Take a look on YouTube!

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See, while I went to school for a while for a career in computer animation, the one thing I’ve never cared for is splashy graphics on screen as a substitute for a compelling plot.  I want an intriguing story, complex characters, well-written dialogue and an in-depth plot that comes together to make a truly memorable movie or TV series.  Far too many directors in Hollywood (Michael Bay) think that explosions and CGI make up for all of that and unfortunately, there are far too many movie-goers who are only too happy to buy into it.

Here are three sci-fi shorts that, while beautiful, let’s be honest, are little more than extended fight sequence and effects masturbation.  I ran across them while poking around one night and, yes, they are well done pieces and I think all of them have won awards for “short subjects”, but in reality, are they any more than effects reels?

Bad Motherfucker:

This may have the most plot of the three, but it’s paper thin.  You’re dropped into the middle of an action sequence between an unnamed agent and another group of unnamed men, in a running battle to recover a teleportation device.  It’s from a first-person perspective and very well done, although it takes about a minute to get oriented, but there’s really nothing to it beyond “ooh, look what we can do!”

Ruin:

All three “films” are done with a mad chase sequence and this might be the most entertaining of them.  Some unnamed kid in a post-apocalyptic wilderness (I hate post-apocalyptic stuff, sorry) gets chased by a futuristic drone bent on his destruction.  All action, no story.

Rosa:

The final one, done in an anime-style, tells the “story” of an android girl presumably named Rosa, who awakes in the middle of an empty post-apocalyptic city, the last remnant of the “Kernel” project, meant to jump-start the planet’s eco-system.  She is almost immediately set upon by two male cyborgs who want to kill her (and eventually do) and every drop of her “blood” causes plants to grow.  Um… okay.

I’m generally cool with nice effects, but these people are pretending to be filmmakers, not effects guys and artists and one of the biggest elements of being a filmmaker is being able to tell a compelling story.  I’ve seen plenty of shorts where they manage to tell a quite complex story with a beginning, middle and end, with good characters, why does it seem you have to pick one or the other?  Style and beautiful effects or story and good writing?

Why can’t we have both?

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School’s Out Forever!

No matter what the Catholics want you to believe, the fact is, they’re failing miserably.  It isn’t just the churches who have suffered from plummeting membership for years, it’s the Catholic schools who they rely on to brainwash kids into lifelong Catholic zombies, that have seen fewer and fewer students coming through the door year after year.

In the past decade, Catholic schools have seen a 24.5% drop in attendance and more than 2000 schools in the United States have closed or consolidated.  Chicago’s Leo Catholic High School for Boys has fallen from 1200 students in the 1950s to just 157 this year.  New York is going to lose 24 schools this year, according to the local archdiocese.  Of course, this isn’t true everywhere, there are small pockets of growing Catholic influence like Indiana, Texas and Florida, but the news just isn’t good for Catholic education in general.

Of course, the Catholics try to spin it like this is a bad turn of events.  They claim that the estimated 2 million students educated in private religious schools save taxpayers over $21 billion a year, but that’s simply not the case.  Public schools are funded by property taxes, those taxes are raised whether the students to to public schools or not.  The only thing that private schools do is reduce the amount of money families have available to spend because they are paying for schooling twice.  I’d rather see that $21  billion pumped into the economy through local businesses than wasted on religious education.  At least local businesses pay taxes on the money they collect, unlike the Catholics who are tax-exempt.

Catholics claim that it’s the charter schools and changing demographics that are harming them but I suspect that it’s a better educated society that is driving people away from religious schools and churches in droves.  Of course, the Catholic sex scandal can’t be helping them.  Add to that the fact that Catholics typically give half as much to their church as Protestants, 1.2% vs. 2.5%, I’m not surprised to see them running out of money faster.  With weekly Catholic church attendance down dramatically since the 1970s, falling from 47% to 24% in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, the schools will only continue to suffer unless they can find a way to boost their ranks.  Many archdiocese are trying to appeal to the Hispanic community as a means of filling their classrooms, but the honest fact is, they will continue to lose money unless they can appeal to a more affluent clientele.  The traditional low and middle-income students just won’t cut it, but the high-income students often come from families with excellent educations who don’t fall for religious bullshit in the first place.

Is it any wonder that the whole religious infrastructure is failing?  If they cannot keep indoctrinating kids with their nonsense, those kids will not go to their churches, won’t give them money and churches and schools will continue to fail.  The whole system is spiraling into oblivion and personally, I think that’s a very good thing.

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This week on TV Thursday, we bid adieu to a number of programs that have shown their season finales.  Castle and Person of Interest both leave our weekly countdown this week and Arrow, Elementary and Doctor Who go away next week.  Luckily, all of these shows have been renewed for another season.  Fair warning though, because this is the end, or nearly the end, of the season for a lot of these shows, some of my reviews won’t only contain reviews, but a lot of speculation on major mysteries and hypotheses for next season!  You have been warned.

Arrow #1×22 – “Darkness on the Edge of Town” – Stephen Amell said he was worried that this penultimate episode felt so much like a season finale that he was afraid nobody would tune in again next week.  As we found out last week, the earthquake device that Malcolm Merlyn had been developing was being delivered to Starling City.  Oliver found out that his mother was involved with The Undertaking and it was all coming down to the wire.  Now that Walter was home, things should be better in the Queen household, right?  Not so much.  Oliver really has no idea how to get the information he needs, going after Merlyn won’t work, he’s far too much of a badass (sorry, John Barrowman just isn’t a badass) and the last time the Hood confronted his mother, he ended up taking a bullet.  He and Diggle work out a plan whereby the “Hood” kidnaps both Moira and Oliver and force her confession when Diggle smacks the crap out of Oliver.  It works wonderfully and she lays out The Undertaking in detail, claiming that her involvement was only to protect her company and her family.  She gets home just in time for Walter to give her divorce papers.  Roy tells Thea why he wants to find the Hood, he wants to be his sidekick and learn how to kick ass with the best, to keep from failing to protect those he loves again.  Well, Speedy is supposed to be Green Arrow’s partner, it’s nice to see everything come around again.  Oliver and Felicity get into Merlyn Global so she can hack his computer, but she’s not as good as she thinks and leaves clues that the police find.  Oliver essentially tells Tommy to grow a pair, but he and Laurel end up in bed together, leaving Tommy with a broken heart again.  Come on, Tommy really is a complete putz throughout the season, he’s afraid to actually do anything, he ends up a complete poppa’s boy.  That leaves me wondering how his comics connection works into this.  In the New 52 line, Tommy is introduced in the Arrow comic as Oliver’s best friend, but was involved in a hostage crisis and presumed dead.  He shows up again in Batman Incorporated #4, working for Talia al Ghul, daughter of Batman rogue Ras al Ghul.  Now while we haven’t seen Ras al Ghul in Arrow yet, I suspect that something along these lines will happen and he’ll end up teaming up with a major villain next season.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.  At the end of the episode, Oliver goes after Malcolm Merlyn, but gets his ass handed to him, his bow broken and Malcolm learns his identity.  I find it a bit bizarre that Malcolm stares down at Oliver’s unconscious body and cries “Nooooo!” since why should it matter to him?  He’s already proven he’s willing to take out all of his best friends, he had Oliver’s father killed, he’s willing to murder thousands of people in cold blood in the Glades, what’s one more?  Now I will say that Oliver’s realization that ending The Undertaking was what his father really intended him to do was interesting, after all, it’s a bit more epic than just hunting people down in a book, but assuming that he manages that in the real season finale, what then?  Clearly he won’t stop being the Hood, as he suggested here, there has to be something bigger that will keep him going, we just don’t know what yet.  In a flashback to the island, we learn that Fyers has intended to use Yao Fei as a patsy the whole time.  They are going to use their missile launcher to take out a commercial airliner flying into China, with the goal of disrupting air travel ala 9/11 and they need a revolutionary to hang the attack on, that being Yao Fei.  Yes, they do contact a commercial jet, owned by Ferris Air, as their first target.  Carol Ferris, as people may remember, is the long-time girlfriend of Hal Jordan, the first human Green Lantern, as well as the occasional superhero known as Star Sapphire.  Fyers starts shooting people to convince Yao Fei to dress up in a costume and make a video admission of guilt, after which, he puts a bullet in Yao Fei’s head.  That, I will admit, was surprising, I thought certain that Yao Fei would make an appearance in the modern world, but I guess not.  Hopefully they will keep Shado around.  Her comic origins really are no help here, in the comics, she’s a Japanese assassin working for the Yakuza.  There is a point where Green Arrow and Shado get “involved” and together, they have a son named Robert.  In the TV series, she’s a Chinese lawyer and weapons expert and daughter of a Chinese revolutionary.  I’m not really counting on a kid here.  So where does this leave us?  If, as I assume, Oliver stops The Undertaking next episode and therefore stops being the Hood, what’s going to bring him back.  The obvious answer is personal tragedy and our top two candidates are Thea and Moira.  Moira would be the obvious choice, but she’s already guilty and flawed, killing her would almost seem like justice and maybe that’s too simple a fate for her.  It could be Thea though.  The actress has made numerous tweets saying goodbye to the Vancouver sunset and previews for next week show her racing into the Glades to warn Roy of danger.  She also said in an interview to Zap2it that Roy will have a bit of a dark edge to him at the beginning of the next season, could that be because she dies?  Of course, I was also thinking that Walter might die, he’s the only one truly blameless in all of this and he’s almost freed himself of the corruption of the Queen family, what if he gets popped on the way out?  That would be sad on just about every level I can imagine.  Next, we know that there is a faceless female behind Fyers’ plan but we don’t know who it might be.  Some have suggested Moira but that makes no sense whatsoever, if it was her, she’d have known Oliver’s whereabouts the whole time and that doesn’t seem to be the case.  No, I think we have to look deeper into the comics mythology to a little-known group called the League of Assassins and their enigmatic leader, Lady Shiva.  I think this is likely because the storyline behind Lady Shiva rings very familiar with some of the story in Arrow, especially the death of Sara and the long-term disappearance of Laurel’s mother.  We’ll see where this goes as well and look forward to the real finale next week.  ★★★★★

Castle #5×24 – “Watershed” – In a case of TV definitely imitating reality, the case this week deals with a woman found dead in a seedy hotel’s rooftop water tank.  In reality, 21-year old Elisa Lam was found dead in the water tank of the cheap Los Angeles Cecil Hotel in late January.  Here, a university student, Erika Albrook, who was living in the hotel under the name Crystal Skye.  She dressed and acted like a prostitute, to the point of playing loud sex soundtracks, but in reality, she was a computer student trying to discover how her best friend died by hacking into the law firm she suspects is covering up the incident.  Unfortunately for her, someone with money and power doesn’t like it and she ends up dead, but she managed to hide her laptop and thus the evidence before she gets whacked.  However, she had help, a former employee of the law firm who ended up dead a day before our killer took out Erika.  Now we have two murders to solve and their prime suspect, a wealthy and influential politician who has an ironclad alibi.  Of course, as Beckett realizes, he’d never get his hands dirty, he’d hire someone to do it for him but who?  His brother, the black sheep of the family, of course!  In order to gain respectability, the younger brother agreed to clean up the mess of his famous sibling, who had crashed a car and killed Erika’s friend, then made it look like she had been driving alone.  Given a choice between cooperating with the police and spending the rest of his life in prison, our black sheep brother confesses and implicates the mastermind behind the whole thing.  It wasn’t a very difficult case to be sure but this episode wasn’t about the murder.  As I said last week, Beckett had been recommended for a high level job with the Justice Department and we started this episode with her formal interview.  She didn’t tell anyone about it, not only because she doesn’t think she’ll get the job, but because she’s afraid to admit to herself what might happen with her relationship with Castle if she does move  to Washington D.C.  I still think it’s kind of an absurd fear, Castle can and certainly will move to Washington D.C. to be with her, the idea that there was ever even the slightest amount of doubt was silly.  However, when Castle finds out, he gets upset with her for keeping such a monumental moment in her life a secret from him.  She does open up to Laney about it and I suspect that even Laney thought she was over-reacting.  Ryan finally tells Esposito that Jenny is pregnant, even though the audience knew a couple of episodes ago.  I’m really not sure why he wouldn’t have been at work the next day bragging about it, was there a reason this was a secret?  It doesn’t make any sense.  The fact is, everyone tells Beckett to take the job and stop worrying about Castle, yet she spends all of her time afraid of what will happen when he finds out.  At the end of the episode, after having not spoken all day, they meet at the same playground where so many firsts have happened in their relationship and Castle, in a moment that displays Nathan Fillion’s great acting ability, asks her to marry him.  Whatever happens in their lives, he wants to be with her.  It was a wonderful moment and the fact that it was just Castle, a ring and an empty park made it all the more meaningful.  Come on, this is Castle here, he’d make into a giant production if he could, but instead, it’s about as raw as you can get.  Now the question is, will Beckett say yes?  Of course she will, but when?  And what about the job?  It’s what she wants most, can she turn it down?  But there are other things to consider.  If she doesn’t turn it down, she and Castle can still be together but what about the rest of the cast?  No more Ryan?  No more Esposito?  No more Lanie?  That’s a hard possibility to swallow.  Therefore, it seems clear that the job will fall through in some way, possibly related to her mother’s murder, but that seems a bit cheap too.  They’re right, she is better than just a homicide detective, she deserves to move up and she deserves to have Castle (not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing, I can see him getting really annoying in the long run).  I guess we have to wait until September to find out. ★★★★★

Continuum #2×04 – “Second Skin” -  Now that we’re into the second season, Kiera is starting to realize that getting back home, to a time that she recognizes, may be a much more remote possibility than she thought.  When Alec detects a signal from a second bodysuit, Kiera discovers that one of her friends from the future, Elena, was thrown back in time farther than she was and has been living in the “present” since 1975.  Elena is in the hospital, old and her memory is failing, but as soon as she sees Kiera, all of that goes away and she’s as intelligent and animated as she ever was.  This gave her a perspective on what life might be for her if she just stayed in the present.  Of course, Liber8 is after Elena’s old suit.  Elena’s son had sold the unused suit at a garage sale to a couple of cosplaying geeks and when Rex, the nerdy dry cleaner discovers it’s abilities, he sees it as a means to be more valuable to his adoring girlfriend who really doesn’t seem to keep him to be any more impressive than he is.  Travis has come up with a new tactic, one that seems far too intelligent for him.  He’s blowing up gasoline tanker trucks and  using social media to gather a following.  By attacking industries that are already widely hated, he and Garza are making Liber8, at least his side of Liber8, look good, something that disturbs Kiera and Carlos.  Kiera has Elena activate the suit so they can track it, but this brings Liber8 out of the woodwork too and they all fight over the suit with Rex in the middle.  Rex is injured in a fight with Travis and Kiera shows up to get the suit back.  Rex tells his girlfriend that he wanted the suit because he wanted to be a hero to her.  She tells him that he doesn’t need a suit for that.  Elena asks Kiera to bring her partner next time she comes to see her, but when Kiera returns with Carlos, Elena had passed away, after being visited by all of her extended family.  Kiera cries on Carlos’ shoulder and mourns the loss of her friend.  Also during this episode, Alec meets up with Emily, who we saw briefly in the previous episode and they agree to go on a date.  This can be a good thing or a bad thing, naturally.  Alec certainly does need more of a social life, Kiera rides him pretty hard, acting like he has to be as dedicated to her cause as she is, but in reality, he’s just an 18 year old kid, he might be a super-genius but he also wants to have a life beyond Kiera’s mission.  Emily could either be exactly what she seems or she could be a trap, she’s being set up to look like both.  The whole time travel thing continues to get more and more confusing.  Apparently, lots of people in the execution chamber got sent back in time, but they all got sent back to different times.  We’ve now seen Elena, who was sent back 35 years farther, we know that Jason was sent back to a time before Kiera and Liber8 arrived, how many other people are we going to discover went back in the explosion?  Things are just  getting more and more complicated for Kiera anyhow, her story about Section 6 is falling apart, Carlos doubts her, Agent Gardiner doubts her, probably Inspector Dillon doubts her, Alec is getting a life and doesn’t feel like being her full-time errand boy, there has to be a time when she opens up to someone, most likely Carlos, but where does that leave her?  Next episode, she’s supposed to have a mental breakdown, not that I blame her, maybe that’s a good time to spill the beans to Carlos.  ★★★★

Defiance #1×05 – “The Serpent’s Egg” – Wow, I guess there is a world outside of Defiance!  We just don’t see it very often.  After the events of the last episode, Nolan and Amanda are transporting Rynn to the Las Vegas Prison where she’ll serve 2 years for her crimes.  Didn’t she kill a bunch of people?  Seems like a light sentence.  Along for the ride is Earth Republic Ambassador Olfin Tennety who has been trying to convince Amanda to sign on with the Republic.  Remember last episode, Amanda was less than enthusiastic to take Republic money and allow a mag-train into town?  Considering how slimy Olfin is, I don’t blame Amanda for trying to duck her e-mails.  Since this show is a post-apocalyptic western, it’s not really surprising that they were essentially traveling in a stagecoach.  I’m really not sure what the whole polygamous thing was all about, nor the discussion of Amanda wanting to be part of a group marriage.  It all seemed out of place, like the show was saying “oooh, we’re so advanced now!”  Whatever.  Anyhow, the traveling preacher pulls a gun and with some outside help, hijacks the coach.  The reverend wants the money that’s secretly being transported on the coach and kidnaps Olfin to get it.  Olfin turns out to be a really cold bitch who doesn’t care about anyone, she just wants money and power.  Nolan and Amanda kill the hijackers and arrest Olfin for planning on ripping off  the Republic and harming their interests.  Once they get back to Defiance, they put her back on the next transport out for trial, but don’t know that she’s almost immediately released by her underlings.  In the b-story, Irisa, who has stayed behind in Defiance, meets up with a Castithan that she is convinced had kidnapped and tortured her in her youth.  In a flashback we see that Nolan had rescued her from a Castithan cult and that’s how he came to adopt her.  According to the cult, Irisa is the chosen one, the destroyer of worlds, she is the gatekeeper… ahem.  Tommy spends a little while  trying to convince her not to kill the Castithan, but once he finally admits that he not only did all the things she said, but that he relished it and welcomed being killed by her as her final test, he starts to enjoy the idea of taking this idiot’s hide off.  In the end, they just let him go because killing him would be what he wanted, his biggest failure comes from not getting his way.  They get back to the lawkeeper station and Tommy admits he’s fallen in love with Irisa and they end up having violent sex on the floor.  Now this episode had a couple of problems.  Olfin was really pretty undeveloped as a villain, although it was pretty obvious from the beginning that if she had a mustache, she’d be twirling it.  Way too Snively Whiplash for my tastes.  Everything she did was clearly set up to show how evil she was, the audience doesn’t need to be whacked over the head with it that many times.  I suppose it was good that Tommy finally got to make the moves on Irisa, he’s been giving her the puppy dog eyes ever since she showed up in Defiance.  Of course, he’s still not a very well fleshed out character, most everyone on the show fits into that category, although we are starting to get some solid backstory with each and every episode now so I’m not complaining too much.  I guess we will be finding out more because Syfy has ordered another 13 episodes for 2014.  I just want to see where this is all going, so far we have a bunch of plotlines and none of them are well defined.  I’ll keep my fingers crossed that by the end of the first season, we might have a good idea. ★★★

Doctor Who #7×12 – “Nightmare in Silver” – I’ve been very much on record saying I don’t like the Daleks and the Cybermen, but that’s not quite the case.  I loved them when they were introduced in the 60s and 70s, but let’s be honest, no matter what you do to them, they’re just not that scary or even interesting today.  Yet, at least once per series, they feel like they have to trot out one of a handful of classic Doctor Who baddies for nostalgic purposes.  I really, really wish they’d stop.  This episode demonstrates exactly why.  It was written by Neil Gaiman, so I expected better but it just… sucked.  The Doctor, Clara and the two obnoxious kids show up at the biggest amusement park in the universe, they just arrive a decade or so after it’s closed down.  You’ve got the Doctor waving around his “golden ticket” ala Willy Wonka, wanting to ride all the rides that just don’t work anymore.  It’s not like they’ve got a time machine and couldn’t just go back in time 30 years to when everything worked or anything.  Wait a minute…  Anyhow, there are a couple of people left in this junk heap, Webley, the curator of the old museum, Porridge, played by Warwick Davis, his trusty assistant, and a military platoon who are being punished for failing in their last mission.  Webley takes them into the museum and shows them his collection of de-activated Cybermen, one of which he has set up to play chess.  He challenges them to explain how an empty Cyber suit could do that, but he’s got Porridge stuffed under his chair playing by wire.  Come on, this is the biggest amusement park in the universe and the best they can do is a dwarf pulling the strings?  Heck, I can do that with a smartphone and a couple of parts from Radio Shack.  The Doctor is paranoid that the Cybermen might come back but becomes interested in a bunch of little cybernetic worms he finds crawling around so he leaves the kids and goes off on a bug hunt.  The bugs were, of course, an evolved form of the Cyberman cybermat and when they attack people, as they do to Webley, they inject some nanotech that makes the person look like a Borg.  Let’s face it, Gaiman watched the TNG episode “Best of Both Worlds” when he was writing this episode.  Also, the Cybermen can overcome any conceivable danger by simply “upgrading”.  This is just dumb, as we will see later on.  The cybermites end up taking over the Doctor’s body, but since his mind is so remarkable, he can maintain some control and we’re forced to see several ridiculous Golum-like scenes with the Doctor talking to himself.  The Doctor and the Cyber-planner in his head agree to play chess to determine their fate.  If the Doctor wins, the children go free.  If the Cyber-planner wins, they get the Doctor’s brain.  Meanwhile, the Doctor had placed Clara in charge of the military platoon, mostly to keep the commander from blowing up the planet.  They all retreat to Natty Longshoe’s Comical Castle in the middle of the park with their one gun and five electrical weapons to await the inevitable.   You know, it’s really a shame they don’t have a machine that’s capable of going anywhere in time and space so they could get more weapons, right?  Something like a… I don’t know… a Tardis?  You’d think that for a people who can blow up an entire galaxy (!), they could just go get a garrison of troops with super-weapons?  Even without the Tardis, we find out later that a ship can pop into orbit in less than 15 seconds, why does nobody try to contact one?  But no, they just keep shooting with the one gun they have, right up until the Cybermen, now in the hundreds, “upgrade” their way around physics.  That’s the problem, they’re not just improving, they’re magically becoming immune to reality.  Okay, now maybe it is time to blow up the planet, at least so long as the Cybermen don’t “upgrade” their way around it, but we have to wait until Porridge, who turns out to be the long-last emperor, says the magic words to activate the bomb, then his ship swings by to pick everyone up, before we can just blow this thing and go home.  Because, you know… no Tardis that they could just conveniently put everyone on the planet into (the inside of the Tardis is infinite after all) and just fly away while the planet goes boom.  Oh wait, didn’t they keep saying the bomb is supposed to make the planet implode?  That’s not an implosion guys.  It was just bad all the way around.  At least the next episode is the end of this series (except for the 50th Anniversary stuff later in the year) and we not only get back Vestra, Jenny and Strax (who still need their own show), but the return of River Song, which could go very well or very badly, depending on how Moffat handles it.  It’s no surprise, with episodes like this, why so many people are very, very disappointed in Moffat’s recent handling of Doctor Who. ★★

