VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI marked the holiest night of the year for Christians by stressing that humanity isn't a random product of evolution.
Benedict emphasized the Biblical account of creation in his Easter Vigil homily Saturday, saying it was wrong to think at some point "in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it." ...
RichardDawkins.net bit.ly/dPmsBY
From: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/hitchens_address_to_american_a.php Dear fellow-unbelievers, Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency. That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private. Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations. As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit...) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson's wall of separation. And don't keep the faith. Sincerely Christopher Hitchens
Focus on the Family, the awful Colorado Springs based organisation that promotes right-wing Christian/Oppressive values, launches a True Tolerance campaign. To help with "bullying" in school. The campaign doesn't start out well:
Concerned about homosexual advocacy in your child's school?
Err no. I want my children raised to be aware of all elements of society. That the world in which they live in is made up of people of many colours. I am concernted with children being raised to belong to a cult that, by ideology, directs people to dislike, "save", or hurt other groups in the name of 2000 plus year old fictional book.
Read more here
Inspired by Hitch:
The Human species has been around for about 100,000 years. For much of that time we have been dying in the most horrendous circumstances. Some believe that for 98,000 of those years a "loving" god stood by and watched us perish. Finally deciding to intervene 2000 years ago by requiring that himself/his son die by a blood sacrifice for a game that he invented.
Easter, like Christmas, is another annual festival co-opted by Christians as their own, to fulfil a marketing scam during the genesis of their religion."Come join us, we have all the same festivals as you." Time to leave immoral Bronze-Age thinking where it belongs.
This morning I entered the kitchen to make a cheese sandwich. Upon opening the fridge the cheese was no longer there. Given this time of year I was wondering whether the empty refrigerated tomb was a sign my cheese had resurrected?