The recent earthquake in Haiti is a major disaster. From the what I have heard and read there are thousands, probably hundreds of thousands dead, and the immediate area is in chaos. Governments and organisations the world over are promising aid and financial assistance, and people of all beliefs are dipping into their pockets to give money to the various aid agencies that have sprung into action.

So, this is all the things that normally happen when there is a huge humanitarian disaster. Everyone bands together in an effort to help those stricken by whatever natural even has befallen them.

Then the religious nuts chime in. First it was that odious toad Pat Robertson claims that it was divine retribution because of Haiti’s pact with the devil to throw out the French, and that it is a blessing in disguise. Second, whilst driving in to work this morning I was listening to Chris Evans on BBC Radio 2, and some religious numpty came on (I didn’t catch his name unfortunately) and proceeded to make some utterly bizarre claims. Echoing Pat he said something along the lines of “How can a god exist and allow this sort of thing to happen. Well, he can’t, unless some good comes of it.”, “Among the first support that came were words of support from the Pope.”, and “God didn’t cause this, it was just a natural event.”

HOLY COW!

OK, first off Haiti overthrew the French over 200 years ago. There is a saying that “Revenge is a dish best served cold” but wow, God obviously wanted it very cold!

Next, this is a huge disaster, with massive loss of human life. What sort of heartless, uncaring, opportunist do you have to be to say “It’s OK, don’t worry about all those dead people,God allowed this to happen so something good would come of this”. An all powerful, loving being would manage to bring about good without killing off vast swathes of the population of a country. A country by the way where around 95% of the population identify themselves  as Christians.

But lastly, the Pope(^TM ) can blow it out has fat ass. Right now what the people of Haiti need is food, medicine, and rescue workers then money in the coming months not some pompous twit sitting in his lavish palace blowing hot air.

If you can, please give to one of the international aid organisations that is actually doing something. I suggest either the Red Cross, or Oxfam.

*** FOLLOW UP ***

Some details of the supposed Pact with the Devil from StraightDope.com

Just shows that Pat has his facts wrong – no great suprises there.

So, once I got home I looked it up. According to BibleGateway.com the KJV version reads:

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.

So… lets see. It appears to mean that they will wonder the streets randomly knocking on doors. If someone answers they’ll just walk in and start consuming the occupants food. They will at least be gracious enough to allow the resident of the recently invaded house to eat some of their own food whilst they do this. That seems like a very odd and not particularly neighbourly or moral act. Gives me yet another reason not to want to answer the door when these freeloading degenerates come knocking.

Isn’t it handy when people like this warn you up front of their poor judgement. Albeit by hiding behind an weird verse written by bronze age desert dwelling goat herders, translated and re-translated over and over again over the centuries. Don’t let that last bit worry you though, the Bible is after all the unchanging and inerrant perfect word of God!

GAH!

Come on people, what the hell are you thinking? No matter how you dress it up neither Creationism nor Intelligent Design is science. It poses no testable theory. It is not falsifiable. There has never been a paper written about it that has been subjected to peer review in any repultable science journal.

It’s NOT SCIENCE.

You can’t teach it in a SCIENCE classroom.

Just like you can’t teach Woodworking in an English classroom. Or Cooking in a Physical Education class.

Please, for the sake of our children, keep the science curriculum strictly scientific. Don’t let educational standards fall any further.

If you absolutely have to teach Creationism then there is already a classroom to do it. It’s the Relgious Studies class (which, by the way, I’m still pissed that no-one told me I could opt out of when I was at school, it could have saved me from a huge amount of tedium).

How Richard Dawkins manages to stay calm and collected whilst being interviewed by these wing-nuts I’ll never know. I wouldn’t succeed.

The two of the most common ones used against evolution are the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the Conservation of Angular Momentum.

Lets quickly have a poke and laugh at these shall we?

Second Law of Thermodynamics (SLoT)

At it’s most basic, the SLoT says that everything tends to go from order to disorder (that’s the layman’s way of saying entropy increases). The idea behind the argument being that because evolution seems to make things more complex that it must be working to decrease entropy.

OK, lets do a quick science experiment.

