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A friend whom I haven’t spoken with in like 12 years got hold of me recently. She’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve met, and is easily the most gifted Catholic apologist I’ve ever met. We talk a lot about Catholicism, which I’m not nearly as well-versed in as I am Protestantism. But I digress.

The other day she tells me that prayer has worked for her numerous times, and that in general prayer can work for anyone. In short: prayer works.

Except when it doesn’t, and that’s a lot.

Let’s do another exercise again, shall we?

• How many little girls say prayers to Jesus when their father forces his genitalia inside of them?
• How many families have prayed not to lose their jobs and their houses when the economy took a dive?
• How many single mothers have prayed for some other choice between paying the rent and giving their children ketchup soup?
• How many people have prayed not to be burned alive in fiery auto crashes or house fires?
• How many people prayed not to have to choose between burning alive and jumping out of the WTC?
• How many women have prayed not to be raped in a dark parking lot?
• How many children have prayed for anything other than starvation?
• How many people prayed when they were being held down and soldiers cut their limbs off with machetes?
• How many people prayed to be rescued before their lungs filled with water after their boat sank?
• How many American soldiers have prayed for their legs, arms, or faces back?
• How many slaves prayed while being whipped by cruel masters?
• How many children have been kidnapped? How many of them have been raped? How many of those have been tortured? How many of them cried and prayed with their last breath to be returned to their parents before their ruined corpses were left to the birds?

To have the ability to stop evil and to do nothing about it is to be complicit with evil. To state that prayer works when it clearly doesn’t is to be complicit in a lie. To say that prayer doesn’t always work is to say that prayer doesn’t work.

God supposedly raises galaxies from thin air, extinguishes suns, makes and destroys kings. Above all else, we’re supposed to believe that he us ultimate good. And yet, he can’t even keep a promise to any number of little girls and boys, scared and crying mothers, or desperate fathers who need nothing more than a little help at the worst moment of their lives. Instead, their reward for faith is terror, misery, and heartbreak.

So I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but the god of the Old Testament is pretty bloodthirsty. On one page he’s telling the Israelites to murder the women and children of all the neighboring tribes, and on the next page it’s the Israelites who are having their salads tossed by the neighboring barbarians. He even executes innocent bystanders like Moses’s brother Aaron.

The fact that god is treating death as a punishment is very telling, because it implies that dying sucks. But, if there’s an afterlife that’s going to last a brazillion million years, we need to ask ourselves: death, so what?

The Torah never actually talks about the afterlife, but Judaism has an understanding of it (developed elsewhere) that is different from Christianity. In Christianity, a loving god throws non-believers into Hellfire for ever and ever because they made a few mistakes in life. In Judaism, almost everyone gets to spend eternity with god, although you might need a period of purification first. People like Hitler probably don’t get to join god in pleasure.

Constantly throughout both testaments, death is treated as a punishment in and of itself. For example, Moses is killed before he can enter the Promised Land. Or, the prophets of Baal (from I Kings) are put to death by Elijah. Or Ananias and his wife (Acts) are executed on the spot for keeping some money back from the apostles after they sold off their belongings. Or, god murders all the innocent first-born children of Egypt because Pharaoh won’t let the Israelites leave. Or, god has the Israelites kill all the Amalekites (including innocent infants and children) in 1 Samuel.

Now that we’ve established death as a punishment, let’s consider what happens at this exact moment. Here I am, a precocious little 10-year-old Amalekite girl. I’ve never hurt anyone. One day, my baby brother and I are playing Mario Kart on our Wii and Saul and his Israelite army roll into town. One of the soldiers approaches me and says that Jehovah has ordained my death, and then proceeds to stab me in the belly with a sword. He puts the sword through the face of my baby brother next. I fall to the ground and painfully bleed out, pissed off that Bowser keeps shooting my now driverless video game character with red turtles. I’m also distraught beyond belief that my innocent child brother whom I love dearly has a new sword hole in his face. He’s not dead yet, and will slowly die of thirst and blood loss over the next few days because me and my parents are only a few minutes from death.

