The US Military has a $660 million contract with the Michigan company Trijicon, which manufactures rifle sights destined for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As it turns out, the company has been surreptitiously placing references to Bible verses on their sights. So much for this not being a holy war.

From the company’s mission statement on their website.

“We believe that America is great when its people are good,” says the Web site. “This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.”

John 8:12 "Prepare to eat lead, raghead."

Dear God. These people make me shudder.

“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”

He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”

That’s precisely how this looks to Muslims.

When imperial powers engage in this kind of religious warfare, things can get very nasty. The Sepoy Rebellion was instigated by the same kind of tactics in colonial India, when the British were accused of greasing their bullets with beef tallow and pig fat, which are ritually unclean to the native Hindus and Muslims respectively.

In order to load their rifles, the soldiers had to bite the cartridges. For Hindus, this meant they would lose their caste. For Muslims, it meant that if they were shot by such a ‘tainted’ bullet, they would die unclean and be excluded from paradise.

So they revolted. And much fun ensued.

(h/t Pharyngula)

If you haven’t heard of Pascal’s Wager, it’s a rather silly way of arguing to someone that they should believe in God. The argument goes something like this: in deciding whether or not you believe in God, you should approach the problem the way you approach a wagering situation. Ask yourself what you could possibly gain, and what you could possibly lose.

Given that you have two choices (believe in God, or don’t) and that there are two possible results (God exists, or he doesn’t), there are four possible outcomes. Traditionally, these are arranged in this decision chart to help you conceptualize.

Clearly, the most sensible solution for a soul-wagerer would be the first row: believing in God. The payoff is potentially high, and the risk is low.

Nevermind that this kind of wagering goes against the very faith-in-the-absence-of-evidence that the Christian God asks of us. Such a disingenuous attempt to feign belief in the deity probably wouldn’t go far to impress Him.

But that isn’t my main problem with the Wager. My beef arises from the fact that it only assumes one possible god. To be a real wager, you’d need to consider all possible outcomes, and that means other gods. Which is why I devised Elliott’s Wager, and the corresponding decision chart.

Unfortunately, it won’t fit in this blog format, so you can find it (here).

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So where’s your money?

For those out there that believe the Noah’s Ark story was a literal worldwide flood, you might want to check this out:

Unreasonable Faith recaps some of the points they make in the video:

1. Even if Noah took out all the “variations” and only stuck with “kinds,” that would still have been over 2 billion animals.

2. For a year in the ark, two elephants alone would require 365,000 lbs of food and 65,000 gal of water;
two giraffes would require 54,740 lbs of food
two lions would require 16,000 lbs of fresh meat.

3. If Noah took all baby animals, how would all the babies get there from around the world at the same time? Or how would all the animals have babies at the exact same time?

…

5. Not even most of the sea life could survive due to the changes in temperature, pressure, sunlight, filtration, salt.

The video makes the point that at an elevation of 29,055 feet, all the animals would freeze to death, or suffocate to death because the air is too thin.

I don’t think that’s right, because you’d displace the air upwards as well. 29,000 feet would be the new sea level, and the pressure would be the same as current sea level (or just a tiny bit less, since the air is occupying a larger volume).

But that’s just a nitpicky detail.

It’s also worth considering that the rainiest place on earth gets 39 feet of rain a year, or 1.28 inches a day. In order to cover Mount Everest in 40 days, it would have to rain 8,716.5 inches per day (726 feet). That’s so much rain that you’d drown standing in it. The sheer downward pressure of that much water would probably sink the boat.

Nothing could have survived (unless it was magic).

Each of the four horsemen of New Atheism (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens) has his favorite argument he likes to trot out in his talks and debates. Having listened to these guys talk over and over again, I have become pretty familiar with their lines of reasoning and preferred modes of attack.

But there’s one I never get tired of hearing, and unsurprisingly it’s from Christopher Hitchens — in my opinion, the most eloquent of the four.

Unfortunately, I’ve hitherto been unable to find a transcript of this argument, so I took the liberty to transcribe it.

I asked Sir Francis Collins, the leading Christian who did the genome project (as you probably know), how long he thought humanity had been on earth, and I asked professor Richard Dawkins how long he thought fully evolved humans had been present. Dawkins thinks it could have been as many as 250k years, Collins thinks certainly not less than 100k — 100k is all I need. 100k years since we definitely separated ourselves from the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals…

…Now, that’s to say — if you believe in a divine intervention in our lives — that, give it just 100k years, for the first 94-95k, people are born, they die mainly of their teeth or in childbirth or of microorganisms they don’t know exist. Their life expectancy is for the first 50 or 60k years, perhaps 25 years. They’re killed by animals. They’re killed by each other in pointless turf wars. They’re killed in typhoons, floods, mudslides, and so forth. But gradually they make slow exponential progress, they get to the point (suffering all the time and heaven watches it with folded arms, like this). And then four or 5k years ago heaven decides “we can’t let them go on like this, we need an intervention. Probably the best place for it would be in Bronze Age Palestine or Egypt. Probably the best form it could take would be a human sacrifice. That might cheer them up a bit.”

Now, if you don’t believe this, you do not believe in any of the three monotheistic revelations, [because] that’s what you have to believe. That’s the minimum you have to believe in order to believe in any of those foresaid. And of course, it’s not believeable, or should I put it like this: it only re-places the argument as before. It replaces the argument as it was before we knew about Cro-Magnons, or dinosours, or Neanderthals. It argues from design. And if everything was designed, what are we to make of the designer, who sentenced so many generations to barbarism, misery, ignorance, slavery and early death?

In the first place, isn’t that a rather incompetent rather tinkering designer, to say the very least of it? In the second place, isn’t it a rather cruel, or at the very best, a highly indifferent one? And we still can’t be sure whether this same incompetent, and indifferent and cruel person cares whether we go to bed with members of our own gender or not, because there’s no way to derive verdicts like this from evidence like that. So the religious still haven’t scored the ghost of a point.

To me, that’s the most compelling argument that God is either non-existent, or an incompetent designer. Either way, the Christian God is a farce.

You can find this argument in most debates Hitchens participates in, but the transcription above is taken from a debate between him and Jay Richards.