses survive their abortion to live in the sewers, where they are being gathered and organized to take over the world
3. People were once perfectly symmetrical and ambidextrous, but then a meteorite struck Earth and tilted its axis causing handedness and shifting the heart off-center in the chest
4. Each of us has seven clones living in different parts of the world
5. Women existed for many generations before they invented men through genetic manipulation
6. Homo sapiens is the result of cloning experiments that were done on Mars using Homo erectus
7. Nikola Tesla came from the planet Venus
8. The Illuminati have nurtured a child, Satan’s son, who was born on 6 June 1966 at the Dakota House on 72nd Street in New York to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis of the Rothschild/Kennedy families. The Pope was present at the birth and performed necromantic ceremonies. The child was raised by former U.S. president Richard Nixon and now lives in Belgium, where it is hooked up bodily to a computer called “The Beast 3M” or “3666.”

I suppose that if you're going to be religious, you might as well go crazy religious.

A proper room rape.

2012-01-11T15:56:00.000Z

My friend just posted these pictures to facebook. Just one of many reasons why you shouldn't leave your University room unlocked.

It's wrapping paper by the way.

(above) On his door.

It's fun to laugh at Christians.

2012-01-11T11:48:00.000Z

Not all Christians are stupid. I know a lot of smart religious people. But there are exceptions....

Why it doesn't matter that Abraham didn't kill Isaac.

2012-01-11T11:24:00.000Z

Everyone is aware of this story. Abraham is asked by god to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah (a mountain that has never been found).

Abraham happily ties up his son and takes him to the mountain top, ready to kill him. But just before he does so, an angel appears and says "Chill out dude, god was just pulling your leg".

So happy ending right? Good moral story right?

WRONG!

This is not a moral story, nor is it an insight into gods willingness to stop a sacrifice.

This story is just pure motivation to make you think that obeying god to the letter is better than to think for yourself. "Don't question god because he is the highest power, and if it was going to lead to a bad thing then he will stop you".

This is the sort of thinking that results in religious nutjobs killing their kids because 'god' told them to (Andrea Yates).

It wasn't as if Abraham knew god was joking around. It wasn't as if Abraham was thinking, "God says he wants me to kill my own son, but I have a feeling that he will stop me before I do it."

Abraham was actually preparing to kill his own son, HIS OWN SON!, just because god told him to.

Christians also seem to forget times when the sacrifice actually happens. In the Book of Judges, Jephthah sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering because god helped him lead the Israelites to victory against Ammon.

I will end with a Christopher Hitchens quote on the matter.

"If I was told to sacrifice [my children] to prove my devotion to god, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said yes I'll gut my kid to show my love of god, I'd say No fuck you." - Christopher Hitchens

Kalam Cosmological Argument.

2012-01-09T19:43:00.000Z

William Lane Craig is well known for the Kalam Cosmological argument. It is just a variation from old Islamic philosophy. It argues for the existence of a personal first cause for the universe.

The argument goes -

P1 - Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
P2 - The universe began to exist.
C - Therefore, the universe must have a cause.

The first premise of Craigs argument is flawed. In Quantum mechanics, things happen that are not caused. Such as radioactive decay or when an atom in an excited energy level it loses a photon. No cause is evident in the decay of a radioactive nucleus. Craig says that these quantum events are still 'caused' but calls it "probabilistic causality". Craig is thereby admitting that the 'cause' in his first premise could be an accidental one, something spontaneous and not predetermined. He therefore destroys his own case for predetermined creation.

Another reason why this argument is invalid and refuted is because it can be expressed in a competing syllogism.

P1 - Everything that has sentience has a cause.
P2 - The Judeo-Christian god is said to have sentience.
C - Therefore the Judeo-Christian god had a cause.

This can be transferred to any god and nearly anything you wish to imagine, and surprisingly doesn't make them real as a result.

Debunking 9/11 Theories - Part 3

2012-01-08T23:18:00.000Z

Almost forgot that I had started this series.

If you missed part 1 and part 2 then read them now!

Todays is all about the Pentagon :)

The hole in the side of the Pentagon wasn't big enough to be caused by a plane.

So why didn't the Boeing 757 create a plane sized hole? Well, because when a plane hits a wall it doesn't create a cartoon-like hole. The Pentagon walls are huge, thick and blast resistant. A plane is thin and created to be light enough to fly.
There is a video on youtube which I can't be bothered to find, which shows a jet fighter being smashed into a similar wall (it is on rails like a rocket sled) and being reduced to mere dust, with nothing left but the wing tips.

The picture of a 12ft hole which is often dragged out by truthers was actually caused by the landing gear.

Why are some of the windows remain in one piece?

Some windows near the crash did indeed survive the crash because that's what they were designed to do. As mentioned earlier the walls are blast resistant, just like the windows.
In a military building as important as the Pentagon everything is built to resist hurricane-like conditions.
Some of the blinds were perfectly intact just behind some of the windows.

There was no plane wreckage.

Blast expert Allyn E. Kilsheimer was the first structural engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash and helped coordinate the emergency response. "It was absolutely a plane, and I'll tell you why," says Kilsheimer, CEO of KCE Structural Engineers PC, Washington, D.C. "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box." Kilsheimer's eyewitness account is backed up by photos of plane wreckage inside and outside the building. Kilsheimer adds: "I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts. Okay?"

10 Questions every Atheist must answer - Response

2012-01-08T13:12:00.001Z

My new thing to do when I am bored is to watch videos by religious people presenting their arguments against atheism. I take them seriously and try to think how I would respond if someone asked me these questions directly. It's good for your brain and makes you think.

I suggest any decent atheist should be well versed in the many arguments against his/her position and know how to respond until it is just muscle memory.

So here is a delightful few questions by some guy on Youtube.

