When I was little  we lived in Newcastle, WY.  My mother and father were public school teachers.  In the summers they did a number of things.  For a couple of summers my father worked as a park ranger at Jewel Cave National Monument.  I grew up listening to stories about my father’s time at Jewel Cave.

Jewel is a beautiful cave.  Jewel is an apt description.  There are many crystalline features that make it a must see if you are visiting The Black Hills.  I found this video online from National Public Radio about a spelunking adventure at Jewel:

If you haven’t noticed I support Non-Believers Giving Aid, a great, new charitable organization that is designed to provide aid to the victims of the Haiti earthquake and beyond.  Please give if you can.  Currently the money donated is split 50/50 between Doctors Without Borders and The Red Cross.  And you can be sure that there aren’t any bibles being bought with the money, and those providing aid aren’t doing so with the caveat that the victims listen to a sermon first.

GivingAid.RichardDawkins.net

There were no “good ol’ days”.  We may be in an economic slump, but these times are better than any others mankind, or the US, has ever had.  More children grow up because of modern medicine.  More family and friends live longer and survive diseases and illnesses that may very well have killed them just 20 years ago.  Crime rates in the US are at all-time lows.  We are closer to true equality than ever.  We have more ways to stay in touch with family and friends.  And science will solve deafness, blindness, and paralyzation in my lifetime.  Yup, *these* are the good ol’ days.

One of the most significant things that make humans human is the ability to hold beliefs.  A lot of thinkers including Decartes, Dennet, Sagan, and others have proselytized that ideas should hold no sacredness.  I think this is probably the core of true thinking.  Why should any notion or concept be give special protection against scrutiny?  It seems that such a concept would promote the abandonment of reason and the promotion of dogma.

So here enters religion.  Any follower of any religion about which I know must confess, if they are honest, that they base their beliefs on faith.  I use the most derogatory definition of faith here.  Faith equals belief without proof in this definition. In the real world faith accounts for nothing.  The earth is not heated by the sun through faith.  Photons and other energetic particles leave our star and heat our world.  Faith does not power the very core of our existence.  There are rational, reasoned arguments to be made for of the natural processes on Earth.  And for those left unexplained, a “god of the gaps” is a poor excuse of the simple statement “we don’t know yet”.  The scientific method, it seems, really does work.

Science had proven to be an amazingly useful tool to further our understanding of the natural world.  Religion has not.  At all.  Let me be clear.  Religion, and in particular the Christian religion with which I am familiar, has done a horrible job explaining our universe.  So I find it disgusting and perverse when people of religion attempt to subvert reality in favor of their fantasies (religion), and on top of that perversion, declare their perverse beliefs sacred!

On top of these points, Christianity and other religions have done  a horrible job providing a moral framework for humans.  As it turns out, humans don’t really derive morality from religion anyway.  Study after study have shown that the true moral lessons are derived outside of religion.  However, this should not be construed that Christians are bad people; just that it does not take faith to make a good person.

An idea is an idea is an idea.  Every idea is available to the scrutiny of reasoning and intellect.  Whether the idea be string theory or the god hypothesis, the idea should be easily propped up or torn down based based on the the evidence available and sound reasoning.

Is this too much to ask?

I found this awesome comic today about The Atheist Apocalypse.  Its quite funny, and features the Four Horsemen: the eminent biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, science writer Sam Harris, and journalist Christopher Hitchens.

Today, December 21, is the shortest day of the year which is known as the Winter Solstice.  This date has had significance to human civilization for thousands of years.  When humans first became civilized, their civilizations (as they still are today) were based on agriculture.  The community would grow crops all spring and summer, and harvest and prepare for the winter all fall.  The winter brought hardship, and the Winter Solstice was seen as a time of celebration.  From this day on, every day is longer.

Ancient peoples based a number of religions around this and other astronomical dates on the calendar.  It should not be surprising that the Romans also based their holidays on these celestial dates, including the Winter Solstice.

In 46 BC Julius Caesar introduced the Julian Calendar.  This calendar was a refinement of the previous Roman Calendar. A year later it was officially adopted by the empire.  The Julian Calendar remained in place for much of the western world until 1582, when it was replaced by the Gregorian Calendar.  The Gregorian Calendar is what we use  today.

Under the Julian Calendar, the Winter Solstice was on December 25th.  This was a major holiday in the Roman Empire, just as it had been throughout much of the world spanning back perhaps three to four thousand years before Caesar.  The Romans celebrated this holiday for centuries before the adoption of the Julian Calendar, and for centuries after.

Somewhere between 200 and 350ish AD (on our Gregorian Calendar) a newly invented religion known as Christianity also placed one of its major holidays on the Winter Solstice.  This holiday, called Christmas, did what many other, previous religions had done and took traditions from previous religions.  Many of the things we today associate with Christmas are from so-called Pagan festivals.  Perhaps you have heard the saying “Yule-tide greetings!”  Yule-tide was/is a Pagan holiday that also took place on the Winter Solstice.  There are a number of other Winter Solstice artifacts from other religions and celebrations.  The Christmas Tree, gift-giving, lights, and increased charity all derive from pre-Christian traditions of various cultures celebrating their Winter Solstice festivals.

When the Gregorian Calendar was adopted Christmas stayed tied to its December 25 time-slot, and the Winter Solstice became December 21 (and sometimes December 22).  This effectively moved Christmas.  You can move the calendar, but the Winter Solstice is based on the length of the day and so cannot be moved.

With this knowledge of the deep history and importance of the day, I wish everyone a happy Winter Solstice!

For Veteran’s Day I just donated again to the USO. You can too!

Click Here.