Knocking Out Fool Feels Mighty Good

My response to the Harris article:

As always when Sam Harris writes an article many people will compare his nonbelief in the gods of organized religions (atheism) to a sort of fundamentalism of it's own kind. This is grossly inaccurate for the following reason:

A lack of belief in a personal god who supposedly wrote a holy book chalk full of absurdities, blatant contradictions and gross immorality is not equivalent to a dismissal of any sort of spirituality or possibility of a higher intelligence or even a cosmic creative force. What it is a dismissal of is lunacy of fundamentalism.
Any sort of honest examination of personal gods the world over will reveal that the idea of an angry middle-eastern sky deity who demands animal sacrifices should be marginalized the same way UFO abduction stories are. Give one reason why such a deity does not seem just as ridiculous as Zeus. The problem is that when a modern person reads the holy books, they interpret them from a modern perspective, which was not at all how they were written to be interpreted. A day *really* is a day, not a thousand years for instance. Only severe grasping would suggest that the original story tellers meant something different. The modern person overlaps their modern enlightenment onto these scriptures and turns them into something that they were not intended to be. It is very true that a reading of the bible for instance, in it's own context without cherry picking, leads to more fundamentalism and not more open-mindedness towards other viewpoints. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" and the penalty is a brutal death- what part of this statement is open to discourse? This is not open to questions of metaphor or allegory, it is literal.

As a former fundamentalist Christian myself I am very familiar with the religious meme. Fundamentalists are duplicitious folks who masquerade as normal citizens, while in the back of their minds they are not satisfied with anything short of complete and total theocracy and diminishment of any other form of belief. The scriptures of the two major American religions make it undeniably clear that other religions are abominations. Only a completely distorted and disingenuous liberal misinterpretation of these scriptures would lead to the fantasy that we could somehow have rational discourse with these people, or that plurality is possible within this matrix of absolutism.

oUT OF THE pIE hOLE and back to normal

Now that I'm firmly out of the pie-hole I can flacidly tread back to my normal way of life. I still have to set up a computer in my new place, so I may disappear for awhile at some point.

Sam Harris has a new Salon article that's good. He's coming out with a new book in September which looks like it's going to be a collection of responses to irate Christian mail replies to his first book. I think it's called "Reply to a Christian Nation".

This is a free article and requires no subscription info, but there is a little advertisement to wade through.

"The disbeliever

Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith," on why religious moderates are worse than fundamentalists, 9/11 led us into a deranged holy war, and believers should be treated like alien-abduction kooks. "

Moment of Zen

I never thought in my entire life I'd be tired of sex. I seriously don't ever want to see a naked woman with a perfect body ever again. Now I understand those guys who prefer obese women. Perfection can get stale after awhile. You need a little character now and then-a little asymmetry, something out of sync, something dissonant, some offhanded odor that makes a smelling salt seem like a summer's breeze.

Actually, I'm in the doghouse right now.

And frankly, I couldn't much care. I have about 5 sperm left, and I'm counting on saving at least one of the little bastards.

This leads me to my moment of zen, courtesy of Alex G:

Let us humbly bend our necks and ask ourselves the following:

"If a man makes a statement
deep in the middle of a forest
where no woman can hear him...

Is he still wrong?"

Sankara Saranam

I'm not at all sure what to make of this guy. Some of the things he has supported (such as the idea that AIDS may not be caused by HIV virus) seem preposterous in 2006. However, he's a gifted logician and sharp speaker. I found some of the monologues in his radio broadcasts to be excellent. He has spent decades as a monostic and calls his pranayama "sense introversion" which I think is an apt description for the modern world. Haven't read his book "God without Religion" but it got good reviews.

http://www.godwithoutreligion.com/roundtable.shtml

Jesus, the fictional character is fun to listen to.

Tit Dirt

Danny is at it again.

http://www.tourettesguy.com/videos/titdirt/

Rules:

*Make sure kids are not nearby

*Turn volume down if necessary

*Make sure nobody knows you enjoy watching this

* Pretend to yourself that you think this is sad and sick even though you enjoy it

* Pretend that Danny has free will and chose to be this way to uphold your foundational belief that things make sense.

* Go have a beer or have sex, praising yourself for being better than Danny.

I Borrowed a House From the Bank

I looked at a bunch of these:





But didn't have enough of this.










I settled for one of these

Cotton Pickers

Capitalism is the most horribly corrupt economic system. The only thing worse is everything else.

Trying to buy a house makes you realize that life is just a lottery. Dick, Pussy, Money, Power, and the protection of offspring. Suck my balls, lick my dick, pick my fucking cotton.

