ABSENCEofGOOD

What it means to me.

2011-12-01T10:32:00.000-08:00

"Twas brillig, and the slithey toves did gyre and gymbol in the wabe
All mimsey were the borogoves, and the mome-wraths outgrabe."

This is the entire universe as it really is from your, or my, point of view, disregarding our relationships with each other. The Sun rises and sets every day no matter how you're getting on with the wife and kids, no matter who is vying for political power at the City Hall, the local district etc., no matter if you're a CEO or a janitor.

It conjures up a picnic scene where we are sitting, relaxed, knowing that things are happening off in the distance. Off in the distance there may be a village or even a big city where the hustlers are hustling and the bustlers are bustling, where they hustle and bustle day in and day out.

If we imagine the city empty of people, there it would be, brillig while off in the distance the busy are busying. It's just the first layer upon which everything else rests, it being explained that there are always, in fact, other thingies doing their thingy. The farmers are farming, the butchers are butching, the mosquitos are doing little fly stuff and so on.

There is always a scene upon which stuff is going to happen, but no matter what stuff happens the scene will tend to go back to being the scene.

After this we could add anything at all. For example, "Twas brillig, blah, blah, blah, 'then Eve gave an apple to Adam', or, 'that's when the President pushed the Red Button'".

The first couple of lines of Jabberwocky is the ultimate scene-setting, the 'when' and the 'where', the 'could be anywhere', the 'nothing to see here folks, unless there's something to see'.

But I've been trying to make you see, which in a way corrupts the whole idea. For you to really see, to really notice what I'm trying to mean, you have to find those moments where it's all just 'there' around you. You may notice it if you practice yoga, or if you have jogged far enough, what do I know, "I'm not a doctor dammit, I'm not an elevator!", to corrupt 'Bones' imfamous saying to my purposes here.

The Supertramp line from their song, "If everyone was listening.", ".. the stage is in darkness and clear..", kind of sums it up too.

Commercials use settings to create moods favourable to selling their product. They have an idea where their target audience are, as far as mood goes, by the show they are interrupting, which has a setting within your setting, then they add another 30 second setting over that.

Like you're at home where homey things are happening all around and you're watching Star Wars where Star-Warsy things are progressing and suddenly you're in 'the kitchen' and 'she' is worried that her pasta isn't going to be perfect! Recommendation? Well, that company's pasta is going to make 'her' pasta-worries disappear, and of course, your pasta-worries too! Then on to the next commercial where, you'll never guess but, there is a solution to your car-worries, yes there is.

Bit of a digression but, have you noticed that most new cars resemble a shoe? I'm tempted to say, "What's up with that?", but I don't want you to feel as if I'm droning on purposelessly.

But what does it mean? Not the stuff about the commercials, which I was trying to use to explain what the Hell I am meaning.

I think that the great Douglas Adams gave it a shot, the 'meaning' thing that is, with his, "Don't forget to bring your towel."

At this point I'm going a bit Monty Python on you, with, "I don't know, what the Hell does it mean to you?"

There's the comment section 'down there'. Let it out! You know, if the scene is set for you to do that at this time.

I, for one, think it has it's own meaning.

Talking to rednecks!

2011-07-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

Me:- Hey Redneck, I noticed your anti-Obama post. I know that you're not a rich man, so I'm proud of you for wanting to shoulder more of the tax burden in your country.

"Broaden the tax base" is the operating phrase, which means, well, you'll be paying more. It's that simple. ... I hope you don't consider the word 'tax' a profane word. LOL I realise you're not going to believe me about that tax thing even tho' I live in B.C. and indeed we have a 12% Harmonized Sales Tax making 12 bucks worth of groceries cost 13 bucks. our B.C. Liberals are badly named they're very right wing.

Redneck1:- @ IAN- LOL!!!! I am for less government, which really means I'm Anti most of the bozo's in office today. And the national sales tax idea is not a bad idea, one I have pondered a lot latley.

Redneck2"- Well you all need to realize that they all ready get way more taxes than they need to take care of this country so more taxes is not going to help any thing except give them more to waste. A plague should wipe all politicians off the face of The earth so we can start over.

Me:- Oh, the idea is no new net taxes, so a few billionaires will get the appropriate giant cut in theirs while you'll get to pay 12% on top of the price you see on the shelf. See something for 12 bucks? That'll cost you $13.44! When you start paying a surtax on everything, if they don't just hide it in the cost, you'll be reminded every single time that you buy something that your State and your Country is not one tiny bit better off for it.

And Redneck2, you're not going to get less government, just less governing. Some pictures of guys clearing the brush down on the ranch, that there had to be worth the 400 grand a year for the Prez, yea?

Redneck2:- Yes there will be less govering caues it will cause utter chaos and throw the world in a panic, in which case I would be way more happy to deal with than what we have now! Case closed.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

There we have a peek into the mind of madness, I suppose. Redneck2 WANTS utter chaos, he's rooting for utter chaos, case closed!

Two dogs humping.

2011-07-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

Imagine looking around at reality without having any prejudices concerning what it's all about, just 'being there' observing, noticing the kinds of things going on and so on and so forth, then being told by someone that bestiality and homosexuality were not natural.

"Well, I don't know about you but when I look around I see dogs naturally being drawn to the smell of a bitch in heat and being so overcome by it that they'll hump just about anything. What better advocate of 'natural' could you have than animals doing what animals do?"

This idea, that what animals do sometimes just isn't natural, seems to stretch the meaning of the word 'natural' to it's breaking point, and I don't think that this goes totally unnoticed by people.

Seems to me that this is an area where religion is deliberately clashing with reality, making it's point that it can convince you of anything at all really.

Interspecies sex you say? TOTALLY UNNATURAL! DISGUSTING! A dog humping your leg now, now THAT is natural, he's just a dog and doesn't know any better than to be, you know, unnatural.

Isn't that the point, when ideas are brought together and they don't match up, where you realise that this religion 'thing' is just fucking with your mind? Hey, I'm a product of my environment, it gives me 'the creeps' just to think about dogs humping humans or vice versa and I'm not advocating it as something I'd like to see on the way to pick up a Big Breakfast. I'm just saying that it's not not natural, or it wouldn't be not natural.

I think that part of the problem there is that we get programmed with the notion that natural is good but the 'natural' we're thinking of that is good doesn't include yucky stuff like sex or poo or sex in the poo-hole or 'GAWDFORBID' poo in the sex-hole! YUCK!!!

I just don't think we're taking reality into account when we avoid the idea that we're walking bags of shit and that if it could be put to a life for life vote, just our own personal space would be billions, if not trillions to one in favour of poop, yummy poop!

Yea, I understand that E. Coli doesn't have a vote and shouldn't have a vote in the matter, I'm just pointing out that the idea that life is sacred is very specific to human life or at least 'higher forms of life', or at least 'naked-eye-visible' life, which just has to count when we're discussing whether we're 'accountable' for what we do with fertilized human eggs surely? It's just that there's another thing that is deemed 'not natural' therefore unGodly by the religious when controlling your own(if you're a woman) body seems at least 'as natural' to me.

I think it says something about us that comedians make good livings off of exposing our hyp9crisy when it comes to 'nature', you know, along the lines of, "By applause who here is kind of disgusted by poop?", followed by, "Now, by applause, who here refuses to take a shit on account of their disgust with it?"

What is that I hear you think, "But we're naturally disgusted by poop!"? Yes, yes and dogs are naturally NOT disgusted by eating a good lump of poo if they happen on one, isn't THAT right?

Camus said that you either have to admit that it's all just absurd or get yourself some religion, but I suppose, in this rant, I'm saying that even if you do get religion it's absurd anyways, you've just blocked yourself from thinking it is.

"Thank goodness" hardly anyone reads the shit I micro-publish anyways.

:o)

Spiritualism/Spirituality

2011-07-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

'It' came up again in the conversation recently.

"What about emotions transmitted over distance?"

A couple of questions clarifying exactly what it was that was being asked, 'til we realised that it's that feeling you get that Grandma(for example) isn't doing so well, then you find out, "Oh. My. GOD! Grandma's had a stroke, I 'felt it'!"

Skeptics can point to the feelings you get sometimes that something is wrong when it turns out that there's nothing amiss. I don't think this helps much. True Believers are as apt to dismiss that as skeptics are to dismiss spiritual explanations. I don't think there is anything at all that one can say to a True Believer which could possibly step in between their idea that their feeling of impending doom for a loved one and the conclusion, that a loved one is in peril is valid evidence for, at the very least, an emotional level telepathy.

There's something seriously wrong with us, I think, when a huge portion of us take it for granted that there is some kind of mysterious force, more or less keeping us in contact with each other, but I do think I know it roots.

Have you ever noticed how you feel different when you are walking along the street by yourself compared to walking along with someone, or even with a dog?

Have you even noticed how the house feels different when there's someone else home?

I think it just has to do with how our brain works, how we are just paying attention to the fact that the wife is in the house somewhere, or that the dog is in the corner, or similarly that we're pacing our walk to accomodate our companion?

That there is your basic 'emotional communication', you ARE 'attached' to that other because you're getting clues, a breath, a footstep, some sound perhaps at the edge of our hearing range which is nevertheless comforting.

I think it's that we react, not to 'the situation', but to the 'change in the situation', which is converted by us to imagining that we are reacting to the situation, there's not much difference in the framing of it.

"We had a good walk.", means, more or less, "No uncomfortable situations arose.", and the same with other situations where your home with someone just being there.

Funny thing happens when you're walking along with a companion and they don't do what it is that you think they should be doing, if for example you're walking and talking, look around and they're not there!

The same kind of thing happens when you're interacting with your companion and they start playing with you, disagreeing with everything you say, disagreeing with the you that is you, they're playing with the emotional bond that you feel you have with them.

I'm trying to paint a picture of the emotional stew that is our daily lives, all our friends, relatives, pets, strangers, other peoples' pets and so on provoke emotional reactions in us which becomes our background, part of the 'I' that I project onto others and part of the 'you' and the 'him/her' that she/she projects onto me.

A stray thought of Grandma coupled with an odd feeling that something is amiss is likely not unusual since Grandma is likely to be old and I might feel that it's been too long since I've contacted her. Couple that with news that something has befallen Grandma and we have the makings of a hit, an instance of long distance emotional communication. That same thought with a quick call confirming Grandma is fine, isn't a miss, "What? I was merely concerned that I hadn't heard from Grandma for a bit is all!"

How simple is it for the True Believer to use such mundane emotional connections to their advantage and declare the rest of us, who are likely in the minority, closed minded?

Alan Roebuck said it! Guess that must settle it?

2011-06-28T12:05:00.000-07:00

On Evangelical Realism, I said,

" [Mr.Roebuck said, quote]“…it is absurd and dangerous (not to mention invalid) to reject theistic evidence unless you have very good evidence for naturalism being true.”[end quote]

Not only shifting the burden of proof, sneeringly shifting the burden of proof!
Are we going to hear a couple of ‘nuggets’ which compose this ‘mountain’ of theistic evidence?
I doubt it.",

to which Mr.Roebuck replied,

"Your responses so far have been underwhelming. Perhaps this is just a site where atheists meet to kibbitz and I have committed a faux pas by intruding on a private conversation and asking that you justify your atheism. But you criticized my essay, so I defended myself. I wonder if you can defend yourselves.
My language is harsh, but fair and not insulting. Since I have to interact with you (I have to defend my essay), I might as well try to knock some sense into you."

Okay, I think that Mr. Roebuck is tacitly admitting that this is just a debate(let the best debater win!), and subject to each and every rhetorical trick in the book.

"There is no symmetry between our positions. Your position is defined by the “No!” you say to a vast sum of evidence and arguments. My position is that some of this sum is valid, and you need to justify your rejection of obviously good evidence. If you cannot justify it, you are probably wrong."

Seems to me that Mr. Roebuck hasn't read many atheist blogs if he doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to know that what atheist bloggers do is point out fallacies in anything remotely regarded as 'evidence' by theists. So, apparently we are being invited to step out of reality into Mr. Roebuck's 'world' as per usual when it comes to Christian apologists.

"Are you even aware of your own reasons for rejecting all the evidence?"

Indeed.

" How much of the evidence do you even know?"

Quite a bit more than I need to know to decide my position on this.

" Are you capable of doing more than sneering?"

This is a bit 'to quoque'ish, don't you think. I say that he is 'sneeringly shifting the burden of proof' and would you look at that, didn't even bother to look up a synonym!

"Do you know how one might investigate something that is not physical?"

Sure, you investigate something that isn't physical by it's effects on the physical world.

" There is at least one non-physical thing that you know exists: Your consciousness. Don’t say “Consciousness is caused only by the functioning of brain cells.” Even if that were true, consciousness itself, the thing you experience, is obviously not brain cells, nor is it functioning of brain cells. Your consciousness does not have weight or a chemical makeup, so consciousness does not equal brain cells. And your consciousness cannot be measured in volts and amps, so consciousness does not equal brain cell activity. Your consciousness is an irreducible thing, and non-material.
So at least one non-material thing exists. (Technically, I’m claiming it’s a “substance,” that is, something that exists in and of itself, and not as a property of something else.) Therefore other non-material things may exist.
We don’t have a direct experience of God, as we do of our minds. So how, in general, does one discern whether a non-material thing exists? Not by empirical evidence, because we cannot detect a non-material thing with our senses. Some other line of reasoning must be used.
The basic evidence for God is that the various aspects of reality cannot generate themselves, and therefore need a cause. Here are brief summaries of two lines of argumentation.
The universe (including space and time) did not always exist. Therefore something outside of matter, space and time caused it. Sure, this analysis does not show that the cause is God. But it does shows that the cause is not the matter that you tacitly assume causes everything.
Darwinists only believe that Evolution can account for the origin and development of all life because they assume God did not do it, and therefore matter is all that could have done it. But they are assuming their answer, not proving it. It is more plausible (unless you have an irrational presupposition of naturalism) that an intelligent Being caused life.
Question: If one does not beg the question by assuming that God is impossible, why specifically is a naturalistic explanation of the origins of the cosmos and of life more plausible than a theistic one?
Saying “science has proved Evolution” is an invalid answer. Science assumes the materialism that I am asking you to justify.
Saying “The Bible is full of mistakes” is in invalid answer. Mistakes do not justify naturalism.
Saying “Religious believer say and do many evil and foolish things” is an invalid answer. Mistakes and evil do not justify naturalism.
Can you justify your rejection of all the evidence?"

I haven't even read all of this yet, there's just so much meat here.

So far I've replied thus,

"Mr. Roebuck says, “There is at least one non-physical thing that you know exists: Your consciousness.”
Consciousness is a process or a word, the first word in this sentence. Now we both know we’re not talking about the word ‘consciousness’ here,so an analogy to consciousness would be ‘the flowingness’ of a river. The ‘flowingness’ is not the water itself, much like the consciousness is not the chemical reactions themselves.
Hey, you came here to teach us something, perhaps you might learn something instead, Mr.Roebuck?
I am underwhelmed(to use your word) that you can point out ‘things’ which don’t materially exist. I think you’re just mixing and matching your categories here.
(Please come to my blog and defend yourself there too! )",

but there's more coming!!!

Everything...

2011-06-25T05:36:00.000-07:00

What is WRONG with everyone?

I noticed that a lot of people, too many people are more than willing to stretch a 4 by 3 picture onto a 9 by 16 screen.

This makes me crazy. These people should have been drowned when they were kittens, in fact this explains the GOP and fucking EVERYTHING!!

Let me count the ways!

2011-03-11T10:40:00.000-08:00

We learn by repetition. Repeat this as many times as necessary until you understand that, we learn by repetition.

Now it's not surprising that some people have learned that it is easy to manipulate others by 'thinking outside of the box', using the fact that we learn by repetition, against us.

Magicians do this all the time. We know that when someone picks up an object in his left hand, it is in his left hand, through countless instances of this being true.

Politicians, people who make commercials, lawyers, theists, philosophers and so on, know how to manipulate language in the exact same way, by using variations in the meanings of words, to their advantage.

These people know how you think, as sure as they know the next number you are going to say when you are counting numbers.

They know that how to twist the system is as easy as redefining words to suit themselves. A great example of this being the redefining the meaning of the word 'torture' to suit themselves when it suited them.

Eric, who comments on The Chronicles of Saint Brian the Godless, is a master of this kind of diverting tactics, one of his favourite tactics being to use the examples of how Moral Philosophy are not as cut and dried as we'd learned(by repetition) that morality is.

Of course it is disingenuous to piggyback your religion on the notion that you can argue against your victim's lack of understanding that morals are NOT as clear cut as we have learned they are, isn't it?

And understanding that morals are not clear cut betray this tactic as one of the 'chess openings'(if debate is seen as a kind of verbal chess) that apologists are willing to use to distract, confuse and defeat an opponent's ideas.

And it's all framed(as per Pliny's framing post) in such a way as to suggest that they're right, they know all, and their opponents are wrong, and they know nothing.

Hey OBAMA, put your chess set away..

2011-02-15T06:59:00.000-08:00

.. 'cos they're playing poker! Actually I think that the President knows this fine.

Trouble with poker is that you don't need to be the sharpest pencil in the box to play, and losing one hand means nothing. Using this analogy the right have the 'God card' and by default the Pro-life card, which most people can agree with 'in principle', just so long as it's not themselves.

The problem with Pro-life it seems to me is the difference between 'just' as in authoritative and 'just' as in fair. They say that it's not fair to the fetus AND that God is commanding us not to commit unjustified homicide, which is the standard taking both sides of the issue.

But 'we', I mean pro-choicers and non-religious, see the fairness issue as fair to the woman and of course there is no reason to browse 'sacred' books for guidance.

It makes no difference that neither God in the Old Testament said anything specific about abortion nor Jesus in the New Testament, I know that they just assume the fetus IS a person then God/Jesus must be talking about fetuses when they talk about all people and such.

This would be a great argument if the state was forcing women to have abortions, by the way.

Back to the 'poker cards' analogy. One card that everyone seems to fall for is the notion that the richest Americans should not be expected to pay to support the poorest. This is all very well if you want your country to resemble a Banana Republic where the infrastructure is left to rot because the rich can all afford helicopters and don't have to look at the poor. Also this plays into the hands of the deeply religious who imagine that non-believers and backsliders ought to live in a kind of Hell and only 'good Christians' ought to be educated tools of the rich or ministering the poor on how, we can see that if they only believed, the Church would provide charity and education to allow people to be, basically, party members, and accept their lot in life as minions.

I'm starting to feel lucky that I lived in the time I did. A generation or two earlier and we'd be at war for this freedom that wasn't available to most before that, and a generation or two later, it's back to oligarchs and robber-baron time because the free enterprise crowd together with the believers killed the socialist dream of casting out the worst of the greedy and the controlling religious.

I can't help thinking how easily the American people are duped by the wealthy into changing their votes though. After Bush, the people who would change their votes were going to vote for the Democrats. The wealthy created the Tea Party to resplit the voters 1/3, 1/3 and 1/3. Trouble is that 2 of those 3 thirds are for the GOP no matter if they vote 'straight' Republican or Tea Party!

It was a typical con of the 'con'-servatives. It's absolutely brilliant! The Tea Party claimed and are still claiming the opposite of what they really are, supposedly a 'populist movement' against 'big government', but not one of them votes against any right-wing 'security' move that lets government intrude on their privacy, thinks their personal welfare check or pension or other entitlement is at risk from their own supposed worldview.

I mean, what a bunch of simpletons! Not the Tea Partiers, likely YOU! All they needed to do was start the shenanegins, a few total nutbars, Sarah Palin, Sharon Angle, Christine O'Donnell and the so-called main-stream media's 'narrative' being written for them, and the wealthy get their way.

No one pointed out that whether the nutbars got in or not, the GOP were going to come out on top. The 'loony left' were so busy laughing at these few cartoonish characters, some of whom even got voted IN, that everyone was surprised that the narrative, that they might be crazy, but the left are all godless(or at least not Christian), totalitarian assholes to be feared, stuck like shit to a blanket.

"But Obama is such a good 'statesman'." you might say? He's still being forced to push the 'center' further and further right to try to please everyone, even the libertarians who now look a lot less fucked up than the Tea Partiers.

But the libertarians are the ones who think that they can leave which 'big government' that ought not to exist until the next disaster then say, "Oh, that one I wouldn't have touched, we can see that we need that one."

Fuck them.

"Dude, you seriously need to get laid."

2011-02-10T00:03:00.000-08:00

verymissmary@aol.com said...
Dude, you seriously need to get laid.

This strikes me as a very odd thing to say. What would her first clue to the situation that she feels I'm in, be? I had to check out verymissmary's blog to try to get some kind of hint as to the kind of mind behind the thought here.

Didn't help. I don't know if it was supposed to be a put down or a joke or perhaps she was drunk at the time and couldn't think of anything else to say, who knows?

This kind of statement reminds me of another one that was common enough for a comedian to make fun of it. Seems he had heard the ladies, a few times, saying, "He's gay, but he doesn't know it.", so, of course he thought it would be funny to analyse that a bit.

Is the guy waking up at 3:30 A.M. some mornings with a sore butt and a guy snoring beside him thinking, "Hey, mebbe I'm gay? Naw, I'm pretty sure I'd know something like that!"

Back to the topic, such as it is. Was it the topic on my last post that elicited that response, I wonder? I spent the pause between that last sentence and the beginning of this one wondering if I'm subconsciously hiding some kind of code only detectable to strange blogger women/girls/ladies indicating somehow that I haven't had sex for awhile.

Let's think about that for a second. What is she thinking the consequences of my having sex would be here? My next post would be way more interesting for her?

Well, here's my 'next' post verymissmary and it's entirely about me puzzling over what you might have possibly meant by your comment that might have been in any way useful to me or even let me know what you thought about the post itself.

I'd like to think I'm a fair critic, myself, but when I read YOUR post on YOUR blog, I'm at a loss for words about that too!!

You live on a noisy street and find that police presence helps curb that tendency.

Oh well.

The Cold Facts

2011-01-24T12:48:00.000-08:00

Seems to me that the cold facts of the story available to the writer, are that Abraham and Isaac went up the mountain and came back down.
There is no good reason outside the story why we ought to believe that God communicated anything to Abraham in a manner different to how any religious person may feel that he is being communicated with by God.
Seems to me that the story is a bit circular, in that it is proposed that Abraham is hearing God's WILL more clearly because he has such faith, yet the story concerns God testing Abraham's faith.
Matt's idea that God can will the resurrection of anyone he chooses seems to make a mockery of the whole idea of Jesus death.
Are the Gospels telling the story to believers who understand God's plan through the exact same story?
Point is that minimizing the killing part, the death part of the Abraham story seems to be special pleading for the Abraham story and ONLY the Abraham story if your not willing to minimize the killing of Jesus in THAT story.
All I'm trying to say here is that shifting emphasis using rhetoric 'a la' Matt here, can have untended consequences for other stories.
If we're going to make a parallel between Isaac and Jesus, we could easily make an unflattering parallel between God hardening the Pharoah's heart and God presumably ignoring the faithful prayers of the Sanhedrin requesting their God's Will??
Can we assume that the Sanhedrin believed in God?Can we assume that the Sanhedrin believed that they were faithful to God and were exacting God's Will?
Then there must be different kinds of faith then?
Or I'm missing something extremely subtle.

So what is wrong with religion?

