Tales of Ordinary Madness

My good friend Sunil asked me the other day why I was so harsh on religion. If I remember the timing correctly he was responding primarliy to the “Crazy vs Religious” cartoon I posted below. Sam Harris summed it up for me very well in the video below, but I’d like to paraphrase. If I came to you and insisted that there was inside of me a giant invisible machine powered by invisible winged monkeys that generated the very energy that kept all of life going, you would dismiss me a crazy person. This is a totally rational response to what I have claimed. Unless I can provide some shred of evidence, I should be dismissed as a kook. However, religion is given a pass when it comes to rational thought. Challenge religion to produce any evidence of its claims and suddenly you are guilty of oppression and religious intolerance. Claiming that a man walked on water, or rose from the dead, or flew off into the sky on a winged horse, or parted the sea is no less crazy than my winged monkeys whodrive the giant love engine. As I’ve said before, how can we as an rational animal be expected to advance, when we insist on bringing the boogey man from the past along with us.

As long as religion continues to attempt to change laws or prevent archaic laws from being changed (like preventing two consenting adults from legally marrying), I will speak harshly of religion. As long as religion keeps attmepting to prevent birth control from being taught in schools or preventing condoms from being distributed to a contintent whose population is being decimated by AIDs, I will continue to speak harshly of religion.

Win a WII.

I’m not a big fan of contests or lotteries or the like, but since this one is being sponsored by a friend, I figure I’ll give it a go.
Rob Schultz, of TrueBlueTitan is holding a contest to win a Nintendo WII. All you have to do is post a comment on his blog and sign up for his RSS feed, or write a blog entry about his contest. All the details can be found at the link above.

Rob recently took the plunge of self-employment, quit his job and is now launching a career as what he terms an “internet entrepreneur”.
It’s a scary leap, one I couldn’t take, but I hope that it works out for him.

Anyways, check-out his Win a WII contest over at TrueBlueTitan.com and take a stab at bringing that WII home in time for Christmas.

Stacy was one of my best friends growing up. I just love her and her family. It was nice to finally spend some quality time with her and get a chance to get to know her husband Ryan.

My friends really can work wonders. I present Matt’s improved image of me with the Tiger Lillies!

Thanks Matt for salvaging the picture for me!

Over the last few days, I have been in touch with a woman that I worked with during the Internet boom days. It was nice to hear from someone who I thought had disappeared into oblivion (isn’t the Internet great!).

Her and her husband own a full service motorcycle and repair shop in Bloomsburg, PA (just Northeast of Harrisburg) called American Cycle Fabrication. They came to this country from South Africa and told me some great stories and taught me some great South African slang.

They even had a write up about them and their motorcycles in the South African Playboy – from what I recall Paul was an expert craftsman and specialized in vintage motorcycles (probably not the proper term – but when we were still in Harrisburg I saw some of his handy work and I couldn’t call him anything else).

Well that’s pretty cool you say – well guess what – it doesn’t stop there – Barbara just informed me that they had one of their motors run in Speed Week in Bonneville. 18 of the 40 records where set at Bonneville by motorcycles and of those 18, 3 were set by the bike sporting their engine. I’ve included a picture of the bike below.

Two muffins are sitting in an oven. One muffin says, “Wow it’s hot in here.”
The second replies, “Holy shit! A talking muffin!”

Thanks to Ron (a coworker) for sharing this with me.