Michael Nugent

September 30, 2009

Campaign for a secular Irish constitution

Filed under: Secularism — Michael Nugent @ 1:34 am

Today is the first International Blasphemy Day, run by the Center For Inquiry as part of its Campaign for Free Expression. Atheist Ireland is an advocacy group for an ethical and secular Ireland: see details in these Irish Times articles on the Irish blasphemy law and our first AGM.

Atheist Ireland is seeking your help today to launch and shape a new long-term campaign with two important aims: to repeal the new Irish blasphemy law and to attain a secular Irish Constitution. Specifically, we are asking you to do three things: send us a message of support, get actively involved in shaping this project, and lobby to persuade Irish politicians to pursue these policies.

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September 22, 2009

Catholic magic tricks #2 – the Resurrection

Filed under: Funny,Religion — Michael Nugent @ 5:50 pm

Catechist's Magic KitHere’s another magic trick from The Catechist’s Magic Kit: 80 Simple Tricks for Teaching Catholicism to Kids. To repeat, this is not satire. It is from an actual book, published this year with the Imprimatur of the Bishop of Brooklyn, New York.

This week I am featuring some of my favourite tricks from this delightful book. Yesterday I showed you a card trick to encourage children to consider becoming Priests by lying to them. In today’s trick, you will learn how to persuade children that the Resurrection was real by showing them a faked illusion.

To perform this trick, you need a cutout of Jesus which is provided in the book, plus some crayons, an envelope and a pair of scissors. You start by asking a volunteer child to colour in the cutout picture of Jesus. You then put the cutout Jesus into the envelope, and cut the envelope in two with the scissors, before showing the children that Jesus has emerged unharmed from the cutting.

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September 21, 2009

Catholic magic tricks #1 – Holy Orders

Filed under: Funny,Religion — Michael Nugent @ 4:45 pm

Catechist's Magic KitWarning: this is not satire. This is from an actual book, published this year, called The Catechist’s Magic Kit: 80 Simple Tricks for Teaching Catholicism to Kids. The book is written by Angelo Stagnaro, and has the Imprimatur of the Bishop of Brooklyn, New York.

The blurb reads: “Simple magic tricks for teaching spiritual truths to children are explained in precise detail in this distinctive compendium. The lessons faithfully follow the catechism of the Catholic Church… The strongest element of this book is the explanation of the theology and spiritual truths that underlie each trick in a simple and inspiring way.”

This week I will feature two of my favourite tricks from this delightful book, starting today with a simple mathematical card trick to encourage children to consider becoming Priests by lying to them.

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September 20, 2009

Hitchens Vs D’Souza debate

Filed under: Atheism,Religion — Michael Nugent @ 10:43 pm

This is video of Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza debating in Orlando last week. In part one, they debate God, Christianity, and Science and Reason. In part two, they respond to questions from each other and the audience.

Part One: Topics

On God, Hitchens argues that the idea of God, unlike philosophy and science, provides only guesses and undeliverable promises based on faith. D’Souza responds that science answers the question of how, and God answers the question of why. Hitchens responds that these are linguistic superimpositions on things we don’t understand. D’Souza says he is arguing on reason alone, not on Biblical revelation, for intelligent design.

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September 19, 2009

Richard Dawkins on Late Late Show

Filed under: Science — Michael Nugent @ 11:51 am

Richard Dawkins was interviewed on RTE’s Late Late Show this Friday about his new book The Greatest Show on Earth.

Strangely, RTE invited a Catholic priest to make the only audience contribution. I am not suggesting that Father Brendan Purcell should not have made a contribution, but when RTE next interview a Catholic author, will they invite an atheist to make the only audience contribution?

Here is a transcript of the interview:

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September 18, 2009

Five funny anagrams for rational people

Filed under: Funny — Michael Nugent @ 5:45 pm

Creationism = I’m so certain

Intelligent design = Deleting listening

Homeopathy = Empty hoo-ha

Alternative medicine = Tame evidence in trial

Faith healer – Hail the fear

September 17, 2009

Fly Vatican Airlines for a Lourdes miracle

Filed under: Funny,Religion,Secularism,The Vatican — Michael Nugent @ 2:47 pm

Last year Pope Benedict gave Catholics a special time-limited promotional offer: if they visited Lourdes during 2008, they would get a free plenary indulgence that would get them early release from Purgatory, and get them faster to heaven, after they died.

This unsubstantiated sales pitch for Lourdes is not an extreme example of primitive cultist belief. Encouraging seriously sick people to travel great distances, in the hope of a miracle cure, is very much part of mainstream Catholic practice.

Did I say that, just a few months before this special offer, the Vatican had started its own official airline, with the launch slogan ‘I’m Searching for Your Face, Lord’, and Vatican logos on the headrests and air hostess’s uniforms?

Or that the inaugural flight just happened to travel to Lourdes? Or that they now offer thirty tour packages to Catholic pilgrims, including a blockbuster $3,000 tour to Rome, Fatima, Lourdes and Spain?

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LUAS tram crashes into Dublin bus

Filed under: Personal — Michael Nugent @ 10:38 am

LUAS Bus Crash 1 350

I was in O’Connell Street in Dublin yesterday when a LUAS tram crashed into the side of a double-decker bus.

