Regarding my most recent ban

Usually I wouldn't care this much, but I feel it's appropriate to bring this matter to the faces of the forum moderators and users. I woke up from napping, and I discovered I was banned from the forum for 48 hours. I was given this reason:

You have been banned for the following reason:
For 'not giving a shit what others think' - it's a forum, not a site
for monologues.

You have got to be kidding me. I made that paraphrased comment in response to another user who thought he could 'prove' right his opinion of me by polling the other users on the forum. I said I don't care what other people think. This is the offending post, #302. Be sure to skim around it to soak up the context given where I had made my comment.

Is this really deserving of a ban? Would another user had received one had he or she done the same exact thing? Not only that, the official message I was given as a reason for my ban highlighted a paraphrased comment completely twisted and out of context - even then, was this the real reason I was given an immediate ban?

Before any moderators rush to this thread to comment on my so-called bad attitude and frequent use of potentially offensive language as justification for my latest ban, I'd like to share that I have been banned for those exact reasons before. Also, I took them fine and didn't fight about it, as I do cross the line here and there. However, that wasn't the reason this time, and the official reason is evidence of that. To anyone responsible for running the forum and making these decisions, don't try to make things up and piece together other matters/reasons right now. I'm not going to believe it, and I have zero reason to. I'd rather like to understand what this is all about, and a healthy sense of honesty would be appreciated just fine, as I would probably understand your views and compromise to your level of tolerance on this forum.

I'm not posting this to fight about it, but it's something that should be brought to the attention of everyone else.

Historicity of Christ to Darwin's Theory of Evolution

Yes Ben, I'm very aware of what the thread subject is, but I have a pretty annoying habit of defending evolution when I see it unfairly attacked or compared to something uncomparable. I'm just clearing things up; when I really defend evolution, I'd have to subject you to very long, boring posts As you're aware, comparing the historicity of Christ to Darwin's Theory of Evolution is baseless, and it leaves me with the instinctual urge to at least concisely explain the obvious contrast between them.

James Randi Rants About "God"

James Randi updated his weekly commentary on his website, opening it with a very amusing rant on religious belief, which might be good to post here. You can read this week's commentary here.
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Well folks, now we all know why Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had his debilitating stroke. Evangelist Pat Robertson has now decided that the affliction was divine punishment for "dividing God's land" – Israel, of course. So, according to Dr. Robertson, strokes are not caused by the brain of the victim being deprived of oxygen due to a clogged, narrowed, or ruptured artery, nor by bleeding within the brain. The old superstition that brain cells thus deprived of oxygen malfunction and die, resulting in loss of function in the part of the body controlled by these brain cells, is refuted by Dr. Robertson’s superior medical knowledge, I guess. No, God did it. That’s the vengeful, savage, jealous, angry deity that Pat accepts and fears.

Said Robertson in his omniscient fashion on his television program “The 700 Club,”

God considers [Israel] to be his. You read the Bible and he says, “This is my land,” and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, “No, this is mine.”

I see. This chap who created everything is touchy about the desert he’s chosen as the chosen territory of the chosen people? Gee, but it’s hard to figure out these basic facts of the world – but that’s why we have the wisdom of Pat to explain this stuff, of course. Robertson, a practiced name-dropper, assured his Club members that about a year ago he’d prayed with Sharon, whom he referred to as "a very tenderhearted man and a good friend." He said he was sad about Sharon’s stroke, but he pointed out that in the Bible, the prophet Joel had warned about doing anything to divide God’s land. In Robertson’s opinion, Sharon flew in God's face to appease the European Union, the United Nations and/or the USA.

I used to think that Pat Robertson was cunning, that he knew how to manipulate the naïve into his way of thinking. No longer. Recent blunders prove that he’s just plain ignorant, vengeful, and stupid. He’s not only a national disgrace, he’s an affront to the entire rest of the world, a blemish on our species.

But at least he’s consistently stupid. He divined that the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin also was due to that man’s efforts to achieve peace in his country by giving land to the Palestinians. Then he suggested that American CIA agents should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. As recently as last November, he warned residents of Dover, Pennsylvania, that disaster might strike there via the angry hand of God because they’d voted to oust school board members who favored teaching the “Intelligent Design” nonsense.

Hey, Robertson, shut the hell up. You embarrass everyone.

While I’m on a God rant, following the recent mining disaster – see www.randi.org/jr/2006-01/010606netherlands.html#i13 – the wife of the governor of West Virginia appeared on the NBC-TV Today Show and reassured viewers that people in her state still believe in miracles, as her husband had stated before the fact of the miners' demise was reported. Ignoring the twelve deceased, she designated the survival of the thirteenth miner as evidence to prove that at least some “miracle” had occurred. What an illustration of the desperate need these people have for their mythology and let’s-pretend philosophy! Want a better example of what looks like a miracle, lady? Try watching a sunset, listening to Mozart, or holding a baby in your arms; those aren’t miracles, either, but they sure out-class what you accepted. Your “God” made the mine shaft fall in, “He” suffocated twelve miners, and then – just to be capricious – “He” let one live, yet you see no defect in “His” decision? “God” even decided to give the survivor some brain damage, maybe as a little joke. Hey, “He” sure is a fun guy, isn’t “He”?

Can I rightly accuse your God of all this? Yes, I can. You see, I looked him up on Google. He’s omniscient – that means he knows everything. He’s omnipotent – so he can do anything. He’s all-merciful, forgiving, and loving, too. He controls everything: remember that falling sparrow? Well, do you suppose – if you thought about it at all – that God decided to carry out the West Virginia disaster – as well as the recent disastrous tsunami, murderous earthquakes in Guatemala and Pakistan, and bombings in Iraq – just for fun? Your merciful, caring deity sent hundreds of thousands of innocent people, many of them children, to their deaths! During the Holocaust, he heard the prayers of other millions, yet he allowed the poison gas to be released. This is your God?

When is the religious population of this Earth going to start figuring out that they haven’t got invisible friends living in the sky or under the ground who do these things?

Let’s grow up, shall we?

Houston Couple Claims Alien Abduction

Someone sent me this article about a Houston couple that claims to have been victims of alien abduction twenty times, including the kidnapping of the woman's fetus. Thankfully, the article included a skeptical/rational point of view from a Harvard psychiatrist. There isn't much in the article, but perhaps someone will get something out of it.

Is Science a Religion?

Is Science a Religion? is an important read to anyone willing to understand the difference between the two. It may look lengthy, but the least you can do is read through it and hopefully get a lot out of it like I did years ago

It was authored by Richard Dawkins, leading evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His book The Selfish Gene gave me profound fascination with evolution, and I can comfortably admit I'm a biology major because of it. Otherwise, I would've ended up tangled in English literature.