Hey OBAMA, put your chess set away..

.. '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."

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

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?

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

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

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....

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!