Thursday, August 7, 2008
F@$# it! We'll do it live!
Can you believe Bill O'Felafel is setting himself up as a role model for children?
You might be a Christian fundamentalist if...
(NMMNG welcomes this guest post from Greyhound1405)
You might be a Christian fundamentalist if:
- You complain when Christians aren't allowed to practice their religion in other countries. Yet you go berserk, for example, when someone tries to set up a Mosque in your neighbourhood, complaining about the Moslem call to prayer from minarets. Yet we all have to tolerate your Church Bells, Christmas Carol singing in the streets. Also door to door and on-street proselytizing, trying to convert already happy people from their current religion, or the even happier non-religious and atheists to join your Church. We don't need your self-opinionated, patronising, religious education on myths, or want to catch your diseased, archaic delusions. Why can't you leave us all alone and mind your own business? We are happy enough without listening to your drivel, your fear and guilt mongering and downright lies!
- Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah. But you don't even flinch when hearing about how your "loving" God, Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in Exodus and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in Joshua including women, children, and trees! The Old Testament is liberally littered with such "(UN) Godly" barbarism. You can keep all your cruel God(s), Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
- You call Jesus Christ the "Prince of Peace", ignoring where He commands people to take up arms. Luke 22:36-37
- You don't object when current Political or Religious leaders say "God told them" to wage war against Muslim Nations. Sounds just like the "holy Wars" of the past. They too were about taking people, land and possessions, under the pretext of converting the ignorant infidel. It's about oil this time. At least your Christian Slavery is mostly outlawed now, except for you, a paying slave to your Church! Nowadays people who say that "God told them" to commit a murder or other heinous crime, are usually locked up in an insane asylum for their own protection and the public's safety too. Why then should today's Religious or Political Leaders be exempted and treated any differently?
- You call your Bible "Holy" yet it contains filth, sexism, oppression, slavery, mayhem, murder, wars and division of peoples. What's holy about that? This negative immoral message far out-weighs the so called "Good News".
- You believe that Religion in general and Christianity in particular, is the only way for people to behave morally. Kept under control by an all-seeing, vengeful God. 2,000 years of Christianity and the world is still cruel & selfish! Study your Bible and see why. Also, most atheists are moral without the need for a God. The Golden Rule of, behaving to others as we would like to be treated by them, predates both Judaism and Christianity by thousands of years.
- You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by religions of others, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of your Christian God(s). Whether they be Atheist or of another "Faith" or Religion.
- You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans and animals, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women. But you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated (read - raped a married woman) a "virgin" - Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god, who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky. Which are actually all ideas copied from other, even older, religions (maybe to gain some credibility from them)! Your Christian holy days have mostly borrowed pagan dates and even make use of some of their pagan festivals and ceremonies!
- You laugh at polytheistic (many Gods) religions, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit [Ghost]). The first verse of Hebrew Bible says GODS (Elohim) created heaven and Earth.
- You consider a single prayer that was 'answered' during your life time as a high success rate. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% failure rate of unanswered prayers was simply the will of God. Mathematical Probability would provide the same odds and success/failure rate!
- You constantly challenge the work of respected scientists who established the age of the Earth as millions if not billions of years old through sound scientific, replicable practices, but have no problem believing the word of ancient Bronze Age Jewish tribesman and later clever, curious clerics, who think it's only numerous Biblical generations old. The 7 day creation of Genesis, then the fictional Adam, Moses through to Jesus, plus the 2,000 years since Christ.
- You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms out of necessity for survival, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that humans were created straight from dirt.
- You believe followers of every other (or even no) religion will spend an eternity in a Hell of suffering for not accepting Jesus, but still consider your religion the most just, tolerant, loving and understanding.
- You believe you must be born again, because of the sins of Adam & Eve. Too crazy & immoral to merit response.
