Yes, it’s over a decade old, and yes, it has nothing to do with Korea, but it’s still fun to read educated men — in this case, John le Carré, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens — slag off each other.
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Robert, it’s completely irresponsible for you to be posting this. The last thing we need here on your blog is for you to be encouraging people to insult each other. I, for one, will stand as a pure and shining moral example in perfection against the insidious nature of insulting one another.
Between the three, Hitchens is the master.
Before the verbiage police gets [sic] me, and at risk of The Missing Linkd jumping on me for my triple-post, I meant “among the three.” I think I still must have had ManBearPig stuck on my mind: “half man, half bear, and half pig.”
Nothing deserves to be insulted with impunity more so than “great” religions.
What qualifies a religion as great anyway? The raw total of ignorant dupes one is able to bamboozle? Or is it the number of goodies and rewards promised to the sheep in the mythical afterlife?
Regardless, I’m pretty sure Jesus is real. The latest image of him on a grilled cheese sandwich clinched it for me.
Yeah. I’ve been looking for tips on how to be more insulting online. I feel like it’s one of my blog’s weak spots.
For more fun, I’ve always enjoyed perusing Roger Ebert’s Zero Star Reviews.
Deuce Bigelow, European Gigolo
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com.....25001/1023
and one of my favorites, “North”
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com.....20302/1023
The same line struck me too iheart…and my reaction was the same. People should not only be allowed to insult religion with impunity, they should be encouraged to do so.
After all, the Klu Klux Klan was only destroyed when it became the butt of jokes and mockery. The Abrahamic religions have done far more harm than the KKK and are just as silly. Mock away, I say.
Nothing is more amusing than “religious” antitheists who are as stupid and ridiculous as bible thumpers. Unlike most, at least Hitchens is intelligent.
http://www.somethingawful.com/.....you-01.php
I thought the Fatwa was lifted against ole Salmon….am I wrong?
It’s… beautiful…
That was a pretty boring exchange.
Being blithe with a religion means you’ve gained something these traditions have not. With a simple mind, as it religion’s wont, I ask where are your followers? If you haven’t accrued any, and you can preach, and you can’t reach anyone, does that make your very sad?
I am very sad.
You’ve all cutting knives for minds. But if you can separate a culture from a religion and still hold the banner aloft, then you’ve got my vote.
blueballs, as usual, preaches on like some hot gospeler, complete with a floppy leather-bound book and all…
Just cuz you don’t have a written tradition that can be blamed don’t mean you’re any more free, 잭애스.
Here’s something more amusing: Christians mocking Muslims for believing there are 70 virgins waiting for them in the afterlife, while at the same time planning their own family reunions in the sky with Jesus and all their dead loved ones.
If that’s the case, I assume you’ll be bowing to kiss my feet, writing me fat checks, blindly following my dictates on how to live your life, and begging me to solve all your problems.
Isn’t that how you dupes treat the kiddie-diddling snake-oil salesmen in black robes?
It’s no coincidence that NES and jives used the same “I know you are but what am I!” response. Apparently the sheep are fond of trying to cast atheism as a “religion,” which is their desperate way of saying that criticizing and mocking magic makes you a magician.
That would be a great example of Hitchens intelligence.
…criticizing and mocking magic makes you a magician.
You want to know what magic is? Magic is like…get this…that life and the universe came into existence, all by itself! Atheism claims that a magic trick happened, but there was no magician.
NetizenKim is from the kiddie school of Christian apologetics.
No atheist claims to be able to answer this fundamental question: Why is there somethng rather than nothing? Rational that we are, most atheists shrug our shoulders to the question. Not all of us however believe that our universe comes from nothing and dangles in the space of metaphysics as a magical causa sui, a cause of itself. A few scientists have made plausible cases for the possibility of a meta-universe, ie, a larger, “time-symetric”, or eternal universe of which our universe is only a part. The troublesome danglers in such a formulation become non-sequitir.
Anyway, here’s the point: The “magic” of atheists is logical and metaphysically sound, stripped of as much baggage as possible. Atheists usually shrug their shoulders in agnosticism to the fundamental questions, whereas theists will cloak their brand of magic in the most unwarranted, anthropocentric, and culture specific assertions; for theists, the magical cause of the world is a “god” and this god is human-like, it’s fatherly, it’s a provider, it cares — it’s Jewish.
The position without all the unneccesary bullshit always wins and ought to be preferred.
Oh, I’m drunk so I will need to clarify my prior post a bit. What makes the theistic/religious position “magical” is not that it posits an extraordinary “something from nothing”, which may or may not be a neccesary paradox of this world, but it’s because according to them this something must be god-like, human, ethical, 8,000 years old, etcetera.. The appendage of all the particular brands of human bullshit, and not the imposition of a metaphysical causa sui itself, is what makes the theistic position magical - in the pejorative sense.
abcdefg’s recent outbursts of convoluted goobledygook in 17 and 18 demonstrate the ridiculous levels of mental contortion acts necessary when trying to explain a Created universe with “anything but God” conjecture.