Elementary #1×22 – “Risk Management” – Moriarty called Holmes at the end of the last episode and suggested they should meet.  Of course, he didn’t mean it, in fact, he says it would be a shame if they ever did meet face to face.  Moriarty has other plans for Holmes though, he wants him to solve a case, the murder of a man named Wallace Rourke who was seemingly the victim of a random mugging.  Of course, the case really isn’t that difficult for Holmes, he hunts down a wealthy investigator named Darren Sutter, who was convinced that Rourke had murdered his sister 22 years before.  Holmes wanted Sutter to tell him all about Moriarty but instead, he went to the police and confessed, not only not ashamed of what he had done, but proud of himself.  Unfortunately, Rourke wasn’t the guilty party and Sutter had not seen his sister’s killer as he had claimed.  It was Sutter’s wife who had seen his sister’s murder all those years before and, wanting to end her husband’s life of torment and guilt, had told him that Rourke was the killer so he could get it out of his system.  Moriarty seems pleased that Holmes could find the “real killer” and, as he had promised, offers to answer any questions Holmes may have, but he refuses to actually meet.  Holmes is smarter than that though, he manages to track the calls made by Moriarty and finds himself, with Watson by his side, at a white house where he suspects he’ll find Moriarty.  What he finds though is even more shocking, he comes across dozens of paintings and a blonde woman who created them, who turns out to be Irene Adler, the “dead” love of Sherlock.  I didn’t see that coming for a second.  There are some things that I think we need to look into though.  In this episode, Captain Gregson tries to get Watson to take an assignment as a sober companion out of the state, eventually admitting that he’s worried about her because they both know Holmes is unstable and she’s constantly putting herself into harm’s way.  I agree with that to some degree, Gregson is an outsider to their relationship, I don’t think he recognizes just how dear Watson has become to Holmes or how far he’d go to protect her.  Of course, Sherlock was unable to protect the only woman he ever loved so I’m not sure what to make of that.  Still, this opens up a lot of questions.  Did Irene fake her own death or was it faked for her?  She didn’t seem all that shocked to see Sherlock, which makes me suspect the former, but that will have to be resolved in the next episode.  Clearly, Moriarty knew where Holmes would end up and set the whole conclusion up so that Holmes would meet Adler again, but for what purpose?  Are they working together?  Are they sleeping together?  Or is Adler just another pawn in Moriarty’s plan.  Only time will tell. ★★★★

Person of Interest #2×22 – “God Mode” – Wow.  Just wow.  This episode answered so many nagging questions we’ve had since the beginning of the series and it did so extremely well.  After the last episode, where both Root and Reese got access to the Machine for 24 hours, Root, with sidekick Harold, has been trying to figure out  the physical location of the Machine, with Reese and Shaw chasing after them.  We find out, through a series of flashbacks to 2010, what happened to Finch’s former partner Nathan, who was killed by the group from the Office of Special Counsel to stop him from going public about the Machine.  We find out that Harold’s physical problems were caused by injuries sustained in that attack, that’s why he walks with a limp and is in seeming pain much of the time.  We find out that this attack is what caused him to walk away from his fiancee when he realizes that being with her is far too dangerous.  All of these are story elements that have been hanging since the first season and we finally have answers.  The episode is worth a watch just for that fact.  However, there’s a lot more worth finding out here.  Finch realized early on that he’d given the Machine to the wrong people (the government) and anyone who had been involved started disappearing or dying.  I don’t blame him for going into hiding.  Both Root and Reese get special assistance from the Machine, first in fending off an attack from the Decima goons who were trying to intercept the Machine’s phone call and then in acquiring transportation, not only across the city, but across the country as they all realize that the Machine’s location must be in a nuclear fuel depot in the Pacific Northwest.  Root and Finch arrive there, only to discover that the giant room that once housed the Machine is empty.  Root is unhappy and wants to shoot Finch.  Shaw and Reese show up and Shaw puts a bullet in Root’s shoulder.  Apparently she’s not happy that Root tried to torture her.  Then the government goons show up and everyone has a chat.  The Machine had ordered itself moved to places unknown weeks earlier, Harold had, as Root supposedly had wanted, set the Machine free.  The virus that had caused the reset was, in fact, created by Finch as a means of ferreting out anyone who wanted to harm the Machine.  Now, nobody knows where the Machine is, not even Finch, the Machine is a totally self-aware entity which can now make it’s own decisions since nobody has any control.  Finch, Reese, Shaw and Root take their leave, the Office of Special Counsel guys earn a bullet for their incompetence.  We’re left to think that the Machine has vanished for a while, not sending numbers to anyone.  This leaves everyone wondering if the most powerful computer in existence is going to leave them high and dry.  Reese even suggests that Finch stop paying him since they’re apparently not going to be helping anyone anymore, but then the phone calls start again.  Reese and Finch receive one.  The Office of Special Counsel receives one.  Root, who I think we’re supposed to think is in a mental institution, receives one.  Whether they’re all getting the same numbers or not, we’re left to wonder.  While all of this is going on, Carter is being grilled.  She was involved in a shooting where she claimed the criminal had a gun, but the gun has turned up missing.  It’s all a setup by HR to get her out of the way while they try to kill Elias, they’ve arranged a prison transfer but instead, take him out into the woods and prepare to shoot him.  Carter shows up and rescues him in the end, although she has no idea what to do afterwards, she’s in a car with a convicted murderer and a couple of cops with her bullets in them.  Fusco, as with last week, was nowhere to be found.  I suspect he had a scheduling issue.  There’s a lot to consider here.  As series creator Jonathan Nolan said, this episode would spell the end to one chapter and the beginning of another.  Some of it is very obvious.  Nobody is in control of the Machine now. Shaw, at least for a while, seems to be teaming up with Finch and Reese.  Also, a lot of the mystery surrounding Finch has been revealed and he’s come clean to Reese about the mistakes he’s made in his past.  It also makes me wonder if the danger has lifted enough for Finch to reveal his survival to his former fiancee again.  We know she’s still around, we’re meant to believe that she’s not involved, can they get back together?  And who is the mysterious woman running the Office of Special Counsel?  I guess we have to tune in next season to find out. ★★★★★

Psych #7×11 – “Office Space” – Gus shows up at Juliette’s door in the middle of the night to enlist Shawn’s aid after he makes a mess of a murder scene, that of his boss at work.  Yes, Gus still works there.  It was a great running gag since he hasn’t really talked about going to work all season.  Immediately, we know two things.  First, Shawn and Jules are sort of back together and second, Gus does not react well to stressful situations.  Shawn goes back to help and together, they make a royal mess of things beyond any rational comprehension.  Then they enlist Shawn’s father, who can’t believe how much of a shit storm they’ve created, but by the time they all arrive, the murder has been discovered and it’s all they can do to keep from being under the spotlight while they try to figure out who really did it.  The problem is, Gus’ boss was pretty much hated by everyone and there are motives galore.  First on their list of suspects is the secretary, who admits she put eye drops into his drink to make him sick, but it seems that didn’t kill him.  I will admit, it was great watching Gus stand up to his boss and while he wasn’t serious about it, putting in his letter of resignation was admirable if not intelligent.  I just question why, when the investigators wanted handwriting samples to match part of that note, Gus didn’t just write a little differently?  It didn’t even seem to cross his mind.  I really liked the fact that Shawn is trying to be really honest with Juliette, even about stupid little things that she doesn’t need to know about.  At the end, when she tells him that she’d rather not be kept in the loop, that was just permission to go back to the way things used to be.  While I admit that at first, the office security guard Leslie Valerie Sally annoyed me a lot, he was very good at his job and spent most of his time showing up Lassiter.  My only issue though is that the real killer, corporate big wig Mitch Murray did come completely out of the blue and when Shawn suggested it, he copped to the murder immediately and didn’t even seem remotely guilty over what he’d done.  That seems to be a trend in recent weeks, murders are just a thing to do and the killers seem to be mostly sociopaths.  I’m happy that Jules is in on the psychic thing now, even she seems a bit confused how she didn’t see through it years ago, but I noticed in this episode that Shawn is moving away from the whole showy fingers-to-the-brow thing in favor of just being an observant investigator.  Well, he’s not that observant, they left Woody taped to the couch for half of the episode, not that Woody seemed to mind.  The best line in the whole episode was when Shawn picked up the phone and said “Spencer for hire.”  Damn, how could they have gone 7 years without using that line before?  My question, does Gus still get to be Vice President?  That would be cool. ★★★★

Warehouse 13 #4×13 – “The Big Snag” – It’s hard to predict how some of these episodes will come out, especially when the team gets split up.  Often, the writers pay attention only to one plot line and the other is just a ridiculous waste of time, it’s pretty rare when both stories are actually good.  In this episode, an artifact goes wonky (like that doesn’t happen all the time) and Pete and Myka are thrown into an unfinished 1940s hardboiled detective thriller where they have to figure out who done it in order to escape.  It’s not the most original plot they’ve done, with effects all in black and white.  I did like the idea that not only was the film black and white, but that’s what all of the actors saw in as well!  Of course, I would assume this makes some of the sleuthing difficult.  They find a stray hair and Pete declares it black.  How the hell can he tell?  Granted, the two actors did an amazing job playing their parts, doing lines straight out of Casablanca, the scenes were really funny and I highly recommend this part of the episode.  The other part… not so much, I’m afraid.  After Artie drives Claudia and Steve crazy playing the piano endlessly, they trick him into retrieving an artifact.  He thinks it’ll be easy.  It’s not.  Someone is using an artifact to steal rare cars and sell them to an disreputable auto dealer.  Artie spent most of the episode throwing himself into danger, making excuses for actually doing so.  It’s like he wants to get himself killed but doesn’t want to take the responsibility himself.  Yes, I know that Artie is still having a hard time dealing with Leena’s death, but come on, every single episode doesn’t have to be full of him moping around endlessly.  I’m not saying magically wish it away into the cornfield, but at this point, he needs a shrink, not to be annoying everyone at work.  Either lighten up or go find a psychiatrist.  Seriously.  I’d have rather seen an episode that was all about black and white 1940s noir to be honest, it would have been more enjoyable and the characters and the jokes really deserved a lot more time than they got. ★★★

Best of the Week:  Two nods this week, Castle and Person of Interest, with two amazing season finales.  My list, I can do what I want.

Worst of the Week:  I don’t see how it can go to anything other than Doctor Who.  This was an uncharacteristically bad episode in a half-season of really pretty bad episodes.  I hope next episode is better because this just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Other Stuff I Watched:  Mythbusters #12×02, Psycho 2 (Rifftrax), Nerdist #2×05

The post TV Thursday – 5/16/13 appeared first on Bitchspot.

Gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to God!

A couple of months ago, I wrote the story of an acquaintance who was battling alcoholism.  I hadn’t heard from him since he asked me about AA and some non-religious programs, but I finally got an e-mail from him over the weekend with a transcript of an exchange he had with a religious alcoholic that was trying to get him into a religious program.

Now I immediately noted in the first e-mail exchange that said theist was using some very religious-style rhetoric regarding the AA 12-step program.  From what I understand, although I’m not exactly clear on all of it, this theist knows my friend’s sponsor and when he stopped showing up to AA meetings, having moved on to a non-religious program, the theist got concerned and asked for contact information, which the sponsor provided.  Personally, I’d be rather pissed off if someone I knew, and presumably not all that well, was giving out my personal information to every Tom, Dick and Harry that came along asking for it.  Regardless, I made a mental note to tell him what I was seeing, but it wasn’t long before it wasn’t necessary, he had identified it himself.

He concluded in this e-mail exchange that this theist 12-stepper was still an addict, but instead of being addicted to alcohol or drugs, he was addicted to God.  He spoke about how much love he felt toward the 12-step program and how it had saved his life and made him closer to God.  Now, he recognized that he was unable to do anything without the help of his imaginary friend in the sky, he spent his days on his knees instead of trying to make it alone and, of course, he was now an evangelist, not only for the program, but for Christianity.  He was personally hurt that my friend had left the program and he got even more hurt that my friend had moved to a secular program where God wasn’t the most important thing in his life.  He begged my friend to come back to the fold and embrace Christianity as his only chance of ending his sinful past.  God was the only way!

Honestly, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that this kind of thing happens in 12-step programs, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it in print first hand.  I’d say it’s scary, but it really isn’t.  It’s more pathetic than anything else.  You have an individual here who is still giving in to his addictive personality, he’s just traded an unacceptable addiction for one that’s largely embraced in western society.  I looked up some of the symptoms of addiction and I could see most of them in this person’s e-mail.  He was defensive, he blamed his alcoholism on “faltering in his walk with the Lord”, there’s clear guilt and shame present in his words, he talks about how awful he feels that God had to punish him with alcoholism to get him to turn his life around.

My friend really wanted to know if he should continue to talk to this guy, seeing how I have a lot more experience debating crazies.  My advice was, unless you enjoy being frustrated, stop responding, he’s never going to change the theist’s mind and the theist isn’t going to change his.  Luckily, he seems to be doing well, has been totally clean, no alcohol, no tobacco and nothing else, for more than 30 days.  Better yet, he’s not trading one addiction for another.  If anything, he’s  becoming a stronger skeptic and non-theist than he was before.  Not only is he becoming healthier and happier, he’s getting smarter!  You can’t beat those results!

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Sidney Toler as the inscrutable Charlie Chan

My wife and I have been watching a lot of classic television and movies lately, and by classic, I mean old.  Very old.  Black and white old.  I’ve seen most of it, my wife has not so it’s fun to go back and see all the very old series, both television and movies, that I haven’t seen in a long time, plus to share it with someone who is new to them.

So far, we’ve watched all the way through the classic 39 Universal Monsters films, ranging from The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923 to The Creature Walks Among Us in 1956.  We’ve rewatched the series of Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies from the late 30s to mid 40s.  We did the 8 Mr. Moto movies made between 1937 and 1939.  We’ve seen the majority of Charlie Chan flicks in all of his guises, from Warner Oland,  to Sidney Toler to Roland Winters.  Of those, Toler is my favorite.

There are so many more to watch though, I’m just not sure what I should pick next so I’m opening it to the reading audience.  Which ones, of the following that I have, should be the next on the viewing agenda?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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You know what they all conclude the secret for  driving traffic to your blog is?  Lying.  Yes, that’s right, lying.  Doing whatever you can do, saying whatever  you can say to con people into coming to your blog, whether they stick around or not.

Want some examples?  Those are easy.

How about guest posting?  Now I may be naive but my opinion on guest posting has always been that if a fellow blogger needs help, is going to be out of town or is too busy to write posts for a while, I’ll jump in and write some content to help them out.  It’s not about me, it’s about producing the best content for their blog and being a good blogging neighbor.  But no, apparently I’m wrong, the whole point of guest blogging is to get yourself hits.  Fuck the blog you’re writing on.  You should find a blog with a bigger readership than yours and write a link-ridden post that makes your blog look good in hopes of getting a bunch of their readers to become your readers.  I’ve written plenty of guest posts in my day, but you know what I’ve never done?  I’ve never asked anyone if I could do it, I wait until I’m asked.  Why would I waste your time, space and bandwidth trying to get hits on my own blog?  It seems stupid.

How about controversy?  That seems to be on everyone’s list.  Do something specifically to piss people off.  Talk about dishonesty!  It’s one thing to write a post that creates controversy if it’s something that you really feel, it’s another to find a topic people feel strongly about and purposely write something that makes them mad so they swarm like locusts all over your blog.  Now yes, controversy sells, we know that, but running around kicking babies just to make them cry seems a bit absurd.  I can honestly say that I have never written a blog post solely to piss anyone off.  Sure, lots of what I write has that effect, but not that purpose.  Believe it or not, I don’t go out intending to be a dick.

One of the newest I’ve seen is Triberr, a site for people who will go around and post links to your posts, so long as you’ll reciprocate and post links to theirs.  Keep in mind, these aren’t people who are going to read your work ,decide they like it and then personally recommend it to others, these are just link farms.  They don’t bother to read anything  you write, they just post links by rote.  I find that horribly dishonest.  My word means something to me, if I’m going to put out a link to another blog, it means I’ve not only read it, I found it valuable and I am personally recommending it to others.  This is just dishonesty galore.  There is another one called JustRetweet that does the same thing.

The same can be said of randomly following people on Twitter in hopes that they’ll follow you back.  I put this into the  same category as paying for Twitter followers.  I find this mindless, but then again I’m not trying to look impressive, I actually want the people who follow me on Twitter or Google+ or Facebook to be fans of my work.   I’m looking for readers who are actively engaged members of my particular community.  There are so many people who follow me on Twitter and get offended that I don’t follow them back, but I’m just not going to do it unless I look at your timeline and see if you’re saying anything I might care about.  The overwhelming majority do not so they do not get followed.  The ones who try to advertise to me anyhow get reported for spam and blocked.  Honestly, although I shouldn’t, I believe that if I’m going to follow you, I’m advocating what you’re saying in general.  I’m agreeing to some degree with what you’re posting or tweeting.  If I disagree with everything you say and everything you do, why would I follow you around and attach my name to your crap?

Finally, the old StumbleUpon and Reddit trap.  This is an issue because they really don’t produce the effect that I’m after.  You can post your own articles on StumbleUpon or Reddit, or get others to do it for you, and yes, from time to time you’ll get a huge number of hits as your site gets flooded with link-monkeys.  However, the overwhelming majority of them won’t even read your article, almost all of them spend mere seconds on your site before moving on to the next link.  They won’t read, they won’t comment and they won’t be back until the next article that gets Stumbled comes along.  This is utterly pointless, except to those who make a few cents for everyone who clicks on the page.  For those of us who are content providers, who actually produce articles that we want people to read and respond to, there’s no point in StumbleUpon or Reddit and it becomes dishonest when you get groups who just go around Stumbling each other’s posts to avoid getting Ghost Banned.

So maybe that’s my problem, I’m unwilling to be dishonest.  I’m unwilling to screw other people over to get hits.  I’m unwilling to mislead people down a primrose path because I want more hits.  All of these methods could be useful in some small way, I suppose, right up until people want to use them as get rich quick schemes.

I get so sick and tired of being part of the human race sometimes.

The post The Secret to Driving Blog Traffic appeared first on Bitchspot.

Go check it out.

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I have a right to look like this!

You find some odd things over on Google+.  One woman popped up to advertise her blog  article on makeup and while it’s not something that I’d normally ever respond to, having no interest in the subject matter whatsoever, her phrasing made me drop a small comment, that makeup is not a right and that no one had a right to be free from criticism.  It wasn’t a nasty comment by any means, it just corrected some of her misconceptions about rights.

That was, of course, when the shit hit the fan.

Now I’ll be honest, I’m not a particular fan of makeup on women, I prefer a much more natural look, but far be it from me to tell women what they can cake on their faces.  I do, however, reserve the right to make my opinions heard, positively or negatively, in whatever available public spaces I decide to use.  That’s not to say I spend my time running around judging women’s makeup, such things tend to entirely fall beneath my radar, I certainly don’t chase down beauty blogs and post nasty comments in order to piss them off, my objection to the article really had nothing to do with cosmetics and everything to do with the fact that people misrepresent the concept of rights regularly.

The fact is, there is a difference between having a right to do something and the ability to do something.  This is something I’ve pointed out to libertarians on a regular basis.  A right is something specific granted by the society in which you live, given to some or all members of society across the board.  It doesn’t have to be given to all people, for instance, if a society decided that abortion was a right, it would be granted only to women because men have no use for such a thing.  Rights are enshrined in official documents or laws of the society in which they are applicable.  There is no such thing as an unofficial right.  Rights are protected.  Abilities are simply things that you can do if  you choose to.  You have the ability to go to Starbucks for a latte.  You have no right whatsoever to go to Starbucks.  Abilities are not protected.  They are not codified.

This writer was asserting that because many women (she was convinced that it was virtually all but I beg to differ) enjoy putting on makeup, that they had a right to do so and nobody had any room to disagree with them on their chosen activity.  In fact, it was somewhat of an affront to any woman who wore makeup if anyone ever criticized the practice, even if it wasn’t directed at her directly.  That’s just an absurd notion.  No matter how much you might enjoy looking like you do, there is nothing in this country, nothing on the planet, which is off-limits to criticism.  Such a right to free speech, and it is a right, enshrined in the founding documents of the United States, overrides your desire not to be criticized.  I can criticize religion, I can criticize politics, I can criticize business, I can criticize  anything I want and nobody can stop me, no matter how badly the criticism might offend them.  Offense is no defense against the right to free speech and voicing one’s opinions.

We had a short exchange which stopped the second I said “Please tell me this isn’t some bizarre libertarian natural rights thing” and she had no response to that.  It just tells me that’s exactly what it was.  Libertarians are infamous for confusing rights and abilities.  To many of them, because you have the ability to do a thing, you have a right to do that thing.  It’s a strange misuse of terms on their part.

