An atheist photographer focuses on faith
CNN (blog)
But I do know this: Even an ardent atheist can look at a house of worship and see the signs of an invisible human longing that is common to us all, believer and unbeliever alike. Mark Schacter is a photographer based in Ottawa, Canada. Mark's newest ...

and more »

Atheist Fires Back at O'Reilly for War on Christmas™ 'Obsession,' Persecution ...
Mediaite
Bill O'Reilly's been at the forefront of this battle, throwing punch after punch at the battalion of anti-Christmas forces, and the group American Atheists is fighting back, charging that O'Reilly's just obsessed and has a persecution complex. Dave ...
Passionate atheist to Bill O'Reilly: 'Religion kills people'BizPac Review
Pot Meet Kettle? Bill O'Reilly Thinks Atheists Are Angry 'Cheapshotters!'News Hounds
Atheists to Bill O'Reilly: 'Religion does more than just hurt people. Religion ...Raw Story
Fox News
all 7 news articles »

Florida To Celebrate Festivus With The Rest Of Us After Atheist's Beer Can ...
Huffington Post
A Christian nativity scene and a Christmas tree at the Florida Capitol will be joined this week by another symbol of the holidays: a homemade Festivus pole. The pole, which will be nearly 6 feet tall and made from emptied Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans ...

Ice stalagmite. My furnace drowned during the recent floods in Boulder, and I replaced it with a high-efficiency furnace. The furnace discharges into a plastic pipe, which the technicians ran up the old flue. We are nearing the end of the first cold snap of the year, with nighttime temperatures running below 0 °F, and the condensation from the pipe evidently caused the ice stalagmite on the roof.... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

San Francisco Chronicle
Gov. Rick Scott allows 'militant atheist' to erect beer can Festivus pole at ...
Raw Story
Rick Scott's (R) office has approved the request of a self-proclaimed “militant atheist” to install an 8-foot-tall Festivus pole made of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans in the Florida State Capitol building. According to Tamarac Talk, Deerfield Beach ...
Atheist to erect 'Festivus' pole in Florida's capitolFlorida Today
Beer can Festivus pole going up next to Nativity in Florida CapitolBizPac Review
Festivus celebrated at Florida state buildingNinemsn
Philly.com (blog)
all 60 news articles »

Raw Story
Sarah Palin: Atheist 'Joe McScrooges' trying to 'take away that freedom to ...
Raw Story
“Angry atheists” aren't just trying to “abort Christ from Christmas,” according to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, they are also threatening the American way of life. In her new book about the so-called “war on Christmas,” she castigates litigious ...
Sarah Palin: Atheists Are Suing Private Citizens Over Nativity Scenes 'On ...The New Civil Rights Movement
Palin Book Critiques: The Gift That Keeps on GivingRoll Call

all 8 news articles »

An atheist photographer focuses on faith
CNN (blog)
But I do know this: Even an ardent atheist can look at a house of worship and see the signs of an invisible human longing that is common to us all, believer and unbeliever alike. Mark Schacter is a photographer based in Ottawa, Canada. Mark's newest ...

and more »

Raw Story
Canadian Billboard Company Rejects Atheist Group's Ads
Christian Post
An atheist group in Canada has claimed that a Vancouver billboard company has violated their human rights by refusing to run advertisements carrying "No God" slogans in the city's downtown area. The Centre for Inquiry Canada (CFI) plans to put ads ...
Atheist Ads Banned In VancouverHuffington Post Canada
Atheist Ad Campaign 'Not Approved' in Vancouver, Human Rights Violation ...International Business Times AU
Atheist group considers filing human rights complaint after billboard rejectedRaw Story
CTV News -Gawker -Globalnews.ca
all 18 news articles »

Charisma News
Atheist Group Seeks to Deny Poor Children Christmas Gifts
Charisma News
An atheist group has threatened to sue a school in West Columbus, S.C., for allowing its students to participate in Operation Christmas Child, a program that blesses needy children at Christmastime. Alliance Defending Freedom sent East Point Academy a ...

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I think we’re all tired of the War on Christmas. The atheists have won; it’s officially a secular, federal holiday, the capitalists promote it as a consumerist orgy of mass consumption, most people see it as a nice time of year to get together with friends and family, and this Jesus guy, as always, is superfluous. But like the Japanese soldiers occasionally found holed up on remote Pacific islands, there’s Bill O’Reilly, dug in and flailing. Apparently, we have some grand plan to destroy Christmas so we can win entitlements and get gay married and have lots of abortions.

Give it up, O’Reilly. You’re just sounding increasingly deranged. War’s over.

I quite like this sentiment:

But of course, Bill O’Reilly would see that as oppressive and atheistic, because it doesn’t elevate his “Judeo-Christian” values to an exalted position.

Just to spite O’Reilly, this year I’m going to have two Christmases, one with the youngest daughter and middle son in Boulder, and another with the oldest son in St Cloud. Nyah.