In the immortal words of Huey P. Long- "He who has Gets!",
and everyone else does this:


(Cotton Pickers)

In the immortal words of David Bowie:

As you grow older everyone thinks you'll be wiser but that's not what happens, what happens is you realize that everything leads to nothing and it's just chaos, Fuckall.

Only recently did I realize that "Fuckall" is a British slang word, and is not to be confused with "fuck all". The difference is possibly only slight, but there is a meaningful difference. Personally, I appreciate the term "fuckall' because it says so much so quickly and with such force. I could not agree more. I simply could not agree more. Just simply and prosaically - FUCKALL.

Best Political Satire Ever Made Hands Down

Last night after watching the film "Flight 93" on A&E, I felt a sense of nausea and my hands were shaking. I had peeled off all the fingernails of my left hand from nervousness. It was a sense of dread, that there is no meaning, no sense in all of life. I still can't shake it, I just can't move on from this.

For whatever reason I switched it to headline news after midnight and caught a glimpse of Stephen Colbert (pic above) making some mildly humorous jokes at an annual presidential dinner/semi-roast. Watching the clips I would have had no idea what significance this Stephen Colbert segment had. Only later when I watched the entire thing (available in the link below) did it occur to me how extraordinary an event this was. Without the slightest bit of joking or hesitation I can say that this speach by Colbert is very likely the most powerful and unnerving political speach I have ever witnessed. It is made all the more powerful by the sheer look of disgust on the faces of the president and the audience. I felt the same sense of nervousness, and fingernail peeling anxiety listening to Colbert poetically say everything I want to say in front of the president and all of his men.

Stephen Colbert has the biggest balls of any man I have ever seen.

He takes a minute or two to get rolling, and he doesn't relent from there.

The most powerful political speach you may ever see in your life, completely eliminated from the nightly news media.

Penn and Teller call it Like it is

Penn and Teller's wonderful show "Bullshit" tackles a touchy subject- the bible. Somehow, the entire episode was put on the web right here. There's also a great segment on Chiropractic, but I'm not sure if it's on the net anywhere.


Reason and Logic are not perfectly reliable ways to interpret the universe. But experience has shown that nothing else even compares. Bullshit is bullshit is bullshit.

Bush Hires Fellow Echohead to Bellow Bullshit

Profoundly brain washed talk show Bullshitter "Tony Snow" has been hired as press secretary for his extraordinary ability to hold staunch opinions in the face of glaring evidence. I started listening to talk radio after 9/11 pretty much for the first time. I wanted to know more about what was going on, and quite literally, the *only* radio stations that come in on the AM dial are right wing talk show propaganda stations, even in this blue state of Washington. I was hooked like a school boy sneaking into a titty bar. My gut reaction was that the shows I was listening to were jokes. They were like Jerry Springer or COPS, where people just watch to get a kick out of the fact that there are other people more screwed up than they are. People don't actually *believe* this horse-shit do they? But then I realized...they do. Oh my. People like this Tony Snow for instance, not necessarily one of the more absurd free-will-less fools I would listen to, but absurd nonetheless. Get a load of this exercise in creative imagination. Can anything spinning be spun more than this? :

Tony Snow-Job Quote:

"Evolutionary theory, like ID, isn't verifiable or testable. It's pure hypothesis -- like ID -- although very popular in the scientific community. Its limits help illuminate the fact that hypotheses are only as durable as the evidence that supports them."

To anyone familiar with basic biological science this is like saying the earth is flat. This is flat insane. It makes you wonder, if people can be in denial or distort reality to this disagree, what else are they capable of? What manner of free will is it possible for someone like this to possess?

Future of Televangelism

Christian fundamentalism is decreasing gradually in the country. It is even decreasing in the black community in which over 60% are Christians. As the black community increases in wealth, they move away from Christianity. Even watching black church sermons, you will notice that almost all of them are rants about prosperity. They typically follow the following progression:

1.) Pastor says that the reason his congregation is not wealthy and happy all the time is because they are not doing enough of such and such.

2.) Pastor implies that there is a cause and effect between actions and happiness and prosperity.

-- Fastforward one week--

3.) Pastor does a sermon explaining spiritual riches and how all that glitters is not gold.

4.) Next week, pastor explains how if everyone just did this or that they would have more financial prosperity...

Its a never ending absurd circle. The solution is to just get some money and then lose the faith altogether because once you can save that 10% and invest it will do more than ceaseless prayer to solve your money woes. You might even be able to afford that new X360 and a subscription to internet porn.

