Author: nuclearnight
Keywords: atheist tag boundlesseyes slyfox38 amhemsley dadalama rickyshore
Added: August 31, 2009
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Author: gsusreloded
Keywords: intolerant bigot bigotry atheist atheism gogreen18 laci togetherforpeace t4peace
Added: August 31, 2009
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Our old buddy Pat has just come out of heart surgery. He's 79. It happens. He's making a full recovery. Here's what the doctors did to save his life.
Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, underwent...a new approach to dealing with atrial fibrillation, called convergence procedure. It involves cauterizing the continually beating heart muscle with heat generated by a radio frequency. It rewires a portion of the heart, in a sense, to correct the irregular beat.
...The technique is less invasive than traditional surgery and more effective long-term than drugs and their many side effects.
In a separate but related procedure, doctors also removed an abnormally enlarged left appendage on Robertson's heart. They believe the growth contributed to Robertson's atrial fibrillation.
And here's who gets the credit.
"Only the prayers of thousands of believing people kept me on this earth," Robertson said in a statement.
Yeah, I know, typical. Medical science that didn't exist 20 years ago keeps some old superstitious codger breathing, and he only has thanks for his imaginary friend in the sky and the prayers that presumably winged their way skyward to him. Right. But that isn't what this post is about. It's about something else very revealing in Robertson's statement.
At 79, Pat Robertson, perhaps the leading evangelist in all of American Christendom, is afraid to die.
I mean, think of it. If you really, truly believed in Christianity's promise of Heaven — a perfect paradise free of woe, strife, pain, fear, sadness, queers and liberals — wouldn't the prospect of finally getting to go there be the happiest news you could possibly receive? Really, I cannot imagine anything happier. That is, if you really, in your heart of hearts, believed in its existence and in your guarantee of a place there. Not to get into a "No True Christian" discussion here, but it seems to me that, whatever your stripe of Christianity — conservative or liberal, Baptist or Lutheran, Methodist or Presbyterian, Pentacostal or snake-handling wacko — if you genuinely believed in Heaven, then the prospect of death should not only not be fearful, but cause for celebration. A diagnosis of terminal illness should be occasion for a blowout "I'm Goin' To Heaven" party, a big sendoff to your great reward! All Christian funerals should be like New Orleans funerals, with marching bands and dancing revelers, not tears.
But listen to Pat. He isn't saying, "Dammit! Here I was, all ready to o to Heaven and be by my Lord's side for all eternity at last...and you bozos had to go and start praying your little fingers off, and now I'm stuck here! Thanks for nothing."
No, Pat's grateful for the medical science prayers that kept him hanging onto this vale of tears just a little bit longer.
Why? Does he really believe in Heaven after all? Really believe, deep down inside...?
Matt Dillahunty has often argued on the show, and I agree, that most Christians, when backed against the wall, are more agnostic than they're willing to admit. That, in all likelihood, they do not truly believe that which they profess to believe about God and Christianity's promises. It's not a new argument. David Hume made it. But it's moments like these, interesting little moments when a Christian leader of Pat Robertson's stature reveals in a public statement that death frightens him, that make the point far more effectively and eloquently than we atheists can.
I know many of you have heard of the Kübler-Ross model of the "five stages of grief": denial, anger, negotiation, despair and acceptance. Look, none of us really wants to die. It's part of our evolutionary hardwiring, that innate instinct for self-preservation. But when you don't have the deceptive promises of religion hampering you, as an atheist, you find that you tend to get through these stages rather quickly when contemplating your own mortality. I have not really met any atheists wracked with existential despair over the fact that one day they too shall pass. Not to say there are none, but there are fewer than you'd think for a group of people who are skeptical of an afterlife. This fact often flummoxes Christian apologists, who are often overconfident in thinking that exploiting fear of death will make witnessing to atheists a cakewalk.
The problem with religion is that clinging to a belief in a heavenly afterlife effectively stymies the process at the "bargaining" phase. You spend your entire life in a desperate, daily attempt to please a God, in the hopes that, while he certainly won't stave off physical death, he will keep you "spiritually" immortal.
I don't think that the fear of death is necessarily the #1 selling point for religion. But the desire to avoid death, to believe that when you die you don't, and that you'll see all your departed loved ones once again on that rainbow bridge, is most assuredly something that religion puts in heavy rotation on its playlist of promises. And for some believers, I guess it can work. Until that moment that death is no longer abstract, but looming.
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Birds, more than any other group of animals, are a celebration of color. They have evolved to every extreme of the spectrum, from the hot pink of flamingos to the shimmering blue of a peacockâs neck. Yet, for decades, paleontologists who study extinct birds have had to use their imaginations to see the colors in the fossils
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In the past, most people who went to Angola were searching for oil, diamonds or landmines.
Now, the country is also proving a big draw for fossil hunters - known in the scientific community as palaeontologists - who have described Angola as a "museum in the ground".
Now, the country is also proving a big draw for fossil hunters - known in the scientific community as palaeontologists - who have described Angola as a "museum in the ground".
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On Sunday, Parsons watched Joseph play with nearly 40 other kids on an 18-acre farm in Princeton that she had helped convert into Camp Quest Texas, the state's first camp for the children of atheists, agnostics and other "free thinkers."
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Well, whisperings of this have been floating through the news for at least a few months now, but now we're at last being faced with the reality. Starting September 22, the sale of flavored cigarettes and clove cigarettes are now banned in the United States.
First, some quick background info: H.R. 1256, The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act was passed by the Senate on June 11 with a vote of 79-17. The House approved it the same day with a vote of 307-97 (clearly bi-partisanship is far from dead). President Obama signed the bill into law on June 22.
