National FFRF Convention
Mark your calendar! The 29th annual Freedom From Religion Foundation convention will take place on October 6-8, 2006, in San Francisco, California at the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway.
http://www.ffrf.org/index2.php
Convention Awardees & Speakers

Sam Harris
Author

Julia Sweeney
Actor & comedian
“Emperor Has No Clothes” Award recipient

Michelle Goldberg
Author

Richard Sloan
Author

Wafa Sultan
Freethought Heroine award recipient

Mike Keefe
Editorial cartoonist
“Freethought in the Media: Tell It Like It Is” Award recipient

Philip Paulson
Premiere recipient: “Atheist in Foxhole” Award

FFRF co-president Dan Barker will entertain at the piano
Photo by Brent Nicastro
The 29th annual convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation takes place at the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway, 1500 Van Ness, San Francisco, on the weekend of Oct. 6-8, 2006. Take advantage of San Francisco’s best time of year to combine a weekend getaway, a stimulating and timely conference, and a chance to meet other freethinkers.

Guest rooms at $139.00 single or double plus tax will be reserved for FFRF convention-goers through September 6, 2006. To avoid disappointment, make reservations now by phoning the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway directly at 415/441-4000 or 1-800-465-4329 (the national tollfree number for all Holiday Inns).

Keynoter will be actress and comedian Julia Sweeney, performing her profound and profoundly funny monolog, “Letting Go of God,” on Saturday night, Oct. 7. The one-woman show by the Saturday Night Live alumna (”Androgynous Pat”) is a tour de force and “tour de memory,” relating Julia’s “beautiful loss of faith story” of going from Catholic to atheist.

Newly confirmed speakers include:

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, whose new book, Letter to a Christian Nation (Sept 06) will also be on hand for his booksigning.

Michelle Goldberg, the lively contributing writer of Salon.com, whose new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, covers the threat of the ascendancy of the religious right.

Mikey Weinstein, commanding headlines for his bold lawsuit against the US Air Force and military proselytizing. His hot-off-the-press book, With God on Our Side (Sept 06), will also be available for purchase.

Other speakers and awardees:

Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-American writer and secular humanist, will receive a Freethought Heroine award. Dr. Sultan galvanized the Muslim world by criticizing religion on Al-Jazeera TV. In May, Dr. Sultan was named as one of Time Magazine’s “100 People Who Shape Our World.”

Editorial cartoonist Mike Keefe, of the Denver Post, will receive a “Freethought in the Media: Tell It Like It Is” award for his many irreverent cartoons, some of which he will show.

Philip Paulson, indefatigable litigant in the 17-year-old lawsuit against a 29-foot high cross on Mount Soledad, San Diego, will be the debut recipient of an “Atheist in Foxhole” award, to recognize courage in the face of freethought/state-church battles.

Dr. Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, will speak on his major new book, Blind Faith, critiquing prayer and religion studies, to be released this fall.

Dan Barker, FFRF co-president, will intersperse freethought music at the piano. Dan, a songwriter and professional musician, is featured on two FFRF music CDs and is author of Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist.

The convention opens Friday night with speakers, music by Foundation co-president Dan Barker, and a cake and beverage reception. It continues Saturday (with optional Non-Prayer Buffet Breakfast, $30, and Banquet Dinner, $45–these are West Coast prices and FFRF is subsidizing some of the taxes on your meals). The gathering formally concludes by noon Sunday, following the membership and Board of Directors meetings.

Convention program schedule.

Registration is $50 per member, $55 for companion-accompanying-member, $75 nonmember, and $25 student. Return the completed registration form on this page to: FFRF, PO Box 750, Madison WI 53701.

To register for the convention, send in your registration form to:

FFRF, Inc.
PO Box 750
Madison WI 53703

This one was just down the road from me:

“David and Liz Carroll pinned their 3-year-old foster son’s arms behind his back, covered him in a blanket and then wrapped him with packing tape like a mummy, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said today.

Only the toddler’s head was exposed, he said.

Then, as Marcus Fiesel cried out in fear, the Union Township couple turned on a fan, shut the door to the 5-foot-by-7-foot closet, walked down the stairs and left the house for a day and a half to attend a family reunion in Kentucky, Deters said.

Marcus was dead by the time they got home early on the morning of Aug. 6. Deters said.

“He was wrapped like a cocoon,” Deters said, choking up.”

I watched this whole thing play out in the local news, starting with the reports about Marcus, who was also autistic, wandering off from his supposedly seizing mother at a neighboring park. Law enforcement, as well as the entire community, came out to search for the missing boy, trampling through the woods with dogs, holding vigils, pulling out all the stops. At one point, there was brief mention that, besides Liz Carroll, pictured, no one could confirm actually seeing little Marcus with her in the park that day. My antennae pricked up with thoughts of Susan Smith in South Carolina. The “grieving” foster mother even held a press conference, pleading for the return of Marcus and even going so far as to question the police effort. The sheer, fucking audacity.

Sure as shit. Bad Gawd. Sorry, Bob.

Fugitive polygamist leader Jeffs caught

LAS VEGAS - The leader of a polygamist breakaway Mormon sect who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List has been arrested and faces sexual misconduct charges for allegedly arranging marriages between underage girls and older men, authorities said Tuesday. Warren Steed Jeffs, 50, was taken into custody after he and two other people were pulled over late Monday by a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper on Interstate 15 just north of Las Vegas, FBI spokesman David Staretz said. The leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was wanted in Utah and Arizona on suspicion of sexual misconduct for allegedly arranging marriages between underage girls and older men. He assumed leadership of the sect in 2002 after the death of his 98-year-old father, Rulon Jeffs, who had 65 children by several women. Jeffs took nearly all his father’s widows as his own wives. He is said to have at least 40 wives and nearly 60 children. [...] Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard told KTAR-AM of Phoenix that Jeffs’ arrest is “the beginning of the end of … the tyrannical rule of a small group of people over the practically 10,000 followers of the FLDS sect.”