- You believe ancient, old debunked myths, like the Devil and Witchcraft are still relevant today and will therefore avoid Harry Potter movies amongst other things, just to be safe. The Devil is in the mind of those who dwell on it, YOU!
- You feel that while modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in "tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" Christianity.
- You think it quite reasonable that a man (Noah) could horde 2 or 7 of every animal on the planet, put them all in a boat, and have enough food to keep them alive for 40 days, Let alone cleaning the muck out.
- You are arrogant and vain enough to think the Earth and its (human) inhabitants are the centre of and the only (human) life in the entire universe, despite it being statistically impossible. God is only interested in you.
- You dismiss the scientifically proven explanation of any event because you don't understand it, or it conflicts with Biblical myths, but are happy to just say "God did it" without any tangible proof.
- You think AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality, which you see as a reversible choice instead of genetic.
- You think earthquakes, floods and other of nature's catastrophes are God's punishing a disobedient people.
- You think a warm fluffy feeling is proof of God. The self-same feeling one can get from Love, friends, beautiful music, art and Natures scenes. Of course you believe Nature is God's handiwork, so round we go in circles again.
- You deplore homosexuality, but will vigorously defend your own Pastor if and when he is caught playing with choirboys. Or he will be quietly moved on to another Parish (In the hopes he will reform)!?
- You know less than your atheist and agnostic friends do about the Bible, Christianity, and the history of your Churches - but still call yourself a Christian. If you are ever allowed to read the whole Bible with an intelligent, rational, critical eye, you will be in for a lot of shocks. Your Pastor will not be able to explain the violence and inconsistencies!
- You and your Church think anyone with an enquiring, rational, open mind has been influenced by your Devil.
- Your church is one of thousands of denominations or sects. If Christianities message is so pure and simple, why so many variable beliefs and Bibles within Christianity? So which Church and which of many Bibles holds the "Truth"?
- You think your Church is the only one practicing "true" Christianity, whilst all the others are headed for hell. Protestants hate Catholics, Baptists hate Presbyterians, and Jehovah's Witnesses hate you all. And that is before you begin hating other religions - the "deluded Muslims", Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists etc. Not to mention the Atheists!
- Your Preacher encourages you not to rationalise, think or doubt, but accept everything he or the Bible says as being true. That's called keeping you in ignorance. We would still be living in the dark ages if we had all done that. Along with the inquisition, its theft of property and its torture and murder at the stake for the millions who dared to question the priesthood. Both Roman Catholic and the Protestant Churches are equally guilty of such base cruelty.
- You share common points of view with the same types of people who thought the Earth was flat and the centre of the Universe. It took science to prove otherwise, but you must still accept the myths and fairy stories with faith, or incur the wrath of your Church and/or your enraged, jealous, possessive, merciless (Loving!?) God, Jehovah.
- You find it difficult or even impossible to accept ways of science and its conclusions only because they conflict with the Bible. A Bible full of errors and contradictions, whichever of the many "Holey" Bibles you choose to pick up?
- You believe that the Bible is the word of God or at least inspired by Him, incapable of error. It is a motley collection from different writers, written after the event, recopied over the centuries, with mistakes. Purposely doctored to fit current beliefs of the day, bits or whole books left out, bits or whole books put in. Yet even now you claim the Bible is still inerrant!? I sincerely hope it does contain mistakes, because I couldn't worship such a God as Jehovah as he is portrayed in your "Holy" Bible. Who incidentally is every bit as evil (if not more so) as your "so called" Devil.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
McCain campaign still breaking the law?
This is very suspicious. Dozens of low-income people who have never registered to vote and are apathetic about politics are suddenly making the maximum legal donation to the McCain campaign. The money is flowing through a McCain operative and oil trader named Harry Sargeant. "Both Sargeant and the donors were vague when asked to explain how Sargeant persuaded them to give away so much money."
