frankmoorman's blog

I was intrigued to see that Carlinism has taken the lead in the new religions survey, particularly since earlier this evening I was flipping through Napalm and Silly Putty, when I came across this passage, in his list of major perpetrators of bullshit.

Calling religion the Greatest Bullshit Story Ever Told, he continues, "Think about it: religion has actually convinced people--many of them adults--that there's an invisible man who lives in the sky and watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And who has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.

"And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place ... where he will send you to remain and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry, forever and ever, till the end of time. But he loves you!

"He loves you, and he needs money! He always needs money. He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, but somehow ... he just can't handle money. Religion takes in billions of dollars, pays no taxes, and somehow always needs a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy shit!"

I'll miss him, but I'm glad I have his books.

How many other readers and contributors on this rational, atheist, scientifically inclined blog would admit to small moments of magical thinking or behavior?

So in addition to the gas lines some may remember from the '70s, are we going to get gas-prayer circles as well?
http://cunningrealist.blogspot.com/2008/05/faith-based-fill-ups.html

I just hope nobody wants to start saging while they're pumping.

Here's a link to an entry I posted on the blog for a play I'm in at Forum Theatre in Washington, DC. The play is The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, and I think it's a terrific piece of theatre:

http://forumtheatre.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/notes-from-the-cast-frank-m...

If you're in the area, give it a shot.

Today's task is updating the list of abbreviations that can be used in a medical record at the hospital where I work.

LDS -- which may evoke Mormons or Latter Day Saints to many of us -- in the hospital translates as Locked Door Seclusion.

I love such juxtapositions. They can make my day -- or at least my afternoon.

For a good survey of the movements of doubt and atheism that arose within all religions, as well as how each new religious movement combines pieces of those that went before, I highly recommend Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht. It's very well written, with wit and humor, and full of information, carefully researched.

This sentence in the chapter on Gnosticism and early movements within the first centuries of Christianity grabbed me. Even though Gnosticism did preserve belief in god, "it left room for men and women to do their own thinking, to work out their own relationship to their inner self and the strangely hostile world in which it finds itself."

Thinking for myself, working out my own relationship to my inner self and to the world around me: I have never found a more succinct characterization of what I like to spend my brain power doing.

This is just the most extreme version of a theme that runs through so many people in the name of religion. A Muslim in England sets fire to his daughters because they are becoming too Western:

Telegraph Story

A Jewish girl I dated once said that her grandmother had said she would sit shiva (the ritual mourning period) if the girl ever married a non-Jew.

I have heard otherwise presumably intelligent people say that intermarriage for Jews was a silent Holocaust, a continuation of Hitler's extermination effort.

Italian or Polish catholics don't want their children to marry Irish catholics.

I don't know enough or have not heard any stories about Hindu, Sikh, or other practices to know what happens within those communities in such instances, but I am not generally hopeful.

Has anybody heard stories of atheists, skeptics, or non-believers banishing, disinheriting, or murdering their children because of whom they married? It would probably be the other way around.