Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1992
June 25, 2014
June 24, 2014
Atheist Rapper Ensomniak’s Latest Song: “Sans Seraphs”
Atheist rapper Ensomniak is back with his latest song! (You can hear his others here, here, here, and here.)
It’s called “Sans Seraphs” and it’s dedicated to “those who are on the edge of letting go of religion and for those who’ve already done so.” You can see a sample of the lyrics below.
Give doctors their credit/ medicine’s not a miracle
It’s science and dedication/ no part of it’s spiritual
If someone put fear in you/ about asking questions
Maybe it’s just their own doubts/ that they’re projectin’
Without angels, there’d be no less vividness
And people would realize some things are coincidence
Without devils, the world would still be the same
When people do wrong they just can’t shift the blame
No miracles, in ignorance, there’s humility
Anything can happen, given probability
And without gods, it’d change the mentality
For so many, and how they engage reality
If it’s not obvious, I love this guy’s work.
If you like his music, please consider downloading the track for a dollar and show your support for what he does!
John Oliver’s Brilliant Segment on Dr. Oz’s Support of “Miracle” Drugs
John Oliver offered a fantastic — and substantive — take on Dr. Oz and his desire to push bullshit “miracle” supplements on Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight:
Amazingly, he didn’t even have to show Sen. Claire McCaskill‘s takedown of Oz to be effective.
(Side note: In just a few weeks on air, this show has really become must-download TV for me.)
Grandmother Fish: A Book to Teach Evolution to Preschoolers
Jonathan Tweet, a game designer who’s worked on such projects as Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering is now working on a children’s book designed to teach basic concepts of evolution to pre-schoolers.
It’s called Grandmother Fish:
Grandmother Fish is the first book to teach evolution to preschoolers. While listening to the story, the child mimics the motions and sounds of our ancestors, such as wiggling like a fish or hooting like an ape. Like magic, evolution becomes fun, accessible, and personal. Grandmother Fish will be a full-size (10 x 8), full-color, 32-page, hardback book full of appealing animal illustrations, perfect for your bookshelf. US publishers consider evolution to be too “hot” a topic for children, but with your help we can make this book happen ourself.
If you go to his Kickstarter page, you can already see a rough draft of the book. Chip in if you’d like to see it become a reality!
33 Reasons It’s Great to Be a Christian in America
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, discusses 33 reasons it’s great to be a Christian in America:
The list was inspired by this one about Christian privilege.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the project — more videos will be posted soon — and we’d also appreciate your suggestions as to which questions we ought to tackle next!
And if you like what you’re seeing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon.
For the Third Straight Year, a Minor League Baseball Team Will Lose Its Faith for a Game
For a couple of years now, the Minnesota Atheists have been running a promotion in which they team up with a local minor league baseball team for a day. And they’re doing it again this year, too.
That may sound strange until you consider how the promotion works.
On July 11, the St. Paul Saints…
will become the Mr. Paul Aints:
The logos on the field will have the “S” covered up (as the picture below from last year shows), and the players will have new uniforms, too:
The player worn jerseys will be auctioned off during the game from which a portion of the proceeds will go to the Family Place Shelter in St. Paul where volunteers from the Minnesota Atheists regularly prepare and serve dinners to families without permanent housing.
“Baseball and atheism have nothing in common,” said Eric Jayne, president of Minnesota Atheists. “Except that both offer happiness and satisfaction once they’re better understood.”
Love that line 
This sort of promotion is nothing new, by the way. “Faith Nights” have been taking place at baseball stadiums (including major league ones) for several years now — and very often, I might add. Just keep that in mind for when someone on the Christian Right complains about the radical agenda of the Saints’ ownership.
The Minnesota Atheists’ promotion, done this year in conjunction with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, is officially in support of the All-Star Freethought Conference, taking place the following day.