2011-01-19T10:39:00.000-08:00

Religions are corporations. Corporations are defined as 'persons'. Religion defines itself as a group of worshippers dedicated to exacting the will of their personal leader. The will of their personal leader is discovered by the edicts of religious leaders who are human beings studying sacred writings to convince the worshippers that their personal leader is guiding them to benefit themselves(supposedly the entire group, but not necessarilly). Religious leaders may come and go, like CEOs and board members, but the 'person' in charge is, of course their transcendental personal leader, who is, in fact, the corporation.

There is nothing wrong with this idea as far as religion is concerned, except that it justifies the existence of other corporations as persons.

The trouble is that corporations have only their own interests at heart no matter what the interests of each member of the corporation and certainly disregarding the opinion of anyone not even in the corporation.

If a group of people want to not be held responsible for their actions and be completely self-centred and have absolutely no regard for others, they incorporate, creating a transcendental 'being', a 'person' who isn't there, in effect a GOD.

C.S.Lewis, Old Nick and the Deacon

2011-01-15T21:59:00.000-08:00

The story so far on Evangelical Realism, is that Deacon Duncan decided to criticize C.S.Lewis famous book, Mere Christianity.

"..in Chapter 1, he writes,
The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the laws of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Nature or to disobey it."

The big problem with this is that Lewis is making an analogy, that morality is a law, which, like gravity is natural, but unlike gravity, we can choose to ignore, which makes this law, named 'The Law of Nature", by Lewis, to avoid naming it morality, a prescriptive law, in need of a Law-giver, who, much to no-one's surprise is going to turn out to be none other than God.

Nick's objection is that Lewis, as a Thomist, is just using this analogy for convenience and doesn't really believe it.

I think that this just makes Lewis doubly disingenuous since he is hiding his prescriptive law of morality in with descriptive natural laws and naming it, "The Law of Nature" specifically to come to the conclusion that it IS prescriptive and that God is the prescriber.

The simpler analogy would have been that morality is a law, but of course everyone would see through this right away and Lewis is trying to sound fair.

Nick's objection that Lewis was a Thomist is a simple diversion basically saying that Deacon Duncan cannot object to Lewis' use of this analogy because Lewis doesn't actually believe the analogy himself, is somewhat tricky as it puts Lewis' reasoning above criticism.

All's fair in Christian apology, I suppose.

Kalam Cosmological argument

2011-01-04T19:21:00.000-08:00

Kalam Cosmological argument

"The material world we sense around us comprises of temporal phenomena that depend for their existence on other temporal phenomena and so forth."

This is fine, sure time passes.

" Such a series cannot continue to infinity, for if it did no one thing would satisfy its dependence and nothing would exist. The fact that things do exist necessarily implies a finite series..."

This is okay too. "Something" started off the Universe, I can go along with that.

(Part duh!)
".. and, in turn, the existence of a being who determined both the existence of this series and the specific attributes or properties that define it."

NO! I can see why, since this argument has been around for so long, that a theist would want to rush through this part, this very important part.

"By rational extension, this being must be eternal and without beginning, otherwise it is temporal and forms part of the series."

I guess if you get away with quickly rolling by with the 'eternal being' thing, your work is done but you keep going as if that isn't just covering up the 'God-slide-in' there.

" It must also be sentient for a timeless cause producing a temporal effect requires an independent will."

I don't see why some 'timeless cause' requires a will.

" Finally, effecting so grand a creation as the universe and all that it contains necessitates knowledge and power."

Only if we are aiming at Allah or God in the first place, do we need some timeless cause to suddenly be knowledgable.

Seems to me that a meteor heading to destroy the Earth and wipe us out could be imagined to have knowledge (of us) and power(to kill us) too.

The Sun could be imagined to be shining just for us, just to be magnanimous!

So, to sum up, Part Duh!, is the part I have a HUGE problem with. Not so much the causal part or the timeless part but the 'powerful, knowledgable, willful being' part.

Especially since (let's call it) HE, seems to be hiding for no good reason at all, and we've backed into an essentially originally purposeless HE and are going to have to back a purpose into HIM later.

Anyone who suggests that the entire thing is a set up so that he can sneak into theists' minds of an evening? Well that just won't do.

Here's one of their favourite backup responses:-
"If the universe is not eternal and had a beginning, this implies that something came from nothing."

Seems to me that this is saying that 'God' is 'nothing' or that they have no clue what 'God' is except to go with the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing thang that they just WANT 'God' to be.

Can you say, "False dilemma."?

It's a small World, but....

2010-12-31T09:57:00.000-08:00

So, it's New Years Eve, many moons ago, and my Ma, Da, two sisters and I are 'bringing in the New Years' at midnight.

Ann was about 14, which would make me(Ian) 12 and our little sister Valerie about six years old.

Me and Ann were given some booze, for the first time ever, to toast the New Year in, and when the 'clock struck' everyone hugged and kissed and that and my Ma and Da started singing, "It's a guid New Year."

Here's the tune:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsU15dAvMck

And here's the lyrics:-

http://www.darachweb.net/SongLyrics/AGuidNewYear.html

And this is what they sang:-

"It's a guid new year to 'e'en' an' a' ..An' mony may ye see, An' during a' the years to come, O happy may ye be... "

Then everyone noticed Valerie because she was crying really hard! When my mother had calmed her down enough to find out what the problem was, it turned out that Valerie was very unhappy to not be included in the song.

You see, she 'heard', "It's a guid New Year, to Ian and Ann.." and of course she thought that if someone was going to be writing a song for New Years, they really ought to have included her!

The coherent argument.

2010-12-30T12:55:00.000-08:00

I've often heard the philosophical types come out with the 'coherent argument' thing. So I decided it was time to have a look at it. Should be simple enough, you'd think, right?

I look up 'coherent argument for God' and up pops a page telling me the ins and outs of why we have to take for granted the possibility that at least one God(if not 'at most') exists, right?

Well, it's not as simple as that. Google has many pages on this kind of thing but each one is either trying to get us to accept a specific argument as coherent or reject it as incoherent.

It gets worse. From here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherentism There are two distinct types of coherentism. One refers to the coherence theory of truth. The other is belief in the coherence theory of justification—an epistemological theory opposing foundationalism and offering a solution to the regress argument. In this epistemological capacity, it is a theory about how belief can be justified.

Now every time I read, 'coherent argument' I'm going to be wondering which kind of coherence they are talking about, since this is usually meant to be a conversation stopper, as in, "We have a coherent argument.(Therefore, you can shut up now.)"

If they are refering to the second kind it seems, at least at first blush, that they're saying that their argument is good because that is what they believe, which seems a bit devious to me.

"One way of explaining the theory of justification is to say that a justified belief is one that we are "within our rights" in holding." This seems to be what the Christian philosophy dudes and dudettes ARE saying. I've noticed that the 'coherent argument' thing is usually preceded by 'epistemology'.

Are atheists so cowed by $50 words that they just 'shut up' when faced with this 'big sister' "'cos I say so." argument meaning, basically, "I have reason to believe in God because it is one of my beliefs."?

I'd like to hear from anyone at all on this, perhaps explaining, why what I just said is wrong, how it is wrong, and at least some kind of conversation 'unstopper' to this, "Well, it's my epistemological, coherent-argument-style beliefs that stump them atheists all the time.", because it seems to me that we are arguing AGAINST those exact beliefs in the first place, aren't we?

Is this the philosophical equivalent to, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!"?, "coherent argument" being the, ".. that settles it!", part?

From here:- http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/joseph_sabella/coherent_god.html#Introduction

we get this wonderful apology, "In this paper I do not seek to prove whether God exists or not, because I don't believe that's possible.", putting the onus on non-believers to cover all possible wordplay and perspective proving the incoherence of God as defined by theists themselves.

Seems that once the 'God genie' is out of the bottle, it's just too big to pop back in, no matter the historical, evolutionary, social, or whatnot reason for popping the cork in the first place.

"We were simply attempting to understand the sky and gain some control over it/find some way to appeal to it!"?

"Over-ruled! We have a coherent argument! There's a mysterious 'baby'(Jesus?) in that bathwater!"

Sympathetic magic ramblings.

2010-12-04T12:13:00.000-08:00

In this post I want to say that the religious are putting the cart before the horse, in a manner of speaking.

I'm thinking 'phenomenology' in a popular sense, if not the philosophical sense (shrug) inasmuchas we were all newborn babies at one point struggling to understand our world and how we relate to it. Seems to me that to study how it is that we get from there, knowing nothing, running on 'empty' as it were, to here, thinking in sentences, or at least composing thoughts into sentences.

Okay, so we maybe don't not know anything at all, but that's just part of it. How much can we be said to 'know' without the means to express it?

What I'm trying to say is that we must see things from a very personal perspective when we are very young. Simple things, like whether we are warm, or thirsty or unsure etc. obviously affected us much more than we are willing to let on now that we are older.

Guess I'm trying to get you to empathize with a baby, see it from a baby's point of view and see if we can agree that, at least for awhile, everything that happens, from the baby's perspective, is just different feelings of the baby, kind of 'directionless' 'stunned' wonder about what the heck is going on here.

At some point, the baby has to move on. Don't know about you but I still feel a little 'stunned' every now and then. Nevertheless, I suppose as the baby is developing it's sense of self and so on, it's going to be making some 'Custer decisions' about whether it enjoys the company of dad as much as mom's company, and so on. I'm gonna make a guess that the development of the sense of self is connected to the sense that there are others, and that some of those others are not familiar, and so on.

Still, not to belabor that point, but we certainly are born knowing how to be babies, having some sort of sense of what makes us feel good and what does not make us feel good.

More to my point here, I think that we grow up learning cause and effect rules for different scenarios. Drop a toy and it will fall down, throw a toy and someone might pay attention to you, kind of thing. I think that we are easily confused by cause and effect sometimes, because sometimes things are not quite as they seem.

An example relating to farmers might be that when a certain constellation is rising in the in the East, it might be time to harvest the crop. Playing the part of a wise man, I might say to a youngster, "I see Leo is rising in the East, the farmhands must be out in the fields gathering the the harvest. Why don't you go to the country and ask for a job?"

The youngster might be quite skeptical about this. What makes grandpa(or the shaman or whatever) so smart that he thinks the plants know when to be ripe by looking at the sky?

I'm sure that there are thousands of examples like this where cause and effect, when not really understood, can be understood in terms of sympathetic magic, or at least what 'signs' seem to portend what 'effects'.

Not being able to say, "The seasons are caused by the Earth revolving around the Sun, the North Pole being inclined towards it in the Summertime, on a tangent with the orbit at the Equinoxes and inclined away from it in the Wintertime.", doesn't mean that we cannot see the various constellations rising in the different seasons knowing the season from that, seemingly disparate information.

Seems to me that this is, very simply, the beginnings of the notion of sympathic magic, a hidden, or occult knowledge, which at times might have a connection like the night stars and the seasons and might just be a few coincidences together with a vivid imagination. Kind of, "We've noticed that there are significant patterns to the workings of the World therefore every pattern that I see is significant."

Seems to me that this is not too difficult to understand but that the religious rail against this, refusing to see it by means of definitions of words.

Try saying 'magic' to a Christian and he/she will automatically be affronted that you should 'accuse him/her' of 'believing in that'.

Their word for it is 'miracle', BUT, their definition of 'miracle' is 'wonder', so something as trivial as a cheque arriving in the mail when you 'need' it might be seen as something of a miracle, and is EXACTLY equal to sympathetic magic, but they are constrained to NOT equate the two in their minds.

Obama the Dino.

2010-11-30T20:09:00.000-08:00

Yea, I said it. Obama must be a Democrat In Name Only, the way he suck-holes to the Republicans, in the face of the abuse he gets from them.

He has to fight tooth and nail for projects which save the economy, catch up to the rest of the Civilized World as far as freedom is concerned, get his people into office and even deal with common sense oversight of the Russian nukes!

Why Obama hasn't clued in to politics of this is beyond me, unless that 'chess game' he's supposed to be playing is against the left. Unless he's willing to say to us that, sure he'd have done 'something' but the right just wouldn't LET HIM, presuming that the left have to vote him back in to be defeated by the right for another four years.

If I were him I'd realise the lost cause I'm in and just let the tax thing run out for everyone. Even if he gets what he wants, what with all this falderal, he's not gonna be getting ANY credit for it at all, ever.

Thought police.

2010-11-22T10:34:00.000-08:00

I just watched a commercial which gave us statistics on what percentage of men arrested for pedophilia had pictures of children aged 3 to 5 on their computers.

I don't know about you, but I feel that this is a wedge issue. We're willing to call these men criminals because they look at photographs. It's certainly a slippery-slope 'crime' inasmuchas the 'perpetrators' are kind of being linked to the people who took the pictures, being likened to 'the kind of person' who would take pictures of this kind and distribute them if they could.

I just don't see a line that we can draw on this issue though.

"Laws have been enacted to criminalize "obscene images of children, no matter how they are made," for inciting abuse."

Really?

If I draw two stick figures 'doing the nasty' and one is, say, twice as big as the other, this could be interpreted to be a man abusing a child, and I could be arrested for inciting abuse??

Apparently, I'm breaking the law, here in Canada for peeking at this website. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolicon

Given this law, I'm thinking that I would really be committing a crime if I were to have a Shirley Temple movie collection, because there's is no doubt in my mind that she was a bit of a sex symbol pandering to men's lust for the 'forbidden' as much as our(everyone's) love of humour and such.

"The definitive Supreme Court of Canada decision, R. v. Sharpe, interprets the statute to include purely fictional material even when no real children were involved in its production."

There may well be 'something wrong' with grown men who are obsessed with sexually explicit stories or pictures of children, but I think that there is 'something just as wrong' with people obsessed by imagining that these men ought to be imprisoned for it.

It seems to me to be 'the seed of a crime', and taken to it's most ridiculous, we really ought to be arrested for admiring something we cannot afford to buy, since we could only be thinking of stealing it. After all, 'thou shalt not covet!'

I want to add that since those moral people seem to know exactly what is allowed and what isn't, what if there is no crime, but it looks like a crime.

For example, women all have different faces and bodies, some look very young for their age. What if I had a sexually explicit picture of a 21 year old woman who just looked like she was underage(as defined by them)?

If I share this picture, am I guilty of something because of her looks now?

Time is not like that.

2010-10-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

Humans learn about time when they are about five years old from the monster that lives under their bed.

Actually, I think that we piece together our idea of what time is, as we are developing, from the days inexhorably going by, birthdays, christmasses, thanksgivings and so on, corresponding to an opening up of our minds, an expansion of personal possibilities, down to time to get up, eating times etc.

We learn to look forward to, or dread an event by counting down to it, as if it were, because it is, in fact, a kind of prediction.

But what is time? What is time like? When we reach a certain state of education we learn that time is not as straightforward a process as we have, up 'til now, imagined.

We are told that time is relative to movement. For example two clocks set to the same time, if one is accelerated relative to the other one, the time-frame will change, things happen slower for one, or less time goes by for one, depending on the perspective you want to use.

This is a kind of useless fact for most of us. I hardly think that I'd be willing to be accelerated around the Sun in order for less time to go by in comparison to everyone else.

Nevertheless, in thought experiments about this phenomenon, we're inclined to be puzzled about the idea that, if we get in a vehicle that accelerates away from the Earth, we can come back, "in the future".

I think this puzzlement is, while an honest and fair reaction, a mixing of the idea that one is 'travelling' and that one is returning to a planet where more time has passed.

Simply because we ALWAYS live in this one time-frame, it is very difficult to imagine that there are countless time-frames 'out there', each relative to ours, depending on how fast the object in question is accelerating compared to us.

Basically, time is not a thing. Time is not lack of a thing. Time is simply the rate of events going by, in the local environment.

When we treat fairly steady events, such as a clock ticking by or a body ageing as the basis from which we measure events, and we've learned to do this since taking our first breath remember, then we imbue time with an essence that it does not have, universally.

Or to put it another way, time does not have a universal rhythm, just a relative rhythm.

I'm wondering what this means for the ideas that the universe is 'so many' billions of years old, but that's a question for another day, boys and girls. (Won't you be my neighbor?)

Philosophy is drivel.

2010-10-08T18:57:00.000-07:00

This is an exerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here:-
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence/

"Like many philosophically interesting notions, existence is at once familiar and rather elusive."

No. No it's not, you pompous ass.(Well it is if you want to include God as 'existing', which you do.)

"Although we have no more trouble with using the verb ‘exists’ than with the two-times table, there is more than a little difficulty in saying just what existence is."

I don't think that we do.

"Existing seems to be at least as mundane as walking or being hungry. Yet, when we say ‘Tom is hungry’ or ‘Tom is walking’, it may be news to those not in Tom's vicinity, whereas ‘Tom exists’ would be news to no one who knew Tom, and merely puzzling to anyone who did not."

Keep in mind that there's a supposedly, really fuckin' smart guy behind this entry into this encyclopedia! Nevertheless, it seems obvious to me that, "Tom exists." could be an elliptical, implying that he 'still' lives and such, so used in that manner it WOULD be news to anyone who knew Tom but wasn't sure about his state of existence. Similarly, it might be clarifying to someone that didn't know if 'Tom' in a story was real or fictitious etc.

" Again, we know what it is like to be hungry or to walk, but what is it like to exist, what kind of experience is that?"

Once again, 'Who are these people?'

" Is it perhaps the experience of being oneself, of being identical with oneself? Yet again, we can readily indicate what is meant by Tom's walking, but surely Tom's existing is not something we can indicate to anyone."

REALLY? We cannot 'indicate' to anyone that Tom exists because you, you pompous ass think that you have frittered away any meaning in the sentence, "Tom exists."???

" On the face of it, there would seem to be no way at all in which we can explain what existing is."

Bullshit! Existing is being, and includes a lot of implication. For example Tom, is usually the name of another human being, likely a male, and emphasizing that he 'exists' is saying that he's not imaginary or fictional.

"It may be tempting to think that ‘Tom exists’ means merely ‘Tom is real’. In fact, this could be distinctly appealing, for ‘real’ is what has been called an ‘excluder’ predicate, meaning thereby that it attributes nothing positive to Tom, but operates in a purely negative fashion simply to exclude Tom from being imaginary, mythical, fictional, and the like."

Okay, shithead, fine then. That would make 'exists' an 'excluder' predicate meaning etc. etc. no?

" To say that ‘exists’ meant ‘is real’ would be to say inter alia that it attributed nothing positive to Tom; and that would do much to relieve our frustration at being so fluent in our use of ‘exists’ despite having no idea of its attributing anything positive to Tom."

I'm thinking that since we think, in what i call 'thoughts'(write that down if you have to) and these thoughts don't necessarilly correspond to facts and reality, to communicate that something 'exists' certainly does attribute the positivity of Tom 'existing'.

"It would be a relief to discover that ‘exists’ attributes nothing positive to him at all."

This is following your other reasoning which I already disagree with.

"Unfortunately, this won't do; for among all the negatives that ‘is real’ might be applying to Tom would be not only ‘not imaginary’, ‘not mythical’, etc., but also ‘not nonexistent’."

Not nonexistent = not unreal. (simple)

" Now, suppose a seer predicted that in two years that a son would be born to Bill and Mary, and that he would be called ‘Tom’. When the prediction was finally fulfilled, we might imagine the seer announcing triumphantly ‘At last Tom exists, exactly as I predicted he would’. If ‘exists’ were an excluder like ‘is real’, then the seer could only be understood as excluding something from Tom; and in this case it would be non-existence."

This is what I'm talking about. This fuckin' jerk-off can't 'figure' what 'to exist' means but he's introducing stories with 'people who can foretell the future' now, as IF they exist outside of fiction, as if they are REAL??? What is this guy's agenda here?

" As said by the seer, therefore, ‘At last Tom exists’ could only mean ‘At last Tom is not-nonexistent’. And if he really were to mean that, we should be entitled to ask him just when Tom could ever have been said to be nonexistent, i.e. never to have existed. In fact, before he existed Tom could never even have been referred to, and hence at that time nothing at all could have been attributed to him, not even the property of being nonexistent."

Now he's denying the entire idea of predicting the future which he himself brought up in the first place!

" Promising as it may have seemed, therefore, ‘Tom exists’ is not to be understood simply as ‘Tom is real’."

BULLSHITTER!

"Of course, the failure of attempts to understand ‘exists’ as ‘is real’ leaves plenty of room for other suggestions, each proposing to substitute one or more terms for ‘exists’, and thereby to show why our original disquiet about it and existence has been sadly misplaced."

Now follows a list of alternatives, we'd be disappointed to learn, NOT!

" If one thinks that ‘exists’ is readily dispensable in favour of some other (less troublesome) expression, then there will be no difficulty in dismissing the thought of there being some such property or attribute as existence."

It's a wonder this jerk can communicate anything at all as he has no trouble using words like 'is', 'being' and 'existence' as though they are well understood to us.

" Alternatively, if one thinks that ‘exists’ is not to be dispensed with in this way, then one might be inclined to continue pursuing the puzzle of just what existence is."

There's no puzzle! You just invoked a puzzle by spouting this half-sense drivel.

"It is probably now reasonably clear that the question of existence is inextricably intertwined with the question of ‘exists’."

Well, you could have knocked me over with a non-existent feather at this point!

Panache! (no substitute for evidence)

2010-08-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

Some Atheistic Arguments Answered
By Wayne Jackson
(http://www.christiancourier.com/articles/405-some-atheistic-arguments-answered)

"In establishing the case for the existence of God, we attempt to present clear reasoning that will lead to a rational conclusion, namely, that the universe, mankind, etc., are not self-explanatory. Rather, logical minds must conclude that a Supreme Being exists. In our approach, we are affirming a proposition for which positive evidence exists."

We have our main points, 'Case for the existence of God', 'Clear reasoning' and 'rational conclusion'. That rational conclusion being that a Supreme Being exists!

I'm not sure of the significance of the 'self-explanatory' bit is though? Is a rock self-explanatory? I think that this might be a bit of rhetoric, implying that atheist 'doctrine' is that the Universe is self-explanatory, perhaps.

"Atheism, on the other hand, is a totally negative system."

I think that this 'point' would be just as good a place for old Wayne to tell us 'case closed' and be done with it, as any other point, but we'll move along.

" It denies much and affirms nothing."

Atheists deny the existence of gods and that's that. What Wayne seems to want is an affirmation of God.

" It robs one of hope and offers emptiness in exchange,..."

As an atheist, I'm hopeful of different things, but once again Wayne seems to be thinking of some kind of 'fullness' which he feels that only God can offer.

".. asserting that there is no transcendent Cause for the universe, and that man is a fortuitous combination of molecules."

Sounds bad for atheists until you 'remember' that he's just defining atheists at this point, painting them in a dismal light.

" Morality does not exist..."

Ahh, now a lie, an outright barefaced lie.

".., or if it does, man, as his own god, determines its nature."

Followed by other horn of a false dilemma. Apparently there either is no morality OR man is 'being god'. Certainly men determine the nature of morality, but Wayne slips in that we need to be in 'god mode' to do it. He sets it up that Either God defines morality or 'man in god mode' defines morality, distancing morality from being a set of customs for the benefit of society.

"Atheism is a philosophical system of contradiction and confusion."

Bold statement. How does 'There are no gods.', become this system of confusion etc.?

" Atheists do, however, attempt to argue their case."

I thought Wayne said that he was going to prove his case. Now he seems to be taking his 'case' as a 'given', 'proven'?

"In this article, we will analyze two of the popular arguments employed in defense of atheism."

Wow, Wayne is setting his bar as low as he can go here, proving to his own satisfaction that a couple of atheist 'attempts to argue their case' don't measure up to his standards.

"Non-Design Negates God?"

Atheist, we 'hear' in this three and a half word sentence attempt to disprove the tautology of 'Designer therefore design, design therefore designer.'

