On NPR, magician and B.S. debunker Penn Jillette submits his essay on the featurette “This I Believe” entitlted “There Is No God”:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557

I love Penn & Teller. If I were given a free ticket to any Vegas show I want, there’d be no question at all, it’s theirs I would see. I’ve been a fan of Penn & Teller since I saw their book “Cruel Tricks to Play on Dear Friends” in the late 80′s.

I’ve blogged another article of his on my “Why People Believe Weird Things, Cubed.”

But I’ve always been disappointed in Penn’s atheism. Especially when I thought his atheism was the run-of-the-mill kind he describes in the NPR article I’ll copy below. It’s no secret that I think atheism is as rediculous as evangelical or literal-Bible Christianity (“Atheism Confounds Me.“) But I have to say that Penn’s description of his brand of atheism, while I still don’t agree with, is refreshing in his admission that it’s a leap of faith, is also very compelling. That is, he mentions the need for us to focus our love and attention here on earth, and rise to the challenges of humanity, without the need for a capricious or cruel god, or deity to pass judgement. He implies the maturity of development to love and have joy and care about fellow man without having to be compelled to do so by a deity.

I have to agree with that. Except I do so with the belief of a creator God that may or may not have had a plan but is certainly not a creature in any understandable sense and does not interact with creation in any human-like way. Otherwise, I completely agree with Penn and his belief of how much more you can learn and understand and grow without the mental and philosophical confines of a dogmatic religion.

And now, reprinted from the NPR site without permission:

I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond Atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word “elephant” includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The Atheism part is easy.

But, this “This I Believe” thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life’s big picture, some rules to live by. So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.”

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Believing there’s no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I’m wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don’t travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that’s always fun. It means I’m learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

Wow, haven’t posted in a while. Been pretty busy! Lately with Thanksgiving (all I have to say, is brine the bird, people!) but also with a server migration at my day job. Got hacked a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve been moving our production server software from that to two new servers. Still working the kinks out.
Anyway.

Some time ago I made the post:
The Absurdity of Revealed Religions. http://www.celticbear.com/weblog/?p=308

Well, over on NewSojourn, Mark asks “Who Does Your god Look Like?” (Still wondering about the lowercase ‘g’ there.)
http://newsojourn.blogspot.com/2005/11/who-does-your-god-look-like.html
He answers himself with quotes about the kind of justice Jesus (in one book) is said to have said. Of course, being an evangelist for reasoned free-thinking, I had to respond. (I’m “Mechphisto.”) My second long winded reply fits right in with the revealed religion rant, so I thought I’d repost it here.

Enjoy (or not,)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-quote-
God did not create us or anything else to be evil. This is a fallacy in assuming that evil is a thing while it is no more a thing than cold or dark could be things. He created us perfect, filled with his warmth and his light. Humans chose to be away from God, and thus when away from the warmth, the light, the good, became cold, dark and evil.
-quote-

Buying into a literal Genesis for a moment (although for the record I have to say again, that’s patently absurd. Not only does the archeological evidence completely refute the Eden story, but we have actual evidence of civilization, writing and human made artifacts, that predate the supposed 6000 year old Earth by even thousands of years. But that’s beside the point.) Going ahead and working off the same playing field, let’s concede the Eden story.
I’ll concede that humans weren’t created evil, and are CAPABLE of evil.

Here’s a question: What use does an omnipotent creator of the universe and such concepts as love and quantum physics, have with a “Tree of Knowledge”? A literal tree of knowledge? Why is there one in Paradise? Especially if its not for humans to eat from, to the point where God has to tell humans “Don’t eat of it or you’ll die.”

Well, either God is stupid or he’s devious. (Neither of which I believe, by the way. This is just what this Eden myth makes God out to be.) Either he’s not omniscent and doesn’t know all, and really has some valid use (being a deity) for a literal Tree of Knowledge and decided he didn’t want to leave the Middle East which must be His home in order to place it on Siberia or deepest Amazon region.
Or, he know full well what the humans would do because he’s omniscient and placed a Tree useless to himself in the Garden knowing what would happen.

So maybe the Bible-God isn’t culpable for creating humans evil, but he IS culpable for intentionally making them “sinnful”.