1. There are so many answers to this question so I will skim over a few of them. The very fact that you are able to ask this question means that there must be something, because here you are asking the question. There might be something without you in it and therefore there would be something, but no-one would be able to ask the question. What if there was nothing and a god did exist? Does the the fact that things exist actually hold true on whether a god does? No, obviously not.
Before god supposedly created the universe there must have been nothing, but there would still be a god. So there is no correlation between the existence of a god and existence of observable matter.
Another answer could be to explain how the big bang expanded the universe out of a gravitational singularity etc. But this would presuppose that they understood science.
And saying that god caused the big bang is just an assertion without evidence. My magical fairy makes lightening....

2. I have written about the field of Abiogenesis at least twice on this blog. Mostly here though.
But if he is referring to how did everything created in the big bang turn into stars and planets etc then it will take a lot longer to explain. It's quite complicated but from what I understand of it the universe was full of matter which clumped together and condensed into stars using nuclear fusion. These stars created heavier elements which then spread out into the universe to form planetary disks. These disks are separated out by gravity to form planets. It goes on from there and would be better addressed by a science book.

3. Evolution explains wings very well. There are dozens of books on wing, eye, heart etc evolution, all of the common toys of the irreducible complexity argument. There is plenty of information on the Internet to answer this question. But here is a good article on the myth that half a wing is no good.

4. The Cambrian explosion was a relatively fast period of evolution around 530 million years ago. But when religious people hear 'explosion' they don't realise that it was still spread over a period of 145 million years. It's not like everything suddenly appeared out of nowhere, like some religious people would have you believe.
Nor does this discredit evolution in any way. In fact the Cambrian explosion is not considered a major evolutionary event, but merely a genetic threshold being crossed allowing more species to evolve.
The possible causes of this are numerous and range from increased oxygen levels, genetic bottlenecks caused by glaciation, to increased calcium in seawater etc.
I am not going to babble on about something which has been studied and found to be fact. The Cambrian explosion doesn't need defending.
As for the fossil record not showing gradual change, I have talked about the fossil record before here. I suggest you read it.

5. Once again, a question I have talked about before. Morals are tricky because you need to decide your position way in advance before you argue it. If you are going to suggest that morals are innate then you need to be able to answer why you think that. If you think that morals come from society then you need to ask yourself why you think that.
Personally I think morals are innate. Or at least the core morals are, such as don't steal, don't murder etc. Morals that can be debated like whether abortion is right or wrong are not innate. They aren't innate because our ancestors never had to deal with this question and therefore was never embedded into our genetics. We used to live in small family groups so we learnt the disadvantages of murdering your own group members, because you wouldn't be able to hunt as well so there would be less food and therefore someone might die.
You could also mention the Euthyphro dilemma, as talked about here.

6. Giving only two options is never kind, but I will play there game. From what we see in the observable evidence we would have to conclude that matter arranged itself through natural mechanisms into complex structures and organisms. You can shout and cry about it being 'impossible', but this is what we see and without any observable divine guidance.
Something worth mentioning is that any divine creator guiding all of the universes matter would have to be incredibly complex himself. So how did the creator get created?
A silly point I know, but I enjoy asking.

7. A very good question. But it requires a very long and complicated answer.
I am not a scientist, but luckily scientists are pretty hot on this question so I can refer you to no less than 3 websites capable on answering this question. Here, here and here. In the future I might sit down and laboriously write a piece explaining this in detail.

What I can tell you is that this is an argument from ignorance. I can't answer this question so god must have done it. There is an answer and it pays better to work hard to find the answer instead of wheeling god out to explain it. God is not an explanation, it is a failure to understand and explain.

8. Very easy. Because a signal shooting through space at the speed of light with a message on it would only ever come from an intelligent life form. There is no naturally occuring space radio transmitting prime numbers as far as we can tell. The genetic code is very different, but not completly understood. The fact that we attribute letters to form a pattern is our doing, not natures. It is not 'read' in our sense of the word.

9. If I die and I am stood before the god of the bible then I would not be ashamed of my atheism. I jusge what is true or not by whether it has evidence to support it. If god had evidence then I would be happy to believe that a god exists.
I might even borrow Bertrand Russels quote when he was asked what he would say if asked by god why he didn't believe in him, "Not enough evidence god, not enough evidence".

But why the god of the bible? Why not the mormon, Hindu, Muslim god? Why not a god that we haven't even thought of? A god that judges the success of ones life by the volume of coffee drank?
All have an equal amount of evidence and therefore an equal chance of being true.

10. So if a Christian managed to answer all of my questions about god would I convert?
No, because that isn't providing evidence for his existence and it doesn't mean that his answers are correct.

This guy also mentions that god can forgive you for any sin. Is this supposed to make religious people moral? Whats stopping you from going crazy and then getting saved? Complete bollocks.

If an atheist calls himself an atheist because he is angry with god, then he is not an atheist. It's that simple. For you to call yourself an atheist you need to not believe a god exists, therefore there is nothing to be angry at.

I might do a few more of these in the future. They are fun.

If only all news reporters looked like this.

2012-01-07T21:30:00.000Z

You wake up, get dressed and flip on the news. Each day it seems that more and more things are going wrong. Economic recession, terrorist attacks, creationism on the rise etc

Everyone knows that when you are delivering bad news it matters how you deliver it.

So wouldn't the world be a better place if your bad news was delivered by a news anchor that looked like this...

All I am saying is that I would start my day a lot happier if Melissa Theuriau (the french reporter pictured above) told me that the Euro was in the pits and not some sweaty old man who looks like he has stumbled out of a geriatrics ward.

Just a thought.

Atheists seem to overlook one very important question - A response.

2012-01-07T16:34:00.001Z

My attention today was brought to the Mansfield News Journal website today. On it was just a small statement about atheists sent in by a Mervin Mosier (good stage name) and makes for an interesting insight into the argument from ignorance.

