Rapture Day - May 21, 2011

2011 end times prediction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What's it all about?

The 2011 end times prediction made by Christian radio host Harold Camping states that the Rapture (in premillennial theology, the taking up into heaven of God's elect people) will take place on May 21, 2011^[1][2] at 6 P.M. local time (the rapture will sweep the globe time zone by time zone) ^[3] and that the end of the world as we know it will take place five months later on October 21, 2011.^[4] Camping, president of the Family Radio Christian network, claims the Bible as his source and says May 21 will be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment "beyond the shadow of a doubt".^[5] His followers claim that around 200 million people (approximately 3% of the world's population) will be raptured.^[6]

Camping's predictions have not been embraced by most other Christian groups;^[7] some have explicitly rejected them.^{[8][9][10][11]} An interview with a group of church leaders noted that all of them have scheduled services as usual for Sunday, May 22.^[12] Camping previously claimed that the world would end in September 1994.

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Atheists Offer Post-Rapture Services

A group of atheists in Seattle have begun a funding campaign for
people who will be left behind, and a website offers to deliver the mail
of Christians after they are taken to heaven to their non-believer
friends.

“Rapture Relief
Fund” was created just in case Family Radio prognostication is correct,
and if not, Seattle Atheists plan on donating its proceeds to Camp
Quest West, a camp for children from non-religious families.

The Cult of Apple - It IS a religion (not a computer company)

Apple causes ‘religious’ reaction in brains of fans, say neuroscientists


Excerpt:

In a recently screened BBC documentary, UK
neuroscientists suggested that the brains of Apple devotees are
stimulated by Apple imagery in the same way that the brains of religious
people are stimulated by religious imagery.

People have
often talked about “the cult of Apple”, and if a recent BBC TV
documentary is to be believed, there could be something in it.

The program, Secrets of the Superbrands,
looks at why technology megabrands such as Apple, Facebook and Twitter
have become so popular and such a big part of many people’s lives.

In
the first episode, presenter Alex Riley decided to take a look at
Apple. He wanted to discover what it is about the company that makes
people so emotional. Footage of the opening of the Cupertino company’s
Covent Garden store in central London last year showed hordes of Apple
devotees lining up outside overnight, while the staff whipped up
customers (and themselves) into something of an evangelical frenzy. This
religious-like fervour got Riley thinking – he decided to take a closer
look at the inside of the head of an Apple fanatic to see what on earth
was going on in there.

Click the top link to read the rest.

Stephen Hawking interview with The Guardian

Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story' | Science | The Guardian

Pope charged with crimes against humantiy in World Court

Pope charged with crimes against humanity in World Court - Los Angeles atheism | Examiner.com
Excerpt:
hey claim the Pope “is responsible for the preservation and
leadership of a worldwide totalitarian regime of coercion which
subjugates its members with terrifying and health-endangering threats”.

 

They allege he is also responsible for “the adherence to a
fatal forbiddance of the use of condoms, even when the danger of
HIV-Aids infection exists” and for “the establishment and maintenance of
a worldwide system of cover-up of the sexual crimes committed by
Catholic priests and their preferential treatment, which aids and abets
ever new crimes”.

 

They claim the Catholic Church “acquires its members through a compulsory act, namely, through the baptism of infants
that do not yet have a will of their own”. This act was “irrevocable”
and is buttressed by threats of excommunication and the fires of hell.

 

It was “a grave impairment of the personal freedom of
development and of a person’s emotional and mental integrity”. The Pope
was “responsible for its preservation and enforcement and, as Prefect of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of his Church, he was
jointly responsible” with Pope John Paul II.

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Catholics “threatened by HIV-AIDS . . . are faced with a
terrible alternative: If they protect themselves with condoms during
sexual intercourse, they become grave sinners; if they do not protect
themselves out of fear of the punishment of sin threatened by the
church, they become candidates for death.”

 

There was also “strong suspicion that Dr Joseph Ratzinger, as
prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of his church
and as Pope, has up to the present day systematically covered up the
sexual abuse of children and youths and protected the perpetrators,
thereby aiding and abetting further sexual violence toward young people”.

