There isn’t much I can add to SciFiHeaven.net’s review of the 5-day Torchwood special, Torchwood: Children of Earth. [link here] It’s a really excellent review of final installment, and I’ll warn you, it has spoilers. In fact, it deals with parts of the story that you DO NOT want to hear about, if you are planning on watching it when it comes out on BBC America, on July 20th.

I couldn’t wait, so I got the 720p off someone in the UK and watched all 5 episodes in order last night. It did kind of leave me tired and numb, at the end, and not just because it was almost 2 am. I’ll leave you with a teaser, and I encourage you to watch it in a week, when it comes to BBC America.

Very funny stuff, when put in the context of an emergency room! To continue my entertainment, I’m now going to watch Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit” – this week’s episode is on Astrology. I can feel a good laugh coming on!

No, really tell me what it is like…

We will be reunited with our loved ones.

Will they have bodies? Will they look like you remember them, or like they looked when they die? Will they have wings? Will I get to hang out with my latest wife (the others aren’t so keen on me)?

It will be as God wills.

Well, that’s no bloody answer, is it? I mean, will my dog be there, Sparky? What about our baby that died in childbirth? What, no answer? Again with the “as God wills”… Then how about telling me why the religion of the Romans or Vikings was so obviously silly, and Christianity was so obviously the right religion? I mean, even in the Old Testament God speaks about other gods being weaker than him. Doesn’t that mean there are other gods?

You are foolish. Of course our religion is the one. It is obvious.

It may be obvious that you killed anyone who disagreed with you. But, let me move on. What if God were (don’t laugh) a spaceman. I mean, a really fucking powerful one? He could raise people from the dead, create new universes in his laboratory, and anything you want. How would you distinguish between a spaceman with amazing technology like time travel and everything, and your God?

Don’t you see that if you take your religion and test it, that it fails? You are worshiping something that seems awfully made up to any independent observer, and you can’t defend your belief other than to say belief requires no defense. You would laugh at primitive tribes, cowering at thunder and lightning, but your preachers blame hurricanes on gay pride parades. While logic applies to everything else we’ve ever discovered in the universe, you claim that it doesn’t apply to God. Can’t you see you’ve set up something that can’t be disproved? It is a circular argument with no evidence to back it up, and insufficient details, so that it can simultaneously frighten and please every believer.

That wasn’t a question. It’s obvious you don’t care about your everlasting soul, and you’d rather burn in Hell than live for eternity with God in heaven. I feel sorry for you.

You fucking twat! Don’t condecend to me, and don’t pity me. You’re turning the tables so this becomes about me. You’ve created an anthropomorphic god who is your sky-father, who will rescue when you’ve been good and punish you when you’ve been bad. You call him a father, but he isn’t anything like a father. What moral creature would set up a game where some are destined to lose? You tell me God knows the future, he created the universe and all of time at once. There is nothing unknown to him. He has to be sadistic if he creates a universe where innocent children die horrible deaths, and where some people are born gay and are therefore destined to go to Hell. He knew the outcome, and yet people claim that God’s will is mysterious or there to teach us a lesson. If that is the God you believe in, then he’s a sick fuck. Jesus Christ, don’t you see that rather than acting like a father that would love his children regardless of their actions, this god tells you that you are a sinner and if you don’t worship him, he sends you to burn in Hell and have your eyes poked out. Talk about someone you wouldn’t want to forget to give a Father’s Day card to. And WHY does he do this?

He wants you to have free will and learn to be more like him.

Right. He knows the entire history of the universe, before it unfolds to us, and yet “we” have free will to decide our fate. Either he created us to succeed or fail, there’s no two ways about it. No. My answer is no. I do not want to spend a split-second in this Heaven you fail to describe. Why would I want to spend any time around a super-egotistical spaceman, that lives for our worship, and locks us in the basement without food or water and beats us if we don’t worship him and call him God? You can’t have one set of ethics you apply to people and then another set of ethics you apply to gods.

I’m sorry, I just can’t get through to you. I understand that the singing and bake sales are fun, and you get some sense of community from congregating with neighbors on the weekends. But, can’t you step back for a minute and apply logic to all this?

Religions were strict, totalitarian regimes that gave cohesiveness to society at a time when it would otherwise have fractured and fallen apart. It pulled society out of the dark ages, at the price of many lives and with the residual harm that it has let us believe we can live with a cult mentality. You can scrutinize any other aspect of your life, but you are not allowed to question religion. You have to accept authoritative answers from religious leaders, and accept their vague answers. Why? Because of a 2000 year old collection of stories, that you believe are better than all the other collections of stories that your religion burned when you killed off its followers?

I’ll pray for your soul.

