francis collins

aparantly fraancis collins is going to be put in charge of the nih, as always Richard Dawkins hits the nail on the head:

I know we are all supposed to say it doesn't matter how ridiculous somebody's beliefs are, so long as he leaves them at home and doesn't thrust them on other people. This is often said of teachers. For example, it doesn't matter if the science teacher believes the world is 6,000 years old, so long as he tells the children the scientific estimate is 4.6 billion. But I can never be quite happy with this. Surely the fact that somebody believes really dopey things tells you he isn't INTELLIGENT enough to teach, even if he keeps his stupid beliefs out of the classroom.

Now, Francis Collins is a very nice man, he doesn't SEEM stupid, and I think Bill Maher was mistaken when he told me, on television, that Collins believes in a talking snake. But he presumably believes the things his Biologos Foundation advocates, for example the view that God causes miracles to happen (illustrated with a picture of Jesus walking on water). Can somebody who holds such anti-scientific and downright silly beliefs really be qualified to run the NIH? Isn't he disqualified, not by whether or not he leaves his beliefs outside the laboratory and the committee room, but by the very fact that he is capable of holding such beliefs at all?

Richard

why do atheists hate your sky daddy?

You might wonder why hate and spend so much time arguing against something that doesnt exist. My response would be to ask why you spend so much time worshipping somthing that doesnt exist? then theres the fact this made up thing causes people to fly planes into buildings and believe the earth if 6000 years old.

How old do people live to?

As you know, the bible says that people lived thousands of years. I think there are 3 explanations and i ask you to decide which is the most plausable:

The bible is true
That people really live to thousands of years even though science has shown that people dont live that long. This option would only work if youre an idiot planning on throwing science out of the window

The bible is misunderstood
That we are misunderstanding how they measured ages when the bible was written. The problem is that your bible was translated by a proper translator and so is unlikely to be mistranslated.

The people who wrote the bible were stupid
The bible was written before scientists discovered how long people live and before theyd worked when people die they just guessed and got it wrong.

Ckearky option 3 is the best explanation for this and i hope we all agree that the bible just got it wrong.

Craig vs hitchens debate

Aparantly the hitchens vs craig debate was put on youtube however was taken of before i got to see it. Judging by some of the comments left here craig must have been slaughtered:

i saw these yesturday, excellent series of q&a's Christopher won hands down :)

I've discussed this kind of thing with theists .Some of them asked me if I had heard William Lain Craig , as if he was this marvellous philosopher with proofs of Gods existence , well I'm less than impressed , He's rubbish

avatarI've just finished listening to William Lane Craig's opening arguments, and all I can say is:JESUS CHRIST!...Hitchens could, honestly, just come on now and break wind, and that would constitute a successful rebuttal.

sbooder- Even I could have torn this guy a new asshole- and thats not too impressive.

Clarifying my last post

Firstly, somebody called crusader for truth wrote on my last blog post:
"Mike, sorry dude but I don't think that's what Dawkins was saying at all. You have to marvel at the ways of the world, and the beauty of nature, but that doesn't mean that a god of any kind made these things."

I agree that we dont need a sky daddy to marvel at the world, however dawkins does believe we are robots. In an interview he said the following:
Far from it. A robot to me, then and now, is potentially an exceedingly complicated and indeed intelligent being. I was using the word robot as almost a sort of poetic evocation of the idea that here is this fantastically complicated machine which has been programmed to do something. What interested me is that it has been in advance programmed to work by all manner of complicated, flexible and if necessary intelligent means towards one end, which is the propagation of the DNA which did the programming.http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Interviews/genes_and_determinsm.shtml

More atheist discrimination

ive noticed a common method of discrimination on the internet. Often websites will ask if you are a robot (with a yes/no) option or a set of random words you need to type. However this assumes that people arent just biological robots which is contary to what richard dawkins teaches.

How people should think

I think there are some fundamental things which need explaining. Most xians dont seem to get these rules and it caused them to come up with really stupid arguments. They are:

1)If it supports atheism then its proberly true. You see, xians have a reputation for lying and getting things wrong(just look at the creationist movement) whereas atheists dont. Lets put it like this, if someone came to you and said they saw a flying pig...then someone else said they had evidence the first person hadnt seen a flying pig. Who would you believe? So information which supports atheism is more reliable.

2)If it supports xianity then it isnt true. The reverse of point 1. people dont rise from the dead so any argument that suggests otherwise is invalid

3)If its on the internet then its proberly true (taking into account points 1 and 2) The internet isnt run by the governement or the church and so anyone can post the truth on it.

This ties into the sceptical aproach that only believs things backed up by good evidence and logic.