Sunday Morning Services

Good morning to all.  This is the first service from America since returning from my socialist utopia in Europe.  As such, I’m highlight a song this Sunday that I ran across right before leaving Germany.  It was part of a Philliips Ambilight commercial I saw and what caught my attention was the part about not talking the easy road.  Why do you suppose that struck a chord with me?  LOL.

I hear a voice calling
Calling out for me
These shackles I’ve made in an attempt to be free
Be it for reason, be it for love
I won’t take the easy road

Prelude to Services

See all of you soon at the top of the stairs!

At the top of the stairs they got keys to Cadillacs, BMW’s Mercedes Benz’s and all of that.

The Miracle of Medical Malpractice

Just when you thought you’d seen the worst of the religion inspired creationist freak shows, along comes a real life example of the extent to which religious idiocy has infected the minds of America.  The glow is fading off this old religious miracle, but fear not my fickle-brained faithful friends!!  There’s a new miracle ready to rock your world!!

It’s a Miracle?

(CNN) — Even in the Bible Belt, coroners don’t use the word “miracle” lightly.

But Holmes County, Mississippi, Coroner Dexter Howard has no qualms using the word for the resurrection, as it were, of Walter Williams, who he was declared dead Wednesday night.

As if to mock the recent rebroadcast of my heavily documented on-line secular miracle, my old neighbors in Mississippi have seen fit to induce another miracle of their own in an obvious attempt to glam onto the press I’ve generated with mine.  Of course it’s rather self serving for this incompetent medical examiner to lay his own incompetence off as a miracle, but it’s a helluva good way to distract the bumble brained Baptists who apparently voted him into his position as coroner in the first place.

A Different Kind of Miracle

I suspect the ecclesiastical certificate of this miracle is already on it’s way back from the Kinko’s where Brother Ted gets a 10% bulk-rate discount.  I hope my religious friends won’t take too much offense to me using such a desultory eight letter word, but perhaps if we examine the actual evidence, there is a more rational explanation for what happened than “godditit”.  Let’s hit the breaks on the Baptist Pope-mobile for just a second here and look at the “observational” science as Ken Ham suggests is the only proper way to decide on these serious issues of life and death.

By Creationist Standards

Because I was taking really good notes the night Ken Ham gave that science lesson to Bill Nye, I decided to look at the ‘observational” evidence of this latest claim of a Mississippi miracle and here’s what I found:

“Among the public health consequences was a medico-legal spoils system that valued pseudoscience and expedient criminal convictions over scientific validity”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/17/steven-hayne_n_3454666.html

The state is one of several that elect county coroners to oversee death investigations. The office requires no medical training, only a high-school diploma, and it commonly goes to the owner of the local funeral home.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2008/02/the_bitemarks_men.html

Mississippi Needs a Miracle

It would be more of a miracle if Mississippi decided to implement standards for medical examiners that included, I don’t know, maybe having some medical license or training?   Until then, Uncle Teds Bible College and Taxidermy graduates are free to fill the role. Heaven forbid they’d think to pass a law requiring doctors to check on the aging batteries of poor old Black folks with failing pacemakers.  You gotta give them credit.  This kind of thing isn’t out of the norm for religious folks. The reason they’re so quick to pronounce the living as dead is because they are gullible enough to believe that the dead go on living.

Enjoy.

Nye-Ham Debate Retrospective

I stayed up half the night here in Germany to live-tweet the event and my overall “impression”? Based on the amount of pre-debate skeptic jitters about engaging in a ‘debate’ with a slobbering God botherer, which I normally concur is a bad idea btw, the whole event worked out quite well for the cause of secularism IMHO. Here’s why I feel that way.

First, there’s the relative popularity of Bill Nye easily trumping Ken Ham with all but the radical right wing ultra-minority of folks willing to overlook the reality of science and physics in the 21st Century. Then you toss in Ken Ham’s reliance on Cliff Notes from the prosecutor’s statements against Galileo.  Those are not nearly as effective as when people were engaged in bleeding themselves to death in their holy efforts to excise demons and return to health.

Finally, Ham’s “Molecules to Man” canard, was wholly inappropriate for a debate on evolution as any seasoned atheist debater is familiar with the tactic of shifting from evolution to abiogenesis willy nilly will be familiar with. I was a little taken back (see my live tweet stream) by Nye’s inability or reluctance to go “Christoper Hitchens” mode on Ham and get to some serious nut-cutting. That was a fantasy of mine I knew would not occur, but I was really saddened that Nye didn’t even do a little “soft shoe” Sam Harris impersonation at some point.

Bill Nye: “That all sounds well and good Mr. Ham, but when I read the Bible, I clearly see the story of “Protons to Polygamy” and your disavowing those parts of God’s holy works that you find unsuitable goes directly against your claims made based on other scriptures literal accuracy and contemporary relevance.” 

If Bill Nye had the quick wit and lust for metaphorical nut-cutting that I do, when Ham was busy refuting the literal facts about the Bible supporting polygamy, Bill should have come back with that line and I GUARANTEE you it would be the thing that made the highlight reel. Of course that overlooks the fact that I invented the phrase concurrent to the time of the debate itself, but great minds think alike and Bill Nye has a great mind.

In retrospect, and perhaps as part of Nye’s master plan, he modified Mohammed Ali’s Rope-a-Dope strategy and just let Ham wear himself out while Nye stood calmly covering his head tucked safely against the ropes. Instead of going for the kill like Mohammed Ali, he was happy to just stand there and witness the exhausted and frustrated puritanical pugilist nearly pass out from running himself in circles?

