Decline era classic, routine news. Boring decline is boring.
Once the secular view takes hold, nothing means anything anymore. If you can get away with grinding up human remains to use in dog food and you don't get caught, there is no reason to think it right or wrong. After all, the secular viewpoint is that it's just discarded meat like that of a horse or cow that has died.
Atheists make me laugh when they talk about "being good for good's sake." It makes me laugh hard. They are less than childlike and do not have any understanding of what sort of animal human beings are. If you tell them, "Do what comes naturally," they will crush your skull and eat your brain.
All my life I have watched as my principles, (my frontal lobes at least twice the size of those of ordinary people) based on absolutes, have been modified by mass media such that ordinary people can be easily trained to think any behavior normal, no matter how outrageous. During this entire time, ordinary people have claimed they are made in the same fashion as I am, that they have an internal compass needle that tells them if something is right or wrong and that this sense is independent of principles with religious fundamental assumptions.
The truth is, how could people ever be like me? They could never be like me. They have frontal lobes the size of chickpeas and brains no more sophisticated than those of housecats. For them, any code of behavior will always be relative, dynamic, rootless and ultimately almost infinitely flexible.
The average man has no innate sense of right and wrong. Their actions betray them. They are blank slates upon which any adaptable and convenient moral code can be erased and inscribed as simply as one modifies a blackboard.
Speaking as an atheist (I can do that any time I wish) I have to tell you that any atheist who promotes a popular ethic of atheism as a culture for his civilization is sicker and crazier than any Christian who has ever lived. These people think Christians are out of touch with reality. They themselves are working towards a civilization with no religious foundation. Are they smart enough to know how that exercise turns out? Like most Christians, they just fake it and pretend to know what they are doing.
It's like those old Roadrunner cartoons where Wil E. Coyote snickers as he cuts a circle with a chainsaw around his own feet.
You'll end up with a society where anybody found dead without means to afford a burial will be piled eight deep in common graves and interred maybe with bone scraps from animal science labs. God help us all.
23 comments:
"You'll end up with a society where anybody found dead without means to afford a burial will be piled eight deep in common graves and interred maybe with bone scraps from animal science labs. God help us all."
Oh come on. These were poor people buried by the state under contract with a local undertaker. The undertaker was doing what a lot of people do -- trying to maximize profit. It's free enterprise at work, the invisible hand of capitalism bitch-slapping conventional custom because profit is the one true religion.
Superstitious idiots are superstitious. And idiots.
What a load of horse shit. The last thing Australia needs is a God bothering Yank. No wonder you chose Queensland to pitch tent, despite the natural disaster risks.
There's a lot of talk in the media at the moment about multiculturalism being a failure, with immigrants importing their own culture enmasse and not intergrating. I'd say you fit that category. Bible bashing Yank with his head up his arse. Multikulti indeed.
I can't say I really care what happens to my body after I'm dead. What I do care about is whether or not anyone else gives a damn. Right now, the answer is "no".
Showing your true colors at last Tex. Something Americans seem to have brainwashed into them but I am surprised that you are so conditioned. The notion that if you don't support God, you are empty, loveless, and soulless. FFS this is like the blind describing how it is to see.
What you are mixing up is the difference between religion and faith. The human animal's primary macro response is to belong. In order to belong, similarities have to be recognized. Your chosen or adopted or hand-me-down religion is simply your team colors, the gang which you have decided to join. The religion could be anything at all but gains validity through faith.
Faith is acceptance. Truth and untruth are irrelevant if you have faith because faith is faith and, by definition, is only answerable to itself.
Maybe you are just making sure that when the shit really hits the fan that you keep your choices open as we degrade back into medieval ignorance.
Digger Banks.
Your reading comprehension is appalling.
Next time, instead of scanning the blog, read it before replying.
Your first mistake was thinking that you could possibly think of something that I haven't already worn down over decades.
This stuff is tired. It's juvenalia. Adolescent overcompensation.
What do you think happens during a medieval period? You think atheists proliferate? Again, you don't understand people. Only our decadent, dying civilization makes these perspectives possible. It is far less cool to pretend to be fighting opposition when all the good looking women are on the other side. Whole different ballgame.
You'll see.
Harder to play the jaded sophisticate in other conditions.
Plus, I'll tell you a secret.
IF you weren't born with an IQ over 160, you are not a jaded sophisticate. Most people with IQs over 160 aren't even jaded sophisticates.
The real thing doesn't sound like you at all. It's your vanity that makes you think you are too bright to believe in God. Your vanity.
P.S. Had a look at your blog.
You're a hardcore druid. That's an earlier religion than Christianity but nevertheless, a religion.
This planet doesn't need protection from us.
You'll find that out soon enough.
"Superstitious idiots are superstitious. And idiots."
Secular westerners are 'Useful Idiots', so what is your point?
Anyway...
If atheists had any backbone, they'd put their money where their mouth is and commit suicide.
After-all, if you truly believe in nothing, there will be no consequence and your consciousness will cease to exist, so you won't even know that you are dead.
However I have a feeling that in reality, even if they deny it until they are blue in the face, due to their childish temper tantrums and their anger at God, the last thing an atheist would want to do is hasten their Judgement.
As for those who place a misguided 'faith' in science, there is one key problem. Science does not even have all the questions, let alone all the answers. Science is also far too easily manipulated by politics to pass itself off as unbiased.
Finally for you limp wristed gaia lovers, what happens to ol' mother earth if an asteroid hypothetically blasted this ball of rock apart? What happens when the sun expands, fries the surface and renders this one planet out of billions into a barren rock akin to Mercury? Does gaia continue to be a mystical and spiritual force within? Or does this rock remain nothing more than a rock like it always has been?
In addition, what of Mars or Jupiter? Is there a 'mother mars' or a 'mother jupiter'? If so, why? Jupiter is a ball of gas. Hardly a fitting place for spiritual entity to 'commune with it's creation'.
- the Australian known as deadman
What do you think happens during a medieval period? You think atheists proliferate? Again, you don't understand people. Only our decadent, dying civilization makes these perspectives possible.
In all my 'scanning' (guilty) of your words over the past few months I cannot recall you pitching the God thing.
No doubt you realise that if any of your predictions come true (and I am with you on that subject) any succour will be found with the faithful. We gotta belong right? And when there's no TV, no internet, no organised leisure, we'll need to get on with our neighbours again.
I understand, like gays, like the mentally and physically handicapped, like foreigners that atheists will become fewer and less vocal as/if we move into a post-apocalyptic existence. Atheists will be easy prey.
Maybe it is vanity, maybe it is a lack of humility, but the only thing that makes sense to me about religion is that you get to belong to something. And as I said earlier belonging is important and maybe worth ignoring the bullshit and dogma for. I admire faith, and I wish I had it. I have no respect for religion.
... and what is it you believe you will lose by having faith in Christ? You think you might not get invited into a country club for intellectuals somewhere? Are they going to make fun of you? Are you going to be less attractive to girls?
If you really are a counterintuitive lateral thinker, then become a Christian and put your faith in Christ. We hope against hope. The best Christians know it's hopeless. That's why we need to believe. You are going to find that regardless of whether God exists or not, Jesus Christ is going to be the best thing that has ever happened to you.
Christ will take misanthropes. Christ will take cynics. Christ will take the hopeless. You repent for your wrongdoing in life, you put your faith in Christ, everything else will follow.
You guys think men like me don't know that Christianity is irrational and fantastic. Of course I know, I was the original revisionist. The fact is, crazy as Christianity is, it's still the sanest set of principles the world has ever known. You don't know what crazy is until you've seen everything else and where it naturally leads.
Tex, it sounds like you're making an appeal to the consequences of a belief, which I'm sure you know is a Philosophy 101 fallacy. Communal religion almost certainly makes a society stronger, and a surge of popular atheism probably is a hallmark of a decadent civilization; both of those premises stand to reason. But neither of them implies that there actually is a god dictating objective morality. That belief in god is good for society doesn't mean that god is really there.
And even if you accept the Bible as the word of a supreme moral authority, you still have to rely on human morality to cherry-pick which moral scriptures we're going to follow. Otherwise, we'd be suffering no witches to live, genociding tribal enemies and making sex-slaves of their virgin daughters, and stoning rebellious children in the street. I do have an innate moral sense, and it tells me that raping the virgin daughters of an enemy tribe is always wrong, even if god tells me to do it. If the ordinary person didn't have this sense, we'd still be living like the Bronze Age Hebrews. The average person realizes that raping children is always wrong, and is thus more moral than the god in the Bible.