 

Calls for the Pope to be tried for crimes against humanity have been issued many times before. Only last April,
Geoffrey Robinson, a United Nations jurist from the UK, called for an
international criminal investigation of Benedict by the UN World
Criminal Court over the cover-up of crimes by pedophile priests, but
nothing came of it. That may not be the case this time because once
charges are filed, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court
must investigate them.

Multi-country poll finds most people think religion is NOT a force for good

CBC News: Poll underlines sharp divide on religion
Ipsos-Reid conducted a survey with over 18,000 people in 23 countries and found that 52% of respondents agreed that "religious beliefs promote intolerance, exacerbate ethnic divisions and impede social progress."

There was wide regional variation in the results. Respondents in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, where there are large Moslem populations, overwhelmingly said they believed religion was a force for good, while respondents in European countries tended to disagree with that.

About two-thirds of Americans polled thought religion was a force for good, but only 36 per cent of Canadians thought the same.
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Block religious content while browsing the Internet

GodBlock - Protect your children
GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted
at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often
violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy
texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of
the age to make such decisions.
When installed properly, GodBlock will test each page that your child
visits before it is loaded, looking for passages from holy texts, names
of religious figures, and other signs of religious propaganda. If none
are found, then your child is allowed to browse freely.
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Cardinal Ouellet lobbying the government to reduce choice for women.

DAMMIT JANET!: Should Ayatollah Ouellet register as a lobbyist?
From the Ayatollah's
media conference yesterday:

"With my colleague, the Archbishop
of Ottawa, who like me has close ties to governments, I am appealing to
the conscience of my fellow Canadians, women and men, so that together
we may one day call for a change in this unjust situation in our
country – the current legal void in abortion matters."

...

A great summary of recent crap in Canada (mainly)

News of the Restless: Wankers of the Week: Bees in the bonnet edition

Conservative Canadian governement spends $800,000.00 on translated bibles for Africa and Asia

Atta Boy, Gilles, You Tell ‘em Where it’s at!
Excerpt:
Can someone explain to me how the bible being translated into African
and Asian dialects is supposed to help a poor weak and tired woman
feeling nothing but despair, wondering how she’ll feed her kids today? 
Or how does sending preachers to explain how end times are a comin’ to
women whose time has come now or that of her child’s due to starvation
and lack of proper health care? And a question that I share with ACR’s
Pale Cold:  How comforting can a preacher who has translated the Lord’s
Prayer be to a woman who is dying from complications to giving birth to
13 kids in a 10 year span?

Religious people more likely to be racist, study shows

Love Thy Neighbor? Not If He's Different | Miller-McCune Online
No surprise here.

Excerpt:

This “religion-racism paradox,” as University of Southern California
social psychologist Wendy Wood explains it, is deeply embedded in
organized religion which, by its very nature, encourages people to
accept one fundamental belief system as superior to all others. The
required value judgment creates a kind of us-versus-them conflict, in
which members of a religious group develop ethnocentric attitudes toward
anyone perceived as different. The study, “Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic
Review of Religious Racism,” appeared in the journal Personality
and Social Psychology Review.

“Religion creates a very strong sense of a moral right and wrong
within the group,” says Wood. “When you do that, members of the group
will be more likely to derogate anyone who is not part of it.” And
because religion in America is practiced largely along segregated lines
(just 12 percent of U.S. congregations report even a moderate level of
diversity, one study shows) that derogation, and the sense of
superiority that drives such diminishment of others, can extend beyond
religious differences to race, class and ethnicity.

Listening to prayer halts brain activity

Study Shows that Listening to Prayer Halts Brain Activity - Science - io9
Excerpts:
A team of Danish researchers have found that when listening to a
well-spoken person who claims to have divine healing powers, the regions
of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less
active.
...
Only in the devout volunteers did the brain activity monitored by the
researchers change in response to the prayers. Parts of the prefrontal
and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and
scepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say,
were deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer.
...

