22/x mmxv

In the Aztec language, the words for sun and eagle are the same – so are the words for moon and rabbit.

In 2011, ASAPS (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery) surgeons performed 316,848 breast-augmentation procedures.

If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side.

In Cambodia, male prostitutes outnumber female prostitutes by a ratio of three to one.

Iran is one of the few countries in the world where a couple can have a “temporary marriage” in order to facilitate sex within wedlock – essentially prostitution. These so-called marriages can be valid for as short as an hour.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

Genocide and Dogma

‘Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.[3] And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide.

[3] The “blood libel” (with respect to the Jews) consists of the false claim that Jews murder non-Jews in order to obtain their blood for use in religious rituals. This allegation is still widely believed throughout the Muslim world.

Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism.

It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion—as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology—is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

While you believe that bringing an end to religion is an impossible goal, it is important to realize that much of the developed world has nearly accomplished it. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations’ Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France’s jails, for instance, are Muslim. The Muslims of Western Europe are generally not atheists. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations’ human development index are unwaveringly religious.’

– Harris. S. 2006. Letter To A Christian Nation p. 15

2/iv mmxv

The opening theme to the American 1970’s television show M*A*S*H was called Suicide Is Painless.

The Latin palmo means ‘I print the palm of the hand’ or ‘I tie up a vine’.

In 1994, there were only ten lawyers in Cambodia.

The Great Barrier Reef is the greatest organism-made structure on the planet. It covers 350,000 square kilometres (135,000 square miles), an expanse greater than Poland.

According to Deuteronomy 22:24, if a woman did not scream loud enough while being raped, she was deemed to be part of the evil that must be purged; it was therefore ruled she must be stoned together with the rapist.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

2/vii mmxiv

On the last Wednesday in August, crowds of over 40,000 people gather in the Spanish town of Buñol and throw tomatoes at each other. The event is called La Tomatina. Over 50 tons of tomatoes are wasted.

In Dutch, the noun eend means both ‘duck’ and ‘Citroën 2CV’.

In Britain, it is illegal for a party in an election to call itself None of the Above. This is to prevent the words appearing on ballot papers; presumably, there is a fear that NOTA would win by a landslide.

In the First World War, the British were the only side to have separate brothels for officers and men.

The hobbies of Norodom Sihanouk, the ex-King of Cambodia, were listed on his website as ‘jazz saxophone, magazine editing and having affairs with foreign women’.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts