/delurk
Like.
/lurk

I can answer with one word: “No.”

I’m pretty sure not all paths “lead to God”, but all roads do lead to Rome, right? So I guess the apotheoses took, and the Roman emperors are gods now. Sounds good to me!
And, yeah. There’s definitely something arrogant about the “all paths lead to God” thing. Those people on those other paths aren’t necessarily trying to get there, after all; and saying that they’re using bad road maps is, essentially, saying that they’re deluded. Better than the old RTC bit that everyone who’s not a Good Premilennial Dispensationalist Christian is only so because they’re directly opposing God, but not by very much at all. Saying that might have a thin veneer of apparent religious understanding, but there is still the very strong undercurrent of “but you’re still wrong, bless your heart”.

Questions like that are a path away from God. Whatever path you’re on, God will meet you there. How you respond in that encounter matters far, far more than whatever path you happen to be on, or where you thought you were going, or whether or not the catechists think you have the correct answers to all the wrong questions.

Win. I like how neatly Fred refutes the catechists. It seems that built into the question is the assumption that a Many Roads=Moral Subjectivism.
Unfortunately, a friend o’mine is a “Many Roads” Christian who has embraced the strawman definition with the result that he cheated on his wife and lied to her about for two years (during which time she emptied out her sizeable retirement to pay a crippling double-mortgage). He is utterly flumoxed by her persistent anger and refusal to forgive him, which he blames on her Catholic catechist upbringing.

All paths lead both ways? Err…

Succinct.

But I thought all roads led to Omaha.
(Very nice, Fred. I especially like the sort of corollary you imply: Paths aside, assuredly not all questions lead to God.)

I thought all dead letter lead to Omaha, and from there, to the sea of Quiddity.

Love the post. I’m not sure though whether the catechist thinks the answer is Yes or No.

@Fraser,
The catechist would say the answer is obviously No because we have the right path and everyone else is wrong, so how dare God accept them anyway?
Fred has a good response, as usual.

I’m reminded of the story of the fourth wise man. Laden with precious gifts, he set out to visit the Christ Child, but along the way he met someone in trouble and traded away the gifts for money to help. Several more times in the next 30 years he tried again, always with the same result. Finally near the end of his life (or possibly in Heaven, I forget which) he meets Jesus and tells him, “I’m sorry I couldn’t get to you.”
Jesus answers, “Ah, but you did.”
(OK, I just looked up and read the story, and I have the details wrong but the idea right.)
I don’t know many RTCs, but the ones I do know think it only matters what you believe. Fred thinks it matters what you do, and so do I, but that may be because I can’t believe. Most Christians think both matter: neither faith without works nor works without faith will get you anywhere.
So, Fred, if you are reading, let me ask a straightforward question: do you believe that a non-Christian can be saved and go to Heaven? There are no traps or tricks here: I don’t believe Heaven or salvation (as I understand the standard Christian understanding of it) exists. I am felicidally curious, however.

I think it’s worth noting that the on-a-path-that-either-reaches-or-misses-God metaphor implies that we START OFF distanced on account of sin’s corruption, as though sin were some sort of anti-magnetic force. The mark-1 mod-1 Sinners’ Prayer, like you see in Fellowship Tract League publications, can perhaps be seen as the antithesis of the path metaphor. Rather than trying to move towards God with the usual deeds and philosophies, which in this view still won’t let you overcome that anti-magnetic field (I really need a better sub-metaphor…), you essentially call God to you by throwing yourself to his mercy, without direct reference to his ideals. In this case, God CAN go through the field without you getting catapulted away by it, and negate it with his grace/shed blood/other analog.
(Am I the master of mixed metaphors now?)
Whether or not the catechists recognize it (given their use of the metaphor, probably not), their “correct” answer means that humans shouldn’t be doing the “path” method at all; God’s supposed to be doing the traversing, not you. What YOU do is “just” send out the distress signal. But then, I get the feeling that fundamentalism subordinates philosophy to piety–rather than divinity’s value being a catalyst to being good, good is a catalyst to attaining the divine/salvation. It seems even AFTER salvation, good is for the purpose of glorifying God (however obliquely), rather than divine grace being meant to catalyze good. (Unless one regards them as catalyzing each other, obviously.) Perhaps they worry that the concept of “salvation by works” regards God AS a path, rather than the destination? Even though, arguably, God HIMSELF should be a path to attaining virtue (as an arch-philosopher)?

So, Fred, if you are reading, let me ask a straightforward question: do you believe that a non-Christian can be saved and go to Heaven?
I think we can probably extrapolate his answer. (Yes)

But I thought all roads led to Omaha.

So THAT’S how I ended up here. Dang! I’m a secularagnohumatheist, but if God is here I wouldn’t mind chatting with him/her/it/them.
Quite a ways OT, but speaking of paths: http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior
Cool for geeks.

“the kind of squirrelly, lawyerly question we tend to ask when we’ve gotten so far from the point that we’ve started thinking that sitting around formulating correct answers to tricky questions is what we were called to do.”
I read this wrong the first time around, and thought you were talking about the kind of squirrelly, lawyerly questions we ask when we’re trying to find a way around the rules. Most children pass through this phase, which is marked by complaints like “But you said I couldn’t run in the house, you didn’t say anything about skipping.” A fair number of adults also do this sort of thing, and it’s not uncommon to see the argument that anything not explicitly made illegal is therefore ethical.

If Fred has regularly faced this query in the comment sections here could someone please provide a link? I’d love to read the back story on this.

Me: So, Fred, if you are reading, let me ask a straightforward question: do you believe that a non-Christian can be saved and go to Heaven?
Spearmint: I think we can probably extrapolate his answer. (Yes)
I think so too, in fact I would put money on it (gambling! woe! doom!) (shut up, doofus, I don’t believe anyway, I might as well have a good time), but I would love to see chapter and verse, if only because Fred’s chapter and verse on just about any topic is so… topical.

My understanding is that the priest and the Levite likely avoided the half-dead robbery victim because they were afraid he might be all-dead and thus touching him would make them ritually impure (see Leviticus 21:1-4). Hence by blindly following the letter of the law they end up leaving a man to die in a ditch. Then for contrast a Samaritan comes along and does the right thing and helps the poor bastard. And that’s a huge contrast as the Samaritans at the time were considered horrible nasty heretics that good Jews at best should have nothing to do with.
That historical context just amplifies the message of “worry about helping people, not the rules” IMO.

I think it depends on the flavor of catechist, but at least some of them are trying to find out how you feel about religious tolerance (i.e., do you think it’s OK for other people not to be Christians). I was thinking about this the other day, because it seems to me that some RTCs seem to think that it is insufficient for them to tell everyone The Good News. They seem to think their job is to CONVERT every single person on the planet. I guess this means they don’t really understand free will and/or grace, not to mention the parable of the sower.

@Lucia: I have heard many Christians say that non-Christians can get to Heaven, but I would be interested, purely from an academic perspective, in hearing how they get around the whole “no one comes to the Father except through me” thing.
Of course, this is assuming we heathens want to go to Heaven.

Bravo, sir, bravo.

@YoungGoodmanFarson:
To extend the metaphore, I think that the man in question was driving in the opposite lane and causing a few accidents in the process. Sure, which road you are on might be inconsequential, but you have to at least follow the rules of that particular road if you expect to get along with the other travelers without causing themselves or yourself damage.
Actually, that also reminds me of Jon Stewart’s metaphore likening the various political ideologies of American citizens to that of the Jersey tunnel bottleneck. Even though it is uncomfortable and they might have to drive alongside people they do not agree with, they still have to get along and work together because they all know that if they do not then no one gets through the tunnel.

@Lucia: I have heard many Christians say that non-Christians can get to Heaven, but I would be interested, purely from an academic perspective, in hearing how they get around the whole “no one comes to the Father except through me” thing.
Not Lucia, but when I was Christian I took “through me” to mean “acting in (or aspiring towards) a Christlike manner”.

I would be interested, purely from an academic perspective, in hearing how they get around the whole “no one comes to the Father except through me” thing.

Extrapolating again from things Fred has said in the past, the theory, I think, is that “I am the Way and no one comes to the Father except through me” means “No one comes to the Father except through doing things that I approve of” which means “No one goes to heaven if they are, freely and of their own accord, a jackass”. Except that Fred has also stated pretty clearly that he doesn’t have a solid idea of what ‘Hell’ is supposed to be, because the emphasis in Jesus’ words and such is rarely/never on how bad Hell is, but on how awesome Heaven is.

I have heard many Christians say that non-Christians can get to Heaven, but I would be interested, purely from an academic perspective, in hearing how they get around the whole “no one comes to the Father except through me” thing.
Not a Christian, and don’t have time to look anything up, but I would guess that it’s via the “Whatever you did for the least of these you did for me,” verse which has always seemed to me to be pretty explicit in saying that, for the purposes of salvation, you’re dealing with Jesus all the time without any need for you to know that that is what you are doing (in fact, you’re expected not to know.)

@Ruby: I think it’s simple to ‘get around’ the “no-one comes to the Father except through me” in this context with a cunning application of the “When was it that we saw you…?” story Fred alluded to; ie, if a non-Christian is feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoners, and all these are synecdoche for, then they’re doing this for Jesus, though they don’t know it, and thus coming through him to the Father.
–Mind you, this is more how I’d put it to more doubtful fellow Christians. It seems rather obnoxious to go around thinking, let alone saying, “You’re serving my god even though you don’t know it, don’t believe in him, don’t like him, and really don’t want to end up with him for eternity in the heaven I’m attempting to consign you to.”

Another interpretation is that were it not for Christ’s sacrifice, there would be no salvation. So those that are saved are saved through him, whether or not they are Christian.

Zeborah: Mind you, this is more how I’d put it to more doubtful fellow Christians. It seems rather obnoxious to go around thinking, let alone saying, “You’re serving my god even though you don’t know it, don’t believe in him, don’t like him, and really don’t want to end up with him for eternity in the heaven I’m attempting to consign you to.”
Eeeeyeah. It’s never the best technique to tell people that you know their thoughts and motivations better than they do, and I would not want to encourage the attitude in others. In fact, I would prefer they think me hellbound than an unwitting dupe for their god.

I have heard many Christians say that non-Christians can get to Heaven, but I would be interested, purely from an academic perspective, in hearing how they get around the whole “no one comes to the Father except through me” thing.
I’m not a Christian either but it seems to me that here Jesus is saying “No one gets there unless I let them” — not, “No one gets there unless they say they like me.” Which kind of throws the RTC “recite the magic words that announce that you believe” thing into a cocked hat.

@Ruby: I think C.S. Lewis covered this in The Last Battle: to wit, the statement that good deeds done in the name of evil were still good, and vice versa.
Personally, I prefer my own prayer book’s take: “Behold, a good doctrine has been given you, My Torah; do not forsake it. It is a tree of life to those who hold it fast, and all who cling to it find happiness. Its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.”

Aye, I just had a friend quote Aslan’s speech to Emeth, in response to my revelation about Coyote**. I can see how it could be seen as insulting, but I prefer to read it less as “Haha! No matter how hard you try, my God has pwned your soul!” and more like “Hey, you’re going that way, I’m going this way– but we’re on the same side*, I bear you no ill will, and I hope to see you in the End, whatever that is.”
*by which I mean Good v. Evil, not Us v. Them. There is no Us or Them, and by “the same side,” I mean the “let’s not be evil” side.
**…I may have to change my name, this is getting ridiculous. It works as a mask on non-religious blogs, but here…

do you believe that a non-Christian can be saved and go to Heaven?
Lucia, I’m not Fred Clark(I don’t even play him on TV), but if you asked *me* that I’d say, “Um, I don’t understand the question. Everyone (Christian and non-Christian) is already saved. You don’t “go to” Heaven; the Kingdom of Heaven is already in the midst of us.. So why don’t we look around, see it, and start acting as befits one of Heaven’s citizens?”

how they get around the whole “no one comes to the Father except through me” thing.
Doctrine, from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Jesus recalled that God’s love excludes no one: “So it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.” He affirms that he came “to give his life as a ransom for many”; this last term is not restrictive, but contrasts the whole of humanity with the unique person of the redeemer who hands himself over to save us. The Church, following the apostles, teaches that Christ died for all men without exception: “There is not, never has been, and never will be, a single human being for whom Christ did not suffer.”

Or poetically, quoting George Herbert: the only Way is the loving heart.
Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
And such a Life, as killeth death.
Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light, as shows a feast:
Such a Feast, as mends in length:
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.
Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a Joy, as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joyes in love.

The Old Maid, who posts in these comments, has her own LB-criticism site which is quite well done.* On it, she first introduced me to the concept of “living up to your measure of grace,” which she says is a catholic idea mostly rejected by protestants, but it seems to imply that under certain conditions, (sorry if I misunderstand or misrepresent this,) A non Christian can so live up to Christian ideals and goodness that Jesus will vouch for them on the big day. But that it’s harder to get in this way than having actual Christian faith.
Most protestants reject this, particularly the Fundamentalist and Evangelical audiences the LB books are written for, because it seems very “works, not faith” based. I kind of like it because it helps make sense of another problem I’ve always had. The Bible says “No man is without excuse” on Judgement day, even if they never heard of Jesus. “How can that be?” I would ask a former pastor. He would respond “Well, Creation witnesses for God’s Grace!” To which I say, “but YOU always say you have to believe Specifically in Jesus, Specifically that he died on the cross, Specifically that he did it for the sins of humanity, and Specifically that he rose on the third day. (basically, “Magic words” conversion.) How does looking at trees and nature give you all those necessary specifics?” “Well” he would respond, “What you have understand is that…” and he would promptly change the subject and dodge the question. That annoyed me.
But hey, “living up to your full measure of grace.” I like it. At least it’s a possible answer. At least someone asked the question and tried to respond.
*The Old Maid has also written many great essays for Batman the Animated Series. I’m an Old Maid Fan boy.

But all that and I still gotta ask… Can Christianity really claim exclusivity on Divine revelation? If yes, is that fair to everyone else? If no, then does Christianity have any real meaning? I know that people ask Fred these questions to be smart alecs and question his faith, but I do think the question has merit.

I consider it unlikely that *all* paths lead to God. But I’d hate to be the kind of person who goes around claiming he knows *which* ones don’t.
(As a christian, There’s a specific path which I believe *does*, but I am not in the business of telling God which *other* paths He can be down.)

All that can be said with any certainty is that there’s a path, and you’re on it. All that can be said as a good guess is that the only destination you can really understand is your next footfall. All that can be said about the co-location of your path’s destination and God is that you might do better concerning yourself with whether or not you’re about to trip over something.
These truths are what freaks out the catechists, and the power structure they represent.

@hapax: I like your comment, I really do, but may I play devil’s advocate for a moment? It seems the most likely counterarguments would be either:
(1) So you think no one goes to hell, everyone goes to heaven when they die no matter what?
or
(2) so you deny there even is an afterlife at all?
Again, I understand the point you’re trying to make, but it seems that they would try to get you on those points.

Can Christianity really claim exclusivity on Divine revelation? If yes, is that fair to everyone else? If no, then does Christianity have any real meaning?
Is it really true that the only shoes that fit me are a particular brand in size 6c? If yes, is that fair to every other person with different size feet? If no, then does shoe size have any real meaning?

@Scott — I would answer that Scripture, tradition, and reason have a great deal meaningful to say about this life. About what happens next, mostly hints and metaphors.
I have *opinions* about all that, but I would not dream of forcing what I personally find aesthetically satisfying upon Divine Revelation. “For now we see a reflection in a clouded mirror; then we shall see face to face.”
Meanwhile, Jesus always responded to questions about the afterlife with “Look around you! Why do you care more about the dead than the living!” (Cf. Matthew 22:31-32 & Luke 9:60 just off the top of my head, I know there are many more.)

Hmmm. I am Universalist, in that I think that no loving deity would create a hell, and thus all must go to heaven. I am Unitarian in that I think, probably, that all gods are the same god. I am Christian because I suspect that all gods are, in some ineffable way, my god. Perhaps. Sometimes.

I’m not religious so I look at the type of people who demand to know “Do you believe all paths lead to god?” as the type of people looking how to wiggle out of all that nasty be nice to Other People business Jesus was big about. Because they know deep down they can’t wiggle out of it. It doesn’t matter if you go to Church every Sunday, Bible study group every Wednesday, and have no fewer than than three colors of highlighters to use on the text if you treat your neighbor terribly. They know that and that’s terrifying.

@Lucia, I’d never heard of the story of the fourth wise man before. It snagged my attention immediately. Where did you come across it? Can you recommend any books or blogs with similar stories?

Lydia, I think that Lucia was referring to Henry Van Dyke’s THE OTHER WISE MAN. There are many versions of this story, though; my children really liked Anneliese Lussert’s CHRISTMAS VISITOR when they were little.

God moves around anyway.
At least, that is my experience of my gods. They like to hang out in unexpected places and then pounce when you’re not prepared for them. So it’s no use asking “Is this the path to…?” It is if that’s where they are looking for you, and isn’t if they aren’t. The initiative is *far* from all on the human side.
I remember a friend saying, “Do you want to see my Samhain altar?” So I went into the back room to admire it, and was at once struck with the supernatural fear that is (I have come to realize) an indication of the presence of my patron. I said, yikes, what do *you* want? and he said, well, at least you’re talking to me now. Was I on a path that led to him? Only because he put himself there. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d run away, but he is a Hunter: I don’t think I’d have escaped.
CS Lewis describes his conversion to Christianity as “dragged kicking and screaming.” Not dignified, as he says, but sometimes that’s how it happens.
I also remember one of many attempts to put a name to that patron god. I was climbing a steep hill and chanting the possible name to myself, a recipe I’d found in a book. I came to a place where the hill was really too steep, and I was in danger of sliding down and sideways into a barbed wire fence. I ended up hanging on with my fingernails, afraid to go down, unable to go up. And then, finally, I had an answer to my question. Not “Yes, I am Anubis” or “No, I am not Anubis.” He said, “Sometimes you can only fall.”
It was incredibly useful, in ways I have trouble explaining. (And I didn’t hurt myself much, just scratches.) I still don’t know his name, but that’s probably another of Fred’s wrong questions.

Hapax, sorry, I didn’t mean to be confrontational.

Chicago sang that “all roads lead to Hugh.”

Scott, *I’m* sorry, I think I was the one being confrontational. I wasn’t upset with you at all; but I do live surrounded by fairly fundamentalist Baptists, and I get into conversations like that a lot (actually, not nearly as courteous)
I just imagined myself being challenged the way in which you described, and answered you as I would answer the catechist.

More props here for The Old Maid. When I found her LB essays I read them all in a go.
Christians like her and Fred convinced me that Christians are worth listening to. Not because I think they’ll change my atheistical ways, but because it’s valuable to pay attention when someone is pointing out a way to be a good person.

s’all right hapax. Friends?

Whatever path you’re on, God will meet you there.
That is the most beautiful 9 word sentence I’ve read in a long, long time.
There are so many ways to interpret it (most of them ones that Fred probably didn’t necessarily intend when he wrote it, but oddly enough I’m not sure that makes them “wrong”) and they all make me kinda weepy. While I’ve thought of a few, my current favorite way of looking at it right now, draws upon the Good Samaritan/”least of these” stories in the bible and I interpret the sentence to mean that no matter what “path” your life has taken God will give you a chance (probably multiple chances) to help him out. Whether you’re studying in a seminary or an unemployed mom or a petty criminal you will have opportunities in your life to help someone out. I think doing so will bring you closer (relationship wise, not “spatially”) to God. You don’t have to be a perfect Christian BEFORE God will deign to meet up with you; he’s constantly giving us chances to do so.
Personally, even though I’m a Christian (hey, I said the magic words when I was like 6!) I often worry whether I’m walking the “right path” because I don’t go to church very often and while I read my bible it’s not a daily thing and… list other things you’d expect someone raised in the south as a Pentecostal to feel guilty about and just reading that it doesn’t matter, God will meet me wherever is…I don’t have words.
Wait, no, I do. I have two words for Fred:
Thank you.

