2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

We take this opportunity to thank you all who visited us, shared your opinions, disagreed or challenged us.

We also wish you a prosperous new year and hope to meet you again

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 33,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 12 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Chronicles of YHWH 37: Paternity

Bethlehem, 2,014 years ago, in a certain cattle enclosure:

Joseph (Looking perplexed): Immaculate conception, huh.

Mary: Yes dear. Completely immaculate. The lord is great. I will praise his name forever.

Short pause. Joseph scratches his head, while looking at the new born baby.

Joseph: He looks slightly Chinese.

Mary: Well, he is supposed to be a saviour of the entire world. Perhaps Chinese are more acceptable worldwide. The lord is great, and his ways incomprehensible to us humans.

Joseph: Hmmm. Say, this angel who originally told you about your immaculate conception: was he Chinese?

Mary: No, he wasn’t. Look, what are you trying to drive at, Joseph?

Joseph: Nothing much. It’s just that, well, this is all a bit overwhelming. I wasn’t expecting our first baby to be Asian.

Mary: I know. The Lord of Hosts is quite overwhelming. But his ways are perfect, for the Lord is great. I will praise his name forever.

Joseph: There will be a lot of awkward questions from our friends and relatives.

Mary: You are over-thinking this whole thing, my dear. We should praise and worship the lord for giving us such a precious gift. Through us, the saviour of humankind has been born.

Joseph (Sighing): I suppose you are right.

All around the two new parents, the cattle chew cuds, and stomp their feet. A few burp. And Joseph continues to gaze at the new-born, a puzzled expression on his face.

Happy Festive Season, Everyone!

N/B: For access to all anecdotes in this series, check out List of all “Chronicles of YHWH” notes.

Chronicles of YHWH 36: Happy Birthday, Yeshua

Heaven, 24th December, 2014:

Yeshua: Dad, do we have to do this? Do we have to have a birthday party tomorrow?

YHWH: Yes! Absolutely! I’ll prepare extra manna for the angels and the four-headed beasts tomorrow. Take care of the unleavened bread and the wine, will you?

Yeshua: But dad, we throw the exact some party each year on this day. The exact same foods and wines, and the exact same birthday songs for me. It’s getting a tad boring.

YHWH: I know, son. I know.

Yeshua: Yet you absolutely resist any attempt to add spice and variety to the celebrations. Last year, Angel Bamanifa suggested new dance moves in the celebrations, and you promptly sent him to hell.

YHWH: Yes. This I did, my son.

Yeshua: Also, the birthday cake keeps getting bigger and bigger. Do we have to place all the 2,014 candles on its surface?

YHWH: Of course, son. That’s your present age, right?

Yeshua: But we can just put one candle there to stand in for the rest, symbolically.

YHWH: Look, son, you’ve absolutely refused to go out there and get your own house. You insist on living under my roof, even after two thousand years. The more you continue living with me, the more your birthday cake will get bigger, as we add more candles to it. Comprendes?

Yeshua (Crestfallen): Could we at least sing some new songs tomorrow?

YHWH: No! Singing the exact same old, boring songs is my peaceful way of protesting against your continued presence in my house.

 Merry Christmas, Everyone!!

N/B: For access to all anecdotes in this series, check out List of all “Chronicles of YHWH” notes.

Public service announcement

Yours truly wishes to announce that blogging activity on this site, especially by me, will go down a bit starting today since I have proceeded to holiday.

Before we take the break, we think it is important to bring to your attention this very important information. The god of the bible is one of the laziest creatures in all of human history.

It took this god six days to say let there be. On the seventh day, the bugger was tired, took a rest and been bumming since. Let no one call me lazy. I do more than just say let there be!

If anyone knows the whereabouts of this god, please tell her to wake the fuck up and do something.

Happy holidays good friends.

Taboo

I was watching TV with my friends and the topic was taboo sex/relationships. There were three or four of them that were aired and it would be nice to hear your thoughts.

