9 March Rest Day (2009)

Workout notes Rest. Both my wife and I have intestinal distress; not sure if it is a mutual bug that we caught or the food we had on Saturday night. My Sunday morning workout went ok so I am not sure as to what is going on.

This week and the next one will be relatively light in terms of workouts due to a heavy school week and my daughter coming for Spring Break.

As for now, we’ll be giving the pink bismuth companies some more of our money.

Science articles Cosmic Variance had a “writing on the nature of time” contest and has decided on the winners. Here is a link to the prize winning essays. I’ll have to tackle these this week as lunchtime reading.

Religion and society: The Invisible Pink Unicorn talks about what happens when an agnostic reads the Bible with an open mind:

You notice that I haven’t said anything about belief. I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn’t really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I’m brokenhearted about God.

After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love.

That is pretty much my reaction when I read it (back when I was a Christian); the people in the Bible struck me as a bunch of crude savages who believed in a primitive, gruesome deity.

The author gives the responses that he gets: many Christians remind him that Jesus made it all better in the New Testament and the Jews he talked to said that “he didn’t get it; God works in mysterious ways”.

The response I got from the more educated Catholic priests was “don’t worry about that (the atrocities in the OT/Hebrew Bible); this was some little tribe popping off about how powerful they were and dressing up their (often empty) boasts in
“god talk”. Many of the Catholic footnotes even say “this can’t be true but this is what the people thought at the time” several times.

The Catholic explanations made the most sense to me, though I decided that the most honest approach is to take the “well, that isn’t true but the primitive people at the time thought that” to ALL of the incredible stories, not just for the unpalatable ones!

Is the United States a Christian Nation? The wingnuts says “yes” but….sometimes say no?

he next time you get into a debate with a fundamentalist who insists that this is a Christian nation, ask them which denominations they consider Christian. Do they consider Catholics Christians? You might be surprised to find many do not. Likewise for many of the more liberal sects. When you go through the list, you’ll find that to many fundamentalists (Church of Christ, Nazerene, Pentecostal, Methodists), a very small minority qualify as Christians. Yet when wanting to persuade people that we are a christian nation, they include all those liberal sects. They use a double standard and should be called on it. The only way they can rightly claim the nation is majority Christian, they have to grant that status to Catholics and Episcopalians and all the other liberal sects.

Yes, in terms of “cultural values” I’d say that this is a mostly Christian nation though there are many, many (if not most) who don’t follow a religion that would be recognizable to the early Christians; most appear to take a cafeteria approach (use what is palatable, dismiss what isn’t). And of course, we have a number of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, New Age religion types and generic theists. Yes, we have unbelievers too; some professions (science) are dominated by these.

Update: there was a new survey that was reported in this morning’s paper:

The percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has dropped dramatically over the past two decades, and those who do are increasingly identifying themselves without traditional denomination labels, according to a major study of U.S. religion being released today. [...]

The only group that grew in every U.S. state since the 2001 survey was people saying they had “no” religion; the survey says this group is now 15 percent of the population. Silk said this group is likely responsible for the shrinking percentage of Christians in the United States. [...]

A pdf file of the report can be found here.

Here is a graphic from USA today:

Here is a discussion on this report at Friendly Atheist.

I hasten to point out that the “no religion” types are NOT necessarily atheists or agnostics. For example, my father rejected all of the established religions and yet believed in a god of some sort; in fact he would sometimes talk to it. But he didn’t believe in the god of a particular religion; he could best be labeled as a “generic theist”.

Fails:

This hits way too close to home:

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I have a running friend who has since moved to St. Louis. She used to date a current friend of mine. Anyway she asked me to stay for dinner with her and her boyfriend; he asked her “aren’t you embarrassed to let Ollie see your house like this?” She said “no, I’ve seen his office”.

This Fail also makes me smile:

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It kind of reminds me of this Julie Larson cartoon (which is a bit of a fail; can you tell me why?)