I have been asked why I hate Jesus.
I do not hate Jesus...nor do I hate Mohammed or Buddha or George Carlin.
There are some very nice people in the world who give very good advice for how to live one's life.
If it makes you feel good to sit in a room and meditate all day, I say go for it...I mean that.
But if you believe in a book, with words, and that books states "facts", then I consider it perfectly okay to ask questions.
Two questions come to mind:
If your book says Noah went out and collected two of every animal, how did he get two kangaroos?
And, Why hasn't god ever answered the prayers of amputees? I mean, if some legless veteran sat out in front of the Statue of Liberty and asked god to please give him his legs back and his legs just popped out of his pants, well, just sayin'......
But when you pray for your Uncle Ed to come out of his coma and he does....don't get all bent out of shape. The other 10 thousand people who did not come out of their coma on that same day were prayed for also.....just sayin'....
But when you pray for your Uncle Ed to come out of his coma and he does....don't get all bent out of shape. The other 10 thousand people who did not come out of their coma on that same day were prayed for also.....just sayin'....
This next is a direct quote by Bill O'Reilly...
Thus is the shallowness of his understanding of a doctrine he lives his life by. Sorry, but that is not good enough for me.
And I don't even want to try to explain gravity to this prick, cause he would just declare....DECLARE that god gave us the gravity, even though he couldn't define gravity on a bet.
But to ask....insist...that I treat foolishness with respect is something I need not do.
Then, there is the pick and choose method of gaining eternal life. People simply don't obey the instructions in the book that they think was written by god.....GOD for god's sake....pun intended.
They don't obey the rules not because they are weak or effected (affected?) by some rib woman eating an apple. They don't obey because they don't want to....simple as that.
But he's pretty clear about what will happen to you if you don't obey. Eternity in hell......e-fucking-ternity....even after the last star has extinguished and black holes or some such shit has gobbled up the whole fucking universe...yeah....longer THAN THAT...................please.
I am of the opinion that the holy books are crowd control pure and simple.
And please don't tell me that faith alone is all you need.
You can walk through any ward in any insane asylum and find many people that have faith that they are Jesus, or god, or that god speaks to them through animals....or through beings that just show up from time to time out of the sky.
(and think about this a minute...What would your reaction be if someone came up to you and said, "My donkey spoke to me yesterday." Would you think of calling 911? Probably.
Well, in your holy book, a donkey (at least one) spoke to a guy. Why, today, would you reject it? Have you ever thought about such things? THEN WHY THE FUCK NOT?)
Then you have people who gamble. I gamble and, if I may say so myself, I'm pretty fucking good at it. But I know how to gamble. You look at the odds of winning, then place your bet when you think the odds are in your favor.
(by the way, the above illustration is EXACTLY what the church my mom made me attend believed)
But considering the illustration above, what do you think the odds are that you...YOU were so fucking lucky to find yourself backing the right horse? And if you think there is really only one Christian church....you are a fucking idiot. Look it up...do some research...or not.
I'm absolutely sure you would not bet money on the odds if it were a horse race...again pun intended.
But considering the illustration above, what do you think the odds are that you...YOU were so fucking lucky to find yourself backing the right horse? And if you think there is really only one Christian church....you are a fucking idiot. Look it up...do some research...or not.
I'm absolutely sure you would not bet money on the odds if it were a horse race...again pun intended.
And then there's this....
A few weeks ago a guy my wife and I love a lot got married in a place far, far away, and we could not attend.
Tonight, they had a reception in Columbia and I got to meet my man's bride.
I am now in a state of euphoria. She is one of the most delightful women I have ever met....AND her mother is a hoot.
I see nothing but happiness ahead for them and that makes me happier than you can imagine.
That she reads my blog has nothing to do with my appraisal of her sensibleness.
She wants to throw things in the next Olympics and I wish her nothing but the best.
And her smile will melt all but the hardest of hearts...
And her smile will melt all but the hardest of hearts...
6 comments:
Love the part re our big guy and his new bride. Happiness is what makes the world go round!
Hm. Holy books seem to be, if anything, a reflection of our character as a species. There's surely myriad genetic components underpinning collaborative tale-telling and "spiritual pursuit" and that sort of respectable behavior just as there is a genetic component towards bad behaviors like violence, bigotry, etc. Holy books are often replete with all of that.