I’ve been distracted lately — it’s end of the world semester time — and so I didn’t have time to comment on this recent PNAS paper that reports on dramatic sex differences in the brains of men and women. Fortunately, I can just tell you to go read Christian Jarrett, who explains most of the flaws in the study, or you can look at these graphical illustrations of the magnitude of the differences. I just want to add two lesser points.

First, let’s all be really careful about the overselling of fMRI, ‘k? It’s a powerful tool, but it’s got serious spatial and temporal resolution limitations, and it is not, as many in the public seem to think, visualizing directly the electrical signaling of neurons. It’s imaging the broader physiological activity — respiration, oxygen flux, vascular changes — in small chunks of the brain. If you’re ever going to talk about fMRI, I recommend that you read Nick Logothetis’s paper that cooly assesses the state of affairs with fMRI.

The limitations of fMRI are not related to physics or poor engineering, and are unlikely to be resolved by increasing the sophistication and power of the scanners; they are instead due to the circuitry and functional organization of the brain, as well as to inappropriate experimental protocols that ignore this organization. The fMRI signal cannot easily differentiate between function-specific processing and neuromodulation, between bottom-up and top-down signals, and it may potentially confuse excitation and inhibition. The magnitude of the fMRI signal cannot be quantified to reflect accurately differences between brain regions, or between tasks within the same region. The origin of the latter problem is not due to our current inability to estimate accurately cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen (CMRO2) from the BOLD signal, but to the fact that haemodynamic responses are sensitive to the size of the activated population, which may change as the sparsity of neural representations varies spatially and temporally. In cortical regions in which stimulus- or task-related perceptual or cognitive capacities are sparsely represented (for example, instantiated in the activity of a very small number of neurons), volume transmission— which probably underlies the altered states of motivation, attention, learning and memory—may dominate haemodynamic responses and make it impossible to deduce the exact role of the area in the task at hand. Neuromodulation is also likely to affect the ultimate spatiotemporal resolution of the signal.

Just so you don’t think this is a paper ragging on the technique, let me balance that with another quote. It’s a very even-handed paper that discusses fMRI honestly.

This having been said, and despite its shortcomings, fMRI is cur- rently the best tool we have for gaining insights into brain function and formulating interesting and eventually testable hypotheses, even though the plausibility of these hypotheses critically depends on used magnetic resonance technology, experimental protocol, statistical analysis and insightful modelling. Theories on the brain’s functional organization (not just modelling of data) will probably be the best strategy for optimizing all of the above. Hypotheses formulated on the basis of fMRI experiments are unlikely to be analytically tested with fMRI itself in terms of neural mechanisms, and this is unlikely to change any time in the near future.

The other point I want to mention is that there’s a lot of extremely cool data visualization stuff going on in fMRI studies, and also that what you’re really seeing is data that has been grandly massaged. Imagine that I take a photo of my wife’s hand, and my hand. If I just showed you the raw images, the differences would be obvious, and you’d probably have no problem recognizing which was the man’s and which was the woman’s. This is not true of the raw data from two brain scans from a woman and a man — without all kinds of processing and data extraction (legitimate operations, mind you) it would look like a hash of noise. But do we look at two people’s hands, with obvious differences, and announce that we’ve made a dramatic discovery that sex differences are hardwired? So why do scientists get away with it if it involves sticking heads in a very expensive machine that makes funny noises?

Furthermore, the processing done in this distance was designed to abstract and highlight the differences, amplifying their perception. Take the photos of my wife’s hand and mine, and now do some jazzy enhancement to subtract out anything that is the same, so the bulk of the images are erased as unimportant, and then pseudocolor the remainder into neon reds and blues, and display it in 3 dimensions, rotating. That would be a weird, complex image far removed from the mundane familiarity of the shape of the hand, but it would emphasize real differences to an extraordinary degree, while obscuring all of the similarities, and give a false impression of the magnitude of the differences.

Let’s not assign all the differences to something genetic, either (although of course, some are modulated by biological — but not really genetic — differences). If you were to do the same comparison of my hand to my father’s, you’d see much grander differences than between mine and my wife’s. He was a manual laborer and mechanic, and I recall doing the comparison myself: his hands were muscular, powerful, calloused, deeply lined. I should have gotten a photo while he was alive so I could publish it in PNAS, touting significant biological differences between father and son.

(via Stephanie)

Logothetis NK (2008) What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI. Nature 453(7197):869-78. doi: 10.1038/nature06976.

Jonny Scaramanga has posted a sampling of quiz questions from Accelerated Christian Education. Take a look, and ask yourself, “Am I smarter than a fundamentalist Christian taught from a home-school curriculum developed by fanatics in Texas?”

You will be reassured by the fact that yes, you are. Much smarter. Although after reading the questions, you might be a little less smart than you were five minutes before.

You’ll need all your smarts when you face the truly terrifying question: who thinks the ACE curriculum is an acceptable educational standard for the 21st century?

In the United Kingdom, UK NARIC has deemed qualifications based on ACE to be comparable to A-level. Ofsted routinely whitewashes ACE schools in reports, and ACE nurseries teaching creationism receive government funding.