It really bothers  me how many people use the English language incorrectly.  With all the lazy communication, the misuse of words and the confusion over terminology, how can anyone expect to have a meaningful conversation?  Words have meanings for a reason, those meanings are not arbitrary, to be altered at a whim because someone has an emotional attachment to a particular ideal and they want to apply a stronger term to their claim for added emphasis.  That’s just dishonest, use the proper words, explain your ideas correctly and may the ideas that are best supported win.

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This is hardly the first time the local Catholic diocese has had trouble, this case comes on the heels of another, where Kansas City priest Shawn Ratigan pleaded guilty just last August to producing child pornography.  In that case, Bishop Robert Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph was charged with a misdemeanor for failing to report suspected child abuse when he found that Ratigan had child pornography on his computer, yet did not report it to authorities.  I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at all, it’s the typical pattern of the Catholic Church protecting their pedophile priests.

According to David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), “We hope that someday Catholic officials will stop using euphemisms like ‘inappropriate conduct’ and ‘boundary violations’ and start being more honest.  It’s hard to believe they are trying to reform when they deliberately use vague minimizing words for these heinous crimes.”  He suggests that leadership in the diocese were well aware of the previous charges and chose to ignore it because it was not public knowledge.

Seriously, how long is  this going to go on?  We’ve already had 8 Catholic diocese in the United States go bankrupt over payments to victims of priestly sexual abuse, is St. Louis trying to make it 9?  You’d think that the Catholic Church, if it gave a damn about stopping these activities, would have a zero-tolerance policy.  If you do anything even remotely questionable with a child, if you even bend the law, you’re out on your ass with your personnel file handed over  to the police to go over with a fine-tooth comb.  Why isn’t the Catholic Church being proactive?  They’re hardly even being reactive?  I think it’s because if they did, the number of priests they’d lose in a matter of months would become an international scandal.  I’m sure this is a lot bigger than anyone is willing to admit and they’re hoping to squeak by without the whole of the United States Catholic Church going under.  It’s too bad they never learn, I just hope the downfall comes sooner rather than later.  Enough children have already been hurt by this criminal organization.

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Now before I begin, I need to point out that the author of the theist piece asserts that he is making no claims about the existence of God and I can certainly accept and respect that.  However, he immediately begins with a false proposition, based upon a bad understanding of what atheism is.  Atheism is the rejection of claims for the existence of a deity.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It has no creeds, no beliefs and no views beyond that simple concept.  However, and I find this true of a lot of theists, when your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail and they start to view the world in terms of their own beliefs, not as the world actually is.

So let’s begin.  He starts off with an almost correct assessment of what theism is.  Where he goes wrong, and this may be simply an error in capitalization, is that he asserts that theism is the belief that God exists.  God, that’s “god” with a capital G, is the proper name of a deity worshipped specifically by Christians.  Hindus, another type of theist, do not believe that God exists, they have their own gods that they believe in.  Even Muslims, another disparate branch of the Judeo-Christian mythos, don’t believe in God, they apply a different name to their deity.  I suppose we should just blame the Christians who were so uncreative as to name their deity the capitalized version of the generic word.  Some would argue that  such an error is no big deal, but when we’re looking at the accuracy of a piece and they make such an obvious error in the first sentence, that’s not very reassuring for what follows.

He then goes into a lengthy discussion of active beliefs, which is well done for what it is.  However, where he loses it is in the third paragraph where he says that atheists must believe that the God question is not true, rather than understanding the simple fact that atheism is a rejection of god-claims, not a claim itself that god doesn’t exist.  Atheism, like all forms of skepticism, is an argument not from positive belief in a proposition, but from a rejection of claims in a proposition for lack of evidence.  You can insert a wide variety of other entities and get the same results.  I reject claims of unicorns because there is no evidence to support those  claims.  I reject claims of leprechauns because there is no evidence to support those claims.  I reject claims of honest politicians because there is no evidence, yadda yadda yadda.  In none of those cases do I hold a belief that those things cannot exist, only that I see no reason to think that they do.  The same applies here, I do not reject the possibility of a god, with exception of those god formulations that are logically self-contradictory, I just don’t see any reason to believe that these gods  actually exist without objective evidence to support them.

He tries to combat this by making the argument that you cannot reject the claim that gods exist while believing that gods exist.  Unfortunately, theists do this every single day.  They reject all claims for the existence of gods other than their own, while believing that their own god exists.  However, unlike most atheists who reject claims of gods based on a lack of evidence, theists reject claims of other gods based entirely on faith.  The  author doesn’t seem to understand that there is something beyond a positive belief, it is entirely possible to have a neutral position.  Here’s an example I’ve used in the past.  Say someone runs up to you on the street and claims that Godzilla is destroying Tokyo.  Assuming for a moment you can’t whip out your smartphone and check, would you believe this person’s claim or would you demand evidence for what they are saying?  Without tangible, objective evidence, you have no reason to accept their claims, but neither do you have a reason to think they are lying.  You have to provisionally withhold assent to their claims until evidence is presented one way or the other.  That’s what atheism is.  You can believe that a god does exist, you can believe that a god does not exist, but you can also reject the  claims made by believers until they are able to demonstrate that their claims are true.  Lots of theists refuse to acknowledge this, they think all beliefs are binary, you actively believe in a thing or  you actively believe a thing is not real, you cannot simply ask both sides to put up or shut up and that’s not a realistic view of the world.

He then goes on to say that atheists, by embracing the term atheism, reject the beliefs of theists.  No, we reject the claims theists make about their beliefs.  If there were no theists making claims, there would be no point to being atheists.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there’s a concept out there of the greater red-breasted froozle.  If nobody ever talks about it, if nobody ever makes claims about it, what’s the point of being an a-froozleist?  Even in the world of gods, I can’t remember the last time someone came to my door to share the good news of Zeus.  I have yet to run into a serious Zeus apologist, therefore I don’t bother terming myself an a-Zeusist.  It’s silly.  I’d be curious to know how many people bothered to ask themselves if they were a froozle-ist before they read this article.  How could you if you were entirely unaware that it was even a potential thing?  So, now that you have heard of it, do you hold the positive belief that it is a real thing, or do you hold the positive belief that it is not a real thing?  After all, some scientist could have found a new species of bird or bug somewhere yesterday, gave it that name and it just hasn’t found it’s way into the scientific literature yet.  If you believe the claim is false, you’d be factually incorrect.  Or do you, as pretty much everyone does, reject the claim for lack of evidence but leave it provisionally neutral in your mind pending evidence in the future?  If you understand this concept, you now understand atheism.  “I don’t know” is a perfectly valid answer to an unjustified and unsupported question.  And no, before you get stupid, agnosticism is not a way to opt out of being an atheist or a theist so don’t even go there.

He spends a lot of time claiming that we’re just evading the question.  No, we just happen to understand the question, unlike our plucky theist here.  We understand that very few questions in life are binary.  Do you believe in the froozle or do you disbelieve in the froozle?  Those are the only two possible answers according to many theists, yet the vast majority of people would reject those two answers as wholly inadequate.

But let’s be honest, this is really not about epistemology, it’s about trying to force atheism into the theistic mold.  It’s the attempt to redefine other people into a specific context so that the theist can jump up and scream “Aha!  They do it too, therefore I’m justified!”  It’s really just a strawman and therefore, inherently dishonest.

I reject claims about gods and alien abductions and Bigfoot and leprechauns and unicorns for the same reason I reject claims about the froozle.  I’ve got no reason to take those claims seriously and I have no means of verifying the claims.  Bring me evidence and we’ll talk.  Until then, God is no more believable than the froozle, no matter what kind of strawman arguments you might make about philosophical belief structures.  When you don’t understand the concepts, it’s clear that your arguments are going to be bogus.

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So let’s take a look at these four arguments that atheists shouldn’t make.

1. “I just believe in one God less than you, you don’t believe in Zeus, Thor and so on and so forth”

This is one of the most common atheist memes out there, often used in the form depicted to the right.  While it might be a pithy comment, it’s also entirely wrong and it makes atheists look silly by using it.  See, the reason atheists reject Zeus isn’t the same as why theists reject Zeus.  Atheists, at least most atheists, reject Zeus because there is no evidence for Zeus.  It’s the same reason that we reject Allah, Vishnu and God.  However, Christians don’t even consider evidence for Zeus, any more than they do for God.  They reject Zeus and all other deities because they believe their God has declared all other gods to be non-existent.  Yeah, I know, they ought to read the Old Testament, there are plenty of cases where the gods of other pantheons perform miracles, but they’ve fooled themselves into thinking “the devil did it”.  That makes the statement factually incorrect, since theists do not exercise their critical reasoning skills to reject the existence of gods, they will never understand why atheists don’t believe in their god.

2. “You might as well say Unicorns exist.”

This is the only one of the four that I would find somewhat valid if done right.  I find it funny that theists get very, very bothered when you compare their gods with leprechauns, unicorns, Bigfoot or alien abductions.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a theist get pissed off because “God” and “leprechaun” were used in the same sentence, but in reality, both words have just as much evidence to support their factual existence.  I think theists get upset simply because they realize just how silly the association makes their religion sound.  I did say that this argument had to be done right, I think that it’s possible to do it wrong by making claims that unicorns or similar imaginary critters really do exist, citing the same “evidence” that theists use as proof.  I can’t tell you how crazy it drives me seeing atheists making jokes about the flying spaghetti monster and the invisible pink unicorn, I think it makes us look foolish because it’s far too easy to shift what we mean by the analogy with a strawman version of our statements.  As much as I hate to say it, theists cannot be trusted.

3. “Science can explain everything.”

While I would agree that this is a very bad argument, I can honestly say I don’t remember ever hearing an atheist actually saying it.  I suspect this is just a theist strawman, something they think atheists ask for but can never demonstrate that they actually do.  Science cannot explain everything, otherwise we’d no longer need science, we’d already know everything.  Science and the scientific method are the only demonstrable means we have of reliably discovering objective reality.  We do need to be careful with how science is handled because it’s often open to theist misuse.  Science does not have all the answers to all of the questions right this minute, that doesn’t mean that it won’t answer many of the questions in the future, nor that religion has any means to demonstrably and factually answer any questions at all.  Science is a methodology.  Religion is blind faith.  One works and we can prove it.  The other fails all the time.

4. “You cannot PROVE God.”

Yes, they’re right, it is foolish to ask them to prove the existence of God, just as foolish as when they demand that we prove that God doesn’t exist.  It’s not about proof.  Proof only matters in mathematics and alcohol.  Outside of that, it ought to be a verboten word.  We cannot expect them to prove anything because absolute proof doesn’t exist in the real world.  It makes us look bad when we demand an unreasonable standard and it opens the door for them to make similar unreasonable demands back to us.  What we ought to expect is for them to produce objective evidence for their claims.  They can’t do that, we know, but it is a wholly reasonable request.

I realize that statements like these are easy and lend themselves to posting witty remarks in 140 characters or less, but when they are so easily distorted, or worse yet, absurdly untrue, they do nothing to help our cause.  Hop on Twitter and watch what scrolls by in a busy hashtag like #atheism.  Just spend 5 minutes and watch every tweet critically, evaluate it for validity and I think you’ll be shocked at how bad most of them are.  We really need to strive to be better than the theists, we need to think about what we’re tweeting or blogging or posting online, we need to examine our own arguments even more closely than we do the arguments of the theists so that when we say something, not only is it better than what the theists come up with, it’s demonstrably factually and rationally correct.

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Over the next several weeks, the network shows start ending for the season so this list will get much shorter over the summer as I’ll be left with only the cable shows.  It will start to pick up again toward the end of summer.

Arrow #1×21 – “The Undertaking” – As the first season winds down, all of the hints we’ve gotten along the way about Malcolm Merlyn’s “undertaking” are finally revealed.  Oliver and Felicity have spent their time in the background trying to find Walter and now it finally has positive results.  After the Hood takes down a key underworld accountant, Oliver and Felicity discover a huge money transfer on the day of Walter’s disappearance to an underworld thug who specializes in high profile kidnappings.  Oliver goes to “talk” to this thug and finds out that he did, indeed, kidnap Walter, but he says that Walter is dead, he even heard the gunshot.  Taking this unsubstantiated news, Oliver presents it to his mother and Thea.  Moira storms out and goes to see Malcolm to confront him, after all, he promised that Walter would be kept safe while he was in his “custody”.  Malcolm shows Moira live video of Walter and the Hood is waiting just outside, listening to the entire discussion.  He and Felicity hack into Malcolm’s phone records and trace his call to a surprisingly high-security tenement building in Bludhaven (damn, I want to see Nightwing in the show now!).  Oliver parachutes into the complex, kills a dozen guards in one of the best choreographed fight scenes in the show to date and rescues Walter.  As Walter recovers in the hospital, surrounded by family, Malcolm shows up and asks Oliver if Walter remembered anything about his captors.  If Oliver didn’t already know that Malcolm did it, that would be pretty damn suspicious.  Finally, Oliver meets up with Laurel and she’s still distraught that Tommy broke up with her.  She had talked to Tommy and he finally came clean, telling her that Oliver was still in love with her.  She asks Oliver to explain to Tommy that it’s not true, but he admits that he still loves her, leaving her wide-eyed.  Oliver then heads off to apologize to Diggle, not only for choosing Laurel over the promise he made to Diggle, but for doubting him with regard to his mother’s guilt.  Diggle has been dead on a lot this season and nobody believes him.  I’ve left this for the end because it’s the most important part of the episode.  Usually, they have flash-backs to the island where Oliver is learning how to be this super-heroic figure, but this time we go back farther, to the group of wealthy investors who are trying to “save” the Glades.  All of them have lost someone to the violence that goes on there and are determined to make it change, but Malcolm has lost hope, he wants to destroy the entire 12 block area and start over, causing thousands of deaths.  To that end, he’s bought up 1/3 of the land in the Glades and he’s bankrolling a weapon of some sort, that’s supposed to destroy large areas and look like natural causes.  Oliver’s father and Frank talk privately about how best to stop Malcolm’s machinations, since he’s just too powerful to publically oppose.  Oliver’s father says he’s going to take the Queen’s Gambit out and, under cover of a trade mission to China, try to stop the device from being perfected.  Frank sells out and plants the bomb that destroys the Queen’s Gambit, making Moira’s later double-cross that results in Frank’s death a case of poetic justice.  We also see what a prick Oliver used to be, while he’s talking about moving in with Laurel, he’s sneaking around with her sister Sara.  What a jerk.  In recent weeks, I haven’t talked much about comic influences in the show, but there are just too many this week to avoid.  As I already mentioned above, the inclusion of Bludhaven, home of Nightwing, the superhero that Dick Grayson became after he stopped being Robin.  The device that Malcolm is funding that causes earthquakes is called the Markov device, a reference to Brion Markov and his sister Tara, who was part of the Teen Titans and, in fact, betrayed the group in the famous story “The Judas Contract”.  Both Brion (Geo-Force) and Tara (Terra) had earth-moving powers.  In one of the flashbacks, Moira mentions a fundraiser for Ted Kord, who was the second Blue Beetle.  There’s supposedly a Blue Beetle TV series in the works, hopefully Ted will be a part of it.  And finally, at least as far as I saw, also in a flashback, Laurel told Ollie that their friends Ray and Jean had moved in together, this is a reference to Ray Palmer and Jean Loring.  Ray is the silver-age Atom and he was married to Jean Loring for a time.  Jean Loring is the one who went crazy, killed Elongated Man’s wife, Sue and started the Identity Crisis.  She also was responsible for hiring the villain that killed the father of Tim Drake, the third Robin.  Amazing how all of these things are connected, isn’t it? ★★★★★

Castle # 5×23 – “The Human Factor” – Castle starts off playing with a remote  control tank on his living room rug, he drives it into the bedroom where Beckett is getting dressed and he suggests that she can remain in that state, or less hopefully.  She calls him a pervert and the phone rings, announcing a car bombing.  This episode was written by David Amman, who has done a couple of others this season including “Target” and “After the Storm”, both of which involved cases high in government interference.  This is no exception, as the crime scene is crawling with government agents the moment they arrive.  The Feds immediately take over the case, denying Beckett’s team any access to the crime scene, the evidence or even any witnesses.  In fact, it looks like the Feds were watching the driver of the car even before the car exploded, two witnesses are identifed by Castle as Men In Black and they drive off, refusing to answer any questions.  If that kind of thing pisses you off like it pisses me off, get used to it, it happens throughout the episode.  However, not to be deterred, Beckett vows to solve the murder with or without Federal assistance.  The victim, Dale Turner, turns out to have been a lawyer with a curious hobby, he ran a whistleblower website that revealed the deepest, darkest secrets of the government and big business.   Dale’s wife says that her husband had tons of enemies, after all, he told everyone’s secrets, but lately he had been more cautious than usual.  Beckett realizes that  the bomb would have to be planted earlier and goes through surveillance footage of Dale’s garage, finding a motorcycle parked there.  It turns out to belong to Monica Lane, an employee of one of the companies Dale’s website discredited, but it turns out the two of them were having an affair and she wasn’t involved in the bombing.  Dale’s wife wasn’t to blame either, she had just found out about the affair.  It looked like the team was stuck, until CSU discovered that it wasn’t a bomb on the car, it was a bomb dropped from an aerial drone that blew up the car.  Now it looked like a government conspiracy and we all know how much Castle loves conspiracies.  Of course, the government is no help, even after agreeing to a meeting, the top brass tells them that everything is classified.  The only purpose of the meeting was to learn how far the police had gotten so that the Feds could swoop in and confiscate all of the evidence.  Beckett discovers that Dale had a partner, Omar Dixon, who did all of his tech support.  Omar was on the run and was being tailed everywhere by federal agents, in particular Agent Jared Stack, a special investigator with the Attorney General’s Office.  Unlike the rest of his government colleagues, Stack was more willing to help with Beckett’s investigation after the attorney  general “convinces” him to cooperate.  While Castle plays the “rise of the machines” angle, Stack reveals that it was a government drone that dropped the bomb, but it was not in the control of the government at the time, someone hacked the system and took over.  This worried Stack and his bosses.  The only person they knew who could do such a thing was a hacker named Warburg who had been in hiding for a year and they were unable to locate him.  Beckett and Castle have no such trouble and, after shooting down one of Warburg’s own drones, find that he did, indeed, have the software necessary to hijack the drones, he had been working with Dale to release the information to the world, thus shutting down the drone program.  He had given Dale a copy of the drone software and suspected someone had made a copy and was now using it.  Warburg was concerned because human drone pilots have a conscience and can over-ride orders, while the new software he had been working on before he went into hiding would have allowed autonomous drones with no human conscience behind them.  It turns out that Stack was just using Beckett’s sleuthing skills to track down Warburg, but he wasn’t the killer.  Attention next turned to Omar, who they caught trying to get to Beirut, but he wasn’t the killer either, he was just a scared kid trying to survive.  It turned out, in fact, to be Dale’s son who was also a hacker and was angry over his father’s affair.  With the only copies of the hijacking software out of the hands of the public, Stack pulls Beckett aside and says he was very impressed with her work and offers her a job as a special investigator for the Attorney General.  She turns him down but he tells her to think about it.  There are several interesting things in this episode that if you don’t look,  you’ll miss it.  In the past, Castle was afraid to answer Beckett’s phone because they were trying (badly) to keep their relationship secret.  Now that Gates knows they’re together, Castle has started to relax.  We also know that Beckett hasn’t completely moved in with Castle, she still has her own place, confirmed by the comment at the end “How about a glass of White Zinfandel when we get back to my place.”  We do know that she  spends much, if not most of her time at Castle’s apartment though and this is where things get a bit tricky.   You could see that she was taking Stack’s offer seriously but she was afraid to upset the status quo with Castle.  She’s not planning on leaving him by any means, but to switch jobs and move away, perhaps to Washington D.C., it’s a big move and how will Castle react?  I think, from a series perspective, it’s clear that we only have a show if Castle is able to follow Beckett around and I rather doubt that the attorney general is going to allow that, no matter who Castle knows.  So, does Beckett give up her big chance and stay in NYC with Castle?  Or is this their “out” for the series, where Beckett moves to Washington D.C., with or without Castle in tow, and they wrap the show?  I guess only time will tell. ★★★★

Continuum #2×03 – “Second Thoughts” – This is a much slower, more introspective episode than the last couple and that’s not a bad thing.  There’s a new drug on the street called Flash, but according to Kiera, it shouldn’t exist for decades.  Clearly Liber8 is behind it and they’re using their new friends, the Coalition Kings, to spread the drug.  However, Travis is none too happy with this arrangement, he still thinks he ought to be running Liber8 and declares war on Sonya.  When she and Lucas meet with the Kings to finalize their arrangement, protection in exchange for Flash, Travis tries to assassinate Sonya, but kills a gang member instead.  He then tries to get all the rival gangs to join together to fight on his side, bringing along a box of former leader’s heads to convince them.  They seem to be convinced.  Alec gets into a car with his roommate and a couple of girls, all of whom have taken Flash.  Sorry Alec, I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.  The car crashes, seriously injuring everyone inside.  Kiera is worried about Alec, which is no surprise  because it’s revealed that Kiera’s sister Hannah killed herself in the future while on Flash.  Alec goes to see one of his friends in the hospital and asks her about the effects of Flash.  She says it made her feel like she was reliving a memory, but better than the actual experience had been.  He decides to use some to remember an half-remembered experience between his parents and a stranger who turns out to be Jason, the crazy time traveller friend of Kiera’s.  He’s been spinning stories for Kiera about “freelancers”, people from the future who travel through time and make selected changes here and there.  He claims that they’re after him because he knows of their existence.  I think Kiera is struggling to decide if he’s out of his mind or wise beyond her recognition.  Kiera and Carlos track an old gang contact, Gabriel, to a warehouse where they’re manufacturing Flash.  A firefight ensues and the gang is pretty much wiped out.  Sonya escapes, but vows to never again sink to criminal activity to further the aims of Liber8.  Lucas, who has been telling her that all along seems to be changing his tune.  Kiera is none too happy with Alec’s decision to work with Kellogg, warning Alec that he’s dangerous, but Alec wants to be able to shape the future and knows more than he’s letting on.  The war between Sonya and Travis continues… I find it funny how many people are fighting to protect Julian in prison.  His mother is bringing all kinds of research to him so he can prove a conspiracy and now that Travis is gone, all of the gangs are being hired by either Sonya or Travis to make him the safest person behind bars.  However, the gangs are actively killing each other so they’ll be the one that “has his back”.  It seems to me that there are so many protectors vying for top spot that Julian is now in more danger than he would have been otherwise, you never know when a knife fight is going to break out amongst his various gang security guards.  I really don’t know how much longer Carlos is going to put up with the “I have my secrets” nonsense that Kiera spouts.  Sooner or later she’s going to have to bring him in on her secret.  ★★★★

Defiance #1×04 – “A Well Respected Man” – At least they’re filling in some of the back-story as they go along, we learn that the Earth Republic has offered to build a mag-rail “railroad” to Defiance, suggesting that the city has been cut off from the rest of the Republic, perhaps due to bad blood.  Opening up the world a bit, showing what’s happening outside the town, would certainly go a long way toward providing plotting possibilities, but we’re still trying to learn about the citizens and the new world after the alien terraforming so I hope they don’t move too quickly.  Much of the story this week is between Amanda and Kenya.  Amanda disapproves of Kenya’s lifestyle as a madam and prostitute, but when Kenya is kidnapped by the big blue bioman that we saw in the first episode, Amanda and Nolan will stop at nothing to find her.  Apparently, there’s an underground drug that requires the harvesting of enzymes from the human adrenal gland.   Funny, didn’t they do this same story in this week’s Continuum?  The bioman has been kidnapping people who wouldn’t be missed and bringing them to his partner, played by former Sanctuary star Robin Dunne (yes, all Syfy shows constantly trade actors, I bet it’s in their contracts).  Knowing that there’s only one bioman in town, Nolan head to ask Datak for help since the bioman works for him, but Datak refuses until his wife, Stahma intervenes, telling Amanda that Kenya was always very nice to her, that her gift is to know how to treat people.  This makes Amanda think a little better of her sister and when Stahma says that Datak only wants to be appreciated, that appreciation shown by giving him a seat on the city council, he agrees to help and they track down the bioman.  Meanwhile Kenya and her employee Tirra manage to escape and kill Robin Dunne, um… Miko.  The bioman hunts them down and is just about to kill them when Nolan arrives to save the day and kills the bioman, bringing the bioman population of Defiance to zero.  We find out about Amanda and Kenya’s childhood, their mother was a scavenger who was killed while abandoning her children and Amanda tells Kenya a story about Saint Finnegan, the name of the man whose body mom was robbing when she died.  They have an emotional reunion and everything is better between them.  On the McCawley side of town, Rafe had given his remaining son Quentin shaft L7 to mine however he wanted, but suddenly declares it off-limits for “safety concerns”.  Quentin gets pissed off and threatens to leave the company, until Rafe sits him down and tells him that he loves him and thinks that something in shaft L7 got his other son Luke killed.  Together they go down into the shaft and discover cave paintings.  If I had to guess, I’d say this is what the former mayor and her henchman were looking for in the first episode.  What does any of it mean?  We’ll have to wait and see.  This was really a story about learning to respect others, we saw it between Amanda and Kenya, between Datak and Amanda and between Kenya and Tirra.  We’ve seen a slow progression of the relationship between Datak and Rafe as well, two fathers who have slowly learned to face tragedy, who are driven by a desire for power and who really both want the best for their families.  If I had to draw a comparison, I’d say that Datak and Rafe are very similar to Londo and G’Kar of Babylon 5.  Lifelong enemies, they slowly evolved into having an incredibly close friendship.  We also see that the real power broker behind the Tarr family is Stahma, which Nolan finally recognizes at the end.  She’s steered Datak into his successes over and over and may be the character to watch.  It was a better episode than last week but I think this show still has a ways to go. ★★★

Doctor Who #7×11 – “The Crimson Horror” – Once again into the breech, my friends, we are reunited with Vastra, Jenny and Strax, who still really need their own series, in their late 1800s attempt to uncover the mystery of the Crimson Horror, a seeming disease that leaves it’s victims petrified with a red skin coloring.  Going from a popular myth, that the eyes hold the last image seen before death, they find a victim of the Crimson Horror whose last image was the Doctor.  They rush to Yorkshire where Jenny infiltrates Sweetville, a cult-like community run by Mrs. Gillyflower and the mysterious Mr. Sweet, who is a supposed recluse.  Mrs. Gillyflower is a dour old woman who preaches about the coming apocalypse, where only her followers will be saved.  She has a daughter, Ada, who was supposedly blinded by her former drunk husband, that she uses as an example of the evils of the outside world.  Once Jenny makes it inside the walls of Sweetville, she discovers that the Doctor has been held prisoner there, a victim of the Crimson Horror.  She breaks him out of his cell and he uses a nearby chamber to reverse the process.  Mrs. Gillyflower and Mr. Sweet intend to use the residents of Sweetville as guinea pigs, frozen in time and protected from the coming disaster.  Those found with the Crimson Horror are simply rejects from the program who didn’t freeze properly.  Of course, the Doctor isn’t human, therefore he contracted the condition.  They go off in search of Clara, who Jenny keeps reminding is dead.  She is found in a glass case and her condition is reversed the same way the Doctor’s was.  Apparently, the apocalypse isn’t just coming, Mrs. Gillyflower is going to cause it.  She has built a rocket and is going to poison all of London with a toxin generated by the salamander-like symbiote, Mr. Sweet.  Gillyflower manages to launch the rocket, but Vastra and Strax get the poison off, resulting in a harmless explosion.  Mrs. Gillyflower falls to her death and Mr. Sweet tries to scamper off, but is killed by Ada in retribution for turning her mother against her.  In the end, Ada says that it’s time for her to come out of the darkness and into the light and make something of herself.  The Doctor takes Clara home and there, she discovers that the children she cares for have made some discoveries on the Internet, pictures of Clara taken in several time periods.  They correctly conclude that she is a time-traveler and demand that she take them with her.  This episode was written by Mark Gatiss, who usually comes up with some good stories and this was no exception.  He’s also well versed in Doctor Who mythology, as we see in this episode.  At one point, the Doctor tells Clara that he once had to take a “gobby Australian” to Heathrow Airport, a reference to Teagan, who was a companion in the Tom Baker/Peter Davison era.  Unfortunately, I think it tried to do too many things and did none of them terribly successfully.  I was happy to hear we’d get another episode with Vastra/Jenny/Strax, but most of it centered around Jenny, while Vastra and Strax only had bit roles.  There was a terrific scene with Strax threatening his horse when it failed to take him where he wanted, but it left me wanting more.  The whole plot of wanting to kill everyone in London really meant nothing, it was never really explained, Mrs. Gillyflower just found a little red alien, stuck it on her chest and now… what?  It needed more explanation.  Of course, the mother/daughter dynamic was relatively well done, played by real-life mother and daughter Diana Rigg and Rachel Stirling, but the revelation that Ada’s blindness was caused by her being used as a guinea pig by her mother just didn’t ring true.  The high point, I think, was watching Jenny, who stripped off her Victorian clothes to a leather bodysuit, was kicking ass while the Doctor looked on.  I think sometimes we focus on Vastra and Strax and forget that Jenny is a part of the team for a reason other than just being Vastra’s wife.  Probably one of the better episodes of this half-series, but still, could have been better.  ★★★

Elementary #1×21 – “A Landmark Story” – A while back, the wonderful episode “M” introduced us to the concept of Moriarty.  Oh, we knew he was coming, after all, he’s the classic foil of Sherlock Holmes, how can he not be a part of the modern adaptation?  Nobody but Holmes believes that Moriarty is real, they see him as a boogieman that haunts Holmes’ dreams, but we get to meet him, or rather talk to him, in this episode.  We start off without Holmes or Watson, in the home of a city planning official who meets up with a man who causes his death after he reverses his vote on a controversial project.  Then we meet up with good old Moran, associate of the mysterious Moriarty, who is just as powerful in prison as he was on the outside.  Finally, we get to Holmes, who manages to dislocate his shoulder just as he receives a call from Gregson and Watson has to pop it back into place.  Gregson tells Holmes that Moran has new information on Moriarty, but he won’t tell anyone but Holmes.  Off Sherlock goes to the prison where Moran has just come out of solitary confinement.  He tells Holmes that the seemingly natural death of the councilman was, in fact, a murder, just before killing a guard to guarantee he ends up back in solitary again.  Nobody believes Holmes so he and Watson sneak into the morgue at night and perform a quick autopsy, revealing that the man’s pacemaker had electrocuted him.  Then, a second murder, this time a man gets an air conditioner dropped on his head.  Holmes does an experiment, throwing a similar machine off of his roof, proving that it’s possible to make a pinpoint accurate drop and thus, it could have been murder.  This victim, too, was a member of the city council committee.  Holmes and Watson find a third member, who is allergic to bee stings, being set up to be swarmed by africanized honey bees and they set up a sting to catch the man arranging all of these murders.  They capture Daniel Gottlieb, a serial killer with 31 victims on his resume and drag him back to Sherlock’s house.  They tell him that he can either tell them everything he knows about Moriarty or they’ll hand him over to the police with all of the evidence they have against him.  Sherlock texts Moriarty from Gottlieb’s phone and demands a meeting and gets a bunch of gibberish back, Moriarty communicates with his killers in code.  Gottleib agrees to help them, but has only met his employer once.  Gottleib’s boss shows up at the meeting place and then, frustrated that Gottleib never showed, takes off with Holmes and Watson tailing him.  He manages to lose them at a railroad crossing, but Sherlock manages to get a picture of him, which Gottlieb confirms is his employer.  However, it’s not Moriarty, it turns out to be another serial killer who starts to explain the plot to Sherlock, but ends up shot in the back.  Holmes receives another mysterious text and shows it to Gottlieb, who cannot translate it.  He then takes it to Moran, who asks to see what time he received it, then claims that he can’t read it either.  That night, Holmes solves the cipher and it is a message for Moran, telling him to kill himself if he wants his daughter to survive.  Holmes calls Gregson, just after Moran commits suicide by bashing his head into the wall.  This pisses Holmes off, he was a patsy, used to deliver that message.  Holmes then gets a phone call, it’s Moriarty, who says they’re overdue for a meeting.  Roll credits.  It’s funny how many people think that Moriarty is a major character in the Sherlock Holmes mythos.  I read all of the stories when I was very young, I remember getting a collected volume of all the Sherlock Holmes stories for my birthday when I was maybe 8-9 and I read them all over and over again.  Moriarty only appears in person in one story, “The Adventures of the Final Problem” and gets talked about in one other, “The Valley of Fear”.  While we’re talking about classic Holmes, the line Sherlock says to Watson, “10:17! Thank you, Watson. You know, some people without possessing genius have remarkable knack for stimulating it,” comes almost verbatim from “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”  It’s nice to see that the people writing the show have a functional knowledge of the original Arthur Conan Doyle novels.  Three more episodes this season, one more single and then a two-parter.  I can’t wait! ★★★★★

Mentalist #5×22 – “Red John’s Rules” – In the season 5 finale, we return to the Red John case and it’s perhaps the best episode we’ve seen on it in a long time.  When a woman is killed in a seedy motel and the Red John smiley-face is left on the wall, Jane is pulled back into the field.  He’s been spending a lot of time lately trying to figure out which of the thousands of men he’s shaken hands with might be Red John, but now he has his list down to seven names.  We find that the woman was someone he knew from his childhood and this leads them back to the carny town that he grew up in.  Red John is purposely focusing on Jane’s memories, he and Lisbon talk about Red John’s almost psychic ability to know what Jane is thinking and doing.  Of course, Red John isn’t directly involved, we even get some no-name agents at the beginning of the episode giving back-story about Red John, how he hasn’t directly killed anyone for a long time, he works through his followers, which was a big “pay attention” sign if ever I’ve seen one.  In this case, the accomplice was a child welfare worker who was willing to kill Jane’s childhood friend in order to steal her baby because she wanted a child.  Once she was caught though, she was very open about working with Red John, about the murder, etc.  She gives Jane a DVD from Red John containing a video of Lorelei Martins, clearly beaten up.  She says that in exchange for making this video, Red John has promised to kill her quickly, he’s none too happy that she dropped the little hint about shaking Red John’s hand.  She says that Red John knows the identity of all of Jane’s suspects and lists them one by one, right on every account.  We know that one of the people listed is Red John, there are no more red herrings.  The list includes Bret Stiles, Gale Bertram, Ray Haffner, Reede Smith, Bob Kirkland, Sheriff Thomas McAllister (who hasn’t appeared since early in the first season) and Brett Partridge.  One of those people is Red John.  However, because Jane has changed the rules, Red John is following suit and he’s going to become an active serial killer again and will continue to rack up the body count until Jane kills him.  A lot of the names on the list are expected so let’s look at them.  Bret Stiles is the head of the Visualize cult movement that Jane has butted heads with on several occasions.  He’s hinted that he has deeper knowledge of the Red John killings than he lets on.  I don’t think it’s him, although clearly he’s an associate of Red John.  Gale Bertram is the head of the CBI and has been directly antagonistic toward Jane.  Both Bertram and Red John seem fond of quoting poems by William Blake.  He certainly has some bizarre coincidences, being in the area of Red John killings, but I don’t think it’s him either.  He just doesn’t seem the type and we’ve seen that Red John is highly competent and Bertram doesn’t seem to be.  How about Ray Haffner?  He’s formerly Jane’s boss with the CBI, although he’s since left the agency to start his own detective agency.  We see him shaking Jane’s hand on camera, he certainly fits all of the necessary criteria, he’s been a high-ranking CBI agent, he is a member of the Visualize cult and, most importantly, it seems he could have been involved in the events of “The Red Barn”, perhaps the first Red John killing.  This is one to watch.  Then we get to Reede Smith, an FBI agent that butts heads with the CBI in the first episode of this season.  I don’t think there’s much evidence that it’s him, he doesn’t seem the type and he hasn’t been around long enough for it to make much sense.  Next, Bob Kirkland, who we’ve spoken about before.  He’s another character that only appeared in the fifth season so the longevity may be an issue.  It’s been played up in the show that Kirkland is looking into Jane’s involvement in the Red John killings, going so far as to break into Jane’s loft and take pictures of his evidence.  Still, they seem to be trying too hard to make him look like a suspect so maybe he’s not.  Sheriff Thomas McAllister, as I said, who has only appeared in one episode back in the first season.  I just don’t see that much of a continuing link to Jane, which I’m assuming is a requirement for Red John.  I’ll be really disappointed if Red John turns out to be a character that has walked through the background once or twice.  Finally, Brett Partridge, who started out in the series pilot and is a forensic investigator for the CBI.  He has a vast knowledge of Red John crimes and seems to have at least a little admiration for Red John.  He’s been found at several Red John copycat scenes.  Those times that we’ve heard Red John speak, his voice is virtually identical to Partridge’s.  Honestly, I know that Bruno Heller drops a lot of red herrings in this show, he wants people to theorize about Red John, but while I have my suspects, I don’t think I can do more than count out a couple of Jane’s list of seven.  We’ll have to wait and see what happens next season. ★★★★

Person of Interest #2×21 – “Zero Day” – As we saw last episode, the Machine has been falling apart following the upload of the virus that Harold identified existed only to take the Machine out.  It’s heading for a hard reset and Harold programmed a fail-safe into it for just that eventuality.  Unfortunately, Decima Technologies, the authors of the virus, know that and are just waiting for that fail-safe, a phone call that the Machine makes to the outside world and whoever answers the phone becomes the Machine’s new administrator and has access to all of the data the Machine has accumulated for 24 hours.  Root returns, she’s concerned with the Machine’s well-being and she threatens to harm Finch’s love Grace if he doesn’t help her.  Shaw comes back and teams up with Reese on a similar mission.  We find that, while Harold was working on the Machine, it was adapting and evolving, developing new abilities and this had caused Harold, out of fear, to reset the Machine once every day, effectively killing that new evolution every 24 hours.  Root is horrified at this development and I don’t know that I blame her.  The Machine has invented an outside persona, Ernest Thornhill, who owns a data entry company, whose employees re-type all of the data that was erased from the Machine every day as the Machine fights to regain it’s memories.  Thornhill, while he doesn’t really exist, buys huge swaths of public telephones to use in the event of a system reset.  It’s clever that the Machine manages to send Finch the number for Thornhill as a means of saying “HELP!”  Through a series of flashbacks we see Harold at the time he developed the Machine, he was a much colder, more callous character whose uncaring exterior was only broken by his love of Grace.  We got to see him propose to Grace and she accepted.  Too bad they were never able to be together, I’m just hoping that by the end of the series, Harold and Grace get to be a couple finally.  We see Decima trying to control all of the public telephones in midtown New York City because they don’t know for sure which one the Machine is going to call.  Harold and Root end up at the library, which she says is an apropos spot and Harold routes the call to a phone so Root can become the new admin.  However, he double crosses her and sends the real call to another phone where Reese picks it up and becomes the new admin.  I guess it makes sense to give the guy with the least technical knowledge and least desire to use the Machine’s data for evil to become the new admin.  Carter spent the episode trying to find Beecher’s killer, which essentially got her out of the way with just a few scenes.  Fusco was mysteriously “uptown” working on a different case.  This is deep, deep mythology stuff and I’m glad we’re finally getting to the center of the mystery of the Machine.  Only one more episode until the end of the season and it’s sure to be amazing. ★★★★★

Psych #7×10 – “Santa Barbarian Candidate” – When Santa Barbara’s beloved mayor washes up on shore, the apparent victim of a surfing accident, the head of the city council is poised to take over but Shawn doesn’t trust him.  However, the only way to stop him from automatically being named the new mayor is to challenge him in an election, so that’s what Shawn does.  Shawn makes a really awful political candidate, as we can well imagine, but somehow, his smooth-talking style immediately makes him the front-running candidate.  Gus, since he has political experience (Dule Hill was a long-running actor on The West Wing and they make a joke to that effect), he takes over running Shawn’s political campaign.  To carry off his charade, he needs to be in a relationship and begs Jules to play along, to which she reluctantly agrees.  There’s a really touching scene where he wants to dance and she says she tried to get them to take a class together but he didn’t want to.  He reveals that he really went somewhere else, but felt so guilty that he took the class later without her.  She just sits down and says “why couldn’t you have been this sweet when we were together?”  Good question, Shawn!  It isn’t long until they discover that the city councilman isn’t guilty of killing the old mayor and Shawn has to find a way not to get elected but he can’t just drop out of the race so Gus takes over, making horrible TV commercials about him and it gets him to drop in the polls.  In the end, Shawn takes over  a city council meeting to reveal the killer and Jules tells him that the only way to have any chance of getting her back is for Shawn to admit that he’s not psychic to the chief.  He makes the speech I’ve been saying he should have made episodes ago, but goes into Chief Vick’s office to reveal the truth to her, stopped at the very last second by Jules who changed her mind.  She’s not quite ready to get back together, but she’s more willing than we’ve seen in a couple of episodes.  We still don’t know how it will play out and I’m more and more conflicted how I want next season to go. ★★★★

Warehouse 13 #4×12 – “Parks and Rehabilitation” – This is the unofficial finale to the Artie storyline that has gone on for most of the season.  In a series of flashbacks, we saw Artie pulled out of his self-induced coma where he was hiding from the reality of having killed Leena.  The Regents forgive Artie for what he’s done and tell him he can go back to work.  After all, he was under the influence of the astrolabe and would never have killed Leena otherwise.  However, Artie can’t forgive himself and spends much of the episode wandering around in an angsty haze.  Myka and Steve remain behind to help Artie sort out his issues whole Claudia and Pete head off to Oregon to investigate an artifact that can move the earth and a killer who is trying to wipe out a decade-old former eco-terrorist group.  Let’s look at this story first because it’s the least interesting.  We find that there was an eco-terrorist group that broke up ten years earlier when one member was sent to prison and ultimately died there, while refusing to give up his partners.  Now, those partners are being killed one by one by someone with an artifact that allows them to create holes, trenches and earthquakes.  It’s not a very good story to be honest and it suffers from the last-minute introduction of the real murderer, who turned out to be the brother of the guy who died in prison, who blames the rest of the group for not coming forward to share the blame with his brother.  There are some good parts here and there, but there’s far too much angst for my tastes, the scenes with Claudia and Autumn sitting around commiserating about how many bad things they’ve  done was a bit over the top.  They really wrote the scenes to bring Claudia and Artie back together at the end, but more on that in a minute.  Back in the A-storyline, Artie still hates himself for killing Leena, even if he wasn’t personally responsible.  He mopes around the Warehouse for a while, then sets off to do all of the jobs that Leena supposedly did, although I don’t remember if we ever actually saw her doing any of them.  It was her job to “balance” artifacts, to make sure they got put into specific aisles for maximum spiritual harmony or some new-agey bullshit like that.  Artie takes an artifact that’s been sitting around for a while into a room where he’s supposed to “sense” where it belongs.  However, because of his dark and gloomy emotional state, it keeps reading his own feelings, not the state of the artifact and therefore, wacky hi-jinks ensue.  However, once he realizes that it’s his own emotional state that’s causing problems and that they all ought to work together as a team to make up for the loss of Leena, he begins down the long road of self-forgiveness.  When Claudia, who had been avoiding him because of Leena’s death, returns from Oregon, they finally talk and she forgives him for killing her friend and he forgives her for stabbing him in the chest with a dagger.  Life is good.  Alright, it wasn’t a bad episode, it just wasn’t as good as it should have been and while I understand why they did it, I think it could have been better without the eco-happy B-story.  I’d rather have seen the entire team come together as a family to help Artie instead of having half the team out running around in the woods.  The scene between Artie and Claudia, while touching, didn’t have the impact it should have.  Instead of having two hurt people coming back together, you had two people who learned separate lessons and then applied them toward each other.  It could have been better. ★★★

Best of the Week:  This is really hard this week.  There were a lot of really good episodes that probably all deserve top billing but it can only go to one.  I can make a case for all of them getting top spot and because we’re getting to the end of the season, we’re getting into some of the best deep mythology stories of the season.  Damn, I’m going to break tradition (I’ve done it before) and award two top spots, Arrow and Person of Interest.