When a human judge presides over a crime and hands down a verdict, he is (hopefully) being just. Indeed. But you can’t equate a human judge with God. The judge did not create the criminal, while God IS responsible for creating the sinner. Whether from the beginning, or from conniving man to become sinful, God is responsible for that. So it become unjust to punish his creation for a condition he either created or contrived to have happen, or at least, (being omniscient) knew full well WOULD happen.

(Although if the Bible were literal, we know God’s NOT omniscient because he expresses surprise at the fact that humans became wicked and would need to be wiped out (along with everything else) in a great flood.)

Also, the judge does not have the power to change the rules. (Regardless of what you think of “activist judges.” Oh by the way, a recent study showed that the three most conservative Supreme Court justices ruled more times in such a way to overturn existing law than the three most liberal justices. Making the conservative justices more “activist judges” than the liberal.) The judge uses the existing laws and prescedent to rule on a case within confines of his mandate. God has no such limitations (does he?) He can change the rules, bend the rules, do whatever he darn well wants with the rules he created. He’s God. He’s not tied down to any man-made rules, is he? Any man made preconceptions.

Equating human ideas of justice to God is rediculous because God is the creator of the human condition in one way or another, and can not be limited by the human constraints and expecations and rules of justice.

-quote-
You claim that God is sick by “letting people go to eternal punishment.” Which would be worse? Giving them the choice or forcing them into heaven?
-quote-

No no no. You completely misunderstand me. It’s not sick of God to send people to eternal punishment, I believe it’s sick of God to set up a system by which the default destination of his creation is eternal punishment for something not of their doing.
Why should I pay for the sins of Adam? How fair is it that my default condition is that after 50-ish years of living I have to go to eternal damnation because of something some guy did 6000 years ago? Is that at all just or fair or meciful or loving?
Add to that the fact that supposedly the only way I can avoid this default destination is through a revealed truth that must be revealed to me, is absolutely cruel and sick.

How loving is that fact that because of something Adam did 6000 years ago, Pualo, a Mon Buddhist in Myanmar who lives in a small villiage in a remote region, is going to hell because a missionary with a Bible has yet to go there?

Christians, who are already Christian, have a very skewed idea of reality, in that we assume that since we have been given the choice everyone else has as well. And so God’s gift of choice is universal and just and indicative of so loving the world. Yet even by some of the most fundamental and evangelical figuring, there are currently more than a billion people living right now who will never have been exposed to the name “Jesus” or a book called “The Bible”. And so according to evangelical Christian religion, the loving and just Bible-God is going to send those people to hell because they never were given the ability to make the choice. No matter how upstanding and moral of a life they may have led.

Not just this current billion-plus, but what about the billions in the last 2000 years as Christianity gets smaller and les far0reaching throughout the world until we go back to circa 400AD? Before Constantine made Christianity one of his many official religions and allowed the Roman empire to spread it?
God’s great gift of salvation was only available to 5% of the world as a handful of people traveled around the Middle East. How great of a loving gift is it to provide this sacrifice to be available to only a mere fraction of your creation?

Then what about circa 30AD back to 4000BC, when the only way to be in God’s favor (or to only have the CHANCE of it at least) was to be born a Hebrew? How much does the Bible-God love his WHOLE creation that he’d make that a rule?

(I guess I won’t mention the thousands of years before 4000BC when human civilization existed before the Hebrews developed into their own viable culture and race. Oops, I just did.)

Do you get my point?
It’s as if I had several children, and I told only one of them “You cannot lie down because if you do I’ll punish you by cutting off your limbs. And that goes for all your siblings and your own children as well.” (Even dismemberment for a small infraction doesn’t compare with the concept of eternal torment for a finite number of years of “Godless living,” but it works for the analogy.)

I know full well that at some point all of them will lie down. They have to. Now I’ve left it up to the one child to have to go and find the rest of the siblings to tell them this big secret only she and I know lest they lose their limbs.

Don’t you think that’s pretty cruel and sick? It’s the same as the idea that God would provide this most important truth of the human condition that he set up and this most important “gift” of salvation from it, to only a very smalll group of people in one geographic location. And then leave it up to them to go reveal it to the rest of the world.

That’s not love. That’s a clear and obvious sign of an arrogant and exclusive mythology.

If God really set it up so that people would would find him if they sought him, would not make what was to be sought a single man who existed in a small region and told about in one book that has to be taken to those people. How does a Shintoist or a Buddhist in deep Asia who has never ever heard of Jesus, the Gospel, God of Abraham, seek something he doesn’t even know he should be seeking?

