Robot Chicken

Before your time

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I believe that anyone that considers themselves intellectual has heard the truly ignorant statement, ‘Oh, I think that was before my time.’ come from the mouth of a teen or twenty-something in regards to the mention of an event, movie or piece of literature that requires thought. These are the same people that will tell you that they believe in a 2000 year old book and deity but they know nothing of Shakespeare! Star Trek and Easy Rider were before my time but I believe that the bible is true! I haven’t READ the bible, but I believe that it’s true! Blah, blah, blah!

What is motivating these people to claim ignorance of anything that is not popular or from their generation? Do they think that it makes them look other than completely uncultured? I was listening to classical and jazz music by the time I was 20 and reading the classics throughout my teens. I was and am proud that I am well read and have worldly experience. I would have NEVER said that something that required intellectual investment was ‘before my time.’

The current lot seems to be following some kind of hipster script of lemming-like idiocy, but even hipsters pride themselves on knowing about obscure old movies and literature! The main streamers, the pop-icon followers are the problem I think. They don’t seem to want to be bothered with anything but what the latest mind-numbingly boring pop and young adult pulp bullshit publications such as the Twilight series and Taylor Swift’s latest uninspired piece of puling shit! Yes I sound like a self-important ass sometimes, but I respect knowledge born of music, theater and literature. I enjoy the classical, the hard rock, the grunge, and I appreciate the new as well. I just don’t discriminate against the things of a different era, I embrace them as a welcome addition to my repertoire.

A friend of mine recently divorced and in his middle thirties made the mistake of dating a girl, and I mean GIRL, in her mid-twenties. This person is a professional two years out of college to his 10 to 15. She is intelligent but I always got the feeling that the true core of this person was only skin deep. She seemed distracted all the time as so many young people appear, with her head in the clouds and her considerably beautiful swimmers body in the present, blindly checking for new text messages and studying her Facebook page for hours. She is very aware of the fact that she is beautiful and pours the narcissism out in generous portions seemingly oblivious to the eyes that watch. She believes that the attention is warranted and is completely expecting of it like the models that prance the runway.

My friend asked this girl to dinner a few times and to a movie or two, always paying of course. The airhead sat thru dinner and the movies bored out of her mind because they were eclectic pictures and required thought and contemplation. She also texted quite frequently throughout dinner giving the appearance that she was completely self absorbed and inconsiderate. The conversation seemed to always gravitate to her and the things that she liked and she frequently stated that certain things that he mentioned were ‘before my time.’ This, of course, has little to do with atheism but illustrates the simplicity of the beings that can claim to believe in something supernatural but can’t comprehend Nietzsche! So to those who are so obtuse and limited that they cannot comprehend anything that doesn’t happen in text or reality T.V, we don’t care about your limited sophomoric opinions and your pretentious superficial ramblings, when you get well read and take your heads out of your collective asses then we might actually give a rolling fuck about what you have to say. Until then, keep your goddamned Kardashian nonsense to yourself and text until your heart is empty and content! If you wake up…..Call me!

More Thinkingatheist.com

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A Letter to a Christian Mother

Posted by:

Seth

When:

Mar 20, 2013 at 9:03 AM

Updated:

1 Month Ago

I contiue to be amazed when I see Christian women defending a bible that denigrates women.  And recently, I found myself in another discussion with a devoutly Christian mother of five who defiantly brandished her faith and lamented my own fall from grace.

I presented her with a form letter I sometimes use in these discussions, customizing a few lines to fit her specific situation.  In my opinion, the letter is a powerful tool, because it briefly presents scenarios regarding women (and children) based on directly-quoted-from-the-bible scriptures.

Feel free to cut, copy, paste, alter and otherwise use the text of this letter in your own discussions, or perhaps use it as inspiration to construct one that is a better fit in your particular situation.