One is reminded of GK Chesterton
A rationalist is quite entitled to look back to the eighteenth century as a golden age of good sense, as the medievalist looks back to the thirteenth century as a golden age of good faith….But we must fix it in our minds as a historical fact that to any one of the great Heretics or Freethinkers of the eighteenth century, this whole modern world of ours would seem a mere madhouse. He might almost be driven, in pursuit of the reasonable, to take refuge in a monastery.
Atheism claims that a magic trick happened, but there was no magician.
Atheism claims no such thing, and you do a vast injustice to the thousands of scientists and free thinkers who have advanced civilization - often at great threat and peril to their lives by religious institutions - to further understand the cosmos and the world around us. You’re just one in a long line of people who don’t understand the arguments put forward by the faithless, and so disregard them out of hand, as “magic tricks”. All that does is demonstrate - along with your credulity - a lack of imagination and thoughtfulness on your part.
Certainly we don’t yet understand the secrets of the universe. But this is to be expected, since we’re mammals, with crude, partially evolved minds. But we’re getting there, slowly and surely (and despite the best efforts of your iron-age cult, as well as others. )
Have you not heard of the Big Bang, of Einstein’s laws? Of evolution? These are theories that try to reach back to the earliest days and make sense of how we came to be here today. Do you believe in them, or simply dismiss them out of hand? Or are you one of the many people who vainly try to find some balance between science and religion, which can never be truly married?
Religious wowsers and scientific naysayers have been around since ancient greece, and they often used terror to silence the thoughtful. The thing is, science is destructive to religion, because it reveals all the little flaws and fallacies of the faiths. I don’t blame the people who lived 2000 years ago in beleiving in a bearded man in the sky, because we knew so little about the world. But the credulous don’t have any excuse these days. The evidence against all the monotheistic creeds are now overwhelming.
I think it was Democritus who put forward the theory of “atoms” (he was laughed at by the religious). It was another greek who hilariously suggested the sun was made of hot metal, and the earth was made of, well, earth, and went around it. Socrates died for expressing disbelief. Aristarchius said the sun was the centre of the universe - and it wasn’t until galileo a thousand and a half years later (and despite religious persecution)that this idea was entertained.
Here’s a quote from Aristophanese, a much greater man than any priest or pope or even Moses himself (and he lived 2500 years ago)
Who can wheel all the starry spheres, and blow
Over all land the fruitful warmth from above
Be ready in all places and all times,
Gather black clouds and shake the quiet sky
With terrible thunder, to hurl down bolts which often
Rattle his own shrines, to rage in the desert, retreating
For target drill, so that his shafts can pass
The guilty by, and slay the innocent?
Have an open mind, is al I’m saying. Don’t just believe because you’re told to. If you’ve never read a book critical of religion, I suggest this one:
http://fertobhades.files.wordp.....-great.pdf
I guess I’m like Pascal in that “I am so made that I cannot believe.” Think about it.
“Goobledygook” is what my posts would be to a definite kiddie apologist, sure. It’s rather like what differential calculus through linear alegebra would be to a 12 yo still doing basic arithmetic. Ie, just way over the head. But my replies aren’t supposed to be anything extreme and I wasn’t trying obfuscate a thing. I simply outline a basic argument that should be recognizable to any one educated enough to follow its contents. (My rhetoric can be better, of course, but I’m not trying to impress anyone with superficial polish.)
I’ll note for now the sneaky and circular “Created universe” in NetizenKim’s post above. One should change “Created” to “caused” to get the corrected view. A “first cause” in the metaphysics of atheists poses no problem to their naturalism. That cause can be another universe. That cause can be a blind expression of an unintelligent set of possible causes. That cause can be a rock from another universe. Such first causes need not be a god, creator, or loving, or good, or a magician of anything, or anything special at all. The human-bound attributes which the religious give to such a cause lack justification whatsoever and are not entailed at all by the acceptance of a ‘first cause.’ The difference between the atheist and theist here is that the atheist is the guy who doesn’t bullshit. No need for Jews walking on water. No need for virgin mothers, ghosts, or childish faiths in falsifiable scripture. Just an open wonder and a plain, factual understanding of the utterly vacuous justifications that religious men and women have for such archaic faiths.
Even in a truly postmodern world, in which god (even the Abrahamic sort) is accepted as an open possibility for rational people, the content and character of such justifications, or reasons for faith, would still be what they are now: Empty. God -in the fully inflated superhuman sense- would be a possibilty, but so would every other empty belief lacking justification, the belief in Dog, for instance, the belief in multi-armed elephents. It’s a world for religious dabblers on the fringe.
Robot Chicken Star Wars Yo Mama Fight
NES, that was hilarious. But now I’ve wasted an hour watching Robot Chicken on YouTube.
Wasted? Wasted?! That was an hour most well-spent.