Feeling fair and balanced, I decided to capitalize on the fine suggestion of commenter Jake Samuels and email PrayAbout.com, in an effort to get to the bottom of these pay’n'pray candle-purchasing shenanigans. Here is their reply (in less than the advertised 2 business days!):
“In the next few months, prayabout.com will be moving away from candle purchasing. Instead we will use paid advertisements on the site to earn revenue. This will eliminate the cost that affects our users. We have, however, always provided ways for users with limited resources to earn candles. Inviting friends, praying for others, and lighting candles will earn a user candles on the site.
We understand that many of our users experience financial hardships and we want to make the site accessible to anyone who wants to use it. However, we are running a business. We have costs that need to be covered. The larger the site becomes, the more money the business requires to keep itself running. I assure you that no one is trying to take advantage of the site’s users or line their own pockets.
I hope this answers your question.
All the best,
Erin
Managing Director
PrayAbout.com”
So the waxy tithes do, in fact, pay for staff at the site as I suggested, though no mention was made of whether they’re chubby or not. The domain is registered in California, so I’m going to assume they’re reasonably in shape. Do the costs that need to be covered include spa lunches and company Smart Cars? Undetermined. Was I being fair and/or balanced, or was the robust marketing plan an incredible—some may say divine—coincidence?
“I’m on the corner with doubt.” preaches Bill Maher in Religulous, a documentary that stares with baleful agnostic eyes into the heart of global religiosity. Indeed, Bill all but wears a sandwich board proclaiming his disdain and ill wishes for the spiritual snake-oil-and-war machine.
Let’s let Larry Charles, director [of Borat fame] synopsize:
“We…talk to clergy, extremists, scholars, politicians, ex-cons, the man on the street and even the man upstairs (that’s right, we interview God.)
The funny (is) scary, the scary wildly funny. The crazy…seem(s) sane and the sane absolutely and undeniably crazy. “
Bill and Larry’s excellent adventure includes
a trucker chapel (inside a truck, obviously) with a reading material such as the pamphlet God’s Last Name…it’s not damn;
Bill doing Xenu’s work in London to the strains of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy;
conversations with theme park Jesus, replete with tourists applauding every time the cruel Romans smack up the bloody Lord;
an enlightening list of famous people the Mormons baptised after their deaths such as the Buddha.
I assure you the Buddha will be mighty pissed if he’s rudely yanked out of nirvana to join Jesus in one of the 3 Mormon heavens.
Bill gets frustrated with nonsense more than you’d expect for a man travelling the world to interview nutbars. The film crew get tossed out of the Vatican and the Mormon Temple. Larry Charles keeps up the lulz, though, with cheesy vintage Lord Privy Seal cuts Expelled can only wet dream about.
Bill is pissed because he doesn’t know, and these guys don’t either. Only he has the humility (I know, when do you see Bill Maher and humility referenced in the same sentence, but stay with me) to admit it. That’s agnosticism. Acknowledging man’s inability to know, without “the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion”.
Religulous highlights the funny/sick/disturbing/sad/easy industry of separating fools from their money, but it ends on a very serious A-bomb spangled crescendo. It’s here that Bill presents his simple thesis: “Religion must die so that man can live”. Sound harsh? Man is dying all the time (like today) to keep religion alive.
The revolution started by the atheist authors a few years ago needs the public support of those who would see it succeed. Religulous stands up to be counted, edging that 16% ever upwards. Social change can happen in a mere few decades; as racism became publicly unacceptable in the 80s and 90s, and the climate was made largely safe and welcoming for homosexuals in the 90s and 00s, so let’s expect and help the next few decades to accept atheism and reason and recategorize religion as embarassing and childish.
What if the Good Lord had to take on McCain and Obama?
This video is by Edward Current, who seems to make a hobby of producing atheist video, and was first spotted on the Atheist News Blog, a collection of news coverage of an (ir)religious nature.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg writes in The New York Review of Books an essay on atheism: Without God. Dr. Weinberg identifies four tensions that put science and religion at odds:
1. Science removing the supernatural as required to understand the world;
2. Science revealing Earth and Man to have no special place in the universe;
3. Religion rejecting the establishment of natural laws as an arrogant constriction of God’s ‘infinite’ abilities, and
4. Science illuminating a paradigm that doesn’t include infallible knowledge.
An excellent read.