Worst of the Week:  Likewise, there wasn’t a stand-out awful episode, now that The Following and Bones are off the air.  Three of them, Defiance, Doctor Who and Warehoues 13, ranked lowest this week, but they were all average episodes, not stinkers.  I think I have to give it to Warehouse 13 though, not because it was horrible, but because so much of it seemed unnecessary and I think they could have had a better episode if they had cut the B-story.

Other Stuff I Watched:  Mythbusters 12×01, The Nerdist #2×05, Toy Hunter #2×05, Star Wars (May the 4th viewing)

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I’ll go ahead and spell this out as easily as I can.  If you take race, religion, creed, gender, sexual orientation, indeed anything about the individual’s look, background or preferences, into account in hiring, firing, promotion, membership, grading, scholarships, etc., then you are being discriminatory.  It doesn’t matter how you rationalize it, it’s still true.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s illegal to do, or even necessarily wrong to do, it’s still discrimination.  I doubt many people would disagree with the policy that only allows girls to join the Girl Scouts.  It’s still discriminatory.  The same with the Boy Scouts, although they’re traditionally more discriminatory on a lot more factors.  I have no problem with the Boy Scouts being restricted to boys and the Girl Scouts being restricted to girls, or the YMCA being restricted to men and the YWCA restricted to women, so long as these are private organizations that do not receive government money or preferential treatment.

The problem is, a lot of people seem to think that the only people who can discriminate are white males and everyone else can do whatever they want, but you can never call them racists or sexists or whatever.  The idea that “these people were victimized in the past so now, they get to victimize other people” is idiotic.  If discrimination was wrong when group A did it, it’s still wrong when group B does it, whether they were the victims of group A’s discrimination or not.  You cannot solve a wrong by committing another wrong and it doesn’t matter what that wrong is.  Affirmative action programs are wrong.  They artificially require that people from a once-discriminated-against class get extra rights and privileges so that they can achieve equity.  It sets up quotas and confuses the equality of opportunity with the equality of outcome.  Here’s a newsflash for people, 100% equal outcome is a logical impossibility unless you’re going to have someone standing there with a clipboard rejecting people for not fitting the necessary mix of social factors.  Black?  Check!  Female?  Check!  Not handicapped… ahem… handicapable?  Bzzzt, go somewhere else, you don’t fit the profile.  Next!

While it should be really obvious that this kind of thing doesn’t work, there are a lot of people who cling to the absurd idea that it’s the only thing they ought to support.  They don’t allow for people to self-select what they want to do.  More men than women are drawn to work in some of the hard sciences.  This is a fact.  It may be genetic, it may be cultural, but it is undeniably true.  Why would we want to force women into a field of study that they have no interest in studying, just to make the numbers artificially equal?  By the same token, more women then men take to hobbies like needlework and scrapbooking.  Do we have to round up men and force them to engage in these hobbies so everything is equal?

Where does it end?  Do we task the TSA, while they’re groping your genitals, with making sure that every flight has the correct mix of race, religion, gender and preference?  “We have room for 2 more people on this flight, they must be gay, half-black, half-eskimo, left-handed and one has to limp.  We’re not leaving until we find those people!”

Is this really the kind of world we want to live in?  Just when are people going to recognize the absurdity of discrimination on any scale?  We can do better and we should.

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Further, why shouldn’t atheists, the ones who are widely mistrusted because of Christian bigotry, not take out their frustration at Christians?  Certainly, I’m not excusing rude, abusive or troll-like behavior from anyone, but shouldn’t Christians ask themselves if their religion, if not themselves, hasn’t earned a bit of derision?  After all, it’s certainly been cruel and callous to everyone else over the years and fundamentalists continue to be driven by religiously-fueled hatred even today.

Charron says that, in her view, having a viewpoint that is fundamentally different than someone else paints a target on one’s head and declares open season on their ideas.  That raises some questions so I went back to her original post and looked through the comments which she claimed were full of cries of indignation and mockery, but honestly I found no such thing.  Granted, I only went through the first page of comments and found nothing whatsoever directed toward her personally.  Some people criticized Christianity but no one that I saw criticized Sandra Charron for holding her beliefs.  At best, I saw one that asked her why she held them and that’s a perfectly valid question.

This seems to be yet another example of “insult my religion, insult me” thinking, where a theist is incapable of separating their own self-worth from their religious beliefs.  This is an issue for a lot of theists, not just Christians.  Heck, look at how many Muslims riot whenever someone says something mean about Islam.  However, it’s not a rational way to live one’s life.  There are lots of things that are very important to me, yet I do not take any slight toward those things to be a personal insult toward myself.  I think Charron needs to go back and look at those comments and realize that there is a big difference between “your religion is stupid” and “you are stupid”.

While there is plenty of possible common ground between atheists and theists, places that we ought to be able to rationally debate and come to an agreement, I don’t see that atheists and theists will ever agree on the subject of religion.  It’s like asking parents and pedophiles to agree on the topic of child safety.  You might argue that’s an extreme example but a lot of atheists and plenty of theists generally think in those terms.  I think all theists, from the most liberal to the most fundamentalist, have something wrong with them upstairs.  When I was a theist, many years ago, I was convinced that all atheists were going to their eternal damnation.  I was wrong.  I got better.  I used to treat my religious beliefs as the most important thing in my life until I realized that such a belief was foolish.  If you think your religion defines you, you’re doing it wrong.

So let’s revisit the issue here.  You have Christians who are putting out a message that is offensive to a lot of non-Christians, not just atheists, just as many Christians find the messages displayed by atheists and Muslims and Buddhists, etc. to be offensive.  If that wasn’t the case, people wouldn’t go ape-shit every time an atheist sign ends up on the side of a bus.  The Christians, in particular, scream bloody murder because they take offense, yet they can’t understand that they’re just as guilty, they’re just blinded by their own rhetoric.  So atheists, who have every bit as much right to be upset as theists do, respond to these posts and articles and pictures and somehow, Charron thinks she has a right to be offended by this?  Does she think atheists ought to be offended by churches who put out pro-religious signage?  There’s some pretty offensive stuff out there aimed straight at atheists, should we just not be bothered by it?  How about a little equity?

If you want believers and non-believers to get along, both sides have to be willing to make compromises.  It’s the Christian side which has traditionally been unwilling to budge even an inch.  Maybe you ought to go talk to them first, then start playing the “don’t worry, be happy” card.

The post Should Believers and Atheists Get Along? appeared first on Bitchspot.

Of course, I am, by my very nature, an equal-opportunity offender, I tend to piss everyone off.  I’ve talked about what a rotten job the Republicans do, what a horrible job the Democrats do and what a crappy job the Libertarians would do, if they could manage to get themselves elected.  There isn’t a political party out there that I really like, all of them have problems to one degree or another and none of them really represent true conservatism, especially non-religious conservatism.

Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at this letter to the editor and address it point by point.

In the aftermath of this year’s elections, there appear to be heightening concern and discussion about the cultural transformation under way in the country. Conservatives flail about, wondering how this can all be reversed so conservative principles might be broadly understood and applied. However, there seems to be something of a chicken-or-egg conundrum. If conservatism itself can’t transform the culture, how is the transformation to be realized?

The problem is, the Republican party no longer represents conservative values on either side, social or fiscal.  What you’re really talking about are neo-cons, not conservatives, two entirely different things.  whereas conservative values can be described as small government, personal and fiscal responsibility and keeping the government out of the lives of the citizens, that does not describe what the modern-day Republican party stands for.  Under every recent Republican president, the size of the government has grown tremendously.  We certainly don’t practice fiscal responsibility and haven’t since before Reagan.  The only real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is where they want to get their money from. Democrats are happy to soak the wealthy, Republicans are happy to borrow money from China.  Neither side understands how to live within our means.  As for the last, keeping the government’s nose out of the affairs of the people, the Republican party, in pushing it’s far-right religious agenda, is certainly not keeping that plank of the conservative platform.  The only thing that has transformed in the past 50 years is the Republican party platform, it’s gone from espousing conservative values and views to looking amazingly like the religious Southern Democrat beliefs that invaded the party in the 60s and 70s.  Unfortunately, for the religious right, the nation is changing and it isn’t changing to reflect their views, it is largely rejecting fundamentalist Christianity and this is seen all too clearly in the number of losses the Republican party has suffered in recent years.  The Republican Party will continue to lose until they get rid of the fanatical religious lunatics on the ultra-right.

There are very few commentators who will even attempt to discuss our cultural crisis comprehensively in theological terms, thinking that would limit the discussion and be polarizing. This may be true, but the endpoint of all serious discussions must center on faith. Denying or ignoring this fact means we never resolve any argument with the truth. We can all talk endlessly about the excellence of conservative principles, but without the help of faith, it will in the end prove to be nothing but talk.

Where have you been?  The discussion from the Republican party is framed in nothing but theological terms, you have tons of far-right ministers extolling the virtue of religion in the political arena from the pulpit every Sunday, you have Senators and Congress-people whining endlessly about how Christianity needs to be the central ideal of the Republican party.  This is simply untrue and absurd.  The fact is, absolutely none of the “excellence of conservative principles” rely on faith, but in the soundness of the ideology.  There are lots of reasons that these positions have worked traditionally and it has nothing to do with religion.  In fact, the Republican Party has worked just fine without the central involvement of religion that we see in it today.  Of course, that was true when the Republican Party wasn’t just a shill for fundamentalist Christianity as it is today.  It’s not too hard to look back to leaders in the Republican Party like Barry Goldwater who openly warned people not to allow religion to mingle with politics and he was absolutely right.  If you  want to see Republican victories again, they’ll have to go back to a non-religious, conservative stance and I don’t see that happening any time soon.

It must be clearly understood that leftism is, after all, a form of religion. Its beliefs and tenets appeal naturally and delightfully to all the base and self-glorifying tendencies of human beings. Conservatism cannot possibly defeat this with a simple set of empirical propositions. It is a fundamental aspect of human nature that people are religious beings. If pragmatic self-actualization, economic self-interest or some similar formulation is represented as the core of conservatism, it will be impotent. Secular, non-theological conservatism is an empty suit. It will not command deep loyalty without a real and far more profound supporting faith.

Ah, now we see that fallacious old shift, the “cast your enemy in the same light as yourself so you can use their tactics” routine that we see so often from the religious.  It’s the same thing we see when the religious declare atheism to be a religion so they can continue using their irrational faith because they assert the other side is doing it too.  Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.  Fallacious tactics are fallacious.  It clearly isn’t a fundamental aspect of human nature that people are religious beings or there wouldn’t be so many non-religious among us.  Once  you step outside of the United States, you find countries like Sweden where only 18% believe in a god and only 2% go to church regularly.  Even here, religious adherence is falling fast, the number of people who do not believe in gods will soon become a sizable minority within my lifetime and hopefully, within the lifetime of my children, will become the majority.  This fact terrifies the ultra-religious so they hold their hands over their ears and clench their eyes closed.  They don’t want to hear that religion, at least modern-day fundamentalist religion is doomed.  The speed at which it seems to be falling off most people’s radar is ever-increasing and that’s a good thing.

Many conservatives seem to think that some simple adherence to the Constitution will save us. Do conservatives understand that the Constitution could not have been written outside of a Christian context? Many churches in our day seem content to be practically doctrine-free entities. They concern themselves mainly with appearing to provide people with golden tickets to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory in the sky when they die.

I’m sorry, the founding fathers did write the Constitution outside of the Christian context.  Most of the founding fathers were very critical of Christianity in general and knew that they wanted to keep religion out of the government, for fear of what had happened in England and Europe happening here.  It always surprises me just how ignorant many theists are of the founding of this country, they live in this fantasy world where all of the founding fathers were just as religious as they were, the whole of 18th century proto-America were all church-going fundamentalist Protestants who believed exactly what the theist in question believes.  The overwhelming majority of our founding fathers were very critical of not only the Church of England, but of Christianity in general.  All you have to do is read the writings of most of them to see that clearly.  This country was also not founded on Christian doctrine in any way.  They put it into the Treaty of Tripoli very clearly and stated the United States was “not in any sense founded on the Christian religion”  The Treaty was published in newspapers across the fledgling nation and there is no record of anyone in the country disagreeing with it.  Why is there such a confusion?

If secular conservatives and libertarians think they can transform a culture with principles and morality detached from faith, or with the tasteless gruel of intellectual policy positions, they will never capture the hearts of men.
TODD LEWIS
Montross, Va.

I don’t want to capture the hearts of men, I want to capture their minds.  We cannot solve the problems that face the United States without logic, reason and critical thinking.  While I recognize what an uphill battle it might be, especially in a country where education is so lacking and emotion, especially religion, is so cherished, we can never get anywhere worthwhile.  Whether Lewis and other religious neo-conservatives like it or not, the culture is already changing and it has been for quite some time.  Unfortunately, I think, and I suspect Lewis would agree, that it isn’t changing for the better.  However, I think we’d seriously disagree on why there are so many problems.  I think a lot of it is the fault of unrestrained emotion on both the left and right sides of the aisle.  I think we need to get  back to what actual conservatism is about, not the two versions of liberalism we have in America today.

It’s not that secular conservatism is an empty suit, it’s that you don’t even know what conservatism is anymore.  You’re so busy complaining about the non-existent strawman you’ve set up in the corn field, you don’t recognize the growing number of perfectly full suits of actual conservatives who are happily living without religion that are surrounding the field.  We’re here, we’re educated and we vote.  Instead, it’s the idiots on the religious right who are vanishing and they, like the emperor, have never had any clothes.

The post I’m Wearing that Empty Suit appeared first on Bitchspot.

In Santiago, Chile, police have arrested four people accused of burning a 3-year old baby alive because they believed the world was going to end and the little girl was the anti-Christ.  According to police, the baby was taken to a hill in the town of Colliguay near the Chilean port of Valparaiso, tied up with tape, gagged so she couldn’t scream, tied to a board, splashed with alcohol and thrown into a bonfire.  The murderers were part of a 12-member cult, led by Ramon Gustavo Castillo Gaete, 36, who has so far avoided capture.  Perhaps worst of all, the baby’s mother, 25-year-old Natalia Guerra, was part of the cult and approved of the sacrifice.  She was among those charged with murder.

This creates many reactions for me, not the least among them being nausea.  I’m confused how these 12 people, all of them who are described as professionals with college degrees, could be taken in by a cult leader and follow with such fanaticism that they’d actually throw an innocent baby into a raging fire.  I suppose it’s nothing we should be that surprised at, it’s hardly the first time that a parent has been willing to murder their own children in cold blood for religious reasons.  Remember Andrea Yates?  The crazy bitch who drowned her five children in the bathtub because she heard God tell her to?  How about Deanna Laney, who stoned her own sons?  How about Dena Schlosser, who decided to give her children to God, right before she amputated the arms of her 11-month old daughter?  Why do we see this pattern over and over?

Well, according to Lisa Falkenberg, a columnist for the Houston Chronicle, “Women who kill their children commonly cite God, the devil and other religious influences for their actions. Although the mothers are also often found to be severely mentally ill or psychotic, the recurring theme of religiosity begs the question: Is religion to blame?”  So is it religion that causes their psychosis, or their psychosis that causes them to seek out religion?

However, far too many people simply give religion a pass and find another cause to point to.  Mental illness in America often takes on theological imagery and the people who are profoundly religious, but take that religion out on their offspring, the religious in our society will often make excuses for the behavior.  “They’re not seeing this as a mental illness. They’re seeing it as the person having demons, perhaps, or a sin problem or not being spiritually fulfilled,” said Roger Olson, a theology professor at Baylor’s Truett Seminary.  Experts have long realized that it’s much harder to identify mental instability in people who hold strong faith in religions that view strange behavior as possession or other Satanic activity, and who embrace prayer and faith over medical treatment and psychotherapy.  Certainly this is a characteristic we see over and over, even among those parents who just let their children die of easily curable diseases while praying over them.

I cannot understand how people refuse to acknowledge that religious belief, especially fanatical fundamentalist belief, is a sign of something wrong going on in the individual’s head.  There has to be something profoundly mis-wired to buy into some of the bizarre beliefs and absurd ideas that we see in hyper-religious individuals.  Yes, I know lots of theists will disagree, they can’t accept the possibility that religion, at least strong religion, is a mental aberration and a clear sign of potential problems down the road.  So long as they refuse to deal with the reality of the situation, we’ll have to keep burying innocent children, murdered by the religious.

The post Horror Show Sunday: Burn the Anti-Christ! appeared first on Bitchspot.

That said though, I came across this list of 25 questions over on Google+ and thought I’d reveal a little about me, for anyone who actually cares.  If anyone has any other questions, I really don’t mind answering them, so long as they’re not too absurdly personal and even then, I won’t get mad, I just won’t answer.

1. Do you have pets?   Yes, I currently have 4 dogs, 5 cats, 4 birds and a snake living in the house with me.  In the past, I have had all manner of other animals, from hamsters and chinchillas to ferrets and weasels.  About the only “common” animal I haven’t had is a horse.

2. Name three things physically close to you?  Right now?  Well, clearly my computer so I won’t say that.  I have my tablet, my headset that I use for recording podcasts and a cat sleeping on my desk.

3. What’s the weather like right now?   Actually, it’s really nice at the moment, sunny and warm without being too hot.  Over the past week, it’s gone from being cold and rainy (right after I washed the cars, naturally) to being very hot and windy.  This is a nice change.

4. Do you drive, if so have you crashed?  Yes, I drive.  I haven’t crashed in a long, long time, the last accident I was involved in was maybe 5-6 years ago, I was pulling out of a parking lot late at night and someone in a red pickup came out of an adjacent driveway without their lights on and without looking.  I had to swing wide to avoid getting t-boned and ended up hitting a street sign, resulting in a huge dent in the bumper and a flat tire.  The guy in the pickup just kept on going.  Insurance paid for it and in fact, the body shop fixed some other non-related damage to the car and billed it to the insurance company anyway.  Shhhhh. And no, I didn’t ask them to, they did it on their own.

5. What time did you wake up this morning?  This morning?  6:04am.  I have a really accurate internal clock, I will wake up and know what time it is, usually accurate to within a few minutes.  I play this stupid little game in the morning where I guess what time it is before I look at the clock.  This morning, I thought it was 6am.  Close enough.

6. When was the last time you showered?  This morning, not long after I woke up, of course.

7. What was the last movie you saw?   The last movie I saw at all?  I rewatched Tron Legacy last night.  The last new movie?  The Hobbit on Bluray.  I don’t go to theaters.

8. What was your last SMS/text message?   Seriously, I don’t text much.  I used to, back when I had some idiot employees who had to ask my opinion on every decision they ever made, but now, it’s just not necessary.  I’m much more of a phone call kind of guy.

9. What is your ring tone?   The theme from the  TV show Psych.  Ought to change it.

10. Have you ever been to a different country?   Yes, many.  However, I’m not a big fan of travel, I don’t want to go someplace, just to say I’ve been there.  Usually, if I’m traveling, it’s for a specific purpose, I have something that I want to do when I get there and the amount of touristy stuff that I’ll do is minimal.  For some people, it’s the journey, not the destination, for me, it’s usually the destination and maybe have a little fun on the journey too.

11. Do you like sushi?  I love it, we’ve got a really great sushi place we go to less than a mile from the house.  I don’t know that I have a favorite type of sushi, although I really like makizushi and onigiri.

12. Where do you buy groceries?  Um… Home Depot?  What kind of a question is that.  It depends on what else I’m doing but the two grocery stores closest to the house are Stater Bros. and Food 4 Less.  I pick whichever one is most convenient.

13. Have you ever taken medication to fall asleep?  Not often, although things like Nyquil just have that side-effect.  They really don’t work on me anyhow, I’ll take something, it won’t work at all the day I take it, but the next day, it’ll knock me on my ass for 12 hours straight or more.  It’s just not worth it.

14. How many siblings do you have?   One, a sister, 3 years younger than I am.

15. Do you have a desktop or laptop?  Both, plus a tablet, a smart-phone, etc.  I have online accessibility pretty much everywhere I go.

16. How old will you be on your next birthday?  My next birthday?  47.

17. Do you wear contacts or glasses?  Neither, I have always had better than average vision.  I guess I wear sunglasses but that’s about as far as it goes.  I also have better than average hearing.

18. Do you color your hair?   Nope, no need or desire.  I don’t get people who are so shallow as to be overly concerned about their looks.

19. Tell me something you’re planning to do today.  I can tell you some of the things I’ve already done, other than the obvious.  I’ve written and recorded another episode of Bitchspot Quickies, I’ve written 3 new blog posts (including this one) and tonight I plan on watching 4 TV episodes so I can put my TV Thursday post to bed for the week.

20. When was the last time you cried?   I don’t know, I don’t cry easily.  There are certainly things, like the death of family members or pets, that can choke me up and a really great emotional scene in a movie can move me to tears, but otherwise, not much of a crier, sorry.

21. What is your perfect pizza topping?  I love meat on pizzas, give me pepperoni, sausage and ham and I’m a happy guy.  I don’t go in for pineapple or anchovies or anything like that, although I’ll certainly eat things like black olives and mushrooms.  I hated mushrooms as a kid but I really like them now.  Go figure.

22. Which do you prefer, hamburgers or cheeseburgers?   Definitely with cheese.  Everything is better with cheese.  My favorite cheese is cheddar, sometimes I’ll just buy a big block of it and eat it as a snack.

23. Have you ever had an all-nighter?   Define all-nighter.  Just staying up all night?  Of course, who hasn’t?  I used to go to conventions and stay up from early morning Friday until late evening Sunday.  I can’t do that anymore.