Here it is -

For the atheist:

You claim that God, Jesus and Satan are only a myth. Of course, this is only the atheist's way of believing, which you are entitled to.
Now if what you are saying is true, then answer this question: How did the first living animal and the first living human being come about? I'm quite sure they didn't come into existence by an atheist; therefore, the only answer and the only logical one is by God.

Mervin Mosier

Lexington

He poses a question which I am more than happy to answer.

How did the first living animal come about?

Not an easy question to answer for sure, but not a hard question to speculate using current scientific evidence.

There are many theories (in the normal sense of the word) about where life first came from, and rest assured that there are people all around the world working on a definite answer for this very question.

The one I hear most about and therefore possibly the most highly regarded is Abiogenesis, or life from non-life. I am not going to babble on about it now, because it is quite complicated. But I did write a bit about it here.

Where humans came from is a lot easier to answer since we have boat loads of evidence to point us in the right direction.

Humans came through evolution, as did every other living thing we see today. There is a fantastic article on Wikipedia about human evolution and is well worth a read. So humans came from evolution (from fish called Placoderm, specifically) following Abiogenesis. Job done.

A Placoderm

What is more interesting than the question though, is the last sentence.

I'm quite sure they didn't come into existence by an atheist; therefore, the only answer and the only logical one is by God.

It's hard to know where to start. Why is there always this application of anthropomorphism to natural processes as if they always need someone to keep them going or give them a running push?

Needless to say, people weren't around at that time so no-one was there, be it a theist or an atheist, to help things into existence.

This is also where the argument from ignorance comes in. I want to make this very clear. If we throw away the idea of Abiogenesis, life crashing to earth in a meteor, and all other theories covering the beginning of life, this would not warrant the need for a god.

God is not an answer. It is the failure to come up with a reasonable answer that sounds logical.

How do earthquakes happen? I have no idea, so it must be god.

The world doesn't work that way. There is an answer and scientists will persevere to find the answers despite certain ignorant religious people not wanting their 'god hypothesis' to be challenged.

Why the story of Adam and Eve is messed up.

2012-01-06T16:58:00.000Z

Sorry about the lack of posts over the last few days, but I have been super busy getting ready for University on Sunday.

I never really see articles picking holes in the Adam and Eve story, despite the fact that an infant could do it.

This is probably that not many people are stupid enough to take it literally. My cousin once told me that she literally believed that we came from Adam and Eve. I didn't dignify her with a reply. I just stared her in the eyes until she apologised and took it back.

I am going to overlook some of the larger and more obvious mistakes about this little tale, and bring some things to your attention.

Adam and Eve had two sons. Cain and Abel. So where did the children come from after that?

Confusing right? This was brought up in the Scopes trial and the Christian defendant failed to answer where Cains wife came from.

So where did this mystery women come from?

Well although Cain and Abel are the only children named, the bible does say that Adam and Eve had both sons and daughters.

So this is the Christian apologists answer. Cain must have had sex with one of his sisters......

Unfortunately, this only complicates matters. Firstly, it defies one of the 613 biblical laws, specifically the one prevented brothers from sleeping with their sisters (Lev 18:9). But Christian apologists have an answer to this as well. They say that since the human race came from two people, then everyone is brother and sister, and therefore the law is not relevant.

They may even refer to Abraham marrying his half-sister and god blessing the union to show that god approves.

Do I even need to respond to this? Fine, I will. The humans race didn't come from two people (Adam and Eve), therefore this argument is useless.

The next problem we encounter with the massive frequency of incest it would have required in those days is the obvious biological implications. We all know that you risk having majorly deformed or disabled children as a result of not spreading the genes apart.

A study into children as a result of brother-sister relations found that 20 of 29 children had serious abnormalities.

Christian apologists have no problem with this. Although questionable, they put deformations down to sin and not from having children with your sister. One site I went on even claimed that the reason people have long hair is to hide their deformed ears they received from sinning.

This is all obviously nonsense and I feel no obligation to explain any further.

I might do a part 2 for this, because there is so much easy stuff to pick apart in the Adam and Eve story.

The lowdown on the Miller/Urey Experiment.

2012-01-04T16:38:00.000Z

The Miller/Urey experiment is the flagship experiment on working out whether life can come from non-life.

In 1953, Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey, working at the University of Chicago, took gases which were thought to make up the early earths atmosphere (Methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water) and ran a continuous electric current through them to simulate the early earths volatile weather system.

A continuous electric current is a bit vague. Specifically the water was heated to enduce evaporation and sparks were fired between the electrodes to simulate lightening.

After a week of continuous operation Miller and Urey observed that as much as 10 - 15% of the carbon within the system had formed amino acids. Stanley Miller later said that a spark in even the most basic pre-biotic experiment would yield 11 of the 20 amino acids.

This experiments caused a plethora of copy-cat experiments. One of the most significant of the subsequent findings was that RNA and DNA nucleobases could be obtained through simulated prebiotic chemistry with a reducing atmosphere (atmosphere with less oxygen).

So what does this all mean?

It means that we are mind-blowingly close to being able to artificially create everything needed for life.

Although it is now thought that the earths early atmosphere had significant amounts of iron and carbon, and less nitrates, this is largely irrelevant. It is irrelevant because it is not a matter of making the experiment identical to the earths early conditions, it is just a matter of seeing if life from non-life is possible.

Although we might not have the entire picture on the beginnings of life, but we have made enormous progress over the last 60 years in clearing it up.

And one thing is for sure. As much as religious people like to state that scientists don't have all the answers about the origins of life, we won't find the answers staring at an old piece of 1st century symbolic literature.

Mindless Google Farming.

2012-01-04T12:57:00.000Z

Through this blogging format I can see what people googled to end up on my blog.