-Seth Andrews

___
This is a difficult letter to navigate, but I’m convinced that difficult questions shouldn’t be ignored simply because they make us uncomfortable.  Ultimately, our end-goal is to discover truth and to pledge ourselves to live good, productive, moral and fulfilled lives.

I suspected that your (Baptist) church’s doctrine lined up with most protestant Christian churches.  To be sure, I pulled up the church website and verified.  I highlighted a few of the words and phrases, to make sure we could refer back to them.  Again, this is pasted directly from the website of the church you attend.
___

I. The Scriptures

The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God’s revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy. It reveals the principles by which God judges us, and therefore is, and will remain to the end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried. All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation.

Exodus 24:4; Deuteronomy 4:1-2; 17:19; Joshua 8:34; Psalms 19:7-10; 119:11,89,105,140; Isaiah 34:16; 40:8; Jeremiah 15:16; 36:1-32; Matthew 5:17-18; 22:29; Luke 21:33; 24:44-46; John 5:39; 16:13-15; 17:17; Acts 2:16ff.; 17:11; Romans 15:4; 16:25-26; 2 Timothy 3:15-17; Hebrews 1:1-2; 4:12; 1 Peter 1:25; 2 Peter 1:19-21.
___

So.  God is the author of scripture.  And as Jesus/God is the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), his nature is unchanged throughout the expanse of time.  The God of today is the same God from before the universe began.  And Christians declare that God is omnipotent, omniscient and worthy of our allegiance and praise.

So let me ask you:

    • If God came down and commanded you to drive a knife into your son’s chest, as he did to Abraham regarding Isaac in Genesis 22, would you obey?  Would you have agreed to execute your own son?  And would this have been a moral act?  (And even though the story stipulates that God pulled the plug on the whole operation at the last second, does that excuse any deity that would ask a parent to execute his child?)
      Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”  – Genesis 22:2
    • Does your conscience allow you to love a deity that divides households?
      “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law – a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’  Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”  -Matthew 10:34-38
  • Does the idea of being silenced because you’re a woman offend you?
    A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.  I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.  – 1 Timothy 2:11 
  • Should your voice be muted in church because you’re female?
    “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.“ – 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 
  • Are you comfortable being a second-class citizen?  
  • After all, even in the Old Testament, female slaves are worth HALF that of male ones (Leviticus 27:3-7).  Women get their hands hacked off at the wrist for attempting to even help their husbands escape a fight (Deuteronomy 25:11-12).  Pity the poor Levite’s concubine in Judges 19 who is tossed like garbage into a sexually-crazed mob (to spare the more valuable males in the home) and literally raped to death.
  • How would you have felt as the Israelites taught the Benjamites how to kidnap women to keep as their own wives (as in Judges 21)?  What would you have done if you had been one of the female abductees?   
    They told the men of Benjamin who still needed wives, “Go and hide in the vineyards.  When the women of Shiloh come out for their dances, rush out from the vineyards, and each of you can take one of them home to be your wife!  And when their fathers and brothers come to us in protest, we will tell them, ‘Please be understanding.  Let them have your daughters, for we didn’t find enough wives for them when we destroyed Jabesh-gilead. And you are not guilty of breaking the vow since you did not give your daughters in marriage to them.'”  So the men of Benjamin did as they were told.  They kidnapped the women who took part in the celebration and carried them off to the land of their own inheritance.  -Judges 21:20-22
  • What about the kidnap and rape of the Midianite women, as commanded by Yahweh in Number 31?  As a mother, you would have been executed.  Any virgin daughter(s) would have been taken as plunder and raped.
    Now kill all the boys and all the women who have slept with a man.  Only the young girls who are virgins may live; you may keep them for yourselves.  – Numbers 31:17-18
  • On the issue of rape, would you support God’s edict that a rape victim be required to marry her rapist?  What if you had been the victim?
    If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father.  Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her.  – Deuteronomy 22:28-29
  • Would you support the execution of a rape victim because, according to the law, she didn’t scream loud enough?
    If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbors wife. – Deuteronomy 22:23-24
  • Would you support God’s edict that the wives of enemy soldiers could be kidnapped, altered in appearance and released like animals after a month if the soldiers felt dissatisfied with them?  What if you had been the kidnapped woman in this scenario?
    “When you go out to war against your enemies and the LORD, your God, delivers them into your hand, so that you take captives, if you see a comely woman among the captives and become so enamored of her that you wish to have her as wife, you may take her home to your house.  But before she may live there, she must shave her head and pare her nails and lay aside her captive’s garb.  After she has mourned her father and mother for a full month, you may have relations with her, and you shall be her husband and she shall be your wife.  However, if later on you lose your liking for her, you shall give her her freedom, if she wishes it; but you shall not sell her or enslave her, since she was married to you under compulsion.”  –Deuteronomy 21:10-14 
  • Would you execute a child if your God commanded it?
    “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”  – 1 Samuel 15:3
  • Would you praise God for the act of baby killing, as is seen in the Psalms?
    “He struck down the firstborn of Egypt, the firstborn of people and animals.”  – Psalm 135:8
  • Do you honestly look with admiration and allegiance to a deity that threatens infanticide and rape to those against him?
    Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword.  Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives violated.  – Isaiah 13:15-16
  • After the walls of Jericho fell, would you have participated in the execution of women and children if God had given you the same command as he gave to Joshua’s army?
    When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.  -Joshua 6:20-21
  • Or at the city of Ai?  12,000 men and women killed?  -Joshua 8:22-25
  • Or the Gibeonites?  – Joshua 10:10-27
  • Or the city of Makkedah, totally destroyed, the armies leaving “no survivors?”  – Joshua 10:28
  • Or Libnah, where everyone in the city was “put to the sword”?  – Joshua 10:30
  • Or Lachish?  With every man, woman and child executed?  –  Joshua 10:32-33
  • Eglon?  (Joshua 10:34-34)   Hebron?  (Joshua 10:36-37)   Debir?  (Joshua 10:38-39)   Merom?  (Joshua 11:6)

