Christianity is torture

Crucifixions vs. mediaeval tortures, who wins?

The other day I was watching a series on the Discovery Channel about various torture and execution devices from a number of different era.

The first featured ancient devices (including wicker men) but focused on crucifixion. The show mentioned that crucifixion was extra horrible and painful due, strangely, to the way the victims are stretched out on the crucifix, which causes compression of the diaphragm. This encouraged victims to try to push up with their legs and create room for their lungs to breathe, but that only put more pressure on the ankle nails; hence victims control their own intense pain. Pretty neat.

But the followup mediaeval show had much more crazy stuff, including iron maidens, racks, pears¹, and thumb/head screws. These are dementedly thoughtful and intentionally painful, and the show didn't even mention some of the even more painful methods.

Crucifixion does have advantages in that it is pretty much a 'fire and forget' device. That said, the extra effort the mediaeval devices required enabled executioners to play on the minds of their victims, letting them anticipate the agony, thus making the torture that much worse. This isn't to deny that crucufixion wasn't horribly painful - it certainly was - yet when you hear most Christians talk about it, crucifxion usually "the most horrible, painful punishment" that humans have ever devised. Why is it that so many Christians deny the even more painful later inventions?

I have two guesses:

1) Christians always like to make their god-related stuff superlative - God is unstoppable; omnipotent-scient-benevolent; loves us like a parent, but to a greater greater extent than any parent, etc. So they make it sound like Christ's crucifixion has to be the most painful thing ever.

2) They ignore the mediaeval execution devices because these were the creation of other Christians. So they are conveniently neglected.

I have a third guess that, depending on how you look at it, is either less or more charitable: they simply don't know much about mediaeval torture. Maybe they just aren't as twisted as guys like me, who love this stuff (and gave a speech about it during a grade 8 public speaking contest).

¹Sadly, the mediaeval pears are not thought to be able to break jaws or kill people; they are merely painful gagging devices.

All this time spent on atheism blogging is useful for something

I think that yesterday, for the first time, all this time I’ve spent reading and participating in the atheism/culture wars blogosphere has paid off in a tangible way.

Last night, me, my wife, and a bunch of friends were gathered at another friend's house playing Wii and Cranium. The atheism stuff didn’t help the Wii playing in any way whatsoever (side note: this was my first time on a Wii and my arms are killing me! I mean, I'm in decent shape but, dude! serious lactic acid build-up. Stupid Rayman); however, it may have singlehandedly won my team the Cranium game¹. We were going for the final question which was to be a word question. I was selected because they guessed I was the best speller on the team (I believe my teammates just didn't want to spell). The other team read the question:

Them: “Spell the following word: ? ... {whisper to teammate} I don’t know this... Me neither. Do you? No. Umm, should we just try to sound it out? {speaks back to us} We don’t know this word, do you? {flashes it to one of my teammates who won’t be answering the question. She shakes her head “no”} Ok, no? I guess I should just try to say it {grumbles} ... here it goes: PRAW – SEE – LIE – TIZE.”

Me: “{hurriedly cutting him off} Oh, I know that word. Proselytize. It means to try to convert someone to your belief or viewpoint, usually regarding religion.”

Everyone but me: “Wha?! How does he know that? I’ve never heard of that before in my life.”

Them: “{grumbles} Now we’ve lost.”

Me: “Not so fast. I always get the ‘e’ and the ‘y’ mixed up. (here I demonstrate that I spend so much time on this stuff that I have a regular misspelling of an infrequently used word). {concentrates so as to not embarrass myself} P-R-O-S-{pause}E-L-Y-T-I-Z-E. {looks up hopefully}²”

Them: “Crap.”

My Team: “Woohoo!”

¹ A little boasting on my part. We were actually far, far ahead. We could have screwed up our next 10 chances at the final question and still won.

² To be honest, my spelling is only so-so these days (I have been seduced by spellcheckers) and I had never seen the word ‘proselytize’ until about two years ago on some atheist blog.

They'll have to make the illness immune to common spells such as "Cure Disease"

For all you nerds out there, a pair of disease researchers are seriously looking into using massively multiplayer online gaming environments to study the spread and control of epidemic diseases. The researchers are already talking with Blizzard to use their World of Warcraft environment to run the tests. They plan to unleash carefully designed diseases into the world to infect player characters and let them interact realistically with each other to simulate a real life disease.

People had been thinking about using World of Warcraft or other online communities like Second Life for disease research since the infamous high-level Warcraft disease that got out of hand, temporarily wreaking havoc on several servers. These researchers look to go ahead with the promise of that unplanned outbreak with research of their own.