Texas takes another step backwards into ignorance

State of denial: Revisionist education in Texas - Parentcentral.ca
Excerpt:
the amendments will overturn a broad array of long-standing tenets and beliefs about U.S. history and society, rejecting the constitutional separation of church and state, promoting a Judeo-Christian interpretation of the motivations that inspired the country's founding fathers, dropping references to Latino heroes and accomplishments, and justifying the red-baiting, anti-Communist extremism that overran large tracts of the U.S. body politic during the 1950s, spearheaded by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Meanwhile, founding father Thomas Jefferson – unpopular with conservatives because he championed the division between religion and politics – is to be downplayed in classrooms. Conservative heroes such as Schlafly (known for her opposition to feminism) and Gingrich (leader of a Republican renaissance in U.S. politics) will now be promoted to U.S. students for their beliefs and accomplishments.

Jackson, a Confederate general in the American Civil War, is to be singled out as "a role model for effective leadership." But references to Latino heroes are to be played down, a move that would presumably affect the legacy of Cesar Chavez, the late Mexican-American civil rights activist whose birthday is now marked as an official or optional holiday in several U.S. states, including Texas.

Oh, yes – and the mainly black hip-hop musical style will no longer be considered "a significant cultural movement" among Texas youth. Country and Western will be celebrated instead.

Atheists vs religion on morality

DTK: Those Awful New Atheists
... The difference between the bold claims of atheists and the bold claims of christians is that the atheists can actually back theirs up. The christians have a book that advises wholesale slaughter of enemies and their children and the willingness to sacrifice one's own son to please one's deity.

Atheists can actually point to a thing called "humanism" for guidance in moral matters. ...
Read the link for the full post.

Antivaccinationists, Vaccines, Homeopathy, Mumps outbreaks due to lack of immunization and more!

How To Spot A Psychopath :: 10,537 bytes with which I do not agree :: May :: 2009
- details a long comment from an anti-vaccinationist, and the follow-up to this comment.

The Anti-Vax Apocalypse Will Be Televised: Measles Spike in Europe
The anti-vaxer movement is wrong, it’s dangerous, and it’s having major effects on public health. Like this one: More than 12,000 cases of measles, around four-fifths of which were in unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated children, surfaced in Europe in the two-year period from 2006 through 2007, with an additional 6,000 infections reported in the first three quarters of 2008.

While the Anti-Vax Movement Strengthens, Their Arguments Only Get Weaker
Excerpt:

The issue at hand is “herd immunity,” which works as a buffer: If enough people in a community are vaccinated, they protect those with weaker immune systems, or those whose vaccinations didn’t take, from catching the disease. The CDC estimates that some diseases, like mumps, can’t generally take hold in a population where as few as 75 percent of the people are vaccinated. But other, more virulent diseases, such as measles or the increasingly common whooping cough, need collective immunity of up to 94 percent to avoid infection.

So, in essence: Sure, your unvaccinated kid may live through the measles, or the mumps (though, as one doctor noted, cases in Canada have led to hospitalizations, deafness, meningitis, and sterility). But he’s also putting the other kids at risk.

As for the argument that children may suffer violent allergic reactions to vaccines? That one may soon kick the bucket entirely, now that a team of experts has discovered that with close monitoring and a few standard precautions, almost all children with known or suspected vaccine allergies (as determined by a pre-shots allergy test) can be safely immunized. One more reason to support scientific research.

Boy, 7, dies of meningitis in southern Alberta

Excerpt:

"Meningitis is a serious disease, and it has dramatic symptoms. It's not a little fever and a little headache; it's a big fever, a big headache. These kids are sick … If they, their children or members of their family have symptoms that are suggestive of meningitis or are worried about, they need to see a doctor."

Children in Canada are now vaccinated against bacterial meningitis as part of immunization programs, according to the Meningitis Research Foundation of Canada.

Maclean said parents should make sure their children's vaccinations are up-to-date.

