Atheism

Edgar, can you point me to the text of the law? The way you describe it sounds a little vague. And whether Texas is violating the constitution or not will depend on the specifics.

I lifted those words off of a sample ballot. Word for word, that is what they voted for.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-markdavis_0228edi.State.Edition1.2a2f2f5.html

They are "non-binding," which shows up in my political thesaurus as "virtually meaningless," but that doesn't mean they won't spark some interest.

As well they should, because they address important issues for the party. From my vantage point, I see three easy yes votes and two mine fields, especially for those of us with a libertarian bent.

Prop 1 is a no-brainer, the photo ID requirement for all Texas elections. Prop 2 advocates limiting state agency budget increases to amounts matching inflation and population increases except in cases of emergency or specific voter approval. Another easy yes.

Prop 3 reads like a bad eighth-grade essay. "Congress should empower American citizens to stimulate the economy by Congress cutting federal income taxes for all federal taxpayers ..."

Still a yes, even with grammar and style-point deductions.

Which brings us to Proposition 4: "The use of the word 'God,' prayers and the Ten Commandments should be allowed at public gatherings and public educational institutions, as well as be permitted on government buildings and property."

Wow. Could we be a little more broad? I'm all about chronicling " and resisting " the assaults on expressions of faith in the public square. But there is enough vagueness and heavy-handedness here to give even devout voters pause.

First of all, I'd like to see the "public gatherings" where "the use of the word 'God' " is prohibited. As for prayer, it is properly an issue at public school events because government should never compel or even instruct us how or whether to pray. Students or government workers should always be free to pray or engage in any other religious expression on their own time or in ways that do not violate the equal religious freedom of others.

As for buildings and property, religious imagery is all over the place in Texas, in ways that properly acknowledge the faith roots of our history as Texans and Americans. The Ten Commandments display on the State Capitol grounds is just such a worthy example.

But there are places where a Commandments display can take the form of government suggesting what your faith should be, which I will always resist. Remember that while many of those sacred rules are good advice for anyone " don't steal, don't murder, don't commit adultery " the most important ones are specific guidance for the religious faithful. Government should never be in the business of offering that guidance, making this proposition a challenging issue unless one craves the trappings of theocracy.

Proposition 5 addresses something that should happen before every abortion " a sonogram allowing the mother to contemplate the consequences of her actions. But is this something government should compel?

There is a long list of things I want people to do but that I know they have the freedom not to do. I want every couple considering divorce to get counseling. I want every married couple to be financially stable before having a baby. Shall we have mandatory marriage therapy and government perusal of bank statements before allowing childbirth?

Any facility offering abortion services should require sonograms as a matter of pure human decency. I know that most would not. I also know that mandatory sonograms would save lives. But the best way to save lives is not the erecting of government roadblocks for those who seek to exercise choices we wish they did not have. It is to elect leaders who will seek Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe vs. Wade, solving the problem at its constitutional roots.

I would expect all five measures to pass. It will be interesting to see whether they are embraced or largely ignored by the Texas Republicans appearing on the same ballot.

Mark Davis is heard weekdays from 8:30 to 11 a.m. on WBAP-AM, News/Talk 820.

Your non-binding measure is meaningless up until the point that someone objects to that horseshit at a public event, and it ends up in court. At which point it violates the no establishment clause of the first amendment.

That is actually to cause of the most friction from atheists, and from marginalized religious groups. Jews and Muslims are no more enthused with Christian dominated claptrap in public events than are atheists.

You're catching a belief in your own assertions Madam. You should stop associating with atheists is my advice. It is catching because of how easy it is.

When I wrote--



I'll admit I was being a bit provocative. I should have said sensual subjectivities. A study of media indicates that the sexual is in first place.



Is there a beginning?

Well- we might start with the parting of the ways between science and theology usually personified by Galileo but it was, of course, a far larger event than that minor incident.

