Luckily, he happens to know just how ignorant he is. If only everyone else could come to that wisdom!

Let him demonstrate how ignorant the human animal is while he talks about UFOs and the argument from ignorance:

Featuring Stephen Hawking.

It’s just Auto Tune, but it’s beautiful.

The sky calls to us.

If we do not destroy ourselves

We will one day

Venture to the stars.

I’m back!

I realized while looking at my last post that, given the fact I haven’t written in so long, some of you may be under the impression that I died.

I’ll have to disappoint you. I’m back. And cancer free. I received a huge scar, but as I no longer have renal cell carcinoma I’ll take that deal. And now that I’ve returned, I’ll get back to blogging.

But until then, enjoy my post-op video from last month.

This blog is called “Suddenly Atheist”. But more than just being an atheist, I’m also an all-around skeptic. So I think it is only fair that I address the occasional issue that is not necessarily religious, but still touches on my skepticism.

Plus, it’s always fun to open up the door for a new group of people to hate me.

So strap in kiddies, ’cause here we go…

As far back as I can remember I always wanted to believe in UFOs.

That’s a pretty heavy statement, so let’s take a moment to dissect it a bit.

When I say “UFOs”, I use the word colloquially. In the literal sense it means Unidentified Flying Object, which everyone should believe in. There are things in the sky that people see that they can not identify. But this is not what I mean, nor what most people mean, when they use the term UFO. They mean “some sort of extraterrestrial spacecraft”.

And I say “wanted” to believe because I was never a true believer. I never saw a UFO. I was never abducted. And I never really thought the books I read were true. But I wanted it to be.

Simply being a human, I think, caused part of my desire to believe. Part of being a human is desiring to be with and connect with others. And I still have that desire today. I want there to be extraterrestrials (aliens) out there somewhere in the universe. I want them to come to Earth and visit us so we could learn from eachother. So the stories and reports one hears from UFO believers are incredibly compelling merely because I wanted to believe them so much.

I finally reached a point, around the time I became an atheist, when I had to look at the UFO question with my newly trained skeptical eyes.

The evidence just isn’t there.

The stories are great. Let’s not pretend any different. But stories, anecdotes, are probably the worst form of evidence. They’re wonderful for personal evidence, but you can’t use them rationally to convince others.

Anecdotes with good evidence, however, would be enough. But I’ve never come across it.

It has, however, been quite a long time since I’ve done any research on the subject. So, by all means, if you have definitive evidence of extraterrestrials or aliens or anything of that nature, please bring it forward. If it’s true, I want to know it.

But if all you have is grainy video of moving specks and anecdotes, it just won’t be enough.

I promise that my blog won’t just turn into me posting YouTube videos that strike my fancy.

That being said, here’s another one. But Australian musician/comedian Tim Minchin, do yourself a favor and check out his 9-minute beat poem entitled “Storm”.

If you’re an atheist, a skeptic, a freethinker, or just annoyed by hippies, you’ll love it. And look below the fold for lyrics.

Inner North London, top floor flat
All white walls, white carpet, white cat,
Rice Paper partitions
Modern art and ambition
The host’s a physician,
Lovely bloke, has his own practice
His girlfriend’s an actress
An old mate from home
And they’re always great fun.
So to dinner we’ve come.

The 5th guest is an unknown,
The hosts have just thrown
Us together for a favour
because this girl’s just arrived from Australia
And has moved to North London
And she’s the sister of someone
Or has some connection.

As we make introductions
I’m struck by her beauty
She’s irrefutably fair
With dark eyes and dark hair
But as she sits
I admit I’m a little bit wary
because I notice the tip of the wing of a fairy
Tattooed on that popular area
Just above the derrière
And when she says “I’m Sagittarien”
I confess a pigeonhole starts to form
And is immediately filled with pigeon
When she says her name is Storm.

Chatter is initially bright and light hearted
But it’s not long before Storm gets started:
“You can’t know anything,
Knowledge is merely opinion”
She opines, over her Cabernet Sauvignon
Vis a vis
Some unhippily
Empirical comment by me

“Not a good start” I think
We’re only on pre-dinner drinks
And across the room, my wife
Widens her eyes
Silently begs me, Be Nice
A matrimonial warning
Not worth ignoring
So I resist the urge to ask Storm
Whether knowledge is so loose-weave
Of a morning
When deciding whether to leave
Her apartment by the front door
Or a window on the second floor.

The food is delicious and Storm,
Whilst avoiding all meat
Happily sits and eats
While the good doctor, slightly pissedly
Holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history
When Storm suddenly she insists
“But the human body is a mystery!
Science just falls in a hole
When it tries to explain the the nature of the soul.”

