The Emperor Wears No Clothes

"Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one." (Richard Dawkins)

More “birkini” madness – No longer optional but compulsory at some UK swimming pool sessions

I have just telephoned my local swimming pool in Hornsey and asked if a (fictitious) Muslim friend could use the pool wearing a “birkini”. They told me straight away that she would be welcome. I also said that I had no swimming trunks and asked if I could swim in my jeans shorts. The answer was “no”. They told me that I would have to have “proper” swimming trunks in order to enter the pool.

As if having special swimming times for women wasn’t already bad enough, according to a piece in yesterday’s Telegraph newspaper:

“Across the UK municipal pools are holding swimming sessions specifically aimed at Muslims, in some case imposing strict dress codes.”
and that
“Under the rules, swimmers – including non-Muslims – are barred from entering the pool in normal swimming attire.”

Surely such measures are divisive and fly in the face of common sense and community cohesion. Is this is not bound to cause resentment from non-Muslims towards Muslims?

If I was to go to my local pool dressed in pirate garb on September 19th, which is a holy day for Pastafarians known as “Dress and Talk Like a Pirate Day”, do you think they would let me go for a swim? I wonder.

Having Muslim-only swimming sessions is yet another example of special dispensation for religions. This kind of policy divides people rather than bringing them together and because there are so many religions, taken to its logical conclusion, one that would exclude the majority most of the time.

Flying Spaghetti Monster

Flying Spaghetti Monster

Maybe the saying “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” applies here and the only way to show some local councils how truly stupid they are being is for all religions and minorities to demand that they have their own special swimming times. Wouldn’t it be great if atheists could get organised and demand atheist-only sessions so that they could swim in peace without being surrounded by weak-minded faith heads.

See:
Swimmers are told to wear burkinis
(Telegraph 15.08.09)

B.P.

Filed under: Atheism, Islam, Neo-puritanism, News, Special Religious Dispensation, Stupidity, , , , , , ,

Naturism in the Noughties – A new era of prude and the bastardisation of reality

I happened upon a video article in the online version of The Guardian newspaper today and was just astounded by the prudishness of it. For a long time, I’ve been telling people that we are living in a new era of puritanism, a sort of 50s in the Noughties. Now I know I got it right. Our times will surely be looked back on with amusement by future generations.

The reality is that we are all born naked and that we all have much the same bodies with similar bits and pieces attached so why are we all so afraid of nakedness?

Red Faced Guardian Reporter

Red Faced Guardian Reporter

Paul MacInnes’ video story in the Guardian concerns the de-designation of a naturist beach by Waveney District Council. MacInnes talks seriously with several of the naturists on the beach about the planned closure before his inevitable de-robing which provides enough amusement to secure a viewing audience.

As three young boys growing up at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, my two brothers and I often ran around naked. In our own garden we would play in a large paddling pool with friends and I remember several visits to a naturist beach near Brighton with my parents. One would have thought that since those days attitudes about nakedness in society would have further mellowed but nothing could be further from the truth.

Not only has this sort of freedom all but disappeared but I seriously worry about some of the few treasured family photographs I have of myself, my brothers and friends. I have visions of the proverbial “knock on the door” one day by State officials and I am always hesitant to show these half dozen or so photos to people; skipping through them quickly whenever my family photos are brought out. How sad is that?

There are many who will say that covering up is purely a question of aesthetics and that nakedness accentuates our differences but I suspect that this is not the true reason for our prudishness. In the traditional religious faith of Britain nakedness is viewed as synonymous with “original sin”. Even Adam and Eve, the originators of this lie, are always depicted with strategically placed fig leaves.

A further reason perhaps for the prudometer having swung back the other way is perhaps the predominance of another even more prudish faith than Christianity; namely Islam. How can anyone be seen to be running around naked in a land where some women cover themselves with bell tents to preserve their modesty? In the 60s and 70s only a few vicars and a dying breed of Mary Whitehouse types were there to offend. The majority enjoyed the new freedoms that came with the culural revolution. That has now changed and there are both many more people who might be offended and a greater hesitancy in society to do anything that might offend anyone at all. It seems as though causing offence has suddenly become a major crime. Whatever happened to the right to offend and the right to be offended? I was taught that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me”. Yet this principle has been up-ended today. Now it is a case of “sticks and stones will get me locked up for a few hours but using the wrong words will get me life”.

The Guardian video is amusing and well worth a watch, if only to see a couple of local fossils bringing sexuality and “deviance” into the argument by comparing the impulse that naturists have to shed their clothing and walk around freely with perversion. One man who is interviewed even talks of “gay men jumping out of the bushes” and at another point in the video, when Mr. MacInnes is undressing behind a large screen to cover his “naughty bits” from the camera, he even says “It’s like page three”. Hillarious stuff.

See:
The end of naturism
(Guardian 15.08.09)

B.P.