Grab a brand new pack of cards. Take them out the box, remove the cellophane wrapper, and take a quick peak at the deck. Chances are you’ll find it neatly stacked, all the same way up, and the cards sorted in order. Now, throw the cards on the floor, and swoosh them around a bit. Chances are that the cards are now strewn all over the place, some upside down, and definitely not in any form of suit or rank order. They are definitely disordered – i.e. the level of entropy has increased. Great!

Now, pick them all up, and put them into a pile. Now square the pile off. Hmm, what’s this, looks a lot more ordered now. Now sort that pile into two piles, one of face up and one of face down. Turn one pile over and put the two piles together. Oh dear, it’s getting more ordered. Now sort the deck back into suits arranged Ace through King…. Fek! Seems to me like you just broke the Second Law of Thermodynamics!

OK, maybe we’ll have a little bit more luck with…

Conservation of Angular Momentum (CoAM)

This law states deals with spinning things, and in layman’s terms means that the total amount of spin within a system must remain constant. The idea behind this argument is that when we look at the various heavenly bodies we find that some of them are spinning in different directions.

Quick note, yes, I know this has nothing to do with evolution, but Creotards and IDiots tend to think that things like the Big Bang are part of evolution, and it’s them I’m trying to debunk.

Now, back to the argument. CoAM says that as the gas cloud that formed our solar system coalesced it began to spin as it contracted. The amount of spin that cloud had must still be here today. As our Sun and the planets formed they took on a proportion of that spin relative to their sizes and distance to the centre of the system.

The problem (according to Creotards and IDiots) is that Neptune doesn’t spin the same way as all the other planets. How can than be?

Now, let’s do our quick science experiment. This one is easy. Stand up. Start turning around clockwise for a couple turns (try not to get dizzy and fall down, I’m not responsible for anything you do). Now, start turning in the other direction. Darn it, you just broke science again!

OK, an explanation might be in order.

Both SLoT and CoAM deal with closed systems. The problem is that most people forget what a closed system is. The room you did the two little experiments in isn’t a closed system. Neither is the building. Nor your country. Planet Earth? Nope. OK, our solar system maybe? Fat chance. Come on, the Milky Way Galaxy? Not even close. It’s the entire Universe of Space and Time. That is as close to a completely closed system as we know about.

Nothing in the SLoT says what happens to entropy locally. In one place entropy can quite happily decrease as long as somewhere else entropy increases by an equal or greater amount. Just within the confines of our solar system our sun in losing heat and thus increasing in entropy at a prodigious rate. We receive some of that heat energy her on Earth and use it do do work that leads to a localised decrease in entropy. However, overall everything balances out just as the science says it will.

CoAM works in a similar way. If some action occurs that causes one thing to spin faster, then something else must end up spinning slower (or the other way round), all in proportion to their relative masses, velocities, and distances. Interesting factoid… even though our Sun makes up the huge vast majority of the mass of our solar system (well over 95% IIRC), it doesn’t contain most of the Angular Momentum. That belongs to Jupiter by virtue of the fact it’s so big and far out. The reason Neptune is spinning wrong is (probably) because something pretty big hit it pretty hard and stole a huge amount of its angular momentum, and whatever hit it gained a huge amount of angular momentum.

In the little experiment, when you started spinning in one direction you ever so slightly changed the angular momentum of the planet – the amount being in proportion to your relative masses. When you span the other way you reversed that exchange. If you were to place a mass equal to that of the planet Earth on one of its poles, and start it rotating in the opposite direction at the same speed then the Earth would in fact stop spinning as viewed by someone sitting on the Sun for example because all of its angular momentum will have been transferred to this spinning mass.

Hopefully that’s cleared things up a bit.

As ever, my usual caveat when I talk all science. I’m not a scientist, just an interested layman. I know that I have heavily simplified the two principles I’ve discussed, but I still believe that the basic principles remain sound. If I have made any blunderingly stupid mistakes then I welcome criticism from suitably informed readers. It helps is you can explain where I went wrong in layman terms if at all possible. Thankyou.