There are some pretty weird things like 'dragons', 'animal fetuses', 'mohammad,s anal sex cartoon' etc.

But I was wondering if I put one post filled with things that are likely to be googled then will this make a difference on my views?

So here it goes.

Rebecca Black

Google +

Ryan Dunn

Casey Anthony

Battlefield 3

iPhone 5

Adele

Tepco

Steve Jobs

IPad 2

Lets see if this works.

Don't worry, this doesn't count as todays post.

A debate with a moron.

2012-01-03T11:16:00.000Z

Around once a year I run into someone that it is hard to believe doesn't belong in a home, being fed mashed up spinach by a nurse.

Yesterday was one of those days. I joined the 'Creationism and the Origin of Life' page on Facebook just to see what arguments the creationists were using.

When you join the page you will be asked the 'GOLDEN QUESTION' by a delightful man by the name of Chad Ak Elliot. The golden question is essentially whether you believe the universe began at some point from pure nothingness or if you believe that space and time are eternal.

Before you rush to answer it doesn't matter what you say. I said both options to see what the response would be and I was told twice, "Did you know that this is illogical and has no evidence?"

I ignored these responses and decided to try to convince him of a third option.

Despite my best efforts Chad simply refused to accept that 'I don't know' is a valid third option. It is ok to not know. Not knowing the answer does not warrant a cheap and easy supernatural answer. I don't hear a bang in the distance and assume it is a ghost because I can't be sure of it being anything else.

I assume that Chad then got intimidated by my sexual prowess and decided to ban me.

And not content with blocking my ability to comment, he decided to save face that he would delete all of my comments.

Chad is both accounts, and occasionally has conversations with himself to make his page seem more popular.

Obviously this guy is retarded to a level previously unknown to science. It is also worth mentioning that at the start of our conversation I received many Facebook messages telling me not to bother and that he would just delete my comments and claim victory.

Obviously I ignored them and have probably accidentally strengthened him in his faith.

Overall......a good insight into the internal functioning of an irrational mind.

No True Scotsman Fallacy.

2012-01-02T21:13:00.000Z

No True Scotsman is a logical fallacy where someone tries to disassociate themselves from an unpleasant act by saying that no true member of their group would do such a thing.

This fallacy is often used by the religious when more fundamentalist members blow up an abortion clinic or attempt to assassinate a cartoon artist.

Muslim clerics are often caught using this fallacy when they condemn suicide bombers by saying they are not 'true muslims'.

Christians also happily utilise it when one of their many members commits one of the many crimes for which the religion is guilty.

Even atheists fall prey to this fallacy occasionally. It would be a fallacy to say that no true atheist would believe in ghosts or UFO abductions etc.

So why is this a fallacy?

Because if a Christian claims that a rapist is not a 'true christian' there is nothing in the word 'Christian' that makes rape impossible, in fact if you read the bible the act is almost encouraged (think of Lot and his daughters).

If the same Christian was to say that a true christian wouldn't worship Satan then this would be correct and they would not be guilty of the fallacy.

Just some handy knowledge to bear in mind :)

How to convert an Atheist.

2012-01-01T20:23:00.000Z

So on the 'Wiki How' website there is a nice little guide to converting an Atheist to Christianity.

Being an atheist I am curious as to the advice that is being given to Christians to attempt to convert me and others like me. So I will go through the guide and point out any potential problems with it, which I will write in red.

1. Know your own reasons for doing this. Are you trying to convert them because their atheism makes you uncomfortable with your own faith or makes you angry? Consider how important your religion is to you.

Good so far. I am confused why someone would be angry that other people are atheist though.

2. Imagine how they feel about their beliefs. They likely hold their beliefs as settled and true to them, so pressuring towards conversion is an act of disrespect. You cannot force belief in God on anyone. If they are interested in talking about the Gospel, then do it. However, don't take every opportunity to inject your beliefs in detail. It becomes quickly annoying and counterproductive.

I would say that generally atheists are quite open-minded and willing to consider all of the evidence, which is usually how they ended up at atheism in the first place.

3. Show genuine interest. If your only interest is in converting them, you are not likely to get a warm audience. If you are going to convince them of anything one on one, you have to first take a genuine interest in that person's point of view. If you find yourself pushing to talk more than patiently listening, this is probably not the case.

If you had other interests than converting the atheist to christianity then you wouldn't be reading a guide on how to convert an atheist.

4. Pray to God in private. Christians believe that it is up to God, ultimately, to convince people to follow him (John 6:44, 16:13). The Bible also says that a Christian is supposed to "pray in the closet" (Matthew 6:5-6). This means that you're not supposed to pray in public to impress someone. If God is going to answer your prayer and convince the atheist, then he would do so whether the atheist hears it or not. Most atheists have been prayed at by many people. They tend to find it extremely annoying and presumptuous. In fact, ending a failed attempt to conversion by saying "I will pray for you" is often seen as an ugly attempt to get a last dig in. That only hurts your goals.

I personally don't mind when religious people pray for me. When I was in Kiev a few weeks ago my friend prayed before every meal. I get told almost daily that I will be prayed for, and it doesn't bother me at all. Praying is essentially talking to yourself, so knock yourself out.

5. Do your homework. If you are a Christian and you believe that the Bible is the direct word of God, then have you read most of the Bible and the Gospels? If not, you may find the person you are trying to convert is better versed in the Bible than you. Remember that atheists live in a world that is mostly religious. They've had to defend their beliefs much more than a Christian who lives in a mostly Christian society would. So, they're generally good at it. Do not accuse them of being unwilling to learn if they opt to not listen to you. It might be that they know many philosophical arguments on religion.

This is a very good point. Many religious people argue with atheist without any knowledge of their holy book. If you are religious and are considering debating an Atheist then go right now and read your bible, Quran, Vedas etc from cover to cover. Because nearly every bible quote has a contradictory quote, so if I know the contradictory quote and you don't then you will look like an idiot.

