Some random pieces of history

Religious madness (21/2/2004)
There was a story in my weekend paper about a group of religious believers who spend much of their time harassing people going in to certain shops. A quote from one of these people caught my eye and would have amazed me had I been the sort of person who thinks that there are limits to religious hypocrisy. The person was asked if he ever saw anyone from another religion working his territory and he said "I see missionaries once in a while. They always like to talk. They figure we're doing the same thing as they are. They ask you to read passages from the New Testament. You just ignore them. You can't chat with someone who's brainwashed". I will repeat that last sentence just in case you missed it. "You can't chat with someone who's brainwashed". This was said by a person who literally wears two hats at the same time because his religion tells him to. This is a man who approaches strangers in the street, asks them if they belong to a certain religious group, and if they say "Yes" he tries to force them to put on a fancy dress costume because his religion tells him to. This is a man who will not touch his wife in any way, not even just at the finger tips, from the moment she starts menstruating until she has undertaken a ritual cleansing seven days after her period has finished because his religion tells him that she is unclean. This is a man who allows his religion to tell him how he must be clothed on those few days when he is allowed to make love to his wife. This is a man who says that the only education required beyond high school (and maybe not even that far) is to read religious texts. And this is a man who has the effrontery and arrogance to say that other people are brainwashed. Breathtaking hypocrisy.

See everything that appeared in 2004 here.

Does atheism imply asense? (22/11/2014)
Before I go on, I need to make something clear. I am an atheist but that is not all of who I am. It just happens to be a part of me. Also it simply means that I live my life without a personal god, not that I'm totally opposed to all forms of religion or that I see atheism as something which needs to be necessarily proselytised at every opportunity. I object, as do most sensible people, to the excesses of religion or when religious beliefs and practices harm people, including members of the religious groups themselves of course.

I participate in several atheist forums online, mainly because I often see things there which are interesting. What I also see are statements which make no sense at all and make the writers appear to be bigots or fools.

As examples, over the last few weeks I have seen people complain about how offended they are when someone says "Bless you" when someone sneezes, whining about the BBC using a rerecording of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" in an advertisement (if they had listened to the words they would know it is a cultural cliché and has nothing to do with religion), someone objecting to the fact that there is a Bible in a public school library (as the Bible is a fundamental part of the canon of English literature it should be in every educational library - what it teaches is irrelevant, what matters is the language that it is written in), and the latest is someone who is no longer going to let his children to listen to the Wiggles because they sing a song called "Uncle Noah". That's the long-running and internationally popular Wiggles children's entertainment group who appear on stage with a yellow spotted dinosaur, a huge dog, a purple octopus who wears a straw boater hat and a kilt, and a pirate with a feather for a sword. All of these were apparently acceptable to this parent before but his antireligious bigotry says that if they are going to sing songs about a fictional person called Noah then the show is unsuitable for his children.

A constant obsession with fundamentalist atheists is the existence of Jesus, and these people apparently believe that the entire edifice of religion rests on the existence of Jesus and if he didn't exist then all the following two millennia of belief and teachings can be disregarded. To people who might not be believers but who like better arguments against religion it's a diversion. We only know of Socrates through the writings of a few others, and there is even a school of thought that says he was invented by Plato to provide a vessel for conveying Plato's thoughts and methods of philosophical investigation. People who say that the teachings attributed to Jesus have to be rejected unless there is proof of a real historical person must apply the same principles to the teachings of Socrates.

Plato (and even Socrates) would understand this.

There are real battles to be fought against religion, but behaving like childish, obsessed, and virtually illiterate fools just provides ammunition to the other side. How can anyone be taken seriously when criticising people like Ken Ham or Ray Comfort if they make the same sort of idiotic and uninformed statements themselves?

As if that isn't enough silliness, I was notified today of a Kickstarter campaign to produce an atheist children's book. The promotion of this fundraiser says the following:

Like many of you, we grew up on fairy tales, fantasy stories and religion. But there really isn't anything out there for nonbelievers to share with their children. The books that are out there are boring. They aren't the sort of thing a child would ask to be read every night.

Children love fantasy, and they are quite capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. Perhaps the author of this book thinks there is something bad about Harry Potter, Lord Of The Rings, books by A. A. Milne and Lewis Carroll, or any other of the almost countless books that children have been reading and enjoying since printing was invented. But that's what happens when you see the world through glasses distorted by ideology.

See everything that appeared in 2014 here.

The Aetherius Society
I like a good synthesis almost as much as I like a good conspiracy. Here is a grand synthesis of religion, yoga and UFOism. Not just any old religion, mind, you, but all major religions. It is remarkable enough to hear that the differences between Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Protestantism have been resolved, but it seems that Islam and Judaism have been reunited with Christianity into a single descendant of the traditions of Abraham and Moses. When the eastern religions are included, not to mention the animist, voodoo and other world belief systems then we can all go to Nirvana. Or whatever it will be called. I can imagine a Hindu Pope looking out across a sea of humanity in St Peter's Square, all of them with their knees behind their ears in the "Position of the Probe" as small, grey men with large eyes move among the congregation taking up a collection (and some subjects and samples). Simultaneously, 30 million Anglicans queue up to bathe in the Ganges while Taliban choristers sing hymns by Wesley and flying saucers full of saffron-robed monks swarm overhead. A lone Rastafarian is heard to say: "Ganges? What's this Ganges, mon? They told me the ganja was a mile wide here."

