The Atheist News Podcast

I am a filthy deceiver.

A falsifier, a prevaricator, a misleader and also, a guy who is fond of the thesaurus.

My computer really did die, but then, miraculously, it came back from the dead for no apparent reason. An atheist holiday miracle? Who’s to say.

This week, Brother Richard joins me as we talk about books we like, movies we like and also we manage to squeeze in some news as ill prepared as we were. Brother Richard sings again, but what else is new?

In the news:
Book burnin’, Texacutions®, do-it-your-self toddler genital mutilation and naughty presidents.

Stream this episode!

I had the news all lined up and a recording time set with Richard and everything… but then I made the foolish mistake of rebooting my ailing computer. Well, trying to reboot it, I should say because while it will POST beep and show the BIOS splash screen, that’s all it will do. No user input is accepted, it hangs the instant it shows the ASUS logo.

I tried a bunch of things to revive it, but I fear my motherboard has motherboarded for the last time. I am trying to find an identical motherboard to limit the chances that I’ll have to reinstall Windows, but it’s a two-year-old piece of hardware, so I can’t find it locally and trying to find things on the internet with my Blackberry is like trying to bring in the wheat harvest with a bucket and a butter knife.

So, I am trying to sort out my finances to see if we can afford it this week and if so, I hope to borrow someones computer to order it have a new one by next week. Sorry about the show, guys; that’s a whole month now with no new stuff and I feel pretty bad about it. I was hoping I’d have something figured out by the time the show was supposed to go up, but it’s Wednesday night and I just don’t see it happening.

I’ll keep you guys posted. Don’t forget to check out Chariots next week, it’s going to be a good one! Eli and Lamar have to find all the news this week, which I am sure has them thrilled as hell.
Aloha,
–Joe

This is just too amazing to not propagate.  Pharyngula links to this spectacular piece of right-wing kitsch that depicts Jesus (Caucasian, like he should be) personally delivering the Constitution to a group of awed on-lookers who include, children, school teachers, US Founding Fathers (including, ironically, notoriously atheistic Thomas Payne), Ronald Reagan, dead astronauts, black soldiers (specifically), and a godless group of professors, Supreme Court Judges, politicians, and Hollywood producers.  Every individual and object in the picture has a nice little mouseover text (eat your heart out, Randall Munroe!) describing how that individual either worked to create the United States of Jesus America, or how he is working to bring Satan (can you find him in the picture?) into the White House.  This is absolutely golden.  Enjoy!

Jesus delivers the Constitution

I like apocalypse movies just as much as the next guy, but this one was far better than any other I have seen in quite a while.  Left behind, the end all of Kirk Cameron christian apocalypse movies, I laughed! I cried! It was better than Cats! And yes the Russians are the bad guys, why not they were the bad guys in all other christian movies, plus all older christian guys love Red Dawn.  Apparently Jesus was against communism, he didn’t much care for the whole people living equally thing, and he hates the color red.

So Kirk Cameron is playing a guy named Buck Something, we will just call him Buck Futt.  Before I get started I just want to point out that no matter how many times Buck Futt gets injured below the waist they manage to patch him up with out taking hit pants off, by I shit you not, stitching him up through the hole in the knee of his pants he got when he was standing next to a car bomb.

So buck Futt is a reporter, and some guy in the middle east makes some grow all drug thing that makes shit grow in the desert.  So he is covering the story in Isreal and there is some giant fucking attack, like 100,000 planes, seriously there are more planes in the movie than there are on the entire planet (including scrap yards, museums and the ones on the bottom of the ocean).  Then somehow he gets dragged into this “top secret” underground base and then all the planes blow up very dramatically, apparently God found out how shitty the special effects were and decided to unleash some wrath onto the cgi set.

So then Buck Futt is on a plane heading back to the us, he didn’t get hurt, hes fucking Kirk Cameron, and holy shit half the people on the plane dissappear!  (I should mention that this movie jumps around a lot, making it nearly impossible to follow).  Apparently  the Rapture (a mythical mass abduction discribed in Revolations) happens on the plane.  At this point Buck is not a Jesus freak, I can just imagine him doing an interview about the movie saying something about how it was really hard from him to play a non-christian on screen, overall being a pretentious prick.

So he gets home and guess what a russian sniper is following him and his buddies around  (all his buddies that didn’t get “left behind”).  There is a confusing mass of informants he uses and blah blah blah, they all get killed, some shot, and some in car bombs, which is how he get injured and subsiquently healed through a hole in the knee of his pants, It was just to riscay to take his pants off on screen, he didn’t want to put naughty thoughts into any little girls heads.

So then throught a Buck Futt in the story line, Buck Futt gets to go hang out with the “anti-christ” whose name is Nicholai Carpathia, Like I said earlier, the russians are bad bad people.  The movie ends quite soon after when Nicolai shoots some world leaders in the head, yeah he has some mind controll shit going on too.  I really wish that Tbn was having a marathon and showed the other movies in the series because I really want to keep drinking and yelling at the television into the wee hours of the moring.  But alas I have to save my 40ozers of PBR until next sunday when they continue to Buck Futt public access television.

Ps… If any of you know any religious movies I should watch and then make fun of, let me know I am open to anything I can find in a video store or on the internet…

I went to a couple more talks today which I actually got decent audio for, so I will cover them a bit later.

After the talks for the day ended, we retired to the convention hall lobby for cocktails. They called it a “happy hour,” but the drinks were more expensive than they were in the bar. I met Noelle Dildine, AAI’s Ambassador Director who introduced Eli, Richard and I to a couple of the people working on a movie about Atheism.

