Ol Shifty

Devil takes the hindmost

So thinking about all of the evils of the world. Well, not the regular evils like greed and violence, rather the ones that bother the christians: homosexuality, drugs, disobedience, personal liberty, logical thought, equality, self-expression, learning about the natural world and just speaking truthfully in general…

Well, it seems to me that they normally blame all of those horrid abominations on the macinations of that satan figure of theirs (the devil, demons, servants of, worshippers of… Whatever).

But what I don’t get is that guy has only been around for what 2,000-2,500 years? So what about all those millennia of humanity before god, jesus, satan, etc, showed up? Was that stuff not happenning then? Was it happening but of its own accord, only later to be deemed bad after jehovah and his cronies showed up? Or did those myriad evildoing pre-abraham spirits all just retire when satan showed up and hand him the reins (and the credit)? Hmmm…

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Seen on facebook

A friend of mine has a bunch of these sort of things up on facebook. I decided to repost one that had my favorite sentiment…

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Things I learned from twitter

Something I saw in a @harryshearer tweet that was retweeted by @lawrence (wait, why am I following Lawrence O’Donnell and not Harry Shearer?), were the proported results of a CBS poll “Believers find athiests as un-trustworthy as rapists”.

Nice. Well, aside my suspicion that the percentage of rapists who are also “believers” probably far outweighs the percentage of people in general who are “believers”… I must complain this is a most egregious display of intentional ignorance. The kind of blunt and unthinking ignorance that leads to hatred and intolerence which, in turn leads to a substantial portion of the world’s woes.

Honestly though, as I’ve said before, this thoughtless distrust of the unfaith stems from the fact that those of faith do not truely believe that which they have faith in yet, sadly, they firmly believe that people are terrible inside and without the “guidance” (aka threats rules and fear) that people get from religion, civilization would collapse! That being the case, for centuries they have felt the need to force people to claim belief and to shun, torture and kill those who won’t go along with it. All just to save civilization!

So hey… Thanks guys for your faith in humanity!

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Ho ho ho

Ok please. I know that December 25th is the day that christians celebrate the birth of their jesus figure (however odd a form those celebrations take, considering…), but I don’t think that there is anyone (aside from indoctrinated young childen) who thinks that it is actually the supposed date of “birth” of that supposed entity… So please stop calling it jesus’ birthday!

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I hate you with a passion

Ok, maybe that’s not the best post title, but after my commute to work this morning, this title from the old Dre Dog album did pop into my head, so I figured, “what the hell?”.

I have a hard enough time with my commute without being tortured on top of it.

While there is one reasonable guy that I ride with, the rest of them seem to be either small minded friendly automatons, or else just mildly creepy. Either way, none of them seem inclined to ever think of uttering some kind of genuinely thoughtful notion about anything, just endlessly repeated drivel about work or the weather or some crap on T.V. Or, even worse, conversations about scouting, church, ignorant commentaries on the news or the other pointless mundanities that fill the minds of these shallow and ethnocentric fools.

The worst of all though (luckily, she doesn’t talk that much) is our little red-headed troll of hatred. I know that this may sound like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black, but she is a bigoted, loud-mouthed (when she talks) small-minded and hateful Baptist. An honest to god heaven believing, palin supporting wingnut who has nothing good to say about anything beyond the walls of her dreary marriage and ignorant little Baptist church brethren. Every time that anyone (especially at her work or in politics) does anything that she doesn’t agree with, she will call them “stupid idiots” over and over again (and over and over)… Which gets very tiring to hear.

Anyway, I spend two hours a day with these people which is normally just boring and mildly annoying. But the little troll was driving this morning, which is very unusual, and apparently that gave her the license to play the radio. While I dislike nearly all radio, especially in these parts, I had never had to listen to anything as trying as “The Light Network”.

Insipid and ArrgghhH!!! I carry both and iphone and an ipod (in fact, even a kindle with some mp3′s on it) so I dug through my pack most energetically wishing I had brought my grado’s with me, but hoping at least hoping to find some ears buds but, no, nothing. Loads of music, but no headphones. Argh! I spent the morning instead trying to write troubled emails and messages, whenever our lousy rural cell phone reception could pick anything up.