One day a teacher of an adult Bible class got up and tested him with this question: “Doctor, what does one do to be saved?”
Jesus replied, “What does the Bible say? How do you interpret it?”
The teacher answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your physical strength and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.”
“That is correct,” answered Jesus. “Make a habit of this and you’ll be saved.”
But the Sunday school teacher, trying to save face, asked, “But … er … but … just who is my neighbor?”
Then Jesus laid into him and said, “A man was going from Atlanta to Albany and some gangsters held him up. When they had robbed him of his wallet and brand-new suit, they beat him up and drove off in his car, leaving him unconscious on the shoulder of the highway.
“Now it just so happened that a white preacher was going down that same highway. ‘When he saw the fellow, he stepped on the gas and went scooting by.7
“Shortly afterwards a white Gospel song leader came down the road, and when he saw what had happened, he too stepped on the gas.8
“Then a black man traveling that way came upon the fellow, and what he saw moved him to tears. He stopped and bound up his wounds as best he could, drew some water from his water-jug to wipe away the blood and then laid him on the back seat.9 He drove on into Albany and took him to the hospital and said to the nurse, ‘You all take good care of this white man I found on the highway. Here’s the only two dollars I got, but you all keep account of what he owes, and if he can’t pay it, I’ll settle up with you when I make a pay-day.’
“Now if you had been the man held up by the gangsters, which of these three-the white preacher, the white song leader, or the black man – would you consider to have been your neighbor?”
The teacher of the adult Bible class said, “Why, of course, the nig – I mean, er … well, er … the one who treated me kindly.”
Jesus said, “Well, then, you get going and start living like that!”
7 His homiletical mind probably made the following outline: 1. I do not know the man. 2. 1 do not wish to get involved in any court proceedings. 3. 1 don’t want to get blood on my new upholstering. 4. The man’s lack of proper clothing would embarrass me upon my arrival in town. 5. And finally, brethren, a minister must never be late for worship services.
8 What his thoughts were we’ll never know, but as he whizzed past, he may have been whistling, “Brighten the corner, where you are.”
9 All the while his thoughts may have been along this line: “Somebody’s robbed you; yeah, I know about that, I been robbed, too. And they done beat you up bad; I know, I been beat up, too. And everybody just go right on by and leave you laying here hurting. Yeah, I know. They pass me by, too.”

I do believe I like the Cotton Patch Gospels.
it’s not uncommon to see the argument that anything not explicitly made illegal is therefore ethical.
So, did you see the thing about the woman in Idaho? She had sex with a guy, thinking the guy was her boyfriend, and she can’t get a conviction on rape by fraud, because the statute only protects women who think they’re having sex with their respective husbands.

“their “correct” answer means that humans shouldn’t be doing the “path” method at all; God’s supposed to be doing the traversing, not you.”
I’m amazed that I didn’t even manage to be the first person to quote George Herbert in the comments to this post, but he is apt again:
I threatened to observe the strict decree
Of my deare God with all my power and might.
But I was told by one, it could not be;
Yet I might trust in God to be my light
Then will I trust, said I in him alone.
Nay, ev’n to trust in him, was also his:
We must confesse, that nothing is our own.
Then I confesse that he my succour is:
But the have nought is ours, not to confesse
That we have nought. I stood amazed at this,
Much troubled, till I heard a friend expresse,
That all things were more ours by being his.
What Adam had, and forfeited for all,
Christ keepeth now, who cannot fail or fall.

Ugh. Typo in the middle of a Herbert poem. Disgraceful. “the” in line 9 should be “to”.

*The Old Maid has also written many great essays for Batman the Animated Series. I’m an Old Maid Fan boy.
Link please?

My take on the “No one comes to the Father except through me” line is to look at the entire verse, and not just part of it:
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
Why do we assume that the ‘me’ in the latter sentence is talking about his Earthly existence as Jesus of Nazareth? What if the ‘me’ in the latter sentence was actually the ‘I’ in the first sentence–the way and the truth and the life?

I am Universalist, in that I think that no loving deity would create a hell, and thus all must go to heaven.
Mike, have you read CS Lewis’ suggestion that Hell is the absence of God? Because Heaven is a choice, and those that choose to not be in Heaven need an elsewhere to go?
Of course, Lewis also believed that God would welcome all who chose to come, and thus eventually Hell might end up empty of people…

Mike, have you read CS Lewis’ suggestion that Hell is the absence of God? Because Heaven is a choice, and those that choose to not be in Heaven need an elsewhere to go?
Ooh, new-for-me theology which has probably been invented several hundred times before:
So, God is everywhere.
But then if Hell is a place then God should be there too.
So what if Hell isn’t a place (so can’t be full or empty) but just a state of mind for each individual. In terms of place everyone gets to inhabit the one place — thus everyone can be happy with all their loved ones present — and everyone’s experience of whether or how the divine is present depends on them.

Mike, have you read CS Lewis’ suggestion that Hell is the absence of God? Because Heaven is a choice, and those that choose to not be in Heaven need an elsewhere to go?

It’s been discussed here before as somewhat problematic, what about people with mental disorders/incredibly disproportionate guilt/etc. who push God away but that are far more moral than terrible people who see themselves as moral and, so, welcome God?
Me, I don’t see how there can be a hell of eternal torment put in place by any deity claiming to be just.

One of my teachers said that the first important thing is to have a path. And the second thing is to stay on it; if you step off, it isn’t so simple as just stepping back on again.

Just avoid that left turn in Albuquerque; that path never goes anywhere good.

Hell is the Absence of God, happens to be one of my favourite short stories that.

And repeating a bit of non-Christian commentary on the subject of paths -
‘The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.
The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.’ Translated by James Legge (1891)
‘The Way that may truly be regarded as the Way is other than a permanent way.’ Translated by J.J.L. Duyvendak (1954)
Of course there is more than one path – but the path is not the word.

I am Universalist, in that I think that no loving deity would create a hell, and thus all must go to heaven.
I still remember a description of Heaven and Hell that I heard in a homily once:
Heaven and Hell are the exact same place. You sit at a table covered with the most delicious food you can imagine, but your only utensil is a fork that’s too long to reach your mouth. In Heaven, people solve this problem by happily feeding their tablemates. In Hell, everyone just sits looking at the food and drooling because they don’t trust their tablemates to feed them back.

No, in Hell everyone holds their fork near the end with the tines and doesn’t care that everyone keeps getting whacked in the face by the long handle of somebody else’s fork.

@Mnemosyne: Heaven and Hell are the exact same place.
I’ve heard that one before, and I like it, but I’ve also heard another (a Jewish) variation on “Heaven and Hell are the same place”…You spend all day studying, and discussing with God, the meaning of the Torah.

Are you not disturbed by your uncertainty, Fred? You claim that no person can know with absolute certainty who is saved and who is not. Fair enough. But then you claim, in a lot more words words words, that one cannot know which paths lead to God, that they should just follow their own with sincerity and compassion. Hahahaha WHAT? I’m all for compassion and sincerity, but such guesswork is unnecessary. God left an instruction book, don’t read it upside down. the path to God is kind of like an airport terminal. You want to get to God, but he is on another continent, and walking across the ocean floor won’t work for you. No matter what you do, you cannot reach Him by your own efforts. But there is a flight to Him, and he gave you the ticket, all you have to do is walk onto your flight and strap in so you can meet Him. or you can scalp the ticket and blow it on booze and drugs and video games, or rent a rowboat and try paddling to him, and the next day the town gets erupted on because the volcano was active and that was an evacuation flight. you had your chance buddy. it’s not a “trick question” to ask you “do you believe there are many paths to God?” when Jesus addressed the matter directly and correctly.

oh great you ignored the whole discussion
well have you ever been disturbed by your certainty

Discussion? huh, I had no idea he was the boss I had to fight all the mooks to get to. I can’t address the blogger directly?

Considering the number of sects of Christianity that disagree pretty fundamentally on what that instruction book actually says, I am required to assume that one of the following is true:
a) God does not exist. (As an atheist, this is my position, barring evidence to the contrary).
b) God exists, but his nature is not such that he would punish everyone for eternity just because they misinterpreted some of his more vague passages.
c) God exists, but he out sourced the instruction book to IKEA.

Re the Afterlife, the Jewish approach towards the afterlife is that it exists but people really shouldn’t worry about the details to much. The focus should be on this world. I kind of like this approach because sometimes with more definite beliefs about the afterlife, you get people who only try to be minimally ethical in order to get into heaven or something. Its not really a good approach to ethics. The disadvantage to the Jewish approach is that some people do not like the ambiguous approach to the afterlife question and demand more definite answers.
Gazza666, you forgot other possibilities:
d) God exists but Christians are not really following the right instruction book and another Abrahamic faith is getting it right.
e) The right religion isn’t necessarily an Abrahamic one.

Are you not disturbed by your uncertainty?
One should always be disturbed by the absolutely certain.

uh oh… the flamethrowers will be coming out soon
as one who’s had this argument many many times, all I can say is that “no the book is not as clear as some would wish it” and that MY favorite analogy of all time concerns the many blind folk trying to describe the elephant by feel..
to imagine that a book of relatively few words (when one considers that, in the internet age, many of us have written MORE than what’s written in the bible) could be ALL that any god would have to say… is ludicrous.

Discussion? huh, I had no idea he was the boss I had to fight all the mooks to get to. I can’t address the blogger directly?
Common decency would ask that you at least address the post you’re responding to directly. Not scan it briefly while muttering “blah, blah, whatever” under your breath and then copy-pasting your favourite generic rant on the subject.
I suppose someone as opressed and put upon as yourself can’t be expected to behave decently.

The 4th wise man story reminds me of a children’s book I read ages ago, about a trained bear who was sent off to be a birthday present for the king. Along the way, he stops to help a lot of people in need, using his special talents. When he finally reaches the castle, the guards don’t even let him see the king–the king’s birthday has long passed and the guards don’t trust him, so they lock him in the dungeon. When the people the bear helped hear that he’s locked up, they go to the castle in person to vouch for him, the king orders the bear released, and everyone lives happily ever after. I can’t help viewing the guards as RTC’s, the bear as the better sort of Christian, and the king as God. There is more wisdom in children’s stories than many adults care to admit.
And Kiyu, you will look like substantially less of an idiot if you actually READ Fred’s posts before you comment on them. I don’t really think that’s a lot to ask, considering you clearly have time to type long angry paragraphs.

‘I can’t address the blogger directly?’
Apparently not, and it isn’t just you (or EC, pseud. for that matter). Which, in the end, is just sort of a take or leave aspect of this comment section – many commenters here seem to feel that any text which starts, ‘Fred, you have written…’ means that they are the ones being addressed.
Accept it – those are the empirical rules of submission here, if unwritten. Admittedly, if you have a direct point to address with him, it isn’t hard to reach him.
But addressing any comment here directly to Fred simply means that a good number of people not named Fred will reply, and demanding that things change in this regard will be a waste of everybody’s time. Even that of someone (such as myself), who actually agrees with you completely on a very narrow technical point.

Not a Christian, and don’t have time to look anything up, but I would guess that it’s via the “Whatever you did for the least of these you did for me,” verse which has always seemed to me to be pretty explicit in saying that, for the purposes of salvation, you’re dealing with Jesus all the time without any need for you to know that that is what you are doing (in fact, you’re expected not to know.)
I’ve always found this irritating. I want to help people who need it because they need it, and because me helping will make their lives better in some way, not because they’re secretly Jesus in disguise testing me in some way. If they’re secretly Jesus in disguise testing me, it seems like a waste of help. Jesus should know if I’m worthy or not, and not waste everyone’s time and energy playing games.
If it’s just me and another human being who actually needs help, it’s worth it. I can pay at least some of what it takes to help, because they’re real and they really need me, but if it was a god playing games, I’d be all “Why are you wasting my time? You’re powerful enough to look after yourself, and wise enough to work out whether I’m worthy or not without playing games.”
I wouldn’t characterize that as why I’m an atheist (much more simply, it’s because believing is the least logical option, given what I know), but it does suggest an interesting possibility. If there was a god, and it cared about people being good, it’d be inclined to leave me alone to get me to behave better, rather than get me believing and deal with the “But if it’s all you testing me, what’s the point?” stuff that would result.

ako… yes
the whole idea of life being a continual series of tests, a minefield, where one misstep sends you to hell strikes me as a far worse version of hell than the one with fire and torture. Perhaps that’s why those folk who believe that seem so… tortured.

@ako,
IMO, I don’t think Jesus was actually saying that when (general you) help people, it’s literally him that you’re helping, or that he’s going to be hiding around every other corner as a homeless person waiting for you. I think it’s more metaphorical than that, like “I identify with the poor and marginalized, so when you help them, I’ll accept it as if you did it to me, even though I don’t actually need any help. That way you can have a relationship with me even if you have no clue who I am.” I have no idea whether that makes it any better for you, but that’s just my take.

I remember that story about the fourth wise man. It moved me to tears when I heard it at my primary school’s Christmas celebration (I must’ve been around nine years old) – the teacher in question couldn’t decline a verb to save his life, but he was an amazing storyteller. In that particular version the fourth wise man didn’t meet Jesus until the Crucifixion; only when his eyes met those of the pitiful, broken man upon the cross did he realise he had found the King he was looking for.
That story gave a whole different flavour to Christmas, I can tell you.

I think it’s more metaphorical than that, like “I identify with the poor and marginalized, so when you help them, I’ll accept it as if you did it to me, even though I don’t actually need any help. That way you can have a relationship with me even if you have no clue who I am.” I have no idea whether that makes it any better for you, but that’s just my take.
Definitely better. Not enough to make me think “Oh, I should believe in Jesus!”, but better. A powerful and well-off being who doesn’t endure any suffering except what he chooses, deciding to use the time and energy I intended to help the genuinely needy for himself instead completely gets my back up. A powerful and well-off being deciding to give me moral credit for the stuff done for those actually in need doesn’t actually irritate me, although “I’ll credit what you did for the needy as if you did it for me, the person who doesn’t need anything” seems needlessly convoluted and confusing. But then again, I tend to veer towards thinking in concrete terms, so some stuff that seems metaphorically meaningful to others loses me completely, because if taken literally, it’s horrible.

@Lunch Meat: yes, that’s what I would say too. To me, the ‘least of these’ verse reads like a warning against the patronising sort of charity Christians are so prone to. We like to think that we can ‘be like Jesus’ to these poor sods – but what Jesus actually says is that these poor sods can be like Jesus to us. Any suffering we may see around us is primarily an invitation to a meeting with God, to learn to understand both him and the world a little better – to learn to love better – not an occasion for us to swoop down from On High like some saving angel. If the latter is your attitude to love, expect yourself to feel bitter and rejected before the week is over.

‘God left an instruction book, don’t read it upside down’
Why not – laying down (on your front or back), sitting, standing – what is wrong with upside down hanging from a tree? Like a nice apple tree on a fall day, the fruit ripe and hanging heavily, almost close enough to pluck and enjoy.
‘when Jesus addressed the matter directly and correctly’
But you see, other people who follow the original, Abraham/Moses part of that same instruction book find that you are reading it the wrong way – it should be read right to left, as written by the original people to receive a copy of that book.

‘by the original people to receive a copy of that book’ (sorry about the self-qoute) – just like Jesus read it, it must be added as a point of historical accuracy.

Whatever path you’re on, God will meet you there. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. i.e. There is no easy path that’s all downhill.

@ako: Kind of like a variation on the old trope “the only real person is me, and you all are just figments of my imagination.” Except instead of the rest of the world being populated by my imagination, everybody else is played by Jesus. But I don’t think that being “Jesus” and being “another human being who actually needs help” are mutually exclusive.
@kcs_hiker: Just because life is a continual series of tests, it does not follow that it is a minefield. It could be a reverse minefield, where one “misstep” is enough to win the game. More likely, it is something in between, as is usually the case.

@ako,
Yeah, the Bible doesn’t seem to have much for literal-minded people. I like a good metaphor, and sometimes even I just want to say, “Can’t you just answer the question and say what you mean? I just want to know what I have to do!” Sometimes it seems like he’s addicted to Cryptic Conversation (not linking to tvtropes to protect you all)
Any suffering we may see around us is primarily an invitation to a meeting with God, to learn to understand both him and the world a little better – to learn to love better – not an occasion for us to swoop down from On High like some saving angel. If the latter is your attitude to love, expect yourself to feel bitter and rejected before the week is over.
Yeah, that attitude is the perfect attitude for resentment. “People are so ungrateful! All I said to that homosexual was that I love him and want to help him even though he’s going to hell! How dare he get mad at me?”

But I don’t think that being “Jesus” and being “another human being who actually needs help” are mutually exclusive.
This is one of the things that gives literal-minded me a headache. Because, as I understand it, if you’re really Jesus, then you’ve got your divine Father to pick you up and set you on the Heavenly throne if you starve to death, and are only on this Earth to make some point via divine authority about goodness or lack thereof, and redemption. It doesn’t matter what I do in the big picture – it’s all about the divine game of proving my individual worthiness, which I don’t get the point of. (People are people, and you can’t give them eternal paradise without handing them better than they deserve, or eternal damnation without being far crueler than even the worst human being has earned.)
But if you’re a little girl, and a real flesh-and-blood person, and I give you a meal, or a safe place to sleep, or arrange it so that you have a reasonably honest policeman to help you, so you’re not sold for the price of a new CD before you’re old enough to understand what you’re getting into, it matters. It matters because there’s only me, and you, and the flesh-and-blood people around, and if I want the universe to be better, I need to do the best I can. (And yes, I fall short of even that standard, but that’s beside the point.) I don’t understand how someone could be Jesus with the knowledge of the divine Father ready to scoop him to the right hand of Heaven, and be a twelve-year-old who needs someone to hold her and tell her that her disease is treatable and she’s not going to die. And I can be there for the little girl, but not for “I’ve got my heavenly throne and an eternity of paradise waiting” Jesus.

@Ako
I find your attitude concerning the whole thing amazing, heartwarming, and more Christian than the average Christian (or myself, really). That’s the only way to read it that makes sense to me– do it out of love, human charity in the strictest sense (meaning love, not… philanthropy, or somesuch), and it counts. I would think Jesus would be rather angry at the people who help out the odd homeless person because they might be a Divine spy.
And now I’m peeved because there’s a thousand awesome answers to Kiyu, and I’d love to join the discussion, but worktime it is for me. I’ll have to read the eloquent claw-unsheathing later.

I’m all for compassion and sincerity, but such guesswork is unnecessary. God left an instruction book, don’t read it upside down.
“The most important [commandment],” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

And now I’m peeved because there’s a thousand awesome answers to Kiyu
Is Kiyu a new name for vermin? ‘Cause all I’m hearing is the whine of pesty insects.

Paths and roads are very specifically religious metaphors to me, since Hecate is called Enodia, She Who Stands in the Road. She’s also the Goddess of the Crossroads. But even though Hecate is not omnipresent, no road can lead towards her, either, because the road is where she is. She is not at the destination, she is part of the journey.
I find the notion of being on “a path” for one’s whole life to be sort of odd. No single path lasts so long. Instead, we come again and again to crossroads and make new choices, stepping from on path to another.
I suppose the road-as-life metaphor has been most useful to me as a reminder to keep going, keep moving, keep making choices, not to sit still as if the road were a river that would carry me along. To be proactive about my life. But this is a different sort of metaphor than the way that the catechists are using it, it seems to me.
I like a good metaphor, and sometimes even I just want to say, “Can’t you just answer the question and say what you mean? I just want to know what I have to do!”
This is true in pretty much every religion. It’s because there are many things in life that can be experienced, but which language cannot accurately describe. This is even more true in the specific realm of religion. That’s what a mystery (in the religious sense) is: something that can be experienced, but not conveyed with words.
In classical Greece, discussing the outwards forms of the mysteries performed at Eleusis was punishable by death. There was no punishment for discussing the content of the mystery, because it wasn’t possible. A general of Athens, having won a great victory, held a celebration at which he had a youth playing a flute and a maiden carry a basket of fruit and bread, and even this was considered too close to revealing the form of the mystery, and he was exiled.

“Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it!”
I have read the Lewis discussion of Hell, either in the original, or here, I can’t remember which anymore. I do like the idea that Hell and Heaven are the same, with people making them so. I also like the Theist principle that our purpose is to change where we are such that it become marginally more like Heaven, with the problem that we really don’t have a good idea (or even a solid consensus) of what that Heaven would look like.
MB – that passage from the Cotton Patch Gospels made me sniffle a little, and I don’t think it was this cold I’m working on.

@ako:
Look at it this way. If you’re already doing it right, the little girl is curled up asleep in your guest bed with a full belly while the police officer arranges for her parents to come get her in the morning.
But if someone is not, if they’re so unsure of what they’re supposed to do that they need an instruction book, if they’re so wrapped up in themselves that they won’t act unless it helps their salvation, then they are told treat that child the way they would treat Jesus. Then they can earn them some salvation tokens.
But that’s the remedial lesson for the slow of loving.
(I am a Christian. But I don’t choose my actions with an eye to my salvation or my place in heaven.)

ako: Here’s my view on “the least of these,” heavily colored by my Quaker/panentheist beliefs.
The Light of God is in everyone. Whatever is done unto even the least of us is also done unto God, for God is in all things. When you are hungry and someone feeds you, they are feeding both you and God. Love for God, love for oneself, and love for one’s neighbor are ultimately the same thing.
I’ve re-written this several times, including a few much longer versions that i deleted. I don’t think I’m expressing myself well, because I’ve been up for about 26 hours (chronic insomnia is not fun).

Jenk: Mike, have you read CS Lewis’ suggestion that Hell is the absence of God? Because Heaven is a choice, and those that choose to not be in Heaven need an elsewhere to go?
Along with what GDwarf said, I have seen far too many people use that idea to up their condescension level to 11 when talking to atheists: “You don’t believe in God? You poor thing, your life must be so sad and empty!”

“L’enfer, c’est les autres” – Jean-Paul Sartre

Ross and Mary Kaye, yes indeed. The RTCs behave as if God were dead or at least helpless. God can find you no matter where you are, and we have no business trying to tell Her how to run Her universe.

