Posting with my Blackberry

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.My old blackberry finally ceased breathing last week after 4 years of very heavy use. As I was changing to my new model I noticed in my address list that I had the email address to email a post directly fro my blackberry. So having realised I ve got it I have to give it a try of course.

My new blackberry is a fairly wide model with the qwerty keyboard that my older one had. The keys are not as widely spaced as on the old one but I am getting used to them.
My new blackberry unlike the ancient model I have just buried has mp3 rintones so I will now be able to inflict my sonic whims on everyone within earshot.
Anyhow here goes. If your reading I got the right mail address.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Time for planning our Tuscany holiday

Although the financial world is doom and gloom just now life still goes on and its time to start thinking about next years holidays. Italy is our favourite destination, not least because it lets us both practice out Italian. My partner speaks like a native and mine is now good enough to have a good conversation. Speaking Italian is of course not a requirement for an Italian Holiday. You can get along in most of Italy and particularly in Tuscany without it but it does make the whole experience more interesting.

We tend to holiday in Italy either in the Lucca area of Tuscany or further south in Italy in the Rome area. Of the two my own holiday preference is very much for the Tuscany area. Tuscany has a lovely warm climate and wonderful scenery but I find Rome and southwards sometimes is a bit too much for me heatwise.

For anyone who hasn't been to Lucca in Tuscany I would strongly recommend it. Its within easy reach of Florence and Pisa and Lucca itself is an old Roman town and the old part of the Town still sits within virtually complete Roman walls that run right around it.

Personally my preference is to stay outside Lucca in one of the nearby villages but one of these years I think we might try actually staying in Lucca itself rather than just visiting it. Who knows maybe next year.

So the holiday rental hunt for a Tuscan Holiday has now started for us. We have been checking out holiday-rentals.co.uk who we have used before. Having a villa with a pool is a real must for us. I have stayed in Hotel type accommodation before over there but I much prefer renting an actual holiday villa. If it has a pool then there is not much can beat sipping the local red wine with a plate of local figs by the side of the pool and watching the world go by surrounded by the wonderful hills of the Tuscan countryside. Its no wonder so many people fall in love with Tuscany when they visit.

For reference, here is a link to the search page for Tuscan Holiday Villas with a pool . I am particularly taken with this one in the Lucignano area at the moment. (Two bed Villa in Lucignano, Tiscany with pool ) but there will be others that will catch my eye no doubt. As I said I would also be happy to get a holiday villa in Pianna di Lucca again. Such a hard choice!

Useful reference links for Tuscany include Tourism resources Tuscany. I always like to see if I can find out something about the history of the town or village that we go to before we go as I think it makes the holiday more interesting.

Now the Rabbis are defending evolution

It seems we have an outbreak of common sense among sections of the world religious community. Not only did we have the US United Methodists recently acknowledging the scientific theory of evolution as the only game in town when it comes to explaining mans origins but we now have a further outbreak of rationalism - this time from senior rabbis. The "blog of the airtightnoodle" refers to news "out of Chicago" that Rabbis are arguing that Evolution is not detrimental to faith but may in fact strengthen it.

Now of course whether accepting both the facts of Evolution and the explanations of those facts through the modern theories of Evolution strengthens or weakens faith is not a matter that greatly concerns me. Certainly for me understanding the fact of evolution was not a critical factor in me losing the faith I was indoctrinated into. Certainly it didn't strengthen or cause me to recover my faith, but it wasn't the thing that made me convinced that belief in gods is hogwash.

As I have said before though when the religious stop parking their tanks on our lawn and trying to rubbish a science which most of them clearly know nothing about then perhaps that will be the day that I stop blogging for Atheism. If we have a breakout of rational thinking among Jewish Rabbis on the subject of Evolution then that day has come one day closer.

And it gets even better -
The Washington Post reports that Gennaro Auletta, a professor at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University (a Vatican-sponsored university) expressed dismay that some Christians reject the theory of evolution and said that recent popes have "recognized the scientific value of the theory of biological evolution."

