Believe in God - Instantly

Via Nerd Approved.

Creation Museum, (aka Land O' Crazy), Opens in Kentucky to Much Acclaim

Yes, friends - if you're in Kentucky these days why not visit the brand-spanking new 'Creation Museum'?:

Creation Museum - Prepare to Believe!

The Cyberweb has been a 'buzzin' with all sorts of news about this exciting venue where, according to the website: "'facts' don'€™t speak for themselves"!

Here's a preview:

Sneak Peek @ Creation Museum

Now, strangely, not everyone seems to be a fan of the CM:

The Big Lie

But I'm sure one trip to this wonderful world of Biblical Literalism would dispel anyone's doubts about the fundamental truths on display.  I've checked the LTA Frappr Map but don't see any listeners in Kentucky.  Which is a shame.  Do we have anybody even remotely nearby who's willing to make the drive down and check it out?

(Photo from the Creation Museum Website:  'Guest Services Staff get together for a week of inspirational training')

Christopher Hitchens on the Life and Death of Jerry Falwell

Via Crooks and Liars / CNN: Christopher Hitchens speaks his mind in a typical fashion, this time regarding the life and death of Jerry Falwell:

Click here to watch for yourself Dear Reader

Update May 17th - More Falwell Action:

Faith Based Fraud, (Christopher Hitchens writing about Falwell, via Slate)

Hitler or Falwell!, (you guess who said it, via BoingBoing)

Christopher Hitchens Promotes 'God Is Not Great' on the Sean Hannity Show plus A Few Words on the Subject from George Carlin

Lou Dobbs Interviews Christopher Hitchens About His New Book 'God Is Not Great'

Presented without comment via Digg / Richard Dawkins.net.

Click here for more posts about this subject on LTA.

GodTube

Via Metafilter comes this new 'YouTube like' service, GodTube:

GodTube

There are some choice vids such as: Baby Got Bible, Christian Camp Slingshot, and of course I had no choice Dear Listeners, but to upload a wee film myself:

Real Science is in the Bible

UPDATE - Friday, March 9th:  Thanks for the emails re:  GodTube going offline - for your viewing pleasure you can watch the clip on YouTube:

Real Science is in the Bible, (YouTube)

Conservapedia

Feel like the web is just too left-leaning?  Feel Wikipedia's not fair and balanced?  Well, never fear cause now there's Conservapedia!

As someone who doesn't see themselves as 'left' or 'right' I was all hyped up to try this exciting new web resource.

But then I saw this entry:

Dinosaur

Uh oh.

I don't care how right-wing / neo-conservative / pre-emptive attack / love Bush / hate the tree-huggers you are:

Jesus did not hang with dinosaurs.

Repeat again after me:

Jesus did not hang with dinosaurs.

Also:

The earth is not 10,000 years old.

Evolution is real.

Our planet revolves around the sun.

And, just cause you want to make the world a better place, maybe through ways not involving force, that doesn't make you a pussy.

And one more time:

Jesus did not hang with dinosaurs.

Via, the Telegraph.

Richard Dawkins Interviewed on Paula Zahn Now

Richard Dawkins Previously on LTA:

Richard Dawkins Review - New York Review of Books

Richard Dawkins on The Late Late Show - RTE

Richard Dawkins on the Panel

Richard Dawkins on Radio Ulster

Collection of Richard Dawkins Clips

More Richard Dawkins Clips

I like the contrasting styles, both in presentation and content between Dawkins and Paula Zahn; Dawkins with the posh English accent and Zahn with all the Botox Action make for a nice pair - like to see them fight supernatural crime on a weekly series - she would see God and a pattern behind all things / he would find the 'real-life' scientific, natural causes behind the events they battle. 

Anyhew, he's right about the misunderstanding of Atheists - I think they get a bad rap.  News from the States:

U.S.A.ians Would Rather Be Governed By A Homosexual Than An Atheist

Am sure many find Dawkins annoying - he can come across as a supercilious prick - but think he's alright in this clip, forthright and with out the usual condescension and patronising attitude.