24. What is your eye color?   Blue.  I’ve had people say they really like my eyes.  Not sure there’s much more to be said about it.

25. Can you taste the difference between Pepsi and Coke?   Don’t know, I don’t drink either.  In fact, I only drink clear drinks and, because I’m diabetic, only sugar-free drinks if I can help it.  My favorite is Mountain Dew, but I can also drink Sprite.  I just don’t care for 7-Up for some  reason.  I’m also good with orange sodas or lemonade.  I do not drink alcohol.  The last time I had a drop of alcohol was about a week after my 21st birthday when a friend and I went out to celebrate at a bar.  We both had two beers and went home.  I haven’t had any, nor wanted any, since.

So, did you learn anything?  Anyone else who wants to answer these questions on their own blog, why not leave a link in the comments?  Sometimes, I guess we forget that there’s a real live person behind the text we see on the screen and maybe this will help to remind people.

The post Some Random Questions appeared first on Bitchspot.

Blogging can be painful. Ow!

The more I think about this, the more I want to talk about it.  See, I’ve realized for a while that people who self-identified as conservative atheists, or secular conservatives, or a myriad of other labels, really don’t seem to want to talk about religion.  They are, almost without exception, political bloggers and podcasters.  I don’t think I’ve seen more than a handful of posts from these conservative atheists that have had anything to do with religion, at best I see them advocating separation of church and state, not opposition to religion in general.

In that, I seem to be relatively unique, or at least I haven’t found anyone else who both labels themselves a conservative atheist and who writes primarily about religious subjects.  Now while being unique is supposed to be a good thing, after all, where is anyone going to go for that information except to you, I suppose it only works if your niche isn’t so small as to be virtually non-existent.  That’s what I’m trying to find out.

Of course, while atheism seems to be a liberal club, the fact is that around 20% of self-identified atheists say they hold some conservative views.  Open atheists, as opposed to the simply non-religious, make up about 5% of the population based on the most recent polls.  Just worrying about the United States for the moment, with approximately 350 million people, that means there are about 17.5 million atheists, or 3.5 million conservative atheists out there.  Granted, not all of them may be online, not all of them may be reading blogs, but you’d think there would be someone, wouldn’t you?

I guess the logical question to ask is, are we talking about atheists who happen to be conservatives, or conservatives who happen to be atheists?  Which side of the equation happens to be the dominant trait?  I can only answer for myself, it would be my atheist side, but that may not be the case for others.  In fact, I’m starting to suspect that the majority of people who share those two traits may be conservatives who just so happen to be atheists, but who spend little, if any, time concerning themselves with their lack of religion.  Religion, among conservative atheists, seems to be largely irrelevant, but I think exactly the opposite is true.  Getting rid of religion and the irrational beliefs and mind poisons that accompany it would do a great deal to improve the political situation in this country.  If people gave up ridiculous beliefs of all sorts, learned more about what was going on in their local, state and federal politics, they would elect better representatives, based on actual evidence and information instead of absurd faith, and we’d be better as a society.

To be honest, I can’t figure out why someone who identifies as a conservative atheist or a secular conservative would be so adverse to talking about religion.  I’ve talked to a lot of people who identify that way, who assure me they are adamant atheists, yet they simply will not talk about religion in any way, shape or form.  This has made life a bit miserable in the search for a conservative atheist co-host for the podcast and finding listeners.  I even asked one of these secular conservative bloggers what he thought of the podcast and he said that it was fine, he listened to one episode, but there was too much religion so he wasn’t interested in it.  I just don’t get it.

One of the big things that’s supposed to draw in readers and listeners is to find your voice.  I have mine.  I’ve always had it.  The problem is, it’s a voice that largely has no audience because far too many people seem to be afraid of half of their chosen identity.  Unfortunately, talking about conservatism tends to drive away the atheists and talking about atheism tends to drive away the conservatives.  Apparently, there are some things that you cannot be too unique on or you’ll spend your time talking to yourself and that’s largely the situation I’m in.  I guess I ought to get used to pain in my toes, I’m just shooting myself in the foot.

The post Blogging: Am I Shooting Myself in the Foot? appeared first on Bitchspot.

I just wanted to remind people that spoilers abound in all of my reviews, I am going to spoil pretty much every bit of the story so if you haven’t watched these episodes and don’t want to be spoiled, go watch, then come back.

Arrow #1×20 – “Home Invasion” – This was a very busy and depressing episode,  I don’t think anyone’s lives got any better during this hour of television.  Diggle is training with Oliver, excited that they’re going to kill Deadshot.  They get news that he’s killed the German ambassador, but that’s overseas and they can’t do a thing about it.  Ah well, it isn’t like he’s not going to come back to Starling City so Oliver can shoot arrows at him, right?  Felicity pops in, having broken into 8 federal databases and tells them that Floyd “Deadshot” Lawton is headed back to meet with a new client.  What an opportunity!  Unfortunately, it’s a trap set up by Diggle’s friend Lyla, so the natural thing for Oliver to do is go to lunch with Laurel, who he doesn’t really want to be with, but it just looks like he really wants to be with her.  Meanwhile, we flash back to the island where Slade and Shado declare Oliver useless and he agrees.  Shado starts training him with the bow, even though he’s pathetic.  Diggle meets with Lyla and she’s pissed that he’s using her agency to find Deadshot, even though the information he provided allowed her to set up the trap in the first place.  Would a “thank you” be out of place?  Apparently so.  Laurel is simply too busy to go to lunch, she has to meet with clients, Eric and Nancy Moore and their son Taylor, who have had all their money stolen by a bad guy named Edward Rasmus.  How do we know he’s a bad guy?  Because he hires an assassin and has them killed.  Taylor survives and is adopted by soft-touch Laurel.  Sure, that’s a good idea.  Diggle tells Oliver he doesn’t want Deadshot arrested, he wants him dead.  Wasn’t this the same guy who got mad at Oliver for killing bad guys at the beginning of the season?  Besides, I don’t think it would be hard to convict Deadshot, he tattoos the names of all of his victims on his body.  Tommy and Laurel are having a touching moment with the traumatized Taylor, but just then the assassin breaks in and tries to kill them all.  It’s a good thing he’s such a bad shot.  Too bad Laurel is even worse.  Luckily, Oliver was hanging around outside the window and bursts in, disarming the assassin and saving everyone’s life.  Tommy seems annoyed by that.  With their apartment all shot up, Tommy suggests, without asking Oliver, that they should all just move in with him.  What the hell!  Diggle arranges a security detail of red shirts while Moira tries to bribe the kid with cookies.  Oliver  says he has something to do and leaves.  Tommy isn’t happy with that, or much else, in this episode.  Thea and Roy are hanging out at a burger joint and apparently, Roy has stolen a police radio.  He gets arrested moments later and carted off to jail.  You know, you don’t have to steal a police radio to listen to  police calls, right?  Oliver is preparing to leap into Lyla’s trap and kill Deadshot when Felicity tells him that Rasmus is about to get on a plane for Singapore, he has to choose Rasmus or Deadshot!  Of course, he chooses Rasmus and leaves Diggle hanging, just as Deadshot, who knew it was a trap all along, starts to kill all of Lyla’s agents.  It would be really nice if the Hood was there, wouldn’t it?  Anyhow, Deadshot corners Diggle and they have a chat about where his name should be tattooed after he’s dead.  He won’t kill Diggle, of course, because he’s not being paid so he whacks him in the head and takes off.  Diggle is unhappy about this turn of events and even more upset that Oliver “reprioritized” without telling him.  He blames Oliver for the four dead officers.  I blame really bad training.  Speaking of bad training, let’s get back to Queen manor to see how that protection force is doing.  Not well, actually, they fall for a really obvious ruse and end up dead.  I did say they were red shirts, right?  The assassin says “this is a big house, I’d hate to have to check every room.”  Dude, it’s not that big.  Oliver jumps the guy.  Tommy lets him.  I guess that being mad at Oliver is only worthwhile when he’s not saving your life.  After a tumble from the balcony, Oliver stabs him in the chest with a fireplace poker.  That was creative.  Tommy says he can tell Oliver still loves Laurel and since there is the slightest chance that she might eventually choose Oliver over Tommy, he leaves her.  What an idiot.  The kid’s grandparents come back from Australia and away he goes.  Thea gets Roy out of jail by promising she’ll keep him from stealing any more police radios.  She’s done such a good job so far keeping him away from a life of crime, right?  They agree that they’ll find the Hood together.  I’m sure that will work out well.  Diggle, meanwhile, says he and Oliver aren’t in the same book, much less the same page so he leaves.  Back on the island, while training, Yao Fei comes bursting into the cabin. Slade wonders how he escaped.  Yao Fei says he didn’t and Fyers’ goons come rushing in, knock Slade out and take the rest prisoner.  Okay, we were led to believe that Yao Fei was only working with Fyers because he had his daughter captive.  Now that Shado is free, what’s the deal with him hunting them down and putting his daughter back in mortal danger again?  There’s got to be something else at work here.  Just about every relationship in the show had a shakeup this episode.  Will Oliver and Laurel get back together?  Will Thea and Roy figure out who the Hood is?  Will Tommy stop acting like a whiny bitch? We’ll have to see.  ★★★★

Bones #8×24 – “The Secret in the Siege” – Uh oh, that shithole lunatic Christopher Pelant is back, I’ve written before how much I hate him and his godlike ability to foresee everything that the authorities do.  I didn’t think they could make him any worse but they did.  Bones comes home without Booth’s beef jerky and he thinks she’s softening to the idea of marriage.  I’ve hated their whole relationship anyhow, but what I hate worst is the fact that they have a daughter together and Bones refuses to get married.  Fucking liberal bitch.  I don’t care if she is educated, I don’t care if she is an atheist, my respect for her as a human being went to zero and has stayed there all season.  They get a case, a body has been found at a state park.  Almost immediately, they suspect that Pelant has set up a murder for them.  Sweets remembers that he wrote an unpublished paper about a body being dumped at a state park, it looks like Pelant has been reading all of Sweets’ secret files and using them for his murders.  The dead man was a former FBI agent, Alan Friedlander, who was killed in the Crystal Creek shootout a decade earlier.  They get a call that another agent is down, this time, Agent Jeff Stone, who was also at the Crystal Creek compound and was shot with exactly the same number of bullets and in the same manner as Friedlander.  This means something!    Bones calls Booth to a secluded spot and proposes and he accepts.  This is the only high point in the entire episode.  Sweets becomes convinced that Pelant is using one of the kids from the Crystal Creek compound to commit the murders and they hunt down an angry young man fitting the description given by a witness at the scene of the second murder.  It isn’t him, although he’s certainly seriously screwed up and needs serious psychological treatment, it turns out to be the girl who gave a statement, the daughter of one of the FBI agents killed in the raid at Crystal Creek.  Pelant has been sending her videos, supposedly made by her father, to goad her into killing agents who survived the attack.  Now, she’s after Sweets, which makes no sense because he had nothing to do with the raid.  Booth races against time to find Sweets in the middle of a massive traffic jam before she kills him.  At the end, Pelant calls Booth and tells him that unless he calls off the wedding, he’ll be responsible for the deaths of five random people.  Booth, hours later, tells Bones that he doesn’t want to marry her.  Okay, this might be a stupid question, but *WHY*?!?!?!?  Now let’s be honest here, this is supposed to be a show about reality, we know that Pelant can access any video camera that’s connected to the Internet so he can get a lot of information.  I rather doubt there are any Internet-connected cameras in their living room and if there are, Booth can turn them off.  So why can’t he just talk to Bones about the threat? It isn’t like they’ve made any plans, nothing says they have to call off the wedding, they just don’t have to schedule anything.  It is utterly mindless that he tells the woman he’s been trying to marry for a couple of seasons now that he’s changed his mind.  Dumb, dumb, dumb!  And speaking of dumb, this whole Pelant thing is just absurd.  He can do anything!  He can access any camera anywhere.  He can make CGI videos that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.  He can create massive traffic jams on demand.  He’s 10 steps ahead of everyone and he’s never, ever wrong.  This guy isn’t a serial killer, he’s fucking Harry Potter.  My wife just told me she’s thinking about giving up on the series after this season.  It’s no longer about the cases, it’s about the relationships.  She wants to see a police procedural, not an emotional drama.  I agree and after this episode, they might have made my decision for me. ★

Castle #5×22 – “Still” – Every series has a clip show once in a while, where they spend most of the episode doing flashbacks and showing scenes from earlier episodes to save money.  Castle really hasn’t done one for a while so I don’t particularly mind and this was a good one.  This episode was originally scheduled to air the week of the Boston Marathon bombing but was pushed back a couple of weeks.  Castle and Beckett are on the trail of a serial bomber.  The case is basically a throwaway, it’s a means to put them into a situation where they have nothing to do but talk about the past.  It doesn’t take them long to figure out who the bomber is and to break into his apartment, but he’s rigged a bomb and Beckett steps on the trigger.  Now, she has to stand there until the bomb squad can figure out a way to disarm it and time is running out.  So she and Castle argue over Castle’s assertion that she fell for him the minute she laid eyes on him.  We go through a lot of clips of earlier seasons and I will admit, the clips were well done, they hit a smorgasbord of the best scenes from the show, going all the way back to the first episode.  It’s made me want to go watch the first four seasons again.  In the end, they manage to work out how to disarm the bomb with… wait for it… 2 seconds remaining.  I think that overall, while I’m not a fan of clip shows in general, this was very well done.  They managed to have a meaningful discussion that actually called for a look back, not one in which the clips felt forced or out of place.  My favorite scene though, and one that I’ve sort of complained about for a while, is at the end where Captain Gates reveals she’s known about the two of them for a long time now.  Hell, a brain-dead blind hamster would have known about the two of them, it’s been painfully obvious.  She gives them permission to see each other, so long as they remain professional at work and away they go.  I’d say it’s nice that they no longer have to hide, but they never really hid before, it’s just not a joke on Captain Gates’ ignorance anymore so at least that’s out of the way.  Now while I’m not a fan of relationships in TV series, this is one that I’ve kind of pulled for because Castle and Beckett do make a good couple.  They complement each other, as this episode shows.  I’d like to see them get closer, I really hate shows where the main characters have an on-again, off-again relationship.  Get them married or something.  That would be interesting.  Castle is certainly committed to Beckett, there aren’t too many men who would stand next to a bomb and be willing to die with the woman they love.  He’s certainly come a long way from the selfish, self-centered jerk he was when the series started. ★★★★

Continuum #2×02 – “Split Second” – Travis hasn’t had a lot of good days.  After Sonya unloads her gun into his chest last episode, we find that he was part of a military super-soldier program in the future, which is why he survived, but now he’s stuck in prison as personal bodyguard to Julian.  After kicking the asses of the local skinhead group, he’s getting transferred to another prison.  Both Liber8 and Kiera think this is a good idea, but Garza still wants to break Travis out of prison, against Sonya’s orders.  Kiera sets up a plan to transfer Travis, but we all know things are going to go wrong and they do.  A lot of this is due to Agent Gardner, who tries to convince Inspector Dillon that there’s something not quite kosher about Kiera, suggesting that she might be in league with Liber8.  They’re setting it up to be painfully obvious that Gardner is the inside man but it may very well be a red herring.  While transporting Travis, he spills the beans on Kiera and her real origins, but Carlos plays it off like he’s insane.  Just then, everything goes sideways as Garza’s forces attack the convoy.  Kiera and Carlos barely survive, relying on her future-tech and Travis escapes.  Meanwhile, Alec hates his new job and is approached by Kellogg who offers to fund him in a new high-tech venture.  Alec wants to know what his future-self is like and Kellogg tells him that he’s a powerful, rich and determined man and he thinks that his future-self sent them back in time to help Alec become even more powerful.  While he has to think about it for a while, eventually he agrees to join on with Kellogg and change the future.  It was a good episode but there are a lot of “duh!” moments.  Kiera and Carlos don’t even put two and two together and realize that someone is trying to rescue Travis until the very end of the attack.  Seriously?  Alec has a discussion with Kiera about changing the future and then signs on with Kellogg specifically to change the future?  Alec has a  good point, she’s going to have to decide between keeping the future that she knows intact and letting people in the present-day die, I think it’s pretty clear that he’ll eventually have to allow the future to change and deal with the consequences when they come.  Still, it’s good to see Alec get out of the Buy More… um, the Memory Express, it’s not only beneath him but I don’t want to see any Chuck references.  ★★★★

Defiance #1×04 – “The Devil In the Dark” – This show is still on the cusp for me, it’s not horribly bad, like some I could mention, but it’s not amazingly good either.  I’m waiting to see where they’re going to go, each episode so far has focused on one of the alien races, the last looking at the Castithan and this time, examining the Irathients.  We open with a jogger putting on some carefully maintained jogging shoes and going for a run in the woods.  He’s attacked by something off-screen and dragged off to his doom.  Irisa’s comment that he should have run faster was funny, she’s got a very dry sense of humor.  We then cut to a sex scene between Kenya and a client who has a weird grease fetish.  The fact that he seemed to be wearing diapers really didn’t help.  Something bursts out of his chest and spoils the mood.  It turns out that the two men killed had murdered an Irathient family and stolen their land a decade earlier and since then, the daughter of the family who had survived had been running with the Spirit Rider gang that had come to the rescue in the first episode.  It seems that Rynn, the aforementioned daughter, has found a way to send hellbugs wherever she wants and seek her revenge against the people who killed her family.  So far, she’s taken out the two men most directly responsible and now, she’s going after the daughter of Rafe McCawley, the man who bought the property, not knowing it’s bloody past.  Irisa reveals that she’s been suffering from visions her entire life but Nolan has considered them symptoms of PTSD.  Instead, she’s gifted with the ability to see the past of other Irathients as well as figure out where they are, kind of like a psychic bloodhound.  She and Rynn’s adopted Spirit Rider father perform a ceremony where she’s able to see what happened to Rynn in her youth and where she is today and Nolan and his posse ride out to the mines, where Rynn has a herd of hellbugs stashed away in the lowest levels, just ready to attack anyone she can spill their scent on.  The problem is, none of it was very exciting.  Even Datak’s fight against the marauding hellbug was almost entirely off-screen, I suspect it would be too much trouble and too expensive to film him fighting a CGI monster with his CGI dagger.  I wish Irisa’s psychic powers had been mentioned in the past, if they have, I don’t remember it.  It seems to have come out of the blue.  And why is Mayor Amanda up for election again?  It seems like she had just been elected before the pilot, has a significant amount of time gone by since then that we just don’t know about?  Please, please, please, enough with the cheesy cover songs in the ending credits?  There hasn’t been one done yet that was any good.  I also think they need to work harder on making some of the characters likeable.  Nolan is supposed to be your Han Solo/Indiana Jones/loveable rogue character but he’s not very well suited for the role.  Everyone seems to have a secret agenda and everyone seems to be out to screw everyone else over if they can get away with it.  That’s not the kind of character that I can identify with.  This show seriously needs one of those. ★★★

Doctor Who #7×10 – “Journey to the Center of the Tardis” – Three men, okay, two men an an “android”, aboard a salvage ship, happen across the Tardis in deep space and decide it could be worth something.  They use their magnetic grapple, which disables the Tardis, since the Doctor was trying to teach Clara how to drive and had put it into “basic” mode.  This seriously messes up the Tardis.  While they are flying, a small metal “grenade” goes rolling across the floor, Clara picks it up and is burned by it.  Then, everything goes wonky and the next thing we see, the Van Baalen brothers are trying to get into their salvaged prize, but can’t get through the door.  Okay, stop right there.  How did that grenade-thing get into the Tardis in the first place?  Yes, the shields were down, but someone would still have to open the door and the door doesn’t open without a key, which the Van Baalen brothers don’t have and couldn’t have used anyhow because the ship was out in space.  Serious problem there.  Anyhow, the Doctor, who was somehow ejected from the Tardis, realizes that Clara is still inside and he has to rescue her.  He shanghais the brothers into searching for her by claiming he’s set the Tardis to self-destruct.  Using their portable scanner, Gregor realizes that the Tardis is the salvage of a lifetime and sends his brother Bram back to the control room to start stripping down the consoles.   This does not end well for Bram.  Meanwhile, Gregor goes into the architectural reconfiguration system and steals a glowing globe, making the Tardis mad.  She  starts creating new passageways to protect herself, making everyone positively lost.  Meanwhile, Clara is wandering around the bowels of the ship, she comes across a library where she reads part of “The History Of The Time War” where she learns the Doctor’s real name.  She is forced to flee after being attacked by creatures she calls “zombies”.  She ends up in the console room alone.  However, the Doctor, Gregor and Trick the “android” are also in the console room, the Doctor hears Clara screaming and uses the sonic screwdriver to bring her a cross from an alternate timeline.  With Clara safe, the Doctor reveals that his self-destruct was a fake, but the Tardis engine core has been severely damaged and there is a time leak, with both the recent past and the near future leaking through.  The “zombies” are actually what’s left of the crew of the Tardis after they are irradiated.  The reactor control rods start to blast through the walls, pinning Tricky.  He begs them to cut off his arm, after all, he can just have a new one attached later, but it turns out he’s not an android at all, he’s the third Van Baalen brother who lost his memory in an accident and they thought it would be funny to replace his eyes with bionic ones and tell him he’s an android so they could take ownership of the salvage vessel.  They’re serious dicks.  While on the way to the engine room, the Van Baalen brothers get overcome by radiation and turn into “zombies”, leaving the Doctor and Clara to press on without them.  It looks like they’re  going to die and the Doctor finally breaks down and demands Clara tell him her secrets, admitting that they had met twice before in the past.  They arrive at the engine room but are too late, it’s already exploded, suspended in time.  The Doctor has no clue how to fix things until he sees Clara’s burn, which reads “big friendly button”, the same as on the beacon she had picked up at the beginning of the episode.  The Doctor squeezes through the rift in time and throws the beacon to his past self.  Clara burns herself on it.  The younger Doctor presses the button and the Tardis is released from the magnetic grapple.  Back in the new timeline, the Van Baalen brothers no longer treat Trick like an android, he’s part of the family.  The Doctor and Clara fly away and discuss how safe she feels.  There were some parts of this that I liked and some that I didn’t.  At the beginning, I think there was just too much of a “relationship” vibe, in fact it pissed me off so much I  told my wife that if the Doctor ever got into anything even remotely resembling a relationship with Clara, that was the last time I would *EVER* watch the show and I’m serious.  I’ve explained why in past reviews so I won’t  do it again.  However, I really loved the romp through the center of the Tardis, it’s something that we’ve never seen before in such detail.  Sure, we’ve seen some of it, such as the Eye of Harmony, last seen in the Paul McGann TV movie, but now we’ve see the swimming pool, whereas we’ve only heard mention of it in the past.  The inside of the Tardis is an interesting place, I can see how people could get lost in there since it’s pretty much infinite, you’d think the Doctor would have installed some kind of tracking system, just in case.  After all, he’s had more than 900 years in the Tardis, I’m sure people have gotten lost before.  Next week, we see the return of some of my favorite characters, Strax, Vastra and Jenny, last seen in the Christmas special.  Hopefully it’ll be fantastic. ★★★