These are just a drop in the ocean.  Yet many, many defenders of the (perfect and true) bible have no idea that these passages exist.  Or…they’re content to cherry-pick the happy verses about joy and bliss and a life mission showered with the glowing love of God.  And the reason is obvious, as “For God so loved the world” is so much more comforting and inspiring than “for I have come to turn a mother against her daughter.”

When I was a Christian, I was baptized in the Roman Road, the Love Chapter and empowering verses like 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”  Our Sunday school teachers skipped over the verses containing God’s rules on how intensely one can flog slaves (Exodus 20:20-21), or Jesus’ threat to kill Jezebel’s innocent children (“I will strike her children dead” Revelation 2:21), or the Lord helping David to create a foreskin wedding dowry by slicing off the tips of 200 dead Philistine penises (1 Samuel 18:27).  The blood-drunk tyrant of scripture was ignored in favor of a gentle but firm paternal savior figure.

But if God never changes, then God remains the tyrant, the rapist-in-chief, the baby killer, the blood-drunk thug.  And the warm feeling of purpose, family, community and mission that the bible-based church gives us cannot negate the very real problems within scripture.  The Christian church is built upon a document that would be, that must be, rejected by good, upstanding and moral people, and if Christians had seen Yahweh’s atrocities depicted under the name Allah in the Qur’an, they would no doubt be recoiled in horror and wailing in protest.

But Christians don’t protest.  They blink a few times until the uncomfortable attributes of Yahweh fade from view, and they treat their faith like a cafeteria lunch, scooping up the tasty morsels and passing over anything and everything that doesn’t please the palette.  Their mouths say that the entire bible is perfect, moral and true, but their actions declare that they’re happy to glaze over and/or ignore the unpleasant, the unjustifiable, the toxic.