@Lila: RTCs seem to view God and Satan more or less the same way, and, I think, in a way that’s much closer Manachaeism than to orthodox christianity. In their worldview, God and Satan are basically two powerful warring entities, alike in kind, but where God is ultimately the stronger of the two. Both have collossal power, but they are also both inexplicably bound by a set of archane rules, which they themselves have set. No matter how much God might want to smite someone, if they’ve said the magic words, He’s duty-bound to save them, and as much as God might want to love you, if you’ve broken his rule about hot shellfish/shellfish action, he’s absolutely powerless to to bring yoink you out of the pit of fire. (There’s loads of analogous stories about *the devil* in medieval pop culture; it’s pretty much a standard story archetype that Guy meets Devil; Devil makes offer guy cant refuse; Guy cleverly exercises escape clause in the deal they make; Devil stamps his hooved foot in rage, because even though he could totally just punch the guy’s head off, he’s powerless against superior rules-lawyering)

Speaking of IKEA…

The fourth wise man story sounds like John Ruskin’s “The King of the Golden River”, which is one of my favorite fairy stories.

Ross, so you are saying that RTC take their theological inspiration from the Belgariad?

@ako
So I still can’t explain things well at all. Speaking of fucked up explanations, there’s something I need to get back to you about in another thread that I hope to address as soon as I have time to compose a post longer than a few sentences.
When someone says, “You didn’t do it to me,” or, “you did do it to me,” I don’t take that as a test or a claim that that the person you did it to was really the speaker in a latex mask. I don’t think, though I can’tr be sure, that actual Christians interpret it that way either.
The best illustration of what I think “you did it to me” means that I have ever seen was in Firefly. I don’t know if you’ve seen any Firefly and if you did you may have hated it, so this might not mean anything to you, but maybe it will and if it does then quoting it will probably do more to explain what I was trying to say than anything else I can write. So here goes:
Jayne: What are you taking this so personal for? It ain’t like I ratted you out to the feds!
Mal: Oh, but you did, Jayne. You turn on any of my crew, you turn on me! But since that’s a concept you can’t seem to wrap your head around then you’ve got no place here! You did it to me, Jayne, and that’s a fact.
Mal wasn’t saying that he was really in disguise as Simon and River and it was all some kind of test. Mal was saying that as far as he is concerned, and as far as the rules he plays by are concerned, doing something to Simon and River is exactly the same as doing it to him.

This might be my favorite of Fred’s many wonderful posts. Kudos.

KIYU! KIIIIIIIIYUUUUUUU! THIIIIIIS IIIIIIS GO-O-O-O-OD!
HEAR ME, O KIYU! THOU HAST FOUGHT THE GOOD FIGHT AGAINST THE EVIL SLACKTIVITES, AND FOR THAT, I AM PLEASED. YEA, VERILY HAVE I SEEN LEGIONS OF SLACKTIVITES COME AGAINST THEE, MY ANOINTED WARRIOR, AND LAUGHED AS THEIR PUNY SPEARS AND SWORDS OF REASON AND KNOWLEDGE BROKE AGAINST THY IMPREGNABLE ARMOR OF CERTAINTY IN THY INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE! HAW, HAW, HAW! YEA, THOU HAST IMPRESSED ME GREATLY, KIYU, AND MANY DIVINE BROWNIE POINTS HAST THOU EARNED! MANY A MANSION HAVE I PREPARED FOR THEE, MY BELOVED KIYU, WITH TREASURES OF GOLD, SILVER, AND LAPIS LAZULI PILED UP THEREIN!
AND NOW, A NEW REWARD I GIVE UNTO THEE: REST FROM THY LABORS. YEA, EVEN AS I HARDENED THE HEART OF PHARAOH, SO HAVE I NOW HARDENED THE HEARTS OF THE EEEEEVIL SLACKTIVITES AGAINST THE WORDS OF MY HOLY ANOINTED ONE, ST. KIYU THE LONGSUFFERING. VERILY, THE TIME HAS COME, KIYU, MY FAVORITE PERSON OF ALL TIME, TO SHAKE THE DUST OF SLACKTIVIST FROM THY SANDALS AND GO FORTH TO DO MY WORK IN OTHER BLOGS.
NOW FLEE THIS PLACE, KIYU, FLEEEEEEE, LEST THOU BE CAUGHT UP IN THE BRIMSTONE SHOWER I AM ABOUT TO UNLEASH! HAW, HAW, HAW!
Oh, and, um, WELL DONE, THOU GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT! [Yeah, I guess they expect to hear that.]

Oh, and Kiyu? I totally used Raj against his will to deliver my last message. I mean, hey, if I can use a donkey to deliver a message, why can’t I use some dude?

Raj, I am currently sending many internets your way.

*falls over, laughing so hard he can’t get up* XD

Oh yeah, that last message is from Me, God. To those who doubt that the last 3 posts attributed to Raj are actually from Me, I say, “WERE YOUUUUUU THERE WHEN I LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EARTH? WOOO-WOOOOOO!!!!!”

And I’m sending a matching donation of as many internets as anyone else gives you.
That certainly made me laugh all the way through. HAW HAW HAW!

THY IMPREGNABLE ARMOR
It’s thine. Honestly, no wonder the instruction manual’s so bad…

@FearlessSon: You know, I’m going to swipe that metaphorical extension of yours because it talks about the consequences of one’s actions apart from intentions, also a sticking point between my sophistical Christian friend who thinks that good intentions are worth more than bad consequences.
As for Many Paths in general, if I were a Pascal’s Wagering man, I’d go with Amida Buddha. If you chant her name as few as 10 times your whole life or envision him radiating her infinite, all-encompassing compassion at the moment of death, you will be saved, that is, reborn in Heaven where all obstacles to enlightenment are removed. (I kind of like how Heaven isn’t the final goal.)

Kiyu, the only people who truly fear the uncertainty of life are the ones that think its a multiple choice test where anything less than a 100% dooms you. When you realize that its really a creative writing exercise, you find that the only way to fail is to answer “A, C, and all of the above.”

I’ve always found this irritating. I want to help people who need it because they need it, and because me helping will make their lives better in some way, not because they’re secretly Jesus in disguise testing me in some way. If they’re secretly Jesus in disguise testing me, it seems like a waste of help. Jesus should know if I’m worthy or not, and not waste everyone’s time and energy playing games.
Thanks Ako, for reminding me what was so annoying about that song “What if She’s an Angel”. If somebody only helps me out of the fear that it’s some divine test, then maybe I don’t want their help.
And thanks to Raj and all for demonstrating another way to deal with trolls: Get more laughs out of them than they get out of you.

Kiyu Agaton :

huh, I had no idea he was the boss I had to fight all the mooks to get to.

This metaphor is made of win. If only I remembered more of the platformers I played growing up I could start a game of “Which Mook Are You ?”
OTIC :

‘I can’t address the blogger directly?’
Apparently not, and it isn’t just you (or EC, pseud. for that matter). Which, in the end, is just sort of a take or leave aspect of this comment section – many commenters here seem to feel that any text which starts, ‘Fred, you have written…’ means that they are the ones being addressed.

… Yes ? Because it’s a comment section ? Are you unaware of how a comment section works ?
Speaking of how comment sections work I’m disappointed you seem to have left the monotheism discussion. You’d finally started explaining how you’d made that logical inference and then… disappeared. No response to any of the replies. Not even a “I’m obviously not getting through to you people so I quit” ? Totally your prerogative of course, but still disappointing for those of us who were trying to understand the logic.

Pathetic. Deliberate misunderstanding of an inelegantly phrased question.

Hey but I like deliberate misunderstandings!

@Kiyu: anyone who isn’t interested in “words words words” is at the wrong site.
—
@Raj: *grin*
I’m glad to see your recent bout with the plague hasn’t impaired your way with a word, or words words words.
—
Which Mook Are You ?
“Clark’s Mooks”?
I don’t know, it doesn’t have quite the ring of “Dumbledore’s Army”, or even “Tarleton’s Light Horse,” does it?

@chris the cynic,
Firefly lover that I am, I think that’s a really good analogy. Thanks for reminding me of it.

Incidentally, Raj’s post reminds me of this.

Isn’t the fact that on Dec. 4th, 1992 you may have prayed the prayer at a Billy Graham crusade or with your Sunday School teacher to ask Jesus to be your own personal savior something YOU have done to earn salvation and a place in heaven? Those of us who grew up in fundamentalist/evangelical churches may remember a little teaching aid called the “Wordless Book”, made up of just colors–black, red, white, gold, enclosed in a green cover. Or maybe the gold of heaven was the one we started with, but if you wanted to go there you had to work through the black (sin), red (blood of Christ), white (a heart washed clean). The green was for growth, a reminder to “stay on the path”!
From the depths of my memory I pull out this gem from somewhere, paraphrased, “Perhaps when we get to the end of our lives we will find that the only deeds that had any value were those done solely under the eye of God.” Maybe all the money I gave to my church or charities in December so I could claim a tax deduction is worth zilch.

Sometimes the detours and missed turnings prove more interesting and educational than a straight run down the boring motorway. Perhaps there is no destination and the journey is all that matters.

That’s the only way to read it that makes sense to me– do it out of love, human charity in the strictest sense (meaning love, not… philanthropy, or somesuch), and it counts.
That’s the only way I’ve ever read it: it’s one of those “I’m answering the question you ought to be asking, not the one you really are asking, because the question you ask is remarkably self centered and that’s missing the point.”
In this case the wrong question is “how can I do things for you (because I’m the sort who likes to suck up to people in power)?” and the right question is “how can I do things for people who need it?”
To which the answer is “If you want to do good things for me, do good things. But do them for the people who need them – they’re everywhere, if you’d just look.”
Isn’t the fact that on Dec. 4th, 1992 you may have prayed the prayer at a Billy Graham crusade or with your Sunday School teacher to ask Jesus to be your own personal savior something YOU have done to earn salvation and a place in heaven?
Can’t say I’ve done anything like that – but I do sing along with “Personal Jesus” when it’s on the radio.

Did the baby in hiis straw in Bethlehem
Finally understand the point of “Us or Them”?
Your kinsman will never throw you out
into a shed. They’d rather do without
themselves and give you their own bed.
But even strangers will feel some sort of pity
(If only because Mary’s young, and pretty)
and offer you a spot against the night.
“Do you think she’ll be all right?”
The innkeper’s wife asks
Before she hurries back to endless tasks.
And does he finally understand that our big brains
Are why our mothers feel their labor pains
Just as he predicted, and love us anyway?
There in the hay
She wraps you up and sings in an angel’s voice.
“Joseph, he’s here! Our baby! Rejoice!
He has your eyes
And your mother’s smile.” As she lies next to him,
Shielding him from the cold
Does he realize?
Or is he blinded by the Magi’s gold?
Because really what’s the point of an incarnation if not
To understand what a body is, and what
Constraints it puts on us and how
Tiny we are against the world, and brave,
The people that he says he comes to save.
Yes we choose sides – the stranger and the friend
But if you’re going to have to send
Some teenage boy on on Judean fields to tend
Your sheep, how else do you tell
The ones who are in it for the lols
From the ones who’d die to save your lambs from wolves?
Until someone comes up with something new
“Us or them” is what will have to do.
How was he as a child? I think I can chance
a guess. “We piped for you and you did not dance.
We wept and you did not mourn.”
He was born a baby, but how odd
Our games must look through the eyes of God.
I hear him answering, “I tried to play!
But the children never liked me anyway.
I was a know-it-all. When I was twelve, I went into the temple
And tried to teach my elders. They were kind.
They recognized a mind
that wanted to learn and had a love for God.
And yes, I get the joke. I’m not that simple.
“But the God they see is petty and makes demands.
You can only enter the temple with clean hands
So you cannot stop to help that stranger
Set upon by a robber band.
The only one who can help is that poor sod
Who thinks he has already risked the wrath of God.
But I’m not like that at all!
I’m not that small-minded! I’m like my Dad:
When I’d pick up something sharp in the workshop,
He’d say, “Thank you, Lad. I needed that”
So kind, and then say, “Here son,
Do this for me” instead of waiting for the damage done, and then the beating.
I want to be like that! I didn’t know!
I didn’t have a dad myself until a short while ago
And now he’s gone. Your lives are so
Short! Help each other while you’re here.
I’ll wait. I have eternity to wait.
“I’ve learned a few things. I won’t make bar bets with Satan any more.
Who knew how long that story would endure?
And that I’d be the hero?
Will my people forgive me anything I do?
See, you need to forgive each other, too.
Please?” he says.
But as each Sunday scholar knows
That isn’t really how the story goes.
He didn’t come to listen, but to preach.
His loss
If he’d listened, would he have wound up on that cross?
And puzzled? “My God, my God”
So he was crucified
The way that many other people died
And I’ll weep for them as much.
Don’t expect me to make a fuss
For a God who blew his chance to learn from us.

Wait wait – I’m not a mook. I’m a Fredbot. You can tell, because I’m wearing my beanie.

Mike,
One man’s Fredbot is another man’s mook.

@Coleslaw,
That poem reminds me of a conversation I had with a therapist a couple of years ago. I was talking about how I struggled with self-esteem issues, didn’t think I was good enough, and wanted to be like other people, particularly during my freshman year. He said, “What do you think Jesus would say if he heard you saying that?” I kind of sighed inwardly, because I’d already heard from my friends, many times, “God doesn’t want you to feel like that! He loves you and thinks you’re awesome! You need to stop feeling like that and I’m going to keep telling you until you stop!” So I replied, “He’d…probably tell me to stop saying that.” And the therapist said, “So you think the first thing he’d tell you would be to correct you?”
That really made me stop and think, because it was one of the first times I considered that maybe God doesn’t always want to tell us what we’re doing wrong, that maybe if someone already knows they’re doing something wrong, they need something other than to hear it for the thousandth time.

@Kiyu-
Are you not disturbed by your uncertainty, Fred?
I’m not Fred, but no, not really…. Having a little bit of mystery to life is interesting. I’m not God. I don’t need to know everything.
God left an instruction book, don’t read it upside down.
I agree with that, Goober. However God’s instruction book hasn’t been revised in about 2000 years and has kind of been translated and retranslated several times over. It also was written in a very different part of the world than you or I live. So to read it without first keeping in mind the culture and background of the 1st century Middle East and taking everything in that context is kind of reading it like a dumbass. Also people tend to use things like metaphors and allegories and whatnot to make points. Something can be literally true without being figuratively true. The types of metaphors and allegories that they used back then are a little different than the ones we use today. Assuming that people who lived 2000 years ago could write something that would instantly make sense to someone living in the modern United States without a lot of study and thought is kind of a dumb thing to assume but that’s what you’re doing.
…and maybe we would be more willing to listen to your interpretation of the Bible if it wasn’t for your constant arrogant assertions that yours is the only one that is correct.
the path to God is kind of like an airport terminal.
Damn, I hope I don’t have a 5 hour layover in purgatory. That would suck.
But there is a flight to Him, and he gave you the ticket, all you have to do is walk onto your flight and strap in so you can meet Him.
Oh, soooo all I have to do is say the magic words and I’m in. Crap! I’ve been wasting all this time doing volunteer work and giving a shit about how I treat other people. If I had known all I had to do was say the magic words, I would have spent all my time acting all superior to everyone like you do. That’s so much more fun!
or you can scalp the ticket and blow it on booze and drugs and video games
Are you saying I’m going to hell for playing video games? …..because those are fighting words. Don’t. mess. with. a. man’s. video. games.
the next day the town gets erupted on because the volcano was active and that was an evacuation flight.
The only evacuation I’m seeing right now is the huge amount of diarrhea that is coming out of your fingertips onto your keyboard.
you had your chance buddy. it’s not a “trick question” to ask you “do you believe there are many paths to God?” when Jesus addressed the matter directly and correctly.
Yes, Sparky, He sure did….. and if you would go back and actually read the comments a bunch of people such as hapax gave much more intelligent and enlightened answers than your “Say the magic words and get a free ticket to heaven” version. So go back and read that or shut the hell up.
Discussion? huh, I had no idea he was the boss I had to fight all the mooks to get to. I can’t address the blogger directly?
You posted something on the Internet, hoss. That means that ANYONE who comes here can read it and respond to it. If you don’t want to have to respond to our replies then don’t post anything. Otherwise, tough shit, buddy.
Not that you respond to them anyway. Last time you told me you were READY FOR ANY ARGUMENT I THREW AT YOU (you used all caps so I did too) and then when I threw arguments at you, you insulted me and then ran away and hid under your bed.
Since you apparently seem to think this is some sort of video game maybe you could put in the Konami code before all of your posts…. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code

Oh, I forgot to add…
I thought all the slacktivists would be amused by the fundies I saw in the Christmas parade this morning.
They had a truck that look like a police truck and it was the “Mobile Command Center” for their SWAT team which in this case stood for “Soul Winning Advance Team.” Also the door of the truck had a logo on it that looked a whole hell of a lot like that logo that was on all the doors of the Enterprise in mirror world. For those of you who are my friends on facebook, I posted a picture of it.

Mike,
One man’s Fredbot is another man’s mook.
“Look dad, two bears!”
“No, son, that’s a bear and a frog. You can tell, because the bear is wearing a hat…”

And, Coleslaw – that poem made me sniffle too. I’m pretty sure it’s not a cold.
how else do you tell
The ones who are in it for the lols
Those are the ones taping snarky comments with bad grammar onto the sheep…

But there is a flight to Him, and he gave you the ticket.
Many will come to the ticket counter saying, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not purchase this ticket with our money and our charity and our tithing?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never sold you that ticket.’

Speaking of Facebook, er, does anyone here mind if I add them on said Facebook?

Raj, you rock.

I do wish I agreed with the exclusivist point of view, as there really is some wonderful wordplay to be done between “All paths lead to god” and “all roads lead to Rome.” like GK Chesterton in full apologist mode quippery.
but sadly, from my perspective as an intellectually honest person, those quips must remain unused.
Fred is right, though, in that it is structured as a gotcha question, an attempt to create a simple question but due to its vagueness, is unanswerable.
Comparable is “What’s north of the north pole?” If you actually consider the question, the answer isn’t simply “nothing.” it’s “the definition precludes such a possibility.”
So, if all paths lead to god, does a dog have buddha nature?
the answers are the same. Mu.

@Kiyu: the path to God is kind of like an airport terminal. But there is a flight to Him, and he gave you the ticket, all you have to do is walk onto your flight and strap in so you can meet Him.
How can you say this without a link to the recording that made it all so explicit! For shame!
Flight F.I.N.A.L.
Your attention please. I am thy captain. The flight thou art making today is the same which Abraham, Moses, John, Peter, Paul, and all of those redeemed before have made. Enoch and Elijah joined us in mid-flight, without passing through the Gate of Death.

Too right, Fred, too right.

Well, right now it looks like all paths to the BCS lead through the SEC.

And, Coleslaw – that poem made me sniffle too. I’m pretty sure it’s not a cold.

I didn’t think it was that bad.

how else do you tell
The ones who are in it for the lols
Those are the ones taping snarky comments with bad grammar onto the sheep…

I make plenty of snarky comments, too, but with good grammar.

I wanna be a Book Mook…

And, Coleslaw – that poem made me sniffle too. I’m pretty sure it’s not a cold.
I didn’t think it was that bad.
No, silly – it was beautiful, thanks for sharing.
I wanna be a Book Mook…
Oddly, those do not rhyme.
Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) published a book called The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough Alas, none of those rhyme either.
Look! A Mook! A Mook with a Book! A Book Mook in a Nook! It is a Book Mook Nook!

And “boot” doesn’t rhyme with “foot”, which is really weird.

Raj, that is pure, undiluted awesome.
And as to being certain vs. uncertain– isn’t there a post/quote from Paul a while back along the lines of “Question Everything. Always question everything.”?
I’m twenty years old, and spend approximately one quarter of my time talking to the people around me, and half of my time arguing with them and getting planed. The remaining quarter is reserved for the blessed moments where I can swallow my Arrogant Youth facade and listen humbly. It’s always worth it. If I thought there would be a day, sometime in my future, where I would know everything, I would dread it– it would mean an end to questions, an end to searching for truth, an end to listening to those wiser than myself, and I would not consider such a life well worth living.

Can somebody direct me to The Old Maid’s site? I can’t find it for the life of me.

I remember reading some thoughtful Batman Animated essays on http://www.toonzone.net/anbat/index.html, but now I can’t connect to the server so I can’t be sure who the author was.

Hey Jason, didn’t you realize that Kiyu thinks he’s leveled up his character enough arguing with us mooks that he’s ready for the final boss fight with Evil Liberal Christian Overlord Fred, so apparently won’t be bothering with us anymore. Of course, if I were him, I wouldn’t be so sure. After all, we’ve only seen him practice the Skills of Dodge, Battlecry, and Feign Hurt. He’s definitely neglected things like Endurance, Courage, and Intelligence in his time here. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a proficiency slot in Formulate Argument, which most consider vital in a fight with other armed with such skills like Compassion, Rational Position, and Actually READS the Bible, such as Overlord Fred. I think, perhaps, it’s his Armour of Self-Righteousness that’s giving him a false sense of confidence in the matter. While it prevents him from FEELING the damage that he’s taking, it doesn’t protect his position from the devastation the slings and arrows of Logic and Compassion cause. The Armour also seems to have the unfortunate benefit of always Resurrecting him no matter how many times he’s slain, so I think we can expect him back.