At first it would appear obvious. Of course he does, he is all powerful so the ability to make his own decisions would be a must. If he didn’t have free will, then by whose hand (or what) are his choices guided? So that would seem to indicate free will for God is certain.

But lets think on. God knows everything. He is omniscient after all. But if he knows everything, then surely by definition he knows the outcome of every choice he has to make. That sort of makes things a little sticky. If he already knows the outcome of every choice he could make, then does he really have a choice?

Now, there is a school of thought that says that even though God may be all powerful and all knowing, he can’t break the laws of logic and create a paradox – i.e. his powers have limits. You may ask the question ‘Can God create a rock so heavy that even he can’t lift?’, but it’s an unsolvable paradox. But I don’t think that’s applicable in this instance. If he is all knowing, then he can’t have free will. If he has free will, then he can’t be all knowing. So which is it?

Maybe we should give God a Get out of Jail free card, and grant that he can’t second guess himself. What then?

OK, so let’s ignore the fact of Gods free will, and lets look at our own. We have at least got the illusion of free will (I’m not going to try and get all philosophical around the discussion), so let us assume that it’s real. The thing is, we still run up against the barrier of omniscience. If God really knows everything, then he already knows the outcome of every possible decision we could make. If that’s the case, then we are doing little more than reading the lines of a great cosmic play. So, what happened to the free will that he supposedly gifted us?

Divine powers don’t seem to be what they used to be.

Link to Times Online article

It’s early days yet so information seems to still be a little patchy, but some details are coming out. Jaycee has been subject to rape, and has two daughters by Garrido as a result. It’s not entirely clear what health Jaycee and her two daughter are in, but it appears they’re relatively healthy thankfully.

Now, just like Josef Fritzl and other similar cases of recent years, Garrido obviously has a few screws loose. From the details of a rambling telephone interview he has given it appears that he claims that God speaks to him. He has done the things he did because he thought they were what God wanted. I wonder how long before some religious types come along and try to dismiss those claims? Will anyone try and claim that Garrido wasn’t a true Christian?

It’s interesting that in general when someone claims to hear the voice of God then they’re almost universally considered to be nutters. Yet Christians heap praise on praise to a guy who claimed he was God. Now given that Jesus is supposed to return at some point, I’ve got to wonder how many Christian would just ignore him and claim he was deluded?

It’s good to hear that Jaycee and he children are now free from this monster, and I hope they get all the care and support they need to bring them back into society.

Link to Time Online article

The Bible has a plaque next to in with ‘If you feel you’ve been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it.’ This has been taken by many visitors are an invitation to deface many of the passages, write a few rude words and express their exact feelings towards the Bible and the Christian religion in general. Not unsurprisingly a few members of the various church organisations are a little upset that this has been allowed to happen.

One Catholic spokesperson said ‘One wonders whether the organisers would have been quite as willing to have the Koran defaced.’

Suffer from Fatwa envy much?

But hang on. Look back at where the idea for the exhibition came from. The Metropolitan Community Church. So, why not go and ask them, they’re part of your little brotherhood aren’t they? This isn’t some exhibition put on by a bunch of Liberal Atheists who were simply out to bash religion. But if it had been, the answer would have been a resounding ‘YES’. In any free society – which is what we claim we live in – then any and all ideas must be held up to scrutiny, and even ridicule

You must not stifle free speech just because you’re worried someone else might get upset and become violent as a result. If you put your ideas out into the public arena, and don’t like what others say about them, then maybe you should take a moment to reflect. Just because every response is negative, and just because it upsets your feelings, doesn’t mean you have the right to restrict people from expressing their opinions.

via Atheist Alliance International

With attendances, baptisms, and church weddings at an all time low, coupled with the news of increasing indifference to the Bible amongst Britains youth this probably comes as no surprise to anyone except the CofE itself.

I predict it won’t be a quick and painless death. There will be many calls from Bishops etc. decrying the state of the modern godless society, bemoaning the fact that they are losing their influence, and demanding state assistance to save themselves. Hopefully they will be recognised for what they are – the last desperate actions of an increasingly irrelevant organisation.

So, does a dead church go to heaven?