Category Archives: Religion

Don’t vote for Rick Perry

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Rebecca Watson makes one mistake (Galileo wasn’t executed, although he was tortured by the Church) but nails Rick Perry’s nuttiness on the head.

Something I’ve noticed about the US presidential race as stands is that all the Republican candidates seem to be absolute cranks. The only exception is Jon Huntsman, who has relatively sensible ideas on science and a serviceable position on civil rights that one could agree to respectfully disagree with.

Huntsman, however, is barely registering in the early opinion polls, so it’s highly likely the Republican Party (let’s not call it the GOP: it’s metamorphasised into a Soviet propaganda writer’s parody of its former self) will have a genuine wingnut in the running for the next election. Given that the majority of Americans identify as political independents, I’d say that despite the general dissatisfaction with his work thus far, Obama has the next term in the bag.

David Mabus ARRESTED in Montreal

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Dennis Markuze, a.k.a. David Mabus, is being investigated by the Montreal police following a petition on change.org for them to take his thousands of death threats seriously. An arrest was made today: we can safely assume Markuze was the one taken into custody (this is further confirmed by Tim Farley’s excellent blog post on the matter.)

I was Mabus’d precisely twice; both times were on Twitter, with a charming poem about James Randi (viz. something resembling a corrupted text file of Nostradamus predictions with the vowels missing.) Neither time particularly unsettled me. In many ways, it was pleasing to know that he’d noticed me (finally, after some three years active in the skeptical “sphere” on the Web.)

The alarming thing is that he had been going at his spamming, obsessively, for over a decade. In the case of PZ Myers of Pharyngula, it was at the stage where the first thing he did every morning on turning on the computer was to bulk-delete Mabus spam.

There is a stage where one has to say that enough is enough. This man clearly had some kind of mental deficiency, and the fact he had, on more than one occasion, turned up in person to harass his targets was a cause for alarm bells.

I can only hope that now he is in custody, this man gets the psychiatric help he clearly needs.

Seven in Heaven Way

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The Friendly Atheist, on when secularism gets too zealous:

There’s a special street sign going up in New York City to honor a group of firefighters who sacrificed their lives to save others on 9/11. Not only were they heroes, they were among the first firefighters to arrive on the scene that morning. There were seven of them and, after they died, they were collectively known as “Seven in Heaven.”

[...]

*Facepalm*

That can’t be right… suing over *this*? It’s a PR disaster in the making.

As a hardline atheist (as in, I believe there is no evidence for a god, and vehemently oppose any attempt by states to endorse a religion) I genuinely don’t see the problem with them calling the road Seven in Heaven Way. Why bother suing? It’s only going to damage the public image of atheism in a strongly Puritan country.

Naming a street after the seven heroes who lost their lives during the atrocities of 9/11 is a lovely gesture, and it astonishes me that NYC Atheists are even considering a lawsuit over this, when actual church/state separation violations are far more worthy of their attention than the name of a sodding street.