Elementary #1×20 – “Dead Man’s Switch” – Alfredo, Sherlock’s sponsor, is back for two reasons in this episode.  First, it’s Sherlock’s one-year sobriety anniversary and second, Alfredo’s own sponsor has a problem that he needs Sherlock’s help with.  Years ago, a serial rapist attacked three girls, including the daughter of Alfredo’s sponsor, and videotaped the attacks.  He was captured and sent to prison, but now someone is sending blackmail letters to the families, along with DVDs, threatening to release the video online unless they pay up.  All of the families do, but the blackmail keeps coming.  Sherlock finds the blackmailer pretty easily, he’s not exactly hiding, but he’s said that if anyone contacts the police or he’s injured in any way, he has a backup plan where the videos will be released anyhow.  Obviously, this cannot be allowed to happen.  Sherlock sneaks into the man’s house and discovers the evidence, but has to hide as someone comes in both the front and back doors.  The blackmailer is shot dead and his body, along with the evidence, are carted away.  Now Sherlock has to find out who the accomplice is before news of the murder gets out and the fail safe is activated.  This isn’t easy because the blackmailer’s accomplice is a man who has filed dozens of lawsuits under different names and they can’t identify who he really is.  Even the original serial rapist doesn’t know, he’s got plenty to lose if the video is release, he has a parole hearing coming up and he’s being blackmailed too.  When they finally deduce his identity, he’s already dead, yet with both conspirators out of the way, someone is still sending out blackmail letters to the families.  It turns out that the step-father of one of the victims who figured he could make some money by killing the blackmailer, taking his computer and resuming the blackmail on his own.  Very clever!  The B-story, mentioned above, has to do with Sherlock’s sobriety anniversary and his refusal to accept the sobriety chip on his anniversary date.  He claims it’s a cheap piece of plastic that’s just a reminder of his prior failures, but what he doesn’t want anyone to know is that he slipped out of the treatment center and got high again, one day after he was admitted, so his anniversary is actually one day later.  He feels uncomfortable getting the chip before he’s actually earned it and he’s embarrassed to let anyone know of his failure.  Instead, he gives himself a tattoo and Watson gives him a poem by Robert Frost.  Not wild about the tattoo (or any tattoos for that matter), but the poem was nice and applicable. ★★★★

Following #1×15 – “The Final Chapter” – One thing that I’ve come to realize about the first season of The Following is that the first couple of episodes were the high water mark for the series.  That’s sad, considering how poor I thought they were, but it all went downhill from there.  This last episode started off with a reminder that Agent Parker has been buried alive but by the end, I wished it had been me who was buried so I wouldn’t have to watch this stupid show.  Hardy and Weston realize that Parker is gone and try to figure out what happened to her.  A kid walks up to Hardy wearing a Poe mask that has a phone number in it, they call the number and it’s a phone in the casket with Parker.  Bitch, you’ve been in that box for how long and you never noticed the fucking phone?  It was right by your hand!  You could have called a long time ago and had them looking for you!  They found one of the cult members who buried her and Hardy and Weston dragged him off to an isolated spot and beat the crap out of him until he told them where she was buried.  Off into the woods they go, but by the time they dug her up, she was already dead.  Sorry, there’s nobody in this show I can identify with, I didn’t care in the least.  But then, Ryan missed an obvious move, he went and put a bullet in the cult member’s skull, he should have buried him alive in the same box they took Parker out of.  It was so obvious!  I was waiting for Weston to walk over, look at the corpse and say “Dude!  Box?  Poetic justice?  Seriously?”  But in the casket was a copy of Joe’s manuscript and directions for Ryan to get to their hideout and finish the story.  He pulls a gun on Weston and threatens to shoot him in the leg if he tries to interfere.  Why the hell not, the guy has been shot in almost every other episode, go for it!  Ryan goes driving off and apparently, the FBI vehicle he’s driving doesn’t have GPS or anything because nobody follows him.   Meanwhile, Joe and Claire are hanging out in a cabin, talking about their relationship.  Claire finds a hiker that Joe has captured in a bedroom and Joe threatens to kill him.  Claire gets all teary-eyed and starts blaming herself for not seeing Joe for the monster he is.  He says she isn’t to blame, everything he did, he is responsible for and to prove it, he pulls out the hiker and guts him.  Ryan shows up and is drugged by Emma and is trussed up in the living room.  He and Joe go back and forth discussing Poe as Joe gets more and more pissed off.  It was such a disappointment that this epic meet-up that we’ve struggled through 15 horrible episodes for, is just Ryan Hardy insulting Edgar Allen Poe and Joe Carroll throwing a hissy fit.  Their argument ends in a storage building that gets set on fire and Joe Carroll burns to death.  It’s a horribly anti-climatic ending.  Ryan and Claire go back to his apartment to rest after their ordeal, there are a couple of uniformed officers waiting outside, but somehow, Molly gets in and stabs Ryan, saying Joe promised she was the one that got to kill him.  Of course, this might have been a surprise had they not let the cat out of the bag around the middle of the season, we knew all of that.  Claire gets in the way and gets stabbed in the back.  Fade to logo.  Facepalms galore.  I said, back in my review of the very first episode of this monstrosity, that FOX was trying to make themselves another 24 and it’s clear that they’re trying to make Ryan Hardy into another Jack Bauer.  He’s gotten more and more unstable as the season has gone on, to the point of beating a prisoner and then executing him in cold blood.  There is no way in hell that Ryan Hardy would pass any psych evaluation on the planet, but none of the other characters are any better.  Mike Weston?  He gets kidnapped, gets the crap beat out of him and gets shot in virtually every episode, yet they keep releasing him to active duty?  Sorry, that’s not realistic at all.  The FBI ought to be embarrassed that a show like this is on TV making them look bad.  I guess the real question, for anyone dumb enough to watch next season, who is the big bad going to be?  I predicted a while back that they’d have to have a new serial killer every season because there wasn’t nearly enough meat on the bone to keep Joe Carroll and his band of crazies around for more than a season and I was right.  Some people have suggested that Joe isn’t really dead, the coroner, like pretty much everyone else in the show, was a cult member and Joe will rise again.  Why?  His cult is gone, virtually all of them are dead or in custody, except for the mysteriously vanishing Emma, and Joe has demonstrated himself to be a really horrible cult leader all around.  Why would we want him back again?  As far as I’m concerned, I’m not watching this next year unless the writers learn a HUGE lesson and actually learn how to plot a serial.  15 hours out of my life wasted that I can never get back. 

Mentalist #5×21 – “Red and Itchy” – JJ LaRoche is an excellent foil for Patrick Jane.  They’ve butted heads a lot over the years but I think that through all that conflict, they’ve developed a certain respect for each other and perhaps even a bit of admiration.  Although neither would admit it, for as rocky as their relationship has been, I think I’d consider them friends.  When LaRoche’s house is broken into, he asks for Jane’s help in retrieving a mysterious Tupperware container that he says holds the ability to end his career.  He makes Jane promise to keep the container and it’s contents secret from everyone else, but they only have until the end of the day to find the criminal mastermind before LaRoche’s secret is revealed.  Patrick Jane is on the case!  I really like seeing that LaRoche has a soft side, from his Sharpei puppy to his Hummel figurine collection, he’s not the monster that he was built up to for so long.  However, he also has a serious dark side as we find out at the end of the episode.  We also get a lot of background on LaRoche, his mother had been raped continuously for 2 hours 9 years ago and the rapist, Sayney, was just released under California’s “clear the prisons” lawsuits and seems to be a suspect at one point.  His mother then killed herself a few months after the attack.  One criminal at his house was killed at the scene, exchanging a bullet from his gun for one from LaRoche’s.  LaRoche gets hit in the arm and apparently, it never bothers him again during the episode.  I’d think he would be wearing a sling or something, but after the opening credits, it’s never mentioned again.  It turns out that the criminal who escaped was the man’s wife, who was now a master safe cracker since her husband had lost most of the use of his fingers due to advancing age.  She admits to stealing the Tupperware container from LaRoche’s safe but she has no idea who the boss is, it’s someone inside of CBI who is tipping off criminals, but it could be almost anyone.  It turns out to be Brenda, the CBI’s press liason, who has gotten herself in bed with the criminal element and was warning several bad guys when law enforcement was about to sweep in.  No loss, she wasn’t that impressive to begin with.  However, throughout the episode, everyone is curious about what LaRoche has in his plastic container.  LaRoche thinks Jane knows, since Jane once hired someone to break into LaRoche’s safe to get his list of Red John suspects, but he never looked into the container.  At the end though, Lisbon finds the truth, someone had broken into Sayney’s apartment 9 years ago and cut out his tongue and kept it as a trophy and a remembrance of his mother.  That’s very dark but I can see it, especially from a dedicated and passionate cop like LaRoche.  As weird as it sounds, this definitely brought them closer together and I think Jane really needs a friend like him. ★★★★

Person of Interest #2×20 – “In Extremis” – This episode, the real important story is in the B-story, assuming you always place the “number” in the A-slot.  Let’s talk about that first.  Finch and Reese get the number of Richard Nelson, highly respected and awarded surgeon and philanthropist.  He’s being given a high honor when he suddenly falls ill.  Later, he almost collapses in his lab and calls 911.  Seriously dude, you’re a doctor, you don’t even go to see your own physician when you’re bleeding from the nose and vomiting blood?  Anyhow, he ends up in the hospital and Reese tells him he’s been poisoned with polonium and has less than 24 hours to live.  Funny, none of the doctors came up with either a cause nor a prognosis.  Reese tells him to get out of his hospital bed and spend the last day of his life finding the people who poisoned him.  Together, they discover that Nelson had inadvertently given away a stock hint to a stockbroker he knows and that allowed his firm to short-sale before the stock tanked.  The firm was being investigated by the SEC and they had to get rid of the evidence that they had engaged in insider trading, thus the billionaire president of the company had ordered Nelson’s death.  Finally finding the president, Nelson explained what a horrible way polonium poisoning is to die, then Reese poisons the president’s drink, condemning him to the same fate.  That’s a bold move, you don’t usually see Reese resorting to such things, but in this case I have no problem with it.  Having found his murderer and reconciling with his daughter, Nelson dies.  On the other story though, Fusco’s past has finally come back to haunt him and we have to go all the way back to the first episode of the series to see these events.  Internal Affairs comes up with evidence that Fusco is dirty after finding witnesses that confirm that Fusco killed a fellow dirty cop, Detective Stills, who Fusco buried in a shallow grave that HR had been planning on buring him in.  After interrogating Fusco, they find the location of the grave and together they all go out to discredit Fusco, but find the grave empty.  It had been dug up and moved by Carter and Bear, who seems to be not just a trained attack dog, but now a cadaver sniffing dog too.  Fusco gets his gun and badge back, although we’re not sure Carter really trusts him anymore.  He was a bad cop, granted, but since they’ve been working together with Finch and Reese, he’s become a truly admirable person, that’s something I think she recognizes, but can’t forgive him for his shady past.  At the very end of the episode, Finch and Reese realize that the Machine has been giving them numbers lately far too late to save the person at risk.  The Machine starts to give errors, flash red and start shutting down.  This has to be related to the virus that was stolen back in “Dead Reckoning” that Finch surmised could be used to take out the Machine.  Now I doubt that this is the end of the Machine, especially since the show has been renewed for a third season, but how can they fix it without Harold, and isn’t Harold supposed to be dead?  The Machine is supposed to be totally autonomous, without any back doors (although Harold has one, obviously), how do they fix it?  We’ll have to see. ★★★★

Psych #7×09 – “Juliet Wears the Pantsuit” – At the end of the last episode, Jules asked Shawn to move out, something that really flummoxed him.  He has nowhere to stay.  Rachel and Max are conveniently staying with Gus, he absolutely will not stay with his father after what happened the last time and Lassiter just tells him no.  Funny, when Lassie needed a place to stay, Shawn and Juliette opened their home to him.  What an ingrate.  So Shawn decides to stay in a trailer with coroner Woody and I can understand why he’s in such a rush to get out of there.  Jules also starts to interview replacement roommates.  First  comes Kimberly, who Shawn tries to convince would have to spend a home with a creepy ghost, but Kimberly winds up dead the next day.  Next, she tries Laura, who they set up as an obvious red herring and more than a little screwy, especially after she steals all of Juliette’s clothing and takes on her identity, leaving Juliette to wander around in a cheesy t-shirt that Shawn bought for her.  I guess she can’t just go to the store and buy more clothes?  Instead, it turns out that Laura is hiding from her crazy ex-husband who is trying to track her down.  He’s the one that killed the ex-roommate Kimberly.  Juliette and Laura end up trapped in their living room with the whack-a-loon ex-husband.  Laura is afraid and says Jules doesn’t know what he’s capable of.  Juliette is a cop, she can handle herself, Laura clearly doesn’t understand what she’s capable of.  Shawn helps put the crazy guy down and all is better.  Well, except for the broken window that the ex-husband came in and Shawn is clearly not the home-improvement type.  They talk for a bit, but that’s really what drives me absolutely crazy in these shows.  Whenever they want to keep two people apart, they make them engage in nothing but frivolous chit-chat, they don’t actually sit down and talk because that might solve the problem and screw up the plot.  See, if Shawn was more mature and Juliette less emotional, none of this would ever have happened.  I can imagine Shawn telling Juliette that he only pretended to have psychic powers so he could work with the police department.  They’d never listen to him otherwise.  Clearly he’s  doing  good, even Jules admits that, so she must see why he lied initially.  As to why he continued to lie to her all the way through their relationship, the answer is fear.  He was afraid that if he came clean, she’d leave him.  If she can’t understand those two factors, then maybe they shouldn’t be together at all, yet they continue to dance around it and it comes off so artificial.  Making people act stupid because it serves a story purpose is not something I’m very forgiving of.  If you can’t find a valid reason for your plot point, maybe you ought to rethink what you’re doing. ★★★

Best of the Week:  It’s a hard decision this week, there were no real standouts, but lots of solid episodes.  As weird as this is to say, I’m going to have to go with Castle this week, even though it was a clip show, it was a really well done clip show and it pushed Castle and Beckett closer together, plus cleared up one irritating mystery, how Captain Gates could be so blind.

Worst of the Week:  Going into the viewing, I thought it would be a toss-up between Bones and The Following.  After seeing this week’s episode of Bones, I thought The Following would have to be really, really, really awful to win the bottom spot.  It was.  This show was just horrible through and through.

Other Stuff I Watched: Sherlock Holmes – Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943), Toy Hunter #2×04, Kingdom of the Spiders (Rifftrax), Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, The Nerdist #2×04

The post TV Thursday – 5/2/13 appeared first on Bitchspot.

The two officers who told the father to take his daughter home and pray for her recovery have been suspended for “misbehaving”.  Police initially arrested a man who lived on the first floor of the same apartment building in which the child resided, but now, have arrested a second suspect, described as an accomplice.  The first suspect, Manoj Kumar, told police that there was another man involved

However, this just isn’t uncommon in many parts of India.  Back in December, a 23-year-old medical student was fatally gang-raped on a moving bus, sparking widespread protests across India.  Police were quick to react when this newest swell of public outrage caused a huge number of people to come out in protest, but they simply haven’t reacted well.  There is a case of a police officer who hit a female protester outside the hospital where the girl is being treated.  That officer has been suspended.  “The government makes laws just for the sake of making them, with no intention to stop crimes. None of the laws are implemented, and we see rapes increasing by the day,” said a man protesting outside the police headquarters.  Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the attack “shameful” and said “The gruesome assault on a little girl a few days back reminds us once again of the need to work collectively to root out this sort of depravity from our society.”

The problem is, this is an epidemic in India.  Rapes, especially rapes targeting children, are rampant.  In a recent report, the Asian Center For Human Rights cited statistics that it said showed 48,338 child rape cases reported in India between 2001 and 2011. The report said the number of cases had risen from 2,113 cases in 2001 to 7,112 in 2011.  This is clearly a growing problem.  It’s hard to find a period of time where rapes in India are not widespread.  There’s the recent case of 3 girls that were raped, murdered and dumped into a well and the case of 5 men who gang-raped a Swiss tourist.

While it’s unclear what the central problem here is, Indian men are simply taught from childhood not to respect women.  Some of it us religious.  Some of it is cultural.  All of it needs to change.  Radical feminists talk about a rape culture.  This is a rape culture.  It’s ingrained in the society.  Stop whining about the first world and go point your fingers at the people who actually do engage in the things that you criticize.  Do you want to fight the problems that actually exist, or just the imaginary problems that only exist in your mind and only in your little corner of the planet?  This is an issue, this is an issue that needs to be fixed and I’m glad that the Indian government is at least acknowledging that they have a problem.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much they can really do to change it, other than to punish the guilty, which doesn’t help the victims.  You have to change the culture and the fact that there are so many backwoods, highly-religious communities where this attitude has been a fact of life for generations isn’t going to be changed easily.

The post Thank God For Rape! appeared first on Bitchspot.

In a recent forum thread, someone posed the question: “How can the Bible be wrong, why would God lie to us?”  I answered, pointing out that this presupposes the existence of a God in the first place, something for which we simply have no evidence.  It would be like saying “the Harry Potter books must be perfect, why would Voldemort lie to us?”  Yes, I know, ignore the fact that Voldemort and God don’t line up very well in their respective mythologies, I think it still makes a valid point.  Both God and Voldemort are mythical creations.  Neither can “lie” to anyone, outside of the contexts of their particular literary works.  It’s a nonsensical question to begin with.

But don’t tell the accomodationists that.  Immediately one jumped up and started making all sorts of claims about the anthropological value of the Bible, the mythological value of the Bible, some of the historical value of the Bible, etc.  I pointed out to him that none of those had anything whatsoever to do with the original question, the one we were all in the thread to discuss.  While indeed the Bible might have literary and anthropological value, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s largely a book of mythology, with characters that almost certainly never lived as described and a main supernatural force that’s certainly imaginary.  In fact, he even agreed that people who take the Bible literally are out of their gourds, yet he couldn’t stop claiming that it must have some value, therefore we couldn’t dare make anyone who believed it feel bad.

Of course we can, and we should.  Not because they believe it, but because it’s blatantly false.  Accomodationists are so desperate to find excuses that they forget that there’s such a thing as reality.  They want everyone to inhabit a world that’s tailor-made for their own personal happiness, even if everything around them is a fantasy.  I have never and will never buy that.  Believe what is actually true and if that makes you unhappy, deal with it.  Better yet, grow the hell up and realize that reality isn’t here for your pleasure.  I think that is something that a lot of modern-day people simply don’t get.  They’re so used to getting everything they want, it’s getting to the point where being happy is seen as a civil right.  How dare anyone ever do anything that makes you sad!  Reality ought to conform to your wishes!

But to get back to accomodationism, what’s the point?  Some accomodationists claim that they simply see a way for religion and science to coexist.  Yes, they can, although not peacefully, except in the case of the most liberal of theologies.  Fundamentalist religions have already proven they are completely incapable of coexisting in the real world.  Creationism in schools?  Opposition to gay marriage?  Flying planes into buildings?  Killing bloggers?  Surely not even the most clueless accomodationist would think that these people can coexist with secular society.  The only case that can be made are for ultra-liberal theists, the “cafeterian Christians” who are juts paying religion lip service in the first place, and these people are, by and large, atheists who just don’t know it yet.  They’re social theists, people who don’t really buy into it, they just pretend to believe because they think their sainted grandmother would want them to.

On the other side, a lot of accomodationists think that religion, while not true, can have some value or redeeming qualities in the modern world.  Name one.  Come up with one redeeming quality that’s not coddling an immature and clueless believer, that’s not keeping the crazy religious borderline sociopaths in line, etc.  In other words, come up with a single value that cannot be achieved, as well or better, using wholly secular means.  I don’t think it can be done, so that’s not a valid reason.  In fact, I think that the reason some people are accomodationists is they lack the balls to stand up against the overwhelming tide of theism in the world today.  No, religion isn’t going away any time soon, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t oppose it at every turn.  Murder isn’t going to go away either, does that mean we ought to coddle murderers and make them feel good about what they do?  The idea is absurd on it’s face.

I really wish that accomodationists would stop making excuses for people to believe ridiculous things.  Whether theists are happy or sad is irrelevant.  The only thing that matters is whether they are factually correct and I think that the vast majority of my readers would agree that they simply are not.  As such, they and their beliefs ought to be opposed, the only valid goal any of us ought to have in this debate is who is right and who is wrong.

And they’re not.

The post Why Accomodationism Fails (Again) appeared first on Bitchspot.

That said though, now that I’ve been more active on Google+, I’ve seen a lot of atheist bloggers wanting to know how to draw more readers and vjack over on Atheist Revolution wrote a really good article on getting your blog noticed.  If you’re not reading vjack’s blog, you ought to be.

