Nihil’s Waste of Bandwidth

7 more deadly sins

March 19th, 2008 at 7:26 am (Free Thought)

So it appears that the Vatican has decided to revamp the seven deadly sins.

Here they are, according to the Sidney Morning Herald Blogs:

1. accumulating obscene wealth
2. polluting the environment
3. genetic engineering
4. drug dealing
5. abortion
6. pedophilia
7. causing social injustice

So let’s see. Given #1 he should give up all of the church’s gold, because if there is an obscene amount of wealth anywhere it is in the Vatican. With #6 does that mean he’s actually going to DO something about it? I can’t even tough #7 in light of the church’s espousal of genocide.

According to the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore they are:

1. Genetic modification
2. Human experimentations
3. Polluting the environment
4. Social injustice
5. Causing poverty
6. Financial gluttony
7. Taking drugs

No more human experimentations or taking drugs? Why is this reminiscent of when doctors couldn’t dissect corpses so the pope had a Jewish doctor? After all, modern medicine involves a lot of numbers 1 and 7.

Wow. This pope sucks. He’s the fucking George W. Bush of popes.

I have a better list they should pay attention to. How about:

1. Protecting the wicked
2. Abusing confidence
3. Promoting the spread of disease
4. Promoting war and hatred
5. The destruction of other cultures
6. Lying to protect your wealth, power, and prestige
7. Actively working to halt the progress of humanity

Oh wait. Those can’t be sins because they’re EVEN MORE GUILTY OF THOSE!

The Pope's good side

Pricks.

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Proving a negative

December 11th, 2007 at 7:15 am (Free Thought)

I keep hearing people harping about how since you can’t prove a negative one is always left with the position of not knowing whether or not God exists. Though the first part of this statement is indeed true, the second is not.

You see, quite simply people keep looking at this ass-backward. It isn’t that the onus is on the atheist to prove the non-existence of God for that is simply impossible, but instead the onus is on the theist to prove that God exists. To date no credible evidence has come up to prove that he does. Sure, people like to use everything in the world as some sort of proof, but at the end of the day it isn’t anything that can more simply be demonstrated as a natural phenomenon. Unless they’re taking a definitional approach and thus assuming that words such as “perfect” have some magical power in them that forces them to point to existent entities…like unicorns and perpetual motion machines. Of course my favorite argument is that the Universe couldn’t have created itself and can’t have been around forever so it must have been created by something…which they claim either created itself or has been around forever.

All said I grow tired of people harping on the whole negative proof thing because it is simply disingenuous. Atheists aren’t proving a negative…they’re simply asking for a solid piece of evidence. Just one will do. And no, the book doesn’t work since no theist believes that all of the books just like the bible, Koran, or whatnot are true…just one. And of course it is the one that their parents believed or is most prevalent in their culture, though some switch to another just to be rebellious.

Until that evidence is shown God belongs with alien visitation and bigfoot: nice stories that yet so far have no proof, and thus are not to be believed.

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Dispatches

November 26th, 2007 at 10:08 am (Free Thought)

I read about this show in one of the blogs I check out, but I can’t remember which one unfortunately. It is a British show that as best I can tell does undercover journalism of some sort. This particular show was quite telling, and came under some amount of controversy for possibly being biased. After an investigation (because the police have nothing better to do with their time) it was shown that the show accurately depicted what their research and undercover tapes showed them. So all said I think it is a pretty interesting look in to the radical element in the UK.

Google, being the source of good bits these days has it on YouTube: Dispatches - Undercover Mosque (1 of 6). The other parts of the episode should be under the related videos. If you have a chance you can view it for what it is worth.

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Ellen Johnson on the Golden Compass

November 24th, 2007 at 10:34 am (Free Thought)

The fine folks over that NoGodBlog put up an announcement about Ellen Johnson speaking on Headline News about The Golden Compass. Though I’ve been listening to the American Atheist’s podcast I haven’t actually seen her on TV, so I figured why the hell not? I taped the two hour show she was on (which included a story about a lion getting loose in Ohio…comedy gold!), and caught it this morning.

Bill Donahue from the Catholic League accuses Atheists of being bigots. Especially these days. The funny thing about it is that in his saying such he was showing how much of a Bigot he is. He also likes to dodge any serous questions, such as the accusation that the Bible promotes hatred toward gays by trying to talk about adultery. Pathetic, really.

