You can't imagine how....noble this makes me feel...
Dear parents who do this to their children...Fuck you...
This comes off as a little arrogant to me. Who can be absolutely sure they know the truth?
There are tools that we use to find the truth. We ask questions. We talk to eye witnesses. We look behind the curtain. We look for motive. We look for "provability"....except in one area.
Faith short circuits the whole finding the truth procedure. As a matter of fact, faith by definition makes it against the rules to ask questions. I wonder why.
Faith short circuits the whole finding the truth procedure. As a matter of fact, faith by definition makes it against the rules to ask questions. I wonder why.
"Why would the apostles just make stuff up about Jesus?" I am asked. "What was in it for them?"
It's like they have never seen this kind of shit.
It's like they have never seen this kind of shit.
The above is especially interesting to me, since the Bible says that true believers WILL be able to perform miracles. Yet, relatively speaking, nobody believes faith healers.
I find it interesting that during floods, tornados, fires, etc, there are many people that prove prays are answered because they prayed and they, in fact, were saved. But these people never seem to stop and think that they are the only "prayers" who are alive to make such a declaration.
...until they weren't.
What kind of fucking contract clause is this? Would you sign a condo lease with this shit in it?
And I think that's the whole fucking point. If it makes me feel like I'm important...even very, very special, then it must be a good thing.
I don't always just hangout with rednecks. A very smart man I've known for years is a devout Catholic. When the opportunity presented itself, I asked him about his belief that a priest needs to hear all of your sins and only then can he decide if you go to heaven.
He said he didn't believe any of that.
I said, "Talking snake?"
He just laughed and shook his head.
I then asked, "Then why do you play along with all the rituals?"
And he said, "I just can't believe that this is all there is and that there must be a better place to go after you die."
That, Gentle Reader, is a very powerful placebo.
I don't always just hangout with rednecks. A very smart man I've known for years is a devout Catholic. When the opportunity presented itself, I asked him about his belief that a priest needs to hear all of your sins and only then can he decide if you go to heaven.
He said he didn't believe any of that.
I said, "Talking snake?"
He just laughed and shook his head.
I then asked, "Then why do you play along with all the rituals?"
And he said, "I just can't believe that this is all there is and that there must be a better place to go after you die."
That, Gentle Reader, is a very powerful placebo.
Look, I have a whole bunch of problems with the Big Bang Theory. I know that from what we deduce from our observations now, it suggest a singularity. But we don't know shit yet. I predict that in years to come our offspring will be laughing at our ignorance.
I just hate to give the nuts the ammo of the "everything from nothing" argument. Oh, well.
I will admit that Theistic Evolution is a pretty good fucking argument. It covers all the bases. The one hole that science can't answer (where did the stuff from the big bang come from) is ADOPTED by the Theists!!! It's fucking brilliant!
I will admit that Theistic Evolution is a pretty good fucking argument. It covers all the bases. The one hole that science can't answer (where did the stuff from the big bang come from) is ADOPTED by the Theists!!! It's fucking brilliant!
1 comment:
Personal gods and divine humans are pretty silly in the face of basic logic, but everybody has "faith" of some kind (see American Civil Religion).
Christian apologetics ultimately employs self-justification or what we might call reflexivity or circular reasoning ("the Word exists and says it's good, therefore it's good"). The same sort of reasoning underpins all morality and law, though. Take proscription of murder for example; why do we disallow it? Because we assume that human life is its own justification (the base form of this logic is "I am a human and I enjoy living, therefore human life is good").
Self-justifying and/or circular ideas are not "true" like 2+2=4 is true. Nonetheless, if we take it "on faith" that human life is an objective or absolute good we can build a system of law and a big civilization. We'll still place other things above human life sometimes (e.g. for self defense) and this reminds us that moral statements are not absolutely true even though they can have much utility. This paradoxical situation (we should believe things that aren't meaningfully true) is... really interesting to me.
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We often take tools and infrastructure for granted simply because we're around them so much. That happens with laws, customs and traditions, too, but this is hard to recognize if one stays isolated. Mark Twain said:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
I tend to think of that when I find myself being particularly vehement in my objection to organized religions. My "children of the stars"-type faith wherein the mystery and potential beauty of the universe is its own reason to live and be nice is closer to objective facts than the vast fictions of organized religions, but it's exactly as circular in the end.
And mind you, I'm not saying you're being a prejudiced, bigoted, narrow-minded person! You're thoughtful and considered, and I think the cruft and mythos of organized religion (when taken super-literally and mega-seriously) is dangerous and stupid. I just like questioning myself and I also like being a contrarian. Since we seem to think similarly about religion I'm kinda killing two birds with one stone here...
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Peter Suber wrote about reflexivity and paradox in American law and that book (available legally and freely there in its entirety) is still good if you want to see how real-world humans deal with the wateriness of morality. Section 20 is full of weird shit.
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Lotsa ~words~ there about not a lot... I hope your 2013's a good'n.
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