At some point, I die. I now wake up in the spirit realm, and god says “what’s up” and gives me a new Wii and a Wii Fit. Two questions come to mind: first, how was my death a punishment? Even if I was a semi-bad person, I just need to work my way through Judaism’s “rooms” of atonement, and then it’s the Garden of Eden for eternity.

Second, what was the point of running me through with a damn rusty sword? I was a freaking innocent child!!!! Plus, I end up in relatively the same place no matter when I die, whether it’s at 10 or 80. So why all the sweaty man action of having an Israeli warrior stab me in the pancreas? Keeping me alive another 70 years will have no bearing whatsoever on the final destination of anyone alive, so a “punishment” death is just as irrelevant as an old age death. Another example: why throw rocks at adulterers? There is no permanent punishment for them in eternity as a result of their adultery, so why the needlessly painful ending to the human life? It’s almost as if people are being rewarded for their sins, because they get to go to Heaven sooner!

In the end, all this anger and warfare and a giant flood to kill all of mankind is completely and utterly unnecessary! So are the 10 commandments for that matter, as you can pretty much ignore them and still get to the same place! All death does is move you from one plane of existence to the next, so what’s the big deal? Essentially, god has an anger problem, and the only cure is to kill someone, preferably by some violent means like a sword to the chest or drowning. The dick thing about it though is that 8 seconds later he has to be all happy again and welcome you to eternal bliss. Personally, I’d be pretty pissed about all the theatrics and needless pain, and might consider giving god a right-cross to the family jewels. Take that, testicle Jesus!

I cannot imagine for a second that the most perfect being to ever exist would have such a retarded system of meting out punishment. Why all the hand wringing over sin only to have that sin and its capital punishment be rendered completely moot about 1 minute later?

P.S. Am I the first person to coin “testicle Jesus?” ‘Cause if so, that’s a pretty sweet name for my imaginary band.

In my last post, I tried to point out how abortion is the best thing that can happen to someone in the Protestant worldview. It also occurred to me that if god had moved up the Apocalypse, billions of people wouldn’t have been created only to end up thrown into Hell.

I wanted to pick up a little more on the weird notion of the ‘age of accountability‘ that I mentioned. This doctrine basically says the following: even though all mankind is guilty of sin because of Adam, god won’t hold Adam’s sin against those who are unable to save themselves (i.e. by believing in Jesus Christ). Ostensibly, this extends to children, and those who have never heard the gospel.

If this doctrine is true, one wonders why god would create these people anyways? He embued them with a soul at birth, only to let them live a random life completely absent from Jesus’s teachings. Then, when they die, that soul gets a free pass and gets into Heaven. This idea basically makes the whole believe in Jesus thing moot.

If anyone can get to Heaven so long as they don’t have the ability to choose Christ, why does the Bible say that Jesus is the only way into Heaven? Clearly, this presents a second option: be born in a place without access to missionaries, or die before you get old enough to make a proper choice on your salvation. Believing in Jesus is not the only way into Heaven.

So we’re back to an absurdity: if the devil is allowed to tempt you your entire life, and if you are more likely to go to Hell than to Heaven by default (because of Original Sin), it follows that the longer you’re alive the more opportunity you have to go to Hell. That sets up the following as true, in order of best to worse:

1. It is best to be aborted in the womb, because you as a human will never know the pain of life. You will never know pain, hunger, starvation, sickness, heartbreak, or warfare. Because you died before the age of accountability, you will go to Heaven.

2. It is second-best to die as a child (or as someone who is mentally retarded). Even though you might experience hardships like poverty, disease, hunger, or abuse, the fact that you are dying as a child guarantees you access to Heaven.

3. It is third-best to be born in a place that has not been introduced to the Bible. Even though you will almost certainly face physical hardships in your lifetime, the fact that you have never heard the word of Christ has saved you from Hell.

4. The worst scenario is to be born into a Christian nation and to survive into adulthood. You will have almost certainly suffered physical hardship, and now having survived into the age of accountability gives you a higher than likely chance of going to Hell.