It doesn't take a Beltway insider to come up with the most likely explanation: Sargeant is using ordinary people to launder money from the fat cats, no doubt for a few extra dollars under the table. I'm glad the Washington Post is publicizing this, but will it be investigated officially? Of course not - every nook and cranny of the federal government has been corrupted by Karl Rove's sleaze machine. Hence the FEC's inexplicable apathy in the face of McCain's already blatant violation of campaign finance law.
I guess this is what McCain means when he claims to be a maverick - he's a criminal, plain and simple.
Day of Infamy
Sixty-three years ago today, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Also on this day, seven years ago, a bombshell was dropped in the lap of George Bush Junior. It was an urgent presidential briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in US." Junior refused to interrupt his vacation to read it.
The rest is history...
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
"Go f@$# yourself, McCain!"
It looks like Cheney the Dick will not be attending the Republican convention next month. It is virtually unprecedented for a sitting VP to skip his party's convention, and a measure of both Cheney's negligible approval rating and the disorganization and consternation of the rethugs as they try to distance themselves from him. (Meanwhile, the Democrats are gleefully linking possible McCain VP picks to Cheney at a website called The Next Cheney.)
Maybe they're afraid Cheney will shoot someone in the face?
Monday, August 4, 2008
Outsourcing the Chinese Room
Kevin Kelly cites some ongoing research at Google as a disproof of Searle's concept of the Chinese Room. It is nothing of the sort, though it is interesting in its own right.
John Searle, a great iconoclast in the philosophy of the mind, came up with the Chinese Room concept as an argument against mechanistic, AI-influenced explanations of consciousness. The idea is to imagine that you are trapped in a room and pieces of paper come in through a slot. The paper contains what are to you meaningless squiggles, but your job is to look up the squiggles in a table and determine what the output should be, then write it on a piece of paper and hand it out another slot. Unknown to you, the squiggles are Chinese characters and you are answering questions in Chinese. You may even be participating in a Chinese-language Turing test.
Searle asked: how can the system as a whole be said to understand Chinese, if no part of it, including you, understands that language? Does the Turing test, therefore, really detect intelligence? Contrary to Kelly's understanding, Searle did not claim a Chinese Room could not be built, just that it did not correspond to our understanding of what it is to comprehend Chinese.
I've always felt that the Chinese Room was a bit of a red herring. After all, the guy inside is redundant. He could be replaced with an optical scanner to read the input and a computer to look it up in the table and print the output. The actual "understanding" of Chinese resides in the lookup table, assuming it would be feasible to construct it.
I write programs every day which encapsulate a little piece of my intelligence and knowledge about a particular problem. I don't make the mistake of thinking that they understand the problem themselves. They are just blindly following a sequence of instructions I laid down.
Can a sufficiently complex and powerful computer program ever be self-aware? We can never know for sure, but I would guess no, at least not in the sense in which humans are self-aware. I wonder if we can ever really comprehend non-human ways of being self-aware. In the animal kingdom there are many more senses in use than the five ones familiar to us. Some animals navigate by sonar, or sense electrical or magnetic fields, or see polarized light and so on. We can only imagine such senses by analogy. Perhaps in future we can alter our bodies to acquire new senses, but would they have to be translated into other senses before we can perceive them - for example, a tickling feeling in response to magnetic variations, or will we ever be able to tinker with the brain enough to create whole new senses?
Note also that intelligence need not imply self-awareness - see Peter Watts' novel Blindsight for an example of aliens that are intelligent but not self-aware. I can certainly conceive of a computer that is artificially intelligent but not self-aware. How far are we from having such a computer in reality? It seems to me that we can't have artificial intelligence without artificial stupidity, i.e. we must give the computer the freedom to make occasional mistakes - otherwise it can never innovate. Standard computer architectures are not well suited for this and can only simulate AI by brute force. Perhaps instead of thinking of the computer as a brain, we should think of it as a neuron, and the internet as the brain?
If you've read this far, thanks for indulging me in my philosophical ramblings. Be seeing you!
What he said
James F. Elliot:
The whole of McCain's argument about Iraq is "I don't give a fig about what the American people want, I'm smarter than all of them on this." For a campaign trying to make their opponent into the arrogant one, this is just about the worst angle one could take: "I'm right and the majority of Americans are idiots."
Wal-Mart to employees: "Don't vote for Obama"
This is not only disgusting but illegal.
"The meeting leader said, 'I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won't have a vote on whether you want a union,'" said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. "I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote," she said.Wal-Mart should be investigated and punished with hefty fines. This cannot be allowed to stand!
Friday, August 1, 2008
Anthrax for the memories
The apparent suicide of Bruce E. Ivins belatedly brings the post-9/11 anthrax attacks out of the memory hole. In many ways, this was an even more terrifying incident than 9/11 itself, as it felt like terrorism could reach into every nook and cranny of the country without warning.
Strangely, ever since then the mindless chant from the Greek chorus of the extreme Bush-worshipping right has been that "there hasn't been a terrorist attack since 9/11," and this is all down to Junior's resolute leadership and what not. Never mind that the crime was never solved - people just forgot it had even occurred.
It's also strange that the targets of the attacks were Democratic congressmen and media figures - real and perceived liberals. And even stranger that the anthrax used in the attack was extremely sophisticated and probably beyond any capabilities Saddam ever had.
I've made it clear in several previous posts that I don't think 9/11 was an inside job. I wouldn't put anything past the neonazi-cons, but the conspiracy theories require hundreds of ordinary Americans, military and civilians, to participate actively and knowingly in an act of mass slaughter of their fellow citizens. I don't buy it.
On the other hand there is considerable evidence that many powerful people knew in advance that something major was going to happen on 9/11 - including Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Mossad, and whoever made a fortune on airline put options.
It's not too far fetched to suggest that the power elite learned about 9/11 some time in advance, but chose to let it happen as it would be very convenient for their warmongering agenda in Iraq. And maybe they decided to put the icing on the cake by following up with a biological weapons attack designed to panic the entire country and leave no-one feeling safe. We'll never know, now that the chief suspect is conveniently dead.
McCain: Married to the Mob
If John McCain wants to fight a negative campaign, he'd better be careful. He has many, many more skeletons in his closet than Barack Obama. Read this article about his ties to organized crime, via his pill-popping barbie doll wife.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Heading straight for the gutter
If John McCain is jealous of all the attention Barack Obama is getting, maybe he should take his own world tour. He could visit Czechoslovakia and denounce the Velvet Revolution, or stroll along the Iraq-Pakistan border and learn the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.
Sadly, McCain has chosen instead to take the low road and drive straight into the gutter, waging a campaign of lies and dog-whistle racism. I can't believe I ever had an ounce of respect for this old bastard. He is just another Karl Rove, only meaner.
McCain's not-too-swift boats
After putting out an ad that just reeks of dog-whistle racism, the McCain campaign is now whining that Obama's very measured and restrained response amounts to playing the race card. What sickening hypocrisy!
A black man with white women continues to be the huge unbreakable taboo in the US. It's the one thing guaranteed to give Republican voters the hives, and the merest suspicion that it might be happening has led to countless brutal lynchings and murders right up to the present day. McCain's spinmasters knew exactly what they were doing when they linked Barack Obama with two well-known promiscuous white women, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Talk about audacity!
For McCain to rant and rave about the race card is as dishonest and despicable as the rethugs cutting every program that helps ordinary people in order to fund more tax cuts for millionaires - and then sneering that we are waging "class warfare" when we oppose their corruption. McCain very definitely owes Obama an apology, not the other way round!
Update: McCain's stupid Paris Hilton ad has very possibly pissed off one of his biggest supporters - Hilton's father! Heckuva job, you little jerk!
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Oops, he did it again!
So much for John McCain's pledge to run a positive campaign with honor and integrity. Now he's equating Barack Obama with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. What, Obama goes commando and records sex tapes?
