The Fool Hath Said ...

FB Humour

2010-02-04T11:58:00.001-05:00

The result of an attempt to hide one of those annoying FB applications that fill up one's newsfeed:

What Would Jesus Do?

2009-11-05T20:36:00.002-05:00

Heal some sick people, feed some hungry people, spew a few fairly common but still for the most part decent platitudes, and then die. If only most of his followers took this question as seriously as they pretend. (Of course, if they really focused on healing and feeding, I wouldn't want them to die). Also, if by some miracle they should come back to life like him, they should (like him) go away.

The Scientific Study of Religion

2009-11-03T11:51:00.002-05:00

"The Religious Studies community, especially as it is represented by the American Academy of Religion, has to a large degree continued to espouse a form of postmodernism, largely, it appears, in order to provide room for religion and humanistically inspired socio-political agendas as part of the Religious Studies enterprise. By curtailing the scientific agenda with its search for testable hypotheses about religion, or some element or aspect thereof, the student of religion, it seems, is justified by postmodernism in seeking---or is at least permitted by it to see---something other than mundane knowledge about religious belief of behavior."

- Donald Wiebe "The Scientific Study of Religion and Its Cultured Despisers"

Hell is not the threat you think it is

2009-11-02T08:02:00.002-05:00

Got another email from my friend:

well if all you're going to do it spout off the commonly heard atheirst cliches, without even reading the material at the site I showed you, then there's no point wasting time with you. you clearly WANT to believe in no God, and one day soon you'll find out just how wrong you are.
sorry i wasted your time

One day soon? Cool. Anyways, my response:

I thought it was you who was spouting cliches. I did read the material on the site. In fact, someone sent me the link before. So it if it is your site, congratulations; you may not be reaching atheists, but other Christians seem to find it useful. (I suspect it is not yours, since I doubt if you were Michael Caputo that you would use jbooks email.) In any case, if you want to see a proper response to each of your/his points, I am happy to do so. It would take at least 18 emails. I have a life and a job, so I couldn't do it right away.

Also, you might want to consider the fact that most other religions make similar absolute claims. You and I might well end up in Muslim hell together, or perhaps have this same argument in another life. Perhaps in both cases, we'll be friends. In other words, your bifurcation of the world into Christians and everyone else seems to suggest that you need to get out more. You may be less willing to condemn fewer people to hell if you get to know them.

Otherwise, I accept your apology for wasting my time. And yes, I WANT to believe there is no God. If he exists, I want to go to hell. Only there can I spend an eternity saying "no!" to Him. Why? If he exists, he has permitted the greatest evils in this world to continue. If he were just apathetic, I could forgive him. But since almost all religions claim that he does intervene in human events (i.e., miracles) from time to time, he is culpable for what goes on here. He could have stopped the holocaust for example, but he did not. He could have stopped a baby from burning to death in a car crash, but didn't. He could have stopped 9/11, but didn't. He could have created a world without cancer, but didn't Even if he makes it "right" later, justice delayed is justice denied. (I.e., how long does a Muslim girl have to spend in heaven for her to feel good about being gang-raped to death in Bosnia in the 1990s by Serbian Christians, who presumably asked for forgiveness and are in heaven with her. Or is she in hell?) I don't think God exists, but if he does, I want to be as far away from him as possible. If you are right, hell is were I want to be.

Is there any point in debating him/her? This is my issue with the New Atheists. Must we become missionaries, adopting the very methods of those who despise us so much? I hope not.

I Got (hate) Mail!!!

2009-11-01T18:40:00.003-05:00

From a reader of by blog, I presume:

1. Bertrand Russell was not an atheist.
2. Darwin rejected Atheism.
3. Sartre rejected Atheism.
4. David Hume was not an atheist. He saw God's presence in the intricacies of the universe.
5. Einstein believed that Judaism and Christianity possessed the answers to all human problems. 6. Madalyn Murray O'Hair's son, William, became a Christian evangelist.
7. The fathers/mothers of modern atheism were "not-so-moral" people.
8. The greatest social advancements were due to the work of believers, not atheists.
9. The greatest scientists of the past were fervent Christians.
10. Many modern Nobel Prize winning "scientists" believe in God.
11. The Scientific Method was conceived by philosophers and scientists who believed in God.
12. The greatest minds of the past believed in God.
13. Atheists were responsible for more deaths than any other group in history.
14. Sir Anthony Flew was arguably the foremost defender of atheism in modern times -- He is now a believer.
15. Jesus Christ is a proven historical figure and fulfilled all the requirements to be the Messiah.
16. The Bible has withstood the test of time.
17. There are ample explanations for alleged Bible discrepancies.
18. The facts supporting Jesus Christ's resurrection are unassailable.

to expand on these points you can check the website they came from
http://atheismexposed.tripod.com/atheist_secrets.htm

If you go to the link above, you see the same points, but you can click on it to get the "evidence". My response:

Never said they were all atheists. Of course, you are confused on some issues. Some people whom you list were agnostics on philosophical grounds and some did not profess atheism for fear of their lives (such as, Hume, who posthumously published his harshest critiques of religion.) Hume has the Christian destroy Deism and had the deist destroy Christianity --- there is little doubt where he stood. His critique of atheism is so tongue and cheek that is hard to read another way. I'll send you the quotation if you need it.

As for 7, look at Baron D'Holbach. Besides, this is an ad hominem attack. The refuge of those with no real argument.
As for 5, you are wrong. Read Einstein more carefully. The term "God" is often a metaphor with him.
As for 9 - 12, everyone was a Christian in the West once, just as every one once believed the earth was flat. It convinces me of nothing. Besides, the more education on has, especially in the hard sciences, the less religious one tends to be. Damn, you really don't read much do you?
As for 13, you are wrong. Bad atheists exist as do bad Christians. Even if Hitler was an atheist, about which there is some debate, almost all the concentration camp guards and soldiers were Christians. Stalin, the other person Christians pull out of their ass, was probably an atheist. So what? All the Crusaders were Christians. It tells us nothing about Christianity or atheism. Don't be stupid.
As for 14. Flew is not the foremost defender of atheism. And now he is hardly a Christian.
As for 15 and 18, you have clearly not read much on recent scholarship on the historical Jesus. Read Myth of Innocence by Burton Mack.
As for 16 and 17, the Bible is an iron age book, full of barbarism, contradiction, and the most vile morality this world has ever produced. It's not even written particularly well, but I doubt you can read Hebrew and Greek. Therefore, you don't know shit about what you are talking about.

Read some books written by your opponents before you criticize them. Don't rely on a very poorly written websites. It makes you look stupider. Your inaccurate facts are typical of ignorant Christians. Even well-read Christians would be embarrassed by your defense. I am. Go away.

(Or pray that your mighty God smites me. The little fucker has been unable to get me these last 50 years or so, since I became unborn again. I once thought like you, but I had been indoctrinated and as was poorly read and young. I hope the same is true of you.)

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

2009-11-01T17:03:00.003-05:00

Sorry for long absence. You need not worry though; I haven't found the Lord, nor has he found me. If he's been looking for me, well, he's probably not as bright as his omniscience implies. All he has to do is Google me after all.

Anyways, ... I do not believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder. First, no one seems to has missed my posts, and second, God has been absent from my life for some 25 years, and if anything, I moved from mild fondness, to loathing, and then to apathy for this figure. However, much of humanity seems to have the opposite reaction. The more the evidence piles up for the absence of this being from the universe, the fonder of him some people seem to become.

I was wrong ...

2009-06-25T07:57:00.001-04:00

worth a chuckle:
http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/GodProof.htm (hundreds of silly proofs for the existence of God. It is surprising how often they are used.)

Joke of the Day

2009-04-30T12:20:00.000-04:00

Atheism is a non-prophet organization

Sunday Funday

2009-04-19T12:35:00.002-04:00

40 Awesome Versions of Jesus.

http://www.holytaco.com/awesome-versions-jesus

Looks promising ...

2009-04-12T10:13:00.001-04:00

"The God Who Wasn't There" - Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73_IjNPmIEI

God Goes Global

2009-03-25T07:40:00.002-04:00

From the people who gave you "God Hates America": GOD HATES CANADA

http://www.godhatestheworld.com/canada/index.html Watch the video. God apparently hates many other countries too. The site has a map and you can click on the red countries and find out why God hates them. I encourage you to find out why you are hated by God.

