The Atheist Blogger

On Valentine’s day, I took 3 of my student group up to London in order to protest the Vatican’s interfering in Italian politics, and their general views on women and homosexuality. It was a great day out, and we managed to attact quite a few protestors for the march, which started at the Natural History Museum, and ended at the Italian Embassy. It was great to meet some famous people there, like the political activist Peter Tatchell (who performed a citizen’s arrest on Robert Mugabe twice), and the President of the National Secular Society, Terry Sanderson.

As promised, I took loads of photos, and those of you who have me on Facebook can simply view the two albums there. For those who don’t use Facebook or haven’t added me, I have installed a cool plugin for the blog that makes my facebook albums available through a special gallery. If you wait for the entire page to finish loading before clicking on anything, each picture should appear in a nifty JavaScript viewer which you can use the arrow keys to move through.

Album 1 (60 photos)

Album 2 (22 photos)

My student group is currently planning a trip to the Darwin Exhibition at the Natural History Museum, which we will hopefully do next weekend, although tickets are selling out faster than we originally thought, so we may have to do it in early March.

Apparently there is no limit to how low Catholics will sink to defend their crackers. After PZ Myers desecrated a cracker back in July, he received numerous emails expressing hate, including some death threats. Then, when a Canadian guy started posting videos of Eucharist desecration under the name “fsmdude” on YouTube, he received the same sort of thing. A Catholic also found out where he lived, and wrote a letter to his father, prompting him to take down his videos.

Crackergate continued though, and police showed up at fsmdude’s house one night. They had received reports that fsmdude might have a gun and was planning to murder children at a local school. fsmdude has a series of 3 videos re-enacting the talk he had to have with the police, which included him having to explain what “FSM” meant, and why Pastafarianism wasn’t a dangerous cult.

Seriously though, if Catholics want to defend their God, I have no problems with that. Just don’t make up blatent lies that accuse someone of being a terrorist. That is so low it’s actually sickening.

I can personally think of about…7 different ways off the top of my head before I start getting bored and have to go play video games. A Canadian YouTube user who goes by the name fsmdude (his noodliness be praised) is trying to find out just that. So far, his video series has seen 20 desecrations, including

• Desecration by Frying Pan (plus whipped cream for a tasty fried snack)
• Desecration by Toilet
• Desecration by Glue-gun
• Desecration by Magnifying glass (plus the good ol’ Sun)

My personal favourite (because it is  so cute) is video #15, Desecration by Groundhog:

Great work, PZ Myers would be proud!

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.

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.

Read more…