Here Is Why Pope Is Against Condoms

Unlike protestant faiths which creates new members through active evangelism, all of the 1 billion Catholics creates new members through procreation & child baptism. The number of evangelical movements in the catholic faith is very low compared to protestant faiths.

Since their gods are not omnipotent enough to pay bills, all religions need new members for their monetary needs (i.e. paying clergy, maintaining religious facilities like buildings & churches). So the catholic faith cannot afford to have a lesser birth rate in their religion.

This is why the pope is very scientific when it comes to evolution & big bang, but very unscientific when it comes to proven methods for disease prevention. Therefore he cannot allow condoms in his religion.

It could be possible that soon all protestant faiths might unanimously ban condoms too. That will happen when, their membership count is large enough to be sustained through procreation alone and with very little evangelism.

We atheists must focus on de-converting the evangelists because, nobody is going to stick to the no-contraception rule. So if we persist for, say the next hundred years on the evangelists, we can cure enough people from this virus of the mind, and perhaps even prevent their self-fulfilling eschatology from happening.

(How do I know this: All of my ancestors have been catholic for a thousand years. I was catholic too, until recently.)

UN ends freedom of speech

United Nations has ended freedom of expression today by banning all criticism of religion. It is a binding resolution. So all nations are expected to follow it.

My country – India, did not vote in protest. I admire my people for this..

I don’t know about Singapore though. Looks like they will indeed implement this rule. Because it is very conservative with good number of Muslims and Christians. And they wouldn’t give a second thought to protecting the interests of atheists because we are in minority.

So it looks like, there may come a day when they will ask me to stop writing this blog.

Apparently this planet’s gods aren’t as omnipotent as the UN. This is how religions have always worked.. They come to power by silencing competing ideas.

But not yet, Lord

Economist.com

Religion, medicine and death

But not yet, Lord
Mar 19th 2009 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

Religious people seem curiously reluctant to meet their maker

HOW do a person’s religious beliefs influence his attitude to terminal illness? The answer is surprising. You might expect the religious to accept death as God’s will and, while not hurrying towards it, not to seek to prolong their lives using heroic and often traumatic medical procedures. Atheists, by contrast, have nothing to look forward to after death, so they might be expected to cling to life.

In fact, it is the other way round—at least according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Andrea Phelps and her colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Religious people seem to use their faith to cope with the pain and degradation that “aggressive” medical treatment entails, even though such treatment rarely makes much odds.

Dr Phelps and her team followed the last months of 345 cancer patients. The participants were not asked directly how religious they were but, rather, about how they used any religious belief they had to cope with difficult situations by, for example, “seeking God’s love and care”. The score from this questionnaire was compared with their requests for such things as the use of mechanical ventilation to keep them alive and resuscitation to bring them back from the dead.

The correlation was strong. More than 11% of those with the highest scores underwent mechanical ventilation; less than 4% of those with the lowest did so. For resuscitation the figures were 7% and 2%.

Explaining the unpleasantness and futility of the procedures does not seem to make much difference, either. Holly Prigerson, one of Dr Phelps’s co-authors, was involved in another study at Dana-Farber which was published earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine. This showed that when doctors had frank conversations about the end of life with terminally ill cancer patients, the patients typically chose not to request very intensive medical interventions.

According to Dr Prigerson, though, such end-of-life chats had little impact on “religious copers”, most of whom still wanted doctors to make every effort to keep them alive. Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of Christianity’s most revered figures, famously asked God to help him achieve “chastity and continence, but not yet”. When it comes to meeting their maker, many religious people seem to have a similar attitude.

——

LOL! Believers love to say, there is no such thing as an atheist. Well looks like there is no such thing as a believer… Everybody doubts.

And Doubt is the central virtue of atheism.

How Apologists Work

We non-believers must realize that, often, all that an apologist wants is, to just appear to onlooking believers like they are sophisticated and has a case to make. To most apologists, all that matters is the appearance of the debate. All they want is to shield existing believers from apostasy.

In fact, I am pretty sure that these apologists hide their doubts. They try not to face the questions they have about their own faith. Because if they really do face their cognitive dissonances, they will lose their faith, like thousands of ex- apologists out there.

This is why often we find countless apologists still sticking to old failed arguments for their case. Because they do not have the guts to read (on their own) what the real counter-arguments are.

But look at us, non-believers! We listen to everything they have to say. We don’t just skim through the books that they write against us. We read them! We read them with confidence, because we are not afraid to face the truth unlike them. And yet here we are. Having analyzed everything they have to say, here we are still sure that our worldview has a better chance of being right than theirs.

Our opponents on the other hand, are scared to open their eyes and see everything we have to show them. Because they are scared of the truth, scared of losing their faith, unlike us.

We are winning.. brothers and sisters! Keep up the fight.. truth cannot be silenced with a UN resolution!

Surrendering Rationality

Contrary to the pseudo- rational face Christianity puts up when facing us, the real deal stinks. Had it not been for us, all of these “rational” Christians would be sucking up to Young Earth Creationism in a jiffy.