Finally, this email hasn’t even begun to address the contradictions within scripture (and with recorded history) that definitively debunk it as a perfect book.  We haven’t covered the evidence that the bible was largely plagiarized and forged, co-opted by individuals and cultures for their own ends, mis-transcribed and mis-translated throughout the ages and ultimately discredited as anything other than a fascinating product of a primitive and superstitious era.  No…that’s another discussion for another day (but if you’re curious, I recommend starting with Bart Ehrman’s “Forged,” the works of John Loftus and Dr. Richard Carrier’s, “Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus.”)

There’s so much out there beyond the narrow walls built for us by our religious churches and cultures, and there are more morally and intellectually satisfying answers out there as well.  If we can only overcome our fear of the unknown (and perhaps the long-ingrained fears of Hell), we might just discover a whole new world.

Now, at the end of this letter, I’ll wager that you’re feeling guilty and somewhat nervous for any doubts that the above content might have generated.  You’re uncomfortable with the topic and uncomfortable with the ramifications.  Mostly, you just wish you didn’t know about it, didn’t have to think about it, didn’t wrestle with it.  It was so much better when things were simple, when everyone reinforced your cherished faith, and when your own innate morality and goodness wasn’t charged to defend a baby killer.

As a woman attending your church this Sunday, will you still sit easily in the congregation and praise a being who, according to your own bible, has committed so many atrocities against your gender, against the young and innocent, against humanity throughout the ages?  Will you charge your pastor to address the whole of scripture instead of merely the happy, catchy, bumper-sticker verses handed out like candy?  And will you baptize your children, figuratively and physically, in a church built to honor the greatest tyrant in recorded history?

Whatever your decision, just remember that I’m merely the messenger.  The heinous deeds mentioned above came from your own book…the very book you’re promoting to the world.

___

For the record, I received a reply to this letter, stating that God designed women to be under the mastery of men and that our fallen world is the reason for the instances of Yahweh’s (apparently justified) wrath.  She punctuated the response with nebulous talk about “personal experience” with a “loving God.”  The specific scenarios I presented remain unaddressed, and the woman has asked that we not talk about it anymore.

I suspect that, even as a lifelong believer, she was unaware many of these passages existed, and perhaps even now, she refuses to accept them as part of (according to her own church’s doctrinal statement),  the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried.

-S.

Tags:

atheist, atheism, bible, God, Jesus

Warp speed NOW!

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Instead of using rockets or thrusters, a craft equipped with warp drive would move by distorting space.
By Konstantin KakaesPosted 04.01.2013 at 12:08 pm27 Comments

The Warp Drive

The Warp Drive Kris Holland, based on Enterprise Design by Matt Jeffries

The warp drive proposed by Miguel Alcubierre would achieve faster-than-light speeds by distorting space-time. The device would generate a field of negative energy that would squeeze or stretch space-time, creating a bubble. The bubble would ride the distortions like a surfer on a wave. As evidenced in the big bang, space-time can expand so quickly that objects move faster than the speed of light.

1) The vertical dimension represents how much a given volume of space-time expands or contracts in Alcubierre’s model. Positive values [red] imply an expansion. When space-time expands behind a craft, it propels the ship forward.

2) Inside the warp bubble, neutral space-time would leave the ship undisturbed. Passengers would experience a gravitationally calm zero-G environment.

3) Negative values [blue] imply a contraction in space-time. The contraction balances the expansion of space-time as the bubble moves forward.

THE OBSTACLES

Negative Energy: Creating a warp drive requires negative energy—a mysterious form of matter that repels rather than attracts. While predicted to exist, it has never been measured in a laboratory, and known methods for creating it are extremely limited; they would generate so much positive (normal) energy that any negative energy effects would likely be drowned out.

