Florida town casts out Satan - Its that simple!

CNN.com - Florida town casts out Satan - January 29, 2002: "'Satan, ruler of darkness, giver of evil, destroyer of what is good and just, is not now, nor ever again will be, a part of this town of Inglis,' Mayor Carolyn Risher says in a proclamation, which was issued on official town stationery."

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Is there any point even trying anymore? Bloody nora. What inspired the proclamation? September the 11th of course. You know that thing, where people crashed planes into buildings 'cos they thought thats what god wanted.

Remember people, it's good to blame a cartoon devil that represents all evil in all its forms, because then you don't have to trouble yourself to understand it.

Theres a video of her ramblings - but as I'm not on godly american soil I can't partake. I'm sure I've missed a very Erudite speaker.

The Apprentice: Cymothoa exigua - you're fired!!

I watched a repeat of the Beeb's Apprentice last night. This week the job was to find an artist and host a night to flog as much stuff as you could. One of the contestants disliked the art he had to sell - refusing to sell the ones that featured a dead fish placed between two boobies. Because boobies are rude. After censoring his Artist he then went on state that, whilst describing her art, she talked about evolution and that "she may have evolved from a fish - but I didn't". Depressingly this wasn't even challenged by those with him at the time.

I've also been reading about Cymothoa exigua - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - a parasite that attaches itself to a fishes tongue and proceeds to eat some of the food that enters the fishes mouth. Eventually it cuts of the blood to the fishes tongue, destroys it and clamps onto the remaining stub - forcing the fish to use the parasite itself as it's new tongue.

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Well, Mr "Bound-to-be-fired-in-the-next-few-weeks" I would rather have Evolution be responsible for my Great^(lots) Grandad having been a fish, than having to believe that when God was setting up his ecosystem for the planet he decided that it was missing a creature designed to rip out your tongue and take it's place. Imagine how shit the world would be if he forgot to invent that!

At least Noah managed to find all the fresh water parasites that would have died in the saltwater flood and keep them alive so that a tired atheist could despair at the horrors of the natural world when surfing wikipedia an 2:30 in the morning.

Oh well, at least Skeptobot will go to the top of the rankings for the countless "The Apprentice Cymothoa exigua" google searches. That will definitely get us new readers...

Turkey's secular protests

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Huge rally for Turkish secularism: "Tens of thousands of people are rallying in Istanbul in support of secularism in Turkey, amid a row over a vote for the country's next president."

There is a scary situation in Turkey at the moment. With the new President appearing to be a fundamental Muslim, arguments over the validity of his appointment, the public rallying for secularism in their government with the protests getting 300,000 people in attendance, and the Army (which has a history of coups) stating that it will defend secularism.

I don't really understand the details of whats happening, but this seems to be a huge event thats being ignored - so I'm going to look into in as soon as I get chance. Here's hoping the people's protests work.

A military coup would be a terrible thing, as is a democracy becoming a theocracy. Unless the peoples protests are sucessful in preventing - or at least constraining - the actions of this new religious government the outlook is pretty dire.

Aside: I'm trying out a new blogging plug in. This should allow me to make more frequent (and worse) posts to the site. Still more content is better right?

10 easy steps to a Facist USA

This Guardian article has been making the rounds on various blogs - but it's good enough to get reposted again here. It is long, and isn't perfect. But it makes a strong point very well.

A good example of this kind of oppression is The Lives of Others which I went to see this weekend - and it's easily the best film I've seen in last year. It's about the East German Governments efforts to spy on a playwright. And that might sound pretentious and shitty, but it really isn't. It's superb. Anyhow, the point I was trying to make was that this film shows you that there was such a situation in CENTRAL EUROPE whilst I was ALIVE and playing with BOGLINS - but despite this we all seem to wander around convinced that this kind of oppression will never befall the west again.

But then if we don't even give a shit when western companies support this hideous behaviour in china, what makes us deserve it for ourselves?

Did the Devil do it?

Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people. It's the talk of the western world (unlike the 100+ people who died in bombings this week in Iraq). These terrible things that happen in the world can be understood in two ways.

Firstly, you can understand the world isn't Black and White, hell it isn't even shades of grey - it's a fucking multicolored spectrum you can't resolve with a simple catch all solution. To work out what went 'wrong' you need to weigh the hundreds of thousands of cultural factors that effect the planet and work out what direction your culture needs to walk to improve itself. You need to face difficult questions, and look at your own flaws. You may even have to except that in a free and good world, you may just have to put up with the fact that occasionally somebody is going to fall through the cracks and go fucking nuts before anyone can help him.

Or if you are
Lauren Green, FOX News Channel's Religion Correspondent, your best course of action is to suppose that there is a simple answer. And that answer is that Satan did it.

Well thats a complex and human tradgedy solved then isn't it? The knowledge that a big red cosmic space demon is larking about making mischief really helps humanity head forward.

She starts well;

Was Cho Seung-Hui schizophrenic … psychotic … manic-depressive? Or were the shooting deaths of 32 people, including Cho himself, at Virginia Tech University part of the ongoing struggle between God and Satan … good against evil … lightness and darkness?

She's not telling us the Devil did it you understand. She's just asking. Some would call the question mark a cop out that lets Fox spout whatever nonsense they like. Those people would be right of course.



Clearly she's being an unbiased journalist reporting the facts, her personal views aren't important:

The battle of good vs. evil in all of us is not a simple choice between two forks in a road, but a cosmic war being waged over our souls.

Oh wait.

It makes you want to give up. But Skeptobot will always be here, weeping and searching for a glimmer of hope that humanities not failed in it's quest to be more than a bunch stupid animals running from shadows.






Skeptobot Rises From the Ashes

Because Blogger's update to make you use google accounts has finally decided I do own Skeptobot (sorry about that) and because some things, some terrible things, can't be ignored - Skeptobot has risen from the grave this Easter like an awesome Zombie Jesus.

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