What Rug Thinks

It's time once again for me to look at what a christian is saying is proof of God and see how it holds up to logic, reason, and science. Peter Guirguis over at notashamedofthegospel.com  posted an article called "This is the Best Proof that God Exists (in My Opinion)" that seems to do just what the title says. Sadly, after reading the article I have come to the conclusion that Mr. Guirguis does not understand logic, reason, or science. From  yadayadayadablahblahblah.com In the first couple of paragraphs Peter talks about his amazing conversion from Christian to Atheist and back to Christian. Then goes on to spout how this is the proof that changed his mind. Then he goes on to say he's not going to use the Bible to prove God, and then immediately starts quoting the Bible. Then he talks about why it's important. Like anyone reading this doesn't already know why. Ugh. After all the hoopla he finally gets to the point. Then I am woefully disappointed with ...

Why don't I believe in God? Simply put, I am incapable of believing something until I have evidence for it. This is the way my mind works. This of course would lead a religious person to believe I was made this way. Assuming for a moment God is real, wouldn't that lead to the conclusion that I was made to not believe? It would follow then, that God made me to go to hell. I ask you then, even if that God was real, is he worthy of worship? There are millions of children dying everyday. Millions of adults die everyday as well. Millions of people suffer with mental and physical illnesses around the world. There are killers and rapist. There are liers and cheaters. There are people that take every advantage they are able. There are wars, suicide bombings, and mass shootings, distrust and hate. All of these notable things happen every day. Yet we see people thanking God for found car keys. We see plans crash with hundreds of people dead, yet people thank God for a single person s...

It's the 4th of July. Here in the U.S. it's also known as Independence Day. The day we celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Which is a nice way of saying we won the war with the British. On this day, we light fireworks to represent the cannon fire in the war. We sign the Star Spangled Banner (National Anthem) which is a song depicting a battle in that same war. It would seem that this national holiday is really a celebration of war, violence, and death. Which brings to mind, when is violence acceptable? From:  wikipedia.org I have struggled with this question for a large portion of my life. Growing up as I did, violence was a common thread in my life. I saw violence all around me. Coming from family, friends, and even myself. I found it excessively difficult to control my temper when I was younger. Finally, in my later years of life, I have found the internal peace I have long sought-after. I have come to see how I had gone wrong in life. I had ...

What is censorship? Why do we feel the need to censor out certain topics? What good does censorship accomplish? These questions and more answered from my point of view in today's What Rug Thinks . (cue applause) Borrowed from NCAC.org  (Worth a read) Google defines censorship as "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts." Which seems to agree with the way most people tend to think of it. However, sometimes definitions are a little weak in how they are stated. Therefore, to put into common language. Censorship is the act of removing content based on the view of acceptability. Which of course brings to mind. What is acceptable?  Google defines acceptable in this usage as "able to be tolerated or allowed." This whole thing seems to boil down to what someone finds offensive and not offensive. Well, that seems to be a load of crap. Most people find anything they don't agree with to be offensive. Instead of...

You may remember not that long ago about people trying to get Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings removed from libraries, cinemas, store shelves, and anywhere else these items could be obtained. Rather it be in literary or cinematic form. You have probably heard of such things as book burnings. You have probably even heard some books referred to "satanic". I'm going to point out just how ridiculous the whole idea really is. Provided by Everynight Teen  (Interesting Article) Harry Potter was a great series of books that were well written, humorous, captivating, and a magical struggle between good and evil. Sadly, the movies did not do justice to these works of art. There are some people that say these books "promote witchcraft" and should be banned. To even have this as an objection to the books in the first place, the people must think magic is real. These books are labeled as fiction because it's fake. If you can't tell the difference between ficti...

