Postings were light last week and will probably be light again this week, because I have job issues to deal with. Doesn’t leave much time for blogging. I’ll try to squeak an article or two in.
Another thing that doesn’t leave much time for blogging is following a link on another blog and ending up at a hilarious web site and spending the next two hours reading all of the back posts. I am referring to Monkey Fluids, which just killed two hours of my evening. Two hours which I have no regrets over.
The site is brilliant! I just added it to my RSS reader. You must do the same. What the guy does is take illustrations from old kids’ magazines and recaptions them. To whet your appetite, here are five of my favorites.
As you’ve all heard by now, Mike Huckabee finally gave up his hopeless quest for the White House on Tuesday. He will now return to his hopeless quest of waiting for Jesus to return.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about his dropping out other than I’m glad it’s finally over. I am concerned about what plans he has for the future. I doubt that McCain will tap him for the VP slot, although McCain does need to do something to appease the fundie crowd.
Tony Perkins Thinks I Value His Opinion
Today I received an email from Tony Perkins of the Fundie Research Council. The first part of the email is titled “Huckabye”. He says some interesting things here, so I thought it would be worth examining it. He writes:
To succeed in his bid for the White House, McCain must consolidate his support among conservatives, including social conservatives, which will not happen just because he is the Republican nominee.
I hear that a lot from fundies right now, but talk is cheap and the election is still eight months away. When November 4th rolls around and they’re in the booth staring at the names:
John McCain
Hillary Clinton
who do you think they’re going to vote for? Many conservatives and probably most fundies dislike McCain, but they absolutely despise Clinton.
Some pundits have suggested that a lot of “social conservatives” (i.e. fundies) will choose to stay home that day. Believe me. Nothing motivates a fundie more than the opportunity to spread their hate. The Republican nominee could be Richard Dawkins, but all of the fundies would still turn out in swarms to vote for him anyway, because what they’d really be doing is voting against Hillary Clinton. And that will feel so good!
Tony Perkins’ email continues:
A poll released last month by George Barna revealed that if the election were held then, only 45 percent of Evangelicals would vote for a Republican candidate.
Again, talk is cheap. A pollster calls them up on the telephone. It’s anonymous. They don’t even have to look the pollster in the eye. It’s real easy to say things they don’t mean. They may even think they won’t vote for the Republican at the time they’re answering the survey, but when they’re staring at the prospect of another Clinton in the White House, they’ll camp out in front of their polling place weeks in advance, like an evangelical Harry Potter line.
That number is down from 85 percent of Evangelicals who voted for George W. Bush in 2004.
If you were wondering how Bush managed to get re-elected despite all of the atrocities he committed, there’s your answer. The so-called “values voters” don’t have any values. If they did, they would not tolerate torture, suspension of the Fourth Amendment, being lied into an unnecessary war, etc. All they want is to overturn Roe v. Wade and keep those dirty, filthy homos from having butt-sex within a legally-sanctioned marriage. No matter what the cost.
John McCain will have to convince social conservatives that their issues matter and that he can talk about them as a candidate and act upon them as president.
That won’t be difficult. McCain has already managed to convince most Americans that he’s a maverick, straight-talking, moderate, incorruptible American hero. Blowing smoke up the fundies’ asses will be a piece of cake for him. (And the fundies will secretly enjoy the anal stimulation and freak out that they might be gay, thus forcing a constitutional amendment against anal smoking.)
The latest Carnival of the Godless is up over at Life Before Death. There’s a good variety of stuff there. I found a couple of articles that relate to recent events here.
We recently discussed John Hagee, the vilest of all fundies. Hagee wants to hasten Armageddon, because apparently Jesus owes him money or something. We also argued over whether Jesus existed at all. Dovetailing with those discussions is the article by Alexander the Atheist, “End Times: 2,000 Years & Counting”. A-the-A writes:
Virtually all Christians believe that we are living during the End Times…. Christians have major issues to address regarding Biblical scripture stating that Jesus would return within the lifetime of his original followers and Jesus not actually being a historical figure, making any debate on End Times specifics pointless because the Biblical end of the world just isn’t going to happen.