@Albanaeon
We can only hope that Raj’s cutscene will satiate his desire for an ending.

@Albanaeon, @Coyote.
Brilliant. I nearly spluttered beer on my laptop.

This blog has the best classy take-downs on the internet. Like the legendary “Well actually I *am* a logician, you prat!” from Hanna (I hope that’s correct) the other night.
Whether it’s the Enormous Fiery Blaze of Izzy and MadGastronomer, or the “I will put this extra clearly for you now” from Kit Whitfield. Or the witty lurk-bombs that Shaenon Garrity lobs this way now and then. Or Raj who has the best image macros. Or the deft dope slap from hapax or Will Wildman or Pius Thicknesse. Also Jason and not just because of his avatar.
Mad props and Internets all around.

Is there anything non-annoying about “What If She’s An Angel?” It doesn’t quite achieve the awfulness of that JMM song about how Jesus smiles at little girls behind the couch while their nonchristian drug-abusing parents abuse them, or, the king of them all, “The Christmas Shoes,” but it puts in a good effort.

@Lonespark: I despise The Christmas Shoes with the fiery wrath of a thousand toaster ovens, but IMHO, this is worse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT9lKyi0dDM
What is with the line, “Say a prayer, to pray for the other ones,” anyway?

Forgot to add Kiyu’s weapon of choice:
Rusty Old Point, aka Same Argument, Different Post, or (among trolls) “Bet you hadn’t thought of THIS before!” – Highly favored by trolls and catechists for its wide availability and ease of mastery, it is only marginally effective against mooks and Fredbots of any level, having been encountered and beaten, often, repeatedly, before. Despite this, the Rusty Old Point has the curious property of always seeming new and shiny it its users and and seems to be able to hide it complete lack of effectiveness to its users.

But that’s the thing: the instruction book isn’t at all clear. It’s clear as mud. Quick: redemption: is it faith or works? Faith you say? Then how come Jesus said it was all about works? (No Christian should EVER feel confident that that bit about “Lord, when did we see you poor or suffering…?” “I never knew you!” doesn’t apply to THEM. We are all put to that test.)
I like Raj’s “God” posts. reminds me of something from high school. I went to a Christian private school and one of my friend’s girl friends broke up with him because she said she prayed and felt God led her away from the relationship. A teacher of ours got wind of this and then said, “yeah, Christian girls pull that all the time!” And I started making all kinds of jokes that I was going to call her pretending to be God and order her to get back with him.

OH, and the bulk of The Old Maid’s Batman editorials are here:
http://www.worldsfinestonline.com/WF/sections/fanworks/edits/
and her Left Behind site can be found here:
http://oldmaid.jallman.net/
Some of the very best thinking on the internet.

I hadn’t been reading this thread in a couple days, but I was going about my day earlier when I felt a disturbance in the Force, as if a million voices had suddenly lol’ed in unison. I said to myself, “Raj must be somewhere being awesome.” And it was true.
Here’s comedian Patton Oswalt’s awesome takedown of “The Christmas Shoes”. It’s Patton Oswalt, so NSFW.

@Scott
You reminded me of an old joke about the Irish Catholic girl who wanted to marry a Protestant boy. Her mother was opposed so she went to their priest for help. The priest advised the mother to tell Brigid to ask for guidance. So Brigid takes herself to church, kneels down in front of a statue of Our Lady and prays aloud, “Holy Mother, may I marry Tommy Finnigan?” The priest, who is hiding behind the statue, calls out in an ethereal voice “No”. “Shut up God, I’m talking to your mother”.
OK, so it’s not hilarious.

Vermic, that is the hardest I have laughed all week. I am tempted to show this to my dad, who actually likes “The Christmas Shoes.”
“Dad, I don’t really think you need to give a kid’s mom cancer–”
“SHUT UP! This’ll be the best birthday you’ve ever had!”

Speaking of Facebook, er, does anyone here mind if I add them on said Facebook?

Not at all, Rebecca, I already have several Slacktivites added on there so you wouldn’t even be out of place.

I thought all the slacktivists would be amused by the fundies I saw in the Christmas parade this morning.
They had a truck that look like a police truck and it was the “Mobile Command Center” for their SWAT team which in this case stood for “Soul Winning Advance Team.” Also the door of the truck had a logo on it that looked a whole hell of a lot like that logo that was on all the doors of the Enterprise in mirror world. For those of you who are my friends on facebook, I posted a picture of it.

…Yeeeeesh. They’re going to fill you full of lead and save the hell out of you (no pun intended), apparently. Welcome to the Christianity of an increasingly militaristic society, I suppose.

I’ve been trying to find the slacktivist facebook group and haven’t been able to. Is it hidden?

I’m coming in late for this, but I have some comments about what “No one comes to the Father except through me.” It’s worth pointing out that in Trinitarian theology, Jesus isn’t just a God-Man born in Bethlehem roughly 2000 years ago–he’s the divine Logos, the Word through whom God’s will translates into Things Happening. Christ is, in himself, a cosmic constant.
This idea, I remind you, is covered in the same Gospel as the above quote. You have to pay attention to the ways it defines Jesus, especially his relation to God.
The Father is infinitely transcendant, and unreachable under any means. It’s part of what it means to be “holy” — completely separate, completely unlike anything we know. But then there are the Word and the Spirit, aspects through which God does interact with the universe. So in that sense, it’s perfectly true: no one comes to the Father except through the Son, because the Son is one of the only aspects of God that we can access.
On Heaven and Hell being the same place, I kinda think Dostoevsky had it better than Lewis: “Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
I think Dostoevsky was a fan of St. Isaac of Nineveh — who is pretty obscure outside Eastern Orthodoxy — who believed God was infinite love, and anything referring to anger or wrath had to be metaphorical or provisional at best. Here’s how he describes Hell:
As for me I say that those who are tormented in hell are tormented by the invasion of love. What is there more bitter and violent than the pains of love? Those who feel they have sinned against love bear in themselves a damnation much heavier than the most dreaded punishments. The suffering with which sinning against love afflicts the heart is more keenly felt than any other torment. It is absurd to assume that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is offered impartially. But by its very power it acts in two ways. It torments sinners, as happens here on earth when we are tormented by the presence of a friend to whom we have been unfaithful. And it gives joy to those who have been faithful. That is what the torment of hell is in my opinion: remorse. But love inebriates the souls of the sons and daughters of heaven by its delectability.
@Sgt. Pepper: OK, so it’s not hilarious.
Coulda fooled me. Laughed my butt off.

I’ve been trying to find the slacktivist facebook group and haven’t been able to. Is it hidden?

Here</a href="" title="".
In case that doesn't work, it's called "Slacktivites," not "Slacktivist."

I haven’t read the thread yet, I was in the middle of the previous one’s comments. But I saw the title of this one and had to make the comment that came to mind.
If all paths really DO lead to the Christian god, I will one day wind up in Heaven. And it’s going to be really awkward trying to look God in the face knowing I just spent my entire life referring to to Him as “She” and “Her.”

Rather a bit of a threadjack — I know it was on another post that there was some discussion of the new Disney movie, TANGLED.
I did enjoy it — it was cute, funny, schmoopy in a good way, with meh music, nice animation, GORGEOUS light effects, creative use of kitchen equipment, and the least annoying animal sidekicks that I can remember in a Disney flick.
The reason I’m threadjacking, though, is that iirc there are several Slacktivites with adopted children and other non-traditional family arrangements. I would *strongly* urge you to see the film first, or at least read the reviews carefully, before taking the children to see it.
Even my teen son commented, “Sheesh, if I had been adopted, I would have spent the entire film feeling devastated and furious.”

I certainly have no objection to anyone friending me on facebook; can always use more friends.
Though you will have to put up with zombie poetry.

Very interesting thoughts. Thanks for sharing.

People may add me on facebook. I’m in the slacktivites group and my name Jason. Just tell me which one you are, so I won’t say “who is this random person I’ve never heard of friending me?”

@Selaris-
And it’s going to be really awkward trying to look God in the face knowing I just spent my entire life referring to to Him as “She” and “Her.”
Seeing as how God is not a physical entity, I’m pretty sure He has no gentalia, so calling Him “She” is most certainly permitted…… and even if I’m wrong, I’m pretty sure He’s secure enough in his masculinity to be called “She.” Also the Holy Spirit is sometimes referred to as She so at least 1 out of the trinity can be considered female, but I think you only have to go with solidly male in the case of Jesus.

but I think you only have to go with solidly male in the case of Jesus.

Except in languages where ‘the Word’ is feminine. The start of the Gospel of John is very confusing in French.

Jason: Cisgender privilege check.

@Alex Scott
Musta been the way I did the accents

The Holy Spirit is actually neuter in a lot of places.

MercuryBlue what do you mean

Eh. God could be an “It”, especially if God is beyond human gender, and a singular “They” works too.
Say, that facebook group? I just saw a thing from Mike Timonin about CREDO telephones, and I just realized (a) where LaHaye and Parshall got that stupid name for a worldwide currency, and (b) why they chose it. It’s a telephone as money!

Hapax, thanks for the warning about _Tangled_. We were somewhat blindsided by _Despicable Me_, and though that ended up being a good (if intense) experience, I’m not so sure about this one.
If other adoptive families haven’t seen it yet, _Despicable Me_ has a send-the-kids-back-to-the-orphanage scene that is *very* raw if you’ve been in that situation yourself. And adopted kids lack the usual sense of surety that this will work out in the end, because, you know, it didn’t for them.

Ryan: You asking me to define ‘cisgender’, ‘privilege’, or ‘check’? I thought the meaning of the combination was obvious: Jason said we could call God by either male or female pronouns because God has no genitalia, implying that genitalia defines gender, and if Jessica comes back she might have a few things to say about that.

Okay so what does define gender, I’m confused

@MercuryBlue-
Sorry…
However I’m not sure however I can say that God is genderless.
……and damn, it pisses me off when I’m trying as hard as I possibly can to be sensitive about something and that makes me insensitive about something else completely different.

…actually I mean to say how *else* I can say…

And this is why we hate liberals, Jason. They’re always out to trap you in your words!

Just say ‘God is genderless’? Possibly with a side of ‘God doesn’t give a damn what pronouns one uses to refer to God’?
Yeah, life’s fun, ain’t it?

‘Yes ? Because it’s a comment section ? Are you unaware of how a comment section works ?’
Depends on whose, doesn’t it? Here, any text addressed to Fred will be responded to by any number of people (sometimes quite rudely, actually, when it seems undeserved). In other comment sections, text addressed to the comment section owner will be often addressed by that owner, while other people will generally not speak for that owner – Scalzi’s Whatever comes to mind. Of course it is a comment section, and people do comment – but different comment sections have different, generally unwritten, styles. Including the reality that our host does not actually particpate in comments, meaning any post addressed to Fred as a single person is not really effective. Which is why, in a spirit of something not really resembling charity, I suggested Kiyu actually contact Fred differently than writing here – not because Kiyu is acting good faith, but because other people do actually think they are writing a comment to Fred. And they don’t deserve comments from people other than Fred deriding their tone, their ideas, etc for what they addressed to Fred – without having the chance to recognize how this particular comment section works.
‘Speaking of how comment sections work I’m disappointed you seem to have left the monotheism discussion. You’d finally started explaining how you’d made that logical inference and then… disappeared. No response to any of the replies. Not even a “I’m obviously not getting through to you people so I quit” ?’
And I thought the words to the effect ‘trivial,’ ‘mundane,’ ‘final,’ and ‘not trying to convince’ would have covered it. Transitive relations are a parlor trick – that one is based on the idea that if one accepts nothing but the claim that there can only be a single god that is the source of everything, then there can only be a single god that is source of everything, ‘single’ and ‘everything’ being fairly concrete. Believers in two different single gods that are the source of everything are welcome to argue that each other’s single god that is the source of everything is not the true one – or perhaps meditate a bit on Lao Tsu’s translated words. In the end, the claims are unprovable – except in the eyes of those that believe those claims, of course. Cue Kiyu and his mocking of those people who don’t understand that the single god that is the source of everything is not ‘She,’ but ‘He.’ So, to truly this close out (I’m finished, done, it bores me to tears by this point, etc.) -
1. ‘He’ is the God worshipped by Christians
2. ‘She’ is the God worshipped by Christians
3. ‘He’='She’
Or not – Kiyu certainly wouldn’t accept that logic, and others will continue to claim that ‘He’ is not the same word as ‘She,’ proving that I have missed the truly, utterly serious, extremely important point that ‘He’ and ‘She’ aren’t the same thing – fine by me. I have no opinion, much less claim to know, the gender of the god worshipped by Christians is.
Apart from being reasonably certain that Jesus (a historical figure whose existence I accept as being well enough documented to allow a reasonable belief that Jesus actually existed as a historical figure – anyone want to play around with ‘historical’ there?) was anatomically male – and that his circumcision provided physical proof of the point at the time it occurred. True, there are no historical records of his circumcision – it is just a logical inference based on the customs of the particular self-defined group of people he was a member of, and requires no unprovable claims of divinity to assume that the inference is valid. Of course, it is just an inference – this doesn’t make it true, and he was on the run as a baby anyways.

As for me I say that those who are tormented in hell are tormented by the invasion of love. What is there more bitter and violent than the pains of love? Those who feel they have sinned against love bear in themselves a damnation much heavier than the most dreaded punishments. The suffering with which sinning against love afflicts the heart is more keenly felt than any other torment. It is absurd to assume that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is offered impartially. But by its very power it acts in two ways. It torments sinners, as happens here on earth when we are tormented by the presence of a friend to whom we have been unfaithful. And it gives joy to those who have been faithful. That is what the torment of hell is in my opinion: remorse. But love inebriates the souls of the sons and daughters of heaven by its delectability.
So Dostoyevsky/St. Isaac also believe that Heaven and Hell are the same place?

I suggested Kiyu actually contact Fred differently than writing here – not because Kiyu is acting good faith, but because other people do actually think they are writing a comment to Fred. And they don’t deserve comments from people other than Fred deriding their tone, their ideas, etc for what they addressed to Fred – without having the chance to recognize how this particular comment section works.

Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes lurking here will quickly grasp that Fred Clark himself almost never responds directly to comments, but instead lets them spiral out (sometimes rapidly!) beyond the original thrust of the post he has made.
If Kiyu hasn’t seen this by now then he or she or other pronoun thereof has proven to be astoundingly unobservant.
You’re also reminding me of this person I used to know on IRC who selectively interpreted the concept of quasipublic space at their whim.
They would loudly and in the most aggrieved manner go “HEY, WHO THE FUCK SAID YOU COULD BUTT IN?” (never mind that the chat was over the open channel and not in /msgs) and then with nary a sense of hypocrisy be all “I AM TOTALLY GOING TO BUTT IN ON YOUR DISCUSSION NOW.”
It… doesn’t work like that, but if you’re loud enough and aggressive enough, it can let you get away with BS no person should have to tolerate.
Bottom line: you don’t get to dictate who shall respond to what on this blog’s comment section.

Sorry, Jason…Totally didn’t mean to cause you lots of frustration. >.<

Actually, apologies to everyone around. I didn’t mean to cause a big scene…The thought was funny to me, so I figured I’d share it and share the laugh. I didn’t foresee it causing a word war.

I am well aware that Fred never responds in the comments section, but on at least two occasions he’s been mad enough to make full-on blog posts attempting and failing to decimate my arguments against his brand of “christianity”. if that’s not a victory, what is?

Kiyu, that would involve you:
a) being the only person Fred knows who’s made those arguments (and hence the only one he’s blogging about)
b) Fred actually failing to decimate your arguments, rather than you believing that because you don’t know how to read
c) you not being a total beckwit

I’ve been thinking about something. Kiyu, do you believe that you will be raptured? And if so, how the heck did you get a body with 10 liters of blood through airport security when I can’t bring 200mL of water?
(One day, I might actually say something constructive here :/)

Kiyu,
You think he’s actually arguing with you? Wow…How do you contain that ego without it bonking you across the bonce constantly?
When Fred writes on something a particular person has said, he links to it, quotes it, and attributes it. I’ve had shakey internet as of late, but I haven’t seen any posts attributed to you.

‘I am well aware that Fred never responds in the comments section, but on at least two occasions he’s been mad enough to make full-on blog posts attempting and failing to decimate my arguments against his brand of “christianity”. if that’s not a victory, what is?’
Man oh man, more fun with logic -
1. Kiyu=Endless ego
2. Endless ego=blindness to not being the center of the universe (unless you have invented the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, and come out of the Total Perspective Vortex feeling refreshed – and are a fictional character, to boot)
The letter ‘t’ in this post is dedicated to you, too.
(For the logic people, here an unused attempt using black, and even encompassing white – and no, I am not reading two threads back at this point -
1. coal = definition of (absolute) black
2. obsidian = definition of (absolute) black
3. coal=obsidian – blindingly false – BLINDINGLY FALSE (if a blink tag could be used, I probably would commit that sin too)
1. Black (absolute blackness) = represented by coal
2. Black (absolute blackness) = represented by obsidian
Represented black of coal=represented black of obsidian – why yes, actually, that is true, as long as the idea of absolute black is true for both coal and obsidian, as claimed respectively by both sets of believers in absolute blackness. ‘Absolute blackness’ being key here – there is only one ‘absolute blackness,’ after all.
Of course one can argue endlessly why absolute black doesn’t exist except as a concept, why either coal or obsidian is not the true definition of absolute black, or why white is the only true color that encompasses all colors, while black is merely its absence, and thus actually doesn’t exist at all, being nothing but an illusion.
And to end with an extended quote -
‘Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the NON-existence of God.
The argument goes like this:
`I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
`But,’ says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
`Oh dear,’ says God, `I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.’)
Kiyu – work on your logic, and maybe, just maybe, you too could promptly disappear from here – because really, there is a whole universe just waiting for you to be the center of, not just this tiny little part of it.

Coal’s a flat black, obsidian’s a semigloss.

I dunno about semigloss, I’ve got some very high-gloss obsidian around someplace.

@Own This Idea Cheap-
And they don’t deserve comments from people other than Fred deriding their tone, their ideas, etc for what they addressed to Fred – without having the chance to recognize how this particular comment section works.
They don’t? Why not? I think if someone is going to post something publicly that is rude and insulting, they ought to be called on it regardless of who exactly its addressed to. Why is it unfair for someone’s public writing to be criticized by the public who sees them? If he doesn’t want me criticizing the crap that he writes, then he can send Fred an E-mail or something. Otherwise I’m going to criticize it, because I’m tired of arrogant people like him making my religion look bad.
@Kiyu-
I am well aware that Fred never responds in the comments section, but on at least two occasions he’s been mad enough to make full-on blog posts attempting and failing to decimate my arguments against his brand of “christianity”. if that’s not a victory, what is?
Delusions. You haz them. Since your smug little ass came along, Fred has been making exactly the same kind of posts he’s always made and I think he decimates your arguments very well. They are pretty easily decimated. Btw, hoss, I responded to a whole bunch of your arguments and you still have countered them. I’m still waiting. You said you were ready for any argument I threw at you. Where’s your response?
@Selaris-
Sorry, Jason…Totally didn’t mean to cause you lots of frustration.
no, not your fault…totally mine. Its so hard to think about everything I could possibly say wrong and eliminate anything that might offend.

…still have *not* countered them….
I suck at proofreading lately.

Strictly speaking the only way to “decimate” an argument is to disemvowel it, and it can honestly be said that Fred has never done that to Kiyu, so for once Kiyu is correct, if only accidentally and due to sloppy word usage than because of anything they intended to say.
Has Kiyu’s arguments been demolished (i.e. had their logical foundations destroyed with rhetorical dynamite) by Fred several years before kiyu ever posted to Fred’s site? Why yes.

OTIC, I was going to ignore this, because you said you were done posting, but you went and posted again, so I thought I’d explain what’s wrong with this:
And I thought the words to the effect ‘trivial,’ ‘mundane,’ ‘final,’ and ‘not trying to convince’ would have covered it. Transitive relations are a parlor trick – that one is based on the idea that if one accepts nothing but the claim that there can only be a single god that is the source of everything, then there can only be a single god that is source of everything, ‘single’ and ‘everything’ being fairly concrete.
“if one accepts nothing but the claim that there can only be a single god that is the source of everything, then there can only be a single god that is source of everything,” IS trivial and mundane, because it’s a tautology. “If the claim is true that there is only a single god, then there is only a single god” = “If x is true, then x.”
But that’s not what you were trying (and failing) to prove, and what you were trying to prove is NOT trivial. You were saying “If it is true that there is only a single god that is the source of everything, and X-ists believe claim(x) (god X is the source of everything) while Y-ists believe claim(y) (god Y is the source of everything), then claims x and y are both true and therefore god X = god Y.” You were also saying “If claim(x) is true, then claim(y) is true, but if claim(y) is not true, then claim(x) is not true.” Both of THOSE claims are totally unsupported by logic. So stop claiming that all you’re doing is making a trivial point, because it’s not. There’s no reason both claims have to be true at the same time, and there’s no reason they have to be the same god.

no, not your fault…totally mine. Its so hard to think about everything I could possibly say wrong and eliminate anything that might offend.

