the peaceful religion of Allah

has its minions sentencing 9 people to death for blasphemy.

One wonders when god will show up as a witness or a complainant in a court of justice/ law or in this case when will Mo[piss be upon him] show up in his defense to say he has been blasphemed.

We end this broadcast with a quote from T Paine

“People in general know not what wickedness there is in this pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take it for granted that the Bible is true, and that it is good; they permit themselves not to doubt of it, and they carry the ideas they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they have been taught to believe was written by his authority. Good heavens! it is quite another thing, it is a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy.”

If love didn’t win

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them

Gore Vidal

we can safely say bigotry lost.

Since all my readers are quite informed, this post requires no background. We have aurora telling us, in her own words

I can understand the mindset and the worldview of wanting “equality” for everyone. I am opposed to slavery and am grateful for the steps toward equal rights for African Americans in the United States. I am opposed to sexism and am so thankful to live in an era where women are allowed to vote, go to college and compete with men for jobs in engineering and medicine. And I believe that all human beings have dignity, value and worth. But I cannot support gay marriage.

Even though she understands the mindset that advocates equality for everyone, if he had her way, she would only grant those freedoms she thinks others need, nothing more.

And she knows our friend Pink is unhappy. She writes

But at my core, I do not believe that marrying someone of the same gender is ultimately for their good; I do not believe it will result in true and lasting joy.

One would be left wondering if all other marriages live in bliss so that if LGBTs get married, only them will be unhappy.

When god speaks to Job, he is being evasive and a bully. Job only wants to know why he is suffering. I see no way this chapter is relevant to LGBTs getting fair treatment before the law. It should always be remembered, had the state and church not concerned itself with who marries who, this court case would not have arisen. The only reason the state should have its nose in private affairs, should be limited to protecting minors or those being abused but nothing more.

And then she declares where she stands, without leaving room for any ambiguity

I tend to have Libertarian leanings. I am Pro-Life, opposed to gay marriage, and in support of keeping “under God” in the pledge.

I don’t know what she would say were Muslims, once they are the majority, ask to have under Allah in the pledge.

If as she says

And He wants us to enjoy pleasure and experience happiness. But He knows what will lead to our ultimate joy, and that is to be patient and wait until marriage.

it could have within her god’s power to make it such that the desire for sex only came once a person was married and never before. Since this is not the case, I suggest she takes the matter to a celestial court. While we are here, those who want to have sex will continue to, married or not and others will be miserable and others not so. In case it is lost on her, when you begin to have sex has no bearing on whether you will be happy or sad.

And, young woman, if this

Wives, how many of you have insecurities because your husbands made love to other women before he met you? Is he comparing me to her? Is he thinking of her when he’s with me?

is your greatest worry, then you have a long way to go and I suggest the best way out for you is to become a nun or remain celibate.

I believe when she writes

Premarital sex undermines the marriage, and – knowing that – God in His love and wisdom asks us to wait.

she hasn’t heard of  the man who was divorced because he had a small manhood.

While she worries that there could be an earthquake in heaven because people are in a celebratory mood, it would do her much good to concern herself with living her life. Nothing is going to change. She will still walk to work, go to church on Sunday and only date men. No one is going to force her to date another woman.

If it will help her sleep, I would like to tell her she is mistaken in thinking

God was not surprised by this ruling; He is sovereign and knew about this day before the beginning of time (Eph. 1).

unless she is ready to admit that the 5 justices were working against her omni god and won.

As many others before me have written, these are the disasters Aurora and others like her can expect will happen now.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Shut up

and dance.

Get your dancing shoes on and just dance. This is us telling you to get serious with life and dance. We all die at the end

thoughts bordering on the absurd

No! Please! I’ll tell you whatever you want to know!” the man yelled.
“Really?” said Vimes. “What’s the orbital velocity of the moon?”
“What?”
“Oh, you’d like something simpler?”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

There are societies, ancient societies, where feeding on fellow human beings was no frowned upon. If they went to war and had prisoners, they would roast one of them and eat not really as a regular source of nourishment but to show their revenge. In 1972 after the Andes flight disaster, survivors had to eat their dead colleagues to survive or die. The question then here is, why do we are we so appalled at the thought of eating one of us?

