Atheism

Them gay activists aren't gonna be happy to hear that, Boss . . .

You forgot the smoke Eorl. I said a headstone or smoke. What was the straw man except the one you invented by snipping my remark in half? You have employed a straw man to accuse me of doing and I hadn't. I chose the word "smoke" after some consideration. I did not say what you quoted me as saying or implying.

That's sneaky you know. It makes atheists look bad. And ci's, hinge's, Setanta's and ed's responses to ajc are quite sufficient to make atheists look bad without you adding to them.

People with very low IQs, congenital, the result of accident, senility or a raging subjectivity, do feel right in such beliefs assuming they are not so far gone as to have no beliefs at all. It is not all that hard to understand. It results from a rejection of Christian teaching on sexual morality which they have presumably found to be restrictive of what they perceive to be their rights. They see no reason why those rights were ever restricted in the first place which shows an understanding of our cultural history as near to zero as makes no difference.

It is ignorant I agree. It partakes of the basest misogyny. Woman as blow-up doll spayed to their convenience and if that fails a disgusting operation performed in the darkest shadows and usually denied.

I thought you meant smoke as the product of cremation.

I do apologise if I misinterpreted that.

Your assumption of my ignorance is a product of your ignorance. Happily there's a cure for that. Open your mind. Seems ironic to you, no doubt.

I think the Westboro Baptists are starting to come round though.

As in "round the bend?"

They ain't crazy, just crazy with the TRUTH!

And maybe a little Freudian terror of some uncomfortably pleasant subconscious yearnings in the locker rooms at school.

Girls will be boys
And boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up
Shook up world, 'cept for Lola . . .

Most science is dead wrong . It is only after repeated failings that it finds one thing thats right . Then it is back to getting it wrong again .

Bloody hell...science does NOT find truth, it finds facts .

Take your mind back - I don't know when
Sometime when it always seemed
To be just us and them
Girls that wore pink
And boys that wore blue
Boys that always grew up better men
Than me and you

What's a man now - what's a man mean
Is he rough or is he rugged
Is he cultural and clean
Now it's all change - it's got to change more
'Cause we think it's getting better
But nobody's really sure

And so it goes - go round again
But now and then we wonder who the real men are

See the nice boys - dancing in pairs
Golden earring golden tan
Blow-wave in the hair
Sure they're all straight - straight as a line
All the gays are macho
Can't you see their leather shine

You don't want to sound dumb - don't want to offend
So don't call me a faggot
Not unless you are a friend
Then if you're tall and handsome and strong
You can wear the uniform and I could play along

And so it goes - go round again
But now and then we wonder who the real men are

Time to get scared - time to change plan
Don't know how to treat a lady
Don't know how to be a man
Time to admit - what you call defeat
'Cause there's women running past you now
And you just drag your feet

Man makes a gun - man goes to war
Man can kill and man can drink
And man can take a whore
Kill all the blacks - kill all the reds
And if there's war between the sexes
Then there'll be no people left

And so it goes - go round again
But now and then we wonder who the real men are

... and one more Westboro Baptist hymn;

All the gods in the sky way up high see the world spinning 'round
But the sun and the moon and the stars are so far from the ground
I'm the shy boy
You're the coy boy
And you know we're
Homosapien too

I admit to starting there and under consideration it seemed a word which covered everything. The product "in the end"

But I hope Eorl that you can see that your interpretation of what somebody says or writes is not the only interpretation it could be given.

I considered "rows" as well. I can justify that too even if somebody points to the curvature of the earth. I would answer that burials are not exactly six feet down and that the entropy applied to the remains and headstones is sufficient to produce straight lines somewhere to a very high degree of mathematical probability. I used "in the end" colloquially in the usual Darwinian or astronomical time-scale. In the infinite time-scale there is, as you no doubt know, no end. Infinite smoke. Drifting through infinite space in infinite time and like with clouds one might see a face in the mind's eye in certain altered states of consciousness.

And in the morning tell ones companions of this vision, who, being nosey sods, would want to know what it looked like and, as with clouds we only see and identify those shapes we are familiar with, it would look like one of us. Or our wisest elder.