The Chinese Pyramids – An Extraterrestrial Legacy
A few years ago, the Chinese used to try to copy things made elsewhere in the world and then manufacture them more cheaply. "Made in China" became a sign of poor quality. It was not always like that though, because it seems that it was in China that the first large scale pyramids were built by the extraterrestrials. This technology was later exported to Egypt and the Americas, although the ETs had to do it themselves because the Chinese did not like to travel too far. It is very significant, however, that the current Chinese government have chosen a pyramid site to launch rockets. Perhaps there are secret instructions for rocket power inside the pyramid. We will never know, because the area is off-limits. The US tries to hide Area 51, and have you noticed that there is almost never a Number 51 on the menu at the Chinese takeaway?

UFO Research Queensland – The Gympie Pyramid
You thought that all the ET pyramids were in Egypt or the Americas, didn't you? That was until you read a moment ago about the Chinese ones. Well, here's more news. There were (and still are) pyramids in Australia. I haven't seen the Gympie pyramid because it is on private land and the owner doesn't want people wearing it out by looking at it. I would suspect that it was a myth except for the conclusive evidence of a petrified ET that was found near Gympie. Just look at that picture and tell me you don't believe that creatures like this once roamed across Queensland. Or perhaps they hopped. Maybe they taught the kangaroos how to locomote. Someone must have, things like that don't just evolve. Gympie has several fine Chinese restaurants. Think about it. By the way, if you add 666 to the first three digits of the Gympie postcode and divide the sum by 51, you get a number which is almost exactly seven times pi. Accidental? I think not!

Sadly, it looks like the landowner has extended his ban on looking at the pyramid to looking at web sites about the pyramid. This just strengthens the truth of its existence, as any conspiracist will tell you.

QUFD: Einstein's Legacy!
You may not have heard of Quantum Unitary Field Dynamics (QUFD), but, as it says on this site in magenta writing on a green background, "This document may very well be the MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT YOU HAVE EVER READ IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE!!!" And it only takes 37 hours to read it, and 135 million people already have! This is an extension of the work of Einstein, answering the questions that were too hard for him. I can't do better than quting the site where it says: "This is what Jerome has done! Father Jerome, theoretical researcher of the famous FIWD Institute, London (OA/OWB), using the very principles that were developed for condensed states of matter (corporeality), HAS NOW APPLIED THOSE same principles TO INCORPOREALITY, the Quantum Forces/Fields themselves! In doing so, Jerome does no more than to take Bose-Einstein's research (as well as that of other BEC researchers since Bose-Einstein), and, in applying it to a BIG PICTURE "model" of consciousness, has thusly created a PHILOSOPHICAL MODEL, and Formulation, OF that very same, elusive, solution which Einstein had sought – A QUANTUM UNITARY FIELD!".

PROPHECIES, a Word Art from Good Works On Earth
There are lots of clichés about words. "A picture is worth a thousand words", "weasel words", "you took the words right out of my mouth". Well, mark my words, the author of this site is a man of few words and believes that action speaks louder than words. For that reason he has decided from the word go that this page will not be a play on words but will be one-thousandth of a picture and only use one word. In a word, this page is about all the prophecies that can be made from the word "prophecies". A word to the wise is required, though. When someone says to you "I see prophecies rise so I hope prophecies sire hopes", these are not idle words. After all, remember "Seer is cohere". Mark those words.

T. Casey Brennan Homepage
This is just one of the many sites dedicated to T. Casey Brennan, comic strip writer and president murderer. When I was studying psychology years ago, I remember some lecturer asking "do you remember where you were when you heard that Kennedy had been shot?" and some fool in the class, trying hard for an "F" grade, thought he was funny and said "I wasn't born then". Well, Brennan, or "TCB" as he is known to his friends, knows where he was, because he was doing the shooting. Since then, it looks like the spooks have tried to control his mind. I think they were trying to make him forget, but he has thwarted them. The truth can be told. Forget the second gun, the grassy knoll, the rumours that Jackie did it. TCB knows! In an interesting aside, in 1989 Bill Clinton congratulated TCB for his stand against smoking. Little did Bill know that TCB killed presidents. Little did TCB know what Bill was later to do with a cigar.

True Life in God – Vassula
Some people tell us that the practice of letter writing is in decline. Before the invention of the telephone and the internet, people used to write to each other, and any good bookshop or library has books which contain the selected letters of famous people. Even collections of the correspondence of ordinary folk help to illuminate history for us by showing us what life was like in other times and what it was that worried, amused and encouraged people we can never speak to. One thing that has always been missing is correspondence that reveals the thoughts of some of the major influences on our culture. We know Shakespeare only through his published works, and we know Jesus only through the words of others, written years after the event and in many cases by people that never met Him. How lucky it is then that Vassula has been able to show us letters from Jesus. The wonderful thing is that she didn't have to search dusty caves in Galilee looking for 1st century filing cabinets. She corresponds with Him now. Vassula has aroused a "small amount of amazement" in the Catholic Church. She does the same for me.

This site triggered Loon of the Month in April 2001. The citation said: