A crafty religious ambush


How cool is that?!

Diamond Mako PDA



Variac step-down electrical mishap waiting to happen

...pretty much daily.


Religious tract cover

...a religious tract!

Fair enough.







Side one of religious tract

Side 2 of religious tract





There Is an Answer




In Which Class Are You?








152 W. Prairie Ave.
Coeur d' Alene, ID 83815

[This would appear to be that church.]

Oh, boy.

Here's what this tract says, boiled down:











And so on, and so on, and so on.




But how can you tell?


The tract, once again, presents no argument.












And yet, that's what we do see.














No, I don't want to live forever.




Christians seem pretty definite about that.

God needed to keep himself amused.


To be in heaven with him.


He could let you die, but he won't.


God's not going to let the bastard die.

All Jehovah has left is sharing the misery.

25 Responses to “A crafty religious ambush”

  1. Skorpyo Says:

    Alright. It's been a long time coming, but I FINALLY registered JUST to post on this article.

    Being a former Jehovah's Witness myself, I can honestly say that this is the greatest piece of writing I've ever seen on this subject.

    I've also pondered the whole idea they have of "living forever", and every time I think it over I can't help feeling that THAT is the closest equivalent of any kind of "hell" I can imagine. I think Jim Jefferies put it best when he said "I don't care if it's eternal bliss; it's eternal, you'll get used to it, and then you'll be fahkin' BORED."

  2. Popup Says:

    Ahhh. Psion Revo! I loved that one!

    I went through the normal path from Series 3C ->5 -> 5MX -> revo, and I must say that the revo was my all-time favourite. Small enough to fit in any pocket, yet with an almost-useable keyboard, but without the fragile mechanism of the 5. (I broke two screens and two hinges on my 5's.)

    A friend of mine had the Psion Sienna, which was also pretty cute.

  3. ScumBunny Says:

    Hey, at least its not a Chick tract.

  4. Slurpy Says:

    I read the article on the Immovable Ladder, which had a hyperlink to the page on ecumenism, and I just laughed and laughed. I want to thank you, Dan, for introducing me years ago to Father Ted (and Linnehan in general), which I probably would never have discovered on my own otherwise, being an uncultured American.


  5. Michael Says:

    Dan, OK, you're an atheist. One of the more moving things I've read by you is your account of the parrot with some horrible disease, and how you can't believe in a benign God who created a world in which that happens. Unanswerable, and for similar reasons Darwin lost his belief (AFAIK, absolutely the crucial thing for Darwin was the ichneumon fly, not his own, wonderful, account of natural selection).

    But it really doesn't do anybody any good if you string together some string of all the absurdities and outdated beliefs that have been held by some Christians, and say that is what everybody in the West knows to be Christianity. As a matter of fact, lots of people in NZ know absolutely nothing about historical Christianity, which is a problem for those of us who've tried to teach about the literature and the thought of the past. And, I would say, if that's what you really believe Christianity is about, you don't know a lot, either.

    You may find it hard to believe, but there are actually genuine Christian thinkers. I kind of like Keith Ward, who's a former Regius Professor of Divinity who makes jokes that are, actually, funny. Or Richard Swinburne, who's rather serious, but wrote a book called The Evolution of the Soul, in which, by evolution, he means precisely the Darwinian notion, with Darwinian time-scales. More heavyweight are people like Bultmann, who tried to take away the mythology from the Christian story, and all his followers.

    I certainly don't want to convert you, because I'm not a believing Christian myself. But it really is beneath you to rant in an uncomprehending way--puts you down with the fuckwit Fundies you think have the monopoly on Christianity.

  6. dan Says:

    Oh, there are plenty of Christian thinkers. Just talk to a Jesuit. Or to almost any non-literalist preacher, for that matter, who actually went to school. They'll cheerfully admit that the Christmas Story stuff and almost every other factual claim you'll read in a tract is just tales and rituals, not a statement about the real world or a recounting of history.

    The more "thinky" they are, though, the less "Christian". Once you delete all the stuff that's patently untrue or completely unprovable, you're not even left with the Jefferson Bible. It ends up being just "be excellent to each other, dudes". You end up like Bishop Spong, who presumably only continues to wear the dog-collar because he feels weird in normal clothes.

    Every prominent atheist is besieged by people telling them to stop messing around with those silly literalists, and instead to listen to this or that learned theist, and hear how reasonable and nuanced they are.

    Sure they are. They're so reasonable and nuanced that most people who share their stated religion are certain they're going to hell.

    It does not make me an atheist fundamentalist if I point out that what the overwhelming majority of Christians believe is claptrap. Particularly if they have asked me to comment.

    Note also that the point of view of this tract, that the only choice is between atheism, a false religion or one randomly chosen but definitely correct flavour of Christianity, is a big part of the problem. Most theists think their religion is the one special one, because most theists aren't exposed to actual religious plurality and so have a very hard time reaching the insight that their own beliefs are every bit as nutty-sounding as those of other religions. The fact that outwardly normal people think it makes sense to send a tract like this to an atheist is very, very important.

    If religious nuts had no social or political power then none of this would matter. Since there are people in positions of minor power torturing their children and fellow citizens according to scripture, though, and also people in positions of major power who believe for unshakable irrational reasons that the world will very soon end, or that global warming isn't real because God will keep the climate in line, or that fertilised eggs are babies, or that nuclear war is desirable because we gotta get this Armageddon thing going, or that whatever ethnicity they are is the best and justified in killing everyone else, or that a husband cannot rape his wife, or... it goes on and on... means that I am not the one you should be trying to make listen to the reasonable theists.