I'm sure you've heard these arguments before, and probably made them yourself. That's why it never ceases to surprise me that you returned to Christianity; these arguments simply aren't refutable. God isn't real, and we are just monkeys in manpants. It's an unpleasant truth, but truth doesn't give a shit.
Digger.
You don't understand anything I've written up here.
You think you do. You're probably used to ordinary people who aren't too swift on this stuff.
Needless to say, you can't think of any "innate morality" that I can't instantly dismantle and reveal as a Christian principle which you assume to be a universal. That's not the way life is. The aboriginal population here has been raping kids for 80,000 years without batting an eye.
I predict anybody who appeals to "innate morality" as a social control will end up on the barbecue first, not last.
The Hebrew says "You will not suffer a poisoner to live," not "You will not suffer a witch to live." Another miss.
The reason that we don't see more thriving Atheist cultures in human history is that atheists usually don't last long enough anywhere to even be recorded in the historical accounts. Atheism is what a society turns to just before they get rubbed out.
You seem all too quick to make assumptions, all too conceited to accept other points of view, all too inflexible to accept that your opinions are just that, opinions.
An American Christian without humility and tolerance, hmmm, what's that about?
p.s. thanks for the druid tip, (hardcore eh?). I'm going to look into that since you are not the first to suggest it.
On the contrary, Tex, I do understand your argument (assuming you were addressing me and not Digger Banks).
"The fact is, crazy as Christianity is, it's still the sanest set of principles the world has ever known. You don't know what crazy is until you've seen everything else and where it naturally leads."
I agree with you; except for the child rape and all that in the OT, Christianity is a pretty decent set of principles. Western culture wouldn't be the same without it. I'm only pointing out the logical disconnect; the consequences of a belief are irrelevant to the fundamental truth of the belief. I would love to be a Christian - a purpose to life and a continued existence after death! What could be better? But I can't get around the fact that it's "irrational and fantastic." I'm mystified that you can. Doesn't your giant Neanderthal brain niggle at you about it?
"Poisoners" instead of "witches." Got it. Thanks. I'm sure that would be a great comfort to all the thousands of 'witches' that Christians have suffered not to live for the last couple millennia. If only god had intervened and fixed the mistranslation... Seems a small feat next to stopping the sun in the sky for Joshua to kill all the Amorites or nuking a couple of cities for fagginess.
I'm sticking with prohibition of child rape as an innate moral tenet in the human brain, at least with humans that have IQs over 90. If you include Aboriginal tribesmen and the Congoids of Darkest Africa in the sample, then obviously the outlook for humanity is less favorable. But if they like raping kids, Christianity isn't going to stop them. There are no commandments or scriptures in the Bible against child rape. You need human morality if you want to live in a society in which raping kids is prohibited, because god is apparently much more concerned with burning goat offerings.
"If atheists had any backbone, they'd put their money where their mouth is and commit suicide.
After-all, if you truly believe in nothing, there will be no consequence and your consciousness will cease to exist, so you won't even know that you are dead."
Christians are the ones who are required to put their money where their mouths are and commit suicide. After all, isn't there some kind of paradise floating on clouds with harps and angels waiting for you? Atheists believe that this life is our only life. What better excuse to preserve our existence than that?
Why would you choose to remain on this earthly plain if it is just some shitty prelude to eternal happiness? Why not jump the queue and stamp your full metal ticket now? We atheists have the rest of our lives to live the best we can. We've got shit to do.
"We atheists have the rest of our lives to live the best we can. We've got shit to do."
First off, I doubt you'd find many Christians of the opinion that suicide is a wise choice. Besides, there is no rush, the saints and I will enter into New Jerusalem in due course.
Secondly, should there be nothing on the other side, then what difference would it make if you lived an extra ten or twenty years?
In that instance, your consciousness will -cease- to exist. Your thoughts, your memories, your hopes, fears, desires and dreams will all vanish in a heartbeat.
You will -not- know whether you missed out or had an extra ten years.
