Amazing Pencil Sketches of Skeptics for Charity

September 14, 2011

DarkMatter2525 makes some fantastic YouTube videos but he’s also an artist and he’s created some drawings that you can bid on — all proceeds will go to Doctors Without Borders.

I’m in awe of anyone who has this kind of talent.

Here’s the pencil sketch of Lawrence Krauss:

There are also beautiful drawings of James Randi and Ashley Paramore. If you have a few bucks to spare, consider bidding on the drawings or donating to Doctors Without Borders directly.

September 14, 2011

Debunking Some Myths About Atheists

September 14, 2011 Mahalo's Interview with Michael Shermer

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Anonymous

To think that digital media will last millions of years is very short sighted. Until some extraordinary steps are taken, a normal drawing or painting will easily outlast any digital copy.

If you store something on a hard drive, magnetic tape or DVD, it will last maybe a hundred years. And that’s optimistic. No one has tested it of obvious reasons. Cheap CD/DVDs have been known to degrade after less than ten years.

Even if the storage medium lasts, chances are high that a future generation will have problems accessing it. NASA had trouble reading old files from the Apollo era when they dusted off the technology recently. That’s because the disk/tape readers won’t be around anymore. Or they will be so outdated that modern hardware can’t interface with them.

If you compare it with clay tablets, rolls of papyrus or books that last hundreds or sometimes thousands of years, digital media is really horrible. The only current solution is storage on several different types of media and regular re-copying to new disks or tapes.
Anonymous

Christians may love “eternity,” whatever that means; but many of them don’t love the scales of time modern science deals with. If humans come from ancestors going back millions of years, that means christianity arrived very late on the scene, well past the time many billions of human lives came and went before they could hear the gospel. And if humanity has a long secular future ahead of it, that raises the possibility that christianity could eventually disappear. Would people living 10,000 years from now even know about christianity, apart from scholars who study ancient cultures? To them christianity would have started 12,000 years in their past, comparable to how long ago the last ice age ended relative to us. I don’t see any religions from the ice age around these days, though many current religions originated during the Axial Age over 2,000 years ago, with the christian doomsday cult and Islam as secondary products of that widespread cultural revolution across the Old World.

That probably explains why many christians want to compress time and center it around themselves, with young Earth creationism behind them and an imminent “end times” lying just over the horizon. I get the impression that the christians who believe in one tend to believe in the other. They don’t like the implications of the Copernican principle applied to time, namely, that we don’t live in a privileged stage of the universe’s history.

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