George Carlin listed  7 dirty words  people can't say on TV way back in 1972. The original Home Box Office (now known as HBO) special the same year had two warnings about how vulgar the special was. One at the beginning of the show and one right before he went into the 7 dirty words section of his stand up. He ended up getting arrested at one point for doing this standup. Why do people care so much about what artist say? Why do people consider certain words as bad? Why do people care what words we use? I don't get it, and here is why. Borrowed from Vsauce (Great Videos) While looking through some cd's at the store, I saw that many of them had a Parental Advisory label on them. Then there was some of the same album that didn't have these stickers on them. I got to wondering what the differences were between these two otherwise identical albums. I soon found out that the one without the label was edited to remove offensive language. I almost bought one by mista...

This post will start a series I am planning. The next few post will be about other topics that are commonly censored, such as language, violence, etc. This will come together in a final post in the series about censorship. Today's topic however, is nudity. Below you will see a section of the plaque on Pioneer with the "naughty bits" covered. The question is, why are these body parts "naughty"? Image from Wikipedia and censored by Rug The first thing you might notice about this image is the male only has one censored bar while the female has two. Why? What is so different about male's upper body compared to a female's upper body? OK, full disclosure here. I am horrible at biology. Therefore, I did the same thing I always do when I don't know something and googled it. I found this information from John Hopkins Medicine  that helped clear a few things up for me.   "The structure of the male breast is nearly identical to that of the fema...

Through my normal pursuing of christian content I came across an article on  everystudent.com  called "IS THERE A GOD?" I then proceeded to read the article. I mean if someone has found evidence of a god I want to know. Sadly, my time was wasted and my face was smashed by my palm so many times my nose will never be the same. However, It did give me something to write about. So, here goes their claims vs logic, science, and reason. The article starts off by quoting the bible and in a roundabout way saying that if you don't believe in God you are lying. Then concludes its introduction, with more bible quotes, stating that you have to believe in God before you can have proof of God. Which is completely contradictory to the whole point of the article in the first place. Still, I pushed on. At this point I was just hoping it would have better science than logic. Then I saw the first argument for God. "1. Does God exist? The complexity of our planet points to a delib...

I would like to preface this post with a little bit of my history and my personal choices in this matter. With my ex-wife I have been through three miscarriages. Which I would not wish upon my worst enemy. They were terribly heartbreaking and a very difficult time in my life. I have never considered for a second aborting any of the pregnancies I was involved in. Unless approached by the mother I would never consider abortion as an option, and even then I doubt I would be in favor.  To make sure I am talking about the same thing everyone thinks I'm talking about. Here is the dictionary definition of abortion as provided by google.com. "The deliberate termination of a human pregnancy, most often performed during the first 28 weeks of pregnancy."  I would also like to point out that google also list synonyms as termination or miscarriage. Termination in this case makes perfect sense, but why is miscarriage listed? Here is what google gives as the definition for mi...

Browsing through my newsfeeds, I came across something that had me almost doing a spit take. A picture saying "Put God Back In The Schools" Similar to this one. My first thought to this post was. WTF? I mean according to most christians beliefs God is omnipresent. Therefore, he is everywhere. So how exactly did anyone remove him from schools? Then I realised that was nothing more than a facetious response to a nonsense statement. I don't want to argue a strawman argument after all. With a little digging I was able to get to the bottom of what this really meant. In my research I found this petition that has a rather simple description of what is meant by this statement. However, that seem to have the facts completely wrong to start with. "This Country was founded on the principles of the bible..." This is completely incorrect, and you only have to read the constitution to figure this out. Not to mention there are other writings by the founding fathers...

In recent headlines from end of 2015 Planned Parenthood has been mentioned a lot. First there was a lot of hoopla over a video that didn't show they were doing anything wrong. Then of course the was the terrible tragedy of a nutcase shooting one facility up. There has been talks in the government about defunding Planned Parenthood, and many nasty thing being said about them all over the news. I would like to take a few minutes here and give my recollection of my experience with them. I was 15 years old living in a small town most people would call the middle of nowhere. This was a predominantly white, middle class, rural town.  The schools had a decent sex education program where they taught about contraceptives, gave rather accurate failure rates of contraceptives, STD's (nowadays called STI's), and showed the only 100% safe sex was no sex. It taught us about our bodies, and the bodies of the opposite sex. To this day I still cannot find any logical or factual faults wit...