Science has been slowly explaining things that used to be God’s domain — lightening, pregnancy, crops, disease, the tide, the motion of the heavens. None of these have thus far turned out to be supernatural. The more sophisticated our measuring devices become, the more mysteries we’ll unravel. Sheer persistence will probably uncover the origin of life itself, and that too will turn out to be a natural process. We just don’t need the idea of God to explain the world around us any more.
We can live in a world without God.
Religion was invented before humanity was capable of adequately searching for and proving things true. It offered explanations (powerful gods) for significant phenomena (the sun rising) which led to ritualistic requests for consideration in the timing or severity of those phenomena (”please make it rain”; “please make my wife pregnant”, etc.). Embedded in our minds as the true cause behind all effects, Gods that you could ask to help you became forces to constantly be obeyed.
Religious “truth” made a great a construct to provide us with a reason to adhere to social rules (restrain your greed and urges to murder, rape, philander, steal) and work towards common social goals (marriage, families, cooperation). It served a purpose in dark ages.
Genuine knowledge—the product of science—strips away the supernatural impetus for prosocial behavior, but certainly not the need. Anyone with enough critical thinking skills to see past God can certainly agree that we benefit from living in a civil, healthy, cooperative society and can accept the social contracts necessary to make that happen.
They can live in a world without God.
The other best use of religion is as an anti-depressant; purposelessness is anathema to the human psyche and we’re highly susceptible to existential fear of there not being a bigger picture. Belief keeps your chin up when you’re not sure you’re on the right path, or whether there even is a path. Belief is also a crutch that obscures the need to assess your own priorities, and to arrive at a decision on how to live your life that’s based on personal reflection. Do we need meaning? Sure, or we go bonkers. But don’t take the easy way out. Reason out your own personal meaning, act on it, refine as your perspective widens.
You can live in a world without God.
P.S. Don’t be bummed about your new found purposelessness. Redirect your sense of wonder where it belongs. This is what science does for us all.
Shame on Tony! Topic Agnostic reported that 6 children had been removed from the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries compound in Arakansas as part of a 2-year child porn sting…yesterday Mr. Alamo was arrested “without incident” in Flagstaff, AZ.
From CNN:
“It’s a hoax,” Alamo said. “They’re just trying to make our church look evil … by saying I’m a pornographer. Saying that I rape little children. … I love children. I don’t abuse them. Never have. Never will.”
Asked why authorities were searching the property, Alamo compared himself to Christ.
“Why were they after Jesus?” he asked. “It’s the same reason. Jesus is living within me.”
Mmmhmm. You’re not in trouble because you’re too much like Jesus, Tony. You’re in trouble because you facilitate people having sex with little kids, for Pete’s sake.
Mmmmk. This is a video of Sarah Palin in church receiving a blessing to aid her in her quest to insert Jesus’ viewpoint into political events and to protect her from witchcraft. I’m not kidding, right at the end.
Isn’t petitioning some higher power with ritual to sway things your way, protect you and smite your enemies basically witchcraft?
I just read something crazy. Apparently Marc Headley, an ex-Scientolgist A/V guy, says that Co$ actually arranged a fake casting call in order to dredge up chicks for the undatable Tom Cruise, back when Penelope split. Potential wife material included Jennifer Garner, Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Alba. Only Scarlett took the bait, but freaked when she found out the “audition” was at the Scientology Center in LA and refused to make a tape. Katie Holmes, being much more impressionable/much less hot than the A-list, went for it, Tom just loved her and the rest is celebricult history!
This video also available on AnonTube, for when the American Rights Counsel [sic!] starts serving up those takedown notices
Go, North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction, go. The school board of Brunswick County, NC, led by hillbillly Joel Fanti, petitioned the Board to allow creationism to be taught alongside evolution.
“The law says we can’t have Bibles in schools, but we can have evolution, of the atheists.” drawls Fanti.
The Brunswick County school system does offer a “Bible as Literature” course in high school, but that would be super boring, so nobody signed up for it and it was cancelled this year.
BONUS:Interactive map from Scientific American on state-by-state creationism controversies.
How does this stuff make CNN? A Kansas fitness club owner has a water stain on her ceiling. The water stain is oppressing patrons of her weigh-loss clinic into busting a nut on the AssMaster® because it looks like a certain patriarchal guilt god (no, not Horus).
I think they’re misinterpreting his eyes on their spandex. Jesus would look down from the moldy ceiling tile with love and acceptance, not reproach. Does not Genesis 45: 17-18 say “ye shall eat the fat of the land“?
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