The Atheist Blogger

As reported earlier this week, 41 year old Brazilian Roman Catholic priest Adelir Antonio di Carli was confirmed dead after his ballooning attempt when badly wrong. The priest was trying to beat a record 19 hour flight, attached only to helium balloons. A day after he made an emergency call to say he was crashing into the ocean, a mass of balloons were found in shark infested water.

Now, the priest has been entered into the 2008 Darwin Awards for removing himself from the gene pool. The great thing is, since Roman Catholic priests enter vows of celibacy, he had already removed himself from the gene pool, resulting in the first “double Darwin” award.

A lesson should be learnt from all this. If you are attempting to do some kind of world record balloon trip, at least learn to use your GPS before you set off!

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A week ago PZ Myers asked everyone to email the president of UCF to complain / voice concerns over the handling of students Webster Cook and Benjamin Collard. I sent a short email, along with a few other hundred people. Today I received this response:

Thank you for your e-mail.

Laws regarding student privacy prevent us from commenting about
individual UCF students. But, in general terms, when a student allegedly
violates student rules of conduct, his or her student account is placed
on hold.

The student is notified of this action and informed that the hold will
not prevent registration for classes. A student is allowed to register
after making a request to release the hold. The Office of Student
Conduct follows this procedure for any student who is referred to it.

More information about the entire Golden Rule and the student conduct
process is available on our Web site, www.ucf.edu. Please be assured
that UCF is committed to following its standard procedures to ensure
fair outcomes in all student conduct review cases.

Additionally, it is the university’s policy to treat all people with
dignity and respect, without regard to race, creed, color, national
origin, religion, sex, age, disability, marital status, sexual
orientation, veteran status, or political opinions and affiliations.

Amy J. Barnickel
Senior Executive Assistant to the President

From Promise to Prominence:
Celebrating 40 Years

Of course its the standard copy/paste response that was probably sent to everyone, but it’s the last paragraph that confuses me. Firstly I’m happy that Cook and Collard are not going to suffer any setbacks in their education because of this, but the so called “policy” outlined in the last paragraph clearly states

“without regard to race, creed, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran status, or political opinions and affiliations.”

Clearly the university is going against its own policy by regarding the religion of others over the individual. If the policy actually counted for anything, this whole issue would have been brushed aside as “free expression”, the same as any political statement or opinion. The UCF need to stop bowing to demands of evil religious organisations and start thinking of their students.

Who says atheists cannot organize themselves? A group of atheist bloggers who debunk everything Ray Comfort says (Raytractors) have organized a strike of his blog. I’ve joined their group as a contributor, so hopefully there will be some posts debunking Ray from me as well, after all I have done them in the past.

Ray Comfort rules his blog like a dictator. Every comment goes through a moderation phase before being displayed, and any comment that contains vulgar language or doesn’t capitalize “god” and “jesus” is removed. Repeat offenders are blocked. He calls his website “Atheist Central”

Due to this behaviour, and Ray’s continual ignorance in science, Raytractors has declared a strike for all atheist commentators of the blog. The aim of the strike is to see what happens to the blog when it is pretty much devoid of all life, since it is evident that Ray has more atheist “followers” than theist ones, mainly because of the absurdities of his beliefs. The rules of the strike are quite simple. You can visit Ray’s blog as many times as you want, but you cannot post a comment. Instead, why not write your comment as a blog post if you have a blog, or send in your comment to an atheist blog you read. I would be willing to post any comments you want to make about Ray Comfort right here.

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Looking over my stats, I found a few visitors coming in from a HaloScan comments page. Incidently, does anyone know how to find the original blog from this comments page? Judging by the comments it’s probably some deeply ignorant Christian blog. Anyway, I’d got some hits off that for my copy-cat wafer stealing event.

Reading through the comments, it turns into a discussion/argument about Eucharist between Catholics and (I assume) either atheists or semi-religious Christians. One Catholic named Rosemarie revealed the miracles behind the Eucharist:

Two miracles take place at the consecration. The first is that the substance of the bread and wine change into Jesus Christ. Not His dead Body and Blood but His risen and living Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity - His whole resurrected Self. The second miracle is that the qualities of bread and wine still remain as though no change has occurred. This is necessary so that the Eucharist can be in a foodlike form that we can easily consume.

Seriously? THAT is a miracle??? It’s always been my thinking that miracles were meant to be observable to be a sign of God’s power, as well as reward the believers (possibly converting some non-believers in the process). Now I know what miracles really are I should have been more open minded towards them. I apologise, and will now list various miracles I have encountered in the last hour.

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Yesterday I commented on a news story about a student in America who took a wafer from a Catholic Mass, incurring the wrath of quite a number of Catholic organizations in the process. The “crime” was referred to repeatedly as kidnap because of the strange belief of transubstantiation which states that the wafer and wine turn to the body and blood of Jesus Christ once blessed, although our sense still perceive them as food.

In this sense, taking a wafer without eating it is apparently equal to the crime of kidnapping Jesus himself. For atheists, this claim is completely ridiculous and illogical; not so much because there is no way of proving any of this transubstantiating actually happens, but because by their own logic, Catholics (and other denominations which subscribe to the process) are partaking in ritual cannibalism of their Saviour.

The whole debacle got me thinking about churches in England, and I found that my “local” cathedral followed a rare doctrine introduced by one of it’s early bishops to unite both Catholics and Prostestants on the issue of transubstantiation. As such, they adhere to the doctrine that the wafer and wine literally become the body and blood, but can only be “grasped by faith”. I decided to mimic the student in America, go to church for the first time in 10 years, and take Jesus’ body home with me.

When I first announced my plan, some people said it was disrespectful of faith and I would be violating someone else’s freedom of expression in order to fulfil my own. Such an idea was not the case, and it was if I had planned to run up to the alter and grab a handful. In my defense, I will tell you exactly how the morning went.

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