A Place for LGBTQ Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists

What is the evidence that life existed 65 million years ago?

Someone had to have been around to put my computer together.  I am imagining a highly skilled stegosaurus with multiple screwdriver bits for tail spikes and schematics scrawled across the plates on his back.  I say, “highly skilled,” but even for a trained (and PC certified) stegosaurus, he was pretty goddamn dumb.

And you know what?  In the 65  million+ years since, the computer itself has evolved to become a dinosaur.

My graphics card blew a couple weeks ago and now instead of having my desktop spread across two monitors, it’s spread across about 3/4^ths of one monitor.  Sometimes.

When I try to plug in more than three USB devices (I have six allegedly working USB ports.) my computer automatically launches the sound file “laughattheretard.wav”.

When I turn my computer off, I can turn it back on in one try once every twenty-or-so attempts.  On those days when it only takes me one try to start my computer, I buy a lottery ticket and play the nickel slots.

If you open the case to feed the gerbils inside, the guts of my computer look like the dusty entrails of Grauballe Man.

My computer actually talks to me occasionally.  He’s less like HAL-9000 and more like that retarded robot from Mighty Morphing Power Rangers crossed with Jessica Simpson.

Here are some actual things that it says.

“What?  Did you want to highlight a passage of text to copy it?  Nah!  I’ll just go ahead and pretend that in releasing the mouse button you actually clicked it 4,200 times.  I’m sure that’s what you meant to do.”

“Tee hee!  You’re trying to run Firefox and GIMP at the same time!  How cute! … DENIED!  FUCK YOU!”

“Oh heeeeey!  What’s this?  Are you working on your novel?  That’s, you know, cool and stuff.  What’s this now?  Page 700?  That’s really cool!  You must have spent a long time on this.  Okay… I’m going to kill myself now.  KTHXBAI!”

“’Ctrl+Alt+Del?  Whassat mean?  I don’t get it.  I’m going to go into a coma while I figure this out.  You should take a nap or something.  You look frustrated.  Plus, this is gonna take me a while.”

When I was a child, I fucking loved dinosaurs.  If it was at all possible, I would have disowned my mother, gone back in time, crawled inside a female brachiosaurus, crawled my way back out and become an honorary dinosaur by being born through the vagina of a large saurapod.  My parents would ask me, “Reed, do you want to have sex with all three of the Hanson boys and Jonathan Taylor Thomas at the same time while the Spice Girls stand around in your bedroom and sing a song about how awesome you are, or do you want to go to the science museum and look at dinosaur fossils,” and I would exuberantly answer (and I did, every time this question came up… which was surprisingly often), “DINOSAURS!!!”  I had dinosaur action figures, tiny plastic dinosaurs, dinosaur tee shirts, dinosaur bed sheets, dinosaur sing-a-long cassettes, dinosaur movies on VHS, dinosaur shoes and a foam dinosaur on a long metal wire that I could “take on walks” around the neighbourhood.  My peers hated me, but the dinosaurs loved me, and that’s all I cared about.  One of the last conversations I ever had with both my Great-Grandaddy (my father’s mother’s father) and my Great-Mama (my father’s father’s mother) were about dinosaurs, their behaviours, their names and how fucking awesome they were.  Dinosaurs were undeniably one of my biggest childhood obsessions.

I tell you that story to tell you this one.  I FUCKING HATE DINOSAURS!  After having fought for five years with the dinosaur purring quietly (for now) at my feet, I have developed a very strong distaste for the nasty, ancient assholes.  That’s right.  Dino-kid just called dinosaurs assholes.  And why?  Because he has owned the same dinosaur for five years and it has come to hate him… and he has come to hate dinosaurs and everything to do with them.  Even modern birds.  Fuck birds too.  I want nothing more than to replace this terrible dinosaur and get rid of it in the most degrading way possible.

If you would like to make me very happy and help make sure that I can continue keeping this blog running and free, you should consider making a donation to the Eradicate The Remaining Dinosaurs Fund, which seeks to raise enough money to buy a replacement computer for yours truly, who promises to “Office Space this bitch” when it’s ready to be replaced.

