In case you haven't read it - members of a religious group took away a diabetic 8-year-old's insulin because they had faith that god would save her.

Unsurprisingly, god was nowhere to be found and the poor girl died.

Theological scholars would probably explain away the failure of god to save the girl in all sorts of ways, but it comes down to this:  on the one hand you have a group of people whose "faith" in this being is so great that they risked (and lost) the life of a child who I have no doubt they loved.  On the other hand you have proven science which basically says, if you've got type 1 diabetes, your pancreas can't produce enough insulin, and without it you die.

This is truly a zero-sum situation.  There are "christian scientists" out there who twist themselves in knots trying to reconcile science and religion.  In most cases it doesn't really matter if you hold a few silly beliefs as long as you stick to the scientific method, or to put it simply, you can have science without religion but you can't have religion without science.  In programming (SQL) parlance it'll always be a left join, with science as the primary table.

However this lot have wilfully ignored the science and put all their trust in the faith side of the equation.  The obvious result ensued.  Case closed.

This is why I'm an atheist.

Maybe this should be in the random thoughts thread as it was just something I was musing about in the shower today.  

But the gist of it is, the hook for most religions is that they offer you eternal life, for nothing more than your belief and a small financial gratuity.  But they haven't really thought it through.  What exactly would heaven be like, for you to be able to bear it forever?

The common conception in christianity is a kind of hero worship.  God and Jesus are sitting there and everyone is kind of sitting around them, basking in the glory and basically... doing nothing.

Look, raising 3 kids and working full time, with countless home renovations and trying to build a plane at the same time, I get that relaxing would be nice.  For about 2 weeks.  After that, find me something to do or I'm just going to get up to mischief.  

The muslims make it slightly more interesting by giving the honoured few 72 virgins. (Is it heaven for the virgins, or hell?)  So ok.  That might be fun for a while.  But after a few weeks, they're not virgins.  Unless they get replaced?  Then they start comparing notes, start complaining that you're not meeting their needs, eventually organise strikes... but anyway.  Even if they were gorgeous, eager and easily satisfied, how long would it be fun for?  Wouldn't you start wishing for meaningful work, or a decent shed to hide away in?

I guess the point is that what makes the fun things in life fun, is that there's a limited opportunity to experience them.  Holidays in France are memorable because they're only a few weeks.  If they were for years, then it wouldn't be a holiday, it'd just be where you live. 

The stupid thing is, as humans we are aware that we only have a short time on this planet.  So we should be doing something exciting and satisfying every minute of every day.  But do we?  How many hours to we waste in jobs we don't find fulfilling, housework, arguing with loved ones, worrying about money, about relationships, about all the distracting and boring shit that comprises 99% of our time?

So death, inevitably, is what makes life special.  We're alive for a mere flash of time between billions of years of not yet being alive, and billions of years of no longer being alive.  But even in that short time, up to 100 years if we're lucky, we may get to the stage where we're ready to die.

How, then, does the prospect of any sort of eternal life hold any appeal?  

"We are a Christian political lobby group and as our fliers are definitely political, they can go into every letterbox."

but, whatever, happy to move on with my life. However, I then received an email  that led with this:

Dear Friend,

Thank you so much for signing up to receive insights from the Australian Christian Lobby! It’s great to be in this together with you.

You’ve joined a grassroots movement of over 250,000 other like-minded Australians who are propelling God’s truth into the public square.

WTF, I was complaining not trying to join them

I replied:

Unbelievable!

Basically he takes all the old stories of the Norse gods, Odin, Thor, Loki, Frigga etc - and writes them in a way that they're interesting and engaging.  He gives the characters, well, character - you see their motivations and faults, it's not just "...then Loki did this and Thor did that".

Got me thinking that if the current religions want to stay relevant, maybe they should update their own books.  Let's face it, the bible is poorly written and about as interesting as the ingredients list on packaged food.  A lot of "begatting" and no character development whatsoever.  I can't speak for the other books but I'm guessing they wouldn't be reviewed favourably by an unbiased critic.

Last night/this morning, I watched a horrifying story which would have been shocking in the 17th or 18th century, but took place in my lifetime.

In the 1940's and 1950's, giving birth outside of marriage was considered the number one sin. Young girls who got pregnant in their teens, and the babies they had, were treated worse than murderers.