At first the divorce presented an unmitigated bonanza. Freed from the mystical ballast (see my bouy metaphor) science sailed off into the wide blue yonder and a high rate of knots conquering new realms. Within a very short period of Darwinian time the mind of mankind was transformed as was the planet itself.

But there was a price to pay. We now live in a world of extreme anxiety. Nuclear holocaust, radiation, global warming, new life forms, decisions which we feared the outcome of in stem cell research, cloning and eugenics and the growth of a nihilism in response as typified by Naked Lunch which few people dare read closely. And there came about a spiritual impasse as well.

Reality dissolved before our eyes. Matter vanished from the materialist world. He held it in his hands for a time and then it evaporated. The vanishing act began with Galikeo and Descartes. Galileo banished colour, sound, heat, odour and taste from the world of science, from physics, and placed them into the realm of subjective illusion. Descartes reduced reality as our common sense apprehends it, to particles with only the qualities of extension in space and motion in space and time.

But in the next two centuries the vanishing act continued. Even those two Cartesian qualities of reality turned into an illusion. The concepts of substance, force, effects from causes and even space and time turned out just as much an illusion as colour, and taste and odour.

Every advance no matter how materially beneficial was payed for by a loss of intelligibilty but that loss was brushed under the carpet, and easily because it wasn't understood and the gains were. The objects you see on your desk are as near a vacuum as makes no difference.

How pretty it is to imagine the nice little electrons orbiting a nucleus when depicted on a blackboard and reproduced in an exam paper in the service of a good qualification. But the dimensions involved are not so pretty. The electron is one fifty thousandth the size of its distance from the nucleus. The size of the earth is a mere twelve thousandth of its distance from the sun. Your desk objects, you car etc are almost all empty space. Enlarge a nucleus to the size of a football and the electrons are hundreds of miles away. Maybe thousands. I've not done the calculation. It is unnecessary to make the point.

Now science has gone further. The electron might not occupy any space at all. Energise a hydrogen atom and its electron jumps further into another orbit. If the energy is given up it jumps back with a light emission. And these jumps are performed without any passage through the space between the two orbits or with any time lapse. It instantaneously dematerialises and materialises in two places which are far apart in the proportions of the dimensions involved. And it is silly to think of knowing where the electron is because it is equally everywhere.

The objects you see can no longer be fitted into a time/space framework. Substance and matter have no meaning. Sexual intercourse is two sets of vibrations seeking the equilibrium disturbed by inputs and build-ups of energy ultimately derived from radiations from the sun and other astrological sources absorbed through nutrient.

Matter is both substance and non substance. The electrons might produce a pattern when passed through a diffraction grating but that effect is no more than the grin of the famous Cheshire cat.

Right then--so we all go nuts. Religion provides an answer which enables people not to go nuts. The religious explanations may be what Setanta and others claim they are but what then? They may be daft, or nonsense or crap but they enable people to cope. The term "mad scientist" is not a cliche for no reason.

Terms like "beautiful" are ridiculous to a materialist. Everything is beautiful and at the same time not beautiful. If you have ever distinguished something beautiful and something not beautiful you have expressed a deeply religious and subjective sentiment which modern science does not recognise.

How's that for "disjunctive raillery" osso? You no like eh? Put me on Ignore. Do the Ostrich Samba.

Escaping from the disciplines of sensual inhibitions is the only game you are all playing and denying it is just another circular assertion. Science is definitely not your forte. It's an excuse. Taking its name in vain.

I'm very lenient and supportive to people that need some crap that enable them to cope.

However, I become irascible when those very people try to sell me that crap..

I have enough vacuum cleaners...

Hehehehehehehehehe . . . good line . . .

I have made a study of media. Simply by watching it. Something like I imagine Darwin watched a pied-piper picking a pickled pepper, or a tortoise turning turtle, on the Galapagos Islands.

I thought about those famous islands when I heard about the tsunami warning off Chile. I wondered if they had ever been washed over in the past. Has anywhere never been washed over in the unimaginable vistas of time spoken of by the Hero of the Atheists. The Flood.