As an outsider, I seriously feel like I am on Candid Camera. We are told stories as children, and then told the stories are just made up. We are told to grow up, and not believe in fairy tales. Well, we’re told not to believe in any except the One. That story is true. Virgin birth. Resurrection. A psychotic god, who started taking his meds and calmed down by the sequel. Yes, all the other religions were damned silly, except this one. After all, this god did magical things. This god claimed to be the true god.

I mean, if you take the long-view and observe history, you can’t help but see how religion is used as a tool to subjugate people. The only liberation that people got from religion in most of the past 2000 years, was promised for after they died. It is much more organized, with lots of fancy vestments, documents and processes, but fundamentally, it is not much different than primitive tribes who anthropomorphized and made up stories about things they couldn’t understand.

If you went to sleep, under a tree (because that is where people tend to sleep in this sorts of stories), and you wake up 1000 years later and people worship a magical pink unicorn, wouldn’t you feel you are still dreaming? I observe tribal rituals over the past 30,000 years, and I see such strong commonalities that most people in society are brainwashed to think their Santa Claus story is real. They continue to believe, in the face of logic, because they justify the good acts they do or the way it makes them feel. This mass-hypnotic, mutual-masturbatory act of self-gratification is ultimately going to be seen as NOT needed, and NOT beneficial to society. We may not be to that point yet. We may not have any framework of ethics and social interaction that can replace religion, with its silly tribal rituals and threats of damnation, but perhaps someday we will. If we continue to advance and evolve, I can’t think that we won’t someday be past this embarrassing phase of our history. Right now, these “clubs” have power and they make people feel special. That’s a hard act to outdo, in a world with over six billion people.

For now, we live in a world that is strange to us. Every day we see people who believe in “Santa Claus”. We are somewhat afraid to claim that the jolly old elf isn’t there. We rationalize that most people WE know are pretty cool, and they aren’t really the “dangerous kind” of believer. But, meanwhile, the dangerous kinds do congregate and plan for Armageddon. We can be thankful that society has progressed as far as it has. I can admit in a public forum that I think God is silly, and I don’t get lynched. But, I still get kept out of the public square and I am ridiculed and not taken seriously. I live in Iowa, where gays can marry and where skeptics aren’t strung up in a cornfield anymore. But, perhaps a majority of the world still lives in the kind of oppression that I can’t imagine. There are some places where Christianity is not an option, and even more places where Islam is not an option.

I wish I would wake up one day and find the world changed, but it won’t happen in my lifetime. It won’t happen until the power of organized religion is reduced to something you choose to opt-in on, when you reach the age of consent. We have to stop giving tax breaks and special concessions to religious organizations. We need to stop allowing child abuse, in the name of religion. We need to encourage democracy and secular governments around the world. To those of us who make the comparison, and look at the evolution of religion over the millennia, we see just how entrenched it has become, and how resistant to reason. Some of us need to make the case that religion and superstition no longer serve us, and should be retired to the dustbin of history, alongside belief in fairies and unicorns, Zeus, Gilgamesh and Thor. (I kind of think that comics have helped to free us of the idea that unfailing gods exist, especially in light of the very human superheroes featured in recent movies. Our amazing technology also makes us more skeptical of amazing claims.)

Society is either ready to handle the truth of reality, or not. If we think we are mature enough as a society, to replace superstition with reason, then the answer isn’t to be quiet and respectful, and erode slowly at the Pew study numbers. I think the plan needs to be that we have pitbulls like Dawkins, who bring some people to face reality. We need scientists who take the “non-overlapping magisteria” approach. We need individuals, politicians and celebrities to stand up bravely and admit they are non-believers. We need to stop playing word games, because either you believe in Zeus or you don’t, you aren’t holding out for Zeus to appear any more than you are for Santa Claus – so, we need to stop hedging and admit that we don’t buy all that organized religion is selling. We need to educate more people, globally; raise their standard of living, feed them, empower them. We need to fight for secular government. We need to make it cool for the kids to “come out of the closet” and admit they don’t believe all that junk their parents did. Ultimately, I think we need to embrace technology (communication/social media) to provide support and make those who “loose their faith” feel like they are not alone. There are others out there who are nice, ethical, caring and live a purposeful life, just without all the “woo woo” and “mumbo-jumbo”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This artwork, by Marco Brambilla, was designed to be viewed by people in an elevator, as they rode up and down The Standard building in New York. I might expect some people to loiter and ride up and down a few times, to get the full effect. Pretty cool!

There are certain places you wouldn’t expect to find life, in the universe. At one time, we thought we’d need to find stars like our yellow sun, if life were to have a chance. It seems that there may be habitable zones around other types of stars, like around red dwarfs (another article), brown dwarfs (hot super-Jupiters, that didn’t quite have the mass to kick of stellar fusion), and even in stranger places, like around neutron stars or white dwarf stars. In all of these cases, debris and gas can swirl around and form an accretion disk around a body, and if given enough time, planets can form. (And, in the case of white dwarfs and neutron stars, the question may be “What survives their death?” These are examples of the leftover core of a star, after it dies in a planetary nebula or supernova explosion.)