1. A lady is in love with the Berlin Wall
2. A man is in love with his cars
3. A sex therapist sleeps with her patients
4. A man is married to a lady 32years his senior.

We look forward to hearing from you

Chronicles of YHWH 35: Jonah

Angel Gabriel once approached YHWH with a troubled expression on his face. The following conversation took place:

 

Gabriel: Lord, I have a few questions about Jonah and the whale that I find puzzling.

YHWH: Ask away, Gabriel.

Gabriel: Well… for a start, how did Jonah fit the throat of the whale, yet whales notoriously eat only the smallest of plants and planktons, due to their small throats?

YHWH: Ah, that was easy. I enlarged the throat of the whale, temporarily. I went like: “Let the throat on that mammalian fish enlarge magically!” And it enlarged.

Gabriel: Hmmm. Okay. But how did Jonah survive in the belly of the fish for three days without suffocating?

YHWH: I made Jonah anaerobic, temporarily. I went like: “Let this geezer become anaerobic for the next three days, like yeast!” And he stopped breathing for the next three days.

Gabriel: Interesting. Still, how is it that the stomach acids in the whale’s belly didn’t digest Jonah, or at least burn his skin?

YHWH: That was a bit of a challenge, but I found a way around it too. I, the lord of hosts, gave Jonah a brand new skin – made of a certain thermoplastic polymer that I had just invented. This new skin was acid proof, and so he remained completely safe and sound there. I went like: “Let there be a skin covering Jonah consisting of polymerized ethylene and short-chain alpha-olefins!” And it happened.

Gabriel: Fascinating. And on the third day, you made the mammalian fish to vomit Jonah again.

YHWH: I totally did, Gabriel. I went like: “On the third day, right amongst the whale’s ambergris, let there be Jonah, safe, sound, and submissive!” And it came to be.

Gabriel: You are awesome, Lord!

YHWH: Ha ha. I know, right?

N/B: For access to all anecdotes in this series, check out List of all “Chronicles of YHWH” notes.

Questions for an atheist: A response

In this post which is likely to be long, (but I hope it doesn’t become too long), I am going to respond to a post on the problem of evil which is a response to some questions I asked last year on a blog post.

When in Genesis, the redactor tells us god saw that what he had created was good, the OP takes this to mean to that they were well made and in the case of humans that this cannot include moral goodness. If we grant him this wish, the question of disobedience to which he alludes to in his next paragraph has no place. Call it full court press, but you can’t have it both ways. In fact I have no problem granting the exception but we must then ask if man was not made morally good- whatever that means- how can he be blamed for any failures arising from his make up.

I would agree, for the purposes of this discussion, with his point about god not able to create us differently than he did, if he can concede that i) god is not omnipotent ii) it is logically possible for another being to create human beings without the flaws we see around us. A limitation of god’s omnipotence doesn’t take the problem of evil away for there is a logically possible world where god does not create humans.

This formulation below is beset with problems which I will briefly show

1. Self-existence requires perfect love and perfect love guarantees self-existence.
2. If 1 is true, the created beings can only have imperfect love.
3. Acting in accordance with its own understanding, imperfect love must inevitably result in evil without bound.

First, in our experience, we have no evidence to support self existence. Premise 1 is thus unsupported and should not be accepted unless the author can qualify it or give us a reason to accept it. What stops an omnipotent being from creating beings with perfect love? And what is imperfect love? In my view, either one love or doesn’t love. I have no definition of imperfect love, leave alone love. It doesn’t follow that we don’t have perfect love, whatever that is, then we are going to run amok. It is not necessary that an all good and powerful being create creatures that need to be corrected. If the believers are to be taken at their word, angels are such beings that need no correction. So it doesn’t entail a contradiction to have flawless beings. I do not see the explanatory value of the thought experiment proposed. One would wonder what one is doing in a small house with the parents for billions of years. Do something with your life! eish!