I did learn that if I opened my eyes I would learn that jesus loves me. I also learned that jesus is lord (though I think I’ve heard that sentiment somewhere before). Anyway, yes, I do feel bad that hearing such stuff causes such a nearly psychotic reaction in me, but I wish they would all just hurry up and make their intended trips to heaven and leave the rest of us alone. There is nothing more immoral, despicable, hateful, demeaning, embarrassing and anti-human than religion and “faith” and I just can’t help but have all of that flood my perceptions when I am made to hear it. It also serves to resalt the mental would that comes from realizing that my cross-country move moved me somewhere that has much different values than what I am used to… In a very troubling way.

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Rather long, but rather funny…

I stole this little bitty from Godless Geeks, but I’ll print it here in its full version…

Hundreds of Proofs of God’s Existence
Formerly: Over Three Hundred Proofs of God’s Existence
Originally adapted from a forum on the Internet Infidels.

1. TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT, a.k.a. PRESUPPOSITIONALIST (I)
(1) If reason exists then God exists.
(2) Reason exists.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

2. COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, a.k.a. FIRST CAUSE ARGUMENT (I)
(1) If I say something must have a cause, it has a cause.
(2) I say the universe must have a cause.
(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

3. ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (I)
(1) I define God to be X.
(2) Since I can conceive of X, X must exist.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

4. ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (II)
(1) I can conceive of a perfect God.
(2) One of the qualities of perfection is existence.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

5. MODAL ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
(1) God is either necessary or unnecessary.
(2) God is not unnecessary, therefore God must be necessary.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

6. ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN, a.k.a. TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (I)
(1) Check out the world/universe/giraffe. Isn’t it complex?
(2) Only God could have made them so complex.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

7. ARGUMENT FROM BEAUTY, a.k.a. DESIGN/TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (II)
(1) Isn’t that baby/sunset/flower/tree beautiful?
(2) Only God could have made them so beautiful.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

8. ARGUMENT FROM MIRACLES (I)
(1) My aunt had cancer.
(2) The doctors gave her all these horrible treatments.
(3) My aunt prayed to God and now she doesn’t have cancer.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

9. MORAL ARGUMENT (I)
(1) Person X, a well-known atheist, was morally inferior to the rest of us.
(2) Therefore, God exists.

10. MORAL ARGUMENT (II)
(1) In my younger days I was a cursing, drinking, smoking, gambling, child-molesting, thieving, murdering, bed-wetting bastard.
(2) That all changed once I became religious.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

11. ARGUMENT FROM CREATION, a.k.a. ARGUMENT FROM PERSONAL INCREDULITY (I)
(1) If evolution is false, then creationism is true, and therefore God exists.
(2) Evolution can’t be true, since I lack the mental capacity to understand it; moreover, to accept its truth would cause me to be uncomfortable.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

Read the rest of this entry »

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and about those darned homosexuals

Relating to today’s previous post about people trying to misrepresent their religious bigotries (or beliefs) as something other then they are, my state of abode is currently going through a gay marriage battle. Now I know I’ve covered this before. but the current dialogue makes me want to go again. I understand the tricky spot that the anti gay marriage folks are in. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no reason to not support gay marriage unless you have some religious beliefs that oppose homosexuality. Now since you can’t really (in this day and age at least) maintain a large public dialogue using reasoning like that, they have to come up with some other excuse.

That excuse being Tradition. I’m not sure when that became a valid excuse… Traditions change, if they didn’t black people would still be able to be bought and sold at market with no say in their lives and women wouldn’t be able to vote. Neither of them could own land and, of course, your wife should be burned when you die and your servants should be killed and buried with you. Strangely, those were changed.

So if one throws out the tradition excuse as just a red herring (or any tradition excuse that doesn’t claim an origin in religious belief), then what are you stuck with?

