Savior of Animal-kind

Somebunny up there loves you.

What is an atheist?

It's not just a person who doesn't believe that your god exists. An atheist is one who lives without professing or believing in the existence of what anyone calls a god. Everybody's atheistic about something. If you are a Catholic you are probably atheistic about the Hindu gods. The Christian Scientist (my former brand) is atheistic about Jesus, defining him as only an especially inspired human. Religion, then, tends to be in some kind of battle stance with at least some other religious systems, despite most of their claims to be life-affirming, loving and peaceful.

Here's a fuller treatment of the subject by John Loftus, a former Christian apologist who runs the Debunking Christianity web site.

I am an atheist. What do I mean when I use this word? I mean that I do not think there are any supernatural beings or supernatural forces. It’s not that I have no beliefs about them. I do. I believe they do not exist. People who do not have any beliefs about such beings are people who have never considered them in the first place.

Full text of the article.

"The Second Declaration" is a piece of crap

There, I said it. And I appear to be the only person in the world who has said it.

What is this book? Well, if you search the Internet, in dozens of entries you'll be told, in these same words, it's

Absolutely original, with vivid style, verve, imagination and sharp view points, The Second Declaration is a fascinating vision of future economies, the development trends of future cultures, and the development trends of future mankind.

Supposedly written by a young (21) Chinese female phenom,

Wang Xiaoping is President of the Beijing Humankind Great Success Educational, Scientific and Cultural Research Institute and Counselor of the Beijing Enlightenment Education Group. She is also a bestseller writer, an academic orator and a thinker. She has been acclaimed as ‘a talented girl’, ‘a legendary girl’ and ‘a goddess of wisdom’. She is the youngest cover girl for the famous magazine China Women.

I tried to listen to the audiobook version of this and couldn't finish it. But that's OK, I keep one part of it on my iPod for when I need a cure for insomnia. It's hard to tell if the original Chinese is well written, but the translation is abysmal. Combine it with a rushed yet almost comatose reading by Marguerite Gavin, who otherwise seems to be competent - and you have a torrent of word-like noise that zaps you like a stun gun. (Poor Marguerite even commits the unforgivable narrator's gaffe of pronouncing "misled" as "my zeld")

And don't bother looking up "1stWorld Publishing," the supposed publisher of this drivel. If you click on the link for it on Amazon, you'll be informed that the item does not exist. If you search for it on the Internet you'll get directed to a website that offers to sell you that domain name.

The strangest thing is that I can find no civilian review of this book. Surely someone else has read it, or tried to - maybe even liked it. But apparently all the "reviews" are by Chinese professionals who are universally ecstatic about the book. I suspect a well-financed promotion campaign that somehow squelches all criticism.

So, if search engine crawlers come across this blog, will the fact that I say "The Second Declaration" is a piece of crap show up in their results lists?