So what happens when the black church fades away? What will be left?

I bring you, the future of televangelism

How do we avoid it?

I was deeply concerned this morning as I read Israel's claim that the axis of terror is leading us towards the first world war of the 21st Century. It's the first time I've heard a public official actually say what we're all thinking. At first my mind was flooded with images of human carnage- melted bodies plastered gooily to charred remnants of houses and buildings. Environmental destruction for hundreds of miles- an eerie silence amidst a once bustling downtown, now infested with mutated rats bleeding from their guts from radiation, lapping fragments of liquified skull, half digested fecal material and roasted human fat sandwiched like oozing overcooked smores from pigeon pecked bones.

But then my mind turned to more selfish things. Will we ever see another superbowl or world series again? What good is my career or my desire to buy a house when gas is 5 bucks a gallon and my earnings are cut in half? What good is my friend Patrick's construction when nobody can afford to construct? What good is looking to the future with this on the horizon? How would the Christians react were they to see their made-up bible prophecies come to fruition? Would we then elect a Pat Robertson? Could I afford a plane ticket out of the country fast enough?

Frankly, I don't see a way to prevent Iran from getting nukes. They picked a perfect time to taunt us, bogged down in Iraq, with public outrage at a failed foreign invasion sold falsely by knowingly shaky information at best and bald faced lies at worst. We bomb them and they just keep working even harder, garnering public support not just from their country but from the growing global anti-American sentiment. We bomb them and we start to lose the liberal Iranian youth who listen to classic rock and love American culture and who may be the only ones willing to "greet us with flowers in the street". We bomb them and suddenly more terrorist organizations sprout up and more technology, organization and financial supporters are willing to back them. Life is tough when you're at the top of the totem pole. In short, I think we're screwed. We may be living at the height of the American Empire right now. It may not ever get any better than this. I see no solution, and now some commentators are pretty much giving up and saying "maybe we can live with a nuclear Iran".

I'll have to agree with George Bush on this one- no, we can't. Good god, please no. It's unimaginable. In fact I think most of us agree since most of us backed the Iraq invasion (based on the false intelligence of course) for the same exact reasons we are concerned with Iran, only Iran is demonstrably more dangerous. Another decade or two and they have an arsenal like the old Soviet Union (as if even 1% of their arsenal wouldn't be enough already), and we may as well be bargaining with a group of people teleported straight from the 9th century who have the power to end civilization and are unafraid of death. But it may be unstoppable. I can picture all out war. With all stops pulled, it may seem an easy victory to us now. Civilian deaths? Who's counting now? Just let Jed and Jimbob from the cable hunting channel have their way and "turn it to glass",
oh... "in the name of Jesus" and republican family values of course.

Then enter every Tom Dick and Harry who thinks they can gain a stake while we're not looking- North Korea, China, Russia. It's too scary to fathom. We've all thought about this for years. We simply cannot let these types of people have nuclear weaponry. It's why congress gave Bush a blank check and the great majority of us didn't complain too hard. Only now it's for reasons that actually exist. It's inconceivable they develop these weapons. It's inconceivable that a major financial backer of terrorism can hand Abdul two pounds of enriched uranium to smash together on a London subway. How wouold we even moniter where the nuclear material is going? Oh my god, it's even worse than I imagined now I think about it. I welcome other points of view on this, because I just can't see any way around it, some force will have to be used eventually and that will be almost as bad as nothing at all- but not quite. We simply can't let it happen.

Imagine if you're an Israeli, and a country that wants you eliminated for religious reasons is being allowed to construct a nuclear program. How would you feel?

Nature is Bullshit

Nature sucks. It's meaningless, it has no rhyme or reason. Those who think the sound of the birds chirping amongst the tulips on a sunny spring morning is the glorious handy work of a loving designer are delusional. Fact is, tulips are nothing but giant sex advertisements, and the birds are chirping because they are fighting over sex and food. Fruit tastes good because thats how plants get their seeds spread. The fact is that all people really want is to be better than others. The easiest way to put your friends in a good mood is to tell them your misfortunes. The easiest way to get them in a state of self doubt and anxiety is to tell them that you just made lots of money. The solution to all this is simply inventing a god. This way, you can make unsuccess seem successful.

Nothing is as it appears, and truth is in inimical opposition to human well-being. This leaves us with a question- do we want to be happy or know the truth? Of course, many will say that they are happy despite the nature of the world, but invariably when you talk to them, they are trapped in a mythic belief system which involves self-deception. The more I learn about the nature of the world, the less likely it seems to me that there could possibly be anything meaningful about any of this experience. No god, no souls, no purpose. No free will, no true ingenuous human actions under the sun which do not involve some sort of secret darwinian scam.