It’s as if access to the gospel is a curse: so long as you’ve never heard it or are too young to understand it, you’re golden. But, as soon as you’ve heard it, you’re as good as doomed. So, in a nutshell, hearing the gospel is a detriment to your health.

If you’re a Christian and you love your family and friends, don’t tell them about Jesus, and abort your children if you have any. It’s the best thing you can do to help get them into Heaven.

Before I go, let’s look at the opposite of this real quick, since the Bible never technically says anything about this accountability thing. What it does say is that all of mankind is cut off from god because of original sin, which means that the only way for anyone to get to Heaven is through Christ. If that’s the case, the aborted, children of any age, and even those who have never heard of Jesus will go to Hell.

The other day, a friend of mine told me that children are a gift from god. Without the age of accountability, if this “gift” dies as a child, it would seem that god is perfectly content to throw it into a lake of never-ending fire and torment. Which basically brings us back to god being a colossal dick. After all, who would create a soul only to cast it into Hell when it dies a month after birth?

Or, consider someone who is born with mental retardation. According to Psalms, god actually made them with mental retardation, thus preventing them from being able to choose Christ, and thus creating them with full knowledge that they would go to Hell upon death.

If god is cool though and doesn’t toss newborns and children into Hell, it means he’s a dick to everyone else who was unlucky enough to hear the gospel later in life, because he gives other adults a pass for not having heard it. Again, I’ll ask: why do people believe in this?

So I’m back from my lengthy mission trip in Colorado Springs…or something…and thought I’d write again about abortion and the problems it creates for Protestantism.

Today I upset my dad in an e-mail, apparently because he thought I was starting to come a little unhinged (like my brother) with respect to politics. My dad is a dyed in the wool Christian Republican with an occasional independent streak. Well, I said something that made him upset, and before long I was a “people like you” and not someone who was inside his testicles at one point.

As he excoriated me for this and that, he ended up suggesting that California is being judged for various reasons, including the MURDER of millions of babies (emphasis his). Which brings me back to my point I wrote somewhere else here, a link to which I won’t provide because I’m in a sling right now and it hurts to type, so you can look it up yourself.

Anyways, I think my earlier point was this: no one seems to lose with abortion in the Protestant worldview. The fetus gets a free ride to Heaven, and the person doing the aborting gets to ask for forgiveness and go to Heaven. Had the child lived to the age of accountability, it’s more than likely that he or she would have gone to Hell and not Heaven. So, if anything, abortion is doing that kid a favor. It has guaranteed him eternity in Paradise, whereas a live birth would have virtually guaranteed an eternity in torment. In other words, the Protestant stand on abortion is dumb, and the paradox seems to be lost on them. They should be grateful for abortion, because it is the single best outcome for a soul.

This of course, leads us to a larger discussion about how creation itself is dumb, and how it demonstrates that either god is not all powerful, or we don’t have free will, in which case god’s a dick for sending me to hell. Follow me here:

• My parents knock it out of their own free will, conceiving me. This forces god to cook up a soul, perhaps against his will. I mean, are there any kids born without souls? God seems to have no choice in the matter, which means he’s our slave. A slave to my mad skills with the women! (In fact, by allowing my hundreds of conquests to bear children, you could even argue that he’s complicit in sending my handsome offspring to Hell some day!)
• Or, my parents knock it out because god made them, in which case they didn’t have free will to conceive me.
• Rather than let me get straight into Heaven by killing me in the womb, my parents birth me.
• Or, god prevents my parents from doing the sensible thing and aborting me, denying them free will and a life full of ample disposable income.
• I’m born a Christian, and live to the age of accountability, where god throws a series of tests at me and allows the devil to tempt me through some unknown mechanism. I become an atheist, and die while watching the Jeffersons. I go to Hell, because I’m so powerful that I was able to manipulate god’s emotions, making him angry enough to sentence me to Hell forever, rather than just a little while.
• Or, I’m born a Christian, and because god decides he doesn’t want my soul in Heaven because he’s already got enough of whatever I am, he makes me into an atheist, and then makes me watch the Jeffersons. Oh, and then send me to Hell when I die.

