via Conservapedia.

This is from the article on circular reasoning.

• Atheists use circular logic to “disprove” the existence of God. That is, they presuppose that God does not exist and then argue that all proofs for the existence of God must be flawed because He does not exist. Christians can use presuppositional apologetics to break the circle of the atheists’ circular reasoning.
• Muslims also use circular logic to defend the Qur’an. They argue that the Qur’an is true because it is the Word of Allah, that it is the Word of Allah because it says so, and that we can rely on it because it is true. This is completely different from why the Bible is true.
• Evolutionists will claim that a fossil is millions of years old because that is the date given by radiometric dating; then state that it is reliable because they “know” that the fossil is millions of years old due to the strata in which it was found; additionally because the radiometric dating methods agree with each other, and date correctly materials which were historically dated by humans.

I did NOT ad the emphasis to the word “Completely”.

via CNN.

Probably one of the stupidest things I have ever heard.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour offered his support Friday for an amendment to the state constitution that would define life as beginning at the moment of conception, saying he cast his absentee ballot for the measure despite struggling with its implications.

Not much of a struggle if he already cast his vote.

“I have some concerns about it,” he said in a statement issued Friday, a day after casting his ballot. “But I think all in all, I believe life begins at conception, so I think the right thing to do was to vote for it.”

Yuck!  Fuck the consequences my preacher says that is when life begins.  Hey, dip shit…  Life does not begin at conception.  Both the egg and the sperm are alive!  If they weren’t alive then you would have life from non-life which creationist always say is impossible.  Your world view is so screwed up that you have it wrong either way.

Initiative 26 would define personhood as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”

Though the text of the amendment is simple, the implications if it passes couldn’t be more complex. If approved by Mississippi voters on Tuesday, it would make it impossible to get an abortion and hamper the ability to get some forms of birth control.

Because the amendment would define a fertilized egg as a person with full legal rights, it could have an impact on a woman’s ability to get the morning-after pill or birth control pills that destroy fertilized eggs, and it could make in vitro fertilization treatments more difficult because it could become illegal to dispose of unused fertilized eggs. This could lead to a nationwide debate about women’s rights and abortion while setting up a possible challenge to the landmark Roe v. Wade case, which makes abortion legal.

So… Any birth control that harms an egg that has touched a sperm could be called murder.  If an IUD prevents a fertalized egg from implanting – it is murder.

If I am in charge of a 2 week old baby and it dies – there is likely to be an investigation.  It is only one small step to having an investigation on every miscarriage.  It a woman does anything risky and there is a spontaneous abortion – it is murder!  LOCK UP THE WOMEN!

If a woman has an Ectopic pregnancy and her life is a risk – tough!  If a doctor helps and the egg dies – he or she could be charged with murder.

If a woman is raped she must give birth.  Maybe we should force her to marry the guy just like it says in the bible.

Can a mother claim another child for welfare as soon as she tests positive for a pregnancy test?  How about an additional tax deduction.  Does this change the rules for creating district lines?

The ballot initiative is part of a national campaign brought by Personhood USA. The Colorado-based group describes itself as a nonprofit Christian ministry that “serves the pro-life community by assisting local groups to initiate citizen, legislative, and political action focusing on the ultimate goal of the pro-life movement: personhood rights for all innocent humans.”

Religion makes people crazy.  I only hope we can survive long enough to break the cycle.

Here is Rachel Maddow on this and some other nutty stuff.  Personhood starts at about 3:00 min.

via Mother Jones.

Earlier this week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced his leadership team for the “Presidency 5″ straw poll in Florida, scheduled for October. Although most of the other major candidates have decided to skip the event, Perry is hoping a strong showing there will give him a boost ahead of the state’s important early primary. So what’s his strategy for voter outreach? It looks a lot like The Response, the prayer and fasting festival he organized in August at a football stadium in Houston.

He is not running for president – he is running for spiritual leader.  The American pOpe?

Take, for instance, his new co-chair: Pam Olsen, founder of the Tallahassee House of Prayer (dubbed the “prayer lady” in her home state for reasons that should be self-evident) and a leading anti-abortion activist in the state.

Here is a little video of Pam Olsen!

God is shaking. If anybody looks at the news and has just seen what’s been happening recently with the floods, the fires, the tornadoes, God is shaking. Yeah I think you have God shaking, sure you have the Enemy shaking, you have both and I don’t want to say oh that’s the judgment of God or that’s the Enemy. But the reality is God is judging us, and I think it’s going to get worse.

Can we assume that NO gay Americans will vote for Rick Perry?  Can we assume that NO Atheists will vote for Rick Perry?

The Response, you’ll recall, featured a number of controversial pastors who believed that, among other things, 9/11 was God’s way of punishing America for tolerating homosexuality and the blackbirds that died suddenly in Arkansas last winter were a harbinger of the End Times.

This nut cannot be elected president.

A few days ago I told you about pastor Mike.  He is the pastor that wanted to make a registry of atheists.  The Thinking Atheist has made a video that explains it all.  Watch and enjoy.