"In contending for the existence of God, theists utilize the design argument, which postulates that where there is purposeful design, there must be a designer."

Panache anyone? I feel as if I'm being panache-pied in the face with all this 'contending' and 'utilizing' and 'postulating' of a silly 'definition' argument(purposeful design implies designer).

"That this type of reasoning is valid is not in doubt,..."

Rolling on the floor, laughing my fucking ass off. A word game, 'design' therefore 'designer'.

" especially for those who respect the authority of the Scriptures (which an atheist obviously would not)"

Paint your opponents as disrespectful and anti-authoritarian, WHILE painting the Bible AS a respected authority! (double whammy)

".., since it is employed by an inspired writer. Paul, in his epistle to the Roman saints, declared:
For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse (1:20)."

But this is an appeal to authority and hardly the logical evidence that Wayne was touting earlier.

"Thus, we may argue logically:
Premise #1: If the universe evinces purposeful design, there must have been a designer. "

Indeed if anything at all 'evinces' purposeful design, it must, BY DEFINITION have a designer. But you are simply posing the question AS the answer.

"Premise #2: The universe does evince purposeful design."

No, it doesn't.

"Conclusion: Thus, the universe must have had a Designer."

Wayne is simply repeating the word game, 'purposefully designed things have a designer', when the question of whether the universe IS designed IS the question. No God, no design.

"The basic point of contention, from the atheistic vantage point, would be the minor premise."

PANACHE alert! Waynes couches his second premise as 'minor', as if we've already proven from the tautology, "Purposefully designed things have a designer!", that the Universe IS purposefully designed!

" The infidel denies that the universe reveals purposeful design."

More panache! 'The infidel' no less! What a joke. And of course he finally reaches the nub of the argument. No, Wayne, you don't 'get away with' saying that there must be a design because there's a God, and there must be a God because the Universe is designed by HIM, and try to pawn that off as logical evidence.

"He feels that he can reverse the argument and make his point against the existence of God."

Why would anyone feel the need to reverse this circular argument?

" He would reason (incorrectly) as follows:
Premise #1: If the universe evinces traits of non-design, there is no Designer.
Premise #2: The universe does evince non-design.
Conclusion: Thus, the universe had no Designer."

What? Why would any atheist try to reverse a circular argument?

"The atheist’s argument is invalid for several reasons."

I'm thinking that Wayne has said 'atheist' when he's meaning 'straw man' here.

"In arguing our case for design, we are not obligated to show obvious design in every single feature of the universe."

Wayne wasn't obligated to write any of this drivel. Looking at some exact opposite ludricous point of view and claiming that this is(must be?) what atheists think is devious because Christians are likely to agree that Wayne's 'opposite' argument must be what 'the atheist' thinks, and we can all laugh at 'the atheist's' silly point of view now.

"We need only a reasonable number of sufficient evidences to establish design, hence, a Designer."

We haven't been exposed to ONE in this monologue.

" Here are two vital principles that must be kept in view:
It is possible that an object possesses purposeful design but that its design is not recognized by the observer. "

Are we down to asking ourselves if it's 'possible' that there 'might' be a God now?

"It is possible that an object once clearly reflected purposeful design, but that through the process of degeneration, its obvious design has been erased. "

Wow! Wayne seems to be readying an escape hatch against any evidence of anything that, if designed, are BADLY designed!

But, there was truck-loads of panache, and disdain. Not so much 'proof' though. No doubt 'faith' steps in to pose as 'proof' later in Wayne's "Case for the Existence of God!"

The wall.

2010-06-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

Seems to me that they have a wall of defense, ranging from the ludricous, "We speak in tongues, science is the Devil's tool!", to, "Christianity is philosophically correct, how can we NOT believe?"

Now while most do not care for the first argument(rolling eyes), most do not try to understand the second one!

Seems if one is smart enough to defend the philosophical arguments made over the millenia, one is also smart enough to use every trick in 'the book' to defend them.

Mostly, I'm thinking, it's diversion. Move the argument away from itself, so to speak.

Which philosophical religionist among is isn't willing to settle for a draw? You can't PROVE me wrong and I can't PROVE you wrong, therefore my position is as valid as yours! On the other hand, we have a couple of thousand years of 'the best minds' on our side, the ontological argument, the teleological argument etc. etc.

Even supposing that each one isn't a 'proof', let's say that they're 99% convincing(to me), then 3 X 99% is 297% convincing, isn't it? (Well, no.)

This is the wall. If one argument doesn't seem to be 'standing up', don't worry, it's not a brick wall, it's more like a force-field! If in doubt, simply accuse your accuser of being unintelligible, if not least because your sources are genius!( and who 'doesn't know' that geniuses are always right!?)

But we don't see these geniuses arguing against their own reason and logic, no.

Why ISN'T the World the Centre of the Universe like religious logic dictates??(It MUST have to have been considered TRUTH for so long, right?)

Guess the reason they took so long to come to a conclusion was not just to put the people they burned well into the past, but also to put that 'irrefutable' logic which they used to burn people, 'well into the past'' too! If we put the irrefutable logic that the World is the Centre of the Universe, 'in context', back when we were all 'morons', then that about covers it.

BUT, but at the same time we can still use that EXACT SAME logic to govern our beliefs now! JUST NOT the 'Earth centrist thing, that is bullshit!"

But while all this is going on, some theists also take the far right religionist positions, running interference for the so-called philosophical, sophisticated arguments, which by and large are the same old, "You can't PROVE we're wrong!", shit, that they've always been spouting, 'genius' or 'no genius'.

Flowers for Harry C. Pharisee!

2010-05-07T09:02:00.000-07:00

(ahem)... Flowers!

I remember sitting in the bar one day, having a beer with Kenny and Dennis. I had been studying Spanish for a bit so, out of my mouth came, "Hey, Kenny, you're from Flores Island, did YOU know that that means 'Flowers' Island!?"

Kenny was a pretty tough kind of manly man, with a heart of gold, but his expression said, "If you weren't my pal, I'd punch you on the nose for saying that!"

Dennis spotted that too and decided to 'back Kenny up', "You are WRONG, because Flores Island was named after a Spaniard named Flores!"

Dennis considers himself a bit of a brain, which is cool 'cos we've had some good conversations, you know, for 'bar conversation', and he was sure that he 'had me there'.

So, not even having to think about it, I piped up, "Well, HIS name was Mr. Flowers though, so it's STILL Flowers' Island, right?"

(YES! Two points for Ian, YAY!)

I was wondering why anyone might consider it 'sissy' to have been brought up on 'Flowers' Island'?

Would Kenny have prefered it to have been named, "EvilBastard Island", or "Ironman Island", or like THAT, perhaps in Spanish?

We just don't know!

Happy b'day Harry!

Emotion = Magick

2010-04-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

Seems to me that people are the same in one regard World-wide, from the tiniest baby to the oldest 'fossil'. Emotion. We delight in the delight of others and are horrified at the horror of other and we can delight in the horror of others and can be horrified at the delight of others.

I think that the terms 'spiritual', magickal and emotional are 'inter-confused' very easily and that we are more or less willing participants in this self-confusion and confusing of others.

I wonder if it is true that whoever makes you feel bad is evil, or at least being evil?

Is anyone that is making you feel good a good person or at least doing good?

I'm not sure if the story of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the 'greatest story ever told' but it certainly is constructed to invoke as many emotions as we have, deliberately(?) mixing emotions, mixing the idea of spirituality and emotions.

Jesus body, we hear, after being horribly tortured to death(sadness, anger, sense of unfairness etc.) is brought to a nearby tomb(sense of decency, right thing to do etc.) and the disciples are worried(aren't you?) that something might happen to it.(the body)

The solution is to have it guarded by some unbiased, unimpeachable 'policemen' of the time, Roman soldiers!(law, order, strictness following orders to the letter etc.)

During their watch, Jesus rises from the dead!(wonder, promise of dreams come true, justification of belief, we WILL meet our loved ones again and forever etc.)

((This doesn't necessarilly follow really, depending on whether you imagine another earthly life and not some kind of other-dimensional plane kind of everlasting life.))

But the Roman guards are bribed to lie about it. (disappointment, betrayal etc.)

At this crucial moment in the Christian faith, in this particular version, the guards are to be thought of as unimpeachable, unbiased witnesses to one thing(Jesus' body BEING there) AND impeachable, biased, easily corruptible, lying scoundrels when it comes to seeing Jesus' body come back to life! Or is it being accurate in their statement that no-one came took the body?(well, the essence of evil really.)

Are we encouraged to feel mixed emotions towards the only ACTUAL witnesses to Jesus' physical ressurection? Of course we are. Are we supposed to NOTICE that we're being encouraged to have profoundly mixed feelings towards those guards?

Well, I think that we're supposed to find spirituality in this mixed message, somewhere in this mix of feeling(that KNOWING) that authority is unimpeachable and that authority is(the KNOWING that authority is), at the exact same time, an illusion really, only as strong as the weakest link, men's avarice, in this case.

Meh, I dunno.(sadness)

Politics in the U.S.A.

2010-04-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

I haven't involved myself in the day to day minutia(sp?) of politics. From what I gathered growing up it seemed more like controlling people's attitudes than anything else.

I believe that in general, people, the majority on the bottom of the heap, lean, at least slightly to the left of centre. No matter how many businessmen or right-wing academics or pundits claim that the capitalist system will look after them, time and time again we've seen that the 'haves' tend to look after themselves and completely ignore the 'have-nots'.

I have been watching the political news on television lately, noticing what a drama it all is.

Passing the health-care bill is hailed a giant success for the people of the U.S.A. who, according to (at least) right-wing pundits isn't going over well with those people who stand to gain from these new rules.

Anyway I feel that there is a big picture here, where the control of the U.S.A has been compromised by corporations who hire ex-government employees for large dollars to help them control overall outcomes. I understand that it is dynamic, situations are mobile and such but it seems to me that Bush and his gang got in and rolled over the 'will' of the American people so hard that they got themselves booted from power.

Does this hobble the corporate interests? Not in the least. Seems the the left can be kept in check AND pushed to aquiece(sp?) to their agenda by simply paying right-wing extremists, propagandists and media to help block any forward movement of government while ALSO having watered down, right of centre bills passed and being hailed as great victories for the left.

Seems to me that part of PNAC's agenda was, and is, to bankrupt the U.S.A, a libertarian agenda, where they deliberately bankrupt the government, fulfilling their own prophecy that 'government' doesn't 'work'.

Apparently NOTHING has changed, in this regard, after a solid year of the new, so-called left-wing majority in the three branches of government in the U.S.A.

The new POTUS seems to be prepared to give lip service to the coming environmental catastrophe likely due to global warming, while 'negotiating' using environmentally risky ventures, for the sake of bipartisanship? Bipartisanerry? (Don't know, who cares?)

But trying to please the libertarian agenda of NO government is ludricous, isn't it? There is no middle ground. There's either good government or bad government, not some good government and some no government.

Obama is a fool for trying to compromise on an issue that has no compromise, on an issue where there IS NO compromise to be had.

The slippery slope.

2010-03-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

How easy is it to imagine this train of events?

Since corporations can now give contributions to political parties for their campaigns we can see that it would be easy for giant companies to insert their candidate greased with big bucks to run for a particular party.

When all the right politicians are in place it would be easy to start changing the rules ever so slightly towards a more orderly and moral society. Perhaps we might wake up one morning to the news that it is no longer permissible to work on Sunday, or, in other words, everyone deserves a day off, these evil corporations have had their way for far too long, forcing secularization on the public at large like this.

Fundamentalist Christians would be dancing in the streets! The right wing media would be ecstatic, claiming peace throughout the land, one step closer to a right and moral society with good values.

A few more obscure laws and abortion suddenly becomes unconscionable, a disgrace, murder even!

Now, not only Fundamentalists, Catholics would be on board, one more step towards ALL admitting that life is absolutely sacred and holy and ought to be revered at least in principle, above all but God.

The next step is to encourage people to see that we are ALL servants of God. We are all here to do HIS bidding after all and the law of the land really ought to reflect this.

At this point the government has been filled with like-minded individuals and it is suggested that, although the Holy Bible is an inspired book it is not the last inspired word of God, obviously, because it seems to cause so many schisms.

The only thing for it really is to change calling yourself a servant of God to plain Muslim, which means the exact same thing after all.

Those who refuse? Well, there are, shall we say, methods of persuasion and the plain facts of the Quran as written by the last Prophet of God, Muhammed, peace be upon him, isn't there?

What do you say? Could NEVER happen?

Can't 'really' know anything...

2010-03-06T01:41:00.000-08:00

I'm arguing my point of view with a good man, a nice man, a man who feels like he knows where it's at.

But he seems to think that he's not just bandying words when he says, "I can't 'really' know anything at all!", then I point out that he is not being truthfull here because he obviously 'knows' that he is right about that. Then he goes on, "Oh no, YOU'RE being disingenuous because now YOU'RE using words in a way to mean what you want."

I admit that words are easy to twist. One of my main objections to philosophy, especially the theistic philosophy of Plato on through Descartes IS that the things they say, the conclusions that they come to don't mean a damned thing although they sound reasonable because they take both sides of the argument.

I think therefore I am, could mean that consciousness is like a first cause kind of thing, that it had to be before space and matter could exist OR it could just mean that the only way you can know that you exist is that you are a thinking being and thinking beings are the only 'things' that can think this.

I'm skeptical of this first view because saying that it is 'correct' seems to imply the supremacy of consciousness much as religion needs to and seems to be tending to confrim religious thinking. Having the second view of this statement seems to deem the statement unnecessary. So what if we are the only things in existence that 'know' we exist? Doesn't mean a damned thing right?

Still, convincing me that you 'can't know anything' seems silly because there doesn't seem to be nowhere to go there but to slyly take that all back then convince me that you know a helluva lot more that you're claiming in that 'first philosophy' of yours, yes?

Then if you start getting into 'first causes' and/or 'quantum physics'.. then you're REALLY calling yourself a total bullshitter, if you TRULY believe that you can't KNOW ANYTHING AT ALL.

What's going on?

2010-03-05T15:57:00.000-08:00

I'm very suspicious by nature, so when I started getting those 'Forbidden' ... Access Denied 'things' instead of my favourite blogs, I naturally assumed that someone was out to 'get' me.

It's funny, but these things seem to come in waves, or you happen to change one thing and another thing 'just happens' to be starting at exactly the same time, much like Brian's Big Brain Synchronicity stuff.

If anyone is having a problem with this and can't access their own blog, I've found that searching for blogspot then signing in seems to get you to your own blog.

Has anyone figured this out yet? Perhaps you could comment with 'the' solution?

A.I vs. A.A.

2009-12-27T11:12:00.000-08:00

I had a flash of brilliance this morning, but how to put in this blogpost in a way that is intelligible, interesting, makes some kind of point, thought-provoking, commentable and/or funny(at least to me)

As with all my flashes of brilliance, this one is likely just 'new to me', so feel free to say, "Pfft, I considered, and rejected that when I was like seven, you moron!", any response is better than no reponse at all.

It must have been wondering through my brain cells for a month or two, my considering Pliny's, what is it, 'idea?', 'notion?' of how artificial intelligence would boot-strap itself up from 'nothing' to avoid problems of biased thinking.

I can't imagine how a Pliny intelligence would operate though, because one of the prerequisites for intelligence is, as is my understanding, awareness. I mean, how does an intelligence solve a problem or avert a crisis if it is not aware of said problem or crisis?

Seems to me that there'd be a hierarchy of nature regarding this, I'll just make one up off the top of my head, why not.

Material. :- rocks and such, completely dumb, unaware, unintelligent.

Simple life. :- micro-organisms with no awareness at all, perhaps fungi, like yeast, barely living at all.

Plants. :- are aware of sunlight, grow towards the sunlight. Some have rudimentary awareness of insects. Venus fly-trap for example.

Fish, animals, birds and insects, which show a variety of awarenesses and quite a bit of intelligence, if intelligence is defined as problem solving.

Seems to me that humans would be on the top of the scale here only if we regard problem solving to be the ultimate in awareness.

There's a good case to be made for that actually. We are aware of our limited awareness and build tools, such as microscopes and telescopes to overcome those limitations. We can't reach out with our minds and 'grok' the stars and galaxies of stars, so we build tools to bring the stars into our field of awareness with photos and such.

Two points here. What is Pliny's intelligence without awareness, if that's what he's saying? What is awareness of the spiritual, what is the spiritual and how is it that quite a lot of people seem to be aware of it?

On the first one, it seems to me that, when trying to build artificial intelligence, we need to build an artificial awareness and that is exactly where bias is going to creep in, the intelligence is biased in favour of it's own awareness because it is not aware of anything outside it's own awareness.

On the second one, I think that spirituality is a confused collection of ideas where we try to imagine that we are aware of something that's just not there. (any ideas on that oneblood?)

Just a story.

2009-12-08T13:35:00.000-08:00

It was bitter cold out, and I was watching T.V., playin' around on the computer when I felt the freezing draft hit me. Emma's son had been over to give her a couple of gifts for her birthday, a little calender that you rip off the pages/days as they go by and a snowglobe that you put your own picture in.

The draft must have been hitting my leg for a few minutes before I became aware of, then concerned by, it. "Wonder what's goin' on?", I said, mostly to myself, "The front door must be open."

Sure enough the door was half ajar and I cringed to myself at the bitter, bitter cold that was the night 'out there' while feeling that good warm feeling of knowing that the solution to all my problems was 'just that' simple, and I closed it and locked it.

"Josh didn't close the door all the way, I was catching a freezing draft on my leg, it's bloody FREEZING out there!", I told Emma taking another look at her new picture-frame snowglobe thinking, "Wonder which dollar store that came out of?"

The night went on as usual, Emma called through that Fred, my deceased wife's dad had died. Not that Emma 'usually' calls through that Fred died, of course, just that she'll tell me 'things of interest' if and when they pop into her mind, and such. Old Fred was a nice guy and we had a 'history' quite a while back but I'd mostly lost touch with him over the years. He was one of those guys who was always old to me. He was old when I married his daughter, old when she died about ten years later and old when I'd see him on very odd occasions after that.

I thought about Emma's story about how her dad said that when he died he was going to come back as a crow and watch out for her. We'd laughed about that the odd times we'd walked past a couple of crows sitting on the wires.

The night rolled on as usual, "I'd have a drink for the memory of poor old Fred!", I called through to Emma, although it wasn't usual for me to drink to the newly dead Fred, I will respond with something from time to time. Emma wasn't taking the bait, no rum for me 'tonight'.

It was getting late so I settled Emma in for the night, which included picking up the bird from his make-shift perch, a fan, in her room, to put him to bed, and a glass of ice water for her, not from the tap, but from the cooler.

Prettyboy Floyd, insisted on riding on my shoulder to assist me getting the water for Emma but suddenly flew off, round and round the rooms finally settling on his cage and peeking out the door shaping himself in that banana shape that cockatiels get when they stretch their necks to peek.

I closed Emma's door for the night because she likes her thermostat set to "July", when we'd finished marvelling at how the bird gets scared by nothing at all, silly bird.

Off to bed for Prettyboy Floyd, he gets on his perch next to his favourite mirror image, blanket over the top, but I don't close his cage door, I figure bird-brain or not he knows whether he wants to be in there or not as he is not shy about 'telling me' when he wants to be to bed sometimes.

So, I'm laying in the dark, the monitor glowing and the television flickering eerily as it is wont to do and the matress dips slightly, something has climbed on the bed with me.

"Oh, Prettyboy what's wrong with.. ", I started, turning towards what I imagined was going to be the bird and as I swung round from the monitor to face him my hand went around and touched what I still thought was him, except it felt a little too big to be him.

I don't think that you can imagine how surprised I was when I looked down at a cat! When I looked down at a charcoal grey cat with silvery tip ends like something peeking through the mist, in the flickery light of the television.

I scooped him, I'm calling it him here, I scooped him up in the blanket that he was laying on as if he were MY cat, or as if I were his owner and took the 'bag-o'-cat' I'd made and asked Emma if she could guess what I had.

After I'd popped him back outside, we chatted about how strange that was.. now I wonder if his name was Fred?

Learning to love WRATH?

2009-11-17T11:29:00.000-08:00

One of the principal reasons that I do not believe in the existence of the God of the Bible is that He is a paradox.

We hear about 'the Wrath of God' perhaps in the same sermon as the 'all-loving God' and this, to me, is not consistent, a conundrum, a paradox, two puzzle pieces which don't fit.

No amout of looking hypnotically into the distance and repeating, "We cannot fully understand the mind of God." or somesuch can possibly mesh the ideas that God is all-loving and God can be wrathful for me.

There's certainly no getting away from God's Wrath in the Old Testament, the foundation documents for Him.

I recall broaching this subject with a nice elderly Jehova's Witness that used to come by of a Wednesday morning. "Why is it that God seems to change from the Old Testament 'full of Wrath' to the New Testament 'full of Love', then at the last chapter, back to 'full of Wrath' again?"

I forget the word for word response, although it must have been some classic Orwellian double-speak, double-think, 'We cannot know the mind of God' stuff. What else could it have been?

But what kind of rebuttal or apology can we expect from anyone on this logical, defining argument against the God of the Bible, that He cannot possibly be all-loving and wrathful?

Seems to me that 'you'd' have to back into it and spill a cartload of bullshit on it right away and THEN 'speak to it' as if it had already been defeated, thus:-

"Well, of course, you WOULD say this kind of thing, being that you have obviously turned away from God, accepted 'the god of this World' as your leader, allowing you to continue sinning in your lustful, cheating, stealing, perjurous ways!"

This may be preceded with, "You seem like a very insightful and intelligent person but.."

I think that perhaps this kind of 'treatment' is to demonstrate how the apologist 'can be' both loving (patronizing actually) and wrathful(disdainful actually) at the same time, 'proving', in a way that the anger/love thing is at least possible? (Just throwing that out there.)

This paradoxical idea that a being can be all-loving yet wrathful(all-wrathful?) is so obviously bullshit that one cannot even begin to demonstrate it, not for the historical lack of trying on Jews, Christians and Muslims parts, without coming across as batshit insane!

Biblically, "I LOVE you! And if I don't feel the love coming back to me in the required way(which you may or may not know), I'll have my 'people' exterminate your 'people'!"

Do you feel compelled to look off into the 'distance of your mind' and say something like, "One cannot know the mind of God."?

Well, do ya... punk?

Rum powered rant!

2009-11-14T02:52:00.000-08:00

Thought I had a few things. Oh yea, I think that it's funny how atheists imagine that life's only reason is to produce more life, and that devout Catholics/pro-lifers seem to want to take that reason 'beyond' reason while denying the reasonableness of that reasoning.

Ummm.. a good apologist is a wordsmith. "Why is material reality any less dogmatic than religious dogma?"

We say, "You're just making shite up!", and they reply, "Isn't what you think you know just 'made up shite' too?"

Well, of course language is a 'made up' thing and we need to express material reality in language, and the good apologist knows that there's no getting around this, so he(or she) is going to use this against us. "Material reality plus(plus spirituality) is shite you say? Well material reality is a cartload of shite, isn't it?"

Well, no. There is a consensus among us that material reality is 'real' to even have the conversation!

"Ahh, but among the majority of people there is a consensus that spirituality is real too!"

But the majority of people, seems to me, are looking for an 'Easy button' when it comes to questions like, "Why are we here?", or, "Why am I here?", or, "Why is here, here?", so they would tend to jump on the "Easy button" bandwagon rather than go on the "Hamster-wheel" of infinite regress that atheists get dragged onto by well meaning(?) or, at least, well versed apologists.