This basically demonstrates the absurdity of the birth/soul contract. If the point of this life is Heaven, why the intermediate step of this life in the first place and not just an immediate creation in Heaven? If god is perfect and wants for nothing, why create a universe? If the point of this universe is a place to host mankind, why have different planets and stars with all different compositions that mankind will never touch or see? And then why populate only a teeny, tiny fraction of all of this with beings that he knew would screw up? And then why allow these screwed up beings to continue to procreate, forcing him to create new souls that he gets to chuck into Hell most of the time? And if they can get a free ride to Heaven by dying as kids, why not just prevent the conception and put the kid straight into Heaven, instead of letting a mother shove a hanger up herself?

He could have stopped all this Hell-chucking a long time ago by simply moving up the Apocalypse a little sooner. Had it been 1,000 years ago, for example, billions of people would not be in Hell right now. But for some cruel reason, god went ahead and let them continue to slide out of their moms’ heathen vaginae on their way to an all-but-guaranteed trip to Hell. Did he not get the point that a kid born in Saudi Arabia 100 years ago probably wasn’t going to turn out Christian? Or were the first 10 million Saudi Arabian people thrown into Hell not enough proof of what every retarded freshman sociology major can figure out on his own: that the next Saudi Arabian was probably going to be Muslim, and probably not vote Christian?

Some will say he couldn’t move everything up, because he has a plan. This is nonsense of course, because what happens in the space of 1,000 years here on earth will have absolutely no relevance 100 billion years from now while Christians are floating around in space near the right-hand of god doing who knows what. It will, however, have relevance for the billions of people that could not be in hell right now, but which are, because of god’s dumb plan that he could have bumped up a little. Maybe he was busy with a tee time and couldn’t be bothered to move up End Times, seeing as how an eternity of fire and brimstone for countless people really isn’t all that big a deal after all.

So to recap, if I had died in the womb, I would have been guaranteed a trip to Heaven. Or, had god moved up the Apocalypse, I would at least never have existed, and would not have to go to Hell some day because the devil, which god allows to tempt me, did the job that god won’t stop him from doing.

Thanks Christianity, for that brilliant theology you’ve got there.

Things prayer works for:

• Sporting Events

Things prayer kinda sorta works for:

• Curing cancer after solid rounds of chemotherapy and/or radiation treatment
• Helping you lose weight, along with proper diet and exercise

Things prayer doesn’t work for:

• Missing limbs
• Regenerating missing eyeballs
• Starving children
• Preventing you from having to choose between burning to death or having to jump from the WTC
• “Fiscal conservatives” spending us into oblivion
• Bringing mommy back after she leaves you because you touch yourself at night.

Yes, I know it’s been a while since I last posted. Yes, I know I’m incredibly handsome and smell nice. You don’t need to keep telling me these things. So, on that note, let’s move on to a short but happy Christmas post about God answering prayers.

In the before time, in the long, long ago, some idiots decided that gas prices were too high and felt that the best thing to do would be to pray about the prices. God, after all, is a socialist, so why not ask him to change the whole course of human events so that Americans can pay less at the pump for their SUV fuel?

Well, apparently it worked. In California, where I live, the average price of gas around my place is about $2.00. I guess I should send the guy who organized that prayer group a letter of thanks, seeing as how he directly reduced the price of gas. Nevermind that his group destroyed the global economy in the process, he did get gas prices down! Thanks Rocky Twyman!

This reminds me of the Twilight Zone, where every good thing had some ugly downside. Or how about real life, where people pray for food to feed their children, but instead of food, they get bloody diarrhea? That’s kind of like food, right?

So in short, enjoy your Christmas, with it’s clearance turkey, Polystations, and robot force toys. If it hadn’t been for Rocky Twyman and his slave God, you’d all be living the high life still.