Why do we wear clothes. I mean, we leave some of the most delicate parts of our bodies, like the eyes, ears, nose exposed?

Have all societies across all ages been monogamous? Why has custom/ tradition put us in a cage where divorce lawyers seem to be doing booming business?

This post has been unnecessarily long, the only question I wanted to ask, is why do we continue to fight against our natures most times living very frustrated lives?

May dog help us

Any dog!

What do believers think about atheists? Maybe I should ask myself where I get this blogs by theists that leave me cussing half the night!

In dear active atheist, the author a Paulite has the audacity to tell us at the end of his post

The visible difference here is that I offer you eternal life in Christ Jesus.  The only thing you have to offer is a hopeless useless existence and then,  “Poof“!  You die and fade away.  Christ is very willing to extend eternal life and notoriety to you right now!

and why? Because he feels that at the end of the day, you and I who blog about atheism or active in humanism will not reach a big group and will soon be forgotten.

At the end of the day, I don’t care really whether the world remembers me or not. I will be dead. But if I make it possible for one single person to live a life free of superstition and fear of ghosts, celestial or otherwise, I will have done well with my time.

Note to self: It is better to watch the sun set than to read some theists.

Reflections

A year ago I wrote a reflection on what next after the death of god. Time flies fast!

I promise to keep this post shorter than the one linked above.

Today’s reflection is on education. In several blog posts and comment sections, I have always said education is the key to solving humanity’s problems. One would easily ask me when we seem to have so many literate people and the human race seems to be on a path to destroy itself?

I am think that education of the youth, as now constituted, in many places around the globe is useless. It is the kind of education that teaches people arithmetic, a bit of chemistry and some world history. The students end up memorizing the date the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima but not why. This educated halfwit would, if they could, repeat the mistakes that led to Hiroshima for they learnt nothing in school. This in my view isn’t education.

The purpose of education, in my view, is to make men and women good citizens. It should train them to hold fear in contempt, to treat everything they hear with a healthy dose of skepticism, to know the meaning of justice, beauty and truth. Most of all, I think a good education should help the student to know themselves.

It is a useless education that fills the mind of a 12-year-old with useless facts without teaching them how to act. How to live with others. I have in my days met children who can recite all chapters of bible passages but would not know how to judge a simple matter of justice between them. I sympathize with all the Muslims who think it is great learning to commit the Koran to memory. How useless an endeavour!

Let the focus of our educational institutions change. Let us emulate the style of Lycurgus that had the Athenians boys taught to be men before they could learn to be orators. Let us not waste their youth with useless stories as who or when the earth was created. That they can learn later in life. Dialectics is useless for the formation of character.

There is philosophy for the youth; the value of truth, beauty, courage, justice, self-determination that will go a long way in forming better citizens than how many stars are there in the night sky. There are many people who know so much about the distant stars and nothing about themselves, no wonder they are such dull company.

I may not make a good teacher, but I believe, a good education is a step forward to improving the lot of everyone or of most people the world over.

CUSTOM

Makes everything aright

On death

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
— William Shakespeare

I am not dead yet, that is why I can write this post.

I contemplate on death fairly often. No, I don’t want to kill myself. I contemplated suicide a long while back. I was young. I felt no one and especially my parents were not listening to me. I didn’t think of how to carry out the suicide. Maybe that is why I am still alive. My contemplating suicide is not the purpose of this post.

My friends, Victoria and ejwinner have both written unrelated posts on death; the unconscious reason atheists are feared and the good death or just dying which are both very interesting.

In this post, I intend to share several quotes or observations about death.

