New Websites and Second Chances

After a year of encouragement, Rebecca will be launching her own website at some point this week. I have been working on a template that will be similar to this one and will allow her to easily create blogs. In addition to blogs she will also have good stuff like pictures and recipes. More importantly, you'll get the Pirate updates that you generally do not get from me.

I'm also launching a second blog within the next two weeks. This blog will be more about skepticism but I may limit it to atheism.

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We had a second instance of a tree falling in less than a month. The first tree fell from our property into the forest. Last saturday we had a violent storm pass through the area and sure enough it felled a tree that was at the edge of the woods. Believe it or not the tree appeared to be in good health but the wind was so strong that it cut it in half. The pictures below do not do it justice.

And in case you're wondering - a tree fell out of the woods and it didn't appear to make a sound. (rim shot)

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I was reading this story in the news last night.

In a nutshell, a guy had a brush with death and then had the feeling that he was saved for a purpose. I get why people might feel that way after a brush with death, I really do. So this gentleman goes on to save a couple of kids from a fire that takes his life. And you guessed it - his purpose was served.

Sigh.... was it served? If you buy into this kind of stuff (and this has nothing to do with religion - I know plenty of religious people that do not believe that God plays an active role in our lives and plenty of non-religious people that thinks that he does) you probably think that this guy served his purpose. Now think about what that really means. You have to believe that this capricious entity actually made this guy a puppet for the express purpose of serving the person whose life he saved.

I can't imagine anything more horrific than thinking that such an entity exists and pulls these kinds of stunts.

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Pope Creepy was in the news again. After centuries of keeping their collective distance from the Shroud of Turin, his Holy Direct-Line-To-God has made several statements about the Shrould lately.

In case you are not familiar with the Shroud, it is a cloth that appears to have the body of a man emboldened into it. It surfaced in the 14th century and people started to bill (translation: make money) it as the burial cloth of Jesus. In the 1980's the church allowed scientists to carbon date the shroud and it showed (surprise, surprise) that it was made in the 14th century. We recently saw a show where they showed that the model for the shroud had to be a relief of an almost-flat figurine that were common during that time. They left the shroud in the sun for a few days and voila, instant burial shroud.

Anyway, back to the story. The big kahuna is now embracing the shroud. He says that the shroud is important because it is now part of Catholic tradition. Catholic tradition? Never mind if it is real or not, it makes a nice story so we'll just go with it.

And people wonder how this stuff gets started....