If you can get people to believe in absurdies you can get them commit atrocities.

Absurdities:

• The earth is less than 6000 years old.
• If you die a martyr, you will get 70 virgins upon your death.
• If you don't believe me, you will burn in hell for eternity.
• An invisible being who created the universe needs you to worship him, so much so he died to get you to worship him.
• There is an invisible, indetectable thing inside you, your soul, that can exist independently of your body.
• Something that happened 2000 years ago is relevant to you today.

Atrocities:

• Child abuse by preists
• mass rape in Guinea
• suicide bombers
• "gay bashing"
• beheading of "infidels"
• killing of abortion doctors
• genocide and "ethnic cleansing"

Faith is delusion, and mass delusion is extremely dangerous. We need to be intellectually vigilant, question everything, and hold all teaching accountable to reason. Reason is the greatest defense against faith.

NYT: Atheists Coming Out of the Closet

Here is a great post from the New York Times about atheists coming out of the closet.

joaquin phoenix and the futility of celebrity

So as I watch Joaquin Phoenix make more and more of an ass of himself, and reality TV incresingly demonstrate the ridiculousness and irrelevance of celebrities...it becomes increasingly clear that celebrity status is going to the masses. Facebook, ning.com, google etc. allow each of us to decide who is a celebrity, and we are becoming more and more interested in our personal friends, and less and less interested in the "big stars", except for when they go to jail, overdose, or unexpectedly lose an article of clothing. I hope one day we can see them for what they are...regular people who act for a living, and beyond that, not particularly interesting.

(with all due respect to Mr. Phoenix, and the celebrity community of course, many of whom I count as dear friends)

Can you Astral Project? a conversation with Tony Gerber

Tony is a very close friend, and an incredibly smart person whom I absolutely respect and love. In SL he is known as Cypress Rosewood. Here is a snippet of one of our many chats.

Tony: can you astral project?
Tree: I can imagine im in space, or something if that is astral projecting then yes and I can bend spoons with my hands!"
Tony: do you see a silver chord attaching you to the earth?

Tree: no usually im just floating free...sometimes Im a pilot of a super cool styrofoam airplane

Tony: now its important that you dont come to resent the "sources of stress" but try to detach yourself from them and deal with them logically, as if you are someone else controlling a body.

"I think Second Life is a good analogy for that...think of your body as an avatar and use your mental "alt zoom" to look down on the situation and then you can see the solutions better." -Tree Kyomoon