On top of that, I'm tired of studying for my exams. I'm tired of seeing shit like this:

Praise Jesus!

And let me just insist on this Easter Sunday, that there isn't a god of any sort, and no human soul. Altruism is no more than a darwinian power tool. The universe is worse than a tragedy.

Eat drink and be merry.

Surely you're Joking Mr. President

If you ever want to read an extraordinary and entertaining book, check out Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, Adventures of a Curious Character.

The word "genius" is bandied around loosely these days. I've always thought it interesting how 50% of the people you poll claim to have an I.Q. in the upper 95% of the world. Ive come to believe that a normal healthy person with dead average intelligence (for a normal healthy person) should score about 120 on a standard I.Q. test. So it's not surprising that virtually every normal healthy person I know claims to have a gifted level I.Q. I guess this means they can tie their shoes or maybe do their own taxes. "Gifted" is average, lets all get over it, we're not all that bright, we're just surrounded by people who have deficiencies. Due to the Flynn effect, I.Q. tests and scores are virtually meaningless. If any of us took an I.Q. test from 50 years ago, we would score in the mega-genius category. Always remember that there are people vastly more intelligent than you are, who believe in virgin births and crop circles. So even if you're just an average gifted person, you may still be much more intelligent than people who solve puzzles better than you, but believe in crop circles and virgin births.

But this Richard Feynman is like Da Vinci reincarnated, a true renaissance man. His stories are entertaining and amazing. Here's a little snippet of him I saw today- Feynman

--The above woman "only" has an I.Q. of 120. Pat Robertson's is higher, I'm sure. Go figure. Yet another reason there can't possibly be a God.

What They Pray For

--"If he actually believes this bullshit, it might
help guide him towards a better life"

--"Oh Lord please!
If you remove these anal warts,
I swear I'll never try double penetration again..."

--"But Lord, I slaughtered them all...
Man, woman, child and beast. Why dost thou
repeatedly not keepest thy end of the deal?"

--"Oooh, here it comes bubblin' up.
He who farts in church must sit in his own pew, hehe"

Pastor Tilton- He talks to:

The Devil
Tongues

The Power of Temptation

I have no idea who this guy is, I just think he reminds me of someone. He reminds me of someone who is about to preach a sermon about warding off the temptations of bodily desire.

Oh ya, I remember who this guy reminds me of...







Pastor John Hagee

Hagee on 9/11 and Islam

If reincarnation is true, this guy was once a member of a dark age church, gnawing giant turkey thighs straight off the spit in between excursions with 15 year old girls bound and gagged in the bushes.

This guy speaks with the certainty that God Almighty is talking through his lips.

Does it look to you as if this guy has a weight problem? Is this someone who you can take seriously preaching to you?

It was the woman afterall, who first ate of the fruit of temptation....







Or was it?

Will the Real Christians Please Stand Up

If the early church believed that war was wrong and that Christians should not participate in the military, why dont most Christians believe that now? How did Christians make peace with the idea of war? John Driver tells the history of the early church from the close of the New Testament through Augustine. He shows how there was a gradual shift in thinking as Christians became involved in the military until they lost their peaceful approach to solving conflict.


I wrote the following note to a friend and thought I'd post it here. I've made a few alterations to make it more readable:

Today I was listening to the right winger Michael Medved's show. He had a Christian guest on who was one of the ones recently rescued from being a hostage in Iraq. Medved and his callers ganged up on this poor guy and accused him for not supporting violence and war and having a twisted sense of good and evil because he was not willing to commit violence against enemies. This guy had this radical and bizarre idea that violence against enemies was "non-Christian", can you believe it? It was the most hysterically funny thing and I wish I could have taped it for you. Here we had a very humble sounding, thoughtful Christian, just back from being captured no less (his friend was the guy who was killed) who simply wanted to follow Jesus and be Christ-like, who was not willing to wage violence against enemies or support violence due to its total contradiction to his Christian faith.

The guy was getting harangued by Christian callers and Medved! It was a perfect example of what I've been going on and on about. Here we had a *real* Christian on a right wing talk show! It was astonishing as one caller quoted some scripture from the book of Joshua about how god commanded the Israelites to kill every living person in a city. The caller was trying to draw a parallel for the current situation, justifying war waging as a Christian ideal or God's will. It was just astonishing. I could not have contrived a better example of what I've been trying to say. The callers in were all Christians and they were unanimous.




