I notice that no one seems to have much to say about Baghdad Entry 1. Perhaps that’s because combat is such an alien concept to everyone, they have no frame of reference. Maybe that’s for the better. They say war is hell, and I agree with them. My grandfather, a Korean War veteran, refused for years to speak about the war. When asked, he’d give a sad smile, shake his head, and say quietly, “Unless you’ve been there, you wouldn’t understand.” I agree with him. And honestly, I’m glad that you guys don’t have any frame of reference to compare combat with. Its not something I would wish on my worst enemy. But, fortunately, we’re definitely winning over here.

Ever since I joined the Army, I’ve heard the term “balls-out firefight”. On October 4th, I found out the hard way. Bunch of shitheads thought it’d be a great idea to engage the United States Army while they were in an observation point, my platoon being the representatives of the Army.

One American went down with a bullet in his throat – Specialist Avealalo Milo. A big, friendly, Samoan M240 gunner and a friend of mine. Over 20 Al Queida combatants bit the dust. We gave a helluva lot more than we got. Ever since that fight, its been nearly silent around here – almost eerily so. We knocked the ever-loving shit out of Al Queida, and took the fight out of ‘em. We took out every single fighter that they sent out to step up to us.

Since that day, the civilian population around these parts has exploded. Everyone has heard about the “Tigers of Baghdad” who took the fight to these fuckers – and are winning. Our Sergeant Major didn’t have the heart to tell the Mayor of Baghdad, who dubbed us the Tigers, that we’re actually the Cougars. Recently, rolling down the street, we caught sight of a man in a red and white shirt, standing on top of his home’s roof, waving his arms like a madman and yelling at the top of his lungs, pointing to the intersection we were approaching. We pulled over to see what this dude’s major malfunction was, and he yells, “BOOM! Americans, BOOM!” and points to the intersection again. Turns out that the dude watched the remaining Al Queida shitstains emplace the IED, an 18-inch diameter explosively formed projectile. Something, that if detonated, was big enough to blow a Stryker in half.

Two months ago, this dude with the red and white shirt didn’t live here.

And if he did, he wouldn’t have warned us about it.

He would have feared for his family’s lives, and he would’ve stayed quiet because Al Queida ran that town.

But since the Cougars got here and started administering the beatings to the proper shitheads, the population has remarkably rallied behind us. They will now risk their lives to warn us and feed us information. We have people volunteering to sit on rooftops with reflective high-visibility belts and not even an AK47 between them, but they’ll sure as hell watch the streets and let us know what’s going on.

I can’t help but remember that one article that was written by that ‘friend’ of the Rational Response Squad that painted United States Soldiers, Marines, Airmen and Sailors as rapists and the like. I think about that article and the negative light it put us all in, and I wish she could see the difference we’ve made. I wish that stupid bitch would come over here now and actually talk to the people whose lives we’ve bettered.

One thing I do have to confess to, however, is the post-mission discussions. “Man, did you see that one chick in House 12? She was hot!” However, the Infantry is an all-male organization and we haven’t seen women in several months. And we miss ‘em. However, we’re professional enough to save that shit until after the mission.

Anyway, for everyone else’s benefit, a foray back into more familiar territory, one that I hope you remain free to explore, hooah. Back to the arguments of the people who ‘Place their reliance on the pseudoscience of quacks and morons and fools’ and who we should be listening to – our science teachers.

“Fucking new-agers, is there any amount of bullshit that they won’t swallow? Its two thousand ought three, god damn it, when are these morons going to join us in the twenty-first century?”
-MC Hawking

“The only ‘secular’ way of surmounting the problem of the beginning is to theorize that there exists an infinitely large, eternal macro-universe within which are embedded an infinite number of finite universes. An analogy would be an infinite turbulent sea having an infinite number of bubbles ever forming and expanding. Each bubble would be a universe, having its own duration, its own laws of nature. Some bubbles bud and give rise to other bubbles. One of the bubbles would be our universe.”

- The Science of God by Gerald L. Schroeder, Chapter 2: The New Convergence, Page 25

Well. No shit. The odds of our universe existing are indeed slim. I am, I admit, incapable of personally calculating the odds. However, the fact that we exist in the possibly one universe capable of supporting life as we know it does not point to the existence of a god. Just because we do exist doesn’t mean it had to be because of some all powerful, infinite and eternal god, it simply means that we got lucky. If we were in some other universe incapable of supporting life as we know it, we wouldn’t even be aware of this, as we would not exist. Or perhaps we would exist, just in some other form, perhaps silicon based instead of carbon based. (Okay, so mentioning the Horta from Janus V (ST:TOS Episode “Devil in the Dark”) might be a rather unscientific move, but you get the point.) The fact of the matter is, we are not primitive man, and when we come upon something we cannot understand, we need not instinctively point to a supernatural entity and say, “Well, its beyond me, so God must have done it!”

In my opinion, this Gerald Schroeder is a fucking jackass. He claims to be MIT educated, and I’m not going to argue that, but if he is, fuck, even I stand a shot at coming home with an MIT diploma. They must be giving them out.