Ellen Johnson earned a lot of respect in her retort to Bill Johnson’s comment: “Now, if there were a series of books out there promoting how horrible gays are and then they made a movie based off of it, is anybody in their right mind telling me that gays wouldn’t rightfully object?”

“Well, let me get back to what you just said, Bill. There is such a book, it’s called The Bible. It says that homosexuality an abomination and in Leviticus that gays should be put to death.”

Huzzah!

So far reading through the books I have found that if Pullman casts religion in a bad light he certainly isn’t saying anything that is untrue. Yeah, everything with the church isn’t rosy. We know this. While some people like Bill Donahue like to stick their heads in the sand about it, it isn’t going to make it go away. Yes the church has tortured and killed people, yes the church wants to take over the entire world, and yes the church has perpetrated acts of abduction, violence, mutilation, and rape against children. I find it funny that he says he is trying to protect children in the name of the organization that has, and still does, perpetrate such things against them - especially rape, which seems to be the modern hallmark of the Church in the United States. He may find a children’s book objectionable, but I find covering up the rape of children at the hands of priests objectionable.

I guess Bill Donahue is concerned that some Atheists are negative about the church, but so far I haven’t seen any reason why they shouldn’t be.

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Alonzo Fyfe

April 30th, 2007 at 12:04 pm (Free Thought, Philosophy)

Listening to one of the Triad of Reason podcasts one of the guests, Alonzo Fyfe was talking about his theory of Desire Utilitarianism. Not bad, all said, in that it seeks to describe how people actually judge things, not how they should judge things. Thus it isn’t trying to find normative truth which is good since in my book, thus far at least, is an oxymoron. Hopefully some day I’ll straighten that one out in my head.

In his discussion he brings up what, in terms of his theories, is a vicious circle, or a small circle of reasoning. His example is fantastic:

“God exists.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the Bible says so.”

“Why trust the bible?”

“Because God wrote it. ”

I agree that in complex descriptive systems things will indeed weigh upon each other. Look at a dictionary. Words are defined in terms of other words. This doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong wih it, but just demonstrates that at some level your descriptions will weigh upon each other as though in a web. The problem becomes when you let the web get too small as in the above example.

I’ll definitely have to read up more on his stuff.

“But first his initial definition: desire is the motivation to make a proposition true.” Hmmm…

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A Galileo quote

April 29th, 2007 at 5:11 pm (Free Thought)

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment - Galileo

It is wonderful to see the faithful fighting against science these days. It is reminiscent of a boxer swinging at the air as he falls to the mat. Most have adapted to science, and all said it is a pretty sensible approach. Better to doge than be hit after all. This, of course, is the crux of how most mythicists deal with it. “Yeah, the book says the world was created in seven days, but that’s just symbolic. What are seven days to God?” (I hope I’m not straw dogging anyone here). Others still do their best to shove us back in to ye olde faithful dark ages by abandoning science alltogether. Reading the above quote from Galileo puts it in to perspective for me. This isn’t new, and with luck civilization will persevere through their latest attacks.

The funny part for me is that watching the fundamentalist movement working in tandem with the religiosity of the neo-cons I find it so obvious that it is nothing more than a ploy to control people, and yet a supposedly educated public does nothing but don the shackles and gladly take up their slavery. Even those who manage to break away from the overt control of the money grubbing churches they still till the same plot of land their master put them to as though they have somehow found freedom.

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New Atheism

April 27th, 2007 at 9:01 am (Free Thought)

A lot of buzz has caught the waves about the New Atheism, led by such writers as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. New Atheists have been called militant in their call to not only disbelieve themselves, but to do away with religion on the whole. I think my favorite criticism comes in the form of calling them fundamentalists.

This whole thing tickles me for a great number of reasons. First of all some act as though Atheism is a unified movement, but nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly some can easily fit within certain labels including Atheist, Free Thinker, Humanist, Materialist, and Nihilist. The problem is that even though those broad brush strokes will indeed capture large numbers of people there isn’t a unified faith behind Atheism as there is in the Theist world, and even then few agree on much of anything. Catholics come in all shapes and flavors, and honestly the only thing they have in common is attending a Catholic church and calling themselves Catholic. This is the same with any religious movement. Until recently I didn’t realize that most people didn’t know that there are several major types of Islam, or that there are major divisions within Buddhism. With Atheism we don’t even have the benefit of working off of a finite set of inspirations. Christians have their bible, and Muslims have the Koran. What to Atheists have? Certainly there is a wide variety of influential authors but none of them are canonical in any sense.

