Atheism

This was one his more reasoned posts. And his biggest issue really shone through. His biggest problem is that he needs a piece of ass.

Wilso means a co-operative piece of ass. It has been orchestrated for him, so much so that he takes it for granted as being the natural order of things, which it is not, and thus he has avoided being a desperate supplicant at the Throne of Venus and finding he has not a single card to play.

His fundamentalist misogyny is there for you all to see. Plain as a pikestaff. He wouldn't dare use the expression "a piece of ass" in the presence of Venus or any of Her priestesses.

All this "I'm looking out for women's rights" is sweet talk girls. It comes from reading Captain Marvel type tripe.

You're a piece of ass. As Christian as Christian gets. They don't come more fundie Christians than that my dear.

"Pray, my dear, quoth my mother,have you not forgot to wind up the clock?

Laurence Sterne having a go at describing the moments of his conception. (His italics.) And he is a long while getting born. It is a book being denied to young minds by various subtle procedures. School boards for example.

As a matter of fact Wilso Augustus John once had a jibe at Eric Gill, a real craftsman, along the lines you are fantasing about. He said that Gill's obsession with the erotic was due to him not getting it very often.

And Eric was not only taking care of the wife but two of his sisters, the housemaid, who was on request, a lanky intellectual colleague in the Fabian Society and sundry prostitutes and casual pick-ups as the need arose. He even brought in help with his wife.

The jibe is envy motivated. Knowing Gill would not seek to prove it wrong and be quite content to let John make such a crass jest about him. Gill might well have asked him to put such a story out to distract attention. They were mates. Gill knew Frank Harris as well. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the winds blows with Frank.

It boils down to Gill's lecture The Artist as Flunkey. And flunkeys are given to that sort of snorty-snotty quick quip.

The insult is really at the audience for the jibe. Especially any who had an inkling of Gill's unusual lifestyle.

There is a wonderful biography of Eric Gill by Fiona MacCarthy which doesn't lend itself to speed reading.

Nowadays the artist is flunkey to a ******* committee of appointed dick-heads and that word, in the plural, which only applies to female persons when seen one-dimensionally and which runs the show.

Hmmmm.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2014/0419/8THEIST-license-plate-in-NJ-Why-states-can-t-rein-in-the-vanity-plate-monster

I knew a woman in Ohio who wanted a plate reading "Atheist," and who was told she could not have one (this was in the '90s). So when she complained to me, i asked her if any of her friends were an attorney. She went back to the BMV with her application form, and said, roughly: "Hi . . . you turned down this application last week and i'd like to talk to your supervisor. Oh, by the way, i'd like to introduce my attorney." She had her plates in about two weeks is is normal for vanity plates.

I think you meant "the BMW". Sounds just like them, those stupid Bavarian petty fascists!

Damned Catholic fascists, too!

Isaiah 34:7
King James Version (KJV)
7 And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness.

people believe this ****?

Yea; isn't it just amazing!

It's still happening. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2014/0419/8THEIST-license-plate-in-NJ-Why-states-can-t-rein-in-the-vanity-plate-monster-video

Ah. I was never Catholic. I didn't know that tithing wasn't a Catholic thing. Thanks for pointing that out. Still, I don't think 4.7% out of the Church's till speaks much for xtian compassion and generosity. If I were a betting man, I'd say that the charitable individuals you were speaking of would find another way to help the underpriveleged if the Church weren't there. I do.

Yes, i agree that individual generosity is not contingent upon a religious confession. I am just remarking that religious organization can make that spirit of giving more effective.

I'm wondering if they may not just be opportunistically exploiting a niche in order to further their ulterior motives. Not sure.

In some cases that may be true--however, my remarks were predicated upon the observed behavior of Catholic Social Services and Lutheran Social Services, neither of whom advertised themselves as significant agents of charity, although such a claim would have been warranted. The crazy holy roller who ran Faith Mission was just the type of a religious snake oil salesman like Jim Bakker, but he offered genuinely sustantiave aid to homeless men, and wasn't making a big promotional opportunity out of it. I only knew about what he did because i was working in the charity industry. The Baptists disgusted me because in my experience they offered as little as possible and then tried to promote themselves for their charity and compassion, while keeping homeless people as much at arm's length as possible. I was working in a family shelter, and our clients were truly needy, so i tended to take a jaundiced view of those who were juts in it for the publicity. My own employer went for maximum public relations effect with the least expenditure--they relied on FEMA and local charitable foundations to provide the funds for their activities on behalf of the homeless. I stayed with them for about two years until i could find a better job.