My hostess throws me a glance
She, like my wife, knows there’s a chance
That I’ll be off on one of my rants
But my lips are sealed.
I just want to enjoy my meal
And although Storm is starting to get my goat
I have no intention of rocking the boat,
Although it’s becoming a bit of a wrestle
Because – like her meteorological namesake -
Storm has no such concerns for our vessel:

“Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It’s time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives.”

And try as hard as I like,
A small crack appears
In my diplomacy-dike.
“By definition”, I begin
“Alternative Medicine”, I continue
“Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call “alternative medicine”
That’s been proved to work?
Medicine.”

“So you don’t believe
In ANY Natural remedies?”

“On the contrary actually:
Before we came to tea,
I took a natural remedy
Derived from the bark of a willow tree
A painkiller that’s virtually side-effect free
It’s got a weird name,
Darling, what was it again?
Masprin?
Basprin?
Asprin!
Which I paid about a buck for
Down at my local drugstore.

The debate briefly abates
As our hosts collects plates
but as they return with desserts
Storm pertly asserts,

“Shakespeare said it first:
There are more things in heaven and earth
Than exist in your philosophy…
Science is just how we’re trained to look at reality,
It can’t explain love or spirituality.
How does science explain psychics?
Auras; the afterlife; the power of prayer?”

I’m becoming aware
That I’m staring,
I’m like a rabbit suddenly trapped
In the blinding headlights of vacuous crap.
Maybe it’s the Hamlet she just misquothed
Or the eighth glass of wine I just quaffed
But my diplomacy dike groans
And the arsehole held back by its stones
Can be held back no more:

“Look , Storm, I don’t mean to bore you
But there’s no such thing as an aura!
Reading Auras is like reading minds
Or star-signs or tea-leaves or meridian lines
These people aren’t plying a skill,
They are either lying or mentally ill.
Same goes for those who claim to hear God’s demands
And Spiritual healers who think they have magic hands.

By the way,
Why is it OK
For people to pretend they can talk to the dead?
Is it not totally fucked in the head
Lying to some crying woman whose child has died
And telling her you’re in touch with the other side?
That’s just fundamentally sick
Do we need to clarify that there’s no such thing as a psychic?
What, are we fucking 2?
Do we actually think that Horton Heard a Who?
Do we still think that Santa brings us gifts?
That Michael Jackson hasn’t had facelifts?
Are we still so stunned by circus tricks
That we think that the dead would
Wanna talk to pricks
Like John Edwards?

Storm to her credit despite my derision
Keeps firing off clichés with startling precision
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition

“You’re so sure of your position
But you’re just closed-minded
I think you’ll find
Your faith in Science and Tests
Is just as blind
As the faith of any fundamentalist”

“Hm that’s a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, it’s absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts it’s beliefs based on what’s observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I’ll spin on a fucking dime
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

You show me that it works and how it works
And when I’ve recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.”

Everyones just staring at me now,
But I’m pretty pissed and I’ve dug this far down,
So I figure, in for penny, in for a pound:

“Life is full of mysteries, yeah
But there are answers out there
And they won’t be found
By people sitting around
Looking serious
And saying isn’t life mysterious?
Let’s sit here and hope
Let’s call up the fucking Pope
Let’s go watch Oprah
Interview Deepak Chopra

If you’re going to watch tele, you should watch Scooby Doo.
That show was so cool
because every time there’s a church with a ghoul
Or a ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
The fucking janitor or the dude who runs the waterslide.
Throughout history
Every mystery
EVER solved has turned out to be
Not Magic.

Does the idea that there might be truth
Frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon
On Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you
Frighten you?
Does the notion that there may not be a supernatural
So blow your hippy noodle
That you would rather just stand in the fog
Of your inability to Google?

Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?
If you’re so into Shakespeare
Lend me your ear:
“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet… is just fucking silly”
Or something like that.
Or what about Satchmo?!
I see trees of Green,
Red roses too,
And fine, if you wish to
Glorify Krishna and Vishnu
In a post-colonial, condescending
Bottled-up and labeled kind of way
That’s ok.
But here’s what gives me a hard-on:
I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant lump of carbon.
I have one life, and it is short
And unimportant…
But thanks to recent scientific advances
I get to live twice as long as my great great great great uncles and auntses.
Twice as long to live this life of mine
Twice as long to love this wife of mine
Twice as many years of friends and wine
Of sharing curries and getting shitty
With good-looking hippies
With fairies on their spines
And butterflies on their titties.

And if perchance I have offended
Think but this and all is mended:
We’d as well be 10 minutes back in time,
For all the chance you’ll change your mind.

Newsflash:

In addition to my blogging here on Suddenly Atheist, I’ve been asked to become a contributor and blogging coordinator for the new and official blog for the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia. As I happen to be a member of that wonderful organization, I immediately hopped to it and set up the FSGP Blog!

But what does this have to do with all of my awesome and talented readers? (That’s right, I’m talking to you!)

