This has to be the best speech I’ve ever seen.  It amazes me the he writes the majority of all his speeches.  His passion and integrity are incredibly inspiring. I seriously believe that he can turn this country around. Please consider voting for him this November!

I’ve been thinking about this for the last day or so now and I just can’t figure it out. The nomination of Sarah Palin seems like such a stupid move to me.  With all of the other well qualified and popular candidates he could have chosen (Romney, Huckabee, Ron Paul etc.) it just doesn’t make sense to pick Palin.  Even if he was dead set on choosing a woman to try and get those Hillary voters, why not pick Condoleeza Rice or Kay Hutchinson the governor of Texas or any number of well qualified Republican women.  But Sarah Palin?  I know she’s cute but come on!  Here’s why I don’t think it works:

1. She’s dangerously unqualified.  Her only major experience in office has been the governorship of Alaska for the last year and a half.  She has zero foreign policy experience and mentioned several weeks ago that she had no idea what a Vice President actually does. Historians are saying she is the least qualified person to join a political ticket in the modern era.

I can understand McCains desire to put someone younger on the ticket, because if elected (god forbid) he would be the oldest president ever going into his first term.  Why risk the second in command having no idea what she’s doing, if something should happen to him? Especially at a time when we’re fighting two wars and the economy is in crisis.  I don’t get it.

Plus she’s going to look like a light weight next to Biden in the vice-presidential debate.

2.  It’s demeaning to woman.  It’s clear the main reason she was picked was the vain attempt to pick up disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters from the Democrats. She made this crystal clear in her acceptance speech citing Hillary Clinton’s historic run and her 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling motif.  I think its insulting to think that the only reason Clinton voters liked Hillary was because she was a woman. What does it say about the guy, that he picked his VP not because of her experience but because of her gender?  

Seems like her insistence on mentioning Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail isn’t going that great either.

3. She’s not the moderate or change agent McCain says she is.  When it comes to her social views she is to the right of the religious right.  She wants creationism taught in schools and doesn’t believe in abortion under any circumstances even in the case of rape or incest.  Unlike the portrait McCain painted of her in his speech, she is in the pocket of Big Oil in Alaska.  She wants to drill in ANWAR and wants polar bears taken off the endangered species list to make it easy for oil companies to drill in their habitats.  She has also been on each side of the issue of the ‘bridge to nowhere‘ lamenting the fact that congressional funds were not more forthcoming to complete the bridge as late as 2006.  

I still think Romney would have been the best choice for McCain.  He has a lot of love among conservatives.  Every Republican I know at work was pulling for him in the primaries. He also ran a successful business and has the perception of knowing a lot about the economy, which is shaping up to be the major issue of the campaign and is something McCain has admitted he doesn’t know much about.  He also has a strong personality that could possibly stand up to Biden in the VP debate.  

Hopefully this will turn out to be one of the worst VP picks in presidential history.  It certainly says a lot about McCains judgment.  I’m seriously looking forward to the Biden-Palin debate.  It’s going to be a massacre.  

Vote Obama-Biden ’08 for real change in Washington!

I hate to say it, but Senator Obama should have seen this coming.  In this weeks “Saddleback Presidential Forum” both candidates were set to do some hard-core pandering to the religious right.  In theory, Rick Warren was supposed to host a fair Q&A time, asking both presidential contenders the same questions with neither of them knowing the questions beforehand.

Barack took questions first and, sadly, despite Warren’s assurance that he had “put McCain in a ‘cone of silence’”, he was in nothing of the sort.  He sat in his limo (which is well equipped with a radio and television) for the first half hour of the forum, before being escorted by the secret service to a room with a television monitor (though supposedly not hooked up), none of which would have stopped him from getting text messages or calls detailing the questions he was to receive.  And as the Huffington Post points out “presumably his aides have Blackberries. Coaching could have taken place without McCain hearing anything directly from the broadcast at all”.  This ridiculous incompetence and/or outright attempt to make Obama look less presidential or prepared is why churches shouldn’t be hosting presidential appearances in the first place.