There was a member here whom you may or may not have encountered. He died a few years ago. His screen name was Dyslexia, and he worked his entire adult life for government social services agencies. He essentially made the same observation about the charity of organized religions, and specifically that Catholic and Lutheran Social Services could be relied on to deliver the goods for clients.

It's a bit of poetic expression Wilso which you have picked out for some reason or other.

They believe in love thy neighbour which means not forcing them to work in poor conditions by bargain hunting and putting their best efforts into the services they provide themselves.

So you can see what a small number of people it is that you are over-excited about.

Enough for one more meal and you getting yourself a virtue frisson eh?

I would have said "if the Church wasn't there" but I would only point out my preference to people who made a big fuss about one of my typos. I prefer "if the Churches wasn't there" after reading a lot of 18th and 19th century literature.

All contributions to the Catholic Church are voluntary. And at the collection plate level tax has been paid on the incomes from which they are taken.

Does anybody want the Catholic Church to not be here?

Which applies to your "I do". Which might be an assertion anyway.

I respect the weight of your greater experience and I hope I'm not coming across as being universally dismissive of Catholic charities. (I have even less experience with Lutherans.) They're obviously there. But are they there because of their religious beliefs or simply because they're humans who share the common human trait of compassion, and are only incidentally linked by a common belief system? I can't think of any reason why they couldn't be erroneously attributing their compassion to their religion, unaware that the compassion has ontological priority to that faith system. Depending on which part of the Bible you empasize, you can justify being either genocidal or self-sacrificing. Seems to me that the relious motivation is a false attribution based on a Hobbesian worldview of the "nasty, brutish and short" variety. Seems that Hobbes had a very narrow and uninformed view. More contemporary analyses suggest that natural selection favors cooperation and compassion at least as much as it does competition. Maybe more.

Firstly, Hobbes provides us with some useful insights into the possible origins of human governance. His was a jaundiced view, no doubt. He wrote at the time of the strife between the first King Charles and the Parliament, and of the three civil wars in the 17th century. You were referring to a passage in Leviathan. He also wrote Behemoth, the full title of which was Behemoth, or The Long Parliament . The Long Parliament fought the civil wars against King Charles, and against the Scots and the royalists after Charles had been executed.

It helps to understand the context in which things are written, and it also helps to understand the context of a passage you quote. After the "discovery" of the so-called new world, European intellectuals indulged in all manner of foolish flights of philosophical fancy, one of the most popular being that of the "noble savage" living in harmony with nature and one another. Hobbes was arguing against the concept of a summum bonum, a greater good as motivating human governance. In fact, he argued that the fear of death, of violent death, was what motivated people to join together to form governments, and also the desire to take from others what that group then desired. He was dismissing the idea of the summum bonum, and arguing that the motive was a summum malum, a greatest evil, being that fear of violent death. So, with a general sneer at the philosophes, he is describint life in a state of nature:

"In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Hobbes is useful both for some basic ideas about human nature which, although perhaps colored by the political turmoil of his times, were not likely to be those of a Pollyanna, but more likely those of Ebeneezer Scrooge, and never to be reformed. They are a useful counterbalance to the unrealistic ideas of the Enlightenment. Hobbes was not the only one to take such a jaundiced view, either--c.f. Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. The philosophes were, i suspect, a standing annoyance to the skeptics of the 17th and 18th centuries.

I am not talking about why people are charitable, and i think that in fact i've pointed out that people will likely be charitable whether or not there is organized religion. I'm just pointing out that "faith communities" can organize charitable endeavors more effectively than individuals can. Without a doubt, religion can also exploit such sentiments to give Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker solid gold bathroom fixtures, too.