There are words that one can easily predict will offend people, like starting a comment with “Hey, you jerk, how can you possibly be stupid enough to think . . .”, and words you can’t. A saying I’ve seen somewhere is “Offense is taken, not given. Practice portion control.” For instance, people often use the expression “scarred for life” around me without thinking that as someone who is visibly scarred for life, I might take offense. And you know what? I don’t take offense. It’s an expression. I know what they mean by it. And generally they are using it to refer to some horrible experience that makes me glad I wasn’t that kind of scarred for life instead of the kind I am.
I didn’t even get the sense that Mercury Blue was offended (I could be wrong), just pointing out something that you might not have considered in making your response. Not everyone who disagrees with you is offended by the disagreement.

Everybody listen to this song…. Its my new favorite Christmas song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-lHZqNcRH0

‘God doesn’t give a damn what pronouns one uses to refer to God’?

Yes, that’s the way I look at it. I don’t pretend to know enough about God to be able to pin down a specific gender, if any, that God prefers; I certainly think however, that any transcendent deity is going to have a lot more important things on Her/His/Its/Eir mind than “This person used a certain pronoun in the very limited and unreliable realm of human language that can barey describe Me in any way in the first place. HELL!” and then God pulls a lever or something. Or at least any competent, benevolent deity wouldn’t really care. And we’re talking about a deity that, in a spiritual sense, considers the entirety of humanity – not merely (slightly more or less than) half of it – created in [insert capitalised possessive form of pronoun here] image, that probably counts for something.
Vaguely related Schlock Mercenary reference: “Lota is too large for your puny pronouns.”

Coleslaw et al: I was not offended, no.
Jason: Loving it.

“I am well aware that Fred never responds in the comments section, but on at least two occasions he’s been mad enough to make full-on blog posts attempting and failing to decimate my arguments against his brand of “christianity”. if that’s not a victory, what is?”
Kiyu, I’m only an occasional poster but a longtime reader here, all I can say is that Fred was posting the sort of things he posts now five years ago when I started reading in the first place.
So no, you asshole, it’s not a victory. He’s not responding to you, he’s responding to the thousands of other morons who spout the same sort of bullshit that you do. Most likely considering the amount of actual contributions you’ve made here he’s probably not even aware of you.
So it’s pretty frakking arrogant to assume that out you, of all the tens of thousands of Christian Fundamentalist Trolls in the world, have been singled out for special notice.
Personally I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a computer buried somewhere under Colorado Springs that randomly generates personalities and posts on blogs all over the place, in order to attempt to “Spread the Word” through Trolling…all the arguments have the same formula and usually sound like they could’ve been made by the same person.
I await a Fundie Christian Troll who shows some originality…but I suspect I will be waiting for a very long time…so I’m not holding my breath.

Jason – that is beautiful. Thanks for the link.

Jason: good song.
BTW, in case I missed someone else spelling it out, I believe the “privilege check” remark referred to your using “gender” to mean “sex”. Sloppy writing, but sloppy writing that plays into some oppressive stereotypes. I have had to be repeatedly corrected about that myself.

OTIC :

Depends on whose, doesn’t it? Here, any text addressed to Fred will be responded to by any number of people (sometimes quite rudely, actually, when it seems undeserved). In other comment sections, text addressed to the comment section owner will be often addressed by that owner, while other people will generally not speak for that owner – Scalzi’s Whatever comes to mind.

I agree that comment sections differ as to how much the blog owner participates. But I’ve never seen a comment section where commenters didn’t address each other’s comments, even when the comments weren’t addressed to them. And nobody here ever claimed to speak for Fred.

And I thought the words to the effect ‘trivial,’ ‘mundane,’ ‘final,’ and ‘not trying to convince’ would have covered it.

I guess since that was the first post where you were actually addressing the point people disagreed with you over I assumed it meant the discussion was finally starting in earnest, not ending. My mistake, sorry.

Transitive relations are a parlor trick

No. They aren’t. Not at all. I can’t believe you can base your whole position on a logical argument when you think so little of logic itself.

– that one is based on the idea that if one accepts nothing but the claim that there can only be a single god that is the source of everything, then there can only be a single god that is source of everything, ‘single’ and ‘everything’ being fairly concrete. Believers in two different single gods that are the source of everything are welcome to argue that each other’s single god that is the source of everything is not the true one – or perhaps meditate a bit on Lao Tsu’s translated words. In the end, the claims are unprovable – except in the eyes of those that believe those claims, of course.

Okay, but I still don’t see how this reasoning can’t be applied to any two unprovable beliefs that have one element in common. Specifically in the case of religion, why would you say all monotheists believe in the same god when you could just as easily say that all religious people believe in the same divine entities.

(I’m finished, done, it bores me to tears by this point, etc.)

Sigh. If you insist.

Caravelle, I wonder if OTIC has ever had math at the level that involves Doing Things With Matrices. (Because [A]x[B] is definitely not the same as [B]x[A].)

@P J Evans: Oh lord, getting flashbacks to commutators ‘n stuff now

Wow, talk about a good morning treat to wake up to. Kiyu, true to his trollish heritage, made posts that completely confirmed the mocking I made of him yesterday. His Armour of Self-Righteousness not only Resurrected him, but yet again prevented him from releasing that he had been thoroughly destroyed again, as he had been before. His amazing wielding of the Rusty Old Point has again blinded him to the fact that none of us here are impressed or worried by his argument since we’ve been dealing with, and defeating it for YEARS. In fact apparently Kiyu’s lack of buffing to his Intelligence has made him particularly susceptible to the Point’s influence as he’s been deluded enough to think that the posts are all about him! Truly a rare, and noxious, breed of troll.
I have seen the breeding pits below the Fortress of New Life Church. It is a sickening process, where they cross Ted Haggart with slugs to breed an army. They are slimey, disgusting creatures unless you concentrate on the slug parts…

I’m trying to think of a kind way to say this, and failing dismally, as usual, but it seems to me that liberal Christians, in their understandable wish not to divide the world into Us (Christians, Saved, Possessed of the One True Truth) and Them (Heathens, Fallen, Badly Mistaken about God and Hell-Bound) wind up dividing the world into Us (Liberal Christians, Possessed of Vast Contextual Knowledge Regarding Scripture Interpretation) and Them (Real True Christians, Literal-Minded, Self-Righteous) and the effect is just as off-putting. While I am just as turned off by Kiyu as anyone here and would dearly love to smack him over the head with a “Jesus Saves” placard, I must admit I’ve seen RTC’s do some real good in the world on a scale that puts me to shame, and wouldn’t be surprised if Kiyu in real life is a charitable person who tries his best to follow Jesus.

Pius, been there (sort of), done that. (I recall that my circuit-analysis class had the weirdest scheduling you ever met, because it had to fit around our math and physics classes. Three days a week, at three different times.) I’m just glad that I don’t need it for my work these days.

@Coleslaw-
I’m trying to think of a kind way to say this, and failing dismally, as usual, but it seems to me that liberal Christians, in their understandable wish not to divide the world into Us (Christians, Saved, Possessed of the One True Truth) and Them (Heathens, Fallen, Badly Mistaken about God and Hell-Bound) wind up dividing the world into Us (Liberal Christians, Possessed of Vast Contextual Knowledge Regarding Scripture Interpretation) and Them (Real True Christians, Literal-Minded, Self-Righteous) and the effect is just as off-putting. While I am just as turned off by Kiyu as anyone here and would dearly love to smack him over the head with a “Jesus Saves” placard, I must admit I’ve seen RTC’s do some real good in the world on a scale that puts me to shame, and wouldn’t be surprised if Kiyu in real life is a charitable person who tries his best to follow Jesus.
You know I’m terribly terribly afraid that I’m guilty of that a lot…..but I don’t know what to do about it. I think that the actions of RTCs as far as oppressing and judging others are hurtful enough that I’m not sure if they don’t entirely offset or negate their charitable qualities as a whole, especially since sometimes the charity comes with the strings of heavy handed proselytizing attached. I don’t know what else to do but raise a fuss about it when I see it, because I feel like someone needs to say, “That’s not what Jesus would want,” and people like Kiyu are too pig-headed to listen or ever even for a minute consider that they might be wrong. Some days I look and see what is being done in the name of Jesus and it just depresses me. I don’t know what else to do about it other than to say how much I hate it and I don’t know how to approach someone who is continually so hateful, arrogant, and dismissal in a way that they might listen to on some level without sarcasm.
So yeah, Coleslaw… guilty as charged, but I don’t know what else to do…

I must admit I’ve seen RTC’s do some real good in the world on a scale that puts me to shame, and wouldn’t be surprised if Kiyu in real life is a charitable person who tries his best to follow Jesus.
Coleslaw, I’ve seen the same, and I wouldn’t be surprised either.
But.
I don’t recall people here saying that Kiyu isn’t a “bad Christian”, far less condemning zir conduct of life.
What has drawn people’s ire here is Kiyu’s conduct on these here comment threads. All Kiyu has given us is zir own “words words words”, and I have zero problem with anyone saying that that the way that Kiyu talks* is not how Jesus talked to people, is not how zie understands how Christians should talk to people, is not how zie understands that ANYONE should talk to people, is not how I want people to talk to ME, and is the preferred method of talking to people around these particular comment threads.
If Kiyu is out treating cholera in Haiti or rescuing puppies from steamrollers or strategizing for Middle East peace right now, I applaud him or her for the good work being done.
I still would appreciate it if Kiyu would not address people in the fashion so far displayed.

whoops, lost footnote.
it was supposed to lead here:
*technically Kiyu Agaton hasn’t “talked” to anybody here, instead pushed electrons toward us in order to arrange pixels in a particular fashion. But the point still stands.

M4YB3 1 SH0ULD ST4RT T4LK1NG T0 Y0U L1K3 TH1S S1NC3 1T’S 0BV10SLY TH3 0NLY W4Y T0 G3T THR0UGH T0 Y0U
B31NG TR0LLS 4ND 4LL

O TH4NK U K1YU
1 UND3RST4ND 1T 4ALL N0W
H0W D0 1 S1GN UP T0 B3 4 R34L CHR1ST14N???

M4YB3 1 SH0ULD ST4RT T4LK1NG T0 Y0U L1K3 TH1S S1NC3 1T’S 0BV10SLY TH3 0NLY W4Y T0 G3T THR0UGH T0 Y0U
B31NG TR0LLS 4ND 4LL

………*Sighs*

If Kiyu is out treating cholera in Haiti or rescuing puppies from steamrollers or strategizing for Middle East peace right now, I applaud him or her for the good work being done.
I still would appreciate it if Kiyu would not address people in the fashion so far displayed.
This is touching on a phenomenon I’ve often noticed in the RTC community. Most of them (not all of them, but most of them) are really nice people who also happen to believe in things that I believe are deeply wrong. Most of them think homosexuality (or non-cis sexuality, although that has some interesting variations. Pat Robertson doesn’t think being Trans is wrong, for instance) is wrong. But at the same time if I was, say, an ex-marine running a orphanage in Indonesia, I could count on those RTC’s for mad bank. I know this because my Grandmother who is very RTC, and her very RTC friends supported that exact charity for YEARS.
So I’m not exactly inclined to stand in judgement. Sure, she doesn’t like homosexuality. On the other hand, she actually gives the Widow’s Mite. Every few weeks she gives money that she can barely afford to a bunch of Indonesian orphans. She doesn’t rub this in your face (I only know about it because I mentioned I was looking for a good charity and she suggested that one.) So on the one hand, she does more good than ten other people I know of any religious or political stripe. On the other hand, she really believes that me and a lot of my closest friends are going to hell.
All in all though, I’m gonna say if there is a God(s), and she and I both end up standing in front of he/she/it/them, I think her Indonesian orphan donations will overcome her anti-gay bigotry much more easily than my pro-gay stance will overcome my lack of donations to Indonesian orphans.
On the other hand, my grandmother isn’t a total asshole about her religious beliefs and doesn’t ram them down anyone throats, and would be the last person to try and claim some sort of moral invulnerability. So I am also prepared to say that shes a nicer and more moral person that Kiyu.
Or, in other words, people, like everything else in the world, are more complicated that that. MLK cheated on his wife. Gandhi had some…interesting sexual/self testing practices. My grandmother doesn’t like gay people. Nobodies perfect. And the best we can do is try not to be assholes and figure that we’re all such sinners we should leave the judgement to God.
That being said, Kiyu, let me put it to you like this. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. I think many things about religion, few of them complimentary.
The faith of people like Fred, MadG, Jason, Hapax…and yes, even my grandmother has brought me, on many occasions, to the hairy edge of religious belief. Not because of their arguments, or their logic; but because these are the sort of people I admire and want to be like. And their faiths are so central to their lives that I cannot help but think it plays some role in their awesomeness. Their lives, their causes, their generally good-people-ness makes me want to be more like them, even if that means becoming religious.
You on the other hand, are a nice, pat, posts-three-times-a-day confirmation of every negative thought I’ve ever had about faith and people thereof. Your stupidity, bigotry, and arrogance make it so much easier for me to dismiss faith as silly claptrap. You are actively driving people away from Jesus, which makes you as good a candidate for anti-christ as twenty blond Romanians.
Fred makes me want to be a Christian because I want to be like him. You make me terrified to be a Christian because I’m afraid I’ll end up like you.
And if you’re right, and I’m wrong and I’m burning in hell while you’re standing in front of Jesus….well, he’s pretty clear on what happens to people who act like assholes in his name and drive people away. I’ll save some marshmallows for you.

Wow… Well that’s a slight improvement since we will have no problem imagining you to be anything but a spoiled, petulant brat now, Kiyu. Not that it was too hard before, mind you, but now I can imagine you to be a cretin in need of a good attitude adjustment without the slightest twinge of guilt at all. Thanks…

relax, albanaeon. it was a joke. I’m not going to condescend to you by asking if you know what a joke is.
CaryB, if I “drive you away from Christ” then by all means stop reading my posts, since that is an ETERNALLY heinous thing for any person to do. If I cause people to think less of Him, then I will answer for that infinityfold. I would be better if a lighthouse were tied around my neck and I were thrown into the void of space. God’s wrath would NEVER stop burning against me.

‘Because [A]x[B] is definitely not the same as [B]x[A]‘
Though coal isn’t obsidian, and black isn’t a color, is it possible to prove that Kiyu is logically a blindly self-centered individual incapable of learning, or do we just return to an argument based on empiricism?
Start with a simple parlor trick (A=B, B=C, then ‘prove’ any relation where A=C through defining B to one’s personal satisfaction), and the answer is to start joining the L33T to talk to Kiyu? That is bizarre – sorry I ever went there.
And to think I thought that stating any discussion where one of the terms being defined as B was illusory because black doesn’t actually exist as it is an absence (people are welcome to explain how black is a color all they want – but please, don’t) would have been an adequate clue to how I look at the whole thing.
So much for my faith in people recognizing how to create falsehood by making sweeping statements – a crime I am guilty of on a regular basis, being the sort of person who constantly generalizes. Constantly, all the time, without exception.

‘I’m not going to condescend to you by asking if you know what a joke is. ‘
We have proof – verily, I was lost in a sea of false logic, and here, upon surrendering my false faith, proof appears on my screen demonstrating the existence of a true joke.

I’m not a Christian, so…frankly, I don’t much care what good Kiyu does. In the reverse “people are complicated” argument from Cary’s: Bundy helped out at a suicide hotline. Gacy entertained sick kids. Manson was apparently very nice to animals. Annnnd yet.
I don’t know what Kiyu does in real life. I can’t know, because ha ha proving things on the Internet. I also don’t care. Here and now, he’s an asshat. And, while my non-Christianity is independent of Christians, people like Fred and Jason, hapax and Amaryllis make me a little sad I don’t share their beliefs. Kiyu is one of the people who makes me very, very glad I don’t.

So, Kiyu are you joking again, because your last post was nearly as ridiculous as the previous. You were just told that your actions cause another to become farther from your stated goal to convert us to your religion. Add on top of that, you acknowledge that it is a heinous thing to do. And your solution is to stop reading your posts? It doesn’t work that way, Skippy. Its YOUR actions that are causing the problem, and it is YOUR responsibility to mend your way. You can’t say “Well, the pedestrians should have gotten out of the way” when you’re the one driving on the side walk, and I severely doubt your Christ is really going to be all that impressed with “Well, they shouldn’t have read my posts” as the reason you drove people away from him.
So I would suggest if you don’t want to suffer your God’s wrath but can’t bring yourself to post in a manner that brings credit to Him and yourself, then for bloody Hell’s sake, STOP POSTING HERE! It would be doing everyone a favor here.

Also: there’s a difference, I think, between the way RTCs separate the world and the way even the most self-righteous liberals, like myself, do–namely, consequences. I don’t like Kiyu, I want him to go away, and I’m happy to call him names when he shows up and acts like a dicksmack. I won’t associate with people who I know to be sex-negative, bigoted, or, um…I don’t know what you’d call holding Scientology-like views of the world. But I don’t think they’re going to burn in Hell forever, I don’t want to deprive them of their civil rights, and, OH YEAH, I don’t show up on JesusRocks.com or whatever to tell everyone they’re wrong and they’re doomed to eternal torment.
That ground is plenty high enough for me.

Umm. I’ll be honest.
I thought the l33t riposte was kinda funny snark on my rather self-consciously constructed comment, actually.
(Sorry)

CaryB, if I “drive you away from Christ” then by all means stop reading my posts, since that is an ETERNALLY heinous thing for any person to do. If I cause people to think less of Him, then I will answer for that infinityfold. I would be better if a lighthouse were tied around my neck and I were thrown into the void of space. God’s wrath would NEVER stop burning against me.
Ah ah ah….it doesn’t work that way Sparky. In your theology, we’re all responsible for our own actions. You are supposed to live your life in such a way that you proclaim the greater being of Christ. You are supposed to live a hard, moral life.
Or at least thats what you claim. You claim that you having a hand in my damnation would eternally turn God’s wrath against you. Yet you are already saved and forgiven your sins through the blood of Christ. All your sins are equally heinous in the eyes of God. Therefore you’ve already been forgiven for turning me away from God, so Gods eternal wrath won’t shine down on you, except you’ve turned me away from God, which is extra doubleplus unforgivable.
Either works count or they don’t, Sparky. Either your actions have consequences or they don’t. Either your actions in turning me away from Christ will result in God’s ill will, or it doesn’t matter.
Now, based on the Bible, turning me away from Christ is a bad thing that will result in God being ticked at you. VERY ticked at you. From which we can assume that there is more to the whole being saved business than saying some Magic Words.
Make up your mind, Kiyu. Either you’re actions are against what God wants, or they don’t matter. Either way, have the courage of your fucking convictions. Because God is pretty clear on how he feels about flip-flopping little pissants.
@Izzy: You are sort of right and sort of wrong with the Manson analogy. Yes, people are complicated, and bad people do good things and vice-versa.
But I think there is a difference between being a bad person who does the occasional good thing and being a good person who does the occasional bad thing (i.e. the human condition.)
Is my grandmothers anti-gay bigotry enough to make her a Bad Person who does good things as opposed to a Good Person who believes a Bad Thing? I don’t think so.
Allow me to illustrate with a personal anecdote. I’m bi. A good friend of mine knows this. He is very Christian and does not approve. He does not hesitate to tell me this. Does it bother me when he does? Yes. But this person is also a good friend, who does a lot of other good things, and who does not let his personal opinion of my sexuality interfere with his being my friend.
Does he believe a bad thing? Sure. Does he cause harm to me when he expresses that negative belief? Better believe it. Does that make him a bad person or a bad friend? No.
I’ve done many things to cause harm to my friends. I wasn’t doing them because I disagreed with their sexuality, but I’ve done and no doubt, do things that are harmful. I’m not inclined to say that because X person’s bad things express themselves in one way that I’m inherently superior because my bad things express in a different way. Is it perhaps a more systemic and codified badness than my “I’m a major asshole sometimes” problem? Yes. I can predict how my friend’s or grandmother’s badness will express itself. I cannot always predict how mine will express itself. We could have a long, long discussion on what exactly evil is and how different expressions of evil are worse or better. Would it be different evil if Matthew Shepard was stoned to death by asshole teens out for a thrill-kill the way James Bulger’s killers were?
My opinion is that we all cause harm. We all do it because we believe, more or less, that we’re justified. Very, very few people do harm because they want to do it and enjoy it. Most people do it because they think they’re doing the right thing, or are justified, or whatever reason. The difference is, some people use the Bible as justification, some people use
“but they started it.”
Harm is harm. We all do it everyday. The best we can do is try not to do it, but until I’ve perfected myself, I’m not gonna go throwing stones.

