The winner of the Ban T-shirts Weekend this time is Alison Sim ( @xAlisonSingsx ) and her winning tweet was for the Last Fish T-shirt.

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The Ban T-shirts Giveaway winner this weekend was @Zombie_Vengence (Stacee Gonzalez)! Congratulations Stacee. The winning tweet was:

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And the winner of the Ban T-shirts giveaway this time is… Kayla Watson (@kaylarw94). Congratulations! Kaylar’s winning tweet was for the Ban Homophobic Marriage shirt.

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I swear I didn’t make this up, but it looks like the typical “too good to be true” customer comment that you get on feedback pages!

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This week’s Ban T-shirts Giveaway winner is “not applicable” (no, really that’s the name they use on Twitter!), username moredetonation.

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So, there is a huge controversy at the moment because the TSA has introduced scanners which allow employees to effectively see underneath your clothing. Travellers are obliged to either pass through a scanner (which according to some reports are not 100% safe) or to undergo an “enhanced pat-down”, which includes touching around the genital area.

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So… the winner of the second #FreeBanTshirtWeekend giveaway on Twitter is… (drum roll)…Anthony Rose! (@RealAnthonyRose):

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You heard it TSA .  The message heard around the world, “Don’t touch my junk!”  Show your support by supporting this tee.
See other offensive shirts here

This weekend was the first “#FreeBanTshirtWeekend” on Twitter, and the winner was Thomas Taylor (@xBurningChromex)! Thomas tweeted about the Together we are stronger shirt and is the winner of one of those shirts!

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For a brief period a number of years ago I almost believed in God. In fact I guess I did believe in God because if (during a period of a few weeks or maybe months) you had asked me “Do you believe in God?”, I would have said yes.
But pretty quickly the doubts started to creep into my mind. And I’m not the kind of person to repress thought, because surely, if God does indeed exist, he gave us inquiring minds for a reason? It didn’t take me that long to realise that it was illogical to follow a religion, per se, especially Christianity, which was the one I had been exposed to since birth (although I had studied Islam for a year also). Religion, though, is really just a construct of mankind (if it was truly the unalterable word of God surely there would be no need for various versions of it [religions]), but just because religion itself is not divine, does not necessarily imply that there is no God.
Anyway, I put the whole matter of belief to one side for a number of years, but recently I’ve been pondering not so much religion, but the existence (or not) of God.
I think, in the end, what it comes down to, is that people use the existence of the universe around them as evidence of God. The fact of our existence, all the plants, animals, oceans, air, the Solar System, the stars, the universe is indeed utterly, utterly mind-bending and I can totally understand why it could lead people to believe in God. But the reasoning itself is a logical fallacy, it is a circular argument. Some people choose to use the existence of life and the vast complexity of the universe, as a proof of the existence of God. It’s not a “how” explanation, more of a “why” explanation.
Recently I was watching “The Wonders of the Solar System” (with Professor Brian Cox), and some of the things he was explaining about the planets were just mind-boggling, there were beautiful pictures, fantastic scenarios, methane-based atmospheres, moons of frozen water, the suggestion that there could maybe be life in some primitive form, even in our Solar System. But did this make me think maybe there’s a God? No. It made me realise that the Earth, in spite of being a beautiful thing, is just a tiny, tiny speck of dust in the immenseness of space. What I was seeing and learning just finally and utterly blew out of the water once and for all the last rusty remnants of the notion that Christianity, or any other religion, has any useful explanation about where we came from, who we are or where we are going. Christianity fails because it is out of time… its frames of reference are thousands of years in the past…. but it is also out of place – the perspective of space dwarfs it into insignificance.
Let me clarify one thing. I’m saying religion does not provide a logically or scientifically relevant explanation of our existence, death, or of life and the universe in general… not that people don’t find it useful (even necessary) in other ways, personal to them. But I think it probably works in the same way that a placebo works.
We look for meaning in everything. We need to assign meaning to events in order to make sense of the world. The thought that there might in fact be no meaning, no explanation for our existence, no sense, no God, can be a depressing and frightening thought. Coupled with that, it is almost impossible to imagine not existing. But all this really amounts to nothing more than wishful thinking. Some people seem to need God, they are more comfortable with the reassurance that the idea of God brings.
When I think of religion, I think of  death. Church ceremonies that I am most familiar with are those related to birth, marriage and death.  When our relatives and friends die, religion tells us that they go to heaven or hell, or at least to some kind of afterlife, or maybe reincarnation. We are reassured by the idea of continuation of life after death. People turn to religion in times of grief or at times of illness and weakness. We want there to be a God, and an afterlife, because we miss those that are close to us, and we are scared for ourselves. But concern for the dead is only felt by those living people who still remember them. People who died before we were born may as well have never existed. They are, at best, just names on tombstones. Those who are born after your death will not know you, you will not matter to them. And in the big picture, our lives are but an infinitely small pixel We matter to each other during the course of our lives, but  in the big picture we don’t really matter at all.

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