Unification among Atheists resides in other places such as science. We tend not to quibble about the meanings of Newton’s laws since they’re quite obvious. But the thing is that we don’t hold science as a religious viewpoint as some fundamentalist Christians would lead people to believe. Most Catholics I know have the same views on Science that I do: it is an attempt to model the world around us and understand how things work. Catholicism had its fight with Galileo and has long since come to peace with science. Being largely mythicistic (is that even a word?) allows you to do that.

The unifying factors of Atheists are simple: lack of belief in a god and the supernatural as a whole. Yeah, many will argue that perhaps spirituality may have some basis, and that some supernatural beliefs may simply be uncovered science, but overall the view of God as popularized by the big religions is considered a pile of hooey. So yeah, there are those in the Atheist world that view religion as incredibly dangerous or the big factor holding humanity back instead of helping us move forward to whatever eudaimonia one may envision. There are also ones that believe it best to pick the beneficial parts out of religion and leave the obvious falsehoods behind (Thomas Jefferson anyone?). The spectrum of Atheistic belief is quite broad and honestly leaves a lot of room for some quite lively discussion.

So honestly this spectre of New Atheism isn’t quite what the news would like people to believe. Hell…they obviously haven’t spoken to any good quality Nihilists among whose ranks I’m usually counted…though I’ve mellowed out as I’ve gotten older.

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The Secret is no secret

April 26th, 2007 at 11:48 am (Free Thought)

I love it when people think age old ideas are new. It shows nothing but a general lack of energy to look under the surface, the desire to be right instead of knowing the truth. Trust me…those are two very different things.

Lately there has been a surge of belief surrounding a movie that appeared on youtube.com and later a DVD and book known as The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne. Its messages about the Laws of Attraction ring in my ears based on years of study in to western mysticism. Let’s face it. They took a few basic ideas from the practice of Western Magic used by such notable authors as Alister Crowley, Peter Carrol and wrapped them tightly in Christian mythos.

Of course the hoi polloi have been eating this shit up with a soup spoon. Why? Because it promises everything with no actual work involved, and of course that’s what everyone wants. The regular world of Christianity fights against this, of course, since it is hard to keep your ass glued to a pew if you aren’t afraid of eternal damnation in exchange for your sense of righteousness, and that’s simply bad for the economics of religion.

At the end of the day, though, if you really look at it people only want to be told that they can do things in order for them to do it. Some folks need some sort of motivating force to propel them forward in to whatever it was they could do anyway if they just convinced themselves of such. You want to know the real secret? You are what you make of yourself, so go ahead and be who you want to be. You don’t need to pay someone twenty bucks to find that out.

As far as the other possible riches of western mysticism? Well…find that out for yourself. It is a fantastic trip.

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I can’t remember…

April 24th, 2007 at 10:10 am (Free Thought, Humor)

I can’t remember where I originally saw this, but since I’m cleaning up my links I thought I should share this one with all of you:

The Official God Faq

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Abstinence Education Does Not Work

April 20th, 2007 at 11:28 pm (Free Thought)

So here’s a great one that came down the AP newswire on the 13th:

WASHINGTON - Students who took part in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress.

Also, those who attended one of the four abstinence classes that were reviewed reported having similar numbers of sexual partners as those who did not attend the classes. And they first had sex at about the same age as other students — 14.9 years, according to Mathematica Policy Research Inc.

The federal government now spends about $176 million annually on abstinence-until-marriage education. Critics have repeatedly said they don’t believe the programs are working, and the study will give them reinforcement.

However, Bush administration officials cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the study. They said the four programs reviewed — among several hundred across the nation — were some of the very first established after Congress overhauled the nation’s welfare laws in 1996.

Officials said one lesson they learned from the study is that the abstinence message should be reinforced in subsequent years to truly affect behavior.

There’s more here, but I simply can’t stomach to print any more of this.

So in short this demonstrates yet another time that religious morality simply doesn’t work and doesn’t help keep people on the straight and narrow. A lot of parents desire to send their children to church even if they themselves aren’t faithful because they are led to believe that religious moral education is supposed to ensure that their children have a strong moral base during childhood and concequentialy become better people.

Bull Shit

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Nihil’s Waste of Bandwidth

7 more deadly sins

Proving a negative

Dispatches

Ellen Johnson on the Golden Compass

Alonzo Fyfe

A Galileo quote

New Atheism

The Secret is no secret

I can’t remember…

Abstinence Education Does Not Work

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