"Have fun kids! I'm just here listening to my tunes"

Alex Rosenberg's Atheist Guide's to Reality answers the Big Questions

Is there a God? No.

What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is.

What is the purpose of the universe? There is none.

What is the meaning of life? Ditto.

Why am I here? Just dumb luck.

Does prayer work? Of course not.

Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding?

Is there free will? Not a chance!

What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.

What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them.

Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral.

Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes.

What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don’t look for it; it will find you when you need it.

Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.

How to Sound Like a Dog in 14 Language

From the research and digital pen of physicist, YouTuber, and cartoonist James Chapman

via twentytwowords.com

"Meong..?"

"The arch-atheist is doing the Lord’s work"

"While the geneticist and militant atheist’s brilliance is not in doubt (this newspaper ranked him 20th in a 2007 list of living geniuses) there is an elite sub-genus of humanity, if I might invent a phrase of my own, called The Clever Fools. These are people whose extraordinary cerebral gifts are yoked, lethally, to the common sense and judgment of an amoeba, and Dawkins is their god." 

"...Dawkins is more repressively dogmatic than the Ayatollahs. Give him such comedy props as a milky eye and a hook, and he’d come across as crazier than Abu Hamza." 

- Matthew Norman, a "devout atheist", writing in the Telegraph

Amoral, Moralistic, and Biblical Film Reviewing - Marvin Olasky

"Along with the triple task, a Christian reviewer should understand a triple distinction: amoral, moralistic, and biblical. Many reviewers today are amoral, worshipping sensation for sensation’s sake, reveling in slow-motion murder and fast-talking obscenity, not even paying attention to whether films and programs glorify evil. That’s sub-Christian reviewing.

A second group of reviewers are moralistic: They appropriately attack the amoral but then push smiley-faced films that preach faith in man’s natural goodness. These reviewers criticize amoral destruction but don’t note how the subtle sapping of moralism can be even more effective in keeping us from seeing our need for God’s grace. They roll over for smarmy products designated as “uplifting”-but uplift apart from Christ is idolatry."

- Marvin Olasky, from his article To See or Not To See

So what's "biblical film reviewing" like?  

"Christian reviewers should be neither amoral nor moralistic. They should be Bible-centered in their search for films that help us to comprehend evil and the need to fight it. Christians disagree on the extent to which films need to depict man’s depravity and sin’s consequences, but truthful films often are not nice, just as Christianity is not a nice religion: Priests used hyssop to spray the blood of sacrifices on the people in Moses’ time, and Christ had to shed his blood, not just preach, to pay for our sin.

The hard reality of biblical faith distinguishes it from the spongecake of theological liberalism. And that brings me back to Saving Private Ryan, a powerful film that starts with a bloody D-Day. Some of the violence is so intense that lots of people will want to skip it. And yet, the showing of violence in a world filled with evil is not evil itself, as long as it does not make killing people look like fun – and this film makes it look appropriately horrible."

Dancing Merengue Dog

How To Care For Introverts/Extroverts

From Fastcompany.com

George Orwell’s Letter on Why He Wrote ‘1984’

"...To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history2 etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope 3 they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer."

-George Orwell, link from The Daily Beast 

Religion of Hatred - A.N Wilson

Now, I think of that exchange and of his bravery in proclaiming his faith. Our bishops and theologians, frightened as they have been by the pounding of secularist guns, need that kind of bravery more than ever. 

Sadly, they have all but accepted that only stupid people actually believe in Christianity, and that the few intelligent people left in the churches are there only for the music or believe it all in some symbolic or contorted way which, when examined, turns out not to be belief after all.  

As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational. Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat. The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. 

It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story. J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it.

- A.N Wilson, an ex-atheist, Religion of hatred: Why we should no longer be cowed by the chattering classes ruling Britain who sneer at Christianity

What a Fake Tweet can do to Wall Street

"Any news of an attack on the White House is a sign of imminent apocalypse, and the market reacted accordingly: From 1:08 p.m. to 1:10 p.m., the Dow Jones Industrial average plunged more than 100 points, from 14697.15 to 14548.58. Just as quickly though, it rebounded. By 1:13 p.m., it was back above 14690"

Anti-slavery alphabet that was used to teach children their letters and abolitionism

While the fight against slavery in the United States waged on, more than a decade before culminating with the Emancipation Proclamation, abolitionist sisters Hannah and Mary Townsend decided to take their efforts in a new direction. Instead of only aiming their anti-slavery rhetoric at the offending adults, they opted to reach out to the next generation through basic education.

from twentytwowords.com (and the rest of the alphabet)

When a man is getting better and worse - C.S Lewis

"When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that's left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less."

- C.S Lewis 

PBS making fun of other TV shows

‘Atheism is to theism as not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’

‘Atheism is to theism,’ Anthony Grayling declares, ‘as not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’. At this point, we are supposed to enjoy a little sneer, in which the religious are bracketed with bald, lonely men in thick glasses, picking over their collections of ancient stamps in attics, while unbelievers are funky people with busy social lives.

Stamp collecting can be funky too!

But the comparison is flatly untrue. Non-collectors of stamps do not, for instance, write books devoted to mocking stamp-collectors, nor call for stamp-collecting’s status to be diminished, nor suggest — Richard Dawkins-like — that introducing the young to this hobby is comparable to child abuse. They do not place advertisements on buses proclaiming that stamp-collecting is a waste of time, and suggesting that those who abandon it will enjoy their lives more....

...Attempts have been made to answer this attack, the defence usually attracting far less notice than the prosecution. The offensive continues unresponsively, exactly as if no riposte has been offered. As Grayling says: ‘The theists are rushing about the park kicking the ball, but the atheists are not playing. They are not even on the field.’ Like almost all atheists, he tries (and fails) to show that his belief is not a belief, but an obligatory default position...

It is my suspicion that Christians and atheists share one very strong emotion — the fear that God exists. The difference is that Christians also want Him to exist. The truly interesting question, unexplored in this book, is why each side wants what it wants.

Peter Hitchen's review of The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism A.C. Grayling  - The Spectator via Justin Taylor

This painting sold for 44 million U.S dollars

Onement VI by Barnett Newman