RIP Christopher Hitchens

A great man has died.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949 – 15-12-2011
Christopher Hitchens was a man of controversy. He was not afraid to pick sides regardless of their popularity. He relentlessly attacked people and beliefs that he thought were wrong. Taking aim at increasingly bigger targets God was the inevitable final target. In many debates with religious apologists Christopher always made the debates interesting to watch. As no other he knew how to fight the rhetorics used by apologists by rhetorics of his own. His contributions to the debates were great ones and he even got his own term for his devastating debating skills: the Hitchslap.


You will be missed by many.

Beautiful short video taken from the ISS of planet earth

Beautiful short video taken from the ISS of planet earth.

Going from the Middle East to the South Pacific Ocean on 29-10-2011.

The video begins just northwest of the Tibetan Plateau, where the greenish glow is from airglow. The line separating the plateau and the city lights to the right of track are the Himalaya Mountains, with cities like New Delhi, Lahore, and Islamabad standing out. Continuing down track, one can spot the brightly-lit city of Calcutta just right of track before flying over Burma and Thailand. Thailand's capital city, Bangkok, is the brightest-lit city in the video. The white lights of the city can be seen nearby the green and purple lights on the Gulf of Thailand, which are fishing boats and oil rigs. Once across the Gulf of Thailand, cities like Kuala Lumpur and Singapore stand out right of track before flying over the island of Java (long, thin island downtrack from Singapore). Near the end of the video the ISS flies southeast over Australia and lightning storms, and the Milky Way can be seen rising in the sky.

Video courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Videos/CrewEarthObservationsVideos/

Welcome to the world of venomous religion

"Cave ab homine unius libri" means "Beware of the man who has only one book".

People who find all their knowledge in just one book or source are the people who think they know it all and have the right to impose their perceived wisdom on all others. Religions like Islam and Christianity are some of the worst examples of this. Before Christianity Europe had relatively tolerant Celtic, Germanic, Nordic and other religions. They usually where not as patriarchal as the Abrahamic religions and where not as absurdly hellbent on the correct rituals and dogma's so they where relatively moderate.

Christianity changed all that. Tolerance was gone and everybody was trying to impose their views on everybody often with social pressure and even violence. Religion had become not a source of enlightenment and spirituality but of very earthly things like vanity, power, jealousy, hate and intolerance.

The same goes for Islam. The Arabian Peninsula had religious tolerance and a plurality of faiths. When Muhammed finally came to power in Mecca and Medina all the religious tolerance he had previously preached was thrown out of the window and all non-Islamic religions where prosecuted and if possible even exterminated. Where ever Islam took root cultural diversity was crushed by the forces of religious hate.

After these Abrahamic faiths came to power their expansion was enforced with a storm of intolerance and an ocean of blood. But ironically enough they claim to bring peace. They claim to liberate the unbelievers. The truth is that they have brought a mental poison that imprisons the mind and has taken over most of the world. Sadly that poison works particularly well on defenseless children. Close minded religions are even growing as they are predominant in countries with poverty and high birth rates. As long as they poison the youth the future is not safe for tree thought. Humanity cannot have a stable future if religions that are anti-freedom, anti-individualism and anti-tolerance are dominating the planet.

An intellectual antidote against poisonous religion is needed for a better future. For a future of personal freedom from ancient desert dogma's. This blog is about a world without the need for organized intolerant religions. Faith should be personal spirituality, organized religion is about telling others how and what they should believe. The latter has proven in the past to be the source of many problems and few benefits so there must be no future for it.
The focus of this blog shall be atheism, agnosticism, ignosticism, secular ethics, debunking apologetic arguments, a little philosophy, arguments against the existence of God, errors in holy texts, immoral religious acts, some biology and the occasional irrelevant topic.

I hope this blog will inspire myself and others and will spark some interesting debate.