Why Did God Create Gay Men & Women?

It's official - and all those arguments going on in churches throughout the land about whether Gay is God, or Gay is Good, or if God is Gay. The answer is: yes. Yes, he has designed men who desire sex with other men and women who desire sex with other women.

On his drawing board he had (at least) 4 types of blueprint for humans. And then some funny peasants in the Middle East got a bit of sunstroke decided it was wrong. And, lo, they convinced almost the entire world to believe in their giddy nonesense.

But looking at it through Darwin's spectacles, why would humans evolve a brain prone to giddyness? I guess that also resolves the 'argument' over ID. Most assuredly, we were not designed by anything intelligent.

Seeing The Light

Someone emailed the Mrs this at work. Caption: "I don't think they thought this through..."

Get Over It

Reading Stories of Faith at the Church of England (seems odd that a church can somehow be delineated by a national border) website it seems every example lists people finding and using religion as a way of getting over some kind of emotional stress or other.

Why are there no stories about people who are perfectly happy, with no problems in their lives, suddenly finding themselves talking to Jesus?

I'm looking for the story which starts, "I was tucking into a bacon sarny, doing the Times crossword, when..."

The Church of England are selling their faith as a solution to hard-to-cope-with problems.

But I'm not complaining. Religion, I think, is a quick fix for personal trauma. Which is a good thing because the alternative is (lengthy and expensive and with a dubious success rate) therapy.

Yes, there are plenty of people not dealing with trauma who were born into their religion. But you rarely find a long-term nonbeliever who suddenly finds faith without that person having just been through some bad times.

I have a friend (who I have known for 30 years) who suddenly converted after splitting up with his wife. It was quite a surprise. He always struck me as quite a rational person.

Then there are those say they can't tell their children the truth because the truth is too nasty.

So this is how the religion delusion persists: personal trauma leads to desperation (basically, a mental illness of some kind), which leads to the need to believe in fairy tales, which leads to raising your kids to believe in fairy tales.

Meat Eating Self Defeating Rats Dressed As Lemmings

This is the world we now live in. The dystopian future is here. Rearing organic chickens is bad for the planet cos they run around to keep warm, wasting feed. Cattle will be raised inside so they stand still and just grow big enough to eat.

Tooo many people. But that's just nature taking its course. This is what we evolved brains for - so we could outgrow our planet and have to raise cows in cow factories.

Wells's idea in The Time Machine was that the human race would split into two - the Morlocks would live underground and feed on farmed Aryans (that's what they look like in the film, anyway). Yeah, we hope we don't turn into those nasty Morlock things...

But wait a minute - we are the Morlocks. The rest of the planet is our slave. We are the evil masters of our universe and there's no James Bond character to take us down. This world is subjugated. Our tyranny is unopposed.

Okay so a few thousand get drowned once in a while, but so what? Grieve 'em and leave 'em. Life is for the living. Keep on improving, expanding and demanding. We can make a better world if we all sing together.

While theists haggle over fossils and how many kinds of nothing it takes to create a something, the rats are looking more like lemmings every day, as they race to be the first over the capitalist precipice.

Our Father Who Farts In Heaven, Hallowed Be Methane...

Creationist Caught Speeding

"Sir, you were travelling at 30 mph over the limit."

"Prove it."

"Well, Sir, I recorded your speed on my speed gun."

"Speed gun? Pah - how do you know that really recorded my speed? Are you trying to suggest that the velocity of an object in space can be measured by a 'gun'?"

"It relies on the Doppler Effect applied to a radar beam to measure the speed of objects at which it is pointed. But I also have you on video."

"Video? The whole concept was dreamed up by video philosophers. The idea that images can be recorded via a lens onto a tape, which stores the information as a series of 0s and 1s - it's somewhat far fetched, don't you think?"

"Here you are, Sir, look for yourself. Is this your vehicle?"

"Nope."

"It's the same model, the same colour and has the same registration number."