If atheists are those willing to go against the religious flow and theists are those wafting the flow along, the apologist would be those fighting turbulence and blockage caused by atheists and even non-theists.

I think that the flow needs impetus and that impetus comes from the desire to live forever. But that can't be the end of it surely? "Jesus saves, thank you very much, see you in the next life, have a good one!"

No, it can't be that because that wouldn't take up a half-hour class for one school semester in grade school for everyone, never mind four years of college for the theology inclined!

No, what I think is going on is the same kind of force that drives bubbles and crashes in economies, swings of public opinion to the left or right in politics and that kind of thing.

While everyone is claiming to WANT a stable predictable economy and a 'central' government, economies and governments just don't work like that. Same with religion. It isn't WORKING if it's not stirring up crises, dragons to slay, enemies to crush, reasons to be victorious.

Much like the weather, which we wouldn't notice if it weren't changing all the time, we wouldn't notice the economy(or care about it) if it were stable and we wouldn't notice(or care) who is in government if there weren't constant crises(real or imagined), we wouldn't notice religion unless there were the controversy and the demonizing and the hate-mongering and the unsolvable, immovable lines drawn in the sand which, if you're not on my side then you are just some sub-human-monkey's-uncle-that's-all.

They don't want us to stop and think, "What is this drivel that they want us to care about now?", no. They want to keep juggling them three balls constantly, politics, economy and religion, 'cos there's nothing else.

"They're trying to steal Christmas from us!"
I suppose when it's down to that, atheists are supposed to say, "Dear Lord help us!", and then they can say, "I knew that you believed all the time, I knew it!"

Scripts

2009-11-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

It popped into my head that we're all, more or less running off scripts. Depending on your age and circumstance your response to any given situation is predictable.

I was busy with 'morning' and realized that I'd hoed this row before and will no doubt do it again and it's pretty much scripted in our minds our roles, where we ought to be at a given time etc.

If I put some thought into it, I could give a 'rendition' of what the regular commenters on this blog are going to say in response, given that we've all come to know each other's scripts.

I wonder if Pliny has anything interesting to say about artificial intelligence and if an intelligent machine would need to follow 'mental' scripts as we do? I am absolutely positive that he does, it'll be very interesting and it'll call into question the nature of intelligencc itself!

Stacy is going to say, "Hmmm.. you made me think again! (secretly:- Darn you!) ((just kiddin' Stacy!)

I could make up stuff for other commenters like a comedian making up 'Bushisms', but to get to my point, I'm thinking that the ladies realise how scripted and self-scripted our lives are a lot better then men do.

It's just 'there' though and not examined for what it is, more used as a tool, a way of being 'mysterious' and such. I think, where a guy might be trying to make a point, the girl is trying to find out which script is being played, perhaps trying to cut off scripts that she doesn't like, off at the pass, perhaps trying to guide the guy into a script in which he is 'out of his league', that kind of thing.

Brian, with his big brain 'theory', seems to be a script to me. I play my role as the total skeptic and he dodges and weaves, seemingly determined to keep pushing the idea that there's more meaning to this universe than we (want to?) think.

I know that there's been books written about this, "What do you say after, "Hello!"?", which brings up, I wonder what our scripts are about the 'question of scripts'?

Does it interfere with our notion of free-will?
How much scripting is involved with religion?
Is something necessarilly less 'free' if it is TOTALLY scripted?
Isn't a job just a physical manifestation of mental scripting?

Now I can imagine some of you(you know who you are) thinking, "This is totally, totally Ian! That last post was odd, but I 'get' this one!"

Life as a virtual business

2009-10-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, I don't know you guys. I mean I know what you think of the stuff I write here and a bit about your senses of humor and that kind of thing, but I don't know what you do, mostly. (Pliny is a doctor, he writes doctory stuff)

Anyway, what I want to do is explain my idea and see if,

a) you give a poop
b)you have any one time suggestions
c)you'd like to do some contributing
d) add a 'd'?

Here goes. We hear about people making money on the 'net all the time with sites they create, basically selling information, the 'best' thing to sell actually. It's practically like getting people to throw money at you.

Then there are the sites which get advertisers to throw money at you for entertaining people or informing folk. (or is that 'informing people or entertaining folk?(I get 'folk' and 'people' mixed up all the time.))

It all good, either way the money goes 'towards' you, which is a plus, no?

Okay so, "Make a site."(step one) Well it's a virtual step one now, in our minds, right?

Step two is making the site about 'something' interesting to attract 'lookers'.

This is all very basic and I'm sure that it's a 'row' that's been 'hoed' to death, so this part is like the set up steps, and if I'm missing anything and you think it's important you could suggest improvements to this part.

There are several 'aspects' to this proposed site. (or modules if you prefer), the first being 'your life'.

Let's say we have some kind of questionaire asking people what they want, perhaps to lose weight or to organize their affairs better, essentially to get their 'shit' together.

They'd do the questionaire, perhaps find out crap about themselves that they'd like to, let's say, "minimize" and things that they want to bring out in themselves. We could let people log in and find out how they're doing towards self-regulation.(even coming(going) to a site to write out what you had to eat that day(if you're on a 'get fit' thingy) would lend focus to their purported aims, right?

(of course, not just losing weight, but maybe quitting smoking or getting out of debt or .. (suggestions?)

Another module might be virtual modelling of a proposed business. Let's say that you want to start a business. You split the business down into components. Buying the parts that you intend to add value to (that's what a business does, right?), then a 'miracle' happens, then selling the product that you dreamed would make you a profit.

Now I don't mean the usual 'small business tutorial' thing. They want to explain stuff like, "Is your business a limited partnership or an Evil Dick Cheney type conglomerate, and they get way into drivel like this, practically begging you to go to sleep or find an online 'Asteroids' game to play.

The point would be to make the title, "Life as a virtual business." mean that in as many ways as possible, and modularizing(if that's a word) everything, from 'givens'(You ARE breathing) to the processes, (You took that 'one-a-day' vitamin, right?), to summaries(You blithering idiot, keep this up and you're gonna DIE very shortly!(no more plans for you))

I think that there are some business-wise tips and tricks that might benefit most people thinking of their lives AS businesses.(the business of living)

Comment with suggestions, modifications, models to emulate, models to avoid(praying to be thin through a mouthful of cheese-cake), add-ons, add-ins, start-ups, details or generalizations.

Basically, what I'm saying is that if you don't know the rules, you're gonna lose the game, and 'theeee' game seems to be a mish-mash of politics/business/religion and manipulating peoples' ideas concerning that mish-mash.

Knowledge dispels fear.

(please, no comments like, "I read as far as 'X', it was boring, could you summarize so I can get some 'closure' and dismiss the summary as the drivel it surely is?")

Words

2009-10-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

I'd like to continue the theme of 'words' here.(maybe I'll get a little more agreement from a certain 'oneblood', who shall remain nameless)

We can see how easy it is to use words to trick each other by using some examples of how religious people trick themselves.

Sometimes it will be a lack of words that is the trickery, an overgeneralzation, meant only to make the comment concise, taken at precise value to undermine the entire meaning of the comment in contention.

Case in point. Someone might go ahead and say, "You're so full of it Ian, I'm a Christian and I NEVER trick others with words or trick myself with words, EVER!" This in itself is a favourite trick of debaters(debators? Looks wrong.), someone makes a general statement and the opposer points to him/herself as an example of how that general statement is false.

Seems we have to be very, very careful to say, some, or , a lot of, but even then, we might expect denial from someone trying to take the legs out from under an argument or point.

The word 'supernatural', I think is misleadin, to say the least, when it is combined with the notion that God created everything. Seems fairly obvious to me that anyone(everyone?) using the argument that God created everything, is dismissing the notion of 'natural' as opposed to 'supernatural' all together, just without 'saying so'.

To say that God created everything out of nothing or out of God-stuff, is to say that everything STILL IS made of God-stuff and we just call that particular God-stuff 'natural' to differentiate it, somehow, from other 'nothing' or 'God-stuff' that hasn't been 'transformed' by God to be 'the world around us'(I guess).

The 'design' argument is implied, and put forward as indisputable, right off the bat, as if THAT is any kind of fair argument to make.

As in, "God made everything. You can see, feel and touch everything. Therefore you must believe that God made everything."

But, of course there MUST be a certain percentage of devout, faithful believers 'out there' who can see that this is a circular argument and therefore no argument at all.

Then there's the other twist that the word 'natural' can simply mean, 'not man-made' which can be used to dither over, because on the one hand that makes all the materials of a man made object still natural, and it's just the manipulation OF these objects, BY people, somehow 'artificial', which we can STILL use as examples of 'creation', and on the other hand a completely DIFFERENT process, supposedly used by God to create everything out of 'nothing' or 'God-stuff'.

We can go on and on, spiraling backwards never admitting that we are just waffling. For example:-

"God made us those beautiful mountains. When I look at them they make me feel so spiritual."

But the mountains are made by the natural process of erosion.

"Why, God invented erosion!"

STFU! Wind and rain, snow and ice act on rock to make the mountains just like that, nothing to do with anything supernatural at all!

"But, God made the wind and the rain, the snow and the ice!"

Rubbish, the wind and rain etc. are caused by the Sun warming the planet during the day and the seasons etc.

"But God made the Sun to shine down on the Earth!"

Etc.

etc.

But this is just a word-game, trickery. If your premise is that, 'God did it!", followed by any argument which concludes that, "God did it!", that's no argument at all.

Of course anyone pointing this out to a believer is likely to be stepped along to the next 'argument' in this chain of 'non-argument', "But you need to have faith!"

Straight out of one set of ill-defined words, and on to the next, keeping in mind that the first 'argument' is taken to be at least a 'draw', if not in fact a 'win' for the religious side, and can be refered back to at any convenient time.

What's in a name?

2009-10-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

"Jesus
There are five separate individuals named Jesus in the Bible, which is not such a wonder since Jesus is the Greek version of the Hebrew name Joshua (please revert to that name for etymology). The most famous Jesus, of course, is the semi-biological son of Mary, son-by-law of Joseph and monogenes Son of God (see our article on John 3:16). Other men named Jesus in the NT are an ancestor of Christ (Luke 3:29), Joshua (Acts 7:45 and Heb 4:8), a fellow worker of Paul named Jesus Justus (Col 4:11) and a Jewish magician that Paul and Barnabas meet on Cyprus, named Bar-Jesus (a Greek transliteration of the Aramaic for Son Of Joshua). The name Jesus means Yah Will Save."

Yea, well, they seem to be twisting things a bit here. The name Jesus isn't Greek, the Greeks don't have a, "J". Seems to me that the name Jesus is Latin.

Funny thing about Latin names, they have a 'us' on the end to differentiate between males and females, kind of like the 'the's of Romance languages 'le's and 'la's denoting male and female objects. Julia would be a girl's name and of course Julius would be a dude.

Not only are Christians seemingly confused between Greek and Latin, they refuse to notice the similarity between the words "Deus", "Zeus", and "Jes".

Taking the 'us' ending to mean 'the man', and 'Jes' to be a cognate of the Greek and Latin words for 'God', we come up with 'Jesus' or 'God the man'.

But I think that Christian scholars are deliberately trying to lead us away from idea that the name 'Jesus' is actually just a title, because that would make the 'Christ' part a second title.

Christian scholars might tell us that 'Jesus' is equivalent to 'Joshua', or in Hebrew, 'Yeshua', but some others will say that Jesus' actual name was 'Yehoshua', adding a little more to the 'confusion'.

I think that the reason for this other source of the name Jesus(Yehoshua), is that one meaning of the name Joshua(Yeshua) is "Savior" and harkens back to the Old Testament Joshua and the idea of a warring Messiah who conquered Palestine for the Hebrews we hear.

Seems to me that the derivation of the name Jesus depends on how deep you are into Christianity. If you aren't a Christian you get this semi-confused etymology but if you ARE then it is perfectly reasonable for the name to mean different things depending on the situation.

For example, when talking to a Christian I mentioned that the name Jesus the Nazarene could very well be interpreted as, "The Savior, The Branch!", and I was surprised by the reaction. His eyes lit up as he said, excitedly, "Exactly!", which to me, meant that he 'saw' the hidden meaning of the Hebrew word for 'branch' which is changed to be Nazarene(coming from Nazareth) when THAT suits them.

That Christian and I both knew of the Old Testament prophecy that the Jewish Messiah would come from a 'branch'(i.e. be a decendant of) Jesse!

Jesse? Jesus? Nothing like each other at all, right?

But it is supposed to be a puzzle, hidden in plain sight, for those of 'wisdom' to 'divide correctly'.(which apparently means to see one meaning when that 'works for you' and an entirely different meaning when THAT fits.

I LOVED the "son-by-law" workaround(from the quoted passage), where Joseph 'gets' to be Jesus dad, but only when THAT suits them. What a laugh!

Son of God, well yes. Son of Joseph the Carpenter, well yes. Son of BOTH apparently.

It's all about eating your cake and having it too, all of it.

How unUnChristian of me.

2009-09-21T18:10:00.001-07:00

I can't believe that a month has gone by without me writing something unChristian on this blog. My, how time flies.

I want to say what I think should be obvious to everyone, including Christians themselves, but which I don't think IS obvious to them.

As one is growing up, it is obvious that one knows very little and has to be coached by a mentor or two mentors or more, the more the merrier, I guess.

These mentors, mom and dad, grandma and that smelly old guy, mean older brother and/or sister(s), all seem to collude to teach you that you are you in this structured society and they are them. Generally they will teach you that you ought to listen to them because they know more than you, they can beat you up, and they can 'get you back' for knowing more than them.

We can extend that structure back in time or on 'up' through society in general, it doesn't matter, either way we realise that the older one is, the wiser one is/was supposed to be, and that they are supposed to have some tangible evidence of their wisdom, namely money, property, good advice and the ability to punish you for stepping out of line.

Stretching the notion of the structure or heirarchy back through time leads to the notion of gods, or A God, while stretching it up through society does pretty much the same thing, eventually supreme power is delegated to one or more supreme beings.

How can anyone NOT believe in the local religious wisdom when, here you are, stuck within that heirarchy whether you like it or not?

After all, we're told repeatedly, that we want to grow up like US and NOT like THEM!

One very wise Christian once said, "Give me the child until he is seven and I'll show you the man.", implying that our values are instilled in us, become ingrained in us, when we are quite young, by teaching and by example.

I'm not sure if that same Christian realised that HE ALSO had been 'brought up' to be HIM, that HE TOO didn't have ANY choice about how he turned out?

God, the unGodly.

2009-08-18T09:24:00.000-07:00

In instance after instance in the so called 'source book' for God, we find God commiting genocide, judging unfairly, being guilty of favouritism etc., pressing home the point that our standards of goodness and fairness pale in comparison to God's.

But with a little smooth talking this can be explained away from every and any point of view that you might take. The stories are not exactly as happened due to mortal influence of misinterpretation, stories being altered to the 'best fit' of a different language and interpretation from language no longer fully understood etc.

We can use double-think. Feeling smug that God, who we praise and worship 'showed them who is boss', while being willing to turn-tables on the gist of the story to allow a benevolent God.

E.g. In the story of Moses, we are encouraged to enjoy the come-uppance of Pharaoah when, powerful as he(as man-god) is, Yahweh, can bring him to his knees. If it's pointed out that this is a cruel story, the emphasis is changed to the benevolent God setting some rules and the evil Pharoah just being evil.

Seems to me that since God can do anything, He could have, instead of hardening Pharoah's heart, instead of getting in a 'cock-measuring contest', he could just as easily have softened Pharoah's heart to just let the Hebrews go. Same result, but hardly the propaganda message, to the Hebrews, that Yahweh was more powerful than even Pharaoh.

We are told that free will is a notion that we cannot live without, if we can only know all our options, a good person(or any intelligent being) would pick the best one.

If I, a lowly human being can see an 'option B' where God sends Pharaoh a dream instead of bullying the Pharoah into 'letting HIS people go', it puts apologists in a position where they have to try to explain God's carnage(as it is written) in human terms while they are trying to explain that God's reasons CAN'T be explained in human terms.

But I think that 'the religious' use the same tactic in politics too, where they, the Godly can excuse themselves of completely lacking goodness either because their example, 'God's Biblical deeds', is a shining example to them, or, because as in their understanding of the Bible, they can switch point-of-views on themselves thereby fooling themselves that their selfish reasoning is, if not 'good', then at least Godly.

E.g.

"Dropping an atomic device on innocent people is evil!" Yes or No?

(If we imagine the hated communist regime of the 20th. Century, we'd have to say 'YES', and that is why we need to have an appropriate, devastating response to this kind of threat.)

"Torturing people is evil and we ought to hunt down perpetrators of such heinous crime and bring them to justice!"

(If we imagine being incarcerated in some backward and/or evil regime for breaking their unjust rules, we would certainly hope that anyone torturing us would get their come-uppance, right?)

But the Godly can agree and disagree. Taking their example from the 'Good Book', they can hold their heads up righteously and say, "YES, dropping an atomic bomb on innocents is evil, unless WE'RE doing it!", and, "YES, torture in inhumane, unless WE'RE doing it!"

... and just as the Bible explains that whatever God does, is Godly, whether it would be unGodly if anyone else did it, then whatever they do is Godly EVEN IF they think that it would be unGodly of someone else to do it.

The POWER... compels you.

2009-08-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

One of the things people need to learn as they are growning up is how to manipulate others.

What works for one person may not work for others. We have various tools to manipulate others, brute force, humour, logic etc.

What I think it boils down to, is that we are stuck here, not only in the confines of reality, things are what they are, but also within the confines of our perception of ourselves and others, as in, "Who is the boss of whom?"

You might not ever verbalize, or even run it through your streaming consciousness, "Who is the boss of you and who are you the boss of?", but you know, you have a good bead on what 'kind' of person, what 'category' of person that you're the boss of, and of course what kind of, or category of person is 'the boss of you'.

Never mind the supposed ultimate question, "Why am I here, why am I alive?", the question that we're all trying to answer, all the time, is, "Who is the boss of whom?"

This 'real' question has no answer. Well, it's being 'answered' all the time, but it's all a matter of persuasion, self-image. It IS the spiritual, the unknowable puzzle that we strive to solve from the day we realise it exists until the day we die.

We have the power of money, the power of brute force, the power of guile, which is like 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'.

Is there such a thing as free will, or are you compelled to be you by the powers which you perceive yourself to have, or to lack?

My pet bird gets up in the morning, sings his morning song, which, sadly, sounds like a deafening squeeze toy, then proceeds to acknowledge us and to re-establish his dominance over all the mirror images of himself in the house. He has a couple of favourites, the one he sleeps beside, the bathroom one, and some he loves to hate, the one on the headboard of my bed, the one in his 'basement'(under his cage).

I say that we are just like him, we get up in the morning and play exactly the same games as him, but with our family, our bosses etc.

Short of becoming a hermit or committing suicide, there is no escape from our condition, it's what we 'really' are.

Games

2009-07-20T11:15:00.000-07:00

I've been caught up on the web game Evony lately.

In this game we build cities, armies, fight and trade. I got used to it fairly quick and saw how to get 'large'. There are Alliances, where we ask and answer questions about what to do, pass time waiting for goals to be accomplished, that kind of thing.

Players will ask me, "How did your cities get to be so large?" and I tell them, it's not a secret, it is formulaic.

I've given these strugglers large amounts of 'gold' to follow through on their plan to make their cities larger and their characters more powerful in the game.

But it is a study in human nature. Since it is a war game, the natural thing to do is to build an army, which uses resources to build and 'food' to maintain.

But, if you build your population, you can tax them and use that to build an army.

Simple. Well no. No sooner do these folk get a large donation of 'gold', they decide that I'm not 'right' with my silly idea of 'growing the city', they build an army instead.

So now, I'm like the dad who explains the value of money to his children, gives them starting money, only to see them squander it.

It's hilarious because it's not real money, the game is only fun if you play it and are having fun, but it is my nature to think of them as ingrates, squandering the chance that I gave them.

They, in turn, act like bratty kids who imagined I was going to watch them squander the 'gold' and give them MORE, me thinking that sooner or later they'd get it right.

Now it's down to a question of the 'value' of what I gave them. I said it was not a big deal when I gave it to them, why shouldn't they do their own thing? If it doesn't work out for them(never will), they'll just whine a little to daddy and HE will cough up some more.

This is very strange because, while trying to tell them how to play well and giving them a boost, they are teaching me that it just won't work. Everyone thinks they know better and welcomed help becomes expected, in fact I'm being mean if I quit supporting them in their bad habits!

I'm left learning that you can't help a new player to help themselves, they want YOU to help and help and help.

Human nature, I suppose.

Evony... where life lessons costs virtual gold.

Cunning linguists.

2009-06-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

There's been some good stuff on the blogs in the past couple of days which finally gave me an idea for a rant.

It's about logic and objectivity.

Logically we are all stuck in our own minds, making every thought, experience and feeling that we have, subjective. No matter how many subjective minds, living or dead(through recorded media) agree that certain things are objective facts, there is no absolute certainty that anything is objective at all.

For two examples, it is just as possible that there is a God as it is possible that you are a brain in a bucket, dreaming the entire world.

It is all more or less a consensus on our parts that objective reality exists at all.

I just read a comment, in which, the commenter(duh!) was saying that atheism runs into trouble when it comes to to the question of morality.

" I think that the biggest question concerning the moral argument is not the question of the morality of atheists or believers, but rather the existence of an objective morality, and our recognition of the need for moral norms.", says he.

But if morality is just another consensus, by us (subjective minds) that some deeds are 'good' and some 'evil', how would it ever be possible to even have 'objective morality'?

He goes on, "I think that atheism faces its greatest challenge in this area when it is forced to give an account of the objective grounds for our moral behavior."

I thought that the religious philosophical view was that we have no objective grounds for anything at ALL really and it's THAT that gives their entire philosophy, which denies materialism, it's 'in', in the first place.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but to give God a big 'in' by denying objectivity while giving atheism the boot on the grounds that IT is not objective enough seems to me to be very disingenous word-play.

Something similar came up with a cosmological 'proof of God', starting with the question, "Is there such a thing as absolute truth?", and of course everyone is steered to say, "YES!", because to say, "NO!", is to invite the question, "Well, is 'no' the absolute truth?", and since saying 'yes' to THAT is a paradox, well, we can see how we are 'trapped' there.

Once again, we can see that this is very disingenuous. Simply by showing that a paradox is created by that question, doesn't mean that everything has an absolute truth to it, now does it?

The question of tolerance is similar. If we advocate hundred percent tolerance then we ought to be tolerant of intolerance, right? Or to put in in the previous terms, "Absolute tolerance, must, by definition tolerate intolerance.".

No? Well, you're not 'absolutely' tolerant then, are you?

Clash of the Wills

2009-06-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

"Don't read this, if you're not going to believe it!"

You're probably thinking, "Old Ian has gone off the frickin' rails, again.", and, "Is he evar(heh) going to get off this 'horse' about 'will'?"

Well, I think that I have something new(new to me anyways) to say about it, but it's a half formed glob of ectoplasm in my mind right now, which I just HAVE TO get rid of , so I thought I'd dump it into YOUR mind and let you deal with it!

I know, I know, you're thinking, "Lucky me!", but it's my will against yours, or it's my will to say something coherent, or it's my will against reality, or something.(Shut up! Voices in my head!)

Where was I? Oh yea, that silly sentence that the top comes across as me willing you to react somehow, but the instructions are impossible to follow.