I don’t think that this is a gay marriage debate at all. The debate is still over homosexuality. The people who do not support gay marriage are the people who believe that homosexuality is a sin or some other kind of abomination and they probably think that gay people should be killed or sent to Siberia so they they don’t infect “our grandchildren” with their filth. God forbid one of your children become gay… How can we prevent it since we can’t just kill gay people anymore and make them hide? I know! The only opposition that is left to us in this country is to say that “real” marriage is too good for them. Let’s do it “No gay marriage, no gay marriage”.

It’s just easier to say in public than “kill the fags”.

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Reducible logic

Okay, let me get this straight… Traditionally, religion (or at least the standard old Christian kind) follows a general belief of Mankind is a special thing created specifically by some all powerful intelligence and the cosmos was created for him to live within. The bible contains all that one really needs to know about such things and any more knowledge of Man or the universe is unnecessary… In fact, at some points even trying to learn more about them was considered blasphemous. I assume because the untruths that were being brought up by these people were works of the devil, rather then because the authorities were afraid of being proved wrong.

On the other hand most people recognize that there are many, many things that we don’t know or understand and science is nothing but a group of methods to try and figure them out. Being that a lot of these things were originally quite basic and were things that religion had tried to explain in their own way (what are those dots of light in the night sky, how does rain come, why does the sun move around in the sky), much of standard religious teaching has been shown to be untrue through the discoveries of science (or the devil’s works have blinded the scientist enough to make it appear as such).

In short, in religion you do not need to study anything aside from what is stated by your religion. In science, you need to study everything (or generally everything that can be studied under the guise of the Scientific Method, “gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence”).

Due to this, and religions historical animosity towards science there has always been a hostility between the two due to a feeling (correct, I believe) that either school of thought would in some way become irrelevant in the case that the other school was valid.

While this is fine and dandy if religion keeps to itself and just sticks to its own little devices… A good example being the garden of eden thing that Abraham cribbed from the Babylonians, it is so unscientific, illogical and fantasy-like that I figure, “go ahead, believe it all that you want”. What bugs me is when the religious folks go beyond their own boundaries and try to subvert the scientific ways. You know, intelligent design. Which I am thinking about again today due to coming across a bit about a movie (“The Case for a Creator”) made by a scientist who, is seems, was looking to convince himself that “god” was real after his wife converted to Christianity. It seems that he ends up falling for the intelligent design credo of “Irreducible complexity”.

I’m not going to go on and on but what I think is funny is that folks pass this stuff off as science when the foundation of the theory seems to be: Some things are so complex that we don’t understand how they could have been made unless someone made them.

That’s it. It is antithesis of science and I find it insulting that any person with any logical faculties at all wouldn’t see that quite clearly. I figure this… “Believe in Jehovah Prime the Great Watchmaker of Man, Creator of Worlds, Sire of Saviors… He who the seas are none but his spittle and the earth naught but a Fabergé egg made to house a trillion little folks he made in his image” and believe in Virgin births, and a world 5,000 years old which he has filled with old fossils to embarrass the fool scientists, and the heavenly dreamland where once your done with your life career you will be reunited in heavenly bliss with everyone that you want to see, forever young wise and happy… But Christ, don’t ever try to pretend that any of that shit is science or has any connection with any method of logical deduction. Intelligent design is a wimpy way out that counterfeits blatant non-science as science when it is really just more of that arrogant “Human’s are the kings of the universe” mind frame that thinks it is better to just make up fairy tales then to admit that there is something that we don’t know.

Face it folks, we’re just people and we’re are still quite new to the practice of figuring out how the universe works. There are still many, may things that we don’t understand out there, and I’m sure that many of the things that we do “understand” we probably understand incorrectly… Learning about the universe is a never ending job and to just say, “how’s this for science… I don’t understand something, so it must have been made by a magician, enough said”.

That is the standard old foolish basis for religion. It has nothing to do with anything else.