But the bill isn't solely on the ban of flavored cigarettes. No, this is a veritable motherload of legislation tidily wrapped up in one bill. Here's a list of just some of the results of this bill:
- It creates a tobacco control center within the FDA and gives the FDA authority to regulate the tobacco industry. All of the tobacco laws put into place will be administered by this new division, and funded by special taxes on the tobacco companies that are expected to raise half a billion dollars a year, which will mean even higher taxes on tobacco.
- The act bans the sale of all flavored cigarettes, with the exception of menthol. The use and possession of them will still be perfectly legal, but as of September 22, you can no longer buy them at your local store. (The ban applies only to cigarettes. Pipe tobacco, cigars, etc, are not included in the ban.)
- It restricts advertising of tobacco products, including broad limitations on outdoor advertising that are nearly indistinguishable from restrictions struck down by the Supreme Court in 2001 [Government 1, Free Speech 0].
- The act requires cigarette warning labels to cover 50% of the front and back of each pack.
- It bans the use of words such as "light", "mild", or "low" that give the impression that a certain tobacco product poses less of a health risk compared to others.
The bill was sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman and Sen. Edward Kennedy (side note: if I have to watch another news bit about how amazing Ted Kennedy was, my television is going to go through a wall). It is also heavily supported by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and, surprisingly enough, Philip Morris, the country's largest cigarette manufacturer, and its parent company, Altria (but more on that later). President Obama has said that the legislation "will protect our kids and improve our health." The New York Times has hailed this as "an enormous victory for public health."
The FDA has 2 years to issue specifics about the new warnings tobacco products will be required to carry. The tobacco companies will then have 18 months to get them onto packages. The new labels will most likely include blunt warnings in large print and graphic images illustrating the dangers of smoking, covering at least half of the back and front of the packaging. If the U.S. takes their cue from other countries, which seems to be exactly what they are doing, the warnings will no doubt be shocking. According to this MSN health article:
If U.S. regulations are modeled after those already in place in Canada and other countries, the warnings will be shocking: blackened lungs, gangrenous feet, bleeding brains and people breathing through tracheotomies.Over the last decade, countries as varied as Canada, Australia, Chile, Brazil, Iran, and Singapore, among others, have adopted graphic warnings on tobacco products. Some are downright disturbing: in Brazil, cigarette packages come with pictures of dead babies and a gangrened foot with blackened toes.
Now, a very interesting part of this whole fiasco is the involvement of Philip Morris, which sells more cigarettes than nearly every other American tobacco combined, holding about 50% of the entire market share. From The Big Money, a leg of Slate Magazine:
"It is a dream true for Philip Morris," Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, told me. "First, they make it look like they are a reformed company which really cares about reducing the toll of cigarettes and protecting the public's health; and second, they protect their domination of the market and make it impossible for potentially competitive products to enter the market." Other tobacco companies have taken to calling the bill the "Marlboro Monopoly Act of 2009"
Clearly, Philip Morris is just using this bill as a vehicle to eliminate competition. Teenagers are not out smoking cherry or chocolate mocha cigarettes. They are just smoking regular cigarettes, preferably in the form of Marlboro brand cigarettes, owned by [drumroll please] Philip Morris. Going back to the MSN article, about 81% of teen smokers prefer Marlboro brand cigarettes. The most popular flavored cigarette is [another drumroll please] menthol, which happens to be the only exception to the law. Menthol cigarettes make up 28% of all cigarettes purchased in the U.S., and a ban on menthols would have seriously hurt Philip Morris, which sells several varieties of menthol cigarettes.
According to a recent survey by the American Legacy Foundation, menthol cigarettes are preferred by 81% of black teens, 45% of Hispanic teens, and 32% of white teens. A 2007 study by the American Lung Association showed that, of the 20% of teens who smoked, only 6.8% had smoked clove cigarettes, and only 1.7% had smoked other types of flavored cigarettes.
The big selling point of this legislation is that it will cut back on teenage smoking by limiting advertising, making the dangers of smoking clearer, and getting rid of the flavored cigarettes which they feel are aimed to lure teenagers into smoking. They clearly have no idea what they are talking about. Teenagers start smoking because they think it's "cool", and they keep smoking because it's addicting. Cigarettes taste horrible, and no amount of candy flavoring could possibly make them taste less horrible.
I'd be shocked if almost every smoker in the U.S. wasn't already aware of the dangers of smoking. A friend of mine who took up smoking in high school had a very "we're all dying sometime, I might as well speed up the process" attitude about it, and that seems to be the norm with smokers. They are well aware of the dangers, are likely reminded of them constantly, and continue to smoke anyway.
I don't smoke tobacco - I think it's a stupid and dangerous habit, and frequently tell me friends and family who do smoke that they should try and quit, but I could never support the use of government to try to reduce smoking, because all that they are capable of is violence. They have written tons of legislation trying to tax and regulate smoking into oblivion. The taxes on cigarettes have become a huge burden on smokers. They have done everything short of just straight-out banning it, which seems largely due to the fact that it would completely destroy the big tobacco companies like Philip Morris, and the government can't afford to lose such a huge beneficiary.
Coming just on the heels of the huge raise in taxes on cigarettes, this is shaping up to be a horrible year for smokers, and for freedom in general. Here is my home state of Rhode Island, cigarette taxes are highest in the nation - the average price of brand name cigarettes currently floating around $8.35. Smokers have quickly become one of the easiest groups to attack in this country, and no one has stepped up to protect their right to put whatever substance they choose into their body. Maybe as the legislation gets worse and worse, people will start to wake up and oppose this latest tyranny, but we can only hope.
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Richard_Dawkins: "Catholic League president says Atheists ‘out there to get us’, compares Penn & Teller to Nazis." ~ http://is.gd/2K9Vp
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August 31, 2009 on FOX News