Solon, that Greek lawgiver said a man can only be said to have been happy after his death.

As we are born we die, and the end commences with the beginning

Let him hide beneath iron or brass in his fear, death will pull his head out of his armour.”—Propertious

Montaigne advises us thus, about death

And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, “Well, and what if it had been death itself?” and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it.

He continues to say

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.

Elsewhere he writes

All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and more sensibly and essentially. If you have made your profit of life, you have had enough of it; go your way satisfied

And to the goddites who want an afterlife

If you have not known how to make the best use of it, if it was unprofitable to you, what need you care to lose it, to what end would you desire longer to keep it?

And about life

Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity:

I will end here, with this last passage

Neither can it any way concern you, whether you are living or dead: living, by reason that you are still in being; dead, because you are no more. Moreover, no one dies before his hour: the time you leave behind was no more yours than that was lapsed and gone before you came into the world; nor does it any more concern you.

Only the living can say so and so died young. The dead have lived a full life. Life is a stage and each of us has a part. Some, like Methuselah :-), have a longer act, others have short acts and others hardly act at all, so is life.

I hope now all of you feel very positive about death.

Happy weekend everyone, with love.

 

On deism: does god exist?

I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D’Alembert, D’Holbach,Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.

Thomas Jefferson

Deists are goddites except they don’t believe in revealed religion.

The author of does god exist? tells us yes.

The author tells us we commit a category error when compare Santa, fairies and god. He writes

fairies and Santa Claus demonstrably belong in the realm of childhood and most people, adults and children, know what they are and look like.

and I say that gods belong to our more childlike origins, that is, they belong to the ignorant ages. That adults believe in gods or that today god is conceived as anything from being personal to a vague ground of being doesn’t negate the fact that belief in god is similar to belief in gremlins. The only difference being some people grow up and stop believing in gremlins.

So when he writes

This is not true of God. Islam rejects any possibility of representing Allah and Judaism used Yahweh to signify God, originally not a name, rather an unpronounceable collection of letters. Christianity has given God a human face in Christ, but even then that is only an aspect of God who is ineffably greater.

it is only to say that human beings have created, in their imagination, a being whose name they fear to mention, a monster. I remember as we were growing up, we would not mention leopards by name at night. They told us, if we mentioned its name, we  would be its meal for the night. I never found out the reason behind this prohibition. Fear was enough to prevent us from trying. The church uses the same mechanism to get its adherents to toe the line.

One wonders why most people think of atheism as a belief system just like theism. How is it difficult to comprehend atheism is a lack of belief. The author tells us

it is as much a belief system as theism, both being faiths profoundly held. It often seems the God atheists vehemently do not believe in is not a God theists do.

I want to count those atheists of faith. And if you missed it, atheists lack belief in all gods.

Agnostics, like the ones I interact with, and Bob comes to mind, is in practice an atheist. His position of agnosticism is one of knowledge. He says, as an empiricist, the nature of god is unknowable one way or the other. From this point, I only go a step further and say, if the nature of god is unknowable it is not for us to know and for all purposes, non-existent. I only differ with my friend Bob in the fact that I believe to know the origins of god belief, we must look at the savage state, and we will find in all cases, god belief was born out of ignorance and the rationalizations are later developments.

One can see even in this statement

This leads some to posit a Prime Mover or Grand Designer, which is not to suggest some human-like being on a grander scale. Both phrases can be picked apart if they’re taken literally, but accepting the limitations of language to describe what may always lie beyond human comprehension, they can be used indicatively.

that it is ignorance that is the mother of all gods. The author instead of admitting his ignorance of why the universe is, imagines there is a grand designer and very quickly tries to defeat accusations of anthropomorphism by declaring this designer as something other than human like.

Deists like Voltaire were those who could no longer believe in the god of revelation. They imagines a god who didn’t give a fuck, but still believed in a god. It is easy to understand then why Voltaire is accused of trying to suppress the Testament of Jean Meslier, a priest turned atheist.

