 |
"Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree." |
 |
Bart: What religion are you?
Homer: Uh... the one with all the well meaning rules that don't
apply to real life... (thinks) ... Christianity!
[The Simpsons]
|
November 11, 2006
|
In case nobody has noticed, I am full of shit. I claimed a year ago that I
was going to reactivate this site, but then after making a few changes I
mothballed it again. This website is now over eight years old. That may not sound too terribly impressive, but just stop to think about it for a moment: Eight years ago, it was actually possible to come up with a domain name that wasn't already owned by someone. Eight years ago, there was no "war on terror", the big internet rush had really not begin, and the word "blog" did not exist. I don't remember what we called this thing that I'm doing right now, but we sure as Hell didn't call it blogging! |
January 7, 2006
The arguments coming from the "Intelligent Design" camp are growing increasingly desperate as scientists and courts dismantle their kooky beliefs. The latest argument coming from the ID camp asserts, in effect, that all thought and science are components of religions. The argument seems to suggest that all theories are religious in nature and that governments are promoting religion by allowing them to be taught in schools. Necessarily, this would include gravitational theory, so "intelligent gravity" should be taught alongside conventional gravity in order to maintain a bias-free learning atmosphere.
If you think I'm making this up, you should read the argument for yourself. Yes, they really are this stupid.
The argument seems to be that, because evolution is a theory (non-fact) and incomplete, creationism must be taught as a scientific alternative. The problem with this argument is that ALL theories are incomplete. No theory is 'complete' or 'proved' - not gravity, not relativity, not classical mechanics, not quantum mechanics. Should the theory of non-relativity be taught alongside relativity? Should children be taught that friction is 'just an idea' - that the heat generated when you rub your hands together might really be the demons inside you getting angry? Should children be taught that, because no one has ever visited another star, that they might really just be pinholes in the firmament that separates the Earth from the heavens?
Just when I think I've heard it all, some fool always proves me wrong!
December 4, 2005
A friend sent me a cool Jesus parody called "Kissing Hank's Ass." I liked the thing so much that, being the dumbass that I am, I formatted it in html and posted it on my Mysticism Page before doing a simple Google search.As it turns out, this little gem appears to have been written by a guy named Jim Huger. You can read it on his website at http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.php. Having found the author, I've gone back and removed "Kissing Hank's Ass" from this site.
November 27, 2005
I've decided to bring back the Evil Heathen Greeting Card thingamajig that I removed from this site when I started to revamp the place. It's really sort of cheesy, but it did get a lot of use, and I'm seeing a whole lot of search engine queries for it.
November 18, 2005
Check out The God Who Wasn't There Your guide through the world of Christendom is former fundamentalist Brian Flemming, joined by such luminaries as Jesus Seminar fellow Robert M. Price, professor Richard Dawkins, author Sam Harris and historian Richard Carrier.
November 13, 2005
Site History & Planned ChangesI decided to change the nature of this largely atheistic website shortly after I found Jesus and welcomed Him into my heart.
Just teasing! This site was started in 1998 with the idea of providing contact information for atheistic and humanistic groups within the state of South Carolina. Well, that idea pretty quickly went to shit since I could find less than ten such groups.
Finding myself in the situation of trying to build a website with essentially no content, I decided to pad the site out with various inane "Shock & Awe" items. I added a Greeting Card gizmo, lots of really rancid anti-Christian humor, and various little JavaScript gizmos. You know ... Crap!
I stopped playing with the site around 2000. I made one addition in 2001, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I considered scraping the thing altogether many, many times. What stopped me from doing so is the fact that, as bad as it was, it still got a reasonable number of 'hits' each month. I was getting a couple of hundred unique hits each month, with maybe ten uses of the little greeting card thingamajig. I also continued to receive email from site visitors. Obviously, some people were still finding the site content useful. Earlier this year, I had a flood of emails after somebody had posted quotes from this site at ChristianForums.com.
I like to write, although I have to admit that the bulk of the writing that I've historically posted to this site has been pretty crude. This is due primarily to the fact that much of it was written specifically for this site to pad out the content, and as such it was assembled fairly hastily. Away from the site, however, I tend to write on various topics from science to religion.
Rather than scrapping ChestnutCafe.com, I decided instead to marry these two hobbies together. I've trashed most of the cheese from this site: The greeting cards, guestbook, FundyCam, and rancid humor are gone. In place of these, I'm organizing the site into three libraries: (1) Freedom, (2) Mysticism, and (3) Nature. I'll have to wait and see how this structure works in the future, but right now, my writing is most easily categorized into these three topics.
November 5, 2005
This site is currently undergoing revision.
|