CNN.com – Pennsylvania voters oust school board – Nov 9, 2005
And there was much rejoicing!

Score one big one for education and reasoned rationalism. Take THAT, evangelical pseuoscience!

Glee!

This last weekend I attended my in-law’s First Baptist church for a three-day special program for an International Missions Board. They had a dozen or so missionaries from all over the world visiting, with one of them the guest of honor at the dinner my in-laws hosted at their house for their Sunday school class. A very, very mixed bag.

On the one hand it was fantastic talking to him about his two and half years in Myanmar. My wife and I spent a lot of time talking to him about it, learning about the social horrors going on over there and his family’s experiences. It’s the 2nd worst dictatorship in the world. Back in the late 80′s when there were a lot of student protests in Asia, such as at Tianamen Square, Beijing, and those governments deescalated the situations and listened to their citizens, Myanmar government basically slaughtered tens of thousands of people and called it a day. It costs as much a month for government workers to travel to work by bus as they make in a month. But if you don’t work, you get arrested. Farmers have a quota to meet, which they can’t meet, and have to buy the remaining quota to sell to the government and so are constantly in debt. The poverty is so hard, that families often sell a daughter to prostitute rings from neighboring Thailand for year’s worth of pay. Once the girls contract AIDS, they’re sent back. Nearly half the people are suffering from malaria, tuberculosis, or AIDS. Ironically, this missionary and his family actually feel quite safe, (even though it’s illegal to be a missionary so he’s there under the cover of a travel consultant,) because the government is so afraid of anything happening to an American citizen that they have special police watching them to make sure nothing happens to them.

Anyway, so this missionary, we’ll call him David (not like any Myanmarian police read my blog, but hey, no sense tempting fate,) is a really nice guy. Extremely sweet and friendly and soft spoken, but early on he said something that drove me nuts. And it’s something that was said by so many others all weekend in different ways. He missions to the Mon people of which there are only 1.5 million left. And he said 1.4 million Mon will die and go to hell because they don’t know Christ.

I went through college on an acting scholarship, so I’ve learned how to smile and nod. But all weekend my gut was writhing and my heart was in pain and my head was aching at these sincere comments of how many billions of people will die and go to hell because they’d never heard of Christ.

Let me ask you a question. If “God so loved the world,” and is so just and merciful and loving and forgiving and the other human attributes Christians project upon him, how much sense does it make that he would condemn billions of people to eternal punishment because they were born in a time and place that prevented them through no fault of their own to encounter a Bible or a Christian? Does that make any sense at all? That salvation all comes from a book? Is that loving and just and merciful?

Some of you evangelicals may say “No, it’s all about a book, it’s about a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.” OK. Let me ask you this, if you, like most Southern Baptists do, believe that as all these faithful people this weekend do, that you will go to hell if you aren’t saved, what saves you? Jesus? Can you have this relationship with Jesus and be born again if you’ve never encountered scripture or met a Christian? Can you spontaneously encounter Jesus otherwise? No? Then it’s not about the relationship with Jesus as the root, it’s about the book which must be revealed to you. Does that make sense for an all-powerful deity who so loved to world to set up a system like that, which dooms people to eternal hell because no missionary with a Bible was able to get to them in some remote part of a jungle that takes 10 to 30 hours to get to them?

That’s the problem with the idea of a revealed religion like Christianity. The idea that God would be so feckless and cruel as to set up a system of salvation from a predestined and default destination of hell based on contact with a book written by humans. Freakin’ absurd.

Ah, but you may say, God’s greatest gift is free will! He gave us the ability to choose our path and our destination! OK, so why are these people doomed to hell a certainty despite the choices they make? If they don’t encounter a Bible or a missionary to tell them about scripture, no matter what choice they make they go to hell. Nice.

