The Atheist Blogger

I watched a clip of the new BBC Drama series “Bonekickers” on Friday Night with Jonathon Ross last week, and the first thing that crossed my mind was how unscientific it was for an archaeology show. They had a scene where the team was gathered around a piece of wood, the analysis said it was from 32AD and it had human blood seeped in it. One of the lead characters said “I’m just giving you the facts. 2000 years ago, someone was lacerated to this piece of wood”. They all gather round a picture of Jesus on the cross.

I was sat there thinking “What? You got that from a piece of blood soaked wood?”. It was a massive assumption, but I decided to watch the episode anyway. The scene in question was put in a slightly better context when it mentioned the finding of Templar Knight skeletons, and went around the basis that they were being hunted and wanted to preserve Christian artifacts. Of course it’s still a big leap of faith for an archaeologist.

The story went on, introduced a Christian Evangelist who was getting in trouble for hate crimes against Muslims, and two characters who turned out to be modern Templar Knights (swords and all). The characters were under the command of the Evangelist, who bought the dig site and ordered the Knights to go about killing Muslims. Only one is executed in the episode, and it was a pretty useless scene that was probably included to be politically correct.

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Pharyngula reports that a student walked into a Catholic Mass and walked out with the small bread wafer that represents Christ. Apparently the Catholic world is outraged, saying he took the poor piece of bread hostage. It’s been called a hate crime, the student has been sent death threats, and Bill Donahue from the Catholic League says the student should be expelled.

So much for freedom of expression, but I tell you what, it’s given me an idea.

I’m ofiicially going to be the first English copycat. I’m going back to church for the first time in 10 years, and I’m going to steal a wafer. To top the American student Webster Cook, I’m going to steal the wafer from one of the most famous cathedrals in England. No, not St Pauls, but Salisbury Cathedral. It’s a medieval cathedral that’s celebrating its 750th year this year, and it has the tallest spire in England. It’s a mega tourist attraction.

The schedule for events can be found at their website.

Regretfully I cannot do this today (Wednesday), but I am in town on Thursday, and I will be attending the late morning Holy Communion at 11:15. I will go to the Morning Chapel, attend the full service, receive communion and pocket it.

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Until Atheist Media Blog posted this video of Ayn Rand, I’d never heard of her, but she makes so much sense about the nature of reason, reality, and order. She has mentioned ideas I haven’t even considered before. A truly amazing individual.

[RAW][/RAW]

To think that blog carnivals are meant to bring people of similar beliefs together. Such philosophies seem to have been completely lost when I hosted the Carnival of the Godless two days ago. SocraticGadfly had an article on the Pew Survey which claimed that 1 in 5 atheists believed in God. As he pointed out, 50% of “agnostics” made the same claim.

The quote which started the debacle was this:

Hey, idiots. If you believe something, you can’t agnostic about it!

As many people probably know, this isn’t true at all. Agnosticism is defined as “an intellectual doctrine or attitude affirming the uncertainty of all claims to ultimate knowledge”. Simply put, the position on whether certain things can be claimed as absolute truth or knowledge.

Ergo, if you believe in God, you can be agnostic about it if you don’t claim absolute knowledge of God. These types of people are referred to as agnostic theists or agnostic deists. I’ve covered them before in my article about agnosticism.

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