Another thing that really pisses me off – ‘faith’. Faith is fucking stupid, if you ask me. “Well, yeah, we have absolutely no proof and absolutely no evidence to betray the existence of a god, but we have faith He’s there!” Is it just me or does that just sound completely fucking retarded? Believing in something of which there is no evidence is, well, frankly covered in Russell’s Teapot, so getting into my own rendition of that, in which I argue the same concept, is redundant.

My squad leader and I had a rather involved discussion the other day, in which he proposed to me that perhaps god was more of a life form that had evolved beyond our comprehension, such as the Organians or even Q. (Sorry, guys, two more Trek references…) If evolution can happen on this planet, what’s stopping it from going further on others, perhaps even other planes of existence? We then discussed the possibility of ‘life energy’, as he put it, in essence, the spark that makes us who we are and where does it go at the end of our lives.

I, for one, have my doubts about both of those concepts. One problem I see with this theory is that if this life form had evolved past our comprehension, then its not really a god, in the true sense, now is it? Its an evolved being. Nothing supernatural at all, there. However, as one man said, I forget who, as well as the exact quote, but in essence, it stated that technology so far ahead of our own would seem as magic and witchcraft. Even if it is merely technology.

Also, granted, we do not have the technology or the knowledge of how the human body works, however, I reject the theory of a ‘soul’ of any sort. We are aware that the brain seems to work on a balance of chemical and electrical impulses. Nothing supernatural there.

A piece of advise to those people who are finally realizing that Christ doesn’t save, Allah ain’t gonna give you 72 virgins in Paradise, Earth is a chunk of rock, not a Mother or ‘Gaia’, Zeus never existed, and you can light all the incense you want to and draw all kinds of circles and squares and triangles with your own blood, but you’re never going to be able to cast that love spell on your crush -

“Life is a game that no one wins
But you deserve a head start the way your life’s going!
So throw in the towel,
‘Cause your life ain’t shit!
No, take the towel and hang yourself with it!
Life’s short and hard, like a bodybuilding elf
So save the planet and kill yourself!
If you’re feeling down and out with what your life is all about,
LIFT YOUR HEAD UP HIGH,
AND BLOW YOUR BRAINS OUT!”

-The Bloodhound Gang

Man, it must really suck to find out that all this time people have spent following their god or whatever, be it Christ, Allah, Gaia, or whatever, that there’s nothing. Especially those older people who just realize this – haha, fuck. They’ve managed to waste their entire life on nothing.

I’ve been reading a lot of Richard Dawkins lately, having finally decompressed a collection given to me by a fellow Rational Response Squad member (damn, I forget who, I’m sorry, but it’s a fantastic collection of works by Dawkins, Darwin, Sagan, Russell, Nietzsche, and Huntington). I agree with Dawkins 110% in the fact that religion is one of the most fucking dangerous institutions ever. If its galvanizing shitheads and incensing them into action against my country and my freedoms, it is extremely dangerous. Something along the lines of having a single TIE fighter shoot at the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701. (For those not familiar with the allusion, the TIE is a single-seater fighter from Star Wars armed with lasers. Even the original Enterprise, no refit, was armed with phasers and photon torpedoes, or matter/antimatter weaponry, deflector shields, and carried 430 crew. For the record, Enterprise delivers an extremely decisive red-assed beat down.)

I cannot make a comparison in the realm of reality as to the U.S. Army vs. Iraqi insurgents conflict over here. This completely blows my mind. As Dawkins said in “Religion’s Misguided Missiles”, one of his many fantastic works, “Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? If only! Nobody is that stupid, but how about this – it’s a long shot, but it just might work. Given that they are certainly going to die, couldn’t we sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life again afterwards? Don’t be daft! No, listen, it might work. Offer them a fast track to a Great Oasis in the Sky, cooled by everlasting fountains. Harps ad wings wouldn’t appeal to the sort of young men we need, so tell them there’s a special martyr’s reward of 72 virgin brides, guaranteed eager and exclusive.

“Would they fall for it? Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.”

The sad thing is, this claim of a god, a heaven, a hell, and 72 virgins or whatever eternal reward is completely unsubstantiated. There is a complete and total lack of evidence in this area. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero.

Every argument to the contrary comes to failure. Always. So when atheists come in and shoot giant fucking gaping holes in the whole theistic view, such as ‘intelligent design’ and whatnot, theists try to counter-shoot science, nitpicking in the much smaller holes. In another of Dawkins’ works, I forget which, but it was definitely Dawkins (I would absolutely love to meet this man and converse for just 15 minutes, that’s all, any more and I’d feel like I was presuming upon the man’s time) pointed out that it is unforgivably asinine to assume that we will ever have a complete fossil record as only a small amount of deaths and soil/environmental conditions result in the formation of a fossil. Naturally, theists jump all over this, simply because they have no other ammo.

Furthermore, theists tend to pick on the fact that science does not put forth any facts. It merely puts out theories. The entire point of science is to prove itself wrong. That is how science advances. Science does not hold itself to an untouchable standard and make baseless claims that it is always correct because an imaginary being said so. Science admits its failures, and more often than not, because that’s the damned point of it. Without disproving its old theories, science would become as religion; stagnant.