Faster-Than-Light Limitation: If scientists could generate a powerful field of negative energy, they would need to position some of it in front of the craft. “The problem,” says Alcubierre, “is that you wouldn’t be able to make this field reach the region you need.” In other words, to get the energy in front of the craft, it would need to move at faster-than-light speeds, which is impossible.

Destabilization: Even if scientists could generate and position a field of negative energy, there is little reason to think the integrity of the field would hold. A group of Spanish and Italian researchers wrote a paper in 2010 arguing that quantum mechanical radiation, analogous to the Hawking radiation that appears at the event horizon of black holes, would show up and “inevitably lead to [the warp bubble’s] destabilization whenever superluminal speeds are attained.”

 

Watching Warp

Watching Warp: If a ship with warp drive zipped past a stationary observer, according to a simulation by German researchers, he or she would see the drive’s effect on space, pinching as it approached [top], transitioning as it passed [middle], and dilating as the ship moved away [bottom].  Courtesy Thomas Müller and Daniel Weiskopf, based on Milky Way Panorama by ESO/S Brunier

 

Read the Popular Science profile of NASA engineer Harold “Sonny” White and his research into warp drives here, from the April 2013 issue of the magazine.

Aside

1. Decide to arrange for something other than yourself to exist

2. Create a being by the name of Lucifer with full knowledge that this being will betray you and ultimately cause an infinite amount of suffering unnecessarily.

3. Allow an unfathomably horrific dimension of existence known as ‘hell’ to emerge created by yourself or perhaps Lucifer and allow that dimension to continue existing. Do not override or prevent such a thing. It will come into play later

4. Create objective unchanging moral prescriptions and base them upon whatever your nature happens to be and then label any action or thought contrary to these standards ‘sin’.

5. Be sure to include in these moral prescriptions edits for social and psychological health such as encouragement to beat ones children with a rod, permission to buy and sell slaves and will them as property to ones children for life, requirement that women not be allowed to teach or have authority over men and of course the instruction to kill anyone who expresses interest in worshiping other gods.

6. Design a physical universe, planets, animals and vegetation all with the appearance of age be sure to include in your creation biological flaws redundancies and over-complications that appear as if they were the product of blind cumulative processes, perhaps a urinary tract that runs straight through the prostate gland or a unnecessary appendix prone to inflation and rupturing, or maybe a respiratory and digestive system forced to share the same plumbing, (these are just a few working ideas).

7. Create a garden with a tree in it bearing fruit that when eaten provides knowledge of your objective moral standards, and create two sentient cognitive beings without knowledge or awareness of these standards and instruct them not to eat from the tree which would enlighten them (in other words, arrange it so that only AFTER they eat from the tree are they capable of understanding that doing so was a violation of objective moral standards).

8. Warn these cognitive beings that they will undoubtedly die if they eat from this tree, but don’t follow through if they do, then endow a reptile with vocal cords, lips or some other means of speaking audibly to your cognitive beings enabling it to make a convincing case to one of them for eating from the tree. Do not prevent this or intervene.

9. Now by this point make sure your cognitive beings have been equipped for reproducing themselves and multiplying, and because one of them has sinned, arrange that every single one of their descendants until the end of time will be born with an inherited sinful nature, defaulting in a future of everlasting torment. Do not by any means allow each of them to be born with a clean slate and the capacity for living a sin-free life if they desire as you did with your first two prototypes.

10. Endow these cognitive beings with a ‘soul’ which keeps their thoughts and feelings and other cognitive faculties in existence forever one way or another. And then allow the sinfulness of these beings to be incompatible with your presence and let hell be the only other place that they can go once they exit the the physical world, do not make any attempt to spare these souls the eternal torment of hell such as allowing souls to stop existing all together or creating additional realm for them to reside besides with you or in hell.

11. Over time allow these beings to populate the earth you’ve creating, knowing with infallible certainty of course that after so many generations they will disappointed you enough that you find it necessary to kill all of them in a global flood and start all over from scratch.

