The Sopranos Finale: My Predictions

I really started getting hooked on The Sopranos around 4 years ago. I've seen every episode at least once, but mostly three times. After over 8 years it is about to end.
Everything must die and there will be life after The Sopranos. I'm sure of it.

One piece of trivia before my predictions: Me and James Gandolfini are the same age. I'm a few months earlier. Chris who got knocked out of the series a couple of episodes ago is actually 41 years old. He definitely played someone at least 17 or 18 years younger than Tony on the series.

Now for the predictions:

1. Tony will flip. He'll realize that he and his family have no future as members of the Mafia. This will sort of vindicate the shrink, as she will take credit amongst her peers for the flip. 9 years ago, Lorraine Bracco's legs were an asset to the show, but in the last few years, they have been pretty hidden by the cameras. Yeah, yeah, I know, she is 52 years old, give her a break.

2. The show will revolve around Tony and his family finding a new location far far away from New Joisey. AJ will start crying because he is going to be separated from his new crazy bimbo.

3. Before leaving, Tony makes an effort to track down the Arabs after finding out they are in town and most likely plotting a terrorist act (this will piss off the CAIR terrorist apologist organization in real life). He finds them, and kills them in a very brutal manner, in a scene that immediately follows his shrink bragging about how great her therapy was.

4. When bargaining with the Feds, Tony insists on taking Uncle June with him, but not his sister, to his new home, showing his true family loyalty.

5. Before leaving, Tony stops off at Chris' widows house to tell her he has to leave and he just wanted to say goodbye and see Chris' kid one more time. He winds up banging the hell out of her in a passionate way, of course.

6. Last scene: Tony runs into Phil at the Airport. Tony and his family are leaving and Phil and a body guard are coming back. Tony stops and says "hi Phil, how is it going" and then he smirks as Phil gives him a very "mean in a scared kinda way" look back.....OK, now for the final tune: How about The Way We Were by Streisand?


I wonder if the end of series will end my recurring Sopranos dream. I am one of his crew members, who winds up in a car with Tony, and I have no idea if he is going to kill me or continue to be my friend.

I Don't Mind Theists Like Rabbi Jonathan Ginsberg

Rabbi Jonathan Ginsberg is not a reality denier. Well, almost. He accepts evolution and an ancient earth thanks to overwhelming evidence, but I don't think he's read The Bible Unearthed yet, or chooses to ignore the fact that the Exodus never happened.
Maybe he should watch these videos. I'd love to see his take on it.

But when it comes right down to it, he is not the type of theist who is going to hinder education.

OK, so he got the 20 light years wrong and the age of the earth (not 20 billion years old). He isn't the Jewish version of Dr. Ken Miller, that is for sure. But at least he doesn't deny reality.

He has over 100 videos on Youtube. Check them out. He has lousy delivery on his jokes. I guess he realized that, and became a Rabbi instead of a stand-up comic. If you want to learn a bit about Jews and Judaism, watch some of his videos.

Here is his take on Noah's Flood. I think he'd like to believe that the story literally happened, but I think he is smart enough to know it didn't:

Lots of theists are amateur psychologists

I think just about every atheist blogger gets unsolicited emails from amateur psychologist theists. We also get mail from nasty theists as well who tell us where we are going and many tell us why there is a God, some of these theists are nasty, some aren't. What bothers me mostly about theist to atheist email is that if the theist has such great convictions, why not just leave comments on my blog?

I'm going to make this post simple. Theist email, followed by my thoughtful reply.

Dear Beaj:

Do you ever read your own stuff? I came across your blog, quite by accident. You were taking take a strip off Rabbi Gelman for saying atheists are angry. Then you spend the next four or five paragraphs telling everybody why you're pissed off. Go figure.