Oh, come on. Tyrannical? Please.

The FLDS Church split from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when the mainstream Mormon Church disavowed plural marriage more than 100 years ago.

But that would mean negating the revelation from Smith. Is that wise? Come to think of it, how do you know when revelations are true or false, anyway?

Jeffs has been called a religious zealot and dangerous extremist by those familiar with his church.

And those who belong to his church think that Jeffs is simply doing what God commands.

We certainly have had our share of crazy fundies highlighted here but, for sheer batshit crazy, I think you’ll find that Aleta Smith takes the cake.
“TUPELO — Aleta Smith, who donated her kidney to a 20-year-old college student last year, wants it back now that the student has changed religions.
Smith, a self-described “on-fire Christian,” gave her kidney to Hannah Felks, a Lutheran and regular Christian camp counselor, last year after seeing Felks on the local news.
“She was going to die unless she got a kidney,” Smith says, sitting on the porch at her home. “They portrayed her as this nice Christian girl who works with kids. I saw it as a great opportunity to help a sister in the Lord.”
The surgery grabbed headlines and Smith was lauded for her selflessness. But shortly after the surgery, Felks embarked on a “spiritual journey” to try out other religions, and settled on a blend of Pagan and Hindu beliefs.
“I wanted to get away from the belief system I was raised in and find the truth for myself,” she says. She took a semester off to travel the world visiting spiritualists on three continents.
Smith was aghast when she heard of the conversion, and she quickly wrote a letter asking Felks to re-convert to Christianity or return the organ, saying it was donated under false pretenses.
“I feel helpless,” she says. “Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who’s going to hell.”
Smith suffers nightmares of her former organ filtering “strange Asian teas, pig blood and witch doctor brews in Africa,” she says. She wonders if the Lord really wanted her to donate the kidney, or if she acted on a “triple-espresso high” she had that morning. She is also concerned that when her body is resurrected, it might be incomplete.
Felks frets that Smith is an “Indian giver,” and says religious affiliation was never an issue.
“The kidney’s working fine,” Felks said by phone from Thailand. “I feel bad for Aleta. She did something wonderful for me, but that doesn’t mean she gets to control my life.”
In the meantime, Smith has alerted several dozen prayer chains, and her women’s Bible study group is praying 12 hours a day for the re-conversion of Felks — and Smith’s former kidney.
“I’m all for spiritual curiosity,” she says, “but you’ve got to settle these things beforehand…”

Eve, here’s the money quote:

“…My kidney belongs to Christ. It will never be Pagan.”

Another really good post over at Pharyngula, with some straightforward comments about knowledge, certainty, and belief:

My certainty that I shouldn’t step out of my second-story window, or that I shouldn’t eat a large cake of rat poison, don’t come from personal experience, but they aren’t dogmatic, either — although I’m awfully darn certain that warfarin and high velocity impacts with solid surfaces would probably be lethal. I can think of many examples and experiments that demonstrate these facts without actually having to experience mortality personally, or requiring blind adherence to unsupported dogma. Similarly, I am sensible enough to see that religion is an irrational course, without having to actually meet God face-to-face, and without having to comb through every particle of the universe looking for him. Waffling is not a virtue, nor is an absence of conviction a signifier of open-mindedness — not when the evidence all points one way.

Given the fact that “possibility” by itself is never a counterbalance for any belief, it seems relatively plausible that atheism shouldn’t be any problem for anyone.

But I could be wrong…

So I’ve been driving by this thing several times a year for the last 3 years and I finally pulled over and took a picture of it a few days ago. This is located in Frostburg, Maryland on I-68. According to their website, they started construction on this boat in 1976. Not a thing has been done to this structure in the past 3 years. I wonder what the holdup is. Funding low??

The Ark is being constructed to the specifications of Noah’s original Ark–450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. To give you a better idea of what that will look like–Imagine a structure one and half
football fields long and three stories high!

verb

1. To instruct in a body of doctrine or belief: drill, inculcate. See teach/learn.

2. To teach to accept a system of thought uncritically: brainwash, propagandize. See teach/learn.

Bachodi over at The Bach recently emailed this image to me. Apparently it’s from a Christian children’s coloring book from 1954 called Listen and Do published by Pacific Press. Starlen over at splitlevel has scanned the whole coloring book and posted it over at Flickr. Definitely check that baby out…

Well, I am off on another trip — this time to help our daughter move from New Haven to the Philadelphia area. I didn’t want ya’ll to think I defected to the “dark side.” I won’t have computer access much during this week away, and will check in when I can, but won’t be doing any blogging until I get back home. I really need to pry myself away from blogland and the computer and take a break.

The dog in this photo looks just like a little dog we had years ago. His name was Trooper. The only difference is that Trooper had some black spots on his back. Trooper could do many things, but we never taught him to drive a car like this crazy woman did in China recently! I just had to leave you with this story because it’s so CrAzy! Human beings never cease to amuse me.

Woman crashes when teaching dog to drive

BEIJING - A woman in Hohhot, the capital of north China’s Inner Mongolia region, crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson, the official Xinhua News Agency said Monday.

Xinhua did not say what kind of dog or vehicles were involved but Li paid for repairs.