Saudi Arabia Tries to Shout Down Center for Inquiry at UN Human Rights Council
Our hero, Josephine Macintosh
Yesterday, we got a rare glimpse of how sensitive Saudi Arabia is to its human rights abuses being exposed. At a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council, a representative of my organization, the Center for Inquiry, was repeatedly shouted down by the Saudi representative in an attempt to stop her from delivering our statement condemning its crackdown on free expression and belief, and its persecution of dissidents such as Raif Badawi and Waleed Abu al-Khair.
And lucky for us, there’s video.
Click here to view the embedded video.
CFI’s representative, Josephine Macintosh, sought to take Saudi Arabia to task. The CFI statement said, in part:
We call on Saudi Arabia, as a newly elected member of this council, to release Raif Badawi immediately and unconditionally, and drop any pending charges against him and others for “blasphemy,” “insulting Islam,” or “apostasy.” If it is to retain any credibility as a member, we urge it to reform its laws so as to protect freedom of religion, belief, and expression, cease the use of corporeal punishment, and repeal Article 1 of its interior ministry’s degree defining atheism as terrorism.
The angry Saudi Arabian representative telling the council president to silence CFI’s representative.
But the Saudis would not have it, and on three separate occasions yelled to the council president that Macintosh had to be silenced. In fact, we at CFI have been told by one Arabic speaker that the Saudi representative wasn’t just demanding that Macintosh be “silenced,” but something closer to “I ask you to shut her up!”
Macintosh was determined to press on, and she was aided in expressions of support within the meeting by representatives of the U.S., Ireland, Canada, and France. Ultimately, Saudi Arabia failed to silence her, and she was able to deliver statement in full. You can read all of CFI’s statement here.
Afterward, Canada’s ambassador for religious freedom, Andrew Bennett tweeted:
Proud that Canada defended @center4inquiry right to speak in Human Rights Council on Raif Badawi case today.
Michael De Dora, who serves as CFI’s chief UN representative, told news outlet Middle East Eye, that this episode was very telling:
It doesn’t look good for Saudi Arabia. By trying to silence us, and looking a bit desperate in doing so, they have actually caused more attention to be given to the statement we were delivering.
For my part, I found it truly remarkable that a representative of such a powerful and oppressive nation would react so strongly and with such panic over the public condemnation of an NGO. It’s extremely encouraging, even if it only means that the work of CFI and its allies on the world stage are beginning to get under Saudi Arabia’s skin, and they begin to feel the gaze of world attention on their oppression grow hotter and hotter.
Friendly Atheist Podcast Episode 2: Dr. Karen Stollznow
Thank you all for tuning in to our new podcast!
Our latest guest is Dr. Karen Stollznow.
Dr. Stollznow is a linguist with a background in history and anthropology. She is also the author of several books, including the forthcoming Language Myths, Mysteries and Magic and Not What The Dr. Ordered. She has contributed to several publications including Psychology Today and Skeptic, and she is a research fellow of the James Randi Educational Foundation.
We spoke with her about “foreign accent syndrome,” speaking in tongues, and her exploration of different kinds of believers (from Quakers to Satanists).
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. If you have any suggestions for people we should chat with, please leave them in the comments, too.
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, get the MP3 directly, or just listen to the whole thing below.
And if you like what you’re hearing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon and leaving us a positive rating!
Ann Druyan Reflects on the New ‘Cosmos’ and Asking the Big Questions
Whenever Ann Druyan appears in the media, you want to pay attention. The co-creator of both versions of Cosmos and wife of the late Carl Sagan, she has a way of communicating the beauty and wonder of science and inquiry that is utterly compelling. Despite that, very few know who she is. That subject was touched upon in an interview she just did with Andrew O’Hehir at Salon, where she seems to mainly find the fact that she’s overshadowed by celebrity men of science men amusing.