Fuck dinosaurs.

It’s Photoshop Phriday!

It’s repulsive… and I love it.

(Thanks to Drew.)

Bef at Footbullet.net has a few good answers to this question.

(Warning:  Two disturbing photos. Don’t read while eating spaghetti with meatballs.)

Yeah, you may have noticed I’m doing my BBC headline check I do every once in a while. I’m shamefully lax when it comes to checking news sites, I’ll admit. I invariably get horribly depressed by the crappy state of the world, not to mention the endless amounts of un-news I have to sift through to find anything remotely interesting.

This article (I posted the image here but it broke the tables, so I removed it) caught my eye. I much prefer this statement to the original “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Not that I disagree with that, but I felt that it was unlikely to change anyone’s minds. I actually have (perhaps a foolishly optimistic) hope that this one might actually make a few people stop and think. 

I think it would be very hard not to share what you believe to be the truth with your child. I have no intention of having children, but if I did I honestly do not know how I would approach it. I believe Atheism to be the natural state – I believe that there is no God, and so the only reason that people believe there is one is that they have been told to. Obviously, religious people believe the opposite. It’s certainly a tricky one, and not one I’m sure I have the perfect answer to. 

I suppose the ideal might be to teach a child about all beliefs as a theory, from the context of history and sociological effect, and for the mythology. There’s no denying the Bible is an important piece of literature in the Western world, with many names and quotations coming from it. Teaching a child to always question things and think them through before accepting them as fact, teaching them acceptance of others and not to be judgemental. I believe that the outcome of this would be a strong turn towards secularism, or at least less organized religion (the dangerous kind) and more general vague spirituality, which I think is nutty but fairly harmless.

The second article I want to share with you is certainly related. It is on the matter of faith schools. Can you guess how I feel about faith schools? Really fucking angry, that’s how I feel about faith schools! How is this shit legal? How in the hell do people get away with brain washing on such a grand scale? You know what, I don’t even care about the discrimination issues here! I don’t care about the working rights of anyone who would willingly attach themselves to such an establishment. 

So you have a child, a child that you supposedly love and care for. You believe in God and want your child to live a good life and go to heaven. I don’t agree with you, but I can understand the mindset. I get it, I really do. If we could make our loved ones immortal just by telling them so, wouldn’t we all? So while I think that indoctrinating children is wrong, there are degrees. I can appreciate the reasons for doing it, even if I cannot condone the actions.

But when you take away from your child the right to hear dissenting opinions, you have crossed a line. When you wrap them up in cotton wool and bubble wrap and blinkers to keep them from the world, blotting out the option of free thought and skepticism (not to mention alternative religious beliefs) then you are taking away their rights as a human. You are giving them no choice, no alternate forms of influence, no way to learn and grow.

The strongest minded children may be able to shake that off and find their own path. My boyfriend came up with his own (and, to my knowledge, unique) reason for being an atheist at age five. That’s some impressive stubbornness, I didn’t start thinking about anything along those lines until age eleven, and I wasn’t ever at a faith school. But for many, how you are raised is how you stay. With parents on one side and teachers on the other, both force feeding one set of unshakable beliefs down your throat, what chance do you stand?

I want to tell you, finally, about a girl I work with. I’ll not share her name. She is close to my age, and is a very friendly, happy person. She describes herself as Catholic. She does not know what the word Atheist means. She also did not understand my meaning when I said that, although my boyfriend’s mother is a vicar and we live in a vicarage, he and I will not be attending church this Christmas. She literally could not comprehend the possibility that someone with Christian parents might not follow their beliefs. It was completely outside the realm of her experience and thought. 

That is brainwashing in action. And it is terrifyingly successful.

Story time, every body. My parents like to listen to Radio 4. Well, correction, my mum likes to listen to Radio 4. My dad prefers Classic FM, but my mum can’t take the advertising. Anyway, off topic. Point is, every day before school I would hear Thought for the Day while I was eating my breakfast. It always bugged me that, whether it was saying something I could agree with or not (and don’t get me wrong, there are occasionally some good points made), it was always from a religion or faith based perspective. 