Is it just me or is McCain getting increasingly unhinged and deranged? Is his jealousy at the attention Obama is getting making him crotchety and bitter? And does he think the majority of voters would rather have a cranky old man in the White House?
I suspect this ad will backfire on McCain big time. It will increase Obama's allure with the American Idol generation. McCain will be left behind as the American Midol, the old guy who gets ornery when he forgets his medication.
Keep digging your political grave, McCain!
Oh, and if you can stomach it, here's Britney's interview with rethug tool Cocktucker Carlson where she gushes about how "we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens." Sounds like a good little Stepford Wife - what could McCain have against her?
Beneath contempt
The headline above sums up what I think of Karl Rove, but a house committee has just found Rove in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify when subpoena'ed. Unfortunately, "[t]he committee decision is only a recommendation, and it was unclear whether Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would allow a final vote."
Presumably, Pelosi will decide that enforcing the law and upholding the Constitution are "off the table." In which I case I will regard her as contemptible too.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
To Serve Chimp
One of Monica Goodling's illegal interview questions to would-be loyal Bushies applying for career positions at the Department of Justice was: "What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?" Gag... could the rethugs' cult of personality around their empty suit be any more vomit-inducing?
Over to you! How would you fare in an interview with Goodling?
Monday, July 28, 2008
Heckuva job, Dumbya
After inheriting a record budget surplus from Bill Clinton, George Bush Junior leaves as his legacy a staggering deficit of half a trillion dollars. Thanks of course to his tax cuts for billionaires and his disastrous adventurism in Iraq which has turned into a never-ending quagmire.
That's the difference between rethugs and dems. Rethugs claim dems are all about taxing and spending. The reality is that rethugs tax your grandchildren!
This is standard operating procedure for rethugs - they run the country into the ground, and loot and plunder the treasury for their cronies while the plundering's good. Then when the voters finally wake up and realize how corrupt and incompetent the 'thugs are, they boot them out on their asses - but then the Democrats have to clean up the mess and deal with recession, unemployment, the US dollar being worth less than toilet paper etc. Then of course the punditocracy screams about how bad things are under Democratic rule, and slobus vulgaris americanus with his 5-second attention span forgets who caused the Cheney-up in the first place, and votes the criminals back in at the next election, repeating the whole cycle.
Rethugs couldn't organize a one-car parade without causing a pile-up. There is only one thing they're good at: bullying, blustering and shouting down everyone else. When it comes to actually doing anything useful, they suck, whether it's about national security, the economy, you name it.
Not only do they suck, they don't even want to do anything useful for ordinary Americans - all they want to do is further enrich the already obscenely wealthy top 1% by manipulating the useful idiots of the religious right, and riling them up on cue with god, guns and gays. Bitter? Hell, yeah, I'm bitter! Bitter at the endless sleaze, corruption and stark raving insanity of the rethug ruling elite.
When will the voters cop on and kick these criminals to the curb - permanently?
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Tennessee church shooting
This is horrible and my heart goes out to the victims and their families. I now look forward with dread to the inevitable response:
- Gun nuts screaming that this would never have happened if everyone in the church, including the children, had been packing heat.
- Dominionists screaming that this is another example of the persecuted xian minority being viciously hunted to the brink of extinction by violent god-hating "fundamentalist atheists." (Notwithstanding that the church was UU, and would thus itself be atheist in the eyes of many theocrats. Could this in fact be the motive?)
Friday, July 25, 2008
All Obama, all the time
The corporatist media's coverage of this election season gets infinitely stupider every day. Currently we are being bombarded 24-7 with the media complaining that the media loves Barack Obama.
Good grief, is everyone's short-term memory that far gone? Doesn't anyone remember the constant screaming headlines to the effect that Obama is a secret Muslim, was trained in a radical madrassa, took his oath of office on the Koran and refuses to say the pledge of allegiance - not to mention the broadcasting in a continuous loop, day in, day out, of Jeremiah Wright shouting, "God damn America"? Oh, and did you know that Obama's middle name is Hussein?