That divine guidance will help reduce the frictions arising from imperfect love. But the evidence we have is that this hasn’t been the case. We continue to kill, rape, abuse each other with abandon. Where is god’s guidance? Is it to happen in a future world?

There is plenty of literature on evolution that I am not going to delve into it here. I honestly don’t know which is more absurd; to believe that we have the vast genetic variance in the human race from two couples or to agree with conclusions we have based on evolutionary biology?

What right has god to judge his creations harshly for his doing? I mean some of the responsibility if not all must rest with the creator.

For the purposes of argument, let us consider Eden a real place and god exists. The good book says the serpent was the sliest of the wild animals. We have no reason to believe A & E were fairing any better than the other animals. It is impossible to see why they wouldn’t fall to the discourse of the serpent. What reason if any, had god to plant this tree in the garden? He could have kept the seeds in his pocket. And there can be no talk of disobedience when the first couple had no knowledge of good and bad. A new term, not disobedience, must be found for their first act.

If we are to take the bible seriously, god had an opportunity at this early time, when the epistemic distance between him and man was to an extent non existent, to correct the anomaly in his creation or to not allow them to procreate. There is no contradiction in A & E not having children for we have evidence of barren parents around us. To allow the first couple to populate the world knowing the result forehand reeks of negligence of the highest order.

It is absurd to suppose that god after creating the world and seeing the harm men were doing to each other that he would for so long a time to come and commit suicide to save men from himself. Who believes a theology such as this? It sound like a parent who keeps having children and sometime in future decides to punish the best among them for the mistakes of the others. All reasonable men would find this reprehensible. It is strange the christian thinks this is the highest virtue!

Two contradictory explanations of the same thing can’t both be true. If one says hell is a place of torment with fire and one says it is a place of separation from god, I don’t see how this can be both true.

Who, indulge me, would stop the will of an all powerful being from being actualized? I am interested in understanding the believer’s meaning of the words omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient. I think they must mean something different from what the rest understand this words to mean.

book reviews and other stories

I just finished reading two interesting books.

Micheal Martins, Atheism a Philosophical Justification which is a good book in many respects. In it he looks at the common arguments for the existence of god and how they fail. He looks also at the problem of evil and the responses that have been proposed by theists and find them inadequate. In his conclusion he says belief in god, given the evidence, is irrational and I agree with him.

The next book is by Sophocles, The Oedipus Rex where Oedipus is guilty of killing his father and siring children with his mother. Though such a story is abhorrent to most of us, I think Oedipus is guilty of a single offence, that of manslaughter. I don’t see how he could have know Laius was his father.

Creon who takes over after him is a mean man and suffers at the end for his unreasonableness. I have no sympathy for him.

The pope has put the Catholics in a difficult spot with his latest pronouncements about animals going to heaven. One must ask of the theologians, given that one of the defenses for the problem of evil is that this is a soul making place, in what way are the souls of animals made? They should also tell us how and when they get souls. Now is the time to ask the Katlicks to tell us how many angels can dance on top of a pin.

Searching for Hydri

N.B: For a related note, see Waiting for Hydri

 

Captain’s log: 17th Megan, Cosmic Year 208GX

 

Cosmic position: Upper Lagrangian Point (L3), assumed after sling-shorting from L5 in the Terra-Helios architecture. From L3, planet earth is neatly eclipsed by the Solar.

 

Space Vessel: Dreadnought, class 4.5, with an M.D.C. hull armor rating of 12. Space vessel christened “Discovery”.

 

Mission Payload: 6 Persons, 435 Terra-KGs (TKGs) in Mass, and a bionic atmosphere of 645 TKGs.

 

Mission Objective: Ascertaining, once and for all, the existence, or non-existence, of a presence, an entity – (a being?) – commonly referred to as Hydri.