The program was a report on the Tuam Home for Mothers and Babies in Galway, Ireland. There is little or no record of what happened to the children born in this horror house. Run by nuns of a religious order called The Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours, who run medical facilities around the world. The nuns are all qualified nurses. An Irish woman carried out an investigation of the Tuam home, and found that an unknown number of children were taken from their mothers and sold as adoptees in America, for the current equivalent today of $3000. This was written off as a 'donation' to the institute on receipts located. The mothers were not given the choice of having their babies adopted, they were told "You WILL sign the adoption papers" and if they refused, the papers were signed by the parish priest,  and fake papers created. This was a conspiracy between the Church, Irish government and Pan American Airlines, who flew a large number of flights containing adoptees to America. Many of the records have been locked away in secure vaults, and a recent law passed in Ireland provides that these records be kept locked up for 30 years, meaning that anyone guilty of this horror will be dead and free from any prosecution.

The mothers were forced to work for the nuns and only allowed to see their babies to feed them. Mothers would come to the 'nurseries' (rooms with up to 30 cots with screaming hungry babies) only to find their cot empty and no explanation of what happened to the baby.

But that is not the worst of it. Death records for 796 babies were found with causes of death such as measles, whooping cough or mal-nutrition, all things trained nurses could have prevented. Death records, but no graves. What happened to the children? A map of the institute showed that there was a large sewage pit in one corner of the yard. In 2018, an exploratory excavation located the top of the pit, and 21 compartments with concrete covers. When the covers were removed, an investigation revealed numerous human bones in the bottom of the compartments. It will take a full excavation of the pits to retrieve the bones, and a law was passed authorising this, but it has been four years and no work has commenced.

When it is completed, the bones will be collected, then they will need to be reassembled into skeletons as much as possible. DNA testing will be carried out to try and identify them, so they can be rturned to their families and given a proper burial.  

Some of the children adopted in America have been able to trace their families and meet their relatives for the first time, but as they are in their 60's and 70's their mothers have died.

The home had magnificent grounds, with gardens of every kind of vegetable, but the children starved. According to one former adopted child, they were never allowed outsde. They could run in the halls, but not outside. Rooms full of donated toys were found locked up, but the children never saw them.

I have watched many episodes of Long Lost Family where children adopted out have been re-united with birth families later in life, but this was the most harrowing program I have seen.

More information on the home can be found here.

I know this because he was driving in front of me today and had personalised number plates.

Seemed like a fairly tame vehicle for the Lord of Darkness, but perhaps he's married with a couple of little demons.

I makes me wonder if, some quarter century later, and having seen humongous changes in the makeup of the population and its culture. When our Constitution was drawn up at the end of the 19th Century, the population was strongly Christian. Therefore, invoking the good will of the Christian God was natural. A century later, the population is diverse. There are a number of non-Christian Faiths followed, but a Faith implies a belief in a god. More than likely, the believers outnumber the non-believers. 

My question seeks to determine if references to God in our daily lives are more cultural than part of the practice of a Faith. By cultural, I mean expressions we use that have their source in holy writings, but are applied with no religious intent, such as the expletives, "For Christ' sake"  or "Allah be praised". I don't know the equivalents for Hindus, Sikhs and Zoroastrians.

Would the referencing of a deity be acceptable to the majority, or should such a reference have no real meaning in a document such as a constitution which is a construct of Mankind?

Today is the first day of the Year 5784 for those of the Hebrew persuasion.

Leaving aside the religious lesson applied to the event, the archeologists have come to the conclusion that Sodom and surrounding lesser cities and towns were destroyed during the time of Abraham by of all things, a meteor that exploded in the air above those urban areas. Evidence has been found of instantaneous high temperatures in the 3000 C range that caused effects which we associate with the nuclear explosions in the air above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such an airburst could well be described as fire coming from the sky, and after the explosion's pressure wave hit the ground it would have thrown rocks into the air, causing them to ignite as well. 

It is interesting that in a peer-reviewed paper written by a group of 20 or so astrophysicists, many stating themselves to be atheists, confirmed from evidence available that such an airburst explains the unique artifacts found in the demolition layer of that site. Such airbursts re not uncommon. Apparently NASA has identified upwards of 500 instances all over the World .

Have a watch of this. It is an interview with the archeologist who has been working on the site of the destroyed city.

Is this always true, or is the other site an anomaly?

The first series was called Finding Bigfoot. Four adventurers travelled the world US, Australia, UK, Viet Nam, Nepal, Canada, Brazil, etc., following reports of a large, 7 - 8 foot humanoid creature covered in hair, being sighted in rugged bushland. Here is a link to the most famous footage of a Bigfoot or Sasquach:

Despite spending inumerable nights in the forests, speaking to hundreds of people who claimed to have had encounters, and collectig lots of "evidence", they have not filmed an encountere with Bigfoot.