Canada "thanks" antivaccinationists for the mumps

Fraser Valley mumps outbreak nears 200 cases

Excerpt:

Since the outbreak began in Chilliwack in February, cases having been spreading like wildfire through the Fraser Valley, fuelled by a high rate of transmission among vaccine objectors from unnamed Christian fundamentalist groups that are against vaccines of all kinds.

About half the 190 confirmed and suspected cases are individuals who have never been immunized, either on religious or philosophical grounds, said Dr. Elizabeth Brodkin. She said another 25 per cent of cases involve people who are only partially immunized.

Yet another really bad day for antivaccinationists: No link between MMR and autism--again

Excerpt:

This is getting to be monotonous, but it's a monotony that I like, as should anyone who supports scientific medicine and hates the resurgence of infectious diseases that antivaccinationists have been causing of late with their fearmongering about vaccines that frightens parents into refusing to vaccinate their children.

Vaccine Denial = Scientific Illiteracy

Excerpts:

Here's the cusp of the matter. These guys scream, "You're giving mercury to my kids!!! ARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!" but when scientists stop giving vaccines with thimerosal to children, the anti-vaccination crowd goes "You're giving aluminum to my kids!!! AAARRRRRRRRRAAAARRRRRRRAGHHHH!!!!" And it doesn't matter that the aluminum is part of the chemistry that makes the vaccine work better, and it doesn't matter that their kid gets less aluminum from vaccines than they do from that hippy-dippy soy baby formula shit they put into their stomachs because Mommy's afraid of making cows cry. These guys will not be happy until the syringe is filled with water. Because for them, it will always be the fault of the vaccines. It doesn't matter what the science says, because these people don't care about science. Their argument is purely ideological, and does not belong in any discussion of scientific, medical, or political policy.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-dickerman/vaccine-denial-scientific_b_180026.html

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Are vaccines harmless? Well, for most of us -- yes. There is a small (TINY) percentage of the population that can't have vaccines, immune-compromised kids, and a very small number of people for whom the vaccines will in fact have a detrimental effect. And by pushing forward their campaign to throw an ideological penny onto science's tracks, these parents and advocates are hurting those kids too. See, those kids... they can't have immunizations, and so the only thing keeping them from getting sick is that enough of their little friends have gotten those shots, making it statistically unlikely that the non-immunized kids will get these illnesses. Viruses don't thrive in a vacuum, it's called herd immunity, and without it those little kids - you know, the ones who's immune systems are screwed up and can't get the benefit of childhood vaccines - they'd probably be dead. In the UK, the original home of Wakefield and still a bigger part of the anti-vaccine movement than the states (don't worry! We can still catch up! USA! USA!), many of these childhood ailments are already making a comeback, and we have small spots in the states where it's happening too. Thank you, vaccine denialists, for saving our kids.

The science is in. Children are exposed to more new pathogens on a daily basis than the entirety of what they're given in their vaccination schedule, you get more formaldehyde into your body from the paint on your walls, and even if it was still in the childhood vaccination schedule (which it's not), the amount of mercury in thimerosal is orders of magnitude below what it would take to actually damage your brain. Vaccines do not cause autism. Measles, Mumps, and Rubella are not diseases we should let come back. Allowing these "green our vaccines" Evidence of Harm "Mercury Militia" people to have their pre-scientific crap pollute our public discourse is retarding our nation's health, and we can't stand for it anymore.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-dickerman/vaccine-denial-scientific_b_180026.html

Comic book characters grouped by religious affiliation

Religious Super-Teams
A strange but thorough site.
I didn't know that "Hippy" was a religion.

All bow down to Oprah!

Shia LaBeouf, Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey and More Celebrities Who Could Helm a Religion - ABC News

Shiantology? We Propose Some Other Celebrity Religions.  Shia LaBeouf, Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey and More Celeb

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Oh God...

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Scientology Star Chart

Celebrity Scientologists | Cracked.com

I hope they speak Norwegian in Hell

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Alberta government want to deny kids access to evolution education in schools

Tiny Perfect Blog: Evolution clips on You Tube

Watch the videos