The first thing to understand about Media is that it is a money making machine. But it cannot flatter our sensual apparatus like an ice-cream vendor can. And flattery is the money-making route. Money itself flatters. Well--the expenditure of it I mean. Misers never flatter anybody. Dickens did that.

There's only ego pleasure to go at. It can't do what a restaurant does, or a pub, or chap mowing a meadow or, dare I say in this new puritan age, a co-operating person of the opposite sex. It's light and sound patterns are crabbed. They are not the light and sound of nature. There are an infinite number of wavelengths of light and sound in nature.

And some mighty fine experts were recruited to flatter egos. And egos being what they are it is a balancing act. The consumer of media will seek a general plus in ego massage from the product consumed. An atheist, for example, would consume products which generally confirm his position and compliment him on being such a sensible and intelligent person for bravely taking it in the face of these beasts out there with their mumbo-jumbo and buying off time in purgatory and putting all the scientists to death and other anachronistic bullshit. He would put up with the horoscopes and the seasonal Christian sales drives and even large spaces given over to a visit by the Pope. Or a juicy sex scandal involving perversions and large fees which derives its naughtiness from Christianity. On balance it will be a product which flatters his sense of himself.

The same applies to all media products.

The amount of money this industry has made for its staff is a measure of how successful it has been. It's money comes from measured ratings, the BBC have a different system all of our own, and flattering the consumer is the route to the top of the pops (in Darwinian time) and thus the route to dollars, gold, ducats, cheques, and bonuses.

What I'm trying to say is that you need to avoid making hard and fast decisions in these metaphysical realms too early in life. Some people advise avoiding them entirely. Once made at too young an age one might become too avid a consumer of those products which reinforce the decision with the flattery I referred to and before you know it your are conditioned into thinking it a certainty, it having been a bit of a whim at first, and also into the whole bag of tricks which is on board with the position. And they are not easy positions to ever step back from.

And if groups are formed of like-minded people then the reinforcement is jacked up a gear or two. But it is generally held that the search for reinforcement is an expression of doubt.

"It's no go the Yogi man
It's no go Blavatsky
All we want is a bank balance
And a bit of skirt in a taxi."

That's Louis MacNeice.

Oh no you haven't Francois. Are you suggesting the end of the consumer as the work-horse of modern society?

Your eagerness to turn a phrase caused you to lose sight of the dogma of materialism in this stage of its development. A candle will only burn at both ends if it has a wick sticking out of each.

I think it a trifle ungentlemanly to take a small slice out of my post and use it to evade responding to the general point of it. Trivialising my post. Allowing Setanta the obviously pleasureable indulgence of thinking it silly and pointless without him even having read it. That's a responsibilty you know.

And I deny you, dear Spendi, the right to be the sole judge of gentlemanliness.

I my view, it would be ungentlemanly if I dissected every sentence of your post to point out that the allegories and metaphors you used have little to do with the subject at hand.

For instance this one :
One obviously conclude that if it doesn't matter, then it's not substantive..

But I'll not undertake such ungracious task.

I'll point out, instead, that some of your assertions, used in other fields of mass manipulation like religion, to give people the feeling of guilt, hence controlling them.

You know pretty well that I ponder and even find some merit to the usefulness of religions to the vast masses of people.

So, you cannot tell me that I

In doing so, you are evading your own responsibility.

So are you defining your own gentlemanliness for yourself. Surely you will concede that such a quality can only be defined by those around you.



And likewise. It is not up to debaters to declare what is relevant to the subject at hand. That constitutes steering which is an offshoot of control obsessions.

The subject of the post is very germane to the matter at hand. That was my reason for posting it. If you can't see why that fact alone does not give you the right to declare that it has "little" to do with atheism and to be expected to be taken seriously. The very phrase is an admission that it had "something" to do with the subject at hand. However little. Thus it is identified as a slippery usage. One which seeks to give an impression when it hasn't actually done so. You should have said "nothing" and been straight about it.