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Joys of the afterlife

I thought this was an interesting tidbit. Considering how much we hear of “the wonders of the afterlife”: sitting at God/Allah/whomever’s throneside, seeing loved ones, joy for all eternity… But I am also thinking, admittedly, mainly of what I hear from watching Big Love every week with all of their “Family’s are together in heaven forever” talk. I thought it was both strange and funny (both kinds of funny to read this article:
Pious fight death the hardest

Seemingly, according to a recent study in the U.S., people who believe in an afterlife are more eager to stay in this life than to move on…

Those who regularly prayed were more than three times more likely to receive intensive life-prolonging care than those who relied least on religion… The researchers from the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute found these people were the least likely to have filled in a “do not resuscitate” order… As well as receiving resuscitation, they were much more likely to be placed on mechanical ventilation in the last few days of life.

Who knows. It may go (I like to think) with two of my theories…

1) People who attest to religious belief do so out of a fear of death

and…

2) People of faith, deep inside (or maybe not so deep) don’t really have that faith anyway. Meaning that, at some level, they know that it is all wishful thinking and BS.

People of unfaith are more apt to accept life and the world for what it truly is, making the inevitability of the nothingness of death something that they are more willing to confront.

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That’s what I love about country OR How Saddam hated our right-fitting jeans

So I’ve just spent the last 5-6 weeks working somewhere that I hear continual contemporary country music (except for the one time that they played each Jolene and The Gambler) for 9 hours a day, twice a week. That works out to about 90 hours of this stuff in the last month or so. Nice. To keep things clear, I cannot stand this genre of music. I couldn’t stand it before I’d really ever heard any of it, and I certainly can’t now. But I must say that it was a learning experience.

I’ve never really heard any modern country music before and since this was a “top-40″ style station, there were many songs that I heard 3-5 times per day, each of those days (to paraphrase one of their slogans “all the greatest songs played over and over and over…”).

Now, in general, the country songs sung by the ladies are alright; sad “lost love” type songs. Which is fine, even if they are a bit trite and the style is boring. But the dude songs? Man. I can listen to the classics: Cash, Williams, Haggard… Those are great songs about loneliness, loss and too many drunken evenings, but that’s not what these new songs are about. These songs covered exciting territory like: four-wheel drives, Jesus and America. And that’s about all.

They also had a strong focus on what I would call intentional ignorance. A blatant support for the idea of “I don’t care what the truth might be, because whatever my daddy said is good enough for me”. It was actually quite depressing.

High points? Here are some of my “favorites”..

Some obnoxious song called Chickenfry. Here are the lyrics that really twisted my tongue:

Salute the ones who died
The ones that give their lives so we don`t have to sacrifice
All the things we love
Like our chicken fried

Cold beer on a Friday night
A pair of jeans that fit just right
And the radio up

I mean, is this their view of world affairs? Saddam and Bin Laden were out to get rid of the cold beer and fried chicken so we have to go and kill hundreds of thousands of foreigners who haven’t even heard of either?

Another one that thought bought up a fine grasp of the world was this:

I watch CNN but I’m not sure I can tell you
The difference in Iraq and Iran
But I know Jesus and I talk to God
And I remember this from when I was young

So these are the folks who says “Support our Troops?” Which, in their eyes seems to mean send them to kill and die in other countries and don’t question it? “Invade/bomb/take over Iran/Iraq? Sure, since I don’t even know what those are”. It’s nice that they are so fond of this country and will stand behind mass destruction of other people and their countries without even caring to know what those nations are.

Especially since they seem to have a rather naive view of this country. These guys would be the first to say “Yay America! Yay “Democracy”! And yay to capitalism and the American way”. Yet they write these lyrics that show that they have no grasp of what this American capitalist way is that they love so much:

Because in the real world they’re
Shutting Detroit down
While the boss man takes his
Bonus pay and jets on outta town

What? Do they think that someone should be intervening with the bosses on behalf of the workers? Wouldn’t these same folks call that activity “socialism and/or communism (who can tell the difference)”, the same stuff that has also been out to get rid of our beer and fried chicken? How stupid can people be? And how desperately must these people stick to their frightened ignorance and stupidity in the glow of reality and knowledge all around? It’s very lame.

Finally, this lyric was just irritating… Especially when played over and over again in a song that I had to hear over and over every day.

‘Cause I’m a country boy, I’ve got a 4-wheel drive
Climb in my bed, I’ll take you for a ride

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