I blame globalization for this one: In the old days, God just hated one people at a time. (Although one could make the argument that He hated almost all people during the time of Noah. But the earth was much tinier then.) God's just trying keep up with world capitalism. I speculate that He is concerned about a possible hostile takeover bid from the Tao. So he has got to expand, and hate is the "poison pill" measure to prevent the takeover. He is a shrewd god.

For another amusing read from the same people, I suggest: "God Love Everyone: Greatest Lie Ever Told; 701 Passages Proving God's Hate & Wrath for Most of Mankind"
http://www.godhatesfags.com/written/reports/20060331_god-loves-everyone-lie.pdf

BTW: Why as a liberal, socialist leaning, gay rights supporting, Obama voting, Canadian-American, atheist academic am I not on this list?
http://www.godhatesamerica.com/posterchildrenforsin.html
I'm willing to have a 3-some with Michael Jackson and Tom Cruise, or Jerry Falwell (even though dead) and Richard Dawkins, if it will get me on this list.

So sez my cab driver last night...

2009-02-27T08:56:00.001-05:00

"How can you teach something you don't believe in?"

Questions

2009-02-24T21:45:00.002-05:00

Wisdumb of Solomon

2009-02-10T09:39:00.003-05:00

I really like the passage in the previous post. The first paragraph describes me well. Halfway through the second one, however, I do have an objection. I have no nefarious designs on the poor, the widows, or the aged. However, the story picks up again in the third paragraph. After having been unjustly accused of evil, yes, I do want lie in wait for the self-righteous bastard to mete out some well-deserved comeuppance. Fucking asshole!

The "Wisdom" of Solomon

2009-02-10T09:13:00.003-05:00

According to the Wisdom of Solomon, this is life as the ungodly see it (Wis 2):

For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,
‘Short and sorrowful is our life,
and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end,
and no one has been known to return from Hades.
For we were born by mere chance,
and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been,
for the breath in our nostrils is smoke,
and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts;
when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes,
and the spirit will dissolve like empty air.
Our name will be forgotten in time,
and no one will remember our works;
our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud,
and be scattered like mist
that is chased by the rays of the sun
and overcome by its heat.
For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow,
and there is no return from our death,
because it is sealed up and no one turns back.

⁶‘Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that exist,
and make use of the creation to the full as in youth.
⁷Let us take our fill of costly wine and perfumes,
and let no flower of spring pass us by.
⁸Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither.
⁹Let none of us fail to share in our revelry;
everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment,
because this is our portion, and this our lot.
¹⁰Let us oppress the righteous poor man;
let us not spare the widow
or regard the grey hairs of the aged.
¹¹But let our might be our law of right,
for what is weak proves itself to be useless.

‘Let us lie in wait for the righteous man,
because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;
he reproaches us for sins against the law,
and accuses us of sins against our training.
He professes to have knowledge of God,
and calls himself a child of the Lord.
He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;
the very sight of him is a burden to us,
because his manner of life is unlike that of others,
and his ways are strange.
We are considered by him as something base,
and he avoids our ways as unclean;
he calls the last end of the righteous happy,
and boasts that God is his father.
Let us see if his words are true,
and let us test what will happen at the end of his life;
for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him,
and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.
Let us test him with insult and torture,
so that we may find out how gentle he is,
and make trial of his forbearance.
Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for, according to what he says, he will be protected.’

...What's the big deal?

Standing in the Road is Foolish

2009-02-07T10:16:00.001-05:00

Testing, 1, 2, 3

2009-02-02T08:27:00.002-05:00

One of the more interesting claims made by Jesus is, "You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test." My first reaction to reading this statement is "You are not my Lord, not my God!" But a more interesting response is, "Why?"

Pierre Elliott Trudeau once wrote, "If my father, my priest, or my king wants to exert authority over me, if he wants to give me orders, he has to be able to explain, in a way that satisfies my reason, on what grounds he must command and I must obey." Well said, P.E.T., but let us add God to this list. If you want to "the Lord, my God," then you will submit to my test. As Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The claim to be God, and the claim that the status of God gives you the right to expect my obedience are both extraordinary claims. Therefore beings like you, were you to exist, must pass my test, my extraordinary test.

Why God would want to avoid any test (not unlike some of my students) is obvious. My students feel they are too stupid or are too lazy to study sufficiently to pass my test. Similarly, God may be insufficiently omnipotent, omniscient, and/or omnibenevolent to pass even my simple tests. Well, that may not be fair analogy. I'm pretty sure my students exist. Perhaps God is merely insufficiently existent.