As a believing Catholic, let me tell you a true story.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was walking into Westminister Cathedral to attend mass on a cold rainy Sunday morning, in the city of London. Out in front of the cathedral was a guy with a sign saying: "THERE IS NO GOD." Archbishop Sheen walked passed him and said "glad to see you believe in God." The man looked at him incredulously and said;"You damned fool! Can't you read the sign?" Sheen responded: "Of course I can read. But a true atheist would be indifferent, at home in a warm bed on this cold Sunday morning. He surely wouldn't be in front of this cathedral, holding a sign saying there is no God."

Bingo.

You're pissed, no doubt about it. I don't why, and frankly, I don't care.

I have a theory that many individuals who call themselves atheists resent believers because they lack the consolation that believers receive by their faith. They would love to have this consolation, but they find it difficult or impossible to believe. However, down deep many of them haven't totally written off God. Actually, they would be utterly delighted if He showed up unexpectedly.

Atheism is no big deal. Many Jews and Christians in our society, even those who claim to believe, are for all intensive purposes atheists. Why? Because they may identify as Jews or Christians, but they behave as if there is no God. Often, but hardly always, real atheists are better people than believers are. Yet, I get so tired hearing from atheists who are always telling us what a horrible thing religion is, especially when you consider that the worst crimes in history occurred because people no longer believed in God. As Dimitri said in the Brothers Kramazov: "If God doesn't exist, all things are permissable." Then the dumb bastard went off and killed his father, just to prove his point.

Hitler and Stalin were hardly religious. The Spanish Inquisition never murdered on the scale of 20th century man. The Nazis killed more people at Auschwitz in two days than the Inquisition killed in all its history. Yet when people talk about the sins of religion, they seem to have historical amnesia. They seem to forget all the secular murderers we've had to deal with in the last 100 years.

So, if you want to be pissed at God, go for it. I just think it's a waste of time.

As Bobby McPherin says, "Don't worry - be happy."
-M

My reply:

I'm not pissed off at God. My stance is that there is no evidence God
exists or has ever existed. There is no reason to believe in God,
other than to live a lie in hoping for an afterlife.
Sounds like you are giving me a generic letter (most of it) that you
are distributing to others. You obviously don't know much about my
views. Jews are an ethnicity AND/OR a religion. Hitler didn't ask
Jews if they believed in God or not.
If I'm angry at anything, it is what religion has caused in the name
of something that there is no evidence of, and in fact something
completely man made. Wars are fought in the name of supremacy (my God
is better than your God or my God is the only God anyone should
believe into).
As far as '"If God doesn't exist, all
things are permissible." Then the dumb bastard went off and killed his
father, just to prove his point.'goes. Atheist are under represented
big time in jail. In theory, you may say that without God, we are
free to be immoral, but the reality is that atheists are as moral if
not more moral than people who believe, thinking that they can always
beg for God's forgiveness.
Your theory is not correct. Atheists have written off the idea that
the invisible sky fairy exists (again because we know that religions
are man made, and that no evidence for God exists), but most of us
would definitely welcome God and the afterlife, but then again, we
would also welcome it if one million dollars miraculously appeared in
our jeans pockets.
Hitler was a believer in God, though he wasn't a good Christian.
Stalin grew up religious, and atheism was not the reason he was a
tyrant. Again, there are millions of atheists on the planet today.
Not too many are tyrants, or even communists.

I'm going to post your letter on my blog, but I won't use your name
and email addy, unless you want me to include it.

Sincerely,

Beaj

*******************************
I was angry at Gelman because, like this theist emailer, he tried to tell me what I think, as if he knows something.


Now for a worthwhile email:

Dear Bacon-Eating Atheist Jew,

Hi I'm a blogger with a site at: http://rjjago.wordpress.com which is maybe beside the point. I'm trying to find as many atheists as I can as quickly as I can.

The CBC is doing this 'pulse of the nation' thing on facebook. It's called 'The Great Canadian Wish List' and it allows people to submit wishes for what they want Canada to be and then vote on them.