I bitched about it a little, and my mum said that she had heard humanists on it before. I doubted this (my mum’s not a liar but she has the leakiest of all memories) but left it alone. Well, it turns out I was right. 

The BBC Trust has rejected complaints about a ban on non-religious contributors to the Thought For The Day slot on Radio 4’s Today programme.

Allowing only religious content did not breach BBC guidelines on impartiality or its duty to reflect religious and other beliefs, its governing body said.

Well then, the BBC needs new guidelines, because those are a heap of shit.

I have a whole fuckton of respect for the BBC most of the time, because they have rules about impartiality. I mean, it’s infuriating sometimes when they’re reporting on something I think is disgusting (pro-lifers, for example) and acting like there’s two sides to it. But I take comfort in the fact that somewhere out there a fundie fucktard is fuming as the BBC reports on my rights with the same relaxed, fact based impartiality. 

But how? How is it goddamn* impartial to ignore the opinions and beliefs of an entire section of your audience? The title of the program is not “Religious Indoctrination for the Day”, nor is it “Entirely Unfounded Belief for the Day”. It is “Thought for the Day”. And goodness knows, thinking is something that Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists are good at. 

The BBC are very good at ignoring complaints, but I have made complaints that caused changes before and it’s worth a shot. The complaints form can be found here. 

*I hope my fellow atheists will forgive, but I like blasphemous slang. Not because it pisses of Christians, although that is a plus, but because all through my childhood I wasn’t allowed to use it and I hate censorship.

Edited to add my complaint to the BBC, because I got all wordy ‘n shit. The way I do. You get two posts in one!

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Kiva is a charitable organization that lets people give small loans to entrepreneurs around the world. As of October 4, 2009, Kiva has distributed $95,136,910 in loans from 568,810 lenders. A total of 135,613 loans have been funded. The average loan size is $406.45. Its current repayment rate is 98.42% [Wikipedia]. As of today, the largest community on Kiva is the Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious group which has raised, as of today, a total of $1,168,650.00. The next largest group is the Kiva Christians, which have raised $727,000. I’m not trying to spark a competition, but I’d like to make a point. Morality, charity, and compassion are not attributes that the religious community, or any community for that matter, can monopolize. The Atheist group gives, in their own words, because “we care about the suffering of human beings”.

I would encourage all of our readers to do what they can, not because of any desire to be competetive and to beat out the Christian group (though I won’t deny that was one of my motivations for joining), but to show people that people can still be good, moral people without living in fear of eternal punishment and hellfire. I know I don’t.

P.S. I’m sorry I was gone for so long. School stuff got a bit busy. I’ll be posting more often in the coming days and weeks.

I just teared up.  I wish that I was this kid when I was 10.

(Via Atheist Media Blog)

I have a client who doesn’t have a lot of support surrounding her for her upcoming birth.  So she asked me to attend her childbirth education class, and I agreed.  I’m fairly well versed in what goes on during a birth.  My client (let’s call her Cee, just so she’s got a name) was as well, but felt she should see if the childbirth education class held anything she had missed in her self-education about all things birth.  I figured it would be a breeze, little did I know what I was in for.

We’re about the same age, and get along really well.  We probably could have been friends if we had met in different circumstances, and so Cee doesn’t always elicit professionalism from me.  Hard to imagine, right?  We also have had a fairly prolonged doula/client relationship and have gotten fairly comfortable with each other.  She also happens to be not the same skin colour than I am.

So Saturday at 8am, I inadvertently found myself part of a interracial lesbian couple.  At least according to the twenty-some odd couples and the CBE educator; it was a bit of a wild experience.

The only way that I was aware of this perception that the educator happened to hold was because she seemed to be flustered by the whole thing.  She apparently had pretty heteronormative language built into her class, making reference to husband or boyfriend, referring to the pregnant woman’s partner as the “father”.  When she happened to look at us, she would quickly correct herself with a huffy sort of “and partner, I guess”.  There was also a portion where a woman asked about how to handle the birth certificate stuff when the father was overseas and unable to present himself to “claim the baby as his own”.  The educator told the woman to contact the hospital and they would get her in touch with the person who could answer that question.  She then looked directly and Cee and me and said “You two probably should just talk to a lawyer.  I doubt the hospital will know how to handle the situation where there IS no father”.