On being further questioned about what the vision had communicated one would naturally say that the companions should all place $10 on this plate one happened to have handy. Should such a Commandment be laughed at one might adopt a procedure which sought to give the vision more authority and dignity and characterised by a degree of impatience. When this is successful, a rhetorical matter, the visionary becomes rich and thus has dignity and authority of his own and can set about using it to finance a project aimed at avoiding the fate of other visions or those visionless ideas which evolution eliminated around the time of the "missing link".

Deliverance from rubble and dust to what Henry Miller called The Air-conditioned Nightmare, which I happen to like, cannot possibly be achieved by failed visions, on the scientific "suck it and see" methodology, and it's even more unlikely with visionless ideas.

Ah, the reverend Pete Shelley.

Roswell posted this in an old thread of his own . . . i figured the folks here would appreciate it . . . and some of Beethoven's ninth as background music, too!

It would have been nice to see "non-religion" mapped onto that video as well. But there are probably very few records showing population alignment with "non-religion".

There is a prejudice deeply engrained into western thinking in favor of the concept of organized religion. For example, the ancient dynasties of China believed (or seemed to have believed) in "gods" and in heaven and earth. (Note that this is not the same as the heaven and hell dichotomy of the West--heaven was above them, and they occupied the middle kingdom [the actual term they used, when well translated] between heaven and earth. Earth was the outer darkness, inhabited by demons and barbarians.) However, this was nothing like an organized religion such as is known in the West. It was a concern of the highest, most powerful ranges of society, and the most well-estabolished, long-lived social group were the bureaucrats, the Mandarins, who had no association with this religion, for which the "Sons of Heaven," the alleged emperors were responsible. There was not, however, any true empire before about 220 BCE--so we can't even be certain how widespread was this elitist belief in a "heaven" populated by gods above, and an "earth" populated by demons and barbarians below. The vast majority of the Han (those whom we call the Chinese) engaged in ancestor worship, which is a very private affair, and does not involve assertions about revealed truth and universal morality. The Shintoism of Japan was similar to the elitist religion of the earliest Chinese dynasties, although it seems to have been ubiquitous. But is was a "religion" of the propitiation of kami, or spirits, some few of which were malevolent and the majority of which were simply capricious. No universal, coherent cosmogony appears to have been recognized in either culture.

You run into similar problems with the colonizers accounts of "religion" elsewhere when it was encountered. Did the aboriginal Americans of North America truely believe in a "Great Spirit" occupying the position of the "Creator" in western religion, or is this simply how Protestant missionaries chose to describe the tales they were told? The earliest prosyletizing in North America north of the Rio Grande was done by Jesuits in what is now Canada, and their accounts were of savage heathens beguiled by Satan and fearing and/or worshiping demons. Nowhere did the Jesuits attempt to adapt the native beliefs to a Judeo-Christian framework.

Even modern archaeology, history and ethnology are perverted in the same manner. It has been until quite recently merely assumed by historians and archaeologists that all culture in Eurasia (west of "China") derived from the middle east. When archaeologists first began to find sites in what once were the nations of the Warsaw pact which showed the smelting of copper and bronze contemporary too and in some cases earlier than the oldest sites of the middle east, it was initially just dismissed as typical Soviet "we were first" propaganda. Many historians were long unwilling to accept that monotheism first arose in the middle east in Egypt, and not with the Jews, and some still don't accept that, despite the textual problems of the early books of the bible which contain many, many clear references to an accepted polytheism.

We may be past the point at which such questions may ever be reliably answered, thanks to the insistence of Christians on their own world view, and narrating any new cultures they encountered in terms of that world view.

I mentioned the History of Doubt some pages back. The author (Jennifer Hecht) discusses that very thing (periods of doubt and non-religion) in the troughs of religious expansion peaks.

Amazon

"You run into similar problems with the colonizers accounts of "religion" elsewhere when it was encountered. Did the aboriginal Americans of North America truely believe in a "Great Spirit" occupying the position of the "Creator" in western religion, or is this simply how Protestant missionaries chose to describe the tales they were told? The earliest prosyletizing in North America north of the Rio Grande was done by Jesuits in what is now Canada, and their accounts were of savage heathens beguiled by Satan and fearing and/or worshiping demons. Nowhere did the Jesuits attempt to adapt the native beliefs to a Judeo-Christian framework."

I think the white guys had no clue about most of what the Indians were about, religion included, and their attempts to explain it are weak and colored by their world view.