I guess what I’m saying is I’ve got black friends that think my gay friends are going to hell, I’ve got gay friends who think my religious friends are morons. I’ve got religious friends who think I’m wrong being an atheist, and and I’ve got atheist friends who think I’m weak for expressing faith as often as I do.
I’ve got friends who I’m pretty sure are hurt by the fact that I’m smarter than they are. I just go about my life, bebopping along, and I know more than some people and less than others. Some of the people I know more than will be hurt when I express that greater knowledge. Is that a bad thing? Is that causing harm? What should I do?
All these beliefs and actions cause people harm. All these beliefs cause someone else emotional grief. All of the people who express these beliefs are doing a Bad Thing. I know that, because I’m often the one being harmed. And I’ve raised my objections, and often they continue doing it. And thats…well, not fine, but not evil either, because I do the same thing to them. I’m sure when I curse a blue streak in front of my religious friends, it bothers them. I’m sure when I tell dirty jokes or tell them to go fuck themselves, or tell religious jokes in front of them, it hurts them. But I’m not willing to change my behaviors beyond a certain point, even for friends, so why should I expect more from them than I’m willing to give.
None of these people are Bad People. Sucks, but…thats life. Its a big messy world with lots and lots of messy people. I’d rather have my friend who is willing to do all sorts of quiet, unmentioned, good things for me at the drop of a hat, than cast him out because he and I disagree on somethings.
I hurt people. On a daily basis. So do they. Either we’re all bad people together, or we’re good people who do bad things. I’m not willing to say unwillingness to cut down on the word “bitch” beyond a certain point makes me a bad person. It is a bad thing, a bad thing that I keep doing DESPITE KNOWING ITS BAD. My friend doesn’t know that calling me a faggot is bad, because from his view, its good. Or at least neutral. So who is worse, the friend who does the bad thing he think isn’t bad, or me, who does the thing I know is bad? Is he a Bad Person? Am I? Am I a worse person when I text when I drive, which has a very good chance of killing someone, or when I call someone a pansy-assed little bitch who needs to nut up or shut up, which is sexist, bigoted and all other sorts of bad things?
I see myself as faced with two options. I can judge other people, and be a hypocrite, which is a worse act than most, or I can say “Hey, mote, beam, lets just try going along and try not to hurt each other and be just as willing to forgive my friend as he is willing to forgive me.”
There’s always gonna be someone with the higher moral ground. Theres always gonna be someone below me. Absent clear indicators of major, systemic, irrevocable bad-human-being-ness, I’m deeply uncomfortable with saying that because I’ve managed to crawl a few more inches out of the mud and slime than x-person, that I’m better than they are. Becuase its a small step from “Moral high ground” to “I’m better than you” to “I’m a better person than you are so I get better stuff.”
Humans are good.
Humans are evil.
Those two statements are not contradictory, but true for just about everyone. And the part of humans are evil that really terrifies me is the part where we start thinking we’re better. History proves one thing: It doesn’t matter WHAT the person thinking they’re better believes. It doesn’t matter if they’re against abortion, against capitalism, against facism, against stalinism, pro-the people, against the people..whatever Once you take for yourselves the moral high ground, you taking one of the most dangerous steps I can imagine, and I hope its a step I don’t take.
Does taking that step mean you’re a bad person? Of course not. Its just one more of the million possible ways people can go wrong. Hell, most people that take that step don’t go any further. But some of them do, and of all the sinners out there…they’re the ones that really scare me.

Good God, (and typing out that word entire, incidentally, is probably offensive to someone) I do get verbose, don’t I?
Shutting up for a while now.

@Kiyu and Own This Idea Cheap: *PLONK*
Congratulations. You’ve both joined Lee Ratner.
My facepalming will be considerably lessened.

OH NO PLUS THICKNESSE IGNORED ME I JUST LOST MY GREATEST FAN

I would be better if a lighthouse were tied around my neck and I were thrown into the void of space.
Is anyone else wondering how being tied to a lighthouse would make being in space any worse? Honestly, if you’re going to paraphrase your holy texts, at least think about why the original metaphor works.
If I cause people to think less of Him, then I will answer for that infinityfold.
Seconding CaryB – how do you reconcile this with “faith, not works”? Or is this somehow the same as blaspheming against the Holy Spirit?

Is anyone else wondering how being tied to a lighthouse would make being in space any worse? Honestly, if you’re going to paraphrase your holy texts, at least think about why the original metaphor works.

I dunno, can you imagine how annoying it would be to try and sleep? Every 30 seconds (or whatever that particular lighthouse is synced to) you get this blinding beam in your face. I think it’d get old fast.
Plus, with a sufficiently taut rope the sound of the foghorn could travel along it to you, and that’d just be infuriating whenever you hit a shoal of space-mist.

always entertained by the efforts to educate someone out of being an asshat… by being an asshat
very similar to the mom who smacks her child while telling him to “stop hitting your sister”

And how much is ‘infinityfold’ anyway?
Try to learn how to use words correctly. It’s infinitely more effective.

Is anyone else wondering how being tied to a lighthouse would make being in space any worse?
It might get awkward when you bump into the door, the window, the clock, and the eyeball.

On the other hand, being tied to a police call box in space is pretty awesome, by all reports.

always entertained by the efforts to educate someone out of being an asshat… by being an asshat
very similar to the mom who smacks her child while telling him to “stop hitting your sister”
Well, actually in that case, the designated authority figure would be dispensing appropriate punishment for a transgression. Thats commonly know as “justice” in most places.
(Depending on your opinion of smacking kids of course. Personally, I think the occasional clip about the ear does a world of good.)
Also we’re posting well thought out responses that are no ruder than Kiyu’s, and he’s continuing to be a schmuck.
You know, KCS_hiker, YOU I don’t get. Kiyu’s the usual troll, but you just hang around to drop in and offer snarky little comments. Either join in and talk or stop dicking around.

justice is never hypocritical
and I’m in total agreement about kiyu’s being a schmuck
what should we talk about? I liked Fred’s post, I’m in total agreement (as I often am)
and I often find your posts to be entertaining and thought provoking

It might get awkward when you bump into the door, the window, the clock, and the eyeball.
I suppose it depends on your initial velocity relative to the lighthouse and whether you’re teleported into space or physically thrown off-world.

@CaryB
That was beautiful. Do you mind if I quote you to a friend? We’ve been talking about the nature of Fallen humanity, and I haven’t been able to come up with the words to explain why I don’t think humans are inherently Evil– yours comes far closer to the truth than anything I’ve said so far.
@Kiyu
It’s Pius, not Plus. Plus Thicknesse sounds like an advertisement for insulation or something. “Fiber-Glass Sheets, now with Double-Plus Thickness!” And if you were truly trying to persuade us unholy heathens to Christ, wouldn’t you be devastated that your behavior has driven away another potential convert?
(Holy crap, that took forever to type. gotta go thaw out my fingers before I aattempt to continue posting.)

CaryB, if I “drive you away from Christ” then by all means stop reading my posts
Kiyu, if someone points out that you keep running off with all their money, then the correct response is not “then by all means stop leaving your wallet where I can see it”.
If someone complains that you keep trying to kill them, then the correct response is not “then by all means learn to hide better”.
If someone is getting upset with the fact that you keep calling them a disgusting sheep-shagging mega-twit, then the correct response is not “then by all means wear earplugs”.
You are doing something wrong. Fix your own behaviour.

Kiyu, if someone points out that you keep running off with all their money, then the correct response is not “then by all means stop leaving your wallet where I can see it”.
If someone complains that you keep trying to kill them, then the correct response is not “then by all means learn to hide better”.
If someone is getting upset with the fact that you keep calling them a disgusting sheep-shagging mega-twit, then the correct response is not “then by all means wear earplugs”.
You are doing something wrong. Fix your own behaviour.

nobody sees the hypocrisy in this reasonable sounding statement?
why should kiyu be required to fix his/her behavior? Are there rules somewhere posted somewhere that defines what behavior is ok and what isn’t? Do they apply to all? Or just those that are branded as “trolls” or “asshats”?
cary, if you don’t like me being snarky… why respond at all? My reply to you could look like this: “go fuck yourself with a chainsaw, I just really don’t give a flying fuck if you like my way of posting or not, etc etc..” Is that truly MORE acceptable than kiyu’s petulant little attempts to troll the board?

why should kiyu be required to fix his/her behavior?
Because Kiyu, by his own standards, is doing something wrong that, in Kiyu’s opinion, will lead to Kiyu’s god being very upset with him.
That sounds like an excellent reason for Kiyu to change his behaviour.

@Kiyu
It’s Pius, not Plus. Plus Thicknesse sounds like an advertisement for insulation or something. “Fiber-Glass Sheets, now with Double-Plus Thickness!” And if you were truly trying to persuade us unholy heathens to Christ, wouldn’t you be devastated that your behavior has driven away another potential convert?

I LOL’ed XD

Treadjack!
@hcs_hiker:
Maybe you can explain something I’ve always wondered about. What exactly is justice? I hear the word so often as a motivation, but I don’t think I’ve heard it as anything but a variation on the phrase “Revenge, except this time the target deserves it”.

if you don’t like me being snarky… why respond at all?

Possibly in hopes that you might learn to answer the comments without endless ‘snark’?
(And too much of your ‘snark’ is just simply rudeness. Snark needs a certain amount of funny to be good, and yours is lacking.)

In other news, the spam comment that just got posted in an earlier thread:

Press Really,weight association officer there show wife own your there marry properly truth discuss law economic drawing consumer track due level right thought development servant operate herself find silence volume well someone clothes month shape switch task review which popular blue appoint military standard within outside account competition index describe mechanism link reasonable come debt improve average step tell war issue small above past rate potential wave percent heat firm pain visit double experiment join would stick grant settle elsewhere tax reflect behind limit citizen box over

Did anyone else try to figure out ways it could make sense?
I think it’s a message to a weight association officer who’s a corporate spy for an economics/law firm, and she needs to break into their monthly clothes review group and turn the speaker volume to mute so that the review group ends up deciding that the proper military clothing standard should be blue – and somehow that’s going to make the war debt improve so that citizens are paying less taxes…

Blast.
“…a weight association officer whose wife is a corporate spy…”
And not a boring corporate spy, either: one of those really cool spies with nightvision goggles and exploding pens. Sort of the James Bond of the business world.

why should kiyu be required to fix his/her behavior? Are there rules somewhere posted somewhere that defines what behavior is ok and what isn’t? Do they apply to all? Or just those that are branded as “trolls” or “asshats”?
No there are no rules. Except for common decency. Surprisingly, when someone comes into what is essentially a long running open discussion and starts being an asshole, and literally every other person more or less says “shape up or ship out” with carefully detailed, often enumerated lists of “hey, heres what you can do to stop being an asshole” and then that person continues to troll and shows no sign of being willing to talk, but instead keeps posting the same asshole stuff, and people eventually yell at them- thats called their own damn fault.
Are there sometimes posters who go off too quickly? Rarely. It’s usually Izzy and MadG who do the really harsh flaming, and they usually save it for people who deserve it.
I think I speak for most people when I say- we don’t give a shit what you believe or who you are. What we want, above reason, above intelligent commentary, is for someone to not be a total douchebeck. If Kiyu wants to be an RTC, than Eru bless ‘im. But part of our tolerance for his differences is his tolerance for our differences. If he wants to go “Hey, I think Jesus is the way the truth and the life and so should you, and heres why I think so,” NO ONE WOULD CARE.* But you get what you give. Wanna be a jerk? We’re nice people, but we’re also smart people who are VERY good at being jerks right back. Wanna be rude, insulting, dimissive, bigoted and everything else? Great. But don’t be surprised when we call a fucking asshole a fucking asshole.
Personally? Kiyu has shown signs of being a little less trollly. I for one would be perfectly willing to welcome Kiyu if they stop being a jerk, stop trolling, and are willing to be good commentors. And besides, its hardly just trolls that get called out. MadG calls me out all the time. Jason, who is probably the most popular poster here (except maybe Kit) gets called on stuff. Kit and MadG and Izzy and even once in a great while Fred, get called on things all the time. Or they say something, or there is a misunderstanding, or whatever. We’re big kids and we’ve got our big kid pants on so we can deal with it and move on. Kiyu wants to act like a three year old but still play with the big kids. You can’t have it both ways.
Kiyu seems very, very much like the sort of person I was at about 16-17- loud, obnoxious, insecure, and an ass about religion. I got flamed then. I learned, I grew up, I GOT OVER IT.
Jesus christ, KCS, we yelled at him/her. We haven’t threatened, intimidated, or even so much as tried to find out more about them. They wandered into our lives and our discussions and started being an asshole. People who are assholes get yelled at. Here, out there, in the street, at home- you’re an asshole, there are consequences from non-assholes. If he wants to stop being an asshole, we’re also willing to help them with that. But its not our responsibility to quietly tolerate anyones douchebeckery.
*Literally. We’ve got plenty of Christians from across the spectrum, I don’t know why trolls always act like they’re the very first person to think Jesus saved them.

“*Literally. We’ve got plenty of Christians from across the spectrum, I don’t know why trolls always act like they’re the very first person to think Jesus saved them.”
@ Cary: Some of the ‘Christians’ I have known over the years seem to take the attitude that “Jesus is MY personal savior” means that the resulting Salvation applies only to them and the people they like. Of course, people who take this sort of attitude tend not to get along well with each other, for obvious reasons.

And in other, far, far more important news-
They dropped the rainbow daleks! And Neil Gaiman will be writing the third episode of the new season! And it’ll features some bad guy from war games!
AHHHH!!!!!
http://airlockalpha.com/node/7957/rainbow-daleks-ditched-from-doctor-who.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Games

Um, back on semi-topic…
So, Fred, if you are reading, let me ask a straightforward question: do you believe that a non-Christian can be saved and go to Heaven?
I think we can probably extrapolate his answer. (Yes)
I know a lot of people have answered this already, but there’s a great metaphor that I think could contribute to the discussion. In my opinion, everyone “goes” to the same non-physical place upon death. On Earth, God is everywhere, but we are able to turn away, or put up barriers, from Him/Her. In Heaven, God is everywhere, but all of those barriers are stripped away. We experience the full glory of God, whether we want to or not. God’s glory is like the brightest, most beautiful sun you can imagine. If you have sought that light your entire life, even though in life you could never see the light but “through a glass darkly,” you will welcome that light. You will revel in its warmth and brightness. On the other hand, if you have spent your own life in the darkness and cold, driving yourself further and further away from the light, it will burn once you are exposed to it. You’ll want to get away from it because it hurts so badly. Most of us will be somewhere in the middle.
Now, how you define, “moving towards or away from God” is up for discussion. I would argue anything that you do that pushes someone else into the dark and cold (whether physically or emotionally) causes you to be pushed there as spiritual.
This theology allows space for both “non-Christians” to experience God’s glory as a good thing and the opportunity to actually change over the course of eternity. It’s about healing, not punishment. From what I can tell, it’s a rather Eastern Orthodox theology, even though I’m not Orthodox. I first heard about it via my husband’s theology teacher though, who is a Catholic priest at Boston College.

OT, but if anyone cares about golf…
Tenrzr ZpQbjryy whfg oebxr Gvtre Jbbqf’ sbhe-lrne jvaavat fgernx ng Purieba ol orngvat uvz ng gur fhqqra qrngu cynlbss ubyr!
ZpQbjryy ebpxf.

“CaryB, if I “drive you away from Christ” then by all means stop reading my posts, since that is an ETERNALLY heinous thing for any person to do. If I cause people to think less of Him, then I will answer for that infinityfold. I would be better if a lighthouse were tied around my neck and I were thrown into the void of space. God’s wrath would NEVER stop burning against me.”
So why in the hell do you act like such a douchebag?
Kiyum I can honestly say that people like you and Edwin Carshall (Pseudonym) and my ex-wife and the hack Evangelical Pastor that I work with on third shift ARE THE REASON THAT I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN. You had a little help from a Christian forum I used to post on, too. I got so tired of trying to be the peacemaker and the reasonable person and trying to get people who should know better to stop acting like a bunch of dumbass redneck morons that I just fucking QUIT.
It’s a hell of a lot easier to say “Really? You REALLY believe that? That’s just plain fucking WRONG, as in, it’s not right, not from a Biblical perspective but from a HUMAN perspective!” It’s also a lot easier tell someone to shut the fuck up when I’m not trying to explain to them why what they’re doing is wrong, even according to the Bible. I don’t have to take the high road anymore, and frankly I’ve not only made a couple of people cry, I’ve also made them apologize for the behavior that led to the nuking in the first place.
I haven’t been a Christian at all for about four years now and I’m a hell of a lot happier, less stressed, and more willing to call bullshit on people’s bullshit beliefs.
So until you either grow the fuck up and stop acting like a spoiled brat, or quit posting here so I don’t have to see your snidely little self-righteous comments, I’m going to consider anything you say to the effect of “That would be really bad if I drove someone away from God” to be complete and utter bullshit.
Because that is exactly what you are doing, people can’t see GOD but they CAN see His believers. I tried for years to point out to many of said Believers that people may judge God based upon their actions.
The net result of this? I was pretty much wasting my time. Most of the Atheists and Agnostics that I know IRL are that way because of Christian Bad Behavior, and American Evangelicalism goes happily skipping down the road towards Gilead heedless of the fact that even as it becomes more dogmatic and circle-jerkish and self righteous it’s also becoming disliked if not hated by a lot of people AND getting smaller and less relevant despite the ass-kissing that it gets politically, and claiming to be oppressed because of not having as much of a right to treat people like shit as it had five years ago. I’m curious, for that matter, at how a good solid 25% of the population that has a ton of influence and is pandered to politically and gets away with a shitload of stuff because Christian = Good be oppressed in the the first place?
People not liking you is not happening because “Jesus said it would” it is happening because you and people like you go around being assholes, depriving others of rights they should have, supported at least one war we totally didn’t need, and at least indirectly have contributed to virtually everyone getting fucked over by a certain subset of the uber-rich. American Fundamentalist Christianity in particular seems hell bent on taking What Jesus Taught and shitting all over it before setting it on fire and then doing the opposite.
I for one am fucking sick of it. Hell, the only reason I began actively participating here was because of a comment by the LAST Troll that really burned my ass.
So instead of relying on those who find your comments destructive to their spirituality, why don’t you just make less dickish comments?

Ack, that should have read: “So instead of relying on those who find your comments destructive to their spirituality TO NOT READ YOUR COMMENTS, why don’t you just make less dickish comments?”
I really hate how the touchpad on my laptop selects text if I accidentally hit it while typing, especially when I just clicked “Post.”

They dropped the rainbow daleks! And Neil Gaiman will be writing the third episode of the new season! And it’ll features some bad guy from war games!
Just as the Mighy Morphin Dalek Rangers were growing on me… (although when I heard this rumour before, I assumed they were going to use the bronze Daleks as grunts and keep the specialists).

Do you think children enjoy it when their parents tell them they’re being naughty? As above, so below.

I really hate how the touchpad on my laptop selects text if I accidentally hit it while typing, especially when I just clicked “Post.”

You can disable that, actually. Most laptops these days have a click touchpad, but I always disable that feature. If I want to click a button I will damn well push that little left mouse button just below it.

…I hope you didn’t just equate you telling us we’re eeeevil godless monsters with a parent/child relationship.
For your sake, I really hope not.

Do you think children enjoy it when their parents tell them they’re being naughty? As above, so below.
Well, first off, kids can’t tell right from wrong. Adults can.
But fine. But if God wants to be my dad, that means he has to act like my fucking dad. And my dad? Wouldn’t send me to hell. And my dad? I can call him any time, and he makes sure if I mess up, that I don’t fall too far.
When god does that for me, I’ll reconsider the whole “parent-child” bullshit line. Until then, the god you describe is nothing like my father, and I’m a little insulted by the comparison. Jesus wants to go around calling God “dad” thats his bundle of Freudian issues. Not mine.

You can disable that, actually. Most laptops these days have a click touchpad, but I always disable that feature. If I want to click a button I will damn well push that little left mouse button just below it.
Oh, great, maybe I should disable that if it ever gets annoying. I prefer the big buttons too, though on my old laptop the left button got broken from overuse or something so I was forced to tap the pad for everything.

Kiyu: Heres some guidelines for you.
The people you’re talking to, especially everyone who has been reading slacktivist for more than about, oh, a year, have a solid background in Christian Theology. ESPECIALLY those of us who aren’t Christians because we’ve been dealing with people like you for years.
So heres the guidline- if you think the argument is clever, new, or useful…it isn’t. If you’ve read it in a book, or a tract, or heard it in church…we’ve read it or heard it too. No exceptions. You want to offer me a stunning new exegesis on theodicy, I’ll pay attention. But until then- been there, refuted that, got the t-shirt.
Augustine couldn’t convert me. Bonhoffer, Lamott, ans Lewis couldn’t. Unless you’re smarter than them, stop trying. Because you literally have nothing new under the sun to say.
Come up with your own material.