Back when I was a believer, I went back home (India) for vacation. I went to the usual retreats run by the Christian cult my mom belongs to. One of the leaders of that cult announced on stage to a huge audience that “there is a 18 year old from Singapore, in the audience, and that God wants everyone to learn from his humility”.

There wasn’t anyone else in that audience from Singapore, so the “message” was intended for me, except of course I wasn’t 18 then. I was almost done with 19 a few days behind 20. And to add to that, my mom was in the inner cult in close relations with the leadership.

Although everyone kept telling me the “message” was intended for me, I kept telling everyone I was an year and a half older than 18, and so had it been indeed one of those  inerrant “messages” that my mom said her leaders got from the engineer of the universe, who would have obviously known my age, the “message” wouldn’t be widely off the mark.

(BTW this is the same cult that believes that the 12th child of the leader did not come out of it’s mother’s womb, but was directly beamed down from heaven. Can you believe I used to believe this shit back then?)

So my mom tried to get me to believe that it was indeed a real “message” after the incident. The more she tried, it felt like she had passively manipulated the event into existence, because she was in close calls with the leaders.

A few days back when I called her to seek company after I screwed up a contract with my employer, she alluded to this event in the past. And she said that the screwed up contract was a message from the engineer of the universe that I should  go back to believing what the cult leader said many years back. And then I knew how much she had tried (passively of course) to get that “message” on stage.

In learned that in cults, everyone is manipulating everyone, under the belief that it advances the “ultimate purpose.” A little white lie for Jesus.. A little bent on the truth. Who’s going to care, when it is winning souls for Jesus?

Islam is trying hard to look innocent.

While the religious leaders of Islam are out there trying to pass a binding resolution at the UN to end all freedom of speech against religion, an Islamic outreach program was here last week, trying to put up an innocent face.

They preached to a mostly Muslim choir (and me too), how Islam has all the cute progressive values like animal rights just like all other religions because the Hadeeth has stories about their prophet punishing people for being cruel to animals, and because the Suras of Quran are name after animals. They also narrated how their prophet loved the environment because he had Proper Nouns for his mostly used widgets around the house.

They also put up a Q & A session, which censored away questions about why the animals torture each other if their God wants animal rights, and they were also quick to ridicule other evidences about reality while being arrogant about their ignorance.

Still they managed to keep up a prettier face than usual with no mentioning of: female genital mutilation of Muslim girls in UK, or how that old woman got 40 lashes for getting food delivered home by an unrelated male, or the countless nonsenses clerics of their religion preach.

I think the truth about religion is simple: Religion is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is bad because hypocrites lie to themselves about reality. I bet , when the chips are down, these pious hypocrites; they will eat each other! Because they have lied to themselves about what is moral and what is not, so many times, that they don’t know what it means to be human anymore.

Now there may come a time when they might win. One day I might just disappear.. They will get their laws passed and use their internal security acts to get rid of me. But ideas cannot be put away in secret prisons or tortured. It will be back.

Try hard not to laugh at this Creationist

I dare you to watch it till the end. (Reverse psychology)

Saved a few million lives today

My professor gave the class an assignment to train a support vector machine with gene expression data of 329 children with various types of Acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

The children were diagnosed by oncologists at the St. Judes Children’s Research Hospital, which is one of the best repair shops for pediatric cancer. We used their help because oncologists at that hospital make very few mistakes. (BTW A wrong diagnosis and the resulting wrong treatment for all types of Acute lymphoblastic leukemia results in death and a lot of suffering and pain.)

But such expert doctors are not available all around the planet, so a support vector machine is trained to look at those doctor’s conclusions along with the gene expression data of the cancer cells of those 329 children. The gene expression levels were collected using the Affymetrix GeneChip which is a DNA microarray.

After training the support vector machine, it “learns” to classify cancers of patients into their subtypes by just looking at the gene expression levels. So we don’t need the best doctors at St. Judes anymore! We can give the software to any mediocre oncologist, and he/she will be able to put some RT-PCRed cDNA from a cancer cell of patient onto the DNA microarray, and our SVM will look at the data, and automatically classify with great accuracy what subtype of Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, does a child have.

The SVM was so accurate that it was even able to point out mistakes made by St. Judean oncologists in the data they gave to test the accuracy of the algorithm.

This assignment was just a replication of original research by my professor, and according to his statistics, it saves our university’s teaching hospital 51.6 million USD per year while simultaneously providing 75-80% cure rates.

Finally, I feel morally superior to a lot of faith healers..

Science…It works, Bitches

Nationalistic Dog

Perhaps people of my country shouldn’t have shown excessive nationalistic pride at the Oscars. The movie was British and not Indian, and it wasn’t exactly stellar performance either. We’ve all seen better stuff at the Oscars.

Excessive nationalism is arrogant because the world is too small and mixing. A 1000 years from now, it will be hard to define what it means to be American or Indian however hard the people of those lands try to restrict who gets to take center stage.