None of this proves that McCain cheated of course.  But what can be verified is that both McCain and Warren violated their promises of a fair interview.  McCain violated an implied or expressed promise to have arrived at the venue by the time that Barack Obama’s interview began. Warren implied to a national audience that McCain was in a quarantined area at the time Obama’s interview began, but in fact McCain was not.  It just goes to show you that progressives shouldn’t trust evangelical leaders.  They’re not interested in being fair.  They’re interested in furthering their own conservative agenda, and eroding the walls between church and state.

Meanwhile I won’t be holding my breath for Sam Harris to host the Atheists Presidential Forum.

Last night I decided to turn on the Democratic Debate between Senators Obama and Clinton. It’s like their 200th debate or something (at least it feels that way) but I was interested in hearing their views on issues that may not have been talked about in previous debates, like the crazy gas prices, the housing crisis and what’s going on in Tibet. Sadly that wasn’t too be. Actually, they hardly even talked about Iraq, and the economy was barely skimmed over, thanks to the god-awful questions of the moderators Stephanopoulos and Gibson. A whole hour of the debate felt like something off E-entertainment news with most of the questions directed at Obama. The first question was about the media contrived story about Obama saying Pennsylvanian’s are bitter. The next was about Reverend Wright (Obama’s old pastor) and whether or not he was as patriotic as Obama. WTF! Oh and speaking of patriotic we notice you don’t have your flag pin on…(yeah they seriously brought that up) And all they threw Hillary’s way was a quick question about Bosnia that wasn’t followed up in any serious way after she admitted to lying about it (without saying the word lie of course). Then it was like “oh yeah, they’re going to be commander and chief. Guess we should ask them about Iraq and stuff”. Ridiculous.

We need a fundamental change in our media, especially in the way we as Americans get news and in so doing are able to participate in our democracy. How can we judge the candidates if we have no idea their opinions on the issues, if all we’re hearing is who misspoke today, and what this one guy the candidate happens to know said once? One of the main problems in my estimation is that the debate wasn’t on one of the 24 hour news channels (although they share similar problems) but was on ABC in prime time. ABC as a company is not set up to promulgate American democracy; it’s set up to make money. And these ‘gotcha’-style questions were in my opinion to boost ratings to make sure people were tuned in and watching the commercials that pay the bills. I’m an Obama supporter that hopes he’ll be able to bring about real change in Washington, but real change needs not stop there. Hopefully somehow, someway it will filter into the way we receive information about the candidates so American isn’t left with a democracy deficit as it has been the last two general elections with questionable counts in Florida and in Ohio. Here’s hoping…

Update: Apparently a lot of other people were as annoyed as I was with the debate. Over 15,000 thousand people have left comments on ABC’s website and 99.9 percent of the ones I read were very critical of the moderators. Click here to share your displeasure, and demand media coverage of the candidates that befits our democracy. MoveOn.org is also protesting the debate.  You can sign their petition at their site.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows Obama attracting 48% of the vote while Clinton earns 44%. Eight percent (8%) remain undecided and another 12% say it’s possible they could change their mind.

This is great news for the Obama camp!  A win in either Texas or Ohio (or hopefully both!) could seal the deal on his bid to become his parties nominee for President of the United States.  Now if only my home state of Ohio would wise up!  Luckily there’s still time, something that hasn’t played in Senator Clinton’s favor in the past.

This is another hilarious video from Flight of the Conchords. Be prepared to laugh your ass off.

“There ain’t no party like my Nana’s tea party” LOL

When you’ve heard the stories of the bible all your life you tend to take them at face value. You assume they’re true without any critical analysis. You may dissect them for what god is trying to communicate to you during your morning devotionals, or for what you think god is trying to tell the people of your congregation, but you never question the story you’re actually analyzing. If you’re a Christian your presupposition is that the Bible is God’s Word. Therefore it’s true. But what if your presupposition is false? What if the stories aren’t true? What I’m arguing is that the stories of the Bible are so ridiculous that they cannot be true. In my opinion you have to resort to sloppy thinking to believe that they are. To demonstrate this I’ll tell you a tale from another religion. You may know it. It’s the story of Joseph Smith the founder of Mormonism.