I am a little bit surprised when critics, who I think are more likely to read the credits with some degree of attention, talk about the show as if Neil has had something to do with its inception or its writing. In the case of Carl it was different. Obviously Carl was the senior partner in conceiving the show with me and [astronomer] Steven Soter. And so, I mean, I am kind of taken aback. But then I look at the brilliance of Neil [deGrasse Tyson]’s performance, and how unexpectedly he has taken what I wrote and given it its best possible expression on the show. So I love the guy. I guess that’s the plight of the writer. It is coming out of someone else’s mouth; people think it must be theirs. It’s a natural reaction. …
I’m happy. I mean, look, I can’t get the fact that this show has played in something like 181 countries, and in the vast majority of them it’s been an off-the-scale success. For someone who started out on this road seven years ago, this is the best possible outcome I could have imagined.
She also talks about how relatively minor the religious pushback has been, and opens up about her feelings about science and the spiritual.
I have no problem asking the unanswerable questions, or in asking the as-yet-unanswerable questions. I have no problem with asking them, and I certainly have no issue with how we get through those dark nights of the soul by answering them. I would never presume to tell anyone how to answer them for themselves, not even my own children. I wouldn’t even think of it. I can only speak for myself when I say, “Yeah, asking questions – the more the better.” It’s just that if you come up with answers that make no adjustment to the scale of space and time that we find ourselves in, we see a failure of the imagination.
In a separate interview with Kyle Hill at The Nerdist, we get a more behind-the-scenes look at the how the new series was put together, and it confirms one suspicion I’ve had about the heavy use of animated scenes:
Seth [MacFarlane] had the brilliant idea of animating the stories of the ‘Heroes of Knowledge.’ Until he proposed that to me, I was imagining schlepping through Romania or Bulgaria to film live-action dramatic recreations, which nobody was excited about. The network thought that it would be a turn-off for their audience to see muttons chops and beards and those frilly Seinfeld shirts. Seth said ‘well listen, we have an army of animators here.’ Those animated sequences work so well because they feel like little graphic novels and they capture the emotional tone of what I was going for in the script.
I remember wondering about that before the series launched. While I loved the way the original series showed almost silent-film style live-action performances of folks like Kepler and Brahe, I worried that this would look a little too, well, PBS for today’s audiences.
To get more great stuff from Druyan, check out Josh Zepps‘ interview with her on Point of Inquiry, which is my favorite episode of the show in a long time.
Bill Maher: President Obama is “Drop Dead Atheist, Absolutely”
On last night’s Daily Show, comedian Bill Maher said something he’s said on his own show many times before: President Obama is a “drop dead atheist, absolutely.” (You can see the full clip at Mediaite, or on the Daily Show‘s own website, whenever they get around to updating it.)
Jon Stewart softly rebutted that line by bringing up the whole Reverend Wright controversy of 2008 — wasn’t Obama a member of that church? — and Maher responded by saying it was only for political purposes and that Obama was a “member” of the church but never really attended services.
Normally when we hear people talk about Obama’s “true” beliefs, we’re referring to right-wing nutcases who believe he’s Muslim. But Maher’s comments echo something I’ve heard from a lot of people that I actually respect. And there’s no reason to let it slide.
The unstated implication from Maher’s perspective is that Obama is too smart to be religious… which is an insult to, well, all the smart people out there who also happen to be religious. His intelligence and academic pedigree is hardly a reason to just assume he’s non-religious. It’s just wishful thinking.
I think my colleague Paul Fidalgo said it best last year:
… look, even if [Obama] is an atheist, or anything else for that matter, it doesn’t really matter unless he acts on those beliefs. It’s meaningless to speculate as to whether he’s a “secret atheist” or what have you if he still allows the Faith-Based office to let fund recipients discriminate in hiring, if he appears at the National Prayer Breakfast, or fights on the side of prayer at legislative sessions.
If Obama’s an atheist, then he sure as hell is working his ass off to keep it a secret. As much as I generally support him, we’d all be better off having someone in office who more strongly defended the wall between church and state.
By the way, I made an Atheist Voice video last October about this very topic. It’s sad to see how little has changed since then.
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