Another researcher travelled to the basecamp of Mt. Everest and on into Nepal and Bhutan, but didn't get to film a Yeti.

The current series has a group of researchers with an incredible array of technology from remotely controlled airships to sound recording devices, infrared and thermal cameras and binoculars and a multitude of sound and movement activated trail cameras which they strap to trees and leave unattended. One of these cameras was realigned from itsoriginal position, and they say a bear or other animal would not have been able to  do that.

As of last night's program they have recorded two heat signatures that cannot be identified, but which, when approached, suddenly vanished. They could not be tracked moving away, just disappeared like a light being switched off. Interestng to see what tonights episode reveals.

Believe or not, the concept of human-like beings, which for want of a collective name we will call "gods", seems to be common right across the joint Eurasian landmass. The number and description of those beings varies from just one in the Abrahamic religions, to many as in the Hindu religion. Common to all these Eurasian religions are the characteristics of the beings involved. They have in most cases a patriarchal power system, and the individuals exhibit the same strengths and weaknesses of character that mere morals have.

However, away from Eurasia Mankind appears not to have those types of supernatural beings who need to be worshiped, praised, thanked and appealed to by sacrifices of various types. The peoples of the other inhabited continents seem to have systems based on a belief in beings who inhabit natural features and whose spaces need to be respected, but the beings do not need to be sacrificed to.

I take my example from the Australian Aborigines. There Creation stories do not seem to involve any Supreme Creator. In their stories it is the native animals which make the natural world, and once they have done so, simply get on with their own lives.

My theory is that the Eurasian concept of "gods" arose after the end of the last Ice Age when Mankind began to engage in sedentary agriculture in the Middle East. It is pretty well accepted that the rising of the oceans after the Ice Age isolated the Aborigines from the rest of Mankind. They were probably pretty well isolated  anyway due to the smaller overall worldwide human population and limitations on travel. So the Aborigines never were exposed to the concept of gods until the start of the 19th Century. I am surmising that something similar would have happened in sub-Saharan Africa until the Islamic Arabs began to move in in search of slaves. 

The civilisations of South America did have the idea of gods who required worship, but it is believed that humans did not enter until the later stages of the Ice age, before agriculture developed in the Middle East.

Anybody who claims that the bible is literally true would qualify.

Alas I doubt that there is anybody out there

Anyway... as part of the storyline some scholars poke some holes in this version of "history".  Namely:

- Pontius had already crucified hundreds of Jewish political troublemakers and rabble rousers.  One more wouldn't have bothered him in the slightest.

- This meeting where the Jews supposedly bayed for his blood was apparently in the middle of the night, and that wouldn't have happened.

- How the hell did a bunch of people call out quite a complicated sentence, all at once?

So then it offers an alternate theory.  That is, that Jesus was a political troublemaker, Pontius put him on a cross along with a few hundred others, and the Jews themselves (of which Jesus was one) had bugger-all to do with the decision.  BUT - when this new religion started to get going, who were they targeting it at?  The gentiles.  Of which the Romans were one of the biggest populations to recruit to their cause.

Imagine that - you're trying to get other Romans to convert to this religion, where this guy that was executed was supposedly either a great prophet or the son of god, etc.  "But who killed him?" your prospective converts ask.  "Ummmm.... the Roman governor... one of us, actually.,."  At which point the target snorts and walks away.

So what's the politically palatable answer?  Blame the people he came from and lived among, of course!  Your Roman convert doesn't give a toss about them anyway, they're just some inhabitants of a far-flung corner of the Roman empire, and certainly not of the aristocratic Roman classes.

In addition, the gospels weren't written by buddies of Jesus (not actually sure of his real name, but it most likely wouldn't have been that) at the time he was alive.  The earliest was written about 30 years after his death, and some of the later ones were 100 or more years after.  So it was a good opportunity to rewrite history a little in order to give a boost to their fledgling religion.

Now to be fair, I don't know how much truth is in this, if any.  I do know that Daniel Silva heavily researches a lot of factual material before he writes his thrillers, and let's face it, knowing how the spin of politics works (and has always worked) it makes more sense than the biblical version.

I decided that I would turn all the names of every deity, sub-deity, prophet, angel, demon, whatever - in EVERY holy book - bible, koran, torah, talmud, what have you - into the names of Cadbury chocolates.  Including, of course, every reference anywhere in the Internet.

Every time an attempt was made to reprint with the originals, they'd revert to chocolate names.