6. Understand their arguments. If you're going to present an argument for your beliefs, skim over what atheists have said about such arguments in the past. This may show interest and respect for the other person's thoughts and time. You might try resources like the About.com atheism FAQ or Positive Atheism, but don't take it too literally. It's an entirely different "world view" perspective.

Atheism isn't a world view. But It might come paired with a sceptical, naturalist world view.

7. Research how atheists experience conversion. What arguments have they heard (and dismissed)? What tactics have been used before (and failed)?

Good, but might leave very few arguments left.

8. Show by conduct how Christianity has impacted your own life in a positive way. Remember: "People don't light a lamp and put it under a basket but on a lamp stand, and it gives light to everyone."(Matthew 5:15-16). Quoting the Bible at every possible opportunity may be a bit much, yet saying "I thank God for... (something that goes your way)" should be fine. However, explain that:

"All good things come from God." Some atheists will wonder why God bothers to bless you with a parking space, help your football team win or set a twenty-dollar bill in your path when people starve to death every day--be realistic of how that seems to them! Also, the atheist will generally not just accept that "God did X" just because you say so. The atheist has a naturalistic view of the world and generally may come up with answers other than "God did it,", although you believe God can and does control your daily pathway.

"You and I are the hands of God, and He expects us to give water, other help and good things to those in need."
- It may also be useful to tell your friend about people you've met at church. When listing their good qualities, include that they are "religious" as a very far side note. Their religious fervor is not going to impress the atheist.

It is true that mentioning friends you met at church and personal experiences will not interest an atheist. So stick to evidence of god. Personal testimony is NOT evidence of god.

9. Be honest if feel your Christianity is being mocked. Give respect to the atheist, but also insist on respect for yourself. Discussion need not turn to angry, harsh argument or put downs. Don't accept something said in a mean spirit without letting the person know how it makes you feel. However, realize that while you deserve respect, your ideas should stand on their own merit. Don't be thin skinned when your beliefs are challenged. Also, what you might think is mocking you, may have a serious point that can be explicitly addressed. Don't just assume that the mocking is out of a mean spirited motive. Before reacting, make sure you understand the point made and keep a "cool" (compassionate) attitude.

Good. Unfortunately many religious people are quick to attack and slow to understand.

10. Avoid the standard dismissive response: "Well, they are not true Christians," when asked about prominent or pervasive offenders (often committed by politicians, evangelists, preachers, etc.) within the faith. This is called a fallacy of ambiguity, often referred to as the "No True Scotsman" fallacy and it will be broken apart within seconds of you uttering it. Avoid making excuses for such people, because these people are often responsible for discriminating against the rest of society for what they have done themselves. Never defend hypocrisy or pretend it doesn't exist in your faith.

Very true. I am starting to like this article.

11. Be ready to have your own faith challenged. You might get confronted with well formulated arguments. Many atheist who are interested in Christianity might be able to explain evolution, the big bang or other scientific theories in an easily understandable way. They might refer to solid scientific evidence and people who support these theories. Before starting a discussion, you must accept that this is a possibility.

Yep. Get ready to have your irrational belief in an invisible deity torn to pieces whilst desperately trying to block out any evidence thrown at you and reassure yourself that you will end up in a heaven which encapsulates wishful thinking.

Discussions

1. Find out why this particular atheist may feel the way he does. Has your friend always felt that there is no [caring] creator? Has something happened in their life, or do they feel that religious leaders are hypocritical? Whatever the reason is, you need to get to the core of their beliefs. Do not ask if he doesn't believe because God made him mad. It's a nonsensical question. You don't disbelieve your neighbor exists if he makes you mad. Most often, atheists don't believe because of rational reasoning and not emotional trauma, so don't bring up emotional trauma or be prepared to lose credibility.

A great point here that more Christians should pay attention to. Atheists don't hate or dislike your god. Do you hate unicorns? Of course not, because you (hopefully) don't believe they exist.

2. An atheist will want definite evidence, not just a rehearsal of your faith. You'll have to provide concrete facts and scientifically thought out arguments. Your beliefs based on faith, Christian love and joy of worship (all immaterial things) are not evidence to the unbeliever. In fact, a reliance on faith may be evidence to the atheist that you aren't relying on facts.

He that comes looking for God must believe that He is and that He rewards those who seek Him early, not as game -- for without faith it is impossible to please God... (Hebrews 11:6)

Yep, please give us the evidence that a god exists. Oh....a bible quote.....awesome.

3. Discuss that human brains work with faith, opinion and many other things than just intellectual/theoretical logic. If you do not know much about how the brain works, then avoid trying to be the expert. Atheists may be versed in their facts and opinions in such scientific areas. When things go beyond your capability to define it, then having faith in something larger than natural processes can bring you peace, but not for those who disagree.

The last sentence is very telling. When things start to confuse you because they are complicated or only vaguely understood, then pretend big brother is working for you and is in control.

4. Discuss how the support of the church can help in one's life. Discuss the good that your church has done recently, but don't assume that the church is the only source of good works. Often, the atheist is already involved in charitable works that are non-sectarian.

By all means discuss your charity work and I would be very willing to exchange charitable stories with you. But it is hardly evidence or proof of any god.

5. Before you try to argue against scientific theories, such as evolution and the "Big Bang," learn more about them. Gain perspective on them from places besides religious view points. Atheists may tend to be versed in their ideas of sciences, and may be put off by your bringing up what they may call stale, old arguments.

Realize that human theories are not evidence whether God exists or not. This includes arguments that require the person to accept your beliefs of how life came about, how "ideal" the Earth is, or how the Big Bang happened. They have already decided. The fact that we don't know everything about the origins of life does not demonstrate to the "unbeliever" that God did it. Not listening to their views on "science" may cause the atheist to shut down to anything else you might say.
If you don't know the answer to something, don't simply say that God is responsible for it."I don't know" is many more times preferable to an atheist than what they perceive as crediting the creator.