It was to do with atheism under the exigencies of modern science driving people nuts. There is no reality. There is no explanation. And people want an explanation. If they didn't curiosity would vanish. And curiosity is a key driver of science. Thus a religious explanation prevents people going nuts however "daft" it is.

I didn't give the half of it actually.



I can't be sure what you mean by that. Matter is it's own effect. As Bertrand Russell explained. The atom is nothing but the radiations of itself. Nothing we can know at least.



Oh do please my good man. I will decide on the graciousness side of it.



Do I really need to point out again that guilt is far more cost effective than fear. What are 301 million uncontrolled people like? Can you not get it into your head that people need controlling to live in a civilisation. This terrible dread of the thought of being controlled is another characteristic of the control freak.



Did you type that looking down your lorgnette like a duchess? What snobbery. The vast masses of people indeed, for whom, unlike superior persons such as yourself, religion might be thought to have some usefulness.

Which, of course, concedes the whole point. If it has merit for them why preach against religion.



What responsibilty? I took it full blown with the post. You didn't answer the post. You cut and pasted a few words from it, out of context, and then used them to evade the post.

By your responsibilty for Setanta's thinking I meant him taking your snigger as enough evidence for my post being of no use. Being his guru in the matter.

Isn't that an oxymoron?

Your obsession with making people feel guilt or belittling them will have no effect on me whatsoever. You're guilty of what you reproach me a thousand fold..

I'm not trying to make anybody feel guilty Francois. Nor am I trying to belittle anybody.

I am putting forward an argument. To counter it by such a claim is ridiculous.

It is the argument which is the only cause of whatever feelings it produces. Not the person making it. It's a well known argument. Science has shown reality to be controlled by glands, genes, atoms and waves of probability. Science can provide no moral guidance, no values and no meaning. It doesn't even know what meaning means. No explanations.

All the serious scientists concur who think of this subject. They can do nothing else. Their science tells them. It has nothing to do with me.

You're thinking of science as it was 200 years ago.

It was fair enough to suggest you were snobby when you referred to the "vast masses" like that as if you atheists are superior and not a part of the masses to which entity you felt a little religion had some merit. Really snobbish.

The vast masses are nurses, soldiers, steel workers, garbage collectors and so on.

Looks like you are falling short of good arguments, Spendi.

As I've never talked about science in any religious thread, such claim is mere assumption and wrong interpretation on your part.

We started with you offering nothing but a sneer to my earlier longish argument.

We've got to where I am falling short of good arguments.

It might be best if we left it there.

Atheist group offers porn-for-scripture swap at UTSA
by Associated Press

Posted on March 3, 2010 at 9:07 AM

******

SAN ANTONIO -- A group of atheist students at the University of Texas at San Antonio is swapping pornography for religious texts other students trade in.

The "Smut for Smut" campaign is an annual campaign of the group Atheist Agenda at the UTSA campus. Group members contend that religious texts are, themselves, pornographic because of the violence and torture they contain and the sectarian violence they spark.

edgarblythe - Ah, well - They're kids.

Heavy handed indeed but they do have a point.

I love Moss coming down from the mountain with the ten commandments including the one about not killing and after getting piss ordering his most loyal followers to kill amount the people until their arms was to tired to swing swords any longer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25EYTbrmgM8

So now meet me Jesus meet me
Yeah, meet me in the middle of the air
And if these wings won't carry me
I won't need another pair.

Moss coming down from the mountain? That guy is one of the liveliest sources of free comic relief at this site.

That crapola about smut for smut is one of the reasons i abhor "organized" atheists. To my mind, the very idea of atheists organizing and forming a group is antithetical to the best reason for being an atheist, which is to think for one's self.

Actually that sounds like a good system - everyone gets exposed to a little bit of everything encouraging discovery and openmindedness.