Words
A few randomly-assorted thoughts for the day.
From Charles McGrath again, Charles McGrath of the pessimistic view of Harry Potter’s geriatric years; this time he’s talking about Beowulf:
Far more entertaining than a lonely troll with grief issues, or one working through identity questions, is the thing from the night who (to adapt Mr. Heaney) bites into your bone lappings, bolts down your blood and gorges on you in lumps.
Yup. Don’t wanna hear about the troll’s identity questions (or why it’s clutching that Volkswagen) or grief issues, wanna hear about the munching thing from the night. Next from PZ commenting on some fundamentalist silliness about why ‘Homosexuality is sin’:
I wish someday someone could explain to me why a vast Cosmic Intelligence, omnipotent and all knowing, is so darned worried about which appendage touches which orifice in a mob of billions of busy, short-lived beings in whom he has imbued a desperate desire to bump appendages/orifices. It seems so petty and futile.
Also from Pharyngula, this time from the sidebar random quotation, from Taslima Nasrin in an interview in Free Inquiry magazine, winter 1998/1999, Vol. 19 No. 1:
I don’t find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. I believe religion is the root, and from the root fundamentalism grows as a poisonous stem. If we remove fundamentalism and keep religion, then one day or another fundamentalism will grow again. I need to say that because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems. But Islam itself oppresses women. Islam itself doesn’t permit democracy and it violates human rights.
And a point Stewart made in a comment on ‘Domain, Nothing’:
What Bunglawala doesn’t do is address his completely different standards for evaluating scientific and religious claims. But then, he doesn’t evaluate religious claims, he just accepts them. How many religious people would there be left if they raised the bar as high for the claims of religion as they do for those of science?
Very good question. Not, of course, one that Bunglawala is likely to answer.
Still, at least M Bunting’s retiring.
Nick, does that prove that god does or doesn’t exist?
Stewart – I think it proves Demos (her new employers) may have found God…
Interesting that the 2nd amendment should get stuffed in there with all that bible-babble. Maybe those people think that if they can pretend they own it, we will come to associate all guns with fundamentalism, and thus avoid them [guns] in revulsion, and then when the fundies pull out their weapons we will all be helpless.
[makes note to self to become unhelpless]
Angiportus: Good point. Why should only the right wing fundies be armed. Count me in as one liberal who is not particularly sold on the “disarm everyone” meme promoted by some liberals.
To follow-up a little on what OB quoted, it is, on the one hand, very understandable that some people would like to think someone is watching over them. I think it was Dennett who pointed out that for most of us, all our formative years are spent in a situation where our parents fill that role and it conditions us to expect that that’s what the world and the universe are like. It’s also somewhat understandable that people want to cling to this comforting illusion when things go dreadfully wrong, forcing them to invent theology to keep a good god up on his perch despite what would otherwise have to be interpreted as an evil abuse of unlimited power (or a lack of existence). The thing that I find stamps a great part of our species as simply perverse is that when there are basically two competing worldviews on offer and one has 100% of the existing evidence on its side (because it is composed of absolutely nothing but the evidence) and the other has none, people still bend over backwards to give the worldview with the worse punishments in store (atheism has no equivalent to eternal damnation – the closest it gets is a very long religious service) the benefits of much more than mere doubt, because – I suspect – it’s also the one with the hope of existence never completely ceasing. And because the one they so want to be true has nothing factual to recommend it, they have to severely handicap the opposing view. And this is done by demanding very high levels of proof for the findings of science. And this is where you get the very same people who say that 2,000-year-old hearsay about a resurrection is adequate evidence to establish it as fact trying to find reasons not to accept the results of very recent, exhaustively documented, scientific experiments. Yep, that’s us all over and I call it perverse as hell.