If you have scientific evidence that a god exists then atheists will be more than willing to hear it. But bear in mind that you are not the first person to attempt this.

6. Talk about the thousands of "precisely" balanced and regulated bio-chemical and electrical systems in the body. Evolution explains this, however, so be prepared.

Haha I love this point. "Point out evolution and attribute it to god". Will only work with children and the illiterate.

7. Talk about how precisely designed the earth is. However, be prepared that "designed" necessitates allowing for a "designer," the very one you're trying to convince them of. It probably won't work.

Another point recommended and then thrown out the window because it won't work.

8. Talk about the numerous instances of well-documented miracles, citing examples. Be prepared for the argument that what we call "miracles" are actually not impossible feats, just highly improbable. And these "miracles" happen with such rarity that they can be reasonably explained that even with the rarest of odds, those rare odds do occur.

Miracle stories carry the same weight as Loch Ness monster sightings and ghost stories. They should be avoided if you want to remain credible.

9. Counter their evidence. Their evidence is sometimes from atheistic scientists who portray their results in ways specifically conceived to disprove the existence of God, so use research from Christian scientists to rebuff their arguments.

Do not use obviously false evidence (e.g. irreducible complexity). These concepts are already popular and some atheist who is interested in honest discussions knows them and may dismiss them without listening.

Amazing. Combat potential bias with more bias? If your idea of refuting scientific evidence that contradicts the idea of a god is to point out that the scientist is probably an atheist, then you have already lost.

10. Use logic. Remember that some aspects of God and his existence cannot be explained logically, but the origin of life cannot be explained. The details of secularism may prompt the atheist to dismiss God, but remind him that, as Creator and the all knowing and on an altogether higher plane of understanding than man, that he is not bound by nature or man's concepts of theories of time, space and cosmology.

I don't want to mock but if the Christian was versed in using reason and logic then he/she probably wouldn't be a Christian. The origin of life may not be explained completely yet, but this doesn't mean that a god needs to be wheeled in to fill in the gaps we don't understand.

11. Provide arguments against the Big Bang theory. Show the lack of logic of how trillions of genes simply appeared without a mother cell and no prior life. The single cell is vastly interdependent, organized and not known by science to form except by a parent life form (mother nature is not a parent life form).

You had just better hope that the atheist you are talking to doesn't have a good understanding of biology or physics. If they do, then prepared to get owned.

Predictions in George Orwells 1984 (Satire)

2011-12-31T10:53:00.000Z

The Quran makes many claims to be filled with many cryptic messages. Fairly bizarre passages are there to apparently predict various historical events, but it doesn't stop there.

The Quran also is supposed to make accurate calculations about the speed of light (it doesn't) and other scientific discoveries just through a bit of number shuffling.

To demonstrate how easy this would be to do with any book I have grabbed the nearest book to me. It happened to be George Orwells 1984, so lets see how prophetic it is.

Because this book was written in 1948, I will be looking for events that occurred after this.
My ideal choice of book would have been one by James Joyce, but that wouldn't make this a fair test.

Lets get started!

'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.' pg 3

The very first sentence is obviously predicting the explosion of Apollo 13's fuel tank in 1970, which happened 22 years later! It happened on April the 13th and 'bright, cold' is obviously describing the contrast between the coldness of space and the brightness of the fire.
This is easier than I thought.

'He was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.' pg 9

This prophetic passage is obviously predicting the El Nino weather phenomenon, which occurred in either 1983 or 1984 (1944 or 1945 plus 39). The El Nino southern oscillation caused extreme weather in many regions of the world.

'WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.' pg 18

This passage occurs twice in this book, and looks very good for some numeracy warping.
There are 45 letters in this. There are 3 lines and it occurs twice. So 45 times 3, divided by 2 = 67.5
So what happened in the fifth month of 1967?
Well of course it is predicting the 'Innovation' department store in Belgium which burned down, killing 323 people.

'He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been.' pg 78

This prediction couldn't be more obvious. What happened in 1973? The Watergate scandal. It also happened on April 30th, which is obviously what was meant by 'thirty seconds'. You would have to be blind to miss this obvious display of prophetic ability.

'Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Winston woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine.' pg 150

This passage is harder to decipher, but I am sure that it is predicting the gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995. The mention of sleep is in reference to the effects of Sarin (the chemical used), which attacks the eyes and blinded several people. Whats the significance of 'nine', well around 900 millilitres of Sarin was used in the attack.

'...but it was probable that already the mouth of the Congo was a battlefield,' pg 301

In 1948 the Congo wasn't involved in a war, but shortly after the Congo erupted into a string of conflicts(1960-2009). Coincidence? I think not!

So why did I look through a randomly chosen book for prophetic passages? Well all I am trying to show is that any book can be cherry picked for sentences that look like they predict things. This can be done with any book in any language, and with a book as loosely written and translated as the Bible or Quran it is almost a guarantee.

So was '1984' divinely inspired? No, it's just that predictions are easy.

Mayans never predicted the end of the world in 2012.

2011-12-30T20:04:00.001Z

Blog passed 100,000 hits a few days ago! Thanks guys!

Next year marks the end of the 5,126 year cycle started on 3,114 BC by the Mayans, predicting the return of Bolon Yokte, the Mayan god of war and creation.

"We have to be clear about this. There is no prophecy for 2012," said Erik Velasquez, an etchings specialist at the the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). "It's a marketing fallacy."

The National Institute of Anthropological History in Mexico has been trying to quell the barrage of forecasters predicting the apocalypse. "The West's messianic thinking has distorted the world view of ancient civilizations like the Mayans," the institute said in a statement.