These two photos show the aftermath of the collision. The second is a close-up of the cabin of the LUAS tram, which has smashed through the side of the bus and is literally inside it.

It shows how flimsy the side of a bus is when it is hit head-on by another vehicle, and how important road safety is. Three people were seriously injured in the crash, and are now in hospital.

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September 16, 2009

The false flow of the Biblical Jesus stories

Filed under: Religion,The Bible — Michael Nugent @ 12:03 pm

Imagine you have never heard of the Bible, and you are given the 27 books of the New Testament and asked to put them in order.

You would probably come close to the order they appear in today: the four Gospels that tell the story of Jesus, then the Book of Acts that tells how the early church developed, then various letters by Paul and others, then the Book of Revelation that tells how the world will end.

If you did this, you would have created a continuous narrative, each book being a chapter, each building on the previous one, to create one grand story. You would also have created a false impression of how and why these books were written. And you would have obscured the sequence in which different writers gradually introduced the various elements of the Jesus legend.

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September 15, 2009

Top ten kinky quotes by Pastor Anderson

Filed under: Funny,Religion — Michael Nugent @ 12:46 am

Steven Anderson is the Phoenix Pastor who recently asked his parishioners to pray that God would kill President Obama, by giving him brain cancer so that he would die like Senator Ted Kennedy.

Anderson has since followed this up with a radio interview in which he calls for gay people to be executed, and insists that the host of the show Michelangelo Signorile, must be molesting children because he is gay.

Anderson’s church website provides endless amusement in the form of transcripts of his sermons and essays.

Here are my Top Ten Kinky Quotes by Pastor Steven Anderson:

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September 14, 2009

Gods and the morality of society

Filed under: Philosophy,Religion — Michael Nugent @ 1:28 pm

It does not make any difference to the collective morality of society whether gods exist, or whether morality is absolute or relative. This is because, in each of these cases, we still as a society have to agree together what we collectively consider to be right and wrong in order to live together ethically.

To oversimplify, there are four broad possibilities:

1. There is a God or gods, and there is an absolute objective morality.
2. There is a God or gods, and morality is relative and subjective.
3. There are no gods, and there is an absolute objective morality.
4. There are no gods, and morality is relative and subjective.

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September 13, 2009

Would you be buried beside an atheist?

Filed under: Funny,Secularism — Michael Nugent @ 1:47 am

Ireland has always casually discriminated against atheists, in ways that are often very funny as well as serious. And it does not end with death, but continues on into the grave.

Here are four funny random news stories, each about fifty years apart, that illustrate how official Ireland has viewed atheists from the mid 1880s to the early 2000s.

Two involve court cases, and two involve burials. For the full impact of the casual discrimination involved, as you read them, imagine substituting the word atheist with that of any other group of people.

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September 11, 2009

Trailer for video on new Irish Blasphemy law

Filed under: Secularism — Michael Nugent @ 8:33 pm

This is a two-minute trailer for a ten-minute video about the new Irish blasphemy law, produced by Baz Grant of Atheist Ireland. The full video will be released next month, when Justice Minister Dermot Ahern plans to sign the commencement order for the law.

All of the lines spoken by the actors (Yvonne Usher and Angelica Grant) are direct quotes from the politicians involved in the blasphemy debate, going back to Eamon DeValera in 1937.

The trailer has been entered in the Darklight ‘Democracy and Dialogue’ viral video competition 2009. 25% of the marks go for the amount of views the trailer gets on youtube, so please feel free to ‘pass it on’.

September 10, 2009

Christian church promotes gay rights

Filed under: Religion,Secularism — Michael Nugent @ 9:57 pm

Would Jesus Discriminate 1A Christian Church in Texas has launched a public billboard campaign in support of gay rights.

The slogan is Would Jesus Discriminate? and it is run by five of the worldwide Metropolitan Community Churches. And the Rev Dr Cindi Love has published a book of the same title.

I believe that atheist and humanist groups should be working with religious groups like these to promote an ethical and secular society.

The billboards will be displayed in north Texas throughout September, and their use of scripture has already been challenged by other Texas Christians. One local baptist Pastor, Sam Dennis, while agreeing that Christians shouldn’t hate gay people, told CBS: “I’m hard pressed to find that scripture advocates that it’s alright to live in a gay lifestyle.”

Bizarrely, he felt the need to add: “Just like I’m hard pressed to find that scripture advocates that’s it’s alright to live in an adulterous relationship or as a wife abuser or as a murderer.” So that’s the collective category in which Rev Dennis places gay people in his mind: alongside adulterers, wife abusers and murderers.

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September 9, 2009

The garden of Eden court case

Filed under: Funny,Religion,The Bible — Michael Nugent @ 11:53 pm

A courtroom. There are two snakes. One is sitting at a Barrister’s bench. The other is lying on the ground.

BAILIFF
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. The Court of Appeal of Biblical Decisions is now in session. All rise for the case of The Snake versus God at the Garden of Eden.

The judge enters. The Barrister-Snake rises and stands upright. The Defendant-Snake stays lying on the ground.

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