I dunno, but since the “debate” was taped, I expect the best of our secular public schools to use the footage, not as a religious exercise, but as an all-too-necessary exercise in deconstructing the rhetoric of creationist apologetics. FWIW, I had an extremely valuable class in critical thinking. It was in Lincoln, Nebraska when I was in 7th grade public school. Being armed with a proper list of logical fallacies is the secular armament most lacking in the rank and file militant atheism army I am trying to corral. If successful I promise not to let you all build a new religion around me since I’ve already started one on my WordPress blog.

Remember troops. Molecules to Man shall from henceforth on, be responded to with Protons to Polygamy, unless somebody can twist up an even shorter, more catchy “meme’ to undermine the creationist mindset.  H/T to Dan Dennett, and I meme that most sincerely.

Enjoy.

Spring Housecleaning

Since my often wonky Internet connection seems to be momentarily solid, having no doubt worn itself ragged from jumping up and down like a midget on a Dutch hooker the duration of this morning, I shall attempt a quick but meaty post on current affairs.  I know the title seems a bit inappropriate for this time of year, but with the winter two thirds over and STILL not a speck of snow (or a good hard freeze) here in my German neighborhood, it seems like spring is ready to break out any day now.  I’ve been a bit less active on my blog lately, owing to the distractions and perturbations of life, but still post willy-nilly across many social platforms and websites, even if I don’t post full-on blog entries with as much regularity as I would otherwise be compelled.  Figured I’d hit my main talking points in one fell swoop here.   First the big three.

Sex

I am still for it, even though my pom-poms are dangling a bit lower than your average hip-hopper’s pants. My wife is also struggling with health issues that make my rooting for sex a more prominent feature of the day than actually having any, but going out to dinner and talking dirty to each other before coming home and passing out in bed was already a prominent feature in our post-50 bag of sex tricks, so it’s not as huge an issue as if we were in our more succulent youth.

That said, I don’t think women need help from Republicans in figuring out their end of the deal, so why the hell won’t these rightwing politicos keep their hands off women’s vaginas?  I like handling a vagina as much as the next guy, but I know I’m only renting it and am not allowed to go nailing pictures all over the walls and trying to install new plumbing fixtures, let alone make up new rules on the maintenance thereof.   Ferchrissakes.

Politics

Politics.  Pardon Snowden and build a statue of him next to the Washington Monument.  Put some bankers in jail from the space being freed by not arresting pot smokers.  Quit arresting pot smokers.  Quit pretending that legalized pot is the end of the world as we know it, particularly you highly paid TV perps with all the false pearl clutching (you know who they are). Put some of those torturers from the past Bush administration in jail before you go all half-cocked about other countries and their “international” obligations to law and justice.  Give us all a fucking break.

Religion

A wish fulfillment fantasy for nervous mortals.  Still as useless as tits on a pumpkin.  In dwindling demand, but still a huge threat to national and international stability due to their reckless reliance on poppycock in their search for deeper meanings in shallow water.

Life

Having a few teeth pulled this week is nothing compared to what Rita is dealing with. My wife is hanging onto life tenaciously, even as she struggles to deal with her terminal cancer.  It’s  already been a bit over a year since she abandoned her unsuccessful treatment regime at a renowned German lung clinic, walking away from an opportunity to turn herself into a long-term medical experiment for a bunch of curious doctors.  Her local doctors are now pushing us to make accommodations at a full blown palliative care facility.  That is an unlikely event in any case, since my wife would sooner do herself in at one fell swoop, than linger in such a pitiful state for weeks/months.  She is still not ambulatory.  She still manages to teach English classes and keep our business running, but her pain is becoming increasingly difficult to manage and the prescriptive solutions more debilitating.  It’s a heartbreaking and worrisome thing to have to witness.  Right now we’re hoping she’ll be physically able to make our 25th wedding anniversary at the end of the month.  Dinner in Paris.

Living

We’re still getting along as near “normal” as we can under the circumstances.  My wife continues to worry more about my future success without her, than she does with the fact that she has bigger issues of her own right now.  I don’t want her to worry about me.  Providence has seen fit to bless me in ways that most men only dream about.  I have no idea why the dice of the universe haven’t crapped me out already, but I’m optimistic on my future even as I attempt to squelch the tears from considering the present situation with my wife.

Blogging

I’ll continue to blog, tweet, post pix, just as I always have.  The subjects will continue to be as diverse as my interests.  I’m still in love with Spotify and thankful to be able to reach out and access so much music.  My wife and I both engage in a fair amount of musical therapy made more pleasant by their vast catalog of music and our deep (read: old people) memories of songs from out past.  I pop in-check in on Yelp every now and then.  I’ll occasional throw a comment on my GetGlue TV social app when viewing a show I like, but never in real-time, since my TV and time is shifted by half a globe from the US.  I’ve been tossing up a few odd AudioBoos lately.  Also trying to spread my photos across several apps.  My main pro Flickr account, Instagram and Facebook get the biggest share of my pics.  Look forward to more photo blogging fun since I acquired my Sony DSC-QX10 for Xmas.  I’ll be trying to organize and post a lot of pics locked on my computer at present and adding new stuff along the way as well.  A fairly comprehensive map to my social media is on my Social page here at this blog for those who are interested.

Enjoy.

Sunday Morning Services

666th post on The Tim Channel.  Just sayin’.

Good Morning all.

Shortest Church Service in history.

Just one song for today.

Past Services

Enjoy.