By Toutatis! It's the End of the World!

Monks beat the holy crap out of each other over a door left open in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem

There was lots of hitting going on - police were hit, monks were hit ... there were people with bloodied faces

Apparently this has been going on for 10 centuries. May be it’s the influence of Toutatis, who’s visiting us today.

Some More Barmy Beliefs-Happy Eostara

EOS was the goddess of the dawn. From her island home of Aiaia, in the river Okeanos, she rose up into the sky each morning in a golden chariot drawn by winged horses scattering the dark mists of the night with her rosy brilliance. The pagan and neo-pagan festival of Eostara is named after her. We consume chocolate eggs on this day,very religiously, and some of us roll blown and painted eggs down hills. It is also the mid-point of this dude’s reign: (OK I made hm smaller) The Oak King, sprung forth at midwinter when he slew his twin the Holly King, and reigining over the increasing year until Litha, when the two will battle it out again.

Their Beliefs are Bonkers...

....but we are asked to have 'tolerance' for these mad cretins . This is part of why I'm suddenly, in my 45th year, absolutely terrified of humanity. "…when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again." I will not survive my own death-but that's the point, isn't it? That something I belonged to will go on. Not, however, if the delusional theists of the world (and yes, that's all of them)have their scary way. ”For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God.

The Magic of 150

Is That Light at the End of the Tunnel?

I am one of those whom the events of September 11th 2001 finally pushed over the edge into atheism, and I'll not apologise for that. I will apologise, well, a little bit anyway, for clinging to my religious worldview for so long. It's a fact of one's life as a religious person that one needn't apply any actual thought to the ideology. Proof destroys faith, there must be someting in it, religion is a good thing to have, et nauseating cetera. So I'm quite perked up to see this letter from ex-Muslims to Mankind online, and also to have read in the Sunday Rag yesterday that this woman seems to be well on her way. Perhaps all is not lost to humanity. Or perhaps it really is a train I see at the tunnel mouth, as the daft league of invisible-freind-believers ram it head on into the rest of the world.

Atheist Pride International Day. September 11th.

The End of Faith

After reading this article at the NY Times on Sam Harris’ ‘The End of Faith’ I was initially impressed by the new book.(Which is not available at your local South African bookstore as yet). Then I came across this comment over at TRA, and had second thoughts. Is the man just a raving fundamentalist of a Buddhist stripe after all? So this morning I took a look at the author’s website . Check out especially the pdf format Q&A. ” How comforting would it be to hear the President of the United States assure us that almighty Zeus is on our side in our war on terrorism? The mere change of a single word in his speech—from God to Zeus—would precipitate a national emergency. If I believe that Christ was born of a virgin, resurrected bodily after death, and is now literally transformed into a wafer at the Mass, I can still function as arespected member of society”. A-bloody-men

Are These Martians?

The Piraha apparently are unique among humans, in that they are resistant to new memes. Or, more properly, to new memes from outside their tribe.

...and he's not bad looking either!

Jamie Whyte, my kind of philosopher

"The weirdest manifestation of this new tendency is when people say: "I'm not a Christian but I believe in something." Then I say: "Of course, I believe in many things, like there is a chair there and a table. What are you talking about?" And they reply: "Well, you know, something more." But what "more"? What they mean is something more than we have any good reason to believe in"

Cheers, Dr Comet

Fred Whipple died on Monday. One of the first books I read on astronomy was his “Earth , Moon and Planets”, and I was there at Burlington House when he was made a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society-I think it was in 1983. He was 97.