We then got introduced to Rich Orman, who is the host of the very popular Dogma Free America podcast. That was pretty awesome, we’ve been hanging out for the last couple hours and he saved me from having to buy another over-priced drink by giving me a beer from his private stash (his hotel room sink is filled with ice and beer. Awesome.) We’ve been having a lot of fun talking shop and having drinks.

For the live Bill Maher screening, Viktor got Eli, Rich and I a press table in the front of the big screening room, which is really nice. Currently we’re watching Bill Maher live. Soon he’s going to have Richard Dawkins on, then they are headed over here for the award Ceremony.

More to come…

Ben Akerley is the author of The X-Rated Bible: An Irreverent Survey of Sex in the Scriptures, his talk is on the unholy mix of sex and religion.

It was a very entertaining presentation in which Mr. Akerley points out the apparent foibles in a traditional religious world view in which everything from masturbation to married sex is something to be feared and avoided. I recorded the whole speech, but I am unsure as to the audio quality, so I may only be able to publish a partial transcription later on.

More to come…

I arrived at the AAI conference and got registered. That was pretty slick, they had a press and VIP line, so I got to skip the line.

There are a number of booths around the convention center representing different organizations which I am going to try to visit later.

I’m currently sitting in on the live broadcasting of the Dogma Free America podcast featuring Sunsara Taylor, William B. Davis and PZ Myers in one of the conference rooms.

If you haven’t listened to the show before, it is quite similar to the Atheist News podcast; covering several current-event type news articles.

Sunsara Taylor is a writer for Revolution newspaper and an atheist and womans rights activist.

William B. Davies is perhaps better known as “the Cigarette Smoking Man” from the X-Files and is also an “outspoken skeptic, a proud atheist and a great admirer of Richard Dawkins.”

PZ Myers probably needs no introduction, but he is a biology professor at the University of Minnesota Morris and his Pharyngula blog is probably the most popular atheist / science blog today.

I am not going to cover what was said, you can go check it out on iTunes, just search for Dogma Free America. I’ll add a link later when I’m at a computer.

More to come…

There has, over the centuries since Darwin posited his theory of natural selection–and, more specifically, of the descent of man from early ape ancestors–been much wailing and gnashing of the teeth.  One of the more frequently wailed notes (translated into language that can be understood by reasonable people) goes something like this: if Darwin was right in even the broad strokes about the origin of humanity, where are all the links between our old-world ape-like ancestors and modern humans?  Why, that is, don’t we see more fossil records of things that look not quite human, but not quite ape-like either?  Discounting the fact that there are a multitude of such forms on record already, where (the wailers say) are our early hominid fossils?  Where, that is, are our Bigfoot fossils?

There are a lot of reasonable answers on record to this.  Even Darwin recognized what he called the “problem of transitional species” in the Origin of Species, and he went out of his way to address it: “[W]e should bear in mind that animals displaying early transitional grades of [any given] structure will seldom continue to exist to the present day, for they have been supplanted by the very process of perfection through natural selection.  [...] Hence the chance of discovering species with transitional grades of structure in fossil condition will always be less, from their having existed in lesser numbers, than in the case of species with fully developed structures” (this is near the middle of chapter five, page 209 in the 2003 edition of the Origin of Species edited by Joseph Carroll).  Darwin’s response to this objection raises a few philosophical problems–perhaps chiefly, it leads us naturally to ask what the hell he means by “perfection through natural selection”–but, I think, the core of his resolution rings true.  Fossilization is an extraordinarily rare phenomenon: it requires precisely the right conditions (rapid burial in sediment) that just don’t obtain very often, at least considering the number of organisms that might be fossilized.  This seems particularly true for even the early hominids, which might well have had the resources to avoid such burials in ways that other animals wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of.

Those points aside, it looks like there’s yet another link in the chain.  Wired reported yesterday on a recent discovery of another early hominid skeleton.  This one predates the previous record holder–Lucy–by at least one million years, and suggests that the line of species that eventually led to humanity originated in the forests rather than the Savannah, as previously thought; the new fossil, which the scientists have named “Ardi,” had thumb-like toes for climbing, walked upright, and had a thick coat of fur.  The artist’s rendition in the Wired article looks suspiciously like the paradigmatically “missing-link” Big Foot.  Perhaps more interesting than the physical features, though, are the hypothesized cultural features that Ardi might have shared with us: based on tooth and jaw structure, the evolutionary anthropologists have postulated that Ardi and her species lived together relatively peacefully, had a cooperative social structure, and generally lived more like humans than like chimpanzees, which have a relatively violent society.  This suggests that our cultural evolution may have been as important in the history of our species’ development as our physical evolution–indeed, the two may be closely linked.

In any case, this is just another piece of evidence for the evolution of man, not that the theory needed any more bolstering.  Any bets on how long it will take for a creationist to point out that now there are two more transitional forms required?

I’m sitting in the lounge car hanging out on the train. We just left San Francisco and I am bored senseless. Over all, the trip has been pretty fun though. I got about 4 hours of sleep before we hit Sacramento and the train attendant woke the whole damn car up evicting people back to their actual seats.

That was when I found out that they gave out free pillows; after I slept.

I got a chance to make a couple videos yesterday and one today. Richard confided in me that he’s never been on a train before, so I might a video tour of the train so that he doesn’t feel left out.

If you didn’t watch the videos I posted you might not have caught the little drama moment I had yesterday, but I misread my train ticket and ended up missing my train in Portland. My wife raced me down to Eugene in a crazed attempt to beat the train down there. In the end, Ms. Andretti was victorious and I made it onto the train.

Brains, beauty, personality and stunt driving skills, what’s not to love?

Well, not too much more to say. If Woody Harelson and Wesley Snipes show up to rob the train, I’ll let you know.