Imagine the sermons.... "and Crunchie said unto Turkish Delight... oh, wait, dammit, what were their names??"

Then there'd be the amusing sight of Cadbury's suing every religion for breach of trademark. 

Heheh.

"An evening at god's"

I post it here because I would never have thought he could write short entertaining stuff without some dark horror.

https://www.read-any-book.net/online/573160

Does that mean that medical intervention to prevent things like morning sickness, or pregnancy diabetes, anemia and toxicity goes against God's Will? Is it wrong to used ultrasound examinations to monitor the foetus' progress, or to use amniocentesis to detect abnormalities?  Does the use of anesthesia in its various forms during childbirth constitute a sin?

How do Fundamentalists, with their strict interpretation of the Bible cope with the benefits of modern medical practice during pregnancy and childbirth?

Bloody funny - but be warned there is some language of a coarser nature!

Said the Almighty, "I saw the Son of Adam toiling until the Helios's chariot disappeared from sight last evening, and when he began again as Eos rose next morning from her home at the edge of the river Oceanus to deliver light and disperse the night. Now I see what the Son of Adam has been toiling at. He has been preparing a grassy place upon which I might rest. He must be rewarded."

The Almighty, being the CEO of The Heavens and the Earth Unlimited was keen on delegation. He called for Priapus, who was V-P Gardens.

 " I'm in a meeting right now", replied Priapus,     "I'll just quickly finish it and be with you in five."

When Priapus arrived, the Almighty said, " That Son of Adam has been toiling hard to make a grassy garden for me. I want you to organise some sort of reward for him." 

"You'll run into a demarcation dispute if I handle that. Grass is an agricultural product and Demeter is V-P of Agriculture. You run the risk of that whole department walking out, and they'll head straight to the Discrimination Board. I'd love to help, but I'm not going to be part of a shit fight with a female V-P."

So the Almighty gave Demeter a call. He explained what he wanted and asked for Demeter's advice. 

 " Where is the Son of Adam up to with this grass?", asked Demeter.

"Well," replied the Almighty, Yesterday he was digging up a patch of ground and ripping out a lot  of plants." 

"That's called weeding and seedbed preparation. Technical stuff, you know," interjected Demeter.

"Whatever. This morning he put pieces of grass in holes where he had been making, what did you call it? The seedbed, was it?" continued the Almighty.

"Yeah. Sounds like he's trying to establish the grass by planting what we call 'plugs'. He's a smart cookie, this Son of Adam," said Demeter admiringly.

"I thought that since he was doing something nice for Me, I'd like to ensure his success. What do you reckon?" asked the Almighty.

"Strewth! You are supposed to be all-knowing. Why ask me?", retorted Demeter.

"Because I'm the CEO and I just have to see that things get done. That's why I employ people like you. If you don't want Agriculture, you can transfer to Hearth and Home with Hestia, and I'll promote Priapus to Agriculture," snapped the Almighty.

"That big prick? He couldn't raise enough grain to make a sandwich," cried Demeter. "Leave it with me. I think the best thing right now is some rain. I'll talk to Jupiter over in Weather."

Demeter returned to her office and sent Hermes  to get Jupiter to come over. (Hermes was a bit, you know ...)

"What do you want? I'm right in the middle of creating a draught," said Jupiter over his shoulder to Hermes.

" Ducky, Demeter wants you to help her finish something the Almighty wants done. Apparently its a working together thingy that the Almighty picked up from a Management Seminar he went to."

So Jupiter lobbed in to Demeter's office, a hot wind blowing from his ears.

"Don't get snotty with me," said Demeter. " His Nibs wants to reward some Son of Adam for 'his good works'. I've had a look at the situation and the best reward right now is some rain. Can you deliver?"

"Typical. His Almightyness gets an idea and it's 'drop what you are doing now and do my rush job'. Well, enjoy the weather today, because I won't have time to make the changes for tomorrow."

Jupiter went back to his workshop and gathered up a bit of water vapour from the atmosphere storeroom and packed it into some clouds. 

Then he called Notos from Summer Storm Couriers.

"Mate. I've got an urgent delivery. Can you handle it?"

 replied," You've missed the morning deliveries, but for you, old mate, I'll do it myself. It's be nice to get out of the office for a while," 

So Notos picked up the load of clouds from Jupiter's workshop and headed over to the Son of Adam's place with the load of clouds.  and dropped them off.

And the Son of Adam looked out at where he had been toiling and saw the falling rain.

And the Son of Adam said to himself, "FIGJAM! I read that sky perfectly yesterday arvo."