In New Zealand, ACE qualifications are accepted for university entrance.

In the USA, ACE’s Lighthouse Christian Academy is accredited by MSA-CESS. The curriculum is used in givernment-funded creationist voucher programs in eleven states.

In South Africa, based on HESA’s recommendation, a number of universities have signed up to accept ACE graduates.

ACE says its curriculum is used in 192 countries and 6000 schools worldwide. This is happening nearer than you think.

They want to dumbify everybody.

Tablet Magazine
Can You Be an Atheist and a Jew at the Same Time? David Silverman Says No.
Tablet Magazine
And once again, as in holiday seasons past, one of the people accused of leading the charge is David Silverman, the brash frontman of American Atheists. Sarah Palin rails against Silverman and his group in the first chapter (“Angry Atheists and their ...
'Tis The Season For Militant Atheists To WhineTown Hall

all 2 news articles »

Soapbox: Atheism becoming national religion of US
The Coloradoan
“Atheist mega-churches take root across US, world” reads a recent AP headline. Therein hangs the problem facing America today as we grapple with “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting free exercise thereof.

and more »

An atheist photographer focuses on faith
CNN (blog)
But I do know this: Even an ardent atheist can look at a house of worship and see the signs of an invisible human longing that is common to us all, believer and unbeliever alike. Mark Schacter is a photographer based in Ottawa, Canada. Mark's newest ...

The Explosion of the New Atheists Churches: What It Means To Christians
Patheos (blog)
The Denver based and original home of the Free Thought Exchange founded by Jason Testerman wants to get atheists into the churches. That would seem inconceivable until you know why they want this. Some atheists have begun “evangelizing” Christians ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Written by Johnny O’Coileain (Add him on Facebook)

Editor,  One Nation Under Nothing/Crackpot Chronicle

 

One of our readers at One Nation Under Nothing submitted the following question for this week’s reader-focused article:

What percentage of Christians/Catholics do you think have actually read the entire bible?

The stereotype drifting aloft in the free-thinking community is: the vast majority of Christians know the Bible the same way a Catholic priest knows celibacy. In short, the familiarity is not very high. The earliest I’ve traced this assumption is to Thomas Paine, who said, “The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.” We know religious people “read” the Bible, but in the same fashion as reading the Denny’s menu. But real examination and superficially reading cherry-picked lines are worlds apart.

To answer the reader’s question in a specific sense, a Religious News Service poll shown by the Huffington Post said only one in five Americans actually read the Bible. This runs concurrently with the assumption that most Americans believe this atrocious book is a good moral foundation. Furthermore:

The survey showed the Bible is still firmly rooted in American soil: 88 percent of respondents said they own a Bible, 80 percent think the Bible is sacred, 61 percent wish they read the Bible more, and the average household has 4.4 Bibles.

What’s even more damning for the proponents of Idiocracy, is that atheists and agnostics (according to a Pew Research poll) scored higher in Biblical knowledge than believers. Reprinted by an NPR article, the Pew Forum on Religious Religion and Public Life additionally posited:

More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

If large swathes of Christians actually examined the Bible, their legions would diminish like a fart going off in an elevator. When a reasonable person studies reality relative to talking snakes and bushes fluent in Hebrew, we subscribe less to explanations not even fit for Sesame Street. On a scarier note, the idea that a Big Brother figure drowned an entire planet; slaughtered Egyptian children; and treats your thoughts as real crimes, is a totalitarianism far worse than Hitler could dream up on an Acid-LSD cocktail. More Christians need to read the Bible, because progress would make tidal waves rather than pond ripples.

Raw Story
Atheist group considers filing human rights complaint after billboard rejected
Raw Story
Atheist group considers filing human rights complaint after billboard rejected. By Scott Kaufman Sunday, December 8, 2013 12:25 EST. cfic. Tweet; Print Friendly and PDF; Email this page. Tweet. An atheist group in Canada is considering filing a human ...
Atheist Ads Banned In VancouverHuffington Post Canada
Atheist Billboard Rejected in CanadaOpposing Views
Atheist billboard ads rejected in VancouverCBC.ca
International Business Times AU -CTV News -Gawker
all 15 news articles »

Passionate atheist to Bill O'Reilly: 'Religion kills people'
BizPac Review
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly found out Saturday why atheists are so opposed to Christmas: It represents a mix of “religion and government,” according to one atheist activist. The night before, O'Reilly asked Chris Stedman, a humanist chaplain, why ...
Atheist Fires Back at O'Reilly for War on Christmas™ 'Obsession,' Persecution ...Mediaite
Pot Meet Kettle? Bill O'Reilly Thinks Atheists Are Angry 'Cheapshotters!'News Hounds
Atheists to Bill O'Reilly: 'Religion does more than just hurt people. Religion ...Raw Story
Fox News
all 7 news articles »

Would I watch this? Probably. Would I hate myself for it? Certainly.