Thy Plague Doctor

Daniel W. wrote:Also, in Imperial China, gay men were called “rabbits”.  Again, it’s a hate crime to bite off their ears and tails.

unless you are a gay man in china…in which case biting the ear off a choloclate rabbit…is empowering!

What if a gay person eats a chocolate rabbit?

Asking for a friend 🙂

I always think this sort of process keeps the idiots happy and busy.  I found the chocolate crucifixes on sale at Rite-Aid again this year.  I wonder who buys them.

If you took a 10×10 chess board and randomly decided which squares were black and white (you can have more of one color than another if you want) … the amount of possible chessboards you could create is so large … we cannot possibly comprehend the enormity of that number. From our limited human experience … the number might as well be…[Read more]

^^…hastily

@daughter

An atheist Spain has a remarkably different life than those in conservative religious America. To be honest, people of my generation or younger are often embarassed to admit they believe in God and go to church. The religious are the minority, the practicing religious is a very small group and those who are actively religious are tiny…[Read more]

@regthefronkeyfarmer we totally need a ‘like’ button!

Finite, but how extensive?  If you have a small bucket and a large, but finite ocean to empty, perhaps finite isn’t the limit that it seems to be

Welcome back 🙂

re:daughter of karl

You are not a rarity. The majority of atheists hold some kind of spiritual or hocus pocus beliefs (the majority of atheists come from Eastern Asia (China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam). And despite years of secularism or even the chinese cultural revolution…belief in ancestor spirits and other kinds of fluff-talk is very real.…[Read more]

I found it fascinating that belief in the paranormal can be linked with schizophrenia, but only in males.  There’s a summary here

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8173547

Sigh.  He’s dead, Simon.

Steve wrote:
Could a ghost be a pattern of energy that does not dissipate fully after the body that held it together ceases to live? Could reincarnation be a pattern of energy that merges with a newer body?

No. There is not even the slightest evidence which demostrates that people have an essence, an immaterial being separate from our physical…[Read more]

There most certainly is a level of evidence that skeptics would accept. Ghosts appearing in public, immune to any attempt to explain them (trickery with light and smoke or holographic technology or some other deception), doing things that are impossible to explain. Behaving in the same predictable way in many different places…all recorded…[Read more]

@robert That is a seriously good reply 🙂