Judgement day is May 21st, 2011.  The Bible guarantees it!  Hope you’re ready to meet your maker…

I’m not a religious guy, so Easter has never been a very big deal for me.  An excuse for cards and candy, but that’s about it.

Apparently I’ve been overlooking an important part of the Easter narrative though – the zombies!

⁵¹ At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split ⁵² and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. ⁵³ They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

I guess I’ve got something to celebrate this weekend after all – the zombie uprising of 33 AD!

The Pre-Christian Origins of Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is a relatively late addition to the Christian liturgical calendar, first surfacing in the tenth century according to accounts written in the eleventh.  (To put things in perspective, Ash Wednesday is older than the Crusades or the Norman Conquest, younger than Charlemagne and Islam.) At least, its Christian practice dates to only a little more than a millennium ago.  The Norse practice of Ash Wednesday goes back several hundred years earlier, when it was done to celebrate the deeds of Sigurd, the hero of the Volsung Saga, a character perhaps better known as Siegfried from the Ring of the Nibelung.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything original in Christianity…

Anyone who’s even thought of calling themselves an atheist has probably heard of Pascal’s Wager.  It isn’t a very convincing argument, but it’s one that gets dragged out time and again.

So it’s great to see Greta Christina rip it apart.

That didn’t take long.  Folks on the right are already blaming James Lee’s actions on his Darwinian views.

Let’s be honest here, Darwin never said anything about taking hostages or laying siege to anything.  He talked about survival of entire species.  If you were really working off of some kind of Darwinian philosophy, you’d be spending all your time trying to reproduce.  You sure as hell wouldn’t be doing things that’d likely get you killed.

The guy obviously had issues.  He seized on some random words that he liked and used them as an excuse to do some very bad things.  But that really has absolutely nothing to do with Darwin or atheism or any of the other labels that have been thrown at him.

There is no Darwinist society that preaches that you should take hostages and make demands.  There are no atheist cabals trying to force their beliefs into law.  Unlike, say, Christians.

Caught another episode of 30 Days last night.  This time they sent a nice atheist lady to live with a Christian family.

First off, I kind of think they could have picked a better atheist to send to the Christians.  This lady didn’t seem terribly well-informed or passionate.  In comparison to the Christian they sent to live with the Muslims, she just didn’t seem to care a whole lot about her belief system.  She seemed kind of quiet and meek, and I was really hoping for more fireworks from the clash of cultures.

But, it was still an interesting show.

The atheist lady seemed to have fewer problems dealing with the Christians than they had dealing with her.  They seemed to take her very existence as a threat.

At one point she took her new Christian friends out to meet some other atheists.  One of those atheists asked the Christians how they’d feel if their money was printed with “there is no god” – the Christian responded with “my money says In God We Trust.”  He said that over and over again.  He just wouldn’t or couldn’t process the question.  He couldn’t even contemplate what it would be like to carry around money printed with a statement he couldn’t agree with.  Eventually the atheist gave up and simply said “The difference is that I’m willing to respect your choice of religion, but you aren’t willing to respect mine“, to which the Christian suggested that if it really bothered the atheist that much he could move.

Why is that always the suggestion?  They were both born in the US…  The both pay their taxes…  They both get a vote…  Why is the atheist’s viewpoint any less valid than the Christian’s?  Why should the atheist move, and not the Christian?

There was another scene where our atheist lady was at a Bible Study group, and they asked her what documents she based her beliefs on, which I found bizarre beyond belief.  As if you needed some kind of external document to validate your experience of the world.  Like you need some consensus in order have an opinion.  Like  you can’t trust an individual human being to collect data and interpret it themselves.

And then they accuse the atheist of being anti-Christian.  There’s nothing anti-Christian about atheism.  Atheists don’t believe in gods.  Nothing supernatural.  How can you be anti- something that doesn’t exist?

Eventually the atheist’s family comes to visit her…  And the Christians express plenty of concern that the children aren’t getting “both sides of the story.”  The problem, of course, is that there aren’t two sides to the story.  If you insist on presenting both an atheistic and theistic worldview, then the story doesn’t end with Christianity.  You also have to talk about Islam, and Judaism, and Janeism, and Hindu, and Buddhism, and every other -ism out there.  Because they’ve all got equally valid claims to authenticity.  They all state “this is what my book says, and I choose to believe it.“  There is no objective reason to believe one rather than another.

It’s funny…  Because the Christians said they were eager to show the atheist what real Christians were like.  They wanted to tear down some stereotypes and show her what God’s Love is all about.  But the atheist didn’t really seem to have a whole lot of stereotypes to be tore down…  While the Christians had plenty of them.

BoingBoing | Adam Savage’s Speech to Harvard Humanism Society

I would love to see the MythBusters take on some religious myths…  But I somehow doubt if their lawyers would let them.  It would probably be too dangerous.

As I’ve said before, I’m not a religious guy.  So I don’t really care whether it’s Easter or not…  Except that it gets me a day off from work and it’s a good excuse to break out the candy.

So, Happy Easter!