Did I hear that right?  Please listen and tell me it is something else….

——-

Update….

I have the best readers ever.  Thanks for the link to the full video.  It sure sounds like she is talking about WET people.

via The Washington Post.

Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact

Q. Texas governor and GOP candidate Rick Perry, at a campaign event this week, told a boy that evolution is ”just a theory” with “gaps” and that in Texas they teach “both creationism and evolution.” Perry later added “God is how we got here.” According to a 2009 Gallup study , only 38 percent of Americans say they believe in evolution. If a majority of Americans are skeptical or unsure about evolution, should schools teach it as a mere “theory”? Why is evolution so threatening to religion?

A. There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

Any other organization — a big corporation, say, or a university, or a learned society – -when seeking a new leader, will go to immense trouble over the choice. The CVs of candidates and their portfolios of relevant experience are meticulously scrutinized, their publications are read by a learned committee, references are taken up and scrupulously discussed, the candidates are subjected to rigorous interviews and vetting procedures. Mistakes are still made, but not through lack of serious effort.

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.

A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.

Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur to a human mind. The power of a scientific theory may be measured as a ratio: the number of facts that it explains divided by the number of assumptions it needs to postulate in order to do the explaining. A theory that assumes most of what it is trying to explain is a bad theory. That is why the creationist or ‘intelligent design’ theory is such a rotten theory.

What any theory of life needs to explain is functional complexity. Complexity can be measured as statistical improbability, and living things are statistically improbable in a very particular direction: the direction of functional efficiency. The body of a bird is not just a prodigiously complicated machine, with its trillions of cells – each one in itself a marvel of miniaturized complexity – all conspiring together to make muscle or bone, kidney or brain. Its interlocking parts also conspire to make it good for something – in the case of most birds, good for flying. An aero-engineer is struck dumb with admiration for the bird as flying machine: its feathered flight-surfaces and ailerons sensitively adjusted in real time by the on-board computer which is the brain; the breast muscles, which are the engines, the ligaments, tendons and lightweight bony struts all exactly suited to the task. And the whole machine is immensely improbable in the sense that, if you randomly shook up the parts over and over again, never in a million years would they fall into the right shape to fly like a swallow, soar like a vulture, or ride the oceanic up-draughts like a wandering albatross. Any theory of life has to explain how the laws of physics can give rise to a complex flying machine like a bird or a bat or a pterosaur, a complex swimming machine like a tarpon or a dolphin, a complex burrowing machine like a mole, a complex climbing machine like a monkey, or a complex thinking machine like a person.

Darwin explained all of this with one brilliantly simple idea – natural selection, driving gradual evolution over immensities of geological time. His is a good theory because of the huge ratio of what it explains (all the complexity of life) divided by what it needs to assume (simply the nonrandom survival of hereditary information through many generations). The rival theory to explain the functional complexity of life – creationism – is about as bad a theory as has ever been proposed. What it postulates (an intelligent designer) is even more complex, even more statistically improbable than what it explains. In fact it is such a bad theory it doesn’t deserve to be called a theory at all, and it certainly doesn’t deserve to be taught alongside evolution in science classes.

The simplicity of Darwin’s idea, then, is a virtue for three reasons. First, and most important, it is the signature of its immense power as a theory, when compared with the mass of disparate facts that it explains – everything about life including our own existence. Second, it makes it easy for children to understand (in addition to the obvious virtue of being true!), which means that it could be taught in the early years of school. And finally, it makes it extremely beautiful, one of the most beautiful ideas anyone ever had as well as arguably the most powerful. To die in ignorance of its elegance, and power to explain our own existence, is a tragic loss, comparable to dying without ever having experienced great music, great literature, or a beautiful sunset.

There are many reasons to vote against Rick Perry. His fatuous stance on the teaching of evolution in schools is perhaps not the first reason that springs to mind. But maybe it is the most telling litmus test of the other reasons, and it seems to apply not just to him but, lamentably, to all the likely contenders for the Republican nomination. The ‘evolution question’ deserves a prominent place in the list of questions put to candidates in interviews and public debates during the course of the coming election.

Richard Dawkins wrote this response to Governor Perry for On Faith, the Washington Post’s forum for news and opinion on religion and politics.

WOW!  I always kinda thought Piers was a dope but DAMN!  Piers is a complete nub!

Brave girl, wonderful rescue team and modern medicine save a boy that was almost dead.  church group prays on beach and the boys parents are happy no matter how gOd fucks with them.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

via Freethoughtblogs.

His site, The Blaze, has an article about these crazy conservative Christians who disagree with the mainstream view that there were precisely two people, Adam and Eve, who founded the whole human race. And it has a poll which is going in a predictable direction for wacky Beck

You will have to scroll down a bit to find this…..

How did mankind come about?

God created man in present form, as per the Genesis story 75.16%

God created man and the universe, but scientific evolution occurred 17.52%

Man evolved without God’s creation or intervention 4.88%

I’m unsure 2.44%