A Vatican official at the same press conference said, "Creationism from a strictly theological view makes sense, but when it is used in scientific fields, it becomes useless."

The same article reports Pope Benedict XVI in Paris last week warning against literal interpretations of the Bible and saying "the word of God can never simply be equated with the letter of the text."

Just those redneck fundamentalist American protestant sects now that need to see the light I guess, oh and fundamentalist Muslims with whom they seem to share so much in common.

Two plus Two is Five - Teach the alternative now

What are mathematicians afraid of? For years they have brainwashed our children with their atheistic mathematics. We know that the Bible tells us that five loaves and five fishes are able to feed thousands of people. This is FACT, because the Bible tells us that this actually really happened. Yet these same mathematicians would deny the universal truth of Fiveism! They are WORSE than the Evolutionists!

Two plus two equals four they will tell you. And don't you dare ask them to respect your alternative Fiveism world view or tell them that two plus two equals five. We know that some religious sects believe that two plus two equals six of course but the Sixists are wrong in their interpretation of the Holy books even though we still love them dearly because they believe in the great creator ( Bless his noodly appendages)

Where in the Bible does it tell us about the properties of a right angle triangle? Nowhere! Yet these primitive beliefs that came from pre-christian greeks have been handed down to us as though they are gospel and our children are not allowed to question these unfounded assertions.

Mathematicians try to baffle us with Atheistic rationality and logic and claim that they can prove these things but this is rubbish. When you have studied this like I have done you will realise that even the mathematicians don't agree on the properties of triangles. Its all THEORY !! Its not FACT like the Bible!

They teach our children that the angles in a triangle always add up to the same number but THEY DONT ! In other types of spaces they add up to different numbers! But do they teach our children in their primary classes about such non-euclidean spaces? No they do not. Because they know that their mathematics is based on lies and they don't want our children to know this.

What does ten sheep and ten sheep equal for example? These mathematicians will tell you that it equals twenty sheep ! But this is atheist propaganda! Ten sheep and ten sheep equals A FLOCK OF SHEEP !!! The Bible says nothing about ten sheep but it does tell us about flocks of sheep and the Bible is HIS word.

We must demand equal time for the teaching of Fiveism in the Bible and challenge the hold of these atheist mathematicians on the minds of our children. Just think of the wonders our engineers could perform if they were properly educated in Fiveism! Why , with five bricks and five nails they could build five thousand houses! Praise the Lord!

So join the campaign for Fiveism and don't let these atheist mathematicians ruin your children's morals!

Creationism fails at even basic biology

Doing my usual round of the creationist vs evolutionary theory blogs and articles I came across an excellent short post on the "For Knowledge" blog. There the author makes the point that evolutionary theory is the least of the problems that creationism has.

The author points out that creationism has problems even with basic biology as it was understood long before the theory of evolution was developed and, in particular he shows how it is challenged by taxonomy and by the work of Carl Linnaeus, who laid the foundations of taxonomy.

Belief in a mankind made "in the image" of God has to be reconciled to the undeniable similarity between humans and the great apes in their bodily structure and form and in their behaviour both individually and in groups.( See this recent example). Even if Evolutionary theory was dismissed, this glaring inconsistency must be explained away by Bible literalists. Did God make mankind in his image and the great apes "almost" in his image? This cannot be squared with Bible accounts without a great deal of wriggling.

I have made the point before and made the same comment in the "For Knowledge" blog that we should be challenging Creationism and IDiocy not just on their fallacies in respect of Evolution but also on their other challenges to modern scientific understanding.

In another post on another blog, the "ParisTampaBlog" the author eloquently makes essentially the same point. As rationalists, we need to be taking the fight to the Creationists and IDiots and showing how their "explanations" are contradictory not only to modern Evolutionary science but also how they are refuted by a vast range of evidence across a number of scientific disciplines.