Anyhow, I had looked over vjack’s list and I think there are a lot of valuable ideas in there and I wanted to steal them shamelessly take a look at them one by one.

1. Install Google Analytics or an alternative system for monitoring traffic to your blog. This should be the first thing you do, so go do it now.

That is certainly a good idea and I’ve had it running on my blog for a while now, I’m just not sure how accurate it is.  I’ve had other traffic monitoring plugins on the blog and none of them seem to say the same thing as Google Analytics.  Just using the basic WP Stats system, Analytics reports 75-100 fewer hits per day than Stats does and they’re both supposed to take the same things into account (weeding out multiple visits from the same IP, etc.)  I don’t know that I’m getting accurate information and worse, judging only from the Analytics dashboard, I just don’t get the kind of quality information that I get from Stats.  It doesn’t tell me, for instance, what search engines people used, what terms they typed in, etc.  Yes, I know I can get a lot of that by going to the Google site, but isn’t the point to make my life easier, not more difficult?  At the moment, I have both running on the blog and am comparing the results.

2. Now that you have a way to track your traffic, it is time to make it easier for readers to subscribe to your blog. You are going to want to set up FeedBurner. You can find additional information FeedBurner here.

Yup, I’ve have had Feedburner for a long time but I don’t find that a lot of people are using the RSS feed, either content or comment.  I suppose that’s not surprising because I rarely ever use RSS either.  Someone was complaining on a Google+ podcasting community that people were just going to their site and listening to their podcasts there instead of subscribing through iTunes and therefore, they didn’t have a good metric for measuring how many people were listening.  I really doubt that, beyond counting page hits, anyone can ever tell that I’ve listened to their podcast because I listen to *ALL* of my podcasts while sitting at my computer, going straight to everyone’s website.  I don’t have a long drive every day and every podcast that I listen to, I listen with my wife, who clearly isn’t in the car with me anyhow.  They’re really not useful for me and while they might be useful for a certain segment of the population, they aren’t the panacea that a lot of people make them out to be.

3. Time for a bit of self-reflection. Why are you blogging? What is it that you are hoping to contribute to the atheist blogosphere? Does your blog clearly reflect these goals? Will a first-time visitor understand what you are trying to do and be able to quickly and easily find answers to his or her questions? Who is your intended audience, and what sort of voice will your blog have?

I think most people understand my voice, it tends to be pretty pissed off.  I started this blog as a place for me to bitch, thus the name.  News flash for the feminists who think it’s some misogynist smear, it’s my “spot to bitch”.  Get over yourselves.  I think I do what I set out to do, this is a forum for me to make my opinions known.  What it isn’t and was never intended to be was a place built specifically make money or turn myself into an atheist icon.  I don’t play the hero worship game, I don’t want to be a hero to millions and admired by atheists far and wide.  This isn’t a stepping stone into the celebrity circuit, speaking at conferences, writing books and making a bundle.  That said though, I don’t really want to just talk to myself, I can do that without posting my thoughts online, so attracting some sort of an audience is important.  I just don’t want to blog specifically for that purpose, I’ve tried it before and I hated it with a passion.  I write what I write.  I just wish I could find more of the audience that wants to read it.

4.  Search Google and Bing for your blog and make sure it is listed in both. If it does not appear, you will want to submit it. You can find information about submitting your blog to Google here, and here is information on submitting to Bing.

Actually, my hosting company sends out weekly reminders, sponsored by Attracta SEO Support to continually update sitemaps for Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo, to check that your blog isn’t blacklisted, etc.  In fact, in thinking about this, I just went and updated all of my sitemaps.  Certainly it’s important to be listed on search engines and, for a lot of the subjects I cover, I’m among the first couple of entries on Google (the only search engine I use).  Every post is optimized for SEO, has a meta description, etc.  The only thing that pisses me off about this are some of my weekly features, like Horror Show Sunday and TV Thursday, it bitches at me because I keep using the same focus keywords.  Well duh!

5.  Does your blog have a blogroll in which you include links to some of the atheist blogs you read on a regular basis? If not, now would be a good time to create one. Other bloggers like incoming links, and this can be a great way to get their attention.

Certainly, although I will admit I’m very unhappy with how I do it currently, but I was even more unhappy with the way it was done before.  Blogrolls take up a lot of space in the sidebar and I try to keep the things that are important to see toward the top and the things that are not drift toward the bottom.  Most people don’t look at blogrolls so I put it in a pulldown, just to minimize it’s size.  I’ve seen people with RSS-feed blogrolls and while I think those are cool, you can see my above comments on RSS feeds and it will still only display a few top entries anyhow.  Anyone have any better ideas?

6. Plan to write at least one high-quality post containing original content per week and as many as one per day.

I write every single day, I don’t think I’ve missed a day in almost a year now.  There was a time when I write 2 posts a day, every single day, but not even I am that crazy to keep it up in the long run.  Certainly, the comments that I get from people who read my blog say I’m writing things they want to read, I just think that, as I said before, I think that combining conservatism and atheism has a detrimental effect.  I think a lot of atheists expect that any blog about atheism is going to come from a liberal perspective and that any blog about conservatism is going to be religious.  I just had a discussion about this very thing on Google+, where someone posted a video on crazy things the neo-cons did in the Republican Party, but used the word “conservative” throughout.  I corrected him but he told me that it wasn’t possible for conservatives to be atheists and even if they were, that’s their problem, not his.

7. Consider whether Twitter is an appropriate platform for promoting your posts and interacting with others in the secular community.

Of course, I have Twitter, but to be honest, the returns usually don’t justify the effort, I’ve found.  It’s difficult to have a decent discussion, you certainly can’t have an intelligent debate, if  you just sit and watch one of the major hashtags, like #atheism, you find that it’s just an echo chamber, people posting pithy comments over and over again that really don’t mean anything or achieve anything.  That said, my blog and Tumblr accounts do post every new thing I do to Twitter and I use Buffer to post back articles 5x per day, at least when I remember to load up my queue.  So far, I’ve seen little new traffic that I can identify from Twitter.

8. Make sure you understand how the commenting system you are using works, the limitations associated with it, and whether it might make sense to replace it with a third party option like Disqus or Intense Debate.

This is where I have a big problem.  Both Disqus and IntenseDebate have massive failings, both have been shown to be glitchy and prevent some people from posting at all from time to time.  I’ve had an ongoing issue with IntenseDebate where I cannot delete spam comments on the blog without disabling the ID plugin first.  I’ve asked ID what I should do, they don’t  care.  I’d much rather have a superior commenting system, one that is WYSIWYG, allows quoting other comments, etc., but I don’t think such a thing exists for WP.  I’m not wedded to either of those systems, I just don’t know that there’s a better way to do it.

9. Submit one of your best posts to the atheism subreddit at Reddit and share a few on Facebook or Google+.

There are problems here, and we’ve discussed them a bit on Google+.  Now I have accounts on Reddit, StumbleUpon and Google+ and I use all of them to some degree.  My blog automatically posts to StumbleUpon every single day and I’m not sure if there’s a Reddit plugin that would do the same, but in both cases, unless you are Stumbling a bunch of posts that are not  your own every day, and I know this is especially true of Reddit, you get downgraded or even shadow banned from the site.  They don’t like self-promotion.  Therefore, you have to run around and enter a bunch of blog stories day in and day out and I don’t have time for that.  I guess I can go around and just Stumble every single blog post on every single blog I read, but that strikes me as dishonest.  These are supposed to be articles that impress you and not every article does.  A bunch of us thought about Stumbling and Redditing each other’s articles every day, but that suffers from the same problem.  Not sure what to do with this one.

10. Review #3 above regularly, asking yourself whether you are accomplishing what you want to accomplish. Pay attention to the visual aspects of your blog, the ease of finding information, and the degree to which you are providing readers with something of value to keep them coming back.

As I said before, that’s a great sentiment and all, but I don’t know how well it works in the real world.  I know what I’m posting and I know the inherent difficulties of what I’m posting, but there is supposedly a sizable audience out there and I have no idea where to find them.  One thing I have noticed, from the few conservative atheists I am acquainted with, is that virtually none of them ever talk about religion.   They are political bloggers.  Sites like Secular Right and The Atheist Conservative rarely talk about religion, whereas that’s the majority of my output.  Politics are fine and certainly I do post about it regularly, but my audience just isn’t the same as their audience.  I’ve asked a couple of them if they want to take over the co-hosting seat on The Bitchspot Report Podcast and without exception, every single one I’ve asked has told me they don’t want to talk about religion.

So now what?  I’ve done all of these things, in fact, I’ve done them and more.  I’m on all of the various blog directories, I post on forums, I participate in Google+ communities, I tweet, although not as much as I did in the past.  vjack suggested getting on Pinterest as a means of drawing traffic, but how many of these damn social networking sites does one have to join, how many directions can you split your limited free time, in hopes of funneling traffic to a blog?  Aren’t you just splitting your audience into a million different places?  One thing I refuse to do is get on Facebook, so that’s out of the question.

Honestly, that’s what’s bothering me.  I started Bitchspot as my primary online voice.  Now I find that I’ve got podcasts and YouTube channels and Twitter accounts up the ying yang and Bitchspot isn’t any more popular than when  I started.  It hasn’t found the kind of audience that I always envisioned for it and hoped it would achieve.  What’s the point, beyond the personal satisfaction and letting off steam, that putting time and effort and money into producing a blog gets for you, if hardly anyone reads it?  How do you reach that mythical 20% of atheists when they’re seemingly afraid to talk about religion?  I don’t know, it’s a mystery to me.  Anyone have any ideas?

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Alright, we see a lot of crazy religious adults causing mayhem with firearms but this is the first story I remember of a minor doing it.  However, I think a lot of us have run into kids who have an unnatural attachment to religion and a violent streak, there have been a number of well known ones preaching on YouTube.  It’s clear they have a screw loose, but it never occurred to me that they might grab a gun and shoot someone for getting between them and their Bibles.  All it takes is a combination of irrational beliefs, mental instability, those wonderful drugs that cause psychotic breaks and a gun and you’ve got a party!  At least nobody was seriously injured, but hey, I bet his parents don’t think religion is harmless anymore.

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I’ve never been a Tea Partier, although I liked some of their original positions before they took a hard right-hand whack-a-loon stance on things I vehemently disagree with.  That said though, I think that way back at the beginning, particularly their Contract From America, they had some good points which I certainly think we ought to implement.  A lot of what Bill Whittle says about conservatism in this series of videos are perfectly reasonable. There are 7 videos, each about 10 minutes in length, and I’ll address what I like and what I do not like about each of them.

Generally speaking, I have few problems here, I think that liberalism, under the misnomer of “progressivism” is largely a failure, specifically because nothing they are doing is new, it’s been tried before and it’s failed before, over and over and over.  Now while I’m not as convinced as Mr. Whittle that human nature cannot be changed to some degree, it certainly won’t be the laws or the government that will change it, it must come from the society itself.  While the general concept is that society will elect representatives that will pass laws in accordance with the wishes of society, laws generally don’t control how children are raised, what values are imparted to them and what morals they receive.  These are the most important elements in determining how a person will behave and think as an adult, although certainly no guarantee.  Today, we have parents who are almost totally disconnected from their child’s upbringing, resulting in misguided and anti-social people walking the street.  We need to change this, but it can’t come from the government, it has to come from the people.  Pass all the laws you want, it won’t significantly affect how children are reared in the home and by the time a child is 7 or so, their brain patterns are set for the future, it’s difficult to change basic personality traits thereafter.

He starts off fine, I do entirely disagree with lifetime politicians who largely have no grasp whatsoever with the trials and tribulations of the common man.  I have and will continue to advocate for  term limits for politicians that require them to get out of politics entirely at least every 2-3 terms for a while so they have to get their own hands dirty and figure out how things operate in the real world.  Oh yes, I hear people saying, the voters can do that any time they want!  You’re right, but we all know they simply don’t do it.  We have a voting population who has been carefully crafted by the political machine who is more interested in how someone looks on TV and what sound bytes they generate than how they will actually do in office.  So long as that’s the case, I think we need to eliminate the possibility of lifetime politicians, for the good of the nation.  You might find that elitist on my part, but there it is.  That said though, I think we need a balance between people who live in ivory towers, no matter how educated and intelligent they are, and the common man, who has direct life experience in a specific field.  We shouldn’t go as far anti-elitism as Bill seems to want, nor should we go as far pro-elitism as I see a lot of liberals wanting.  The proper answer is somewhere in the middle.

Again, he makes a lot of good points at the beginning, wealth creation is the result of human innovation and creativity.  It makes no sense for the liberals to complain that people have more than they do, they simply have not worked hard enough.  I really hate people who whine about the wealthy, unless the wealthy can be demonstrated to have violated the law.  I am sick and tired of the poor whining about how the wealthy got their share, as if wealth is supposed to be broken up equally among the population and someone stole yours.  The wealthy got the way they are, by and large,  by hard work.  If you have not bettered your position in life, it’s because you haven’t earned it.  Pointing at the wealthy and claiming life is unfair misses the point.  It’s not their success that you ought to be worried about but your own failure.  I’m not going to argue about acting immorally because that’s subjective and frankly, I have little respect for the “morals” that a lot of liberals bandy around.

Sorry Bill, you lost it right off the bat.  No vote of Congress, no Presidential decree can overturn a Constitutional amendment.  That has other requirements.  He then goes into the laughable idea of “Natural Law”, which I have soundly discredited many times in the past.  There is no way to demonstrate that Natural Law exists, there is no logical, rational, evidence-based means by which one can discover what Natural Law is, nor separate it from what Natural Law is not.  He then tries to claim that Americans are exceptional, simply because we are Americans.  That’s laughably untrue as well.  He tries to use the first line of the Declaration of Independence to justify his beliefs, but he does what so many do, they imbue the Founding Fathers with magical powers and godlike authority.  They were just men, they were no better than you or I, they had an idea and expressed their opinions on how a nation ought to be run.  They were good opinions, to be sure, but they were not infallible opinions.  Bill seems to think they were.  Bill is wrong.  Unfortunately, he, like so many others, seems overly enamored by his heroes, such that anything said hero says is seen as automatically correct and valuable, instead of looking at what’s said, regardless of who said it, and evaluating the idea on it’s own merits.  People on both the left and the right make this serious mistake.  It’s why I think hero worship generally sucks.

 Oh look, an appeal to common sense!  Logical fallacies out of the gate.  I’ve spoken before about the misreading of the 2nd Amendment that goes on so I won’t do it again, but he seems to take it to heart, even if he doesn’t detail it in his video.  That said though, I think that people do have a right to own firearms, within the context of the law and it would be entirely impractical to think otherwise.  You cannot stop people from getting guns, you cannot confiscate all the guns that are out there and even if you could, it wouldn’t be long until people got more guns.  We live in a gun culture, it’s as absurd to think that you could get rid of all the guns as to think you could get rid of all the cars.  It’s just not going to happen, so from a matter of practicality, it’s stupid to try.  I find it bizarre that modern people think the way Bill does.  Yes, there was probably a time in the past where an armed population could overthrow their government, but, especially in the United States, it’s simply not practical today.  A government who would move against their citizens and is willing to pull out all the stops wins.  They just do.  A bunch of guys, no matter how many they number, with handguns, shotguns and pick up trucks simply cannot win against a military battalion with automatic, armor-piercing rifles, rocket launchers and tanks.  It’s just not  going to happen, no matter how much some dream that it would.  You’d end up with a lot of dead people with the military rolling right over their bodies.  That might be scary to some people, but that’s the reality of the world we live in.  So stop thinking that you’re going to fight off a determined government, or even a determined invading army, with the .22 you have stuffed in your pants.

 Then he starts to come around again and I agree with most of his positions on illegal immigration.  Look folks, like it or not, these people are criminals.  No, their crime is not as bad as murder or child molestation, but a crime is a crime is a crime and just because you don’t personally care about it, it’s still a crime.  This is something I have written about many times before so there isn’t a lot of reason to go into it again.

 I have a problem with American exceptionalism, especially as it tends to be thrown around by the neo-cons.  They assert that people are exceptional just because they are Americans.  I disagree.  Exceptional people are exceptional because they do exceptional things, not because of where they were born.  There was a time in this country where we encouraged and even expected people to do exceptional things, where success was the benchmark and exceeding expectations was the word of the day.  America was better than everyone else because we worked hard and earned it.  However, that’s not what a lot of far-right wingers mean when they say American exceptionalism today, they mean that you’re just better than everyone else because you happen to have been lucky enough to be born on American soil.  Like it or not, it just isn’t enough to be born here, you have to work for it too.  You can’t ride around on the shoulders of past greats and pretend that you’re great too.  You have to earn your place among the exceptional.  Many Americans do, they work hard and achieve much but that doesn’t entitle everyone to go riding along on their coattails.  In fact, I think the myth of American exceptionalism, the idea that you’re a better person just because you live here, is harmful.  It suggests that people don’t have to work as hard to be exceptional, just because of where they were born.  The fact is, as technologically advanced as we are in America today, as much as we innovate, we really aren’t that exceptional, we’re just so far ahead on the tech curve that nobody else can catch up.  That doesn’t mean we’re doing everything we can, just that we’re standing on giants and feeling good about ourselves because of how far we can see.

We can take  good ideas from a wide variety of sources, even sources we probably largely disagree with.  I think it’s important to be open to plucking the gems, even from places that we’d otherwise not tread, but I fear that the nation is far too ideologically extreme for most Americans to be willing to do that.  Everyone hides behind their labels, everyone believes only the official word and rejects anything that falls outside of party dogma without even thinking about it.  How can we ever expect to improve our nation if we’re not willing to fix the problems?

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This past week, they had author Dale McGowan on to talk about secular parenting.  It’s a great topic, there are always lots of questions about how kids can be raised to be secular, free-thinking and rational and those are fantastic questions.  However, while I welcome the discussion, I think Dale is doing it all wrong.  The link to the audio podcast version is here, Dale is on right at the beginning of the show after announcements.  They say that their YouTube channel is back up so if you want to watch it, it should be available soon.

Dale wrote a book called Parenting Beyond Belief.  I’ll be honest, I haven’t read it and almost certainly wouldn’t, just because it no longer applies to me, I’ve already successfully raised two secular children and am not planning on doing it again.  I just wanted to point out to people that it’s out there and if it sounds like something you’d like to check out, by all means, I encourage you to do so.

That said, I disagreed with just about everything he had to say in his phone call to TAE and, while I don’t want to put words into the mouths of Russell and Jen, there was a lot he said that they didn’t seem to agree with either.  However, I’m not going to speak on their behalf, I’ll limit it to thinks that I had issues with.

To be honest, and this is just an impression I got, but a lot of what Dale said came off with a very accomodationist vibe.  I’ve talked in the past about how much I dislike accomodationism, just as a philosophical position in *ANY* argument.  It isn’t limited to religion, I don’t think that you should change your argument or moderate your stance because someone might get offended at what you say.  That’s not to say you should be a dick, but your position is your position and you are entitled to your opinion, regardless of what anyone else thinks.  You ought to stick to your guns if you feel strongly about your position, and if you don’t feel strongly about it, maybe you ought to rethink holding it in the first place.

So much of what Dale seemed to be saying is that the parents ought to be keeping their religious, or non-religious, views to themselves, lest they piss someone off.  I think Russell had it right, they’re your kids, you get to choose how they’re raised.  Religious family members might dislike what you’ve chosen to do, but they have no say in what you do.  If they don’t like it, their one and only option is to accept it or to hit the road.  From where I was sitting, it seems he wanted to put on a dog and pony show in front of kids to let them pick their beliefs from among a wide range of alternatives.  That’s frankly stupid as far as I’m concerned.  As atheists, and hopefully as rational atheists, we’re in no way obligated to present idiotic ideas to our children in the guise of being open minded.  We’re not open minded and we shouldn’t be.  All ideas are not created equal, all beliefs are not equally valid and just because people have stupid ideas doesn’t obligate us to put those ideas before our children.  We don’t say “well, we taught you that 1+1=2, but some people believe 1+1=3, so let’s have them tell you why…”  No, those people are objectively wrong, their reasoning has no place in a child’s education.

I think that some atheist parents get completely paranoid over the idea of “indoctrination”.  Oh no, we can’t possibly indoctrinate our kids!  They then go overboard the opposite direction, where they feel they cannot pass on facts to their offspring.  It’s absurd.  No matter what you do, you’re indoctrinating  your kids, no matter what you teach them, you’re putting ideas into their heads that they are going to take seriously.  It’s how a parent-child relationship works.  They are going to look up to you to instruct them how to live their lives and if you refuse to do so, you’re performing an injustice.

If you want my opinion, as a parent of two very well-adjusted, intelligent atheist teenagers, here you go.  Teach your kids from a very young age, not what to think, but how to think.  Teach them how to question authority, how  to examine propositions and how to make decisions based on evidence, logic and reason.  Tell them they should never accept any proposition until they have checked it out on their own and verified it is factually true.  If you do that, you’ve inoculated them against stupidity, both religious and otherwise.  That is really all you can expect, but if done properly, if the lesson takes root, you have nothing to fear.  I found it funny that they kept talking about hell and how traumatizing it is for children.  No it’s not, not if  you’ve done your job right.  We never had to teach our kids that hell wasn’t real, we never had to teach them anything about Christianity or any other religion, we just taught them to think and they rejected it all on their own.  If they come home with a false idea and seem interested in it, walk them through the logical steps.  Why is this idea true? Where is the evidence?  Why should they accept the idea as valid?  Do this every single day with every single new idea.  Make them justify these ideas.  Point out the holes in their logic.  It won’t be long until they are doing this automatically and I think you’ll find they make a lot fewer bad decisions.

I really don’t understand why so many atheist parents have so many problems just standing up for themselves.  They’re  your kids, they’re your responsibility, you have every right to teach them whatever values you hold and whatever beliefs you have.  Do not ever allow a family member, any family member, to come between you and that extremely important fact.  It’s better to eject a family member from your life than it is to let them poison the innocent minds of  your kids.  Raising your children to be productive, intelligent and rational members of society is your #1 job in life.

Don’t blow it.

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