Long story short, religious people have taken it over and we atheists are getting beaten quite badly.

I've put up a wish for an atheist Canada. Right now it's just barely in the top 50 with 52 votes. The Christian ' revival of spirituality' wish is pushing a thousand. It matters because the CBC will be doing a TV special on Canada promoting the top ten or twenty wishes and I would prefer that at least one of those were mine.

I was wondering if you could:

a. Vote for that wish?

b. Promote it on your blog?

I promise, by the prophet's beard, that if you vote for this, you will get 72 virgins in heaven.

The wish can be found at: http://www.facebook.com/sgroup/subgroup.php?sub_oid=2382939609 . To support it you'll need to register for Facebook and click 'add support' in the top right of the wish.

Best regards,
R.

****************************
If you are a Facebook member and a Canadian atheist, do the right thing:)
I would rather be voting for a totally secular Canada though. It makes more sense and might even be attainable.

OK, For The 50th Time, Morality Is Hardwired In Us

I've made a few posts on this topic previously, but I keep reading blog posts and articles by theists who keep on repeating the same garbage, that without God's word, or God's laws, humanity would become Sodom and Gomorrah like and even worse.
There are many theists out there who believe that the only thing stopping them from raping, murdering at random, and pillaging is the bible or the fear of God. They think that nothing holds atheists back from being "evil."
The reality is that morality is hardwired in our brains. And it developed long before we became humans. In fact, moral behavior is found all over the animal kingdom within like species at least. If social animals were only selfish and not hardwired to take a bullet for the group now and again, extinction would be the end result.
This morning I saw a mother sparrow feeding three near-adult offspring on my driveway (me and my wife always make sure there is birdseed and bread crumbs on the driveway, evil atheists that we are), I mentioned to my wife that this mother bird didn't need a bible to do the right thing.

The reason I'm bringing this up now is that more research has come out verifying the fact we are hardwired when it comes to morality:

“You gotta see this!” Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.

As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other.

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

The only thing I will argue about this is the idea of altruism. If doing good things for others gives us a positive brain rush, then it really isn't altruism. It becomes an act out of selfishness in a sense.

The reality is that the 10 Commandments for example, are just the result of writing down what was already hardwired in our brains, and we can easily substitute God with "nature" too, of course, to make sense of the Commandments by doing this, poetic allegorical analysis would be required.

Read the entire article on the new research.

Pat Condell on morality:


Here is a great way to overcome moral dilemma's:

Seeing Red

Less than 1% of humans have red hair. In the USA, 2-6% of the population is red headed, Ireland and Scotland have a high percent of red heads. Red headedness is just as unnatural as homosexuality, it seems:)

A new scientific study has found "that apes first evolved color vision to help them forage food, after which nature made red the sexiest color around and spiked apes’ evolutionary tree with red hair and skin."

“It looks like red skin and hair became a sexual preference,” said evolutionary biologist Molly Morris, the other study’s author. “So while the benefits in terms of eating may not apply anymore,” she said, it’s still socially—and sexually—relevant for an ape to see red."

This makes me wonder why red headedness didn't become prevalent for humans, since we are just apes after all. Maybe it has to do with climate change and adaption winning the evolution over color attraction. I'm sure there is a very good scientific explanation, I just don't know what it is right now.

I don't know if it is just me, but I've always viewed red headed women as, um ok, I don't want to say easier, but uh, more inclined to be sexual without that much urging. How is that? Like I mean, red heads have a certain do-ableness aura that brunettes and blondes don't have. Blondes have an aura to be easier, but possibly less approachable and less really into it (more artificial) when it comes to appreciating the possible act, if that makes sense. Of course, I'm just generalizing here:)

Going by this South Park video, red heads might be the least trusted minority in the USA. I used to think it was atheists. Probably the least trusted minority in the USA would be a gay red headed Arab atheist.

Come to think of it, has America ever had a red headed President?