I found this link today via Fark:

The Mountain Of Sin That Threatens To Destroy America: Pornography, Abortion, Sexual Sin, Divorce, Murder, Greed, Torture & Child Abuse

Before providing links to back it up, the author has this to say:

America was once the greatest country in the world. We were wealthy, we were civilized, we were cultured, we were generous and kind-hearted, we loved others, and we tried to follow God.

But now we have seen decades of moral decline. Men of God have gone across this nation warning that the huge mountain of sin that America is building will bring the judgment of God.

But has America listened? Has America repented? No! Instead America has treated God’s patience with contempt and has indulged in ever increasing sin year after year. Now America is absolutely loaded with evil and wickedness…..

I want to address two things. First, America has never been a nice nation, and is probably more moral now than at any time in its past. Second, I want to logically follow through this whole judgment thing to show how stupid the idea is.

Regarding this:

America was once the greatest country in the world. We were wealthy, we were civilized, we were cultured, we were generous and kind-hearted, we loved others, and we tried to follow God.

I have my own list:

Slavery, rape of slaves, fornication with slaves, 3/5 compromise, genocide against the Indians, lynching innocent blacks, child slavery and labor, witch trials, segregation, Jim Crow laws, dehumanization and abuse of immigrants (e.g. Irish, Chinese, Mexican), subjugation of women as second-class citizens, support of cruel foreign dictators, legal disenfranchisement of poor people, the Tuskegee experiment, debtor’s prison, sexual abuse by priests, the Trail of Tears, bounties for Indian scalps, and so on.

There has never been a golden age for American morality. If anything, we’re living in it now, as scary as that is to say. So-called Christians of the past have been far more evil to their fellow man than the average evil-doer of today.

Now, as for this judgment thing: what does that mean exactly? Obviously, this person means god will judge America in the physical sense, as I doubt there’s an actual country in Heaven called Los Estados Unidos. Since it’s in the physical sense, it means god will either kill us, or cause us to suffer in some physical way. And, since we all die anyways, who cares if god smites the unrighteous? Christianity teaches us that god decides when we die, so is judgment just saying that god is moving up the date a little bit?

If god does smite “America,” does that mean he smites the righteous along with the unrighteous? If so, it just sounds like everyone dies like we do anyways, so so far judgment pretty much means nothing.

If god doesn’t kill us, does judgment mean we’re all going to suffer terrible boils and junk, or only the bad people? If everyone, well…I guess it pretty much sucks to be Christian too, as that doesn’t earn you much favor. If only the bad people, why do the Christians care? Let the bad people get evil pubic lice. Maybe then we’ll be more receptive to the loving god who killed our firstborns or gave our young daughters horribly painful skin lesions.

If he’s not going to actually physically punish us, maybe he’ll make the US like the second best nation on earth. Or worse yet, maybe we’ll become like one of those backwards black nations and become poor. The bible doesn’t promise that believers will be financially successful, so again, how is this judgment any different than normal life? Millions upon millions of American children already eat wholesome meals like ketchup soup and live in abject poverty, so have these innocents already been judged for all the abortions they’ve performed and all the gay sex they’re having? If ketchup soup is a sign of god’s “patience” and his “love”, he can pretty much go screw himself for all I care.

I really don’t understand what this judgment thing means. Of what concern is it to our everlasting souls if the US is a rich nation or has cool swag like LCD TVs?

Basically, it sounds like god is going to kill people, or he is going to give us all painful diseases, or he is going to take away our Playstations. In 100 billion years when all these Christians are sitting on a cloud playing ping pong with Jesus, what possible f’ing relevance could all this punishment have to do with anything, and why would god go out of his way to kill us all when he’s got us at the Last Judgment in a paltry 70 years anyways? Moreover, isn’t he the very one that lets good ol’ Lucifer run around and tempt us all?

Anytime you follow this lunacy through to its logical extent it makes no bloody sense. I swear to Zoroaster, god is like an over imaginative 12-year-old who got rejected by some other ugly 12-year-old. His books are full of dragons and invisible sword fights and punishment for the evil doers, not to mention father-daughter incest, naked women taking baths, donkey penises and young girls’ breasts being fondled. Seriously? That’s the best god can do?