But of course, that's so five minutes ago. The current strategy is to give Obama's trip blanket coverage in the desperate hope that he will utter some gaffe that will torpedo his campaign, or at least diminish the aura of inevitability that surrounds him. Now they are expressing disappointment that he didn't make any gaffes, but their consolation prize is that his very popularity in Europe means they can equate him with Hitler. The "citizen of the world" remark proves his anti-Merkin hatred, of course.
The lunatic right is also screeching in deranged unison about some incidental remark Obama made about Belfast. It's comical in a way to see them coming unglued like this.
Anyway, whoever genuinely thinks that the media has fallen in love with Obama is a willfully ignorant fool. There's just doing what they always do. They pile on a certain story, be it Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, then five minutes later they all lose interest at the same time and pile on some other story. But it is entertaining to see John McCain frantically dashing around every podunk burg in Ohio in search of a bratwurst shop so that he can stand in front of it and speak to two people, while desperately hoping that some news cameras will show up.
Of course, a lot can happen between now and November. I'd stake my life that the rethugs are right now hatching some really vile dirty trick that will make the Swift Boat Liars for Bush look like saints. The wurst is yet to come! (As Bismarck might say, those who are fond of sausages and election victories should not inquire too closely into how they are made.) But it's looking more and more inevitable all the time that Barack Obama will be the 43rd legitimately elected president of the United States. You might as well stick a fork in McCain!
Tennessee: worse than Florida
I came across this link by sheer chance, over 7 years after the article was written. If Al Gore had won Tennessee he would be president today, and the world would be vastly different. He didn't, and the reason is widespread, blatant and brutal disenfranchisement of black voters on a massive scale.
How could this stunning injustice, the worst of the Jim Crow era, occur in the 21st century? And why has nobody heard anything about it?
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Define your terms
Does God exist? Many would say this is the central question in theology, but in a way it's the wrong question.
Do Higgs bosons, Bigfoot or lake monsters exist? These are meaningful questions because whether you argue yes or no, at least you and your opponent have a common understanding of what you are arguing about. However, God is a much more slippery concept.
In the past, people had a relatively clear picture of the god or gods they believed in. There was the rain god, the sun god and so on. There was Krishna with his blue skin, or Jesus with his flowing locks and doe eyes. Today most rank and file believers probably see their god in similar terms. At the same time, they accept what their preachers feed them about God being omniscient, omnipotent, infinitely benevolent and what not.
However, as soon as theologians started thinking systematically about god concepts, problems cropped up. If God really is all that and a bag of chips, then you quickly run into such difficulties as the problem of evil. If God is omniscient, he knows whenever suffering is occurring. If he is omnipotent, he can stop it. If he's infinitely benevolent, he will stop it. So why does suffering occur?
Ever since then, theologians have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. They encourage the faithful masses to go on believing in traditional ideas of God, while they themselves issue learned treatises about an arcane, abstruse god that would be quite unrecognizable to the masses. God is that being than which no greater can be conceived, he is the ground of all being, he is defined as that which cannot be defined, he is not a member of any set (not even the set of gods? What about the set of all entities that are not members of any set?), and so on.
It often seems to me that theologians are constantly moving the goalposts, redefining God to avoid logical problems (and perhaps as a sort of reverse strawman tactic, so they can sneer at uppity atheists for attacking strawmen) and in the process they end up refining and abstracting God out of existence. And yet they have absolute certainty in identifying such hazy and useless god concepts with the traditional god who raised Jesus from the dead and will dispatch everyone to Heaven or Hell on the Day of Judgment. After all, who prays to the ground of all being, or has a personal relationship with the indefinable?