A long time ago in the year 1827, an angel named Moroni appeared to Joe Smith and told him about golden tablets that were buried in the country side. Eventually after many attempts Joe was able to find these tablets and read the hiroglyphics encoded onto them with the help of special glasses given to him by the angel Moroni. Eventually the plates and the glasses would be lost. The translation of the plates would become the book of Mormon used by the church of Latter Day Saints all over America.

The story sounds ridiculous right? There’s angels, hidden treasure, decoder glasses, and nothing about the story can be proven (sorry Mormon readers…you know its true ). It’s totally unbelievable that anything like this could happen, (and harder to believe that you could lose golden plates…I wouldn’t let those babies out of my sight!) but it serves as the foundation of Mormonism. Any Evangelical or Catholic Christian would reject this story outright as being untrue, but would turn around and refuse to apply the same standard of reason to their own book. It happens all the time, Muslims reject most of the teachings of the old and new testaments, Christians reject the Quaran. What we see as ridiculous stories in their book, we embrace in our own. Even when they’re very similar.

All this to say that the Bible has a lot of unbelievable stories in it. First God makes man out of dirt and woman out of a rib, then a snake gets them to eat a fruit and that screws up the whole world. Next the world is flooded when god gets pissed off, but luckily all the animals (even dinosaurs according to some Evangelicals) come to Noah and he builds a giant boat that fits them all in, saving them from the torrential rains. Oh and there’s a guy getting swallowed by fish only to re-emerge to preach hellfire and brimstone, another guy who flies a chariot into Heaven, and another who splits a sea in two just by waving his staff in the air. There’s a donkey that talks, a little boy who kills a giant with a slingshot, and finally god’s son comes down to save the whole mess by being brutally murdered, coming back to life and then flying off into the sky like superman. Oh and don’t forget he’ll be back to toss all the people who doubted him and this book into hell.

These stories are so far fetched that if someone was telling you they saw them take place you would think they were nuts. We’ve just heard them repeated over and over again until we believed them, and afterwards turned off our brains. Think critically about the stories in the bible. They cannot be literally true. When was the last time you saw a talking donkey, a plague of frogs, or people coming back from the dead? I’m sorry, it just doesn’t happen. It’s nice to have something to believe in, but the stories of the bible have very little substantive basis for our belief.

Coming Soon: Part 2: We Don’t Get Our Morality From the Bible

It has been a long religious journey for me, beginning around the age of ten when my family first took me to church. I was baptised when I was fourteen, catechized, and later majored in Pastoral Ministry at Mt. Vernon Nazarene University. Thats around fifteen years of religious training, praying, mission trips, sermons, and endless rounds of praise chorus’. I know my stuff.

Over the last three years though there has been a nagging suspicion that God wasn’t all he was cracked up to be, and today I’m officially declaring myself an Atheist. Losing my faith so to speak, was a slow process of disappointments and the accumulation of scientific and theological knowledge. I’m not really fond of the term Atheist though, because it only describes what I’m not. I’m not a Theist. I don’t believe in a god. I prefer the term Rationalist or Secular Humanist to Atheist, because both terms describe what I am: committed to reason, science, and the belief in the beauty and sacredness of the lives of human beings. I’ve come to the conclusion that the proof for an all powerful God is lacking, especially a God who ‘loves and wants to have a personal relationship with me and others’.

The reasons I don’t believe are numerous so I’m planning on discussing each of the reasons in depth in different posts. In these updates, I’ll mostly be discussing this as arguments against Christianity, only because its the religion I am most familiar with. Sorry if you guys from other religions feel left out.

I think you should also know that I’m a really happy person, much happier than I was as a Christian. Because I’m criticizing something though, these posts are probably going to sound pretty negative. I apologize for that in advance but hope you’ll keep reading.

I also hope these posts can in some way raise your consciousness about the subject or at least let you know why I believe what I believe. Feel free to disagree with me, or argue a point I make. I’m open to hearing you’re opinion too. I won’t lash out or say you’re stupid for believing in god, I think its an important part of many peoples lives. But these are the reasons I cannot believe.