Reminds me of a story, in something called Genesis. Where an omniscient God who is the beginning and the end and knows all, puts a Tree of Knowledge in Paradise and tells the humans not to eat of it or they’ll die, knowing full well (being that he’s omniscient) that they would eat of it. How deceptive and mean is that?! Why even put the freakin’ tree there in the first place? Oh, it’s the origin of the gift of choice, right? Well, not much of a choice when God knows exactly what we’d do. Unless… he DOESN’T know what we’re going to do, what the future is. Which would make sense if one takes the Bible literally and reads the beginning of the Noah story where God appears surprised that people have become “wicked,” so decides to kill off everything and start again. You’d think he’d have seen that comin’. Or when he allowed Job to be tortured beyond all reason in order to prove a point. He could have just said “You know, Deh-bul, screw you. I happen to know Job will stay faithful because I know the future, so nyah!” (Of course I’m being silly. A creature personification of evil is just as mythological as a humanoid God.)

So really, free choice? How much of a gift of that is it to people who are doomed to hell because they don’t get that gift because some guy with a Bible hasn’t made it out to their village yet?

Now of course I’m railing against evangelical Baptists mainly, or any other Christian denomination that believes this way. I was raised in a moderate Methodist church where we didn’t believe people who hadn’t heard the gospel were doomed to eternal punishment through no fault of their own. I don’t know what the current Methodist thinking is on eternal punishment for those who the scriptures haven’t been revealed to.

The other thing that really irked me to no end, was his unveiled and sincere attack on Buddhism. He outright said the Buddhism we Americans think we understand is the Buddhism of Star Wars and Disney, and Buddhism is really murder and rape and theft, etc. And what gets me, is he’s living among these people, and even talks about his “Buddhist friends,” and he can’t make the distinction between the belief and the behavior.

I haven’t lived among Buddhists, but what I know about Buddhism is not from movies. I spent about a year reading as much as I reasonably could about Buddhism from Buddhist teachers and writers. And rape and murder and theft and all that is the antithesis of Buddhism, just as it is of Christianity. What he’s seeing is the behavior of people who say they’re Buddhists but are by no means following the teachings of Buddha!

It’s like if a Buddhist monk were to be dropped in the middle of east L.A. To mission to them. He’d look around at this city of people who according to polls is mostly Christian, see gang members with Christian tattoos and hip-hop that praises Jesus, but at the same time experience one of the highest crime rates of any industrialized nations, experience gang warfare and hip-hop’s violent and misogynistic content. Now, would this monk have an accurate idea of Christianity if he had to serve in the ghettos of L.A.? I’m thinking not. So I think it’s incredibly short sighted and small minded to think Buddhism is something that’s indicative of behavior he’s seeing from people who may call themselves Buddhist but obviously aren’t practicing Buddhism.

Sort of like Jerry Farwell and Christianity.

OK, so here’s the link I said a couple of posts ago I wouldn’t provide:
The Bible is “Full” of Contradictions
Seriously, if you reply, be kinder than I am. (I’m “Mechphisto” on there.) I’m annoyingly arrogant and eletist and confrontational and even downright insulting. Not proud of it, but when I write stream-of-conciousness like I do….

I decided to post the link, because of two things that occured to me today, and I’d like to share it in context of the discovery.
First, is actually a discovery my wife made today at lunch. I’m an evangelical missionary. Yep. But not for Christianity, but for freethinking reasoned intellectual rationalism. I strive to tell everyone the “truth” of it and convert all I can to my cause.
I kind of like the idea. Not just because it gives me a convenient excuse for my arrogant eletism either. *grin* I like the idea of being a missionary for intellectual rationalism. Although, I need to be careful not to burn and kill what I don’t convert, like many past missionaries of a certain religion. *evil grin*

The other realization, which I’d actually already sort of been aware of but not really so concrete, but me and God are doing just fine. The comment I discussed earlier about someone claiming to know my heart and assuming I’m fighting against the “truth,” mixed with a new reply today from Mark in the thread linked above also indicating I’m fighting against the truth and I’m struggling against God, really brought home and in perfect clarity that for the first time in my life (these last year or two) I’ve actually done quite the opposite. The scales have fallen from my eyes and I have fully embraced the reality of the nature of God and the universe. Despite the tone of my ranting and ravings, I’m very, very happy and content in my relationship with God and my spirit is actually more at peace than it ever has been, including the period of my life I was a fightin’ Christian who argued and debated with people for literally hours on end as to why the Bible was God’s word.