The Mayan calender divides into 394-year segments called Baktuns. The Mayans also held the number 13 as sacred. The Mayans didn't think to make their calender 14 Baktuns because of their special affection with the number 13.

At the time I am sure that they didn't think of the reprecusions because it was over 5,000 years in the future. But now 5,000 years later we have started to project our 'end of the world' fears onto the fact that this calender ends next year. I am sure that if this calender ended in 2002, or 2345 we would be fretting about our well-being at that time as well.

Another fact worth mentioning is that of the 15,000 Mayan texts that have been discovered, the year 2012 is mentioned only twice. If it really was the end of the world then I would think that it would be a rather big deal.

New Years.

2011-12-30T18:05:00.000Z

Sorry about the lack of posts over the last few days, but I have managed to get super ill just in time for all of the New year parties! Yay!

My minister credentials arrived today, making me an officially ordained minister able to perform baptisms, weddings etc.

Proper posts will resume tomorrow.

Debunking 9/11 Theories - Part 2

2011-12-28T10:45:00.000Z

As promised here is part 2 of the new 'Debunking 9/11 Theories' series. If you missed part 1 find it here.

Today I will focus entirely on the Collapse of WTC 7.

Seven hours after the two towers fell, the WTC 7 building fell. This was not due to fire, but rather a controlled demolition.

Many conspiracy theorists incorrectly believe that WTC 7 suffered little damage during the collapse of the towers.

The truth is that falling debris from the collapse of WTC 1 created a massive 10-story gash at about 25% of its depth. This ruptured large pressurised fuel line and ignited massive fires. Additionally the building had several diesel tanks used for emergency generators. All this time the large tank in the basement is still feeding fuel through the pipes to the fire.

There was no fire fighting in WTC 7 due to the potential for it to collapse, so the fires rages uncontrolled for 7 hours until it collapsed.

After 7 hours of uncontrolled fires, a steel girder on floor 13 lost its connection to one of the 81 columns supporting the building. The whole of floor 13 collapsed, beginning a cascade of floor failures to floor 5. Additional columns, now not supported by a girder, buckled and caused a systematic collapse running from East to West.
This is known as a 'Progressive collapse' when damage moves from one structural element to another.

So there you go, no need for your conspiracy theories about WTC 7 anymore thanks.

A debating defeat.

2011-12-27T20:23:00.000Z

I have been super busy today so I don't have time for a long post, but instead I will endeavour to write a nice long one tomorrow.

So yesterday I suffered what is probably my first ever debating defeat. I was challenging a group of Christians to answer 'What evidence would you require to stop your belief in god?'

This was a perfectly normal question I thought. It got a mixed reply and I discovered that most of the evidence required was largely philosophical and could therefore always be twisted to not mean anything to the person being challenged.

But there was one person willing to put their entire faith on the idea that Jesus's Resurrection actually happened, taking the Gospels as truth.

I won't get into details, but I managed to corner myself quite disastrously with all 6 or so Christians taking full advantage of the hole I had managed to dig myself into.

But today while driving to my Nan's I pondered on it for a while and many possible questions came flooding into my head.

Are you aware that eye-witness testimony has been proven to be unreliable?
But the gospel writers most likely never met Jesus.
There is eye-witness in other holy books, do you take them to be fact as well?
Why isn't there any archaeological evidence to match these claims?
Even if these people claimed it happened, does that mean it actually did?
Filling in one gap about Jesus's life doesn't make the entire bible or indeed the existence of a mystical deity true.
The gospels conflict so many times at this point, how do we know they didn't fabricate the story?

The list goes on and on.

So take this as a warning kids. If you are going to dive down a hole in a debate, make sure you know what you are talking about. Because if you show just a hint of misunderstanding or lack of knowledge, then your opponents will tear you apart,

Tomorrow I will post the second part of the new series, 9/11 Myth debunked. Part 1 here.

Why Muslims should hate Pepsi.

2011-12-26T12:02:00.000Z

Firstly, HAPPY HOLIDAYS! I hope you have all had lots of nice presents etc, and if you don't celebrate the C-bomb then I just hope you have had a nice few days.

I came across this rather hilarious video this morning, so I thought I would share it with you.

It is of a Mulsim Cleric Hazem Abu Ismail babbling on about the evils of Pepsi on Egyptian TV. (watch it here)

Here is the transcript of his inept televised idiocy -

Do you know what the word 'Pepsi' means?
Pepsi as in P-E-P-S-I.

The first P stands for 'Pay'. E stands for 'Every'. The third letter stands for 'Penny'. A penny means any small coin you recieve and don't know what to do with. Pay it to 'Saving', I - 'Israel'.

In other words, pay every small coin you recieve in order to save Israel. They don't want money from you - they want your small change, your pennies. If I'm not mistaken, in American economics, a penny is a 1/1,000th of a dollar. It's not even worth a piaster. It's only a millime. At least I think it's worth a millime, not even a piaster.

They say: "Donate the small change you don't need, but give it to the right cause. If you collect small change, you can buy this drink." They took the first letter of each word - 'Pay Every Penny Saving Israel' - And they formed the word 'PEPSI'.

When you pay (to buy Pepsi) you are saving Israel. I am not talking just about Pepsi, but about Coca Cola and all of them. I don't want to specify the products. See for yourselves. You are Muslims. You can tell me. I don't know. My little son knows more about the boycott than me. When we go shopping, he says to me : 'Buy this, don't buy that.' He knows them by heart. He has become an expert in this.

But what does this tell us?

Other than showing that he has very little knowledge of American currency and that his son has a talent for memorising brand names, I think it highlights a need for central leadership in Islam.