12. Now when this happens (again right on schedule) make an exception for one small family of cognitive beings who you deem righteous of course it goes without saying that powers of omnipotence allow you to know, again, with infallible certainty that this family to will ultimately disappointing in the same way that those who you drowned, rendering the entire endeavor futile, but for now it’s best that you pretend not to know that.

13. Instruct this small disappointment of a family to populate the entire world all over again by way of incest.

14. Declare that until further notice the only way for these cognitive beings to rectify their sinful nature while on earth is to preform ritual animal sacrifice’s and other acts of senseless violence, additionally when certain sins are committed by any one of your cognitive beings demand that the surrounding community kill that being themselves.

15. In the meantime perform many epic miracles for all to see and intervene often with your physical creations, stop the sun in the sky, part the red sea, turn rivers into blood, and women into pillars of salt, give men superhuman strength, speak to the thousands with a booming voice from heaven etc, but before these cognitive beings become advanced enough in the area’s of science and communication that they could actually document, share, playback and verify these epic miracles, make sure you stop performing them all together .

16. Decide at some point that the most pressing of your objective moral prescriptions are not as obvious to these cognitive beings as you once thought, take this opportunity to chisel your top ten moral concerns into two tablets of stone and commission one of your cognitive beings to deliver these tablets to the masses, (Note to self: Roughly half of these moral concerns should center around pleasing you, praising you and remaining loyal to you)

17. After several thousand years impregnate one of these cognitive beings so that she gives birth to your son in physical form, who also happens to be you, at the same time.

18. Allow this cognitive being who is your son but also you to grow up and make several revisions to you/your son’s original standards of morality then arrange for other cognitive beings to torture and kill you/your son, authorize this sacrifice of yourself as a means of granting all other cognitive beings immunity from the consequences of their sinful nature, which you allowed them to be born with in the first place.

19. Do not however make this sacrifice free, establish that none of these cognitive beings shall be eligible for benefits of this sacrifice unless they actively believed that it happened, in other words, despite the quality of their intentions any cognitive beings henceforth who finds themselves unconvinced these events actually took place, is unwittingly designating themselves for the endless suffering of hell.

20. With that established, be sure to refrain from making it clear and knowable to the rest of the world that these events actually took place, ensure that no cognitive being after the first century has the luxury of witnessing your son who is also you say or do anything to indicate he was a living guy. Again, make sure that all of this occurs before advancements in science and technology are available to verify for those who aren’t present.

21. Arrange so that the only surviving record of these events will be offered anonymously by non-eye witness’s translated to a language different from the one you/ your son will speak written no earlier than thirty years after you/your son preformed these miracles and makes these clams, however do make sure that these records feature the precept that believing in something without evidence is morally superior to investigation and verification.

22. Be sure that after only a few decades the only accounts of these events in existence are copies of copies of copies which will be verifiably altered and added to in historically and theologically significant ways from generation to generation, sect to sect. Do not preserve the original copies of these accounts, do not protect them from revision, do not set in place any mechanism of protecting them from being interpreted in hundreds upon hundreds of ways most of which being heretical and therefore punishable.

23. Do not bother to employ your omniscience in such a way as to discern which of these cognitive beings are truly rebelling, and which simply don’t know how to distinguish you from other versions of god which do not in fact exist.

24. Do not make it clear to these beings that you are are even here. Allow for your very existence to remain an easily debatable, easily questionable, easily doubtable proposition, allow billions and billions of souls to be unthinkably tortured for all of eternity regardless of their character, integrity, bravery, responsibility or conduct because they had not correctly assumed that the right set of propositions were true by the time their lives on earth were over.

25. And finally… when all is said and done demand that you be praised for this plan.

Checkmate… there’s Christianity for you. 

Above content borrowed from an atheist argument site. Very pertinent and specific. This piece yet again asks why an all knowing omnipotent being would go thru all this fucking drama that reads like a bronze-age episode of the Kartrashians!