We are Legion

2009-02-01T21:13:00.001-05:00

Well, maybe not that many, but we are not alone. For a collection of pithy / witty statements by various unbelievers, see:
http://www.thefoolhathsaid.com/

Disappointment

2009-01-31T22:35:00.002-05:00

I'm sure it is possible that there are many former believers who became atheists because they heard sound, logical arguments against the existence of God. But atheists are humans, and like their religious counterparts, are more often swayed by emotion. (It is the sad case, in my opinion, that atheists cannot win the battle with believers, the hearts and minds of religious people for precisely that reason --- the heart still trumps the mind for most humans. So much for the sapien in homo sapien).

The emotion that gets some believers to stop believing is anger. A dangerous emotion since it usually makes the atheist into a missionary, railing against God, religion, and anything that threatens the church and state separation. They are the mirror image of the Christian fundamentalist, and just about as scarey.

For me, the emotion that turned me from God is disappointment. As Woody Allen once quipped, God is a bit of an "underacheiver." If I were his teacher, his report card would say, "He needs to pay more attention and apply himself." There was a character in the show Babylon 5, who had just saved his true and unrequited love from what appeared to be certain death. But now as he lay dying, he reflected:

You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.

If God exists, and he has any control over this universe and what happens to us, I would think he should be on his knees asking us for forgiveness. Or, perhaps he hopes that we will all become atheists and therefore escape our judgement. Anyways, a generally hostile and unfair universe is infinitely more comforting than a universe with such a disappointing God in it.

Jesus Christ, meet Jack Shit

2009-01-30T00:25:00.004-05:00

If you ask any 20 year old about what a 10 year old knows about life, the answer will approximate "jack shit". Not surprisingly, if you ask the same question to a 30 year old about a 20 year old, you'll get a similar answer. If the question was asked again to a 40 year old about a 30 year old, the answer might be, "s/he knows jack, but s/he still don't know shit."

Why does this matter? It occurred to me that if some 30 year old started telling me that I was a bad person or began instructing me one how to live, who to love, how to think, etc., I would probably tell him/her to drop dead. Now, if the traditional accounts are to be believed, Jesus was, hmmm, around 30 when he began preaching. That's not even old enough to have had a decent midlife crisis. According to the founding fathers of the United States of America (Article II, Section 1 of the constitution), he wouldn't even have been old enough to be the president. Those nation builders were on to something. My assessment is that when it came to how to live life and get along with people, Jesus didn't know shit. Not his fault though; he was young, hadn't traveled much, and had never gotten laid.

Now I have met some wise teenagers, 20- and 30-somethings. Hell, a few of them even post on this blog, and I'd like to think I was one of them (at least in my 30s). I just don't think Jesus was one of them. I'll say this for him though, at least he didn't wait around for me to tell him to drop dead.

Jesus, Muhammad, and the Buddha too

2009-01-29T08:47:00.002-05:00

There is little in the Bible that is worth quoting, but "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46) is. In the last few seconds of Jesus' life, just after he shouted out these words (assuming it happened), I would like to think that he became one of us fools too.

Moving to the Qur'an: "Why do they not study the Qur'an carefully? If it were from other than Allah/God, they would have found in it numerous contradictions." (Qur'an 4:82) I would like to think that even Muhammad himself, when he recited those words for the first time, chuckled silently, shook his head, and instead of repeating the whole shahadatayn "La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad al-rasul Allah" (There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God) understood that the first two words sufficed: "La ilaha" (There is no god).

The Buddha said, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." I would like to think that even Buddha himself, when he taught these words, hoped they would be the only words of his that anyone remembered.

Sometimes, I really do wish religious people read their scriptures a little more closely and a little more literally. For if there is a God/Consciousness, he has forsaken us, contradicts him/her/it-self, and makes no (pardon the pun) goddamn sense.

Oh Jesus.

2009-01-29T02:35:00.001-05:00

Performative language and the perspective of the believer

2009-01-28T19:24:00.002-05:00

Not so long ago, in a seminar devoted to Durkheim's Elementary Forms, a student expressed distress that Durkheim started from the position that "religious beliefs are wrong." I responded by saying that was a crude way of describing Durkheim's method: it's not that Durkheim thinks the beliefs are WRONG, but rather, it's that they are not explanatory. Rather than be a militant atheist in support of Durkheim's method, I chose to defend him based on the performative theory of language, utilizing theories of language by Austin and Crapanzano.

