User:EVDebs

Hi. This is not my real name. I'm a Wikipedia editor of several years' standing who chooses to remain semi-anonymous here on RationalWiki; I believe quite strongly in the mission of Wikipedia, but I come to RationalWiki due to the fact that Wikipedia, in what I consider to be an unfortunate but fortunately mild infection of Compulsive Centrist Disorder, does not consider scientific/rationalist POV to be inherently equivalent to NPOV. I am an atheist, raised Catholic, very liberal socially, but rather centrist economically (I support a mixed capitalist-socialist system with a mandated living wage, strong, independent labor representation and a decent public health safety net to be deployed alongside a well-regulated private health care system, for example, but I also have some libertarian quirky bits).

I tried to troll Conservapedia once by writing an extremely over-the-top article on open source software (check the history), but got ratted out by one of the few honorable sysadmins there. Oddly enough, no one twigged to the provocative username until I mentioned it.

On RationalWiki, I hope to help increase coverage of old-school woo, the type Martin Gardner wrote about. I'm also interested in phony skeptics such as Steven Milloy and John Stossel and the degrading effect they have on peoples' bullshit detectors. I also hope to keep being someone who reminds people that as long as your data is accurate, you can be as silly as you damn well please.

Googledämmerung
This word does not seem to exist anywhere on the Web, or at least within Googlespace. Give it a meaning and make it exist. (I'm not sure, but I think it wants to mean the moment of singularity when anything and everything that exists has been indexed by Google, creating some kind of nexus of infinite information.)

Why I am not a Christian
You cannot prove the existence of divine intervention in the universe.

Without that, you cannot prove the existence of God, since if there are no verifiable effects on the universe there is nothing that can be meaningful proven.

Pascal's Wager and Lewis' Trilemma are based on false premises: Pascal fails because there's more than just faith/no faith involved, and Lewis fails because it depends on the gospels reporting the words of Jesus accurately. Neither is a valid assumption.

The Prime Mover argument does not require intelligence or omnipotence in answer; the idea that God is an absolute good is nonsense since an example of an absolute does not need to exist for the quality to be measured by it (e.g. absolute zero or any asymptotic function).

The words of Jesus and the words of Paul cannot be meaningfully reconciled without making either Jesus look like a lunatic or Paul a cult leader.

The history of the Bible does not always match up with outside history, and many of its sources cannot be verified, having been lost since at least the Exile.

In conclusion, Abrahamic religions (because the Koran and Book of Mormon are dependent on the Bible) are bullshit and it's time to put them out to pasture.

Any questions?

Warning
Some perverse bastard gave me a mop and bucket. If you see it used, rest assured someone has thoroughly pissed me off.

Links

 * James Randi Educational Foundation
 * insolitology.com and crank.net, which gives the woomongers the attention they deserve (though not necessarily that which they want)
 * Calibrate your bullshit detector at SkepDic.org
 * com/pharyngula Pharyngula, Denialism Blog, Respectful Insolence, and Bad Astronomy, some of the best skeptical science writing out there