At this point, I was absolutely livid.  It took almost all of my restraint to not call that woman out on her bigotry.  We managed to get out of the class without me making an ass out of myself, but it really got me thinking.  I actually apologized to Cee, both for this woman’s horrific behaviour and my inability to find a constructive way to address it within the class.

Is THIS what gay and lesbian couples go through, when they attempt to access these classes we promote as part of a “good” parenting experience?  Is THIS what single mothers get when they reach out for help and support?  I am sincerely sorry for anyone building their family if this is the type of help they get.  Please know that there are people out there that want to support you in the best way possible.

• My mother has three daughters.
• I live with two other women, making three in our household.
• My heterosexual boyfriend has had three sexual partners.

In all these cases, I am the one in three. I am the statistic – I had an abortion. 

One in three – with odds like that, you don’t expect taboo. You don’t expect lies, shame and moral outrage. One in three women. I’ll say it again, until the message gets through. One. In every three. 

Think of the groups of three that you know. Three sisters, three friends, three generations. Now I’m not saying that in each sample you would find the one in three that I am, not at all. But that’s how common we’re talking. One woman, in every three. How many women do you know? Do the maths, think it over. How many women do the statistics say have had an abortion, out of the people you know? And how many would ever, ever talk about it?

Being against abortion pits you against one third of the female population. Is it any surprise, then, that the pro-life movement is seen as inherently misogynistic? I can believe that some naively, but genuinely, think that they are doing good – but not most. Most are actively seeking to remove rights from one in three women, to punish that one in every three for her sexual freedom, for her ambitions, hopes and dreams, and for her choice.

And they get away with it. They get away with it again, and again, and again. They say that God is on their side, they say that all human decency is on their side. What they don’t tell you is that one in three women are not on their side – more, really, but at a bare minimum the one in three who made that choice for whatever reason, some easily and some after great internal or external struggles. They get away with it because we stay silent, because we let them dress us up in shame and guilt. Because talking about your abortion just isn’t done. 

I’m in the UK, things are better here, but that doesn’t mean that Stupak-Pitts doesn’t scare me. I’m scared for the women I know in America, I’m scared that this bullshit will cross the Atlantic and fuck with my rights, and the rights of my friends. But more than that, I’m angry. I’m goddamn furious. That a group of people (mostly men, I notice) get to vote on the rights of women to choose whether or not to go through a dangerous and painful nine months (followed by the even more dangerous and painful experience of childbirth) in order to create a child they do not want and cannot care for. That a group of strangers get the right to choose for us whether or not we get to continue with our lives, or have our whole world turned upside down by a piece of random chance.

I’m pissed, and I’m not staying silent. I was recently 19 when I had an abortion. If I had not I would have ruined my body, my relationship and my career. If I hadn’t had the abortion? I’d have given birth this week. I’d be an (almost certainly) single mother, with no job prospects. I would be homeless, I would have absolutely nothing. Here in UK, the National Health Service paid for my abortion. It cost me nothing at all. Because of that, I have everything I have ever wanted. I will soon move into a flat with my boyfriend, I have a wonderful job and great friends. I also have a fantastic body, not gonna lie. The only thing I don’t have? Guilt. That I do not have and do not want. The pro-life fucktards can keep it, can rot in it for all I care. Perhaps if we stop caring what they think, if women who are not ashamed and will not live in regret begin to feel able to talk about abortion honestly and openly, we can shut them down once and for all.

A Christian, a Jew and a New-Ager walk into a crowded auditorium in Mexico and are confronted with three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse…

The joke practically tells itself!

I’ve never seen a three-way philoso-rape (not to be confused with philosoraptor) before, but this was most entertaining and, dare I say, enjoyable.  It’s also as long as most feature-length movies, so you might want to click through, load it in high quality and pop some popcorn before you commit to watching the violent assault of three morons by three bloodthirsty debate-machines.