The Atheist Blogger

The main video event this week was dprjones‘ 24 hour blogtv charity drive in aid of Doctors without Borders. The target amount to raise was $10,000 and this was quickly surpassed during the show and reached a final total of $18,761.92. The combination of this total and the amount brought in by the eBay auctions reached over $32,000.  Congratulations to dprjones and all his co-hosts for putting on a great show and for raising so much for a great charity!

The first video I want to share is a new one from QualiaSoup, and fans of his videos will know that he always manages to convey complex ideas across in an easy to understand manner. His latest video on “Putting faith in its place” is no exception.

Some of you are probably still trying to figure out how Derren Brown actually managed to predict the lottery, so here is a video laced with helpful hints and annotations (go to the YouTube site to view the annotations).

Finally, I’m not sure how many people will be able to view this due to “copyright restrictions” but here is a clip from a TV show making fun of an American Christian superhero show called “Bibleman”. It really is quite bizarre, and if you want to see more, I suggest searching for “Bibleman” at YouTube; there are plenty of videos to watch!

The internet was screwy yesterday so I didn’t get to make this post, but this morning we got 50MB internet in the house, which is amazing! So anyway, here are the videos I meant to post yesterday but didn’t:

Mr .Deity is a hilarious series of shorts that gradually but effectively tear apart Christianity and the Bible. This one (from series 3) deals with the contradictions in the Bible such as the virgin birth, and the multiple genealogies of Jesus.

Second up is a great explanation from Neil deGrasse Tyson about why the world will not end in 2012…or any other year in the recent future for that matter.

Finally, a video by Richard Wiseman explaining a quick personality test to do right in fron of your computer. Richard Wiseman is a celebrated psychologist who performed a test of psychic power over Twitter about a month back. You can follow him on Twitter as well as read his blog!

I haven’t been watching many videos over the last few weeks, but when I finally sign back into YouTube, I discover that Thunderf00t has gone on his trip, and a load of atheists I subscribe to are making videos on…well, nothing to do with atheism.

I did notice however that Edward Current had some new videos out, so I thought I’d dedicate this entire blog post to him! Edward Current is not a Christian, but a very clever and amusing comedian, who parodies religious thought on YouTube.

So, just why does the Earth support life? Was it chance, or was it…God? Edward Current tackles this question with his astounding…erm…logic.

What do you do when your “Christian soldier” is standing to attention? Using his experience as a Christian Youth Councillor, Edward Current explains why it is wrong to play with this “throbbing vessel of sin” (unless you are a Catholic priest of course).

Finally, do you think a cat can’t play Amazing Grace? Well, you’d be wrong. Through faith, everything is possible:

A few clips have been going around the internet in the last week, due to the almost radical turn of the new series of “That Mitchell & Webb Look”, a comedy sketch show starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb. The first two seasons were filled with hilarious sketches, but the third has some absolute gems surrounding issues of skepticism, such as this sketch mocking religious zealots and their passion for finding messages in pieces of fruit (or anything else for that matter).

In the same episode, they attacked the pseudoscience of homeopathy with a sketch called “Homeopathic A&E”.

On the subject of David Mitchell, I was rather surprised to find an article he wrote a week ago in the Guardian that spoke out against the “Camp Quest” summer camp for children of atheists. I’m not sure if he has ever stated his religious beliefs, but evidently he doesn’t support the “new atheist” ideals. I wouldn’t suspect him to be a Christian (or even a believer given the content of his shows), so perhaps he’s on the same line as Julian Baggini?

So I was planning on doing a YouTube Thursday, but our BBQ party turned into a night of card games (Phase 10 FTW!) culminating in a poker game that ended quite early Friday morning. Of course whilst we were playing, the news of Michael Jackson’s demise arrived through a text message. At first, we were certain it was a joke, so I fired up TweetDeck (news travels faster in the Twitterverse), expecting to see nothing but the random tweets of people I follow. This was not to be, as my screen was suddenly filled with the words “Michael Jackson”, “heart attack”, “dead”, and links to various news sources that were covering the story. My heart sunk, and I said to my stunned friends “Oh my goodness…it’s true”.

We got the news quite early on, so early that when we turned on the T.V to watch the BBC news flash, the reporters were still saying that nothing was confirmed, that the LA Times were the only ones saying he was dead, and that other reports claimed he was in a coma, but still alive. I hoped that the LA Times had received a bad source, but 30 minutes later and all the networks were showing the official reports from the hospital; that Michael Jackson had collapsed at his home, fallen into a coma, and had died on the way to hospital. For an hour, medical staff attempted to revive him, but they were unsuccessful.

So for this special YouTube Saturday, here are some of his greatest songs. Oh, and to get away from the dreary and religious “R.I.P”, I say L.I.M (Live In Memory) which is much more upbeat.

Black or White:

Earth Song:

Thriller:

Bad:

I Want You Back (Jackson 5)

ABC (Jackson 5)