Islam has become like a crowded market place, with each cleric and Imaam selling their own special kind of crazy. The problem is that each preaching cleric will make sense to a small gullible group of Muslims. This would be ok if they were just preaching about the dangers of Pepsi, but they aren't. This Cleric could have just as easily been shouting about the need for destruction in the West, death to the Israelis etc. Thankfully boycotting American products is about as far as his train of thought took him.

The 613 (not 10) commandments.

2011-12-23T22:41:00.000Z

Christians like to bring up the ten commandments. They are supposed to be followed to the letter. Now lets ignore some rather absurd commandments (e.g. not to covert your neighbours oxen), instead we should focus on the fact that most Christians forget that the bible goes on to list another 603 biblical laws.

These, supposedly, should also be followed as closely as the first 10.

So why aren't they?

Because they include some pretty bat shit insane laws.
I am not going to list them all, you can find them here, but I will instead mention a few of the nuttier ones.

Number 17 - Do not embarrass others - Leviticus 19:17
20 - Not to take revenge - Leviticus 19:18 (Maybe Christians should actual follow this one)
60 - Not to be superstitious - Leviticus 19:26 (LOL)
62 - Do not engage in astrology - Leviticus 19:26
69 - Men must not shave their beards with a razor - Leviticus 19:27
72 - No tattoos - Leviticus 19:28
120 - Courts must decide when a new month begins - Exodus 12:2
123 - No sex before marriage - Deuteronomy 23:18
132,133 - The female victim must marry her rapist, and he can never divorce her - Deuteronomy 22:29

139 to 161 lists people in your family that you can't have sex with. Although it doesn't mention cousins, your son or grand parents - Leviticus 18:9-20

234 - Do not plant diverse seeds together - Leviticus 19:19
373 - Sacrifice two lambs every day - Numbers 28:3
475 - Always repay a debt - Leviticus 19:13
479 - Don't ignore a lost object - Deuteronomy 22:3
504 - Purchase a slave within the prescribed laws - Exodus 21:2

545 to 556 - The courts must stone, burn, kill people with swords, strangle, not let witches live, stone those who commit blasphemy and give lashes - Various Exodus and Deuteronomy.

The Euthyphro Dilemma - Gods morals exposed.

2011-12-23T09:10:00.000Z

You may have heard of the Euthyphro Dilemma. It is dilemma found in Platos dialogue with Euthyphro. Socrates asks Euthyphro : "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

Meaning - Are things moral because god has said them, or has god said them because they are moral?

If god is saying them (the ten commandments etc) because they are moral, then they are moral independent of god and we don't need him to parrot what we would already objectively know.

If they are good because god is saying them, then anything god says is moral and the bible should be followed to the letter (including killing your family because they don't believe in god etc) because it is the word of god and everything he says is moral.
God could say tomorrow "Kill every other baby by dropping it into a well", and it would become perfectly moral.

Obviously people wouldn't want to start dropping babies down wells. Why? Because it's immoral. This drags us back to the first point, that morals are independent of any gods.

After scanning through a few Christian websites I found a reply to this apparent dilemma.

"The Euthyphro dilemma is actually a false dichotomy. That is, it proposes only two options when another is possible. The third option is that good is based on God’s nature. God appeals to nothing other than his own character for the standard of what is good, and then reveals what is good to us. It is wrong to lie because God cannot lie (Titus 1:2), not because God had to discover lying was wrong or that he arbitrarily declared it to be wrong."

If these morals are underlying in his own character, then surely they are his own morals to follow. He did not invent them, they are simply part of his character and he follows them unwillingly. This takes us back to the first point again.
If they are part of gods character then it follows that he had no choice in putting them there. Following on from that, it means that they are innate and therefore objective and independent of god. If he isn't deciding these morals (just being born with them) then they are natural and not being decreed by him.

Theres a lot of very plainly stated, evil deeds that are required to be committed by followers of god in the bible, but people don't follow them. Why? Because morals are naturally innate within us. Serial killers and murderers can normally be found to have some sort of serious psychological problems, separating their morals from ours.

My trip to Chernobyl.

2011-12-22T19:00:00.028Z

Literally just got off the plane from Kiev, Ukraine a few hours ago.
I won't bore you with the details of the first day, but instead shall skip to yesterday, when I went to Chernobyl.

I got up at 7am to meet my group outside the hotel on Independence Square, the heart of snow-covered Kiev. Despite standing exactly where I had been told to wait, I couldn't see my group.
I phoned up the Chernobyl tour office and the guy standing next to me answered his phone.
I turned around and realised that I was standing right next to the tour guide.

Me and the 4 other people in my group then endured a 2 and a half hour ride in a very comfortable minibus into the depths of the Ukrainian countryside. Apparently Chernobyl will still be radioactive for at least another 800 years, but no-one had told our driver. He drove at crazy speeds, commonly overtaking 5 cars at a time.

We passed through two military checkpoints to get into the inner exclusion zone near the blown reactor. We stopped at some abandoned tanks. The background radiation was 0.2, but when held near the tanks the device would show well over 50 and the geiger counter would start making alarm noises.

Next we went to the reactor itself. I was surprised by the amount of construction going on around the plant. Over 20 countries are pooling together to build a new $1bn cover for the reactor. You aren't allowed to take photos from the little office near the reactor, but there is a monument outside which can be used as an excuse to aim your camera in its general direction.

Prypiat was the town near Chernobyl when the disaster happened. Once home to 50,000 people, it is now a ghost town. Wandering through the destroyed buildings and the famous abandoned fairground, it is almost a moving experience. It is the small details that grab your attention. The shoes, the clocks that have stopped and the empty swimming pool.

183 times the normal background radiation!

Overall a fantastic (if not very cold) experience. But expect to be scanned several times for radiation before being allowed to leave.

No posts

2011-12-19T12:17:00.002Z

There will be no new posts until the 23rd, because I am going to Kiev, Ukraine for a few days.

:)