There are times in life when things become clear without you expecting them to. It is indeed a strange feeling to understand suddenly how big things really are, how little we really are. It is a surprise to find that your living room is an immense space, and that your body is simply a point inside of it. You can virtually hear the sound of the air swirling around the corners of a remote control, or experience the blinding darkness that a candle smoke eclipse throws across the enormity of the table it rises upon.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are sitting in the farthest upper deck corner of the largest baseball stadium you have ever been to. It is only you and the blowing wind. In the very opposite corner of the field, lying in the grass, is a grain of sand. Look across the field from your seat and try to imagine how incredibly small that grain of sand is from your position. Now imagine the billions of atoms that makeup that grain of sand. You, my friend, with relation to the size of the universe are even smaller than a single atom on that one grain of sand viewed from the farthest corner of the world’s most enormous baseball stadium. Of what possible concern are you to the universe?

I hate to say it, but there is no plan for you. There is no imaginary sky wizard sitting up in the clouds gazing down upon you. When your tiny little atom gets cancer, there is no man in the upper deck that takes a tiny little syringe and casts an itsy bitsy little magic spell on it to heal your even teeny tinier cells. When your little atom prays before a basketball game, there is no giant man that reaches down from the cosmos to guide your tiny little basketball into the tiny little rim. There are no guardian angels with bird wings, no demons with swords, and no god that smells your lamb sacrifices. There is no god bigger than the enormous universe that would turn himself into an atom-size man and try to impress the world by changing a tiny little jar of wine into a tiny little jar of water. A jar of water!!!! The creator of the universe, so enormous that countless planets are still smaller in size than a grain of sand, made himself that small only to try and impress us with a goddamn jar of water!!!

A god that oversees a universe in which you are smaller than the smallest atom on the smallest grain of sand would not waste his time parting oceans on a planet smaller than an atom, killing men for ejaculating on the floor, telling you to cut open the neck of a pigeon to drain the blood out in order to atone for your sins, or anything so ridiculous. He would pulse and the universe would forget about your speck of a planet. He would not look down from his upper deck seat, point to your invisible little atom and order you to strap on a tiny little belt to go blow up people who think differently from you. A cracker does not symbolize a god larger than the universe. Dipping your baby in water is not visible to someone so enormous. Does a universal god really care that you cut off the foreskin of your child? Employing a tiny little angel with a flaming sword to guard a garden that is invisible even from the next planet over makes no sense. Having a person smaller than atom thrown into a lake of fire because that person didn’t properly repent for a talking snake smaller than an atom tricking a woman and a man smaller than an atom into eating an apple smaller than atom makes no sense in any possible reality anywhere. If this is your god, he is the lamest possible god I could ever imagine. He blinks and a universe comes into existence. He shrugs and galaxies sputter out. He yawns and a billion planets cease to exist. And yet, he somehow manages to find time to come down to little ol’ earth and get flown around by the freaking devil.

You know what’s real? Not this tripe. What’s real is the curled fingers of your child across your neck as you carry his sleeping form to bed. What’s real is you and the person you love, pressed face to face with eyes open and soft breath on each other’s skin. What’s real is you standing by the bed of your spouse as they take their last breaths, knowing that of all the things in this enormous universe, the only thing that matters are the unspoken words of eternal love that move between you.

The miracles of the universe are not found in the Bible or the Koran, filled with their ridiculous nonsense of flying horses and Samson hair. Real miracles are things like two people—smaller than atoms on atoms in the face of the universe—bumping into each and knowing that they are meant to be together. Get out of church and go live your life. When your candle blows out, there is no heaven of atomic sized angels playing atomic sized banjos and trumpets. You return to the earth to be forgotten by the universe. If you live your life right, however, you will not be forgotten by those whom you loved, and those who loved you.