 

Mission Profile: Tracking down, analyzing, and documenting any and each single instance of electromagnetic interference, in the cosmic, gamma, x, visible, infra and microwave factions, that lie outside standard expectations for the heliosphere. Magnetic fields and particle flux from the Solar and periodic comets lie within the standard formulation.

 

Mission rationale: Hydri is hypothesized to be an invisible, intangible being, but who nevertheless affects the physical universe in profound, empirical ways. Any being that can accomplish this, even when lacking personal substance, would necessarily employ physical forces that can, in turn, be empirically observed, and documented. Hence even if Hydri lurks in a higher dimension, Hydri’s interaction with the physical universe should be scientifically irrefutable.

 

Captain’s log: Entry #1376 – (1500 Sidereal Hrs, synched to the vernal equinox)

 

Transcription for main bridge commands between the captain and Discovery’s neural nodes, recorded verbatim:

 

Captain: Routine system check up, Discovery. Report.

 

Discovery: ROUTINE SYSTEM CHECK-UP COMPLETED. ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL.

 

Captain: Recheck Visual Train. Set priority at level 4.

 

Discovery: VISUAL TRAIN RECHECKED AT PRIORITY 4. ACUITY SET TO MAXIMUM. ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL.

 

Captain: Initiate new directive. Code-name new directive “Project Hydri”.

 

Discovery: NEW DIRECTIVE INITIATED, CODE-NAMED “PROJECT HYDRI”.

 

Captain: Log in all electromagnetic interference sourced in the spatial cone circumscribed by Discovery, Constellation Lyra, and Alpha Centauri.

 

Discovery: COMMANDS UNDERSTOOD. EMI IN INERTIAL CONE HASH 325.9 INTERCEPTED, TABLED OUT AND DOCUMENTED.

 

Captain: Report on any EMI lying outside standard expectations for Inertial Cone Hash 325.9. Accommodate nominal magnetic and particle flux from known celestial entities.

 

Discovery: COMMANDS UNDERSTOOD. EMI DATA REFILTERED. NO EMI LYING OUTSIDE STANDARD EXPECTATIONS DETECTED.

 

Captain: Roger that, Discovery. Thank you.

 

Captain’s log: Entry #1377 – (1545 Sidereal Hrs, synched to the vernal equinox):

 

Discovery’s data verified as irrefutable by all persons on-bridge: no empirical evidence for Hydri detected. Directive code-named “Project Hydri” concluded.

Chronicles of YHWH 34: SwineGate – The Untold Story

After Yeshua cast out the demons and sent them to the pigs, the pigs run into the sea, and drowned. A very upset man then run up to where Yeshua was, and the following conversation ensued:

 

Man: Those were my pigs, magic man. I want my pigs back.

Yeshua: Sorry man, but your pigs have all just died.

Man: You’ve just destroyed my entire life’s work. I have no earthly possessions now.

Yeshua: Look at it this way: there are unlimited treasures waiting for you in heaven. Just be patient and kind while on earth, and you’ll get your own mansion in heaven.

Man: I don’t care about riches beyond the grave, magic man! I want my pigs NOW! Bring them back!

Yeshua: No can do. The deed is done. Besides, even if I brought the pigs back, they would all be full of the demons I’ve just cast into them. You wouldn’t like them.

Man: Why did you cast the demons into the pigs, instead of sending them straight to hell? Why have you impoverished me like this?

Yeshua: The demons requested me to cast them into the pigs.

Man: But why did you oblige them in that request? Why did you value the needs of the demons over my own needs, as the owner of the pigs?

Yeshua: I’ve just told you: there’s a fabulous mansion waiting for you in heaven. Forget about the damn pigs!

Man: I want my pigs back! I want my pigs back!

Yeshua (To his disciples): Peter, Bartholomew, Simon: get this heathen away from my face.

N/B: For access to all anecdotes in this series, check out List of all “Chronicles of YHWH” notes.