I can’t write two blogs all by my lonesome. That’s why the FSGP Blog is looking for contributors. And as I know that Suddenly Atheist is visited by many bloggers and writers, I knew to come to you first.

Are you a freethinker? Do you like writing about science, skepticism, atheism, humanism, religious freedom and philosophy? Can you spare one post a week for the FSGP Blog? Then please get a hold of me as soon as you can!

Shoot me an email at fsgpblog@gmail.com if you’re interested. This project looks to be a lot of fun, and successful if done right.

Thanks!

I came across this on P.Z.’s site and could not pass it up.  Gotta love that old testament narrative!

Did you all miss me? I’m sure you did! Sorry for my absence, but I’ve been enjoying a much needed two week holiday vacation with the family. But I’m back, and I promise to start posting things that will annoy most of you as soon as possible.

Hope everyone had as great a holiday season as I did. Now back to the grindstone!

Having spent most of my life as a nerd (I don’t count the years before I could read.) it is fair to say that aliens are a huge part of my life. My favorite movie as a child was ET: The Extraterrestrial. Part of ‘family time’ in my house involved getting together on Saturday evenings and watching that scary bastion of humanism, Star Trek: The Next Generation. One of my favorite novel series involves an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth during an alternate World War II. I was a believer in UFOs for years (and am now recovering), and even took a “UFOs in American Culture” class while in college.

So obviously my brain has been running with the possibility of aliens for my entire life. Unfortunately I’ve also come to terms that if there is intelligent alien life somewhere else in the universe, I will probably not live to see them. Unless they are far more scientifically and technologically advanced than we are, it will take a long time for any intelligent species to reach us. The Universe doesn’t seem to lend itself to short trips across its expanse.

Still, it’s fun to think about!

What most people seem to concentrate on when they discuss first contact with aliens is whether or not they’ll be friendly. Independence Day, Contact, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind cover the three most likely possibilities. But that’s not what I’m interested in. Here’s my question:

What happens to religion when we make contact with intelligent aliens?

The simplest explanation for what will happen, and the most likely, is that the religions will scramble for a good many years and possibly decades until finally reinterpretting all of their scripture to include the existence of intelligent beings other than humans.

Along with being the most likely scenario, it’s also the least fun. I see a definite possibility for the self-destruction of several religions when this event happens, and the growth of a few more.

Scientology will almost certainly see an increase in their numbers.

Judaism, at least the liberal kind that I am familiar with, will pretty much ignore the aliens when it comes to their religion. It wouldn’t be surprising to many of them that their god could have created more than just humans.

Many of the more extreme Islamic sects will, I predict, think these aliens are demonic and, unfortunately, attack them. And I’m sure certain Christian sects will agree with them. Whether they attack physically or verbally depends on how far in the future this takes place.

The Mormons, I predict, won’t be surprised at all…though they might be if they discover that the aliens hold no religion for themselves.

Liberal Christians may actually be pulled, finally, away from the faith when something happens that obviously has no reference in their holy book.

Evangelicals will freak out for a few years before the apologists come up with some excuse that god could have created aliens and not told them in the bible. Then they will feverently learn the alien language in an attempt to evangelize and create new alien Christians.

As for Humanists…we may have to change our name (Beingists?), but otherwise not much will change.

But these are just the fantasies of my mind. What do you think?

One of the ‘dangers’ of being labeled a liberal is that I hold many positions that aren’t traditionally considered liberal. That may not seem like a danger to many other people, but it’s never fun being hunted down by a mob of angry environmentalists.

Which is not to say I’m against the environment. But my support for something like this might get me banned from a lot of ‘green’ parties:

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

…

The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.

‘You could never have a Chernobyl-type event – there are no moving parts,’ said Deal. ‘You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it’s too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.’

How freaking cool is that!?

The one issue that I sided with McCain with over Obama was his stance on nuclear power. I’ve done my own research, and to me it looks like nuclear energy is the way to go if we want to ween ourselves off the oil and coal. Obviously we can work on other technologies like solar power and wind power, but nuclear power is the only thing currently out there that can compete with oil for the amount of electricity that Americans use.

It is also incredibly safe and clean. These mini reactors, over 10 years, would allegedly only produce a softball-sized amount of waste. And most of it could be recycled and used as fuel for another reactor! How can the amount of pollution that we pump into the air every 10 years even compare to less than a softball of nuclear waste?

I think a key problem with some of my environmentalist friends is that they hold an irrational bias against nuclear power. Perhaps it’s the word ‘nuclear’? There’s a lot of baggage there. When one sees that word, the next word you think is usually ‘bomb’. Or perhaps it’s the cooling towers? I didn’t even know until a few years ago that those massive smokestacks are not pumping radiation or pollution into the air…just steam.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I definitely want my own reactor in my back yard.

If nothing else, it will make me feel like the Bond-villain every evil atheist truly wants to be…