As I write in the end of my last reply in that linked blog thread, God is in my heart, I have a great relationship with him, and it’s hard for Christians to understand because it doesn’t conform to their dogmatic belief of Jesus=God and God=Bible. I fight and fight and argue and work to spread the word of reason and rationalism, and thus fight for the realization that the Bible is simply a book of man no different and holy and divine than any other man-written mythology, because I want so desperately for other people to share in the joy and freedom of living an honest life unchained by dogma and the twisted will of others 2,000- 6,000 years dead.

And it’s of vital importance (to me) that people not live a life of belief in a mythology that advocates intolarance and genocide and hatred and arrogance and allows people to judge and condemn others for no other reason than personal senses of morality shaped by a mindset and culture of an ancient and nomadic patriarchal draconian society. When the focus of our spiritual furvor should be on improving the human condition and striving to discover and learn as much about God’s creation as he’s given us the ability to do so!

No, when I think of the murderous, schitzophrenic God of the Bible, I get sad and frustrated. When I think of the glorious and awesome God creator of the infinite Big Bang and genetics and evolution, my spirit soars right along with my mind!

Read something yesterday that really, deeply bothers me. It was a reply to my reply on another blog responding to a, in my opinion, very lame attempt to defend contradictions and factual errors in the Bible.
My response pointed out the absurdity of using a. circular logic, b. spurious logic, and c. hypocritical method of equating the Bible with any other secular historical document to defend contradictions but then claim the Bible is inerrant and holy, d. equating internal contradictions with variations in crime scene eye-witness accounts and then claiming the Bible is still inerrant and holy.

But the reply to my challenges and exposing logical fallacies in defending the challenges was:

“Apparently mechphisto, some of us just see what we want to see because our hearts know the truth, but it’s our human nature to reject the truth. I believe your heart know the truth or you would not so fervently argue the opposite. Perhaps I am just not as “enlightened” and “educated” as you. Hopefully I never will be.”

This type of reply seriously bothers me, makes me sad. It’s indicitive of the reason rejecting attitude most evangelicals, fundamentalists, and most generally religious people hold onto.

(I’m not posting the link to the blog or my reply because I really don’t want people to possibly flame the blog, any more than I may have already. I’m surprised now and then how I discover there really are people I don;t know who read this blog! People who are likeminded freethinkers, and I’d hate to inadvertantly send them to flame a nice person. Because this replier I know to be a sweet, selfeffacing, person; and while their response is pretty, well, sharp and *sigh* ignorant (sorry) they shouldn’t be flamed for it.)

But here’s my problems with this reply. First of all, the assumption that humans reject “truth” is kind of absurd. By what evidence can one say humans reject truth? Isn’t it the goal of humanity to find “truth”? Well, maybe not. But certainly not reject it. Most of us are in search of truth. Which is why we have religions and myths and beliefs in New Age claptrap and aliens and stuff. We all are looking for truth… but, and here’s the crux, most of us rely on pseudoscience and feel-good mythologies because they are a. easier to understand and b. touch on our emotions which can be more powerful to people than intellectual awareness.

And that brings me to the part of that reply that makes me the most sad, and I touched on it in my blog entry: Is U.S. Becoming Hostile to Science? The rejection of reason and intellectualism in favor of myth and illogic in order to defend a belief that is in conflict with hard evidence and scientific discovery. I also address my thoughts on why people hold onto religion with unreasoning deathgrips on my page: Faith or Delusion? In this case, I think upbringing, social conditioning, and fear of the (believed in) alternative makes so many people unable to see through the dogma and conditioning and accept the “truth” of the mythological aspects of religion and the harmful effects of attacking scientific and logical intellectualism.

For hundreds of years, thousands, science and faith hadn’t been in conflict. Up until the last couple hundred years in fact, science didn’t challenge the tenants of religion (although pure reason and logic should have ALWAYS been a threat to Biblical fallacies and interal illogic and contradictions.) Now that science can prove the universe did not come into existance as a literal interpretation of the Bible suggests, the development of humanity is different than the Bible’s explanation, the need for evangelicals to try to prove the validity of their religion becomes tied to DISproving science. Despite the futility of that point of view. Imagine disproving airflight, penicillin, cancer treatments, food preservation techniques, genetic medicine, crop disease immunization….