It goes to show... you get an *actual* Christian, you know, one who *actually* follows the teachings of Jesus or at least takes them seriously, and you put this guy on a right winged family values talk radio show and he is A-BOMBED!


Christianity in America has become little more than a political ploy.

Dawkins

"I believe natural selection represents a truly hideous sum total of misery...a process of misery that has given rise to immense beauty."--Richard Dawkins

I love this picture of Richard Dawkins (Darwinian evangelist). It just has that penetrating look of deconstruction. His eyes are similar to Midas' touch, only everything he looks at turns straight to shit.

In reality, I think Dawkins is awesome. I once despised the man, following the line of complainers about his uncompromising "faith" in stark naturalism. Once I pulled my head out of my sigmoid colon, I realized that Dawkins really wasn't all *that* bad. The fact is that Dawkins has a mountain of evidence and lots of semi-testable ideas which can be evaluated and make a butt-load of sense. The fact is that there is not one competing explanation for the origin of life and it's behaviors- not one single one that can be tested and evaluated. No wonder his opposition is so irate.

"Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators"

-Richard Dawkins

Immense Beauty

The more I've listened to debates concerning naturalistic evolution versus faith the more I've come to realize that there really are three different camps. One is 97% of biologists who study the stuff who are almost entirely in agreement with Dawkins' basic ideas. The second camp is tiny. It's maybe 3% of biologists, most of whom don't conduct serious research or serious work, who grasp onto ideas which are faith based and completely untestable. They generally have religious backgrounds like Michael Behe. The third camp- an astonishingly huge group of people, are people who have almost no idea of what the hell they are talking about, yet want to agree with the 3% crowd without bothering to learn about evolution. They remind me of the talk radio hosts who don't believe in global warming who fish around for some expert (usually a guy who was paid off by some conservative think-tank to do corporate PR and disguise it as scientific opinion) to come on their show to cleverly make reality dizzy. "But volcanoes millions of years ago spewed vastly more CO2 than cars do today" they might say. And you always feel like calling in to say that an asteroid obliterated 95% of all life on earth 65 million years ago and we all turned out just fine, so who gives a shit about giant asteroids either.

`Look how powerful a male I am, because I can afford to wear my balls outside my body, in the most vulnerable position. You'd better not mess with me because I am proving my strength and my ability as a fighter.'

Dawkins on balls

Cheney, I'll be praying for ya

---This is a still life of me upon learning that there is no soul. Either that, or it's a man from Nantucket.

Well, the news media took up the big failed prayer study today. You can read about it everywhere. or on onegoodmove.org (see my links column). One of the weird findings was that those in a test group who knew they were being prayed for had more complications. Researchers postulated that this may be due to the extra anxiety of knowing that people are worrying about them, and/or the psychological distress of knowing that your condition is serious enough to warrant people you don't even know to pray for you. Anyways,

I thought the following comment was hillarious. This may turn out to be a running national joke. Taken from onegoodmove website:

Study: Prayer doesn't affect heart patients

There is an important lesson in this for those that believe in the efficacy of prayer. If you have to pray don't tell the victim, then at least you'll do no harm.
In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.
Oh, I almost forgot, my letter to the VP.
Dear Dick,
I heard you have a history of heart problems. I just want you to know that if, God forbid, you are hospitalized for treatment that I'll be praying for you.
A friend

The Lie of Happiness

From SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND (July 2005):

The Lie of Happiness

Lying to ourselves may be one way of maintaining our mental health.Several classic studies indicate that moderately depressed people actually deceive themselves less than so-called normal folks. Lauren B. Alloy of Temple University and Lyn Y. Abramson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison unveiled this trend by clandestinely manipulating the outcome of a series of games. Healthy subjects who participated in the games were inclined to take credit when they won the rigged games and also typically underestimated their contribution to the outcome when they did poorly.

Depressed subjects, however, evaluated their contributions much more accurately. In another study, psychologist Peter M. Lewinsohn, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, showed that depressives judge other people's attitudes toward them far more accurately than non-depressed subjects. Furthermore, this ability actually degenerates as the psychological symptoms of depression lift in response to treatment.

Perhaps mental health rests on self-deception, and becoming depressed is based on an impairment of the ability to deceive oneself. After all, we are all going to die, and a great deal of the world lives in abject misery. These are hardly reasons to be happy!- D.L.S


I can't help but think of the Dalai Lama when I read this. Is it possible that a spirituality based on feeling happy is basically just a neorological bolstering of self-deception mechanism through reinforcement (brainwashing)? Seems so to me. Demonstrably and obviously so.