A Series of Tubes

I’ve been busy recently and haven’t had time to finish my follow up to the last post.  Until I finish it, please enjoy this Venn Diagram:

So during the day I often wonder “just how much did Jesus love the animals of this world.”  Well there are blog posts, here, that can tell you the obvious fact that Jesus loved them a lot.  They unfortunately use the example of Jesus being referred to as the lamb of god as proof that he loves animals.  It is unfortunate because the lamb of god is a reference to Jesus being the perfect sacrifice, just as lambs were often sacrificed to god at that time, and you usually don’t murder the things you love.  Of course Jesus was murdered and Isaac was almost murdered so perhaps I’m wrong and murder is just Gods way of giving you a big hug.  I’ll ignore the confusing details and stick with the conclusion from the blog post:

“Did you ever notice that when a person really loves someone, they talk about them all the time?  That’s because they are thinking about them so much.  Jesus obviously loves the animals very much, because He had them on His mind so often!”

(Above image from the blog)

Now for people that read the bible literally there is a small problem of the dinosaurs.  Well if you count the generations of people named in the bible, how long they lived as stated in the bible, and count back all the way to Adam and Eve you only come to about to 4 or 6 thousand years.  Animals were created on day 5 of creation and man on day 6, so all living animals, including dinosaurs, were created one day before man.  In reality then the above illustration should be modified slightly in lieu of this additional information:

I love the pterodactyl in the background.

So in the radiolab post I mentioned the story of Isaac and Abraham and pointed out that it is in fact not a moral action.This video really highlights that point:

Radiolab used to be my favorite podcast.  If you have never heard Radiolab, then here is their own description of what their show is about:

“Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we’ll feed it with possibility.”

With that information floating in your head I’m going to move on to my list.  As someone who does not make a ton of money, I personally don’t donate a lot of money.  I don’t have a lot of material needs or wants, so my relative lack of funds does not particularly bother me.  When my birthday or when Christmas rolls around, I’m usually at a loss as to what thingamajig I want.  When constructing a list of desired presents, I usually end up filling it with places I would like money to be donated to instead of stuff I would like to have and then trow away a year later.  Topping the list is usually a donation to Radiolab.  Unfortunately my list will have to remove Radiolab.  But Why? Read more

Meth will mess you up:

I clicked through all the photos from the drugfree.org site with a sort of morbid fascination.  I managed to click to the website off of the Matt Taibbi blog post about religious apologist Terry Eagleton.  It was sort of a non-sequitur from religion to drugs (and now I’m going to do the same but in reverse order).  Fun quote from the blog post:

“This is the kind of stuff that permeates Eagleton’s work: a lot of masturbatory semantics and naked goalpost-moving buried in great gnarled masses of old-world sneering and unnecessary syllables.”

Matt mixes serious arguments, which help prove his point, with ad hominem attacks, which make it fun to read.  Of course Matt might be mad at my use of ad hominem considering his dislike of A priori:

“First of all, why is that no professor alive can make it ten feet from his front door without sticking an a priori into a sentence? Is there some kind of subterranean lair where academics are beaten with whips and clubs until they learn to write alliterative book titles (”Pus, Primates, and Pessimism: Jane Goodall’s Descent into Septic Shock”) and lard up perfectly good sentences with epistemological catch-phrases?”

This video has been making the rounds.  I enjoyed it:

You can check out similar ones here.

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I’ve been reading Jesus Interrupted by Bart Ehrman.  In the book Bart goes over some of the peculiar things one finds in the Bible.  I’ve always heard that there are contradictions in the Bible, and this book is an interesting Journey through contradictions, disconnects, and other Biblical oddities.  I’m not that far in, but so far one of my favorite parts is the story of the last supper in the Gospel of John.  I had to go back and reread these quotes to make sure they were actually there.  To set up the quotes, Jesus is being questioned by his disciples about his imminent crucifixion:

John 13:36

Simon Peter asked him, “Lord, where are you going?”
Jesus replied, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

John 14:5-6

⁵Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

⁶Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

John 16:5

⁵“Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’

The explanation of how this obvious disconnect made it into the Bible is that the book of John had more than one author and the authors were crammed together without thinking about how the different portions of the story fit together.  If you are a fundamentalist, where nothing in the bible is allowed to be false, then the only explanation has to be that Jesus, the son of God, completely lost his short term memory.  Not only did Jesus forget about two people asking where he is going, but Jesus forgets that he responded to them only moments after it happened.

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I recently bought Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book The Pluto Files.  I’m only a third or so through it (it’s not a long book), but it is a very entertaining read.  Most people will probably recognize Tyson as someone who frequents the Colbert Report and The Daily Show.  It is obvious why you would want him to appear on your show given how enthusiastic he is about his subject matter and his knowledge of it.  He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, and became famous as one of the Astronomers leading the charge to demote Pluto from its Planet status.  I’d heard him interviewed on the topic of Pluto and on the topic of his previous book Death by Black Hole, but below is a video of his thoughts on religion and science.  Definitely worth a listen.

As a side note hulu has Carl Sagan’s Cosmos videos posted online.  I’ve only watched the first one but I plan on watching more.

I saw a posting where someone had this as a small picture next to what they posted. I want one (It’s Darwin):

He based his design off of the famous Shepard Fairey Obama poster.

I found the website of the creator and he sells TShirts with the above picture on it. Profits from the shirts go to the national center for science education.

When going to a party where you don’t know the politics or religious beliefs of the other guests I tend to avoid the subjects.  When someone brings up either topic I tend to get similar shooting glances from my girlfriend as the ones described in the following video:

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