Tag Archives: medieval-mindsets

Malala Yousafzai

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more striking example of Intelligence vs. Ignorance and Enlightenment vs. Dogma.   I wish I believed in hell so I could be certain the idiot Talibs were destined for it. Ehsanullah Ehsan, chief spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that Yousafzai “is the […]

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John Cleese Despises Christianity

Excellent religious argument from John Cleese aside, this is a fascinating time capsule of England in the late 1970s. When a comedy film with a religious setting could be dragged across the coals by the media and the establishment. But it’s the Pythons’ argument that is the meat of the clip. Cleese and Palin ask […]

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Tumblr Jesus

The Digital Testament?  This is pretty funny. The Life and Times of Tumblr Jesus | Slacktory | This seems legit..

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Bean Duped

Favomancy is a form of divination that used to be practised by seers in Russia, in particular, among the Ubykh. The practice involves throwing beans on the ground and interpreting the patterns in which the beans fall; it is therefore a type of cleromancy. Russian methods of favomancy may still exist; however, since the departure […]

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St Roch’s Dog

A random Facebook post led me to read up on Saint Roch, or Saint “Does this look infected?”, as I’ve been calling him since seeing his statue in a Paris museum. Roch’s claim to fame was in a miracle escape from plague, assisted by a local mutt: …he would have perished had not a dog […]

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Happy Holidays

Memo to anyone reposting that “and it’s MERRY CHRISTMAS, not Happy Holidays” whine: If you’re doing it as a religious assertion, remember that (as the interminable song tells us) there are 11 other days involved in the Christmas season, making “Happy Holidays” totally valid. And if you’re posting it to be exclusionary or not-so-subtly racist, […]

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Atheist’s 10 Commandments

As an atheist, I’ve long preached (ahem) that we don’t need a magic book or special creed to know how to behave like decent human beings, but Penn Jillette came up with some good rules of thumb. e.g. 1. The highest ideals are human intelligence, creativity and love. Respect these above all. 3. Say what […]

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Backmasking – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking In the late 1970s, during the rise of the Christian right in the United States, fundamentalist Christian groups began to claim that backmasked messages could bypass the conscious mind and reach the subconscious, where they would be unknowingly accepted by the listener… During the same year, thirty North Carolina teenagers, led by their pastor, […]

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Sparklebeans reviews – StumbleUpon

http://sparklebean.stumbleupon.com/ Who pays any attention to their god’s will anyway if it doesn’t coincide with their own. Loved this. I once landed on 100 Huntley Street while channel surfing and watched a bunch of mothers praise God for letting all their fertility treatments work. Cafeteria Christianity (or “Catechasm”, if you will) furthers my impression that […]

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U.S. Religious Knowledge Quiz

http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-knowledge/ Here’s that Pew Religion quiz I blogged about earlier. As I suspected, I did pretty well – 14/15. Missed the question about the First Great Awakening, which was new to me. (Another distinction between myself the religious types who probably scored lower: I actually looked the Awakening up in Wikipedia, ’cause, you know, curiosity.)

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