"How can that be my vehicle? You can see for yourself my vehicle is right there at the side of the road. How can it be in two places at once?"

"Sir, you know what I mean."

"How do you know that I know what you mean? Hey, what are you doing?"

"I am arresting you for obstructing the course of justice."

"Wait a minute! I haven't done anything?! Where's your evidence?!"

"I'm taking you in, buddy. You'll have plenty of time to talk evidence with your lawyer. Now get in the car."

"I'm not getting in that car... ouch! Stop! You're breaking the Second Law of Thermodynamics!"

Square Pegs

The theist often finds it necessary to have their faith hammered into their children. It's all about repetition. Why?

We talk about having things 'drummed into us', sometimes. With religion, this is a very appropriate analogy. Theistic ideas are presented to vulnerable young minds like the beats of a loud drum ... God is Love God is Love God God is Love ... You'll Go To Hell You'll Go To Hell You'll Go To Hell You'll Go To Hell ... with the idea that this will encourage (or force) the children to march along in step.

Theists often claim atheism is a religion. Yet I don't know any godless folk who sit their children down and have them repeat "There is no god" over and over. I don't know any godless folk who encourage their children to read The God Delusion x number of times a day and repeat key parts before they go to bed. I don't know any goldess folk who send their kids to special atheist schools where they can have the lessons on the lack of evidence for gods.

In my own case, my son knows I'm an atheist but he's free believe whatever he wants. Weeks, months, maybe years can go past without imaginary creators ever getting a mention.

But I have to wonder why, if a god is so almighty and his lessons for life so strong, belief in him has to be bludgeoned into us from an impressionable age. It's like a square peg being forced into a round hole - if you keep hitting it hard enough, eventually it will go in (and you'll probably never be able to get it out again).

Fact and Theory

This is for my theistic friend:

"Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about evolutionary mechanisms."- Theodosius Dobzhansky

"Well evolution is a theory. It is also a FACT. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do..."

Stephen J. Gould


"It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a FACT, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a FACT that the earth with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a FACT that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a FACT that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a FACT that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a FACT that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun. "

R. C. Lewontin


"Today, nearly all biologists acknowledge that evolution is a fact. The term theory is no longer appropriate except when referring to the various models that attempt to explain how life evolves... it is important to understand that the current questions about how life evolves in no way implies any disagreement over the fact of evolution. "

- Neil A. Campbell, Biology 2nd ed., 1990, Benjamin/Cummings, p. 434


"Since Darwin's time, massive additional evidence has accumulated supporting the fact of evolution--that all living organisms present on earth today have arisen from earlier forms in the course of earth's long history. Indeed, all of modern biology is an affirmation of this relatedness of the many species of living things and of their gradual divergence from one another over the course of time. Since the publication of The Origin of Species, the important question, scientifically speaking, about evolution has not been whether it has taken place. That is no longer an issue among the vast majority of modern biologists. Today, the central and still fascinating questions for biologists concern the mechanisms by which evolution occurs."

- Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, Biology 5th ed. 1989, Worth Publishers, p. 972


"A few words need to be said about the "theory of evolution," which most people take to mean the proposition that organisms have evolved from common ancestors. In everyday speech, "theory" often means a hypothesis or even a mere speculation. But in science, "theory" means "a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed." as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it. The theory of evolution is a body of interconnected statements about natural selection and the other processes that are thought to cause evolution, just as the atomic theory of chemistry and the Newtonian theory of mechanics are bodies of statements that describe causes of chemical and physical phenomena. In contrast, the statement that organisms have descended with modifications from common ancestors--the historical reality of evolution--is not a theory. It is a fact, as fully as the fact of the earth's revolution about the sun. Like the heliocentric solar system, evolution began as a hypothesis, and achieved "facthood" as the evidence in its favor became so strong that no knowledgeable and unbiased person could deny its reality. No biologist today would think of submitting a paper entitled "New evidence for evolution;" it simply has not been an issue for a century."

- Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed., 1986, Sinauer Associates, p. 15