My cousin is smart. Really smart. One of the smartest guys I know. So it was a surprise today when he remarked, offhandedly, that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. For those cats in the know, this is a creationist fallacy that is repeated frequently but is without merit.

Before I continue, I should mention that the following blog contains science content, and if you’re not interested, you may just want to dip out now. Pretend you’re going to the restroom or something so I don’t get my feelings hurt. Also, just so that you can feel like you took something away from this anyways: monkey banana raffle.

Creationists misrepresent our friend Mr. Second Law, and often state it as something like “a system will tend towards disorder rather than order.” In terms of evolution, they state that higher order organisms like humans represent more order, and therefore ye olde second law is being violated. This is not at all what the law states. The law concerns the amount of energy (heat) in an isolated system, and for our purposes is more appropriately stated as “a system without outside energy influence will tend towards a state of lower energy.” Note, however, that this is still technically incorrect, but it’s a fairly practical adaption of real-world circumstances.

For example, let’s suppose that you put some fresh water in a box and drop it to the bottom of the arctic ocean. As you can guess, the water in the box will likely freeze, dropping the energy of the molecules in the water towards a very low state. Unless something acts on that water to heat it up, the water will stay frozen. We can then say that it went from a state of high energy (liquid) to a state of low energy (solid), and will remain this way unless something changes the closed heat state of the water inside the box.

In the case of the surface of the earth, HUGE amounts of energy are being fed into it all the time. We get large amounts of energy from the sun, and we also get some from the molten core of the earth which radiates heat upwards, occasionally erupting and melting thousands of god-fearing believers in a horrifically painful way that only a benevolent god could devise. The surface of the earth is in no way a closed system at this point in time.

If, in 10 million years, the core of the earth cools down and becomes solid and our sun burns out, we can probably say, for all intents and purposes, that our world will have become a closed system as relates to biological processes. There will likely not be enough outside energy to allow for life, and evolution will stop. But, if our closed system suddenly got an outside energy source, it could become “open” again, and we’d be back in business. Well, not you, because you’ll be dead, but I’m assuming that I’ll probably rise from the grave because I’m pretty much the best thing to happen since always.

So as you can see, evolution doesn’t violate the second law at all, since the law doesn’t really have anything to do with biological complexity. If we want to frame it in terms of biological complexity, however, the law might be this: genetic complexity will be allowed to increase so long as there is sufficient outside energy introduced into the biological world. Once that energy flow ceases, the systems underpinning biological processes will lose energy until a period of equilibrium is reached,and life stops.

It’s as if creationists are telling you that you can’t make apple pie because you don’t have enough oranges. They’re completely unrelated.

If you want to read a great writeup on the real science behind the law, check out this link. Note, however, that if you thought this blog was boring, you’re in for pretty much a worse ride over there.

It’s like, 1 million a.m. and I’m unable to sleep. Rather than roll around on my mattress padded with the unrealized dreams of poor children, I’ve opted instead to write about an annoyance I have with people who believe on faith.

It seems to me that you have to have at least some basic empirical reason to believe in something. For example, maybe you feel that your prayers have been answered with an alarming regularity, and this leads you to believe that god is listening to you. Or, perhaps you’re smart enough to understand the improbability of prayer answers, and look to ostensibly fulfilled prophecy. Or, maybe it’s even simpler than that; maybe when you pray you feel like you’re connected with something, and that’s proof enough.

People of religious stripes will often say that you can’t use science to prove god, but the fact that you rely on something of at least a very minor physical nature to derive your faith implies that you are, in fact, using science to prove your faith, even if it is weak science. You’re saying, in effect, that you have a theory that you feel or believe the way you do because of some stimulus. What’s more, because you’ve described that stimulus, it’s theoretically possible to falsify it, making it scientific.

I have a problem with using such weak evidence as a reason for faith, but these things don’t bother me much. At least the mind is pointing to something tangible to derive faith from. The thing that annoys me is that most of these people think it’s wrong for us to ask for more proof for the fantastic events they defend than the very personal, very subjective kernels of faith they rely on. It is so strange that the human mind can so easily go from “feeling good when we pray” to “I believe that an omnipotent god larger than the universe converted himself into a tiny human in order to kill himself and bring himself back to life and then magically appear to hundreds of select individuals separated by many miles of space in order to settle a debt made by two unrelated people thousands of years earlier.”