“Do you think children enjoy it when their parents tell them they’re being naughty? As above, so below.”
Were we in the same room, this comment would not only provoke the response of “YOU’RE not my fuckin’ dad.” It would probably have gotten you physically assaulted. As my dad happens to be dead, my mom and my grandparents are the ONLY people who may speak to me in that tone without me flying off the handle. I am a grown-ass man and while they have EARNED the right to speak to me that way YOU have NOT.
As you are God-only-knows-where and therefore safe from the consequences of your own stupidity, the response is still the same. YOU have no business attempting to speak to a 37 year old adult who does not know you and is not even related to you…and who I bet is older than you too…like you are their fucking parent. There are places I’ve been…hell, lived…where that would provoke an ass-whupping. All the more so since you come off like a spoiled teenager at best, and one who really doesn’t know much about anything at worst.
Religion does not give you the right to treat a grown person like a child (much less an entire group of people who seem to be smarter than you) and not all churches encourage a child-like attitude in their followers, either.
So why don’t you just frak off and go back to whatever bridge you crawled out from under?

If I want to click a button I will damn well push that little left mouse button just below it.
That’s assuming you have a mouse button at the bottom. My Mac just has the touchpad…

“Come up with your own material.”
Ann Lamott, CS Lewis, and Deitrich Bonhoffer all came up with their own material.
If the trolls here and the trolls on the blog where I’m a moderator are any indication, coming up with their own material may be a feat that’s beyond the capabilities of the average Evangelical/Fundamentalist/Pentecostal Troll. They all seem to use the same arguments.
This is why I’ve got a pet theory that there’s some sort of Command Evangelization Program run by a supercomputer buried under Colorado Springs, except that it was programmed by a Fundie so it acts like one. All the arguments the Trolls use are the same, calculated to be offensive, un-original, and have multiple uses if you just change up the variables.
I can provide evidence that militant Atheists, Christian Fundamentalists, and Muslim Fundamentalists copy off of each other’s homework. I’ve literally seen all three use the same story, just with the variables changed around, I googled it once with that in mind because I needed to prove this point.
Hell, I’m pretty sure we could compile some Troll Argument form letters to make it easier for them, if we really wanted to.

@ Pentecostal Cylon
seem to take the attitude that “Jesus is MY personal savior” means that the resulting Salvation applies only to them and the people they like.
I think I’d track down a copy of Avalanche Soldier and make them read it. The main thread is about religion, a teacher who is the One, but only for a few people; the rest are just ordinary listeners and followers.

If you have a spare USB connector on your laptop, plug in a real mouse and make your life a bit easier. (I hate touchpads. Can’t get them to work reliably.)

CaryB: Hm. I think this might be one of these areas where we agree to disagree. For me personally…well, I wouldn’t be friends with someone who thought homosexuality was wrong, or that anyone non-Christian was going to Hell. The relatives who I know think that way are people I put up with at family gatherings, snark about the rest of the time, and sort of enjoy subtly pissing off*; I choose to believe my grandparents don’t think that way, because then I feel like I would think much less of them. (It’s one of the reasons my extended family Doesn’t Talk about Certain Things–because, otherwise, many of us would never talk to each other again.)
There are degrees of bad and good, and while I don’t think Kiyu is a serial killer and I don’t think I’m a saint…well, I’m also not in your camp of non-judginess.
*I’m very much looking forward to That One Aunt, for example, calling up my dad all “Your daughter is writing SMUT OMG”. Hee.

Pentecostal Cylon: I can provide evidence that militant Atheists, Christian Fundamentalists, and Muslim Fundamentalists copy off of each other’s homework. I’ve literally seen all three use the same story, just with the variables changed around, I googled it once with that in mind because I needed to prove this point.
Although I would like to point out that this is in fact a worn-out cliche: “The ‘militant’ atheists are just as bad as the fundies.”
First of all, the vast, vast majority of people I have seen make this argument either a) do not know what the word “militant” means or b) if they do, they refuse to apply it to believers in the same manner they apply it to atheists.
Second, if an atheist disagrees with a believer, disagreement is as far as it goes, approximately 999 times out of 1,000. That is, atheists do not have a tendency to either assume or advocate that the believer be punished (let alone tortured, let alone forever) for hir beliefs.
Sorry, it’s just a pet peeve of mine that the minute a believer starts misbehaving, the comparison to “militant” atheists is trotted out.

well, I wouldn’t be friends with someone who thought homosexuality was wrong, or that anyone non-Christian was going to Hell. The relatives who I know think that way are people I put up with at family gatherings, snark about the rest of the time, and sort of enjoy subtly pissing of
Truth be told, I love ticking them off too. I’m not laying any claims to saintliness here.
It all goes back to the Nuker/Appeaser (seriously, we need a better word, I feel that this is discriminatory language) debate. We need nukers and appeasers. Go where your talents lead you, I say. And I enjoy your flames far, far too much to think they should stop.
Nukers are sort of the Audie Murphies of civilized debate. Nice most of the time, but you really, really don’t want to cross them.

If you have a spare USB connector on your laptop, plug in a real mouse and make your life a bit easier. (I hate touchpads. Can’t get them to work reliably.)
Yeah, but my touchpad is SO COOL. I can use it normally with one finger, scroll down the page with two fingers, switch between apps by using three fingers sideways, go to the bottom of a site by using three fingers downwards, or go to my desktop with four fingers. *loves*

@ Ruby…as for the story in question the Fundamentalist Christians and Muslims just changed the variables in it, the Atheist version simply cut the story off at a convenient point.
You’ve probably seen it, it usually features a Christian or Muslim student conveniently pwning an Atheist college professor. The Atheist version is shorter, because it ends when the first Christian or Muslim student (presumably the non-Fundie) sits down in defeat.
As for “militant” well…I chose that particular choice of words because “Fundamentalist Atheist” seems like a serious contradicition in terms and yes, they do have their own version of the story.

“If you have a spare USB connector on your laptop, plug in a real mouse and make your life a bit easier. (I hate touchpads. Can’t get them to work reliably.)”
I HAVE a Mouse, so I never actually USE the touchpad.

Second, if an atheist disagrees with a believer, disagreement is as far as it goes, approximately 999 times out of 1,000. That is, atheists do not have a tendency to either assume or advocate that the believer be punished (let alone tortured, let alone forever) for hir beliefs.
Well yes. But I think they meant J and his ilk as opposed to you or I. I’m certainly somewhat ‘militant’ about my atheism, in that I’m as openly atheistic as most believers are…umm…’belief-y?’ (kinda wrote myself into a corner there.)
That passes for militancy a lot of places. But I’m not in J’s camp either.

Yeah, but my touchpad is SO COOL. I can use it normally with one finger, scroll down the page with two fingers, switch between apps by using three fingers sideways, go to the bottom of a site by using three fingers downwards, or go to my desktop with four fingers. *loves*
So…many…dirty…jokes.
Strain of…repressing them…too much!
Becoming…William…Shatner!

@ Cary: Personally, I’m a Militant Agnostic. I don’t know, and niether do you!
/snark but yes, I actually am an Agnostic.

Second, if an atheist disagrees with a believer, disagreement is as far as it goes, approximately 999 times out of 1,000. That is, atheists do not have a tendency to either assume or advocate that the believer be punished (let alone tortured, let alone forever) for hir beliefs.
On the other hand, “disagreement is as far as it goes, approximately 999 times out of 1,000″ could also be said of Christians.
Dealing with RTCs and RTAs, though, tends to be very very similar (references to hell notwithstanding).

PC, you seem to be upset. I forgive you. Perhaps you misunderstood. I was comparing Our Father in Heaven to a parent, not myself.

Do you think children enjoy it when their parents tell them they’re being naughty? As above, so below.
Aside from the dubious applicability of the God = parent metaphor in this particular (or indeed, any) case, it’s pretty becking obvious that you’re not a parent.
Because I can absolutely guarantee that there is NO “naughty” behavior on a child’s part that will infuriate and disgust a parent so much as having one of the child’s siblings take it upon zirself to assume the parental role and start in with the supercilious lectures.
As above, so below.

We’ve heard that one before. Where do you think “Fluffy iguana cookies” came from?
… Alright, granted, that was a particularly strange turn of conversation that lead from the theology you describe to that particular slactivite meme.
I have conceptual issues with it though — it seems to assume that if one is non-christian, especially atheist, that’s because of a hatred of God and everything that God embodies. I’m not a non-believer because I hate God, although the majority of concepts of God that I’ve encountered I’d hate, and fear, and oppose with my whole heart if I were convinced they were real. There are concepts of God which do not inspire such feelings in me, however, so if I felt the need for God-belief I’d pick one of those. But I don’t feel any such need. There’s just no evidence that convinces me, and I can’t really even imagine any evidence that could convince me, without who I am significantly changing.

Well, that was a reply to storiteller.

Where do you think “Fluffy iguana cookies” came from?
Where did fluffy iguana cookies come from?

CaryB: That’s cool, and thanks!
I personally don’t think Kiyu’s worth talking to directly. Things like him don’t change their mind due to reasoned discussion.
But it’s worth repeating, in general, that my parents gave me a reason when they told me not to do things. If they hadn’t, I’d be finding excuses not to go home for Christmas these days. A deity who demands I follow its commands without reason, particularly when those commands involve abstaining from behavior that harms nobody, can use its omnipotence to go and fuck itself.
On the atheist/fundamentalist thing: the problem seems to be that “militant” can encompass a range from “openly states opinions when asked” to “is really a dick about it” to “kills people with rocks”. (Yeah, yeah, dictionary definition, whatever: language evolves, prescriptivists can suck my astral cock.) “Atheists who are dickheads are as bad as ninety percent of the fundies” would work okay, I think.

I was comparing Our Father in Heaven to a parent, not myself.
And yet you continue to speak for God.
I can only take the advice of my Lord, as to how we should consider those who claim to have unfiltered, certain, true knowledge of the intentions of God: “And when they shall say to you, See here; or, see there: go not after them, nor follow them. “

CaryB: Well yes. But I think they meant J and his ilk as opposed to you or I. I’m certainly somewhat ‘militant’ about my atheism, in that I’m as openly atheistic as most believers are…umm…’belief-y?’ (kinda wrote myself into a corner there.)
That passes for militancy a lot of places. But I’m not in J’s camp either.
I see what you’re saying, Cary, and I think we are actually very close to each other on the spectrum of attitude about our atheism, but you are kinda helping me make my point: the attitude that people call “militant” in atheists does not get believers of the same outspokenness called “militant.”
You say you’re about as open about your atheism as most believers are about their belief. Do you think that most Christians are militant? Most Jews? Most pagans? You would not believe how many times I, and people far less outspoken than I, have been called militant by Christians who would never dream of calling themselves or other believers militant, even when they actually advocate things like actual punishment.
I guess what I am advocating, here at least, is for people to stop and think before they start calling people militant, especially when the people you are calling militant have absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at hand. As I’ve said, the calling out of “militant” atheists and RT Muslims is a very old tactic whenever a Christian starts acting up.

PC, you seem to be upset. I forgive you.
PC, you seem to be upset. I apologize.
Fixed that for ya.

PC, you seem to be upset. I forgive you.
Not Pentecostal Cylon, but… you’re not the one with the right to forgive anyone here, you condescending little beckwit.

I have conceptual issues with it though — it seems to assume that if one is non-christian, especially atheist, that’s because of a hatred of God and everything that God embodies. I’m not a non-believer because I hate God, although the majority of concepts of God that I’ve encountered I’d hate, and fear, and oppose with my whole heart if I were convinced they were real. There are concepts of God which do not inspire such feelings in me, however, so if I felt the need for God-belief I’d pick one of those. But I don’t feel any such need. There’s just no evidence that convinces me, and I can’t really even imagine any evidence that could convince me, without who I am significantly changing.
QFT.
However, assuming I’m wrong, AND assuming that God has a good enough explanation for…well, for fucking everything…I could get behind a fluffy iguana cookie heaven. One in which everyone can do what they want without pain and suffering, where all diseases are cured…
Yeah, its a nice enough fantasy and I’d rather end up there than in hell..
But its also a little patronizing.
“Oh, MY god is so awesome even ATHEISTS are happy and run around in the sunshine. And all those silly atheists realize the error of their ways and learn to love God. Don’t worry! God loves you even though you’re too stupid to believe in him.”is the way it can come across.
To get something of the same flavor, imagine me talking about a perfect secular world, where abortion is beyond question, all people can marry, there is no war in the Middle East or Ireland…but, you know. We’ll let the religious folks hang out and sooner or later they’ll realize the error of their ways and learn to love atheism like I do!
I mean, its nice that I’m including you guys, and its nice that I don’t want to strip you of your rights, but…yeah.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the thought…but yeah, its a skosh patronizing. And I’m not trying to say that you, person who posted that, are an asshole, or that you’re evil. I see what you’re trying to say, and I appreciate it, and I know it comes from a good place. But when you say that, it can come across as patronizing atheists.
Not to mention those people of other religions and so on who don’t have the same view of heaven, salvation or a lot of things that your average Christian does.
(Can I say it? I really want to say it!)
*ahem* Please check your privilege.
(Did I use it correctly?)

Kiyu: I was comparing Our Father in Heaven to a parent, not myself.
As has been said, when “Our Father in Heaven” shows up and starts acting like a father, maybe I’ll listen. I already have a father, and have no need of another.

To get something of the same flavor, imagine me talking about a perfect secular world, where abortion is beyond question, all people can marry, there is no war in the Middle East or Ireland…but, you know. We’ll let the religious folks hang out and sooner or later they’ll realize the error of their ways and learn to love atheism like I do!
I mean, its nice that I’m including you guys, and its nice that I don’t want to strip you of your rights, but…yeah.
Much the same way I feel about the song “Imagine”, in fact.

Ruby: Oh, totally, I didn’t mean to disagree with you. And there is that problem of no way to separate “I talk about my atheism as much as a Christian talks about their faith*” from “hi, I’m J and I’m here to be a beckwit.”
There is also the colloquial meaning of “militant” which I do think gets applied more generally than you might think. I would describe anyone who hijacks a completely unrelated thread to rant about their faith or lack thereof as “militant.” To me, its not about how much you talk about it, but how you talk about it. If its a lot of “Hey, here I am, this is what I believe” thats not militant. If (without provacation) its “Hey you dumbass, I’m right and you’re wrong and here’s an out of context quote proving it” then they’re militant. J and Kiyu and EC and Scott (original) and Freedom Fighter all do exactly the same things, just about different subjects. I would classify them as MA’s- militant assholes. They can’t agree on anything else, but they can agree they’re beckheads.
*How much is that, anyway? I know people all over the spectrum, and some of the nicest ones (Fred) are the most outspoken.

Much the same way I feel about the song “Imagine”, in fact.
EXACTLY!
I mean, I love the song, but…yeah, its a little patronizing. Doesn’t mean Lennon was an asshole, just that he needed to not be so condescending. This particularly irritates me when Atheists do it, because the entire point is that we DON’T know the perfect One True Way to be happy.

I see what you’re saying, Cary, and I think we are actually very close to each other on the spectrum of attitude about our atheism, but you are kinda helping me make my point: the attitude that people call “militant” in atheists does not get believers of the same outspokenness called “militant.”

Truth be told, I think that part of the problem there is the general culture of the United States. The batshit insanity (and I’m sorry but much of it is, at least to my Anglo Eyes) allowed by the First Amendment makes for some frankly warped notions of anything even remotely resembling what I would call Christianity. And don’t get me started on their persecution complex, seriously. Coming from a bunch of people whose historical forebears thought that the genocidal maniac who banned Christmas celebrations wasn’t going far enough, yeah, I feel that pain.

As has been said, when “Our Father in Heaven” shows up and starts acting like a father, maybe I’ll listen.

Mainly I’m think I don’t need two absentee, lying bastards waiting in the wings to get their familial fix before buggering off to whatever new thing has taken their fancy, so yeah.

Where do you think “Fluffy iguana cookies” came from?
Where did fluffy iguana cookies come from?

A conversation about Heaven and Hell being the same place except some individuals wouldn’t be happy in Heaven no matter how hard you tried to make them happy. It led to a mock conversation “Would you like some cookies? No? How about a fluffy cloud? How about a bunny? How about an iguana?” and of course that all got condensed to Fluffy Iguana Cookies.

Kiyu, it really is useless to tell children they are being naughty. What they need to know is what specifically they are doing wrong and more importantly, what to do instead.

On the subject of Christian behavior…I’m a big fan of the show “Community” and this season they had an episode that was not only hilarious but an interesting theological puzzle.
*******************SPOILERS*************************************
One of the main characters, Shirley, is a devout Christian. Another one, Abed, is a muslim filmmaker who suffers from Asbergers and uses film-making to help him communicate and understand the world.
Shirley asks Abed to make her a christian viral video. However, he decides to do a very post-modern film, where the entire world is part of the film, and he, the filmmaker, is a Christ figure. (Its very complicated, but thats the gist of it.)
Shirley opposes him, trying to get the production shut down, as she feels it is very offensive. Everyone else at the school follows Abed in a rather clever pastiche of Jesus’s life (With shirley standing in for the Pharisees/Judas.)
Finally, after she seems to have failed at stopping him, she hears him praying in the garden. He says that his film is awful, his reputation will be ruined, and begs god to take the production to be taken away from him. (The scene is also surprisingly touching, and I think, a rather nice Garden of Gethsemane scene.)
So Shirley goes and destroys the cameras and the film. She acts as the bad guy to save her friend, and never takes any credit for it. It’s a beautifully filmed and beautifully Christian moment. The whole episode makes for interesting theological considerations, and is, in itself, a very nice little parable on what it really means to act like a Christian.

CaryB, if I “drive you away from Christ” then by all means stop reading my posts, since that is an ETERNALLY heinous thing for any person to do. If I cause people to think less of Him, then I will answer for that infinityfold. I would be better if a lighthouse were tied around my neck and I were thrown into the void of space. God’s wrath would NEVER stop burning against me.
So, if you’re driving someone away from Christ, they should read your posts eh?
I guess then if you rape someone, they shouldn’t have been wearing such a short skirt.
If you got drunk and ran someone over with your car, they shouldn’t have been out walking day.
If you punched someone, they should have moved their fist out of the way of your fist.
If you broke into someone’s house and stole their TV, they shouldn’t have bought that fancy HD flat screen.
If you beat your child, he shouldn’t have been acting like such a brat.
I didn’t realize that sin worked that way….. I thought it was up to the sinner to not the horrible thing not the victim to move out their way. Wow, thanks for teaching me about my own faith, Kiyu. I never knew that it worked that way. You’ve really shown me the light. Thanks a million.
Also I’m delighted that everyone has taken to calling Kiyu, “Sparky” and whatever else.
…and I’m a bit humbled and not sure what to say that I’m on Cary’s list of people he wants to emulate.

Oh, Kiyu, earlier this week I came here and tried to play the “I’m smarter than everyone else” game and got my butt handily spanked. I learned to be a little more humble.
Do the same.

There’s a funny thing about forgiveness that I’m surprised you never learned, Sparky. See, it’s the person who’s been wronged or insulted who does the forgiving. Trying to do it the other way around just makes you even more of an ass.
To me, “Sparky” is forever associated with a greyish little guy with a wide frog-like mouth and enormous eyebrows who’s more than willing to sell his mates out at any opportunity. And even he’s more pleasant than this guy.

As a person who is known as Sparky, I am less than thrilled that is becoming a slur.

@Lonespark-
As a person who is known as Sparky, I am less than thrilled that is becoming a slur.
Well we still have Goober, hoss, and Binky. Apparently Skippy means something over in Britian, according to someone here, which is why I quit using that one.

As a person who is known as Sparky, I am less than thrilled that is becoming a slur.

At this rate, we might have to stop using slurs.

Apparently Skippy means something over in Britain
I don’t know if it means anything in Britain, but in Australia it’s a derogatory term for Anglo Aussies.

Every time you use hoss, though, I think of Ebenezar’s name for Harry Dresden. It’s one of the little tiny details about their relationship that gives them history.

I personally like the Irish slang “hardshaw.” It used to mean tough person, but now has a much more sarcastic implication. Much like “tough guy” in American slang.
And that lovely long Irish A (“Haaardshaw”) gives it such a lovely, contemptuous tone.

Spanky?

‘Hey You’?
(My idea of a militant atheist is someone who not only is sure that atheism is the Only Real Answer, but also insists that everyone who isn’t an atheist is like a child, believing in a ‘sky daddy’. Demeaning, insulting, and wrong, in other words. So yeah, probably an MA as well.)

Spanky works, Izzy!

Perhaps we need a thread specifically to discuss what slurs it is okay to use in Slacktivist discussions, but to do that we first need Fred to write a post on the subject of what slurs are okay to use in Slacktivist discussions. I wonder how such a post might read?