As a human you take in information and process it trying to make sense out of it, and as another human, trying to impart information, we have a kind of contract. We don't think of it like that though but that's just the way it is.

Imagine, you're a baby, you look up into mom's eyes. Mom can either smile or give you a stony look, maybe turn her head away. By looking back and smiling, mom is fullfilling her part of the contract and you smile back.

I don't imagine that I have to drone on example by example, it's obvious that every interaction cascades down from that.

Jump to you and I right now. As you are reading, I am saying, "If you are like me, you'll understand, you'll 'get it' , if you have read this far and see me as 'weak', you'll be reading this and plotting how you can best tell me that I am incoherent, perhaps stupid, never seem to make any sense, perhaps 'embody' everything that you find dispicable in people of my 'ilk'!"

Of course there are many shades here, including a very neutral one where you are willing to suspend judgement depending on whether I can remain focused or I ramble on incoherently yadda-yaddaing, 'putting-you-to-sleep', 'you-got-better-things-to-do', or 'whatever'.

Example: It's interesting to note that if we add one to fourteen thousand, one hundred and nineteen we conclude that the answer is fourteen thousand, one hundred and twenty!

Well, no. It is actually NOT interesting at all to go on explaining something to the point where you, the reader, feels like you are the 'dead horse' being 'beaten', is it?

So it's kind of a 'test of wills' where, if I want to hammer home a point, I have to be very careful to not just be grating on your nerves and still try to lull you into reading crap(if it's what I'm trying to do) that MUST be true by dint of, "It must be true!", because it, of course, must be true,(You just keep getting that impression right), kind of thing.

But, I would never do that to you, my good buddy, mypalmychum-myfriend, you have to believe that.

Hey, if you don't go along with my little plan for you, I'll kick and scream and cry and pout and hold my breath 'til my face turns blue AND when that has no effect, I'll try to persuade you with scarcasm, reverse psychology, examples of 'how I'm right' and how you, my little pawn are constrained to move only one square forward(two if you're on the beginning square) and only attack one square on the forward diagonal! And you do this only when I tell you, got that!

But now you're thinking, how come I'm all of a sudden playing by YOUR rules? Who makes up these rules? Who died and left the rule-making chair empty and who says that you were dancing closest to it the last time the music stopped?

Aha! I've GOT you! If I can persuade you that it's a puzzle really!(It's really a puzzle!) If I can persuade you that I know that puzzle.(I know it's a puzzle.) If I can persuade you that I have that puzzle 'in MY pocket'.(pfft!) If I can persuade you that I am THE(or one of THE) Puzzle-master(s), THEN I have your attention, your focus.

If I can make you believe that I can pass this knowledge on to you by various means, parables, fables, multi-level ideas which can only be understood step by step, then, I've got your mind by its balls.(wrap your head around that one 'padiwan'! HAH!)

Seems to me that it's only a question of how determined I am to plant my flag of 'my will' into your 'new land' of 'your will' as painlessly(or painfully, if you're stubborn) as I can!

But now, I'M thinking, wait a nano-second here, how do I know that someone didn't do THAT 'thing' to ME?

Oh JESUS! There they are, all these little flags of other people's wills all over my nice clean will.

DAMMIT!

(Tell me that I won this round, but, "you'll be back!"(and you'll bring re-inforcements next time!)

Free will, God's goodness and sociopathy.

2009-05-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

Free will, God's goodness and sociopathy.

As you probably know, I am not a believer in free will. I base this on the idea that Decartes, "Cogito ergo sum!", is WRONG because it was already implied that he existed in his first word, which is doubly, just 'implied' by the Latin.

'Cogito', means 'I think'.The 'I', implies his existence. Long boring story short, I'm sure that Decartes didn't look at a rock and imagine, "It thinks therefore it exists!"

So, I think that we need a more pragmatic 'beginning' for our philosophy. I think, therefore I am a streaming consciousness which percieves my material body and other material bodies, with my senses, through time and space etc. etc.

I have come to the conclusion that our mind is our streaming consciousness together with all the information that we have stored since we were born which makes up a model of reality which is our memory and that we operate within THAT model comparing incoming information to it.

This explains the 'buffer' between the input from eyes, ears etc. and what is actually happening in the world.("I thought I thaw a puddy tat!)

I think that my 'model' model goes a long way to explaining religion, historical ways of thinking etc. AND sociopathy which I'm going to get to in a minute.

The question whether if God is good why did he create evil, or why did HE give us the freewill to BE evil becomes moot if we don't believe that there ARE gods and we don't believe that there is such a thing as freewill.

Still, I believe that God, goodness, evil, and freewill are incorporated into the majority of people's model of reality. I think that it would be impossible to escape growing up without having to deal with these ideas.

I think that, in sociopaths, all the way from the toddler bully up to the most heinous criminals(Hitler and Stalin jump to mind) came/come to be like that, not from any inate, freewill EVIL, not from any free will 'causa sui', but because their model of reality had/has been damaged, broken, fucked up, however you want to say it.

I believe that this kind of thing is BOUND to happen and the only way to fix it is to understand what is going on.

Imagine that you're in pain. There are only so many ways to deal with it. You could take medication if it's available. You could distract yourself OR you could try to pour THAT pain all over someone else. I think that we ALL do a bit of all three sometimes. (e.g. "I'm sorry I 'bit your head off', there.." Follow up with a description of the pain you were in.)

So, you see, you can entertain a cartload of drivel in your model of reality and project YOUR "failings" and/or pain onto others as part of your EVIL freewill, you know, if you're a sociopath, or you can deny the mountain of drivel which we pick up in our experience of life, admit that there is NO FREE WILL for anyone.

This doesn't make anyone at all less culpable for any crimes that they commit or any less culpable for bullying or gassing six million Jews, but it does give us some license to view them as 'damaged goods', a little(or a lot) fucked up in the 'head'.

Hey, maybe the religious message that you ought to give your freewill over to your favorite higher power is supposed to 'work' BECAUSE you only imagine you have it in the first place, and the pastor/minister/guru/or whatever ought to know better than you what to do(give HIM your extra cash, for example.(hehe)).

Exercise your free will NOW! (read this)

2009-05-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

I occasionally get asked about how my idea that we all have a Model of Reality(which is our memory) which makes us us, precludes the notion of 'free will'.

What happens is that someone will ask a question regarding it, when it comes up in our ongoing marathon here:-

http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2008/09/27/obama-and-the-reagan-doctrine/520

then I'll explain how 'free will' is an illusion.

Then an interesting thing usually happens. Sooner or later the commenter will have a comment which pointedly states that he/she uses his/her 'free will' in some way or other. (Proving to him/herself that there is such a thing because it can be 'brought up' I imagine.)

I'm not trying to say that I am in some kind of better position to understand reality than anyone else, after all, I just have a 'model of reality' myself.

Still, I think that this is a helpful idea in several important ways.

Admitting that your mind, right now, is a model of reality that you have built up since you were born and will continue to build on throughout your life gives us answers to philosophical conundrums such as the notion of solipsism, 'Brain-in-bucket' thought experiments, "Who are you?" type koans and things like this.

Who am I? Well I am the streaming consciousness having the accrued model of reality which no-one else has or could ever have.

Why does this obliterate free will? Well you were born a blank slate and at THAT time you could be said to have a free will or no will at all.

Excepting some instinctual needs which are exactly the same for everyone, we are born into a situation which we must learn to deal with.

We must learn to communicate, which means building a model of reality.

Even the most vociferous opponent of the 'model of reality' can't say that babies through several years have any meaningful options concerning who their care-givers are and what the care-givers education, financial situation, physical location etc. including what their 'model of reality' is.

I'd like to hear from some proponents of 'free will'. Exactly when, in a child's life does he/she attain this state of having 'free choice'?

When did you start imagining that you have/had free will? Did someone tell you that it was something that you had?

I'm thinking that if you are a proponent of free will, you have no choice but to believe you have it, BUT do you have any rationale for your belief of free will, or is it just part of your model of reality?

Just another rant.

2009-05-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

Seems to me that Christians in the USA are quite willing to be total pricks when they gain the political majority BUT the instant that they lose that political majority they start crying that they are the popular majority.

One minute it's "all" support 'our' president, even if you loathe him because he is a complete moron, can't even read a speech off a teleprompter, believes in magic and expects everyone else to believe 'the same' magic as he does.

The 'goalposts' for the word 'majority' are shiftable, that's true, but "come on", let's be real here, how slanted do we have to imagine 'popular opinion' is to assume that the latest President is 'trying to fuck us up' with his 'diplomacy' and 'reasoned judgement' and such?

Close your eyes for a second and try to imagine if you are one of the hard working, generous people that you assume the majority of Americans are, or are you just using that image as a propaganda tool?

I, personally don't believe that we have free will. I'm NOT a compatibilist. I believe that each of us are burdened with an individual model of reality that we cannot help but be influenced by and that the future is too complex, too chaotic from an individual's perspective to work out, but, we are set in our ways, beings(I hate the word 'creatures') of habit, meaning that we resist personal 'change', even though (and if we even realize) that change is inevitable.

I think that G.W.Bush was basically an idiot who actually believed his dad's and Reagan's propaganda, which is a giant FAIL by the way, and that he was propelled into the Presidency by other 'believers'(in virtually governmentless capitalism) who are under the delusion that 'GOD' is 'in control'.

My mind 'boggles' to think that the World gets to be influenced by people who think that there is a supernatural 'being' letting them know what to do.

I can't believe that some people are insisting that the Bible is a book explaining the goodness of God while explaining how goodness is what God did which isn't what any reasonable person might expect even a good PERSON to do.

Seems like these people are trying to tell us that we don't know 'good' when we see it.

Add some years of booze and cocaine abuse to this 'scenario' and we have a born again twat who imagines that he's gonna be considered the bestest PREZ every-dever.

What's 'free' about that? If we think that everything is just opinion, of course things are going to turn out batshit crazy, of COURSE!

Choices.

2009-05-03T02:54:00.000-07:00

Choices, choices choices.

What do you want to pick?

a) reason
b) unreason

...if YOU picked (a) then continue!

Must GOD(if HE exists be...

(a) reasonable
(b)unreasonable

If you picked (a) then continue!

God created HELL because

(a) Satan was jealous
(b) ...

If YOU picked (a) continue.

It says in the KJV of the Bible that God says HE is..

(a) jealous
(b) imaginary

If you picked (a) continue..

Jealousy is ..

(a) a sin
(b) a banana split(don't they get smaller every year, what, are they 'breeding' small bananas or what?

If you picked .. never mind, if you're not catching my 'drift' or are willing to cavil or quibble about previous choices(i.e. you're a Catholic), just 'never mind'!

Just remember, a person's choice counts for 100% more than a not-person's choice.(which a not-person can't have duh!)

Swine Flu FAQs

2009-04-27T21:11:00.001-07:00

"Will my non-swine flu vaccine work on the swine flu?

NO! Shut your hole, don't be so fuckin' stupid!

"Is it okay to eat bacon?"

Fer'christsake!

"I have some pork-belly futures?"

ARRRGGGGHHH!

"You know how some men are just pigs..?"

Oh man. Selling tickets to Euthanasia ought to be legal! I swear!

"I have faith that disease is caused by demons, will that help?"

Shut yer HOLE!

"Hey, it says in the Gospels.."

Shutthefuckup!

"One time Jesus cast demons into pigs, waitwaitwait, AND the Jews won't eat it! Co-incidence?"

(speechless)

Reflections of your mind.

2009-04-24T16:25:00.000-07:00

See comment section.

I'm too lazy to reformat this cut and paste drivel.

The Word

2009-04-19T05:58:00.000-07:00

In the Beginning was the Word.

I think that here's a clue to the real meaning of religion that gets lost in the shuffle.

Two thousand years ago(a little less) the story of Jesus was a great leap forward in thinking.

As always, there are 'forces' allowing progress and 'forces' holding us back.(but from ''what " though?)

That's it though isn't it? We all live in the present and can look at 'mankind' or society through the eyes of an author of some book.

The forces keeping us back(from what?) are parental, the early mind-model that your mom and dad taught you. (Basically, 'here are our mind-models, slightly used, but servicable'.)

As you 'grow', battling through the 'hormone stage', being an organic 'model' too, with IT'S wants and needs, your streaming consciousness has to weed out the insane from the even more insane (sometimes such is 'free-will').

Think of it, if we imagine all the 'thoughts and ideas' of EVERYONE, what a stinky soup of boobs and cocks and hatred, lust and calculus and Jesus and magic and.. everything all mushed together.

In your streaming consciousness you, only you can make the decision to put all your money in an envelope and send it to me! (you have the ability!)

No, what I mean is that only you 'get to' build your mind-model as progressive, hopeful, forward-looking OR parental, harking back to mythological 'good ol' days'.

What I'm trying to say is that evolution has gone 'mental'(not insane) and 'the Word' is how we are trying to infect each other with the 'virus' of magical thinking or evolve our mind-models to embrace 'beyond religion'.

The Word, i.e. communication beyond 'mama said "be careful out there", is how we're evolving NOW.

But I think that the message from the past, the Old and New Testaments are crippling remnants of parental guidance gone wild, the path of the theist is a dead end, stuck in the duality that parents NEED to use as simple explanation to their children. A voice from the past.

If that means anything to you.

Spirituality EXACTLY = Mumbo Jumbo

2009-04-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

I commented this piece to a Creationist who felt the need to call all 'seculars' hypocrites for not being religious yet being happy to take the day off, 'their' day off, to celebrate the birth of their Savior.

"You gripe about non-Christians commandeering your holiday for Jesus while denying that Jesus represents an abiding faith in God.

Hey, Jim, the Winter Solstice was celebrated since humans looked up at the sky and noticed that the Sun rises in a cyclical pattern ending/starting(or dying and being reborn), a natural end to the natural year followed by a natural beginning to a new year.
If people attributed this to an otherworldly consciousness and gave it spiritual meaning, Sun-worshippers(and I don't mean beach-goers) marked the occasion by feasting, celebrating the end of the natural new year(Solstice) and perhaps praying that the Sun would climb back from it's low points on the horizon, beginning a new year.

The Sun ALWAYS started it's climb back towards summertime BUT the Sun-worshippers didn't know that, they felt that if the Sun kept getting lower down, it would eventually disappear and the world would come to an icy end.
Every year, the Sun-worshippers' prayers were answered and the Sun climbed higher in the sky, starting it's 'journey' from farther north on the horizon.

This, after three days of no apparent 'movement'.

And you think that just because early Christians hi-jacked the Winter Solstice, the natural New Year, to celebrate, not the Sun's rebirth, but your Messiah's birth instead, that we ought to just take your word that Christmas ought to be celebrated by everyone who ought to acknowledge your Messiah?

Then you, being totally ignorant of the Sun's apparent movement at the horizon, dawning at a different location, in a cycle, EVERY MORNING, you feel you have a right to call us hypocrites?

Well, I guess your religious brain-washing is complete if you have no idea of the importance of the Solstice to 'early man' as an unexplained natural phenomenon promising another growing season.
So, you see, it's not so much that people are 'hypocrites' as much as you are ignorant.

But, since you read this, you're no longer ignorant, are you? You can put it down to 'you learn something new every day' and throw the 'Christmas hypocrites' argument in the toilet. "

Anyway it got me to thinking that there were likely people celebrating the Winter Solstice putting perhaps a much MORE religious spin on it than others and some who were actually just in awe of nature and the inexplicable Sun cycles of the World (the cycles are created by the motion of the planet).

For some it would be a grand feast with a primitive lesson in astronomy for the children to pass on generation after generation but for others it would be thought of as communication with the gods, pleading for the Sun to bring the World back to life, a very spiritual thing.

Using the spiritual idea to their advantage, shamans, priests, religious leaders would tend to control their flocks by persuading them that they were in communication with the spirit that controlled the apparent movement of the Sun through the year.

They would ritualize the Winter Solstice celebration pretending (confusing themselves?) that THEY, the priests, were in communication with, controlling the gods/spirits/God, or at least attempting such control, when IN FACT they were actually controlling their population, convincing their followers that THEY(the priests) had occult knowledge/spirituality.

Christians were well aware of the power of spirituality to control the population/pray to God.

Priests were the keepers of knowledge and the arbiters of goodness in a largely ignorant World and they could hi-jack natural phenomena to their advantage disguised as spirituality.

(Say, "Hi!", to God for me oneblood, wherever you are.)

Spirituality equals Mumbo Jumbo

2009-04-06T11:28:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking that if you're a bullshitter you don't like to be CALLED on your bullshit.

"Spirituality, in a narrow sense, concerns itself with matters of the spirit."

Oh, well, guess that clears thing up. LOL

The English word "spirit" has many differing meanings and connotations, but commonly refers to a supernatural being or essence — transcendent and therefore metaphysical in its nature.

Really? I can't make up my mind if I'm being 'dazzled' or 'baffled' here.

Metaphysics, a branch of philosophy dealing with aspects of the ultimate nature of reality

Oh, I see, 'they' pretend to be doing a little dazzling AND a little baffling here, because following the word-trail Spirituality had to do with Metaphysics which is 'really' the study of spiritual things, isn't it? Let's see.

Metaphysics investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science.

So, spirituality is looking for a deeper understanding of reality, going beyond science then? How would one go about that?

Cosmology deals with the world as the totality of all phenomena in space and time.

Here we seem to be drifting away from spirituality all together.

Ontology is the study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations.

This branch of Metaphysics seems like a better lead to discover what spirituality is all about, yes?

After much hemming and hawing, ontologists ask, "Why does anything exist rather than nothing? (This overlaps with questions in cosmology.) "

But where is the elusive spirituality?

This drivel about cosmology and ontology seems to be going nowhere.

Let's backtrack.

Spirituality apparently concerns the supernatural which pertains to an order of existence beyond the scientifically visible universe.

Concepts in the supernatural domain are closely related to concepts in religious spirituality.

I see, so spirituality is a concept closely related to the supernatural and the supernatural is closely related to spirituality.

Ah yes, I see now, don't you?

The 'thing' is...

2009-03-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

The thing that I detest about the Bible is how it is used by the wealthy by the church to maintain their wealth.

Whether there is a 'baby' to 'throw out with the bathwater', as far as 'the spiritual' is concerned has NOTHING to do with the wealthy and the church 'scratching each other's back'.

The Bible tells two stories. The first is about how the status quo came to be and ought to be maintained by religion.

The Jews trace their heritage, their ownership of their land back to the beginning of time through their God, who is the ultimate owner of everything. HE had, and still has the right to give and take away. HE gave the Hebrews, the Israelites, the Jews that land and only HE can take it away.

This is the Conservative Christian rant. Thoughout history, monarchs have been saying that God gave THEM their kingdoms for them to do with as they pleased.(with HIS guidance, of course.)

But EVERY Conservative Christian has 'the right' to THAT rant, everyone has the right to stand tall and say solemnly, that God gave him/her everything that they own and that only God has the right to take it away.

The Old Testament is that story of God's Chosen People and their trials and tribulations to aquire and sometimes lose the land that God gave them.

The 'thing' is, that it is just not true. I'm not denying the fact that Israelites owned that land for a period of time. I'm not denying that their stories are based on historical truth, as they remember it, when it comes to owning and losing control of that land.

What I AM denying is all the magical thinking that interweaves the stories, justifying genocide of the other inhabitants of that land and justifying their never ending ownership of it, whether they control it now or not.

Here, it is obvious to me that Christians adopted this magical thinking attitude towards any lands and wealth that they have owned, own now, and any that they may own in the future.

"God gave us this land!" (implying that as God ordained land owners they ought to 'call the shots' for everyone ON that land.)

It automatically excludes all non-believers from calling the land, or any part of the land 'theirs', obviously because if God gives and takes away land then unbelievers have no rights to it!

As the New Testament story 'testifies', the Jews God-given land is under the iron grip of the Roman Empire and the believers in Yahweh have not been able to control their God-given land for hundreds of years, the Jews have to have gotten something wrong if God is not willing to send a Messiah to cleanse their HOLY land (which God gave them) of these hideous unbelievers.

The thing is that reasonable people, kings(politicians) and priests alike can see that the only thing they can do is allow the invincible Roman Empire to rule through THEM, trying to keep their culture alive.

The priests might preach a coming Messiah because religious hope(magical thinking) is 'undying' by nature, but that Messiah BETTER ACTUALLY have GODLY powers, not just powers of persuasion which might get the Jewish nation 'put to the sword'.

Still, the priests could not stop itinerant preachers from convincing some of the population that they had magical powers, in fact 'THE POWER OF GOD'!

The New Testament is the story of one such iterinant preacher who had thought it throigh that owning a piece of land could not be the magical-thinking reason for the religion since, while they were still religious, while they sitll had God's promise, they hadn't actually owned the land for hundreds of years. Jesus made the 'move' from God's promise being an actual piece of land to a promise of a spiritual kingdom that could NEVER be taken away.

This is what makes religion palatable to the masses. The poorest of the poor can believe that they have God's kingdom in their hearts.

The wealthy can, with the masses appeased, and the collusion of the church, believe that they have rightful authority over God's land, their land, given to them since the beginning of time to do with as they wish.

Once upon a time..

2009-03-26T12:55:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a God who wanted to be worshipped by everyone.

HE chose the descendants of Abraham as his vehicle to enter into the minds of everyone in the world.

HE gave Moses the LAW, the first and foremost being that Moses people should not worship any other gods on pain of death.

Moses people believed God and would put any of their people to death for not worshipping the one true God.

When Jesus preached that he was the Son of God and allowed people to worship him, the priests of God convicted Jesus of blasphemy and had him killed.

The people who worshipped Jesus said that the priests who had Jesus killed were wrong because God had just forgotten to mention that He was more of a 'three-in-one' God.

God tricked the descendants of Abraham's people into thinking that HE was just the one God when HE was actually a 'three-in-one' God and used HIS chosen people to sacrifice the Jesus part of HIMSELF to show that HE was not just God of the Jews, but God of everyone.

God LIED.

2009-03-22T13:08:00.001-07:00

I'm trying to convince Observant and Man_In_Wilderness that the Garden of Eden story is flawed.

The facts.

"Eden's location remains the subject of controversy and speculation among some Christians." (This is straight from Wikipedia, hence the link.)

"..some Christians see it as metaphorical."

I cannot understand how they could do that. Does that not make everything in the relationship between Man and God metaphorical?

If that's it then isn't 'God' just a metaphor for 'goodness' and they are essentially saying that if you're not 'good' then bad shit will fall on you?

I'm disputing the story of the Garden of Eden with it's two magical trees which God sets up as the de facto 'temptation' .

In the story, God LIES to Adam and Eve, telling them that they mustn't eat these fruits because they will 'surely die!'

Apparently God has fooled Satan into believing that the fruit has the power to make humans into Gods or at least knowing things that only Gods ought to know.

When Eve eats the apple, she wants Adam to share the blame for disobeying God. At this point the only thing that the fruit has done for Eve is to make her feel guilty about eating it.

It didn't kill her as God had promised, but it didn't give her any knowledge meant only for Gods or any Godly powers.

The only thing that Adam and Eve 'get' out of eating the fruit is the 'knowledge' that they ought to be ashamed of their nakedness. (But no they don't.)

Seems to me that the Bible could make the opposite case. Adam and Eve being the perfect, and only, human specimens could easily have shed their clothes and God could have come for a look and chastised them for NOT being ashamed of their bodies.

I think that there are a LOT of Christians, Jews and Muslims who would agree.

We can only imagine that the Serpent was feeling a tad 'gypped' too unless he also knew that the fruit had the one purpose of exposing God's lie that Adam and Eve would surely die if they ate of it.

