Sam Harris joins plot to have Pope arrested

Sam Harris, the atheist writer, has launched an appeal to fund a legal bid to have the Pope arrested when he visits Britain.

The American neuroscientist is seeking financial backing for the campaign that is being led by British writers Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The pair have asked human-rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church.

Harris, the author of The End of Faith, launched his appeal online, stating: “I would like to announce that Project Reason, the foundation that my wife and I started to spread scientific thinking and secular values, has joined Hitchens and Dawkins in an effort to end the ‘diplomatic immunity’ which the Vatican claims protects the Pope from any responsibility.

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Preaching to the converted?

A great video from One Good Move

I'm getting this comment that I'm 'just preaching to the converted' with increasing regularity — I'd like to nip it in the overgrown bud. Not only does it encourage nothing but apathy and inaction, but on the briefest examination it's shown to be based on clearly flawed premises.

Correct methods for opening up reason based discussion?

Found:Genes that let you live to 100

An interesting article from the BBC today on the discovery of a set of genes that would ensure people live to over 100 years, regardless of their bad habits.

SCIENTISTS have discovered the “Methuselah” genes whose lucky carriers have a much improved chance of living to 100 even if they indulge in an unhealthy lifestyle.

The genes appear to protect people against the effects of smoking and bad diet and can also delay the onset of age-related illnesses such as cancer and heart disease by up to three decades.

No single gene is a guaranteed fountain of youth. Instead, the secret of longevity probably lies in having the right “suite” of genes, according to new studies of centenarians and their families. Such combinations are extremely rare — only one person in 10,000 reaches the age of 100.

The genes found so far each appear to give a little extra protection against the diseases of old age. Centenarians appear to have a high chance of having several such genes embedded in their DNA.

As science reaches a stage where we can ensure that our bodies don't grow old, the cells in our bodies remained are just as strong with each division, then possibly this would mean that combined with advances in medicine the likelihood of death through natural causes and diseases would be very small.

How old could we hypothetically live for? I'm guessing if we continue to advance as quickly in this area of science as we are now, and are able to understand and manipulate more and more our genetic code then really there is no limit. A world where people cannot die. Its a beautiful but scary thought.

If this was the case, and we could ensure that our children would live forever would it be ethical, in the interests of avoiding the overpopulation of the planet, to prevent reproduction through laws or even sterilization?

Who do we allow to breed? Or put another way, whose genetic code do we choose to be passed onto future generations? It would take artificial selection into a whole new dimension.

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TED: Julia Sweeney on letting go of God

The Spectacle of Faith

As you may have come to realize I am not particularly fond of religion. In fact I'm not that fond of anyone telling me what I can or can't do. Although I know I'm not perfect and if I'm proven wrong then I'm happy to be corrected.

However, when an organisation tries to dictate how I, my friends or my fellow man should live their lives based on something so questionably bogus as the Bible and/or the rules they've made whilst listening to the voices in their head, well its hard not to question why anyone takes them seriously.

See I quite like politics for exactly the reason I don't like religion. Even when I don't agree with someones political point of view I know that through debate and discussion we the people can vote and fight to change laws and bills to suit the needs of the majority. I believe something similar is what Sam Harris means when he talks of a "Science of Morality".

When the organization tries to enforce their bronze-age doctrine on society behind the veil that they are the voice of an omnipotent creator of heaven and earth and their views on what is right and wrong cannot be questioned, well this starts to look an awful lot like a dictatorship. A dictatorship that spans ordinary political boundaries.

Then we hear that at the same time that this organization spins its "infallible" lies, it has been trying to cover up the rape and torture of innocent young children to protect the guilty, and not the innocent, so that the organization can continue to prosper, you have to ask why isn't society trying harder to bring these sick individuals to justice.

When it comes to anything else other than religion we the people stand up together as one and say that is not right, we do not want this in our society, and we put these people before the judicial system.

Josef Fritzel, Gary Glitter, Fred West, Baby P, Shannon Matthews, Jaycee Dugard are all names that we recognize because of their relation to child abuse scandals in recent history.

What is the difference between these stories and the Catholic Church?

Nothing is happening to the Catholic Church.

Below are some links for those who want to read up on just who truly horrible the Catholic Church really is:

For Years, Deaf Boys Tried to Tell of Priest’s Abuse

Pope May Be at Crossroads on Abuse, Forced to Reconcile Policy and Words

Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys

In Abuse Crisis, a Church Is Pitted Against Society and Itself

Abuse Case Offers a View of the Vatican’s Politics

Bring the Pope to Justice

A Woman’s Place Is In The Church

The Great Catholic Cover-Up

We Can't Let the Pope Decide Who's a Criminal

The Pope Is Not Above the Law

Tear Down That Wall

The pope should stand trial

Ratzinger is the perfect pope

GOD! I need a beer.

Life on Earth Arose Just Once

A great article by Tina Hesman Saey of Science News on the proof for one of the central components for the Theory of Evolution.

One isn’t such a lonely number. All life on Earth shares a single common ancestor, a new statistical analysis confirms.

The idea that life forms share a common ancestor is “a central pillar of evolutionary theory,” says Douglas Theobald, a biochemist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. “But recently there has been some mumbling, especially from microbiologists, that it may not be so cut-and-dried.”

Because microorganisms of different species often swap genes, some scientists have proposed that multiple primordial life forms could have tossed their genetic material into life’s mix, creating a web, rather than a tree of life.

To determine which hypothesis is more likely correct, Theobald put various evolutionary ancestry models through rigorous statistical tests. The results, published in the May 13 Nature, come down overwhelmingly on the side of a single ancestor.

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