Jesus Camp on Google Video

The acclaimed documentary Jesus Camp is currently online at Google Video.  Am watching it right now and find it so distressing I can only take a few minutes of it at a time; (via Digg).

Click Here to Watch

Richard Dawkins Review - New York Review of Books

Interesting review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion at the New York Review of Books by H. Allen Orr:

A Mission to Convert

The book is attacked on many fronts - my favourite -  the one that made me smile - is the accusation that it's middlebrow.  The reviewer is correct in this I think - and it's one of the things that I didn't care about it - but then I don't think H. Allen Orr and I are the target demographic. 

Here's a couple of concurrent good paragraphs from the review:

"The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know, Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion. What Dawkins never seems to consider is that this incident might have been, in an important way, local and contingent. It might, in other words, have turned out differently, at least in principle. Believers could, for instance, have uttered a collective "So what?" to evolution. Indeed some did. The angry reaction of many religious leaders to Darwinism had complex causes, involving equal parts ignorance, fear, politics, and the sheer shock of the new. The point is that it's far from certain that there is an ineluctable conflict between the acceptance of evolutionary mechanism and the belief that, as William James put it, "the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe." Instead, we and Dawkins might simply be living through the reverberations of an interesting, but not especially fundamental, bit of Victorian history. If so, evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit from which to preach about religion.

None of this is to say that evolutionary biology cannot inform our view of religion. It can and does. At the very least it insists that the Lord works in mysterious ways. More generally, it demands rejection of anything approaching biblical literalism. There are facts of nature—including that human beings evolved on the African savanna several million years ago—and these facts are not subject to negotiation. But Dawkins' book goes far beyond this. The reason, of course, is that The God Delusion is not itself a work of either evolutionary biology in particular or science in general. None of Dawkins' loud pronouncements on God follows from any experiment or piece of data. It's just Dawkins talking."

I love that line:  It's just Dawkins talking. 

He's right and it's one of the reasons the book has the feeling of ephemera - it won't last.

Certainly not in the same league Dawkins wonderful 'The Selfish Gene' - and that's a shame.

Alluding to Orr's first paragraph above I wish that certain Christian creeds had been able to get past the shock of Darwinism - it's refusal to engage with the realities of our time, (the equivalent of saying the Earth doesn't revolve around the Sun), are a hindrance to thought, religious or not, everywhere.  In the review H. Allan asks why the book was written - this is why I think - Dawkins' fear - not of religion; but of the corrosive effects the anti-evolution brigade has on critical thinking - something, it goes without saying, we need now as much as we ever did.

I wonder:  should religion be viewed as many do technology; a neutral 'force' that humans can use for good or ill?

Religion is different in the sense that from what I see it has a biological basis - or least spirituality does - there's a 'component' or area, (whether actual in terms of being located in a specific region or 'virtual' in the sense of a various of neuronal systems working together), that enables or I would even say creates that mystical feeling - that combined with like-minded upbringing, (perhaps by relatives that have the same predisposition towards the mystical), gives us religion. 

So in that sense it's not a 'delusion' - it's real.  One of the best examples of this I've seen in recent media is the German film 'Requiem'.  A young university student raised in a strict religious family who suffers from terrifying epileptic attacks stops taking her medication - and begins to believe that she is being possessed by demons.  The film is very effective in demonstrating that whether or not these demons are real, existent observable and recordable phenomena is immaterial - they're real to the girl and her family and her church.  If there's no one else in the room of a possessed person, other than those who believe - than how can one say the events are not real?

Right, that's enough rambling for now.  Let us look at that photo of the Sun setting on Mars that starts this post. 

I love it.  So desolate.  So lonely.

The thing is, if humankind never existed - the Sun would still have set on that landscape - it doesn't know that we were ever here. 

And someday we'll be gone and there'll be no one to remember us.

Dawkins and sunsets Previously on LTA:

Richard Dawkins on The Late Late Show - RTE

Belfast Sunset

Glasgow Sunset

Taos Sunset