If the story is metaphorical, in that it's a kid's story about how they ought to listen to their mother and father even if they suspect, or are even outrighi TOLD, that mom and dad are LYING to 'protect them' from mom and dad's WRATH and that, by the way, is a totally unforgivable breech of trust.

I'm not sure how Christians could slough off the story as a metaphor when that suits them then use details of this story to explain the entire basis FOR their religion when THAT suits them.

I'm sure that their doctrine is that God wouldn't lie, so any evidence that HE did lie has to be downplayed as metaphor, or the subject has to be changed to Jesus on the Cross but it's all part of the same story to me.

Jesus died on the Cross for our sins. We are all sinners because of original sin. The original sin was NOT BELIEVING God's lie that by eating the fruit, Adam and Eve would surely DIE!

I suppose that, speaking metaphorically, every absolute authority figure from drill sergeants to Stalin to the Pope would naturally be furious at being caught in a lie.

They'd all likely explain by PUNISHMENT that if you had only 'believed that lie' then they wouldn't have to be punishing you.

Stem cell HORROR!

2009-03-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

Here's part of a comment by MIW from here:-
http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2008/09/27/obama-and-the-reagan-doctrine/253#c17679839

"I mean this murder of the innocent child being born, but not completely out of the mothers womb and then stick a needle in the back of the child’s head and suck the stem cells out and still call themselves a human being much less a Christian."

Okay, MIW and whatever emailed drivel he's reading, is conflating 'stem cell research' with 'brain stem cell research'.

Brain stem cell research is where evil doctors suck the cells out of partially born babies' brain stems. It stands to reason that stem cells have to come from somewhere, right? They MUST come from babies' brain stems.

The horror story that they have concocted is delicious in it's evilicousness. Where are all these would-be mothers who are willing to carry their fetus to term only to have an evil doctor suck it's brain stem cells out?

Can you not picture that horrific scene? The mother is puffing away and squeezing the baby out and the doctor says (as they are prone to saying, "Stop pushing, I see the head!"

He gently reaches down under the sheet and shuffles around. The mother is curious, then shifty-eyed, then a little scared. Suddenly the doctor brings up a gynormous hypodermic dripping with tiny crawly brain stemy life, and the mother screams!

The doctor laughs, "Obamas new rule! We can save some good socialist lives with your baby's brain stem cells. Don't worry, you can have ANOTHER baby!"

The mother passes out as the doctor pulls the dead baby out and tosses it's lifeless (and stem cellless?) little body through a basket-ball hoop and into a garbage bucket, shouting with glee, "Three points!"

Those evil abortionists! MIW is being quite righteous spreading this lie. Abortion is never mentioned as being part of God's plan.

Definition of stem cell research:= cytoblastphemy!

Strawman atheist or what?

2009-03-11T22:45:00.000-07:00

Brad says, " I believe he said one who (i) makes a truth claim about there being no consciousness after death, yet (ii) holds proof as the measure of truth and thus required in any truth claim, is acting hypocritical for making a truth claim that necessarily can't have any evidential basis in this world."

Well, that is your straw-man. Who, in their right mind would wiggle themselves into a situation where any claim they make is a particular 'truth claim' that REQUIRES proof in situations where proof is impossible?

cl might wiggle a 'theoretical' atheist that he is 'challenging' into such a situation though, right?"

The Challenge!

2009-03-09T22:23:00.000-07:00

Public Challenge To Atheists: Why Believe In What Can Only Prove False?

Every now and again I meditate on the fact that the atheist / naturalist / materialist position cannot be empirically vindicated. By atheist / naturalist / materialist position, I mean the Epicurean idea that death entails the complete and final cessation of consciousness - that after we die, there will be no more thought, no more experience, no more anything.One of the many disadvantages of this world view is that no other option can potentially befall it other than falsification.

That is to say, even if this position is correct, we can never prove it, for how could we ever be conscious of the cessation of consciousness to prove that such was indeed the case? You need consciousness to prove anything, and indeed, the atheist / naturalist / materialist position cannot be empirically vindicated. It can only prove false, because if even one iota of consciousness continues in any form after death, the idea is effectively bunk. And so the challenge is for any atheist, naturalist or materialist to satiate my curiosity by reasonably or at least politely answering the following questions: Why believe in an idea whose only possible empirical verification is disproof? What of the hypocrisy in committing yourself to a position that claims to rely on proof as the highest measure of truth when the position itself cannot possibly be proven?

http://thewarfareismental.typepad.com/There you go, 'cl' is challenging you to prove a negative, and he's calling you a hypocrite TO BOOT!

Sic' em!

Existence!

2009-03-07T19:39:00.000-08:00

Existence! What does it mean to you?

I always supposed that this was an easy one that we could all agree on. Turns out that there is a crucial difference between what we imagine is plainly obvious when we're talking about things such as tables and chairs, plants and animals, rocks and air and other 'stuff' that can be said to exist..

How about space though? And time?

Most folk will agree that existence is a state, as in the sixth definition of the word here:-

6. form: any form or quantifiable condition in which a physical substance can be, depending on its temperature and other circumstances.

Trust me the other definitions have to do with land boundaries and mental and physical messes.

But of course we'd be comparing things in a state of existence with things that used to exist which would make the existence of particular things a process, a process that ends.

And there's the other option of comparing things that exist to things that don't exist at all. Non-existent things still kind of exist as ideas, characters and objects in books and such.

That's where things take a sharp left into the Twilight Zone. That's where, if you are a Christian, you can go to a church meeting and swear that you saw Jesus, four hundred feet tall, standing in a field telling you that you must succeed in your effort to collect money for some project and the people listening to you HAVE TO believe you!(at least in their capacity as Christians they do.)

Common sense can fly right out the window at the drop of the proverbial hat. Their God exists through all time yet outside of all time, which is a special meaning of the word existence reserved for non-existent things.

Now, if you are a religious philosopher at heart you will no doubt have your special meaning of the word which CAN include the gods or the avatars ot 'the God' that you believe in. No doubt you'll be screaming 'red flag' and 'epistemological nightmare' and drivel like this even though you'd laugh with me at the idea of a four hundred foot Jesus!

Can we really know things? Can we be certain that we can't be certain of anything?

I think that we can be certain of quite a lot of things. Just right off the top of my head, I am certain that I am going to die, I will one day, in fact, cease to exist.

When I started following the arguments set out by Dinesh D'Souza's allies and other Christians using his blog for their own agenda I was sure that there were two words with two meanings. Existence, what we all know about things inside our Universe, and existance, everything including imaginary realms that we can never 'get to' at least while we're alive.

But no, it was just a misspelling, an alternate spelling.

What I believe.

2009-03-05T07:46:00.000-08:00

(This one's for oneblood, who has somehow managed to not notice me ranting about my beliefs before.)

I believe that I am a streaming consciousness. My streaming consciousness tells me that I am a human being. I believe that my streaming consciousness is connected to my body via my nervous system and my conciousness of my body and it's surroundings is created by my nervous system as multiple feedback loops from my extremities and my senses.

I believe that if there were no consciousness in the universe it would keep doing what it is doing and that processes in the universe were responsible for all life including mine.

Space, time or space-time, matter and energy or matter-energy are what we call existence(in general) and any space and/or matter exists in this existence, space, time and energy ALWAYS being present whether there is matter filling a particular space at a particular time or not.

I believe that there is no space with exactly no time passing and with exactly no energy passing through it.

I believe that the universe is OBJECTIVE REALITY, no being is 'thinking' this universe 'subjectively' into being or ever 'thought' this universe into existence.

I believe that I exist as part of this REALITY and I will continue to exist as a body until it decays, is eaten or is burned.

I believe that my streaming consciousness will continue to exist until it dies.

I believe that my brain is equipped to operate feedback loops, memorize and recall them and build a conscious identity, me, which includes all my internal feedback loops and all incoming senses, in the sense that I KNOW that I am hearing something, or seeing something etc.

This includes knowing when my nerves are misfiring in my ears(high pitched note) not from an external source, or when my feedback loop to my eyes is projecting a 'random' image on the back of my eyelids.

I believe that I learned to interact with my guardians and siblings experimenting with language etc. in several stages called 'growing up'.(write that down).

I believe that when we are very young we learn that we have some trivial choices.

I believe that we learn from our environment (parents etc.) that other people are devious and that we are easily tricked, if only by learning humor and how we can be surprised by 'disappearing' objects, words not meaning what we expect them to mean, being talked down to, being fooled in general, being misled and outright lied to.

We are given clues to be shy about the mysterious 'adult only' things like sex, drinking, drugs and taught to be disgusted by bodily functions and local taboos.

It is in this environment of mysterious taboos, mysterious purposes and mysterious meanings that we learn about the ideas of spirituality and religion.

.

The Ungodly Evil Temple of Evil

2009-03-02T14:36:00.000-08:00

All liberals, socialists, atheists, agnostics ought to join a Temple of Evil!

There are no gods to worship!

We could pretend to drink Unholy blood!(actually it would be wine!

We could pretend to eat Unholy flesh!(pizza!)

Drink Unholy PEE!(beer)

Sing favorite Unhymns by classic rock bands.

Sacred Unholy smoke! (Don't tell me you don't know what I'm getting at!)

We would proselytize small business, encouraging them to hire temple members and trade each other's services!

We would make it a POINT that Godly people can just FUCK OFF!

In fact our motto would BE, 'FUCK OFF, Godly people!

We'd need to convince the Godly that they're not welcom by giving ourselves Ungodly names, like Brother Baal, Sister Morlech and suggesting that a right of passage into the temple was to eat an unborn(a raw egg!)

Who is there to tell us that we do not have epistemic warrant?

PLUS, atheists always seem to have the 'herding cats' problem!

Well, no more! Create an Ungodly Evil Temple of Evil and PARTY ON! (tax free)

Apologizing for(or with) science, now?

2009-02-27T13:56:00.000-08:00

This:-

"Point is, there's always been far more to reality than we imagine. Instead of producing insurmountable discontinuities, the horizons of human knowledge and objective reality tend to expand astronomically. We used to think this world was all there was. We were wrong. We used to think this solar system was all there was. We were wrong. Some of us think that this universe and this existence are all there is. Especially in light of emerging evidence combined with past tradition, isn't there a reasonable chance that they, too, are wrong?
Of course the following is not infinitely extensible, but the truth is, often when we try to set a limit on what Nature can do or has done, it is us who ends up looking the fools."

Okay, baby steps now.

"Point is, there's always been far more to reality than we imagine."

I guess we are talking 'reality' that DOESN'T include all the gods that even you or I can think of that used to explain 'reality' to so many people throughout time. Traditionally, all we HAD was our vivid imaginations.

" Instead of producing insurmountable discontinuities, the horizons of human knowledge and objective reality tend to expand astronomically."

I suppose we are being constrained to imagine the exponentially larger our universe seems to be 'getting' the more we look out at it? And here I was thinking that the TRADITIONAL explanations were at least part of the problem. (consider 'Intelligent Design' in the 21st. Century.)

" We used to think this world was all there was. We were wrong."

So all traditional astrologies and what-not including Stonehenge, the pyramids, Sun-worship etc. can be dismissed from this discourse due to their dismissal BY modern science then?

Fact is that we NEVER thought that the world was all there was, but we were totally wrong about the conclusions that we came to.

" We used to think this solar system was all there was. We were wrong."

Really? We didn't notice all them little lights that we call stars now?

" Some of us think that this universe and this existence are all there is."

Here's a giant leap. He seems to be implying that since science has brought us out of our traditional godly explanations of the heavens, that doesn't give us license to dismiss ALL traditional godly explanations.

" Especially in light of emerging evidence combined with past tradition, isn't there a reasonable chance that they, too, are wrong? "

BOOM! Having completely demolished our new GOD 'Science', showing us how 'HE' changes through time, we can now 'reasonably' still use science and combine THAT with Jesus rising from the dead to save our souls, to form our reasonable religious worldview!

- from here:-http://www.thewarfareismental.info/the_warfare_is_mental/2009/02/why-arent-less-science-students-atheist.html

Imaginary imagination.

2009-02-25T11:03:00.000-08:00

Is God real or imaginary?

If I imagine God with my eyes closed tight shut and I 'see' him in my 'mind's eye' is He then 'real' to me?

Can we say that the image that I have in my mind is real? Surely if we CAN say that then we can say, that for us who are imagining God right now, he is real.

But what if I'm just imagining imagining God? This is like the turtles that hold up the world now. "It's turtles all the way down!"

But religion is constantly asking us to imagine a Hell-hole of a World without God. Is the imaginary Hell-hole of a World then real?

Imagine a USA that is NOT a Christian Nation? Imagine a USA without morals and values?

But Christians would dismiss the notion of imagining the people sharing the world and imagining there's no Heaven out of hand.

"It's ridiculous to imagine all the people sharing the world because someone would cheat!"(They know for sure that THEY(or at least some of them) would!)

Imagine living a Christ-like life, giving away all your possessions, relying on the Godly nature of people to support you? Imagine that it IS easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into Heaven.

What's the point of being rich? What's the plan? Is the 'rich man' imagining that 'he' is going to debate God at Heaven's Gate and claim that he did'nt imagine himself as 'rich per se' or that he ought to be 'allowed in' because he DID imagine living a Christ-like life and it was a REAL mental image?

Stacy points out that I 'sound' like I'm stoned or something. That's fair enough.

But, I put it to you, that you HAVE to imagine ME imagining something, because there's just no way around that.

EEG's can tell us that the person being tested is imagining SOMETHING! But exactly what a person IS imagining can only be left to your imagination.

Much older universe?

2009-02-19T12:30:00.000-08:00

If you squint at the Sun on a bright day you'll be seeing the light and feeling the warmth of it from eight minutes ago.

Since the apparent movement of the Sun is actually the movement of the World turning we can point at the Sun. If the Sun was moving around the World then we'd be pointing at the place that the Sun WAS eight minutes ago.

Okay, how can we know how far more distant stars and even galaxies are? For the closest ones we can use parallax.

If we take a picture of part of the night sky in June and map that on to a picture of that same part of the sky in December, very close stars will seem to move compared to distant stars.

It's like if your nose was our Sun, the Jnne picture was your left eye, the December picture was your right eye. If you hold up your finger to represent a close star and 'wink' back and forth, your finger seems to move relative to objects on the wall.

Astronomers can calculate how near close stars are by knowing the distance between the summer and winter pictures and how far the close star seems to shift compared to far background stars.

But the point I'm trying to make is that, just like the light from the Sun is eight minutes old when we see it, the light from a close star is a few years old when we see THAT!

If we're talking about the closest star, we're talking FOUR YEARS ago. We can't say that Alpha Centauri is four light-years away, we can only say that Alpha Centauri WAS four light-years away, four years ago!

So here's where I start scratching my head. If astronomers are acurately telling us that the light that comes from the farthest galaxies is about 13 billion years old then THAT doesn't tell us where they ARE NOW, it tells us where they were THEN!

I think that speeding galaxies might have 'moved' a bit in 13 billion years, don't you?

The Tangled Web we Weave.

2009-02-17T11:01:00.000-08:00

Seems to me that theists are the one's with a story. Of course it's stories within stories but the point is that it is their story and the onus is on them to back it up.

Their main tactic is to simply repeat portions of the story which seem to fit the situation. For example, talking to atheists, there is a very short story dismissing them entirely with the, fool, who says, in his heart that there is no God.

I think that if we were talking about any other piece of literature, we'd all recognise that as a slogan. Actually I think that most people still do recognise it for what it is, but of course 'Bible-studiers' won't talk about what a great slogan that is, no, they are simply enlightening us as to the obvious 'truth' of the Scripture.(and 'happily' calling anyone who disagrees with it and them 'fools' in the process.)

Unhappily, if a person doesn't believe that the Bible is a special book with supernatural truths, he or she is unlikely to be impressed with this slogan and can see it is obviously just tit for tat, you call me a fool for being a magical thinker and I'll quote my magical book telling you that YOU are the fool! Ha!

Of course if you do 'study the Scriptures' you'll notice that it is chock full of characters having Godly experiences. I think that sooner or later you will have to come to the conclusion that it is drivel OR start wondering when YOU get to have some personal Godly experiences of your own.(not to mention seeking out Godly experiences of everyone else.)

The efficacy of prayer, the spiritual contact between a person and his/her God, is neatly circumvented by the idea that God has the option of fulfilling your wish, dismissing your wish or postponing(indefinitely) your wish.

In other words, if you believe that God is 'there', then he must answer prayers but(sadly) the answer comes in the form of a fulfilled wish, a 'hit' or an unfulfilled wish which is either an out and out miss(Grandma died) or perhaps not yet a hit(Grandma isn't getting better 'yet').

Pointing out that the efficacy of prayer would be the same no matter which God one prays to, or if prayer is directed at an inanimate object like an empty jam jar, is insulting.

Did you get that? The plain truth, the plain facts of the matter are an INSULT! Of course other Gods reference was insulting enough but the 'jam jar' thing was total sarcasm, insulting, demeaning and an attack on their spiritual/supernatural beliefs.

God is no better at answering prayers than an empty jam jar. The truth of this is lost in, and denied with, a hurricane of affront and loathing.

Seems to me that if an appeal to God is deemed necessary then 'things turning out alright' is deemed 'personal experience proof positive' that prayer IS effective. But the opposite isn't true. If things don't 'turn out alright' then God is forgiven. Did you get THAT one? God gets forgiven for not using his awesome powers to 'make things alright'!

The reality of God(in believers' minds) only depends on HIM occasionally 'making things alright' and the non-reality of God is exposed by 'things turning out alright' for people of differing faiths AND for non-believers too!

This obvious fact is COMPLETELY and WILLFULLY ignored by all true believers.

Morals.

2009-02-16T09:04:00.000-08:00

I think that morals, scandal and hypocrisy go together like bacon, lettuce and tomato.

Watching a show late last night/early this morning I couldn't help but notice the constant commercial interruption for 'Girls gone wild!' videos and 'Extenze' ad nauseum.

What's the connection here? Are there horny old toads who can't get it up by watching eighteen year old chickies showing their boobies? Are they thinking, "If only I bought some pills to give be that big boner, I could beat the meat while watching that video of girls who are way too young for me, but I can DREAM, can't I??"

But I DO remember when I used to hang out at the bar, sitting with this seventy year old dude, "Gus", and his one purpose in life was to screw the youngest crack-whore that he could lay his grubby mitts on. I thought that he was disgusting and yet fascinating. I'd bike over to his house occasionally, for exercise and to shoot the shit with him and his wife and a couple of times he practically accused me of ratting on him about the sex thing to his wife "June".

It seemed to me that June was really lonely, sitting in her kitchen playing solitaire, day in and day out, while Gus was hitting the bar, day in and day out, doing his 'thing'.

It never occurred to me to rat him out to June, she seemed happy enough with the situation. Gus used to hire a couple of bar-bums that I knew to house-paint etc. for him, sometimes for beer, and hunting them down or helping them do 'a job' was Gus's excuse for being 'out' a lot.

Eventually things went 'south' and Gus was busted for drinking and driving then June sold their houses out from under him and SHE 'went south' too! I'm not sure if it was co-incidence or not but at about that time, those two bar-bums turned into crack-heads and one of them was found dead in his house. This happened to be the house where Gus took crack-whores to too. Now that I think of it, Gus used to take crack-whores to the other guy's apartment too.

The whole thing was very sordid and they kept that part of their lives separate from me but it kind of leaked out, as these things usually do, over a couple of draft and an 'amazing tale' here and there.

The strangest thing, to me, was that everyone seemed to have a similar story as to how 'into it' they were. I'm sure that, when they were talking to me, they imagined that they had the wool pulled right over my eyes but it might be that they had the wool pulled over their OWN eyes. Each person talking to me, whether bragging or complaining, wasn't 'like THEM'! They knew all the stories and were happy to relate them to me with the 'caveat', "... but I'm not like them, I'm not the scum of the Earth!"

I remember being told by this German guy that it was like I was from another planet and I took that to mean that he supposed I didn't know what was going on around me. This from a guy who couldn't get through the day without smoking pot like Cheech and Chong.

I guess to them it DID seem like I was from another planet because I wasn't 'into' the pot or the crack or the crack-whores, "What the fuck was I doing there?"

The point that I think I'm making is that we're all hypocrites, we're all deceitful little animals scurrying in circles, deceiving ourselves that 'we're not as bad as 'them'', we're not as bad as those 'hardcore' self-deceiving hypocrites, rats etc. who are 'in the know' precisely because 'we are'.

If you're an exception, you're not to be trusted, you're 'bucking' the societal mores, you're the immoral one.

More, please!

2009-02-10T11:25:00.000-08:00

What does life 'want'?

If the smallest, most insignificant life forms could be said to 'want' anything, they'd want more. More of whatever feeds them to make more of themselves.

Birds want it, bees want it, even educated fleas want it, MORE!

Let's call this a basic axiom. Any life form wants more of/for itself.

But, what do you do if you are thinking beings and you have enough safety, enough food and your population is expanding with no limiting factor in sight?

Well, you still want more, right?

Perhaps you want life itself to be more. Perhaps you want more for yourself. More money, more power, more followers, more certainty more meaning, more of something, anything!

I read up on the effects of the naturally occurring drug DMT(apparently 'gives' you your dreams). If taken in sufficient dose for 'recreation' one is 'propelled' into a 'spiritual realm' where there are beings who replicate 'crazily'(?), and they tell you to do what they do! Apparently it is a very profound experience and the 'message' is that, in short, we want more!

I think that this yearning for more can be seen in every addiction from food to booze to cigarettes to sex, from coffee to cocaine to heroin, from television to video games to business to politics and religion.

'Fluence

2009-02-05T11:47:00.000-08:00

I want you to try a couple of exercises to determine who you are. Write down your most precious positions that you take on subjects that are important to you.

Now, ask yourself why you take that position. When you realize that you 'take a stand' on a subject, it is because someone influenced you to take that POV, try to ask THEM why they feel that way.

oneblood says, "I kind of treated the will to choose like it was a lark, a given, natural, like there was no system in place to maintain the pre-existing construct."

I think that most people treat the 'will to choose' exactly like that, something that is just 'there' and not part of their training, the sum of all the influences of their upbringing.

I think that this is odd if you have ever dealt with children because as a guardian you automatically try to steer the young ones away from bad influences, and there ARE bad influences, it must be admitted.

I don't think that there are trivial choices inasmuchas one has to choose based on experience. What I mean is that you have to recognise that a choice IS trivial THEN go ahead and pick 'the one on the right' or whatever.

I think that this 'choosing', which we feel is automatic, is ripe for manipulation by influencers.

e.g. I'm trying to influence you right now! You have 'on the fly' choices to make. Your mind is busy 'doing what it does'.

Your mind is doing what it does based on your experiences, your influences right up to this moment, but it is evolving. I'm not saying that you are necessarilly progressing in any way, perhaps you are just a tiny bit surer of what you have always thought.

" Long-term memories, .. are maintained by...stable and permanent changes in neural connections widely spread throughout the brain.

These memories are generally about what someone said or wrote, how they said it or wrote it and how we felt about it at the time.

Come on, 'fess up to yourself here! When you were a kid, who were the important influences in your life? Did they bribe you to agree with them or did they cow you into 'going along' with them? Probably a mixture, right? Did they sandbag you, promising things that they had no intention of delivering? Did they gaslight you, persuading you that their POV had to be the only sane one, otherwise the world, your world would become a madhouse!(They would MAKE your world a madhouse, punishing you for not knowing things that you have no experience of, for example, or playing drill sergeant, "Everything you do and say is wrong!(until you can automatically repeat my POV, then you're cool!)

Child abuse or discipline. It's an invisible line, isn't it.

Point is, when do we get handed this miraculous 'free-will'? When can we say, "Well, I certainly believe that of my own free choice!"?

Extraordinary indeed!

2009-01-28T13:41:00.000-08:00

Here, from "Deacon Duncan's blog!" , Duncan demolishes a commenter, Jayman's two cents worth that is trying to refute the claim that 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', giving alleged miracles 'carte blanche'.

Jayman claims that 48% of the population of the United States are positive that they have witnessed a miracle.

Jayman says, "If you were to try and explain many of the miracles you would offer extraordinary explanations as well."

I think that this is brilliant. Here Jayman turns-tables, or, attempts to hoist atheists by their own petard!
I love that stupid saying!
I always picture a crazy man running with an unreliable bomb.

It's 'funny' that Tony warned everyone about just such a confusion between meanings of the word extraordinary!

It certainly WOULD be extraordinary if you COULD explain all the 'wannabe' miracles to everyone's satisfaction, in the process advancing science and medicine immeasurably!

Alas!(hehe)Jayman knows he has hundreds of millions of Catholics who are guaranteed to be dissatisfied with anything less than a miracle!

No matter how convincing your explanations are, they will simply refuse to be convinced, making your task impossible.

If you managed to convince the public that 99% of their supposed miracles were natural events, they'd change tack and pronounce you evil for stealing their thunder, for being a successful adversary, for being SATAN.

e.g. The Resurrection.

Explanations.
1)Jesus wasn't quite dead.
2)Jesus' identical twin subbed for him.
3)After his death, Jesus 'appeared' a la if-there-are-two-among-you-gathered-in-my-name' and/or as he appeared to Paul.

(This was originally meant as a comment on Deacon Duncan's(I get mixed up and call him Duncan Deacon(LOL))blogpost but I don't want to be accused of stealing his thunder, PLUS, Duncan 'tch-tched' me and Gear Hed Ed, or at least Ed, for being snarky to Jayman.)

Theists imagine..

2009-01-27T10:28:00.000-08:00

..... that there are preprogrammed answers in their books.
Hence the standard replies. Ask any question and the answer is, "The Bible says..", or "The Scriptures say..."

I'm not sure why this would be any kind of adequate answer to an atheist query.

I don't think that they see the question in that light, theism versus atheism, and they just want to fend off every expression of 'fading' to 'differing' to 'non' to 'anti' belief in their solution to the mystery of life and the universe.

Quote from Bible.org. "The Bible is, through and through, a historical revelation. It is the account of God’s activity in history."

"Through and through"? Whoever wrote this is sincerely deluded and is prescribing the notion that science is without merit, any merit at all.

Of course there's nothing stopping them from softening their position and 'allowing' actual pre-history to have happened, 'allowing' evolution to have happened and allowing the possiblity of 'The Big Bang' to have happened.

I just think that it's being very dishonest to imagine both 'what really happened' and 'what the Bible says happened' as being equally valid!

Conversely, I think that they are being very dishonest imagining that both what really happened(Biblically) and what 'science' says happened can possibly have 'equal' truth.

The booklets were written long before science could refute the literal, Biblical 'truth' and it's a matter of historical fact that theists DID try to hide the facts from the public.

I'm sure that the public, such as it was hundreds of years ago, what with the state of 'education', wouldn't have been able to handle the truth anyways, but we still get the 'intellectual argument' that it was known since before Jesus that the World was a sphere.

Judging by the state of education today versus what the average person believes, it doesn't take a vivid imagination to guess that the priests and pastors of yore were filling their locals' heads with FEAR to keep them in line.

Likely, since the priests and pastors of the time were a source of news back then, it would have been the equivalent to Fox News today.

"We need the king to protect us from rogue armies, he is appointed by God.", and such.

I'm kind of leery about having GOD appoint people to look after me, and I'll continue to be leery of this idea until God or Jesus or Allah or some 'magical' Mullah, whatever, let's call 'him' Maitreya, shows up on the Larry King Live show and starts performing miracles.

Even then, I'll 'grant' miracles, but I'll still be a little leery of whether 'goodness' is involved, never mind Godliness or Evil.

You better believe it!

2009-01-14T12:00:00.000-08:00

Here is some 'wisdom' from an article by Jason Lovelace called, "How to Properly Read the Bible."

" How,.. can someone read the Bible and understand?

"We Must Understand What the Bible Is."

"First and foremost, the Bible is a love letter. "

"..the Bible is food for the spirit, and it is living water for the soul. The Bible is living! It is alive!"

"The Bible is definitely a tool, and a useful one."

"We need to remember that the Bible is a weapon, and we must use it carefully."

"Ask God to help you understand the Bible, and he will help you."

"People make the Bible difficult when they try without help. If we will take our time, ask God to help us understand, and get to know God through the Gospels, we can understand the Bible the way God wants us to. Let us pray."

I will NEVER understand how someone is supposed to believe the entire Bible before having 'cracked' the Bible.

Whether you are going to believe it or not is not even considered in Mr. Lovelace's little essay here. Believing that there is a God is taken for granted. Believing that there is a Holy Ghost is taken for granted and, if you read the essay from the beginning there are four or five quotes FROM the Bible giving us hints on how to read it.

I get the feeling that if I sincerely asked how, as an atheist, I could try to understand the Bible(and perhaps come to believe it's 'truths'), Mr. Lovelace would have to tell me that I ought to stop being an atheist first.

This is confusing. I cannot imagine getting any kind of coherent reply from a Creationist if I invited them to read, "Origin of species.", by first believing that Darwin's conclusions were correct!

The Creationist would think me insane!

This is why I think that the entire system of 'learning the Bible' sets out as confusion technique. To be a 'decent' client for Mr. Lovelace's 'how to' technique, one would either have to have taken the notion of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit as a 'given' from as far back as you could remember OR be vulnerable and/or searching for 'the TRUTH' to escape a drug/alcohol/food addiction to be able to read and understand the Bible from the point of view that you already believe it.

I CAN empathize with those who rebelled against mom, dad and the kind pastor's "hokey" beliefs only to hit a void in their life and come back 'home' and declare that their 'atheism' was a DAMNED LIE.

Such a person might go further and declare that they tried to believe in evolution but he/she was busy drinking and cavorting to pay much attention and declare THAT just another belief system, one which, since he/she has 'seen the LIGHT' was just 'wrong thinking'.

It is easy to see how mom, dad, the pastor and even the prodigal child would be ever so pleased with themselves and all that college money wasted would be forgotten, forgiven, or at least considered a pay-backable loan while the prodigal child returned to the fold of his father's business or a simpler life of 'toiling the soil'(or any equivalent) sure in the knowledge that that higher learning stuff was the Devil's work and those colleges and universities(at least the non-theological ones) were the Devil's playgrounds.

"The Prodigal Son" is even a template for this very act of homecoming by the kid who thought that he/she was smarter than shit.

Failure is seen as a learning process here. Failure is, in fact, SUCCESS!
Ignorance is bliss!
The outside world is cruel, inasmuchas they expect you to LEARN difficult concepts and police yourself of the tendency to procrastinate, chase the girls/boys, party hearty etc. etc.

I CAN empathize with intelligent kids who got sidetracked and had to go home to mommy and daddy with their tails between their legs blaming everyone and everything BUT themselves for their failure.

FREE WILL! (plus $7.99 S/H)

2009-01-07T12:44:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a bit about free will lately. I've been on the 'thumbs down' side of that for a while now.

Maybe because, like Socrates imagined, the smarter you think you are, the not-so-smart you might actually be, then 'maybe' the 'not so free' you imagine your 'will' is, the closer to free your will actually is.

Have you tried to imagine how you might be if you grew up in a very religious home, Mom and Dad making references to the Bible, just EVERY SINGLE CHANCE THEY GET!?

Do they really have free will, or are they just feeding off each other, feeding off the pastor's words, feeding off their Scriptual studies? I can see how it would be ridiculous for them to even IMAGINE that there might not be GOD, or Jesus, and to disrespect the Scriptures by saying that there is plenty of evidence that God DIDN'T do EXACTLY what the Bible SAYS HE did, would be insanity.

If the Bible says God did something or said something, it MUST be true because the Bible is inspired BY GOD!

How free are you(as said Christian) to even imagine any different?

Let's assume that we all agree that one is not at all free to consider that the Bible is not TRUTH. But you are free to worship God and Jesus and study the Scriptures or to HATE God, backslide, succumb to your animal lust, avarice, gluttony, pride, sloth, envy and of course ANGER! You're angry at God, angry at yourself, angry at everone including believers, who will ascend to Heaven leaving you to suffer in Hell for Eternity. (tsk, tsk!)

Evolution says nothing about the existence of spiritual, supernatural realms and beings, but it DOES tend to try to make you admit that God didn't ACTUALLY make the World and all the living things in it, in seven days.

Of course, I don't know anyone like this.

Let's imagine a gay guy. He looks at an attractive woman and thinks, "Gee, I wish that I were THAT attractive to the boys! Hey, if the boys that I'm trying to attract like OTHER boys!? HUH?! Think about THAT!"

Of course, I don't know two, or three people like this. Well, not three. Not that I can think of.

What I'm saying is that I don't think that the Crazy Christian that I described or the crazy gay guy that I described have any real choice here.

Sure the Christian might be convinced by an atheist that the notion of GOD is ridiculous and the gay guy might be convinced by a (let's say) Christian that he is doing wrong but they, neither one was CHOOSING his/her original position.

I think that it's very simple. You(and me), from birth, make a model of reality in our minds. Each person has a different and unique model created by outside influences(everybody else) and we use THAT model to consider any new information(also created by someone else) to guide us in decision making.

If you are a guy, you use THAT model, unless you don't think of yourself AS a guy per se.

Ying/Yang, male/female, up, down, in, out, well shit, ANY opposites that you can imagine DON'T COUNT!

As sure as you KNOW that God made the Universe in six days AND/OR as sure as you are that you think the 'boys' are sexually attractive(or both/neither even, though I don't know why you would), I just don't see any 'choice' involved there at all.

Meta-conscious- much?

2009-01-04T11:21:00.000-08:00

"Metarealism is synonymous to metaconscience, which means beyond psychological consciousness, beyond a subjective psychological polarized view of reality. Metarealism seeks to depict the reality which exist beyond that psychological subjective perspective. Metarealism proposes not only to communicate further than the pictorial aspect of the perception of other dimension of reality, but also the essence of those dimensions and their relation to us as human beings. Metarealism then becomes a tool for the evolution of consciousness; just like in the old days artists painted sacred art to depict their vision of the reality they perceived, through their spiritual interpretation of other dimensions."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metarealism

I think that saying 'metarealism seeks to depict the reality.." would certainly catch the interest of those people who are 'into' that 'higher plane', or 'higher consciousness' or even the BB Theory, that sort of thing.

But a slightly different notion, just dumping the 'meta' this or that and imagining how it DID in fact work through the ages is just as interesting.

I cannot imagine what would have happened if Mozart was born in the days of drums and flutes or Einstein was born into a world with no concept of zero.

I can see how it all 'has to fit', society with the right mixture of knowledge and freedom, universities communicating, working things out, solving problems and gaining insight to the previously unknown.

We CAN imagine an Einstein being born at the dawn of civilization and being brought before his king to perform wonders, predict wonderful things for that king etc.

Pure 'shite' we realize NOW, but 'hey' THAT was the 'meta-conscious' of the time, if you like.

We can see how the 'meta-conscious' holds us back today, government bureaucracy stubbornly sticking to some out-moded political agenda, yet that same 'meta-conscious' pushing forward.

Out of the ashes of the old comes the new and exciting, which works great for a while, then it too becomes old ashes.

In short, I don't think that we need 'meta-anything'. Reality is going great-guns without us imagining that we are somehow looking beyond it.

Just think, we pretty much have the crystal ball(okay, it's not ball shaped, it's TV shaped) and we have magic wands(clickers), we can fly, we can do wondrous things and, as it turns out we don't need to invoke spells or curry favour with 'meta-beings'.

Turns out that, after all the electrical engineering and manufacturing of components were done, all we needed were double A batteries and electric sockets.

The new atheism

2008-12-22T22:19:00.000-08:00

I think that the so-called 'new' atheism is simply a 'not believing that there are any gods'.

Christian philosophers can try to drag that into their 'arena' and 'hammer' it with the old, "How can we know anything?"

That's an uphill climb. If a person lives on this here ball of mud long enough to form an opinion about supernatural beings and that opinion is 'thumbs down' all the word-magic in the World is not going to change their minds.

Think about it. Anyone who is an atheist today has overcome all the church people who belong to all the churches on all the street corners. They've overcome all the teachers, perhaps their own parents and surely some of their sisters and/or brothers.

These people are determined. There is no way that you could be an atheist because daddy was. If you grew up in 'the West' you had to PERSONALLY overcome the notion that there is an all-powerful authority in the face of KNOWING that there IS authority (of course there is), in the face of the propaganda that Christianity IS freedom, in the face of all the propaganda that goodness is exactly the same thing as Godliness, in the face of their DEMAND for respect.

But they KNOW that to 'respect' their demands, is to be them. There is no escape. If you ridicule them, you are in league with Satan.

How do we few, as little as 10% continue on, challenging the D'Souza's of this World that we are not monstrous Stalins, Maos etc. ?

There's NO convincing them that if we're not with them we're not against them.

It is a stand-off.

We can only hope that since the internet is the ONLY means by which we can stand them off, the only means by which we spread our 'reason', that they will not find some way to cut off our solidarity(for want of a better word).

... and they say that we have no 'hope'. HAH!

I believe..

2008-12-19T23:05:00.000-08:00

I believe, in fact I KNOW that I am a streaming consciousness.

What is 'essentially' ME is NOT my body but the process of ME knowing that I am me.
I believe, and I'm SURE that the process of being me is an electro-magnetic process caused by my brain and extended nervous system which 'tells' me that I am an individual human being living in this world with other living human beings who have their OWN personal nervous systems, brains and streaming consciousnesses.
I believe that we can and have, through science, constructed an objective model of reality where individual objects, known as atoms, exist in three dimensions of space and 'through'(or over) time.

I believe that some of these individual objects have combined to form MASSIVE complex objects that we see around us. Anything with the element CARBON in it is called an organic compound because we KNOW that all life is based on CARBON compounds.(therefore, by definition, organic compounds)

This doesn't mean that anything with carbon in it is alive, it means that anything alive has carbon in it.

Speculating that there may be 'life' without CARBON in it, is IMAGINATION.

Does your notion of GOD include HIM being composed of CARBON compounds?

If, "NO!", then your GOD is NOT alive in reality, which is, by any scientific definition that is not speculation or imagination.

Sure, you can hark back to a time when science hadn't defined 'life' or appeal to philosophy(unempirical, untestable "knowledge"), but then you are avoiding the answer to the question, "What is life as we KNOW it?" and substituting an answer to, "What is life as we might imagine it to be?" Is THAT clear enough?

Sunday Sermon

2008-12-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

Sunday Sermon.

There is an awesome process going on here. It's cyclical nature seems to be hinted at in all.We thinking beings noticed this by the seasons, the tides, the phases of the moon, the repetitive nature of life itself.

But we came to be thinking beings by being social beings, and societies have leaders, societies have authority.For us, it is only natural to assume that the cyclical process of the universe is run by authority.

If some of us call the process GOD, it is natural for us to anthropomorphize that process and have that process be 'the decider' of our fate.

There is NO appeal to this ultimate authority, which is fate. At the same time there is Earthly authority, natural authority that we can see in leaders of packs, herds and flocks of animals and birds, which I'm sure is an extention of the authority of parents.

BUT with religion, there can be an appeal to an organized 'reflection' of spiritual authority. With religion we can connect parental authority to 'fate' through a hierarchy which becomes it's own purpose.

This is a double edged sword as authority not only grants favors, it demands compliance, submission.

The idea is that, ONLY with submission, can come favors BUT as with all authority comes corruption and the authority becomes self-serving, loses its original purpose of 'peace and love to all mankind' to 'bring us together' and replaces that with "you must obey".

What we 'are obeying' here is someone's interpretation of 'that, that is good' corrupted to be, 'that that is GODLY'. The only trouble with this is that the process, or fate or God, is NOT fair, it is not necessarilly good. Authority is not necessarilly just.

Can't you almost hear the theists whispering, "YES, but OUR religion is the best model, the least corrupt, join us, join us..."

"the hat's fault"

2008-12-07T14:44:00.000-08:00

Do you know how many sperms 'vie' for 'entrance' to life as a being-that-will-'sex'-another being?

Gotta be a couple-a-hundred to one!(at least) Right?

But we're assuming that the 'egg' is 'in the pipe five by five' here, what are the odds that MAMA would be 'in the mood' to spread her legs?

Are we talking 'mamas' like the women that "I" know here? Are we talking, "Miss Priss!" or "Mattress Mona!"(seriously, I KNOW HER), or what the fuck(pun LOL) are we talkin' here?

Ya KNOW, just 'cos you 'BITCHES' have 'outies' , don't mean that 'goddidit!', surely!

You DO realise that us organic life forms 'happen' to be here 'BECAUSE' we find humping 'intriguing'???(mesmerizing, sexy, 'better than chocolate' etc. etc.)

WTF is wrong with you 'god-did-it''s?

I'd be a 'happy camper' if you would simply live up to your OWN expectations!!!

Why is THAT so hard for you?

Example.. AAAAAAAAAA! AAAAAAAA! You live in the desert! THAT'S why no food will grow! Are you MENTAL!?

Everybody thinks different, Jackass!

2008-12-05T21:34:00.002-08:00

I am pissed off at people saying stupid things, such as, "How do atheists think?", "What do atheists believe?", etc.

What part of, "There are no gods, not even one!", synthesize into, "You guys are warring on Christmas!", or, "You guys are responsible for a million-plus abortions!", or , "Can't you see God everywhere you look, you must just HATE God, if you don't!", or, "You saw a killer-whale that you fell in love with at first sight, and YOU just want an excuse to hump that bitch, right?!"

Honestly, I don't want to 'make a woman out of' "Wilhemina", I don't 'bear ANY responsibility for ANY abortion EVER!, and, "NO!", of course I can't 'see' GOD everywhere, I can't 'see' GOD, ANYWHERE!

I just don't 'get it'.

I understand that your entire belief system is BUILT to keep you guys IN and bring more converts in too, and I realise that you MUST KNOW THIS!

So, if someone considers Pascal's Wager, considers the entire contents of THE BIBLE, considers the possibility of any kind of spirituality AT ALL, even SATANISM, or witchcraft, or wicca and comes to the conclusion that it is ENTIRELY BULLSHIT!, why must you take that up as some kind of challenge?

The facts are clear!

NO SPIRITUAL BULLSHIT.

Sure there are atheists who just don't believe in 'supreme beings', and ... I like 'em.

There are probably atheists who want to 'dominate', to 'control' you daffy ducks, and I HATE THEM!

There is a middle line, a fairness, a justice that is REAL and your GODLY MORALITY is just NOT IT!

Denying all gods then proceeding to imagine that then YOU ought to be 'in command' is NOT IT EITHER!

Show me your qualifications. OH, you don't believe in gods, you say.

Hmm.. well, neither does a ROCK or a worm or a dog.

But religion is NO SUBSTITUTE for 'REAL' KNOWLEDGE!

Yea, I know, you have knowledge of propaganda, rhetoric, persuasion, but that is DECEIT!

Don't believe me!

Your booklets tell you that 'they' saw the future!

WHAT. A .LOAD.OF.NONSENSE!

("'Tis the future you see!"- Yoda
(Luke asks him if it is real.
("Hard to see, the future is, always in motion!)

Hey, this is in a fictional story where they can lift objects WITH THEIR MINDS!

In the Beginning...(revisited?)

2008-12-02T10:30:00.000-08:00

"In the Beginning..", there was no beginning, unless God created time and forgot to mention it.
Life cannot come from nothing, excepting the eternal life of God, which renders the 'When did life begin?' answer moot.
God, as a spiritual being, needs no rest, has no 'feelings' and somehow 'lives' outside of time and space(nowhere, nowhen).

Yet, God created heirarchy (for a mysterious purpose.)

"A hierarchy is an arrangement of objects, people, elements, values, grades, orders, classes, etc., in a ranked or graduated series. The word derives from the Greek ἱεραρχία (hierarchia), from ἱεράρχης (hierarches), "president of sacred rites, high-priest" and that from ἱερός (hieros), "sacred" + ἄρχω (arkho), "to lead, to rule""

Whether God is real, in any sense, HE certainly created heirarchy.

Given HIS manifestation on this planet as religions, the first booklets are clear about who is in charge! God's priests are given authority over us.

The objective of every priesthood is to claim leadership of every hierarchy with a simple trick.

The idea is to convince any hierarchy that they are ultimately responsible to GOD(whether their GOD is real(living outside space and time) or actually DEFINED as a personification of ultimate leadership of all hierarchies. Since every hierarchy NEEDS GODLY advice and the priests are the GODLIEST then the hierarchy ought to take advice from the priests.

Simple. Straightforward. It works every time.
............................................................................................................................

The controlled.

The controlled are kept in line by means of propaganda which has a full range of complexity.

Brainwashing children to accept absurd stories. Bribing children into the scheme with candies, formal dinners etc. never ceasing to equate Godliness with goodness and God with Order.

Conversion of the weak, poor and elderly.

Simple propaganda for the less-than-faithful, "GOD means Good Orderly Direction!", "If there were no GOD, we'd have to invent HIM!"

Infiltration of secular institutions(hierarchies).

Sound-bites.

"Abortion is Murder!"
"Atheists HATE God!"
"This is a Christian Nation!"

Thought-bites.

"Goodness IS Godliness"
"Godliness IS Goodness"
"Atheism CAUSES totalitarianism"
"Atheism IS sociopathy"
.................................................................................................

Can we escape from the clutches of those who know that God is another word for power, that God is another word for money and that God is another word for control?

Perhaps when the controlled stop believing that Godliness is exactly equal to Goodness!

Example.

If I were a pastor of a small community church I'd dream of having a larger congregation, having more money, more power, more respect and more control of secular hierarchies.

Wouldn't you?

The thing that pisses me off about Christianity is their willful ignorance.
Let's say that 'all' is God. The Holy Spirit is life, intelligence, the power to have faith and such. Christ is the tradition, the traditional way to impart the 'power' of belief, the 'power' that you can have OVER those who believe. The 'thing' that we thinkers are, as an entirety.. GOD.

Talking to them is like talking to tricksters and buffoons who are trying their best to trick us non-believers into their buffoonery.
If we point out that there is NO archeological evidence for their most important stories they simply start dissembling.

There is no archeological evidence for the Exodus, NONE!

I can almost hear the faithful mentally adjusting, "But we have the tradition as truth, there IS a place called Egypt, the Sinai desert, Palestine etc. you dummy!
Someone will chime in about morality!
Someone will chime in about philosophy!
Someone will chime in that science is to be questioned!
If they believe that they are 'intellectual' they might try to 'hoist us by our own petard!', (ab)using science against us.(D'Souza anyone?)

There is no archeological evidence for a city or a town or even a village of Nazareth in that time period!
These two facts ought to demolish Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions RFN(right-fuckin'-now!).

But the power to control believers is more or less deliberately confused with some power of God(ALL, remember) to control nature, nations, the future, personal happiness, health etc.

It is this mumbo-jumbo, this praying, this open admission of submission to priests and those at the tops of hierarchies controlled by those 'in submission' that pisses me off!
To misquote the Mythbusters, they reject reality and substitute their own(doctrine, dogma)

Politics! Yech!

2008-11-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

Ooo, the socialists crow, we've defeated capitalism, the government can take care of everything NOW!

Communism(the USSR) collapses!!

Socialism takes a beating as the public loses confidence and votes for Conservative policy over most of the world.

Bitter 'belt-tightening' prevails for years as Conservative policies 'take-effect'. Not a problem for the rich though!

Conservative policies(total privatization) works for a spell but even as the last bitter pills of socialism are being spat from our mouths, THE FREE MARKET proves itself to be far from self-sustaining when it turns into a 'casino' and the public loses confidence.

And 'yea yea', if we were all 'free market' Conservatives and NOT SO GREEDY then it 'might work'.

What'll work? Oscillating back and forth between totally restrictive government (wage and price controls, deficit spending) and 'ridiculously free' government, total free market, letting the bullies grab everyone's toys.

Oooo.. do you see how absolutely wrong socialism is? The fixers will use the market as a club, showing it up!

O... do you see how absolutely wrong conservatism is? The fixers will use the market as a casino, crapping in their 'own' pool!

Communism tried to kill the fixers, but, much like the 'war on drugs' trying to jail all the dealers and users, the fixers are found to be us, albeit a 'bad side of us' that we don't want to admit to.

If you really want to be a really real fiscal Conservative, that'll be no 'war on drugs' please, let the free market decide!

But, I can almost here your thoughts 'screaming', Conservatism and religion go hand in hand, like, "It's all mine, stay away from my piece of the pie!", goes with, "Let's all share! Let's all be friends and love one another!"

It's like punitve justice goes with freedom!

Just 'not'. Right, just 'not'.

But the government can 'check' runaway free market greed by buying food corporations, fuel corporations etc. BEFORE they run themselves into the ground! Before we're all starving and walking and freezing! The government can create employment etc.

This is the exact opposite of Conservatism and ought not to be a smug 'rebuttal' of free market, because, in the end, public confidence will return and socialism will overdo it, holding back 'freedom' just as much as Conservatism does when THAT is hailed as the 'be all and end all'.

Unions having an iron grip on an industry is just as bad as Corporations having a totally free hand to employ wage-slaves.

The public are no better off with extreme socialism holding their 'feet in the fire'(as it were) than they(the public) are with extreme conservatism holding their 'heads in the fire'.

Seems to me that a dedicated zealot of either extreme would be just as happy switching allegience. The zealotry is 'the thing' for them.

And they have these 'hidden agendas', wilfully ignoring the public's "pain" as they yank us from extreme to extreme, each insisting that we'd ALL love to be living in their particular HELLISH vision of Utopia!

Where are all these economic egg-heads that graduate every single year from universities all over the world?

Can they not use spread sheets?

Reagan became president KNOWING that his policies would CAUSE hyper-inflation , fucking with the public's wealth, but he didn't TELL THAT to the voters!

Hmm, wonder why?

In God's Kingdom, CONFUSION reigns!

2008-11-19T00:27:00.000-08:00

"In essence, it is no more than a presentation of a whole series of individually differing, contradictory suggestions, apparently all at variance with each other, differently directed, and requiring a constant shift in orientation by the subject. "

"As the subject accommodates himself to the seeming confusion..., thereby unwittingly cooperating in a significant fashion..."

"As the subject tries, conditioned by his early cooperative response to the ..apparent misspeaking, to accommodate himself to the welter of confused, contradictory responses apparently sought, he finds himself at such a loss that he welcomes anv positive suggestion that will permit a retreat from so unsatisfying and confusing a situation. The rapidity, insistence, and confidence with which the suggestions are given serve to prevent the subject from making any effort to bring about a semblance of order. At best, he can only try to accommodate himself and, thus, yield to the over-all significance of the total series of suggestions. "

"These suggestions are also recognized as carrying a weight of acceptable meaningfulness, and every effort the subject makes to understand it leads to acceptance of them."

"These suggestions are given not in the form of commands or instructions but as thought-provoking comments, at first. Then, as the subject begins to respond, a slow, progressive shift is made to direct suggestions.. "

from here

Theists will poo-poo the notion that they are being hypnotized. I can't imagine why they would do that though, can you? Religious leaders would certainly be able to keep better control of their flocks if, when being sermonized to, the flock were in a suggestible state.

The Godly Hebrews, according to the Bible, did the Godly thing, slaughtering in the name of God, but of course this is childs-play to counter! God himself saw their incorrigible evil and commissioned the Hebrews in HIS NAME to wipe their presence from the land that HE gave the Hebrews!

Any Christian would be more than willing to accept an explanation like that if he/she believes that Godly is good.

This is obvious stuff, obvious confusion technique where the recorded atrocious acts of the Hebrews can't be put down to them 'not being truly Godly' as is done with modern day genocidal religious fanatics. In the Bible, God not only wanted them to commit atrocious acts, HE commanded them!

But I wanted to talk about a more subtle confusion technique that modern religious leaders perpetrate today.

The pro-life movement takes it's cue from religious leaders who presumably feel that they are supported by the Bible using this vague, all encompassing quote, "Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me."

But every Christian worthy of being called a Christian ought to know, and believe me that they DO KNOW, when it suits them, that the Gospels are backed up by the entire Old Testament, the truth of the Gospels falls if the truth of the Old Testament falls because then the prophecies prophesying the coming Jesus(as Christians would have it) would be meaningless.

I don't want to get into 'context wars' with Christians here, so I'll say that the context of the Old Testament PROVES the context of the New Testament to the Christians themselves.

Here's the crux of the confusion, if God related his LAWS to Moses, then left it to priests to pass that on, and to fathers to pass that on(which is kind of obvious, still happens today), THEN the father of a household is given complete authority over his children, to the point of stoning that child to DEATH for disobeying HIM, never mind GOD!

If a girl got pregnant out of wedlock then the father would have every religious right to have her stoned to DEATH! The notion that the fetus would die too doesn't even enter the equation.

The girl was a slut! The girl committed adultery! She disobeyed her fathers instructions to NOT do this.

Under GOD'S LAW, she ought to be condemned.

To stand at your altar and expound to your flock that they were 'funny old days' and we should pay that 'no never mind' is confusingly OPPOSITE to invoking the EXACT SAME GOD'S LAW trying to justify that fertilized human eggs are SACRED!

The whole notion that life is sacred and can be TERMINATED only for sacred reasons is just one example of priests/clergymen talking out of both sides of their mouths at the same time.

The idea that the Old Testament's context proves the New Testament's context yet they were silly old buggers in silly old times, and that GOD'S LAW is changed now, but is the SAME(when you feel like it) is OPPOSITE, which is confusion technique, pure and simple.

'Good' is Godly, because Godly is 'Good'?

2008-11-14T13:37:00.000-08:00

Here, Roger Mannrgmann at kc.rr.com quoted online book by Vincent Cheung entitled “Ultimate Questions”.

“Only the Christian conception of God, as revealed by God himself in Scripture, is consistent with a God that possesses all knowledge, and at the same time makes knowledge possible for man. In God dwells "all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3). Since God has all knowledge, he requires no one greater – there is no one greater – to justify his knowledge. His absolute sovereignty implies that he wills what he knows, that he knows what he wills, and that there can be no error in his knowledge. At the same time, "the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever" in the words of Scripture (Deuteronomy 29:29), and so we have knowledge as well. God has all knowledge – his knowledge consists of what he wills – and our knowledge consists of what he wills to reveal.”“On the other hand, since non-Christian religions and philosophies cannot produce an adequate and defensible – not to say infallible – epistemology, on the basis of non-Christian thought, there can be no knowledge at all. If non-Christian systems of thought cannot provide a foundation for knowledge – if they cannot know anything – then they cannot even begin or produce any content. If they cannot begin or have any content, then they can pose no challenge to Christianity. Without an adequate and defensible – and even infallible – epistemology, it remains that no intelligible proposition can be uttered on the basis of non-Christian worldviews, let alone objections against the Christian faith…”“However, since all non-Christian worldviews (including all non-Christian religions and philosophies) are without any ultimate justification, there is really nothing to prevent them from collapsing into total skepticism, but one cannot remain a skeptic because skepticism self-destructs – it is self-contradictory to affirm that we know that we cannot know. Only Christianity rescues the intellect from complete skepticism; therefore, rather than depending on a non-Christian foundation to construct a case for the biblicalworldview, the Christian adopts the revelational epistemology of biblical infallibility.”

As we can see, from this out-take, non-Christians, apparently, don't have 'a leg to stand on'.

"Right out of the gate" it is circular. Christian GOD because Christian concept of GOD therefore Christian GOD.

Certainly this is 'GOOD' from a Christian perspective and strangely ONLY from a Christian perspective.

Sermon from REALITY

2008-11-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

What was I going to say again...Oh, yea.

The entire Bible is set up as a 'confusion technique' document.

It evolves to a certain extent but like an old, worn audio disc playing through it's tune, the needle(or stylus) just naturally 'skips' back, hence Creationism, Intelligent Design, Pro-life and other wedge issues.

The wedge issues are an important part of religion as believers want to force their opinions on the less devout.

Believers are on a 'mission from God' to have everyone subject to GOD. This becomes obvious when reading the famous TEN COMMANDMENTS right 'out of the gate', we hear that GOD HAS SPOKEN and he's telling us that it is a CRIME to worship any other god but HIM.

What believers are telling us, is that the church(their religion) IS 'GOD' and that it must be obeyed. They will deny it, of course. They use 'confusion technique' on everyone, including themselves to aviod facing reality.

They believe that there was, in order of appearance, God, various other spirit beings, the universe and all non-spiritual beings and things, semi-spiritual beings which are human beings(or MANKIND as they like to put it), a general 'falling from grace', a very few ELECT(intrinsically GODLY men who recorded history and prophecies of the future) who were IN CONTACT with GOD!(hence their GODLINESS!)

They are confused between 'the good' and 'the Godly' and they want us all to be confused about that too.
Example:- At this point in time(in 'the west') we are clear that slavery is wrong, that subjegating a person is inherently 'bad'.
But the Bible is unclear about this. We hear, in the story of the Exodus that slavery IS bad(for the Hebrews) but later we hear that slavery is not necessarilly unGodly!

I liked this so much...edit 1

2008-11-07T12:08:00.000-08:00

... I read it over a few times and was amazed at my own brilliance!(LOL, that's not as difficult as you might imagine!)

I was thinking here, that you guys might give me some 'additions', some thoughts or pointers so that I might improve this into an open source multi-authored document putting into words the 'common sense' worldview opposing, not religion per se, but this disingenuous attempt at religification(and exposing it too).

Hey theists, throw in some of your mindless drivel if you think I can use that too!

I see possible 'expansion' points all over this! All the formatting disappeared into the 'spiritual realm'(DAMMMMYOUGOD!) so it is 'shit' to read right now, but I'm hoping that it will be an ongoing project.

The references to specific God's lawyers will be scrapped of course eventually.

"What God's lawyers don't want to see."

If life begins at conception, then the sperm wasn't alive.

If life begins at conception, then the ovum wasn't alive.

But "life doesn't come from non-life" is one of the cornerstones of God's lawyers, isn't it?
If we were all to be honest we'd admit that life is a continuum, an evolving continuum which has absolutely nothing to do with possible 'spiritual realms' or nonsensical beings that can be imagined 'living' in them.

We, each of us, individually, get to choose which points to amplify and which to decrease in our mind like a row of dials to magnify or diminish our worldview.Now historically a baby begins it's life at BIRTH.

We use this term for the beginning of actual things."The birth of a nation.", comes to mind, as opposed to 'the conception of a nation', where it might be an idea, a notion in people's minds.

Pregnancy is a 'chance' thing, everyone knows this. The woman will visit a doctor to improve her 'chances'.There is a good chance that a fertilized egg will just not 'stick' and the woman will never even know that "God gave her a child!", to put it in religious terms.

We need modern technology for a woman to know if she is pregnant before her body 'let's her know',(No doubt breaking a few would-be mothers hearts), it is an 'iffy' thing.

We, by convention, start counting a baby's life at their first breath. This has religious significance from when breath(which people didn't have a scientific understanding of) was considered 'spirit' AND the fact that some babies were 'born' DEAD.

I'll call this position 'the timeless common sense view'.

We can contrast this with the God's lawyer's recent(on generational timescales) view that for 'new' religious purposes we now ought to consider the beginning of a human life much earlier, as a wedge to force God's law into common law.

(Observant, Janesophie, I'm not being 'smug', I'm just RIGHT, and you are just WRONG!)

Most folk have enough common sense, even if it is just a feeling in their hearts, to know that the GOD'S lawyers are deviously trying to force a religious agenda on this Constitutionally secular society.

D'Souza practically admits that he thinks even Islam is better than secularism. Same as 'the Decider' was when he said that the Constitution was 'just a piece of paper'.

BAD Christians!

Deceitful Christians!

(Observant. You're really not very observant since you have read a lot of my comments and you imagine that you are 'rattling my cage' when it must be obvious that I LIKE nothing better than a good argument.It must be obvious that I have the patience of 'Job'(LOL) when it comes to 'rewording' my position to make clear to anyone who is willing to read EXACTLY how daft, cheaty, evil, dispicable, disingenuous etc. etc... xenophobic YOU GOD'S LAWYERS are.I know what you're thinking, Observant.I don't need to be psychic or Nostradamus-like.You're thinking, "But the Bible says(some drivel or other!)!"('cos you're ALWAYS thinking that, you simpleton!)

Fermat's "margin" PROOF!

2008-11-05T15:33:00.000-08:00

Fermat's theorem was supposedly cracked by an English mathematician a few years back using math SOOOO complicated that they couldn't begin to explain it on the NOVA show about it.

I spent quite a few 'odd hours' puzzling over why it would be 'SOOOO' complicated. I seemed to always get stuck when I would ask myself that one damning question, "Why does that solution mean that it only works for whole numbers? It never did!

My attempted solution was always along the lines of, if there is a whole number

Solution to x(cubed) + y(cubed) = z(cubed) all being whole numbers then there couldn't be a whole number solution to yx(squared) + y(cubed) = yz(squared), which there obviously IS!

Seriously now, there is no way in HELL that, if the second equation is 'true' that you could decrease the value of y to x and also increase the value of y to z!(THAT IS FERMAT'S PROOF that fits in the margin, that no-one til I, pboyfloyd figured it out!)

I think that there needs to be a visual aid in the real-life not complicated solution because of the difficulty defining a whole number.

Picture a room with a tile floor. The tiles are layed first one white one in the corner to represent the 1(square)(duh!).

Three black tiles(unit squares) 'surround' the white tile making a four tile square representing 2 squared(or 4).

Five white tiles are layed 'surrounding' the "2 squared" to represent "3 squared"

All this is a question of 'can you "see"?

The 'stumbling block' is ... do the sides need to follow the 'rules' for squares?

If you 'see' it, YES THEY DO!

Here's the proof!

Imagine that there IS a solution to x(cubed) +y(cubed) = z(cubed)

This equals x times x(squared) + y times y(squared) = z times z(squared)

But to rearrange this equation to a similar one which we KNOW is true :-

k times x(squared) + k times y(squared) = k times z(squared)

all we need to do is make k (any constant whole number) equal to x or y or z.

But if we do that then we see that we are ADDING to the left side of the equation and SUBTRACTING from the right side of the equation!

This happens no matter what 'power' above 2(above squaring).

How about the power of 2, does it work there?

3 + 4 = 7 (let k = 4)

k3 + k4 = k7

12 + 16 = 28

Subtract 3 from both sides...

9+16=25

This becomes essentially a 'trap' because we can see that if we multiply by k (again letting k be the same as 'y', that is 4 in this scenario, we get:-

k9 + k16 = k25 or..

36 + 64 = 100

forcing another solution of power 2!

Attempting to jam a solution for power 3 means subracting 9 to make the first term 3^3 from the left side of the equation but now we must ADD 25 to the right side of the equation.

Attempting solutions for powers higher still only results in EVEN MORE ludicrous disparity!

The visualization part comes in when looking at what 'happens' when the third dimension is added.

$$$
$$$
$$$
+

####
####
####
####

(# and $ Both being unit squares)

=

$$$$$
####$
####$
####$
####$
MUST follow this 'look' whether we are dealing with just the 'squares' or with ONE FACE of the cubes!

The 'tiles' earlier looked like this(BTW)

#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#
$$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#
###$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#
$$$$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#
#####$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#
$$$$$$#$#$#$#$#$#$#$#
#######$#$#$#$#$#$#$#
$$$$$$$$#$#$#$#$#$#$#
#########$#$#$#$#$#$#
$$$$$$$$$$#$#$#$#$#$#
###########$#$#$#$#$#
$$$$$$$$$$$$#$#$#$#$#
#############$#$#$#$#
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$#$#$#$#
###############$#$#$#
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$#$#$#
#################$#$#
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$#$#
###################$#
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$#
#####################
(and so on down as far as you need)

if any added layer is a complete square, if any 'L' (or backward L in this case) of black or white tiles) then x^2 +y^2 = z^2

There are also a huge amount of 'non-solutions'. i.e. 7^2 + 7 along + the corner 1 + 7 up whch is 8^2 but 15 is not itself a 'square'.(hey, almost tho!)

Then there is the 'double layer' solutions. 8^2 plus the 9th and the 10th layer = 10^2

AND the the ninth layer of tiles plus the tenth layer add to 36, a perfect square(6^2)!

So, the general expression of true(and the trivial non-) solutions are x^2 + n2x+n^2 = z^2!(where n is a whole number duh!)

Or, visually pick a square on the floor made up of black and white rows and colunms, add the next row/column or the next two rows/columns or the next 3 etc. etc.

Example x^11 + y^11 = z^11 cannot be 'reconciled' with the 'truth' of y*x^10 + y*y ^10 equaling y*z^10!

BobamafamafofamaOOObama!

2008-11-05T09:27:00.000-08:00

Looney-tunes Fundies are likely still letting the fact that Armageddon has been put on hold for another four years sink in!

Bet they are wishing they hadn't gotten that sub-prime loan NOW!

Still and all, the American people are a fickle bunch and one has to wonder if a lot of them didn't vote in Obama because they felt that he was the man to 'work wonders'!

Don't want to come off as a pendejo(wet prickly blanket, as is my understanding) here so, "WooHoo! Obama, Obama, Obama!, Obama RULES(in 100 days approx.)

Bush can't destroy the world in that time, can he? NAW, he must have seen what a dork he is/was in the movie 'W'.

On a completely different note, did anyone notice if Sarah Palin was allowed to say anything or is she supposed to lay low and keep 'mum' for the 2012(end of times) election?

Plan B(from outside of spacetime!)

2008-11-01T12:52:00.000-07:00

So, here you are after drinking the equivalent of an entire lake of booze and you never did find the answer at the bottom of that glass, did you?

Life has stopped being fun!

You are, as the AA slogan goes, "Sick and tired of being sick and tired!"

What to do, what to do?

Well, you do what everyone else does, you find yourself a 'higher power!'.

As you forgive yourself for being busted for impaired driving(again?), or beating the wife(again?), or waking up with a layer of shit between your bum and your underwear(again?) or any one(or combination of) of a myriad of sins, several things will start to penetrate that thick fog that you call your consciousness.

1) The 'higher power' is Jesus!
2)The unforgivable things you've done are called 'sins'.
3) The 'power' that Jesus has is the power to forgive you of your sins, which is the power to forgive yourself!
4)It's not easy to forgive yourself and the only way to make it permanent is to be BORN AGAIN!
5)Suddenly, you'll see the deceitful world for what it is. It was the deceitful world's fault that you did those unforgivable things, it was Satan's fault all along!
6)Now that you are BORN AGAIN, no matter how many lives you've screwed up with your drinking or drug addiction or whatever, it wasn't your fault at all!

How easy is it now to look down your humble nose at the 'world'? Well, how easy is it to fall off a log?

Is there more? Shit yea!

The Morality Argument

2008-10-28T12:26:00.000-07:00

How can there be 'good' if there is no GOD?

Well let's turn that around, dump it on it's head and paint it with a mixture of poo and urine!

Disgusting, isn't it?

Okay, now let's hose it off again so we can have a peek into the mind of a Creationist.

Ultimate question, where did we come from?

Answer:- GOD!

(see the first Book of the Sacred Holy Bible, conveniently named Genesis, which means 'Beginning'!)

How do I know that that is right? Well, it is simple, straightforward, to the point, and written in an unimpeachible, sacred, holy book! If your not going to 'go along' with this part you are definitely going to have a bit of a problem with the rest.

But what if you're not the gullible, childlike, uncritical simpleton that we LOVE to teach-hahahaha? (regular teaching can be complicated and might make you prone to thinking and that just leads to trouble, BUT "teach-hahahaha-ing", although it can be quite expensive too, does exactly the opposite!

What if you are not the kind of person that we can say to, "Look around you, do you not see God's handiwork?", and you unthinkingly say, "Sure!", well, that's not as bad as you might think that we think it is. We have, of course, what we laughingly call "Plan B".(I know, that's not very creative, but we already have a Creator and we'd like you to suck that 'fact' up, keep it in mind as it were. If you can do that you are already unwittingly 'ours', "Bwahahah!, ahem, I mean, 'Praise the Lord!'")

If you're not the kind of person to say, "Sure!" to the premise that everything is God's handiwork, then, although we have 'Plan B'(see above parenthetical introduction of "the Creator"), we CAN be very disappointed that we know that you are not the kind of person who would automatically answer, "Yes, yes!"(while skipping in circles) to the question, "Do you love your mommy and daddy with all your heart and know that they are the very bestest mommy and daddy that a little girl could ever, every-dever have?????!

This one giant, 'Holy jumping Jesus!' black mark on you already! Just letting you know 'buster', we'll be keeping a close watch on you, don't you think that we won't!

Sadly it's time for me to go and 'get a life' just now. Hey, what do you think that my armpits clean themselves?

You can rest assured that I will be back to explain 'Plan B' and, subsequently the Morality Argument and why it is important for you to look around you and see God everywhere!

(ending music) chic-a-bau-chic-a=bau-chic-a-bau... "Peace-out!"
(I'm trying to be 'hep' here, you ungrateful Philistines!)

2008-10-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

I was really hoping for some comments defending either the idea that life was good(in any sense) or that life was good(in the sense that it is holy.)

I think that it is safe to say that, in general, people will cling to life. Even more generally, it is probably safe to say that all life clings to life.

But is that because there is a basic 'goodness' to life?

Now, I believe that religious people will, without even thinking about it, without thinking that they even need to think about it, would say that life is 'good' at least in the sense of being 'holy' or sacred.

I was hoping for some 'action' from eric or Botts, something that we could get some 'traction' on to at least get past the 'beginning', the Genesis, in the sense that there is some kind of definite 'goodness' to life and/or in the sense that 'God saw that it was good!'.

I was hoping to create some kind of beginning point that we might agree on, or even not agree on without going full tilt into a religious or anti-religious rant!

2008-10-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

Who can say, in all seriousness that they know good from bad?
Is it 'good' to be alive?

What absolute drivel runs through our minds on a day to day basis...

Geez, am I trying 'my best' to sound like Kevin Spacey's character in the movie 'Seven' or what?

The question is, "Is it good to be alive?"

Good Friday
c.1290, from good in sense of "holy" (e.g. the good book "the Bible," 1896), also, esp. of holy days or seasons observed by the church (c.1420); it was also applied to Christmas and Shrove Tuesday.

There's a twist on the question. Is it 'holy' to be alive?