I will conclude in the words of Ingersoll

A few years ago the Deists denied the inspiration of the bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time, they worshiped what they were pleased to call the God of Nature. Now we are convinced that Nature is as cruel as the bible; so that if the God of Nature did not write the bible, this god at least has caused earthquakes and pestilence and famine, and this god has allowed millions of his children to destroy one another. So that now we have arrived at the question- not as whether the bible is inspired and not as to whether Jehovah is the real God but whether there is a god or not. The intelligence of christendom today does not believe in an inspired art or an inspired literature. If there be an infinite god, inspiration in some particular regard would be a patch-it would be the puttying of a crack, the hiding of a defect, in other words, it would show that the general plan was defective.

 

on freewill: additional thoughts

“Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”
― Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life

I hope it will be a while before I write on this topic again.

We have been having a discussion with Marvin on his blog post titled two undeniable truths and since the post is short, I will copy it here for ease of reference.

He wrote

A) Assuming perfect determinism (and I always do) then it is a fact that every decision we make is inevitable.

B) Every choice we make is either freely made by us alone for our own reasons (free will) or it is a choice we are forced to make by someone else (unfree will). Both A and B are undeniably true. And both are always true at the same time in every decision we make.

A is straightforward. However, I would like to add for clarity that the freewill vs determinism debate is really about actions.

B is where Marvin gets so mixed up in a web he seems unable to untangle himself from. A while ago, I did say the freewill vs determinism debate continues to take place because of how freely we use words. Two, because words have different meanings. When writing on the above, I use the word choice specifically to mean awareness of alternatives. Any other meaning, other than this, in this discussion only works to confuse the debate. For example, I have a choice of coffee or tea in the morning. This awareness tells you nothing about what I will actually do. That settled, Marvin’s insistence that our actions are determined and we have freewill is so confused, I can’t begin to express how contradictory this sounds.

A and B cannot both be true.

Marvin’s problem is to insist that since the motives that determine our action are ours, we have freewill. Problem with this is we don’t will what our motive will be.

In the comments, Marvin gave this example, and I will quote it at length,

Billy wants to go out but doesn’t want to wear his jacket. His mother says, “It’s too cold outside, either you wear the jacket or you stay indoors.” So he wears the jacket, but does so against his will. The reason for wearing the jacket is his mother’s reason. It is external to Billy.

When Bill is older, and no longer required to follow his mother’s advice, he is autonomous. He can choose for himself, of his own free will, whether to wear the jacket or not, and live with the consequences of his choice. Having experienced the consequences of not wearing a jacket on a bitterly cold day, Bill decides to wear the jacket. But this time it is for his own reasons. It is internal rather than external.

It is a decision Bill makes on his own, for reasons that are his own. And that is what the English speaking, human species of biological organisms on this planet have decided to name “free will”. Bill’s decision fixes his “will” at that moment. And the fact that it was by his own reasons, and not by reasons imposed upon him against his will by his mother, that we say his will is “free”.

And I pointed out to Marvin, that Billy isn’t acting his will by wearing the sweater. If the motive of going out is great, Billy will bear the inconvenience of wearing a sweater. Wearing the sweater is a manifestation of the will. The mother’s condition is a cause. And as I have said countless times, all our actions have antecedent causes. In the case of Billy, we can easily show the cause of his wearing a sweater. It is not always easy to map out the causes to our actions as we did in this case.

So when Marvin goes ahead and writes

Exactly. Meanings are derived from real world phenomena. The real world phenomena that are called “free will” are those where a person decides for himself or herself what they will do.

I am certain we are not talking about the same thing. What he describes in this statement are unknown in the real world. There are causes to every action. Unless he can name one where this isn’t the case, I am open to persuasion.

I will close this already very long post with the words of Henri d’Holdbach

Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born without his own consent; his organization does in nowise depend upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, reasonable or irrational, without his will being for any thing in these various states.”