To which I would counter: The Biblical end times may not be nigh, but if Hagee and his followers manage to convince President McCain to drop nukes on Iran, we may all end up just as dead.
Vjack at Atheist Revolution is rubbing one of my sore spots with “‘In God We Trust’ Must Go”. I’ve railed against this thorn in the side of separation before. God doesn’t belong on our money or anywhere else in government that the theists keep sticking it. VJ argues against the slogan from three different directions:
The Tyranny of the Majority
Argument From Tradition
The Legal Rationale
After you’ve read those two articles, you should head over to the Carnival and find some more good reading.
The Sun and the Moon are among the signs of Allah. They are there so that we can contemplate His wondrous and incredible creation. The eclipse is one of the greatest signs of Allah. Do you not see how the moon perfectly covers the sun? The moon is the perfect size to block out the light of the sun. Allah made the universe in perfect proportions. Will you then not believe?
I found this quote from a Muslim creationist on a BBC discussion board about an eclipse back in 1999. It’s a claim I often hear from creationists whenever the topic of the solar eclipse comes up. To a creationist, everything marvelous (or even curious) is proof of design.
It’s an interesting coincidence, though, isn’t it? The moon does perfectly cover the sun! Except when it doesn’t.
This diagram (from The Dome of the Sky) shows how things line up during a total eclipse:
And this photograph (from Astropix) shows what it looks like from Earth:
That’s Godly perfection! I’m going to have to burn my copy of Origin of Species. Oh wait! What’s this? Jerry Lodriguss of Astropix wants to throw cold water onto my bonfire. Here’s what he says about this “perfect” size match:
However, for those who see more than mere coincidences in things, it isn’t always like this. Because the moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular, sometimes it is a bit farther away from the earth and it does not completely cover the sun’s surface even when the orbits exactly coincide. This is called an annular solar eclipse.
Bummer. Maybe that means God only exists during a total eclipse.
Here’s a diagram (from The Dome of the Sky) that shows how things line up during an annular eclipse:
And this photograph (from Mr. Eclipse) shows what it looks like from Earth:
To further rub salt in God’s wound, Jerry Lodriguss adds:
And, it hasn’t always been like this in the past, and it won’t always be like this in the future. Millions of years ago, the moon was much closer to the Earth, and due to the transfer of angular momentum from the Earth to the moon, the Earth slows down in its rotation while the moon moves farther away. Millions of years from now, the moon will be farther away and will never completely cover the sun’s surface.
Oh, no, God! You almost got things perfect.
And the Year Isn’t Perfect Either
Then there’s the problem of the length of the year. If our solar system is so perfectly designed that the moon exactly covers the sun, then you’d expect that other measurements would also be perfect.
Why, then, is the year such an awkward length? Why do we need leap years? Why are the rules for calculating the leap years so convoluted? Phil Plait explains in torturous detail here all about leap years. The bottom line is that the year is 365.242190419 days long. What sort of crappy design is that?
Another question to ask is why the moon’s cycle isn’t perfect. Why is it 29.53 days? Why isn’t it 29 or 30? In fact, shouldn’t the cycle be 28 days or some other multiple of 7? Shouldn’t it reflect the perfect week, which is how long it took Magic Man to create the universe?
That would make our months exactly four weeks. That would give us 13 months of 28 days each. Uh-oh! That doesn’t work out either! The year should have been exactly 364 days long. I guess God screwed up again.
There’s nothing especially Biblical about four weeks. It would be better if the moon took 49 days to go through its cycle. That’s 7 times 7. Then the year could be 7 months long, or 343 days. God’s blowing it right and left.
Instead of a perfectly-designed solar system where everything lines up in perfect harmony, all I see is a random collection of numbers. There is no design apparent in these facts.