Crapanzano and Austin both discuss the performative function of language, as opposed to its referential or descriptive function. Both rely on Austin’s initial definition; performatives are characterized by the following: “A. they do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, and are not ‘true or false’; and B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of the action, which again would not normally be described as saying something.” Austin’s understanding also requires that performative utterances have the first person indicative active.

What is interesting about performative utterances is that they cannot serve as a proposition in a logical argument (based on formal rules of logic). That is, one cannot base an argument upon a performative utterance, because nothing is logically constrained to follow from it in the same way that conclusions can follow from descriptive/declarative propositions, which must have either a true or false value.

Durkheim’s starting point was problematized by the aformentioned student for dismissingthe potential truth value of beliefs. If, however, we consider all religious discourse from the believer to be “performative,” in the sense that it is performed in the experience a lived religion, then all stated beliefs become performative utterances upon which logical arguments cannot be based. That is, religious beliefs when stated by the believer could be understood not simply as a declaration that “X exists” (or whatever) but really as a performance of “I believe that X exists.” In a sense, expressing the beliefs is integral to the performance of the religion as a whole. Seen from this perspective, I think it becomes all the more clear why we cannot use the content of beliefs as explanations for religion. By their very nature, they are not propositions and so no explanatory argument can be created in which actions or consequences logically follow from them.

By reorienting the perspective on belief from a description to a performance, as I did above, I think I have problematized even further the explanatory power of belief. Austin and Crapanzano, among others, highlight the performative function of language, and this is all too often ignored in the study of religion. Instead of being conceived as performative utterances, beliefs are typically taken as declarations or descriptions, which have an inherent truth value. However, if we situate them in the entire context of the lived religion, we can reorient our understanding of what beliefs are, and so understand them in a different way. Performative utterances do not have truth value in the same way that descriptive or declarative statements do, and so we do not need to get sidetracked by worrying about the accuracy of the beliefs.

I find it shocking that the question of the truth of belief is still a matter of debate for scholars of religion. Haven't we thought of more creative, useful ways to understand beliefs, other than simply grading them as true or false?

A Carpenter and His Wood

2009-01-27T21:04:00.001-05:00

Thought of a joke. Not that funny by any means, but what the hell.

How do we know Jesus liked sex?
The last thing he did before he died was get nailed.

This is not my joke, but again, what the hell:

Why can't the Buddha clean in the corners?
Because he has no attachments.

God the Frog Smiter

2009-01-27T20:08:00.001-05:00

So, I'm cleaning the skimmers in my pool yesterday. I see a frog there. He's belly up, but looks fat and old. He probably had a decent life and got to pass on his DNA. (Even frogs deserve to get laid). O well. After disposing of him and the leaves I see another small shiney dark green frog swimming at the bottom of the skimmer: the basket is still in my hand, so if the frog isn't careful, it will be sucked down into the pipes for about 40 ft and several right angled bends, only to be drowned in the pump. In a manner completely out of my character, I run to the shed to turn off the pump. I return to find the frog gone. I check the skimmer flap to see if he is hiding there, which is where he probably was when I first took the basket out. Nope. Damn. So, I got to the pump. Open it up. He's not in that basket either. I cannot believe that he could be liquified that quickly. He must be stuck in the pipes. I wait to see if he has the intelligence to swim in one direction of the other. Again, nope. So I close up the pump and turn it on for a minute. I then stop it, and open it up again. Lo and behold, the little bastard is in the pump. I take out the basket and dump him in the garden and he hops away. I bask in the glory of my good karma. Even God, should he exist, would have to be pleased with me. (I believe he has had a fondness for frogs ever since the plague-thing in Egypt.)

Today, I was working in my front yard and what did I see? A little shiny dark green frog squished flat just behind my driver's side rear tire. I can't be sure it is the same frog, but it sure looks like him. God, you are indeed a fucking bastard! I can respect that, especially since I suspect you never let this poor bugger get laid. I'm not sure what message you are trying to send to the frogs of this world, but clearly they need to hop their little green asses to frog-church/synagogue/temple/mosque, get down on their knees, and do some serious praying.