Here’s the answer. I HAVE THE ANSWER! *grin* It’s such a simple answer, that will allow all of us to live in peace and harmony. Er, OK, TWO answers. =) The impractical and impossible answer (at least until humanity evolves a little further) is to eliminate all religion.
OK, but the feasible answer which seems completely absurd and impossible to so many, is to accept no religious text is inerrant, infallable, and to be taken literally.
That’s it. That’s the simple answer. People could live in faith, still have their relationships with God and Jesus/Mohammad/Bashet/Zeus/whoever, and not have to try to disprove science in order to validate their religion. And not use ancient laws and rules and intolarance and hatred to hypocritically accuse people of “sinful” behavior. Isn’t that just the crazyest idea?!

Oh, and the other part of that reply, “I believe your heart know the truth or you would not so fervently argue the opposite.” The rest makes me sad and depressed for humanity, and American society, but that comment really irks me. It’s patronizing and condescending and arrogant. To assume one knows my heart. =P The truth in my heart is unequivocalbly passionate about reason, logic, intellect, and a focus on the human condition as opposed to mythological distractions and intolarance. If I doth protest too much, it is because I spent the first 18 years of my life ensconced in the fantasy, making the same rationalizations and leaps of circular and spurious logic I see apologetics using to defend something that can’t be turned into literal and inerrant. And I so desperately want to help people to see the truth of the harm of following a dogma. Sure it’s feel-goody-goody and I get the appeal of that. But it’s still a lie. Is it better to feel good and happy but because of a lie, or be a little scared and uncertain but knowing you’re not a slave to dogma? Me, I prefer to live life truthfully and with my eyes and mind wide open even if it means being uncertain about some things…which may have no answer.

It’s scary, to leave the comfort of dogma. It took me 14 years to come to grips with reality. It wasn’t over night, and it wasn’t taken lightly. And certainly not superficially and not without a lot of angst and fear. Coming to grips with reality and the truth of mythology/religion is a leap of faith! (Yes, I said faith.) But strengthened and bolstered by evidence, proof, logic, reason, and not “prophesies” and scrolls and hearsay and ancient texts filled with circular logic, fantasy, draconian laws, and magic. My heart believes in the awesomene mysteries of relativity and quantum science, of amazing mind bending evidence of an infinite universe created from an infinite Big Bang, the incredible delicacy and complexity of evolution and genetics. The inerrant truth of the scientific method, even when the results are sometimes wrong. because unlike religion, when science is wrong, it finds it out and self-corrects. Scientific errors will always eventually lead to discovery, accuracy, proof.

Religion seeks to defend itself using acrobatic bending of logic and skewing of “evidence” to match a sought result. Science seeks to explain reality as it is, while religion tries to bend reality to fit a preconception. And that is the truth my heart believes in, and why I feel a desperate need to try to help people to realize that religion leads to intolarance, hatred, arrogance, ignorance, stagnation; and reason and intellect will lead to the betterment of humanity, the improvement of the human condition, the evolution of the species, and a better understanding of this amazing universe God has created.

Just learned that one of my favorite fantasy artists died recently of cancer. At a young age, 47.
The announcement and a letter from a friend of his:
http://www.gamingreport.com/article.php?sid=19122
His site:
http://www.keithparkinson.com/main.php
About:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Parkinson
Three years ago I met him, briefly, at GenCon in Indianapolis. He signed a print of “Druid Stone” for me, one of my favorite works of fantasy art.

I love this piece because unlike most fantasy art, it’s very real, very realistic. Oh sure, scantily clad. But, look how her hair is plain, bound back and not big and fancy like a lot of fantasy art women. Here it’s realistic, even a little oily looking as would be normal for a Medieval-esque person. And if I may be a little risque, look at her figure. She doesn’t have huge gravity defying breasts. They’re real and normal looking. Her body is a real looking figure. I fell in love with this painting the moment I saw it as something different, above the normal unreal fantasy scene. The far away and strong look on her face, the detail in every leaf on the ground (which you can’t really see in images–but it’s extremely detailed on the 4-foot print.) This print alone made me a fan of Parkinson. But if you have time, take a look at some of his other works. He puts a lot of subtext, feeling, and story in a single painting. Expressions mean so much.
One of my other favorite works of his. You can read a lot into the body language, the faces:

Go here for a large size version: http://members.fortunecity.com/mrmagoo/parkinson/stoneoftears.jpg

So, it’s a sad day for me. Granted he wasn’t a Picasso or Van Gogh, but his art spoke to me. And it’s sad that he died so young. It’s a real shame.