Filed under: Neo-puritanism, News, , ,

Welcome…

"The philosophies of one age become the absurdities of the next and the
foolishness of yesterday becomes the wisdom of tomorrow."
Sir William Osler

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“Atheism” – A term that should not exist

"Atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs."
Sam Harris

For more Harris quotes Click Here

“There Almost Certainly Is No God” says Mr Dawkins

"...most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer - a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it - it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence - let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it."
Richard Dawkins

For full text Click Here

Hitchins says “Islam. Don’t ram it down my throat”

"Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet – who was only another male mammal – is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent."
Christopher Hitchins

For full text Click Here

Magician James Randi says “Magic does not work”

"Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work."
James Randi

For more Randi quotes Click Here

Hitchens declares himself to be an “antitheist”

"I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case."
Christopher Hitchens

For more Hitchens quotes Click Here

Atheist Quotes

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Richard Dawkins


"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion."
Robert Pirsig


"We must question the logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."
Gene Roddenberry


"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
Mark Twain


"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."
Unknown


"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake. Religion is all bunk."
Thomas Edison


"I'm afraid that I am severly dissapointed in God's works. All three of him have shown no tendency to improve and He merely sits at the back of the class talking to himselves. He has shown no interest in rugger, asked to be excused prayers, and moves in a mysterious way."
Monty Python (God's School Report)


"People will then often say, ‘But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?’ This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, 'cross your fingers behind your back', Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway."
Douglas Adams


"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
Steven Weinberg


"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
Stephen Roberts


"After my Christmas Lectures I received letters from the pious saying that they would have no objection if only I had qualified my remarks by saying: 'But I should warn you that many well-informed people think differently'. When did you last hear a priest-in the pulpit, on radio, on television or in Sunday School qualify his statement with 'But I should warn you that many well-informed people don't think God exists at all?'"
Richard Dawkins


"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish."
Unknown


"From the first moment I looked into that horror on September 11th, into that fireball, into that explosion of horror, I knew it, I recognized an old companion. I recognized religion."
Lorenzo Albacete


"If there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence."
Bertrand Russell


"Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
Douglas Adams


If…

"If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:


If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools


If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'


If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, ' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!"

Rudyard Kipling

Five Thousand Dead Gods

No god I know is still alive
all five thousand and seven
appear to have died.

The great god Huitzilopochtli
led the Aztecs' divine pack -
but He departed awhile back.

Zeus was fun, and had His run,
but while disguised as a swan,
they say, His neck got wrung.

Pluto - God of the Underworld,
offended the ladies of Hades,
and got buried in his own Hell.

Thor, I'm told, was big and bold,
but going out without a cloak,
they say, He died of the cold.

And ghosts of dead Indian gods
can't even haunt a decent tepee,
and many die on late night T.V.

No prisoners tremble on the altar
when their beating hearts are torn
to join Tezcatlipoca in the sky.

And no children scream as they
are loaded onto the simple machine
that feeds them to Moloch's fire.

And for ancient Greece's Dionysus,
no drums sound, no flute plays -
but, oh, weren't those the days!

The goddesses, too, we must include,
for all were dear to some, and lived
in our hearts until the time had come.

There was Athena , Gaia, and Kore,
Xochiquetzal, Minerva, and Astarte,
Ixtab, Kuan Yin, and Kali of course.

Five thousand gods and goddesses -
maybe ten or a hundred fifty thousand
or more, there might have been.

But the goddesses and gods have all
gone, one by one, until there are none
but those that are still willed alive.

- Gods and goddesses kept alive
by people still believing - still
trusting - in their own creations.

Pinocchio becomes god of the wood,
while Pygmalion falls on his knees
before his goddess of stone, Galatea.

We remember the Loving Mother
and the Father the All-Mighty
looming large in an infant's eyes.

For each girl-woman makes the God
she craves and needs - then kneels
before Him and says, "Oh, please!"

And each boy-man makes himself
a Goddess that he wishes,
giving a Mother's hugs and kisses.

And older men and women tend
to make our gods with
wrinkled brow and constant pout.

Still we always make our gods
to look a lot like me and you -
one head, one mouth, two eyes.

But the god of songbirds flies,
and the gods of all the fishes
must swim through ocean skies.

The god of cattle may be a bull,
or just maybe it's a cow -
I can't hope to settle that now.

But I am well informed by
one who ought to know:
the god of dogs is a bitch!

God laughs? Not on your life!
The joke's on us - but I'm told
She's heard this joke before!

glennlogan

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Videos

Michael Shermer on strange beliefs
"Why do people see the Virgin Mary on a cheese sandwich or hear demonic lyrics in "Stairway to Heaven"? Using video and music, skeptic Michael Shermer shows how we convince ourselves to believe - and overlook the facts."
Michael Shermer at TED

Click Here to watch

Elaine Morgan says we evolved from aquatic apes
"Elaine Morgan is a tenacious proponent of the aquatic ape hypothesis: the idea that humans evolved from primate ancestors who dwelt in watery habitats. Hear her spirited defense of the idea -- and her theory on why mainstream science doesn't take it seriously."
Elaine Morgan at TED

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Pat Condell - Apologists for Evil
"The comedian Pat Condell has made over 50 videos that are hosted at YouTube. This one, "Apologists for Evil" is one of his best to date and deals with 'The cultural treachery of the liberal left.' Mr. Condell's plain speaking doesn't pull any punches. He tells it how it is and I've yet to find a single thing I can disagree with in any of his videos."
Pat Condell

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