A while back, I commented on a Christian’s blog concerning a post he/she made on an atheist’s blog which stated that there really is no sound historical evidence to support the idea that Jesus even lived. The gospels conflict with each other, one of them doesn’t even pretend to be a first-person account (Luke), all are written at least several decades after the purported life of the Christ, and Jesus’s most fervent evangelist never even met the man (Paul). What’s more, the gospels and the works of Paul make incredible claims that should be well documented elsewhere (like dead people coming out of their graves and walking around), and yet we have no non-apologetic sources to confirm them. In the case of Matthew 27:52 and 27:53, there’s never even a mention of these zombies again. Dead people are wandering the streets of Palestine—perhaps one of THE most important events in human history—and the event is only given 30 words of text in the entire Bible. Boy, I’ll jump right on believing that one.

In any event, I pointed out that we have no contemporary sources period (since the gospels are several decades post-Jesus, if he existed), let alone any non-apologetic contemporary sources (the earliest non-Christian source is approximately 60 years after Jesus’s death). You know what this person’s reply was? Basically, it doesn’t matter, because word of mouth was how “they” used to do it in the old days, and therefore the objection is moot.

Granted, there’s some truth to this from a pragmatic perspective. Much of what we consider to be “true” ancient history has no primary source to vouch for it, and is often construed by historians from conflicting or significantly post-dated sources. If I remember correctly, there are conflicting stories about Hannibal crossing the Alps, for example. Even so, it’s pretty much accepted that he and his army did make the crossing in some manner. The problem with using this as an analogy to Jesus, is that we know armies moved and invaded other countries, but we don’t have expectations that people walk on water, raise others from the dead, or die, go to hell, and then come back from the dead. Armed invasions, unfortunately, are a common occurrence even in the modern age, so we don’t require extraordinary evidence to believe they happen. Resurrections are not, however, and so we should require extraordinary evidence. And yet, we have none.

To paraphrase from someone else’s writing:

Suppose we hear a story of a man named Mustafa who’s a runner in the Middle East. As I type each sentence below, ask yourself whether you would believe the claim at face value without increasingly more concrete evidence.

• Mustafa can run an 8-minute mile.
• Mustafa can run a 6-minute mile
• Mustafa can run a 4:30 mile
• Mustafa can run a 2-minute mile
• Mustafa can run a 2-minute mile while running backwards
• Mustafa can run a 2-minute mile while running backwards, and can knock down solid concrete walls in his way without slowing down
• Mustafa can run a 1-minute mile, and can pass through solid walls without knocking them down
• Mustafa can run a 1-minute mile and pass through solid walls, but no one alive has ever seen him do it, and he refuses to demonstrate it now.

As you can see, as the claims get more outlandish, your willingness to believe the possibility of them being true diminishes. Is it really that hard to understand why we don’t believe what religions say when the claims they make are even more outlandish than Mustafa running a 1-minute mile while passing through solid walls? God doesn’t perform any of the types of miracles purported in books like the Qur’an or Bible in the modern age. People don’t rise from the dead, snakes don’t talk, men don’t part seas, prophets don’t ascend to heaven on winged horses, and so on. Sources conflict with each other. Sources are written and codified generations after people live. And all the proof religious people have for these incredible events are books that are based on circular reasoning (I’m god, and I say the Bible is true. I know god is telling the truth, because the bible says he’s god and the bible is true).

I ask for more evidence than an ancient manuscript and I’m the one who can’t run for President? What about the guy who thinks an invisible man in the sky is listening to his telepathic thoughts and rearranging the course of human events to answer these thoughts? Who seems more rational and poised to make reasonable decisions? Oh man….

Alright, I’m out. This post is long enough and I have a big kid meeting in the morning.