You will cease to exist.
You may as well embrace nothingness, because you surely cannot ultimately avoid it, in that instance.
- deadman
Should there be nothing on the other side, then the difference is living life now. Already you are showing that you think this life is not worth living. Living for an extra ten or twenty years would mean providing for my family, and enjoying our time together. How Christian of you to assume otherwise...don't you believe in family, and life experiences? If consciousness does end, and all memories, hopes and fears vanish. Does it not make sense to you that we should enjoy and experience them while we can?
I embrace life while it is available. You fear death and subscribe to unproven notions of an afterlife, as some kind of reward for suffering through this life. You choose to embrace false promises at the expense of the only existence currently known to you, without doubt, to be real.
You are not thinking, but then your dogma does not require you to think. Just follow.
"Should there be nothing..."
"If consciousness does end..."
Should? If?
If you are indeed an atheist, then why the uncertainty? Do you believe in nothing or not?
"You fear death..."
Actually, quite the contrary, I'm somewhat curious to know the how and why. In addition, I do not fear the outcome, even if the outcome is nothingness. Death to me is not an end, it is merely a transition, one way or the other. Cue Alice In Chains.
"...your dogma...Just follow."
So pray-tell, what dogma would that be? Catholic dogma? Protestant dogma? Baptist? Orthodox? None of those denominations have any relevance to me. Just as the Mormons, JW's and SDA's don't have any relevance. As a result, I'm not following anyone else. It is my own chosen path.
"You are not thinking"
Wow, I was unaware that you had documentation on my level of brain activity.
Yet it is you who is -seemingly- unable to contemplate the idea of your consciousness ending. It is you who is -seemingly- and overly concerned about 'living life' to the point where, one could argue that it is in fact -you- who is fearful of death.
If it were not for one simple reason, I'd never understand the overly emotional response that atheists put forth when discussing religion. You'd think that if they truly believed in nothing, they'd dismiss the idea and concentrate on other matters. However, I am aware that the average atheist is simply 'angry' at God and as a result in denial. Which of course then gives rise to the highly emotive, arrogant and knee-jerk reactions where you have to wonder who they are trying to convince. Everyone else or themselves.
- deadman
"Should? If?
If you are indeed an atheist, then why the uncertainty? Do you believe in nothing or not?"
I do not purport to know what happens after death. That's a hobby for the religious. As of now, there is no evidence for the case that anything happens after death. I don't know, and you certainly don't know.
I believe in what I can see, hear, smell and touch.
" I do not purport to know what happens after death. That's a hobby for the religious. As of now, there is no evidence for the case that anything happens after death. I don't know, and you certainly don't know.
I believe in what I can see, hear, smell and touch. "
Wow, you just couldn't let it go, could you? Over two weeks later and that is the best argument you can come up with?
Of course I don't know with any certainty what happens upon death. That is part of what having -faith- is all about.
As for believing in the here and now, would that be the energies, forces, particles and atoms that this universe is constructed from or -your- mere perception of what reality actually is?
Hell, you've gone from an avid athiest to someone who does "not purport to know". Have a bit of backbone guy.
- deadman
Now you're just playing games. What are you really arguing for? Faith in a concept you don't know to be true, but hope is the case? You believe there is an invisible father figure floating in the sky, who watches your every move, every day. Who will reward you with an eternal afterlife floating on clouds, if you follow his 10 rules. Or punish you with eternal torture in a fiery lake, if you don't.
My position is simple. I don't subscribe to your bullshit fairytale, will not be told how to live my life, and choose to go about it according to my own moral compass.
You talk of backbone, but subscribe to a herd ideology which requires you to relinquish critical thought and subjugate yourself to an authoritative Overlord. Backbone indeed.
Enjoy.
"Now you're just playing games...Backbone indeed.
Enjoy."
T'would seem my previous response got lost into the ether...
Yes it has been fun. After-all, your emotional diatribe and pointless ridicule actually says more about you than it does about anyone else.
I'll say it again :
"the average atheist is simply 'angry' at God and as a result in denial. Which of course then gives rise to the highly emotive, arrogant and knee-jerk reactions where you have to wonder who they are trying to convince. Everyone else or themselves."
- deadman.
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