What gets me about the purveyors of "sophisticated" religion is the smugness of so many of them. They rightly scorn the simple-minded fundamentalists who believe in every kind of barking lunacy imaginable, but they are equally disdainful of atheists, whom they regard as just as fundamentalist and simple-minded. To them, we are rigid, closed-minded fanatics who are too dense or stubborn to grasp their ethereal, recondite concept of God - which they refuse to define except in the most vacuous terms.
It's all very well to say for example that God is the ground of all being - but what does that mean? What information does it convey? If we lived in a universe where it was not the case that God was the ground of all being, would anything be noticeably different about that universe?
The theologians' airy, ineffable claims about God are, in my humble opinion, nothing but obfuscation and semantic masturbation. Theologians sometimes invoke Wittgenstein's language game as a rationale for their content-free statements. But, as I understand it, Wittgenstein viewed the language game as a cooperative effort where the speaker conveys information to the hearer by means of a mutually accepted vocabulary. The theologians' god-talk is, it seems to me, smoke and mirrors to cover up the awkward fact that there's no there there.
This is why I say that "does God exist?" is not the central question. After all, if we define God as Stevie Wonder, then God exists. If we define God as love, God exists as a concept in peoples' minds. And if we say God is that which cannot be defined, we are just making noise.
If you claim that God exists, the first order of business should be to define what it is that you are talking about - at least in enough detail so that the hearer can meaningfully address your claim. Anything else is evasion. Personally, I don't think I've ever heard God defined in such a way as to make a debate about God's existence even worth engaging in.
What set me off on this rant was my frustration at Sam Norton, an English vicar who blogs on theology and what he calls "humourless atheism". Several months ago, he started a series in which he promised he would show why atheism is irrational and Christianity is rational. A great deal of verbiage later, I am no closer to understanding what the hell he is asserting - except to realize that he can redefine his way out of any difficulty. And when you ask him a direct question, he responds, if at all, with lowest common denominator Josh McDowell apologetics: "the god you disbelieve in" versus "the god I believe in" and what not. I'm sure "Slippery Sam" is a perfectly nice guy in person, and would serve you tea and cucumber sandwiches, but trying to engage him in a discussion in terms that are meaningful to both parties is an exercise in futility. It seems the Celtic Chimp has the same reaction - see his interesting post.
Bottom line: if you want to convince me that God exists, the onus is on you to come up with a coherent, non-contradictory definition of God. Then you can get back to me. Until then, I won't hold my breath.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Arizona Conservative Idiot of the Week: Jack Harper
This is the sort of schoolboy shenanigans that go on in the Arizona state legislature all the time and make the state the laughing stock of the country. The rethugs who dominate the state senate try to bulldoze through a gay-bashing bill, a Democratic senator starts to filibuster it, and the rethug chairman, Jack Harper (R-Surprise, surprise!) simply switches off his mike. Then he switches it on again and gives the floor to a fellow rethug, the slimy Thayer Verschoor, a previous proud winner of the ACIOTW award.
Although Arizona voters turned down a similar gay-bashing proposition in 2006, the rethugs are determined to force their bigotry and hatred down our throats, due process be damned. It reminds me of the sleaze and dishonesty they used to abolish Martin Luther King Day as a state holiday.
Once again, Arizona shows itself to be the dumbest state in the union...
A host of troubles
Sorry, PZ, but you're only a piker. Someone has already gotten really creative with communion host desecration. Would you believe hosts as poker chips, or spiked with LSD - aired on Canadian network TV?
And I can't decide if this is for real: the Purity 125 Communion Host Dispenser. Apparently the priest holds it by the handle and shoots a host into your mouth, no doubt while fantasizing that you are an altar boy... okay, I don't think I need to dwell on the sexual overtones.
Coming soon, the heavy duty Purity 400 Communion Host Dispenser! I swear, I'm not making this up.
Sheesh - how the hell can we of the sanity-based community be expected to keep a straight face, let alone treat this lunacy with respect?