NASA’s Kepler mission is hunting for planets, so is the French mission, COROT. They will find earth-sized planets around other stars, and not limit themselves to just the likely places. We will learn a lot. Between discovering life outside of Earth (perhaps, Mars, Titan, Europa…), and developing a stronger theory of where planets might form and whether they might be able to support life, we could make great strides this century in understanding just how likely “living planets” are in the universe.

[Visit Scientific American, and view a video on this topic, or read the article.]

What strikes me, is that there were different clear religions throughout the ages. The fall of Rome, led to the rise of Christianity. The Vikings then attacked the British Isles and Europe, but were defeated. And, with their demise, ended their religion. Islam was pushed back to the East. Peasants and noblemen alike had little ability to read and write. Without science, tools, mathematics… gods provided hope and reasons. People were no longer strangers, because they belonged to the same club. The God Club. I don’t defend the killing that was done, in the name of the church, but religion had its purpose. It was based in primitive myths and superstition, and it was perverted and used to subjugate whole populations. It evolved, to offer what people needed at the time. The idea heaven (the promise) and Hell (the threat) were refined, and demons were everywhere, blamed for bad things that happened to good people; because you couldn’t let God be directly blamed or people would choose a better god.

At this time in history, people needed something that couldn’t exist outside of a fairy tale. The church served an important function, but like any bureaucracy, it didn’t fade and go away when the Dark Ages ended. Around the end of this period, in the 12th century, a mini-ice age was ending, and some attribute this to an increase in reliable agriculture. People were fed, and better educated. Rather than religion fading from necessity, the church held a firm grip on on the hearts and minds of the people. The Dark Ages was a time of evolution. Less able religions disappeared, leaving basically two religions, Islam and Christianity. Religions that were powerful and insidious. They spread and were invasive like the plague, and they had evolved into reason-resistant strains.

With the perspective of an educated person, in the 21st century, the Dark Ages appears as a primitive time, to be sure. Yet, for all our progress, a majority of the people on the planet still believe in demons and other primitive superstitions. The trend is looking good though. Organized religion is losing its grip, I think. With an economy this century that is more good than bad, that means more and more people have a standard of living that is raised up and they no longer worry about starving. The Internet and global communication will help to show people of different cultures how much we all have in common. People will be more highly educated, and science will make advances. When it comes to the Religious Dark Ages, we are still living in them. To many of us, we look at angels and demons/heaven and hell the same ways we would if it were superstition coming from any primitive tribe. This “plague” is not resistant to reason, and more people are able to step back and look objectively at religion and reject it. This means there is light at the end of the tunnel; the Religious Dark Ages are coming to an end. But, I think we are always one major cataclysm or tragedy away from falling back into the abyss, where the candle of reason is snuffed.

Organized religion was the outcome of Europe’s trial by fire, in the Dark Ages. We shouldn’t make it easy for organized religion to exist. Churches shouldn’t be exempt from taxation. Blasphemy laws must be abolished. It is encouraging that fewer young Americans, and even fewer young Europeans feel beholden to organized religion. We should be able to unite as a planet of people, without bribes and threats from sky gods. Without organized religion, and with more secular governments, superstition and myths will be exposed to the light of knowledge and the test of science, and they will fade – perhaps, once and for all.

(When will nations like Iran and even America, truly separate politics from religion?)

(Given that we can’t eliminate the “religious virus” entirely, can we come up with an even more virulent strain of “reason” to vaccinate ourselves against it, if it were to threaten to spread again?)

Some other wartime propaganda and nostalgia sites:

• WWII Posters on Flickr
• The Powers of Persuasion
• World War II Propaganda, Cartoons, Film, Music, & Art
• WWI & WWII Posters

This man is not a predator, nor is he a risk to have around children. Quite the opposite; he has been an ethical and valuable resource, but as soon as someone complained that his belief system was different, he was forced to pay with his job and reputation. I find this deplorable. I realized that the Boy Scouts discriminated against gays, but for some reason I thought that was in the past. This is evidence that the Boy Scouts of America are in fact the ones who are no good role models – I would never recommend a child participate in activities with this organization again. I was a Cub Scout, and Boy Scout myself. Of course, I never really enjoyed it that much, and gave it up in elementary school, but it did have it’s fun moments. I remember the Pinewood Derby with my Dad… now, the only thing I’ll think of when I hear the name of the organization is that they are a bigoted American group that teaches children to discriminate. This is hateful and wrong. I hope the B.S.A., nationally, is more ethical and tolerant than this branch in California.

[Read the story here.]

** From xkcd.com.