  7. Fallingwater Says:

    Man, I envy you. I wish people sent me this sort of oldware for free; I've been looking for a Psion Revo since forever, but no luck so far.

    I love energy-efficient portables with keyboards you can actually type on, but I've yet to find the perfect one. The Alphasmart Dana has a good keyboard but the fixed-angle display with that weird green backlight is not exactly an ergonomic masterpiece; the other old portable I own - a Nec 900C - has a good screen and a decent keyboard, but it's much more energy-hungry, emptying its two 18650s in 4-5 hours. I'm thinking the Revo might do the job.

    By the way, whoever made the Obsolete Computer Museum site you link to needs a good slap and an explanation of why you don't use a picture containing lots of black as a background when also using black text. Not that white text would be an alternative, as most of the rest of the background is white.

    Perhaps it's meant to have the text end before the black stuff, but it's never worked for me.

    Adblock this and that site actually becomes readable.

    As for the religious stuff, it goes without saying that I agree with most of what you say (possibly even everything, but I've yet to read the whole thing). However, I've long given up debating this stuff with the religious. Religion wouldn't exist without indoctrination, and it's been long established that fighting indoctrination with rationality and logic doesn't work.

    But doing it properly requires a considerable commitment in time and willpower, and the angle of approach has to be tailored to the specific person you're dealing with - and to be honest, while hearing people I like spout religious nonsense makes me groan and facepalm, it's not quite enough to make me willing to go to all that trouble.

    • Michael Says:

      Yes, there are religious people doing bad stuff. Need stopping. Not just fundy Christians.

      But what does get me is how come the New Atheists get to decide what is Christianity and what is not? This is the basic move of that twerp Dawkins (who bloody nearly moved me back to Christianity [on Dawkins as a twerp, see Mary Midgley, _The Solitary Self_, and no, she's not a theist, either]), and it's the No True Scotsman argument. Also, getting angry about abuse and bigotry is fine, but how come New Atheists are *so* angry about all theistic belief? Do you also get angry about Buddhism, which is at the intellectual top end non-theistic and not really a religion, but in some manifestations looks pretty superstitious to the outsider. Why not have a bash at Zen practitioners, because *real* Buddhists are now even getting into persecution? That's obviously absurd.

      You don't have to listen to thinking theists, by the way, but the undiscriminating anger makes you look all unpretty, and quite bigoted.

      • Michael Says:

        Sorry, this was meant as a reply to Dan, and I misplaced it.

      • cr Says:

        Howcome you're so sensitive about imagined insults? If you're not a tone-trolling Christian, you'll do till one comes along. Quoting Mary Midgeley is telling - another twerp claiming not to be religious but apparently in love with religion. Strikes me as pretty hypocritical, really.

        Oh, and the No True Scotsman fallacy is not what you think it is. Check it out on Wikipedia. I think you probably meant 'straw man'. ;)

  8. MikeLip Says:

    Congrats, Dan! You wrote your own religious tract! :)

  9. Steven Clark Says:

    I'm pretty sure I've got a USB IRDA adapter still. And Newegg still sells them so you can probably find one in your neck of the woods if you look. Sure I could send you mine but I'm not very fond of the "send it global priority mail, and claim it's not merchnandise, hope customs doesn't keep it" approach to international shipping.

    • Chazzozz Says:

      I've got one of those adapters lying around doing nothing. I used to use it with my Palm Treo 750 and it worked like a charm (if a bit slow). I'm also only interstate, not international, so if you'd like it Dan I'm happy to send it to you.

      However, I would be very surprised if your favourite money sink didn't have one. Wait on a minute...yes, they do!

  10. michaelshewitt Says:


    I'll see your 150km and raise you 250km.

    • Stoneshop Says:

      I have a working NeXT cube.

      I also have a total lack of religious alignment, and the appropriate number of tracts to go with that.

      I will therefore not be offering either of you my NeXT cube. Mwhahaha.

  11. Gridlock Says:

    TL;DR - "Chiclets good, religiosity bad"

    I have a Nokia 9000 Communicator here, do you have any gospel-singing-type-churches nearby? :D

  12. Steve Says:

    Last time I saw that font that's in the religious pamphlet was in a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

    • cr Says:

      Last time I saw that font was in a nicely illustrated Kodak booklet on photography. (Remember Kodak? This would have been dated just before the bit of hardware Dan describes above, but some while after photographers used to have to hump suitcase-sized boxes with enormous glass plates around with them. In the days of 'film' cameras i.e. non-digital, they were full of ingenious mechanisms and did *not* have more computing power than the Space Shuttle, in fact some of them contained no electrical parts at all. End digression).

      The font was called 'Southern' IIRC, and when printed on high-quality glossy paper it was most elegant. Its use in this tract is most regrettable, not just from the subject matter but also because (judging by Dan's illustration) it's not a very high-class printing job. I won't be so rude as to suggest they use Comic Sans instead, maybe Times Roman?

  13. rwmj Says:

    This takes me back to university.

    There was a mad old lady who used to give out these tracts to the students. Never ones to miss out on a contest, myself and some fellow atheist students started to collect them. The aim was to collect as many different pamphlets each term. I remember the winner (not me) had nearly a hundred different ones by the end of the summer term.

  14. andybear Says:

    Too bad all the NeXT cubes got set on fire.

  15. alan_cam Says:

    Hey, I'm in Adelaide (city of churches). How do I get some cool free hardware?

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