Organized religions seem bad but I don't think most people who claim to belong to organized religions are bad (I mean, otherwise, you'd have to believe that most people are bad, and that's just too cynical even for a cynic like me).
Big religions seem to result from the mixture of our natural capacity for spirituality and/or wonderment with our tendency to structure and codify things and with the fact that organizations of a certain size develop their own cultural momentum. Such momentum can lead to good things and to bad things; the exact same thing can be said of any group that attains such momentum (governments, militaries, businesses, sports leagues, whatever).
Richard Dawkins put forth in the 1970s that organized religion is a meme complex...a psychological virus if you will....that gets transmitted among people of the same culture and may spread to others in different cultures. "mutations" occur during the process that five spinoffs similar to the branch diagram in your cartoon, such there are many different species/sects of religions.
My view is that religion arose to explain the unknown, to provide hope after death, and to gain power. It was and still is effective in organizing people for a unified goal or objective, but unfortunately it is often used for the wrong purposes.
Myths are myths.
To give them credence leads us to the zodiac signs, palm reading, tea leaf reading and baptism...and if you want to go to the extremes, eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a god....every fucking week.
Rationalism does not have all the answers, but at least it asks some questions....questions that, as yet, we do not know all the answers.
Human uniqueness has always confused me. Now, later in life I reject it completely. I savor the notion that the universe is, by it's very nature, pointless. But in the pointlessness, we are allowed to revel in it's magic..... metaphorically speaking.
As for "Holy Books", they were "written" when people lived in dirt floor shacks and sacrificed goats, for sanity sake.
I do think that most people are good. But if a loved one joined up with Jim Jones, or David whatshisname, or L. Ron Howard, I'm sure you would seriously consider some intervention.
What I try to do is to provide just a little bit of intervention. I start with questions like this:
"Do you think that Noah could fit two of every animal on earth into one boat."
The key to effective intervention is to get them talking rationally about it...or trying to.
Let them have to logically explain their own belief system without all the Thee's and Thou's; in plain English and it gets kind of funny sometimes.
I only want to provide a nudge. And knowing enough of their holy book to ask the right questions is kind of rule number one.
Thanks for your comments. I really appreciate them.
It seems to me that EVERY cultural norm, or "meme" (a good term), arises in order to explain the unknown, and that the energy source of it's continual promulgation and even evolution and adaptation is the power gained from understanding, and especially utilizing, the knowledge gained by that explanation. Organized religion is obviously a major conduit for such power, whether or not the "knowledge" is objective or empirical (I agree with Ralph Henry that it's not). But why such focus on religion? Isn't Keynesian economics also a target worthy of one day a week?
And as to whether "holy books" are "if anything, a reflection on our character as a species", as Jambe claims: I view EVERYTHING humans have created as a reflection on our character as a species. What else could it be? There's good and bad, and hopeful and depressing, and every judgement our there, but to each his own! What I call good someone else calls bad and my bad is his good. Isn't that life? I've actually read the bible, atheist that I am, and I see a lot of good (the Jubilee in Leviticus strikes me as particularly wise in these times). But as far as I can tell, the basic premise of the bible, apart from the existence of an imaginary man, is that growth is good, and this is a problem for mankind in my opinion.
As I see it, the (god-like) human forebrain developed way too quickly for the "animal" hindbrain to catch up, and the result is a species that can solve short term problems extremely efficiently while ignoring long term ones, particularly those caused by the short term fixes. I hope to god (ha ha) that the hindbrain evolves fast enough to overcome most of the detrimental consequences of ecological degradation and financial exploitation that the forebrain and its "memes" have caused.
I'm a staunch anti-theist, but I do worry that some atheists and skeptics caricature all spiritual pursuits as fundamentalist hooey. I'm certainly not accusing you of that, though; I just thought it was worth mentioning. I like to reinforce the idea that there's a core to religion that is worthwhile and respectable (despite being buried under centuries of often dumb and dangerous lore and tradition).
I like exposing Christians to the umpteen inconsistencies in their own texts, but I also like suggesting to them that virtually all humans innately desire group membership, meaning & purpose, wonderment & awe, etc, and that those desires can be fulfilled without the contradiction-strewn morass of organized religion.
You might appreciate Tim Minchin's Storm, a beat poem about the silliness of New Age beliefs.
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