While I am just as turned off by Kiyu as anyone here and would dearly love to smack him over the head with a “Jesus Saves” placard, I must admit I’ve seen RTC’s do some real good in the world on a scale that puts me to shame, and wouldn’t be surprised if Kiyu in real life is a charitable person who tries his best to follow Jesus.
I have not seen RTCs (which does not mean just Christians, but Christians who think that their own brand of Christianity is the One True Way, and that everyone else is damned and probably evil) do significant amounts of good, but I have seen them do significant amount of harm, to me and to people I care about. Any good I’ve seen them do, I’ve seen them pair with equal harm, and then do harm on top of that. Defending them because they’re Really Good People, They Just Hurt People Sometimes Because They’re Mistaken About A Few Thing, when we aren’t calling them bad people but taking them to task for the specific instances in which they hurt people, is missing the fucking point.
Also, the Internet IS a part of real life. Kiyu is an asshole here, despite being told that what he’s doing is assholish. He’s doing harm, despite being told that his actions are harmful. He’s hurting people, despite being told that his actions hurt. I don’t give a flying fuck what he’s TRYING to do, I care what he’s actually doing, and what he’s doing is being an asshole.
Most of them think homosexuality (or non-cis sexuality, although that has some interesting variations
I think you have misunderstood “cis-sexual.” Cis-sexual people are those whose physical, genital sexes match their gender identities. Cis-gendered people are those whose assigned genders match their gender identities. Generally, the two indicate the same thing, as assigned gender nearly always equals genital sex, but there can, in rare cases, be a distinction. One does not generally use “cis sexuality.”
If I have misunderstood your point, I apologize.
black isn’t a color
It is, too. Black is a color of pigment. Black is not a color of light. There’s a difference between additive and subtractive systems of color. Learn it, you twit.
people are welcome to explain how black is a color all they want – but please, don’t
Fuck you, you complete asshole. No, seriously. You want to be able to define all the terms, but your definitions are flat wrong. You’ve been an asshole frequently. Fuck you.
always entertained by the efforts to educate someone out of being an asshat… by being an asshat
And yet, you sanctimonious asshat, you have seen the evidence that it sometimes works. Roughly as often, in my experience, as being nice in an effort to educate someone out of being an asshat. Your comments are passive-aggressive and are an instance of rectal haberdashery, so possibly you might want to examine your own silicate abode before utilizing lithic missiles.
Also, fuck you, too. You fucking hypocrite.
It all goes back to the Nuker/Appeaser (seriously, we need a better word, I feel that this is discriminatory language) debate.
I say, one more time: go read the original article from which we gleaned the terminology: ALL of the styles are named for their worst aspects. It’s not discriminatory, it merely refers to the flaws of each style of communication. If you want to find another fucking word for “appeaser,” please find an equally nice on for “nuker,” because neither of them are complimentary.

I think you have misunderstood “cis-sexual.” Cis-sexual people are those whose physical, genital sexes match their gender identities. Cis-gendered people are those whose assigned genders match their gender identities. Generally, the two indicate the same thing, as assigned gender nearly always equals genital sex, but there can, in rare cases, be a distinction. One does not generally use “cis sexuality.”
I think I understand. I was using cis-sexual because “gender” is a word that I rapidly get lost in trying to deal with.
And I’m stopping right there because, in my experience, gender vs. sex debates tend to make abortion arguments look like doctor who discussions.
I say, one more time: go read the original article from which we gleaned the terminology: ALL of the styles are named for their worst aspects. It’s not discriminatory, it merely refers to the flaws of each style of communication. If you want to find another fucking word for “appeaser,” please find an equally nice on for “nuker,” because neither of them are complimentary.
OOOOOOOH. That would explain a LOT actually. And maybe its my normally loud personality and somewhat pugnacious nature, but I didn’t see that “nuker” was supposed to be as negative as “appeaser.”
Your comments are passive-aggressive and are an instance of rectal haberdashery, so possibly you might want to examine your own silicate abode before utilizing lithic missiles.
Hee!

Roughly as often, in my experience, as being nice in an effort to educate someone out of being an asshat.
And both in combination are the good ol’ “Good cop, bad cop” routine which is terrifyingly effective.
Seriously, even been GCBCd? It’s frightening how quickly and well it works even when you know whats going on.

Roughly as often, in my experience, as being nice in an effort to educate someone out of being an asshat.
And both in combination are the good ol’ “Good cop, bad cop” routine which is terrifyingly effective.
Seriously, even been GCBCd? It’s frightening how quickly and well it works even when you know whats going on.

If it helps, for the sheer lulz factor I decided to roll it oldschool using a dialup modem to download a driver for a computer because I couldn’t be arsed to find the CD for it, and I had my USR Courier modem to hand.

And maybe its my normally loud personality and somewhat pugnacious nature, but I didn’t see that “nuker” was supposed to be as negative as “appeaser.”
Yeah, several people have missed that, which is why I keep having to explain it. I’m kind of tired of it.
Not unconnectedly, allow me to recommend to all and sundry Lemony Snicket’s book, The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story, the moral of which involves how angering it is to have one’s words and beliefs constantly misconstrued, and to be constantly told that one’s beliefs are other than they are.
I am in sympathy with the latke. It’s rather surreal for me to say that.

Pheew. Nothing like reading an MG nuking to be REALLY glad to not be the target. It reminds me of a Fourth of July display using PeeWee nukes and napalm. Fun to watch but from a very long distance…

Nuke me all you like but I will walk out of the radioactive haze unharmed, stronger even. Giving me nicknames only demonstrates you puerile nature and make me laugh. If you’re going to argue with me, GIVE ME SOMETHING SOLID TO WAIL UPON.

I have to say, I’ve much more appreciation of the whole “nuker” approach since I asked some people on a forum I frequent to stop tossing “rape” around as a casual term. The sheer wave of wailing protests about how I didn’t respect free speech and couldn’t I see how terrible it would be if they had to use words like “decimate” instead and besides it’s just a word, so why does it matter (gah! Why can’t people at least make their arguments internally consistent?) etc. etc. etc. Have made me really want to just punch some people in the face over the internet, ’cause politely explaining that it does hurt some people, it trivializes rape (which is already horribly trivialized in modern society) and that there are dozens of words that could be used the same way that cause no harm has gotten me exactly nowhere. >>

FUCK YOU KIYU.

NO, SERIOUSLY. FUCK YOU, YOU PIMPLE ON THE ASS OF THE FORMER PLANET PLUTO.

Hey, beckwit? People HAVE given you solid arguments. ou fucking ignore them, because you are a fucking troll.

Fuck you.

God damn it, you passive-aggressive little piece of shit purposely putting in an unterminated tag in your sign-in name just to mess with the goddamn thread. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU.

Noooo, we’re all being nuked with F-bombs

….

testing?

Going to bed, so btw, if he pulls that shit again….
[/S]
replace the brackets with .
Hope Fred bans your ass for that, Kiyu.

Giving me nicknames only demonstrates you puerile nature and make me laugh.
because making an entire page of striketrough on purpose is oh so mature.
If you’re going to argue with me, GIVE ME SOMETHING SOLID TO WAIL UPON.
oh and btw, you did and you ignored it.

err. we did and you ignored it..

You worthless little scumsucking, dogfucking, weak fart of a human being.
Do you have even the slightest fucking idea of what a rude little turd you are? Do you have any conception of basic fucking courtesy, or was the syphilitic rot so clearly affecting your brain the only thing your mother gave you?
Listen you little teenaged, bible-thumping, onanistic shit tick. Fuck. Off. Away.
Got it? Go. Away. We don’t want you. We don’t like you. Personally, your latest petty, vindictive little fit of pique has finally cut my last fucking mooring.
You paltry sack of piss. You know what you are? You aren’t a maggot- maggots are crucial parts of an ecosystem. So are dungbeetles. You, you’re more like a tapeworm, except even a tapeworm will someday be capable of reproduction, you sad little eunuch.
You are, like your Gods Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh, something new and sui generis. You are an utterly worthless entity, a sack of meat that by some miracle manages to remain ambulant while producing nothing of value. You toil not, neither do you sow. Yiddish has a word for you: schmuck. You know what a schmuck is? Its the little bit of the foreskin you cut off. Utterly useless and throughly superfluous.
You’re what happens when Jack meets Shit, and you ain’t shit, Jack.
Fuck. Off.

You worthless little scumsucking, dogfucking, weak fart of a human being.
Do you have even the slightest fucking idea of what a rude little turd you are? Do you have any conception of basic fucking courtesy, or was the syphilitic rot so clearly affecting your brain the only thing your mother gave you?
Listen you little teenaged, bible-thumping, onanistic shit tick. Fuck. Off. Away.
Got it? Go. Away. We don’t want you. We don’t like you. Personally, your latest petty, vindictive little fit of pique has finally cut my last fucking mooring.
You paltry sack of piss. You know what you are? You aren’t a maggot- maggots are crucial parts of an ecosystem. So are dungbeetles. You, you’re more like a tapeworm, except even a tapeworm will someday be capable of reproduction, you sad little eunuch.
You are, like your Gods Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh, something new and sui generis. You are an utterly worthless entity, a sack of meat that by some miracle manages to remain ambulant while producing nothing of value. You toil not, neither do you sow. Yiddish has a word for you: schmuck. You know what a schmuck is? Its the little bit of the foreskin you cut off. Utterly useless and throughly superfluous.
You’re what happens when Jack meets Shit, and you ain’t shit, Jack.
Fuck. Off.

The rant so angry it posted itself twice for effect…

Jeez, why is everyone acting like I raped the dog crossed the moral event horizon? I was demonstrating to you how immature you were being in a way you couldn’t ignore. Don’t like it? Tough.

Pie recipes, anyone?

I was quite enjoying having the troll killfiled, but if it’s going to sabotage the page in order to disturb even the people who are ignoring it, then yes, please ban it.

Because what you did was so mature, huh Kiyu? Wait to set an example.
Unlike others, my atheism has nothing to do with how nice or nasty Christians are (any more than it is affected by the geniality of Buddhists), so I’m not going to the same “you’re the reason there aren’t more Christians” well. But let’s just say that your recruitment poster needs work.

Google Kiyu Agaton and the only hits are here, and 4chan. Kiyu isn’t even an RTC, just a garden variety troll, hence the constant escalation to provoke a response. There’s no point trying to engage in good faith, Kiyu isn’t interested.

While I am just as turned off by Kiyu as anyone here and would dearly love to smack him over the head with a “Jesus Saves” placard, I must admit I’ve seen RTC’s do some real good in the world on a scale that puts me to shame,
You’ve met some very different RTCs than I have. The ones I’ve met largely tend to do things that, from my atheist perspective, seem useless (such as giving tracts to the starving) or actively harmful (spreading lies about condoms, encouraging people to pray the gay away, etc.). Some do good, but it’s often either sufficiently tainted by their ideology (“You can have somewhere warm to sleep for the night, but if you’re a trans woman, we’re going to throw you in the dorm full of strange men and expect you to shower with them, because that’s totally safe and reasonable, isn’t it?”) or sufficiently balanced out by the harm they do that I’d be hard-pressed to categorize them as basically good or doing a significant amount of good.
I’ve known some Christians who do staggering amounts of good for the world (as well as some atheists, Buddhists, Wiccans, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc.), but the ones who I’ve seen do good are also the ones who seem ready to extend a reasonable degree of tolerance. (Not necessarily “I’m totally okay with the gay thing”, but “Not hurting people is far more important than telling them why they should believe what I want them to”.) I’m sure you’re describing the people you know accurately, but they’re really outside of my experiences, and I’ve met a lot of people whose behavior when talking about their religious beliefs matches their behavior towards people in general.

You’ve met some very different RTCs than I have. The ones I’ve met largely tend to do things that, from my atheist perspective, seem useless (such as giving tracts to the starving) or actively harmful (spreading lies about condoms, encouraging people to pray the gay away, etc.).
Ahhh, I realize the difficulty. RTC to me means the adherents of the Premillennial Dispensationalist (PMD) and related theologies- Rapture, anti-christ, what have you. RTC, as you use, means I think “Someone who is convinced of the inherent superiority of christianity and their beliefs, and who denies the acceptability of other religions.” In other words, the Kiyu’s of the world. They do boucoup badness. However, there are PMD’s who are great people and who do a lot of good.
Most PMD’s are RTC’s, but not all RTC’s are PMD’s, if I follow correctly.

RTC, as you use, means I think “Someone who is convinced of the inherent superiority of christianity and their beliefs, and who denies the acceptability of other religions.”
Yeah. Real True Christians are the ones who think they’re right in all of the important ways, and holding diverging views is wrong not just in the factual sense, but in the moral sense. I haven’t met many PMDs. Most of the RTCs I know are actually Real True Catholics, who believe that God is on the side of the Republican Party, a moral commitment to human life that involves forcing barely-adolescent rape victims to carry risky pregnancies to term is important but a moral commitment to human life that involves not blowing up people who might possibly be in the same building as people who hate America isn’t important, and what poor and deprived children in the Philippines really need is more rosaries. And everyone who doesn’t totally agree with them is not Christian enough and will go to Hell if they don’t conform.

‘…and 4chan’
Sad – but it explains much. Including the expressed deep concern that Kiyu’s image had changed between the first and second post ever made here, while adding another bit of evidence to the idea that Kiyu is under 15 years old.

Thank Nurgle, I was wondering when someone would think to google my name. To someone who’s a teacher above all else, it’s somewhat disappointing how easily you guys fall to such elementary provocation. Hopefully you remember this lesson, I’d hate to think I spent all this time vaccinating you only for you to forget your lesson.

GOD FUCKING DAMN IT TO HELL, KIYU.
okay, okay, I’m going to be nice about this. I’m offering you one last opportunity for conversation.
okay, here’s the deal. Post an objection to something Fred has written or one of the posters has written. DON’T STATE THAT YOU HAVE ALREADY DONE SO, AND DON’T ALLUDE TO THE IDEA YOU HAVE ALREADY BEEN VICTORIOUS. This is a start over with a clean slate opportunity. Just post a thought. I or someone else will respond to this thought. You may at your leisure post a counter response, and so on. No insulting attacks, just a polite conversation.
BUT DAMN IT, THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE.

Thanks for the lesson Kiya, but I already knew some people were arseholes.

God dammit, I did that google first thing too, but I thought it was bad form to throw that sort of accusation around without proof. I hate being right.

Totally OT but..
NEW ATLAS SHRUGGED!
http://newscum.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/atlas-shrugged-iv-strange-bedfellows/

Wow, you’re on 4chan! Oh what a big boy you must be. Does your mommy know you’re on the computer?
Fuck off little child, the adults are trying to talk.

Cute little troll.
*pats on the head*
Run away and play, the grown ups are talking.

Oh trolling may toughen you up I guess that makes it a worthwhile endeavor

* Deird, who just had a massage and is relaxed beyond belief*
Clearly! Damn, if massages will make me pat trolls on the head, I want one!

MOTHER. FUCKER.
Never mind the New Atlas Shrugged. Thanks Gazza. I screwed up.

CaryB, currently you could put me in front of Stalin, Hitler, and Scorpius and I’d just smile nicely and tell them all to have a lovely day…

Ok. NOW there’s a new Atlas Shrugged.
http://newscum.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/atlas-shrugged-vi-the-ballad-of-hank-rearden/

kcs_hiker: the whole idea of life being a continual series of tests, a minefield, where one misstep sends you to hell strikes me as a far worse version of hell than the one with fire and torture. Perhaps that’s why those folk who believe that seem so… tortured.
Oooooh, yeah. One of the many repellent features of Fundamentalism is the (apparent, implied) belief that this world is one big obstacle course. Weird how Gnostic that seems…

CaryB: And both in combination are the good ol’ “Good cop, bad cop” routine which is terrifyingly effective.
Seriously, even been GCBCd? It’s frightening how quickly and well it works even when you know whats going on.
Possibly relevantly:
When I’m feeling a little more cynical about religion than usual, the fact that Fundamentalist Jesus and Fundamentalist Satan are running a Good Cop/Bad Cop act seems pretty gaspingly obvious.

I’m now sitting here all confused because it hadn’t occurred to me that Appeaser could be considered as derogatory a term as Nuker

@Julie Paradox: Think “Neville Chamberlain”, and the derogation of it should be more apparent.

Kiyu :

I’m not going to condescend to you by asking if you know what a joke is.

That’s like… condescension to the power of condescension. Kiyu, keep posting here by all means. I think that’s been three one-liners of yours now that made me go o_O in a fun way. (Or two one-liners rather. “Murder is killing for selfish reasons” made me go o_O in a not-fun way)
Own This Idea Cheap :

Start with a simple parlor trick (A=B, B=C, then ‘prove’ any relation where A=C through defining B to one’s personal satisfaction), and the answer is to start joining the L33T to talk to Kiyu? That is bizarre – sorry I ever went there.

I don’t care about Kiyu but I do care about your parlor tricks. I can’t believe how insulted I feel, that you’d make ALL THAT DEAL about monotheists all believing in the same god and how this was completely trivial, and all along it was a parlor trick ? Why didn’t you just say so ? “Hey people, I’m just playing around with transitivity here of course it isn’t a serious argument”, it isn’t that hard. You know what they call people who make others waste time and brainpower debating on the internet, right ?
Oh well, at least we got Hanna’s course on semantic logic out of it.

Kiyu, keep posting here by all means.

Oh-kay, that’ll teach me to post before having finished reading the whole thread. The troll theory does explain the sense of humor.
OTIC :

So much for my faith in people recognizing how to create falsehood by making sweeping statements – a crime I am guilty of on a regular basis, being the sort of person who constantly generalizes.

Gosh, maybe next time you knowingly generate a falsehood by making sweeping statements, and people call you on it, you could AGREE WITH THEM instead of proving that 0=1 therefore you’re wrong.
CaryB :

They dropped the rainbow daleks!

Oh thank God. I didn’t like them when I saw them, lately I’d been thinking that the season as a whole had been so great I’d give them the benefit of the doubt next time but now it seems I won’t have to.
Although that raises other concerns… Retconning something away isn’t easy to do gracefully.
In other news I’ve just found some First Doctor DVDs. My previous forays into Old Who involved some kind of Ice Planet, and the opening was boring enough that I tried watching and gave up several times before I got to the point where they explained that this was Earth and that nobody had seen the Ice Age coming until the icebergs were here, which given what we know today was in some ways amusing and in some ways a complete wallbanger. Say what you will about global warming, we did see it coming.
The First Doctor visiting Rome though ? Totally fun. And I looooove Barbara.

@Hapax
“Because I can absolutely guarantee that there is NO “naughty” behavior on a child’s part that will infuriate and disgust a parent so much as having one of the child’s siblings take it upon zirself to assume the parental role and start in with the supercilious lectures.”
*sigh* In my family the opposite seems to be the case my sister has carte blanche to say whatever she likes and I’m the black sheep (who’s being kicked out of the house in 90 days due to a recent escalating argument. Ahhh family.)
While I don’t post in the comment section often (or you know at all) I have been following this blog for several years. It’s because of Fred that I haven’t given up hope on this whole Christianity thing (while simultainiously learning how not to be an asshat about it.) As such people like Trolly McTrollerson over here don’t raise my blood pressure. Keep being awesome you guys.

“PC, you seem to be upset. I forgive you. Perhaps you misunderstood. I was comparing Our Father in Heaven to a parent, not myself.”
Eat shit and die you arrogant little motherfucker.
First of all, YOU are the one who is doing wrong here. Not. Me.
Second, YOU keep taking it upon yourself to speak FOR God. If anyone needs to be forgiven here, it is you, and I. Do. Not. Forgive. You.
Third, God is not my father, God does not deem it necessary to speak to me directly and rarely has spoken to me indirectly at all, IN SPITE OF MY HAVING BEEN A DEVOUT CHRISTIAN FOR MOST OF MY LIFE.
God does not answer the phone when I need somebody to talk to like my mom does. God’s never sold me a car dirt cheap when He didn’t have to so I had a way to get to work, my mom DID. God didn’t help much (if at all) when I was down and out after my divorce, unlike my mom. God didn’t tell me to take Vitamin C when I mentioned I had a cold yesterday. GOD IS NOT MY FUCKING PARENT YOU MORON.
What exactly is it that you are getting out of being such a fucking douchebag?
Are you enjoying this???
If so, Fuck you sideways with a fucking rusty rake you fucking asshole. Eat shit and die, and hope for your sake that you never run into me or someone like me, because an ass-whupping can be very educational, but it usually hurts.

“Thank Nurgle, I was wondering when someone would think to google my name. To someone who’s a teacher above all else, it’s somewhat disappointing how easily you guys fall to such elementary provocation. Hopefully you remember this lesson, I’d hate to think I spent all this time vaccinating you only for you to forget your lesson.”
Listen here, Fuckhead. You. Aren’t. Teaching. Me. Anything. I. Didn’t. Already. Know.
I already knew people are stupid.
You’re just trying to piss people off, well, congratulations, it’s working.
Assuming you have one, didn’t your mother teach you any manners? This shit is getting old, dude.

So the troll is all proud of himself because he managed to…successfully impersonate a member of a group so willfully blind to both reality and the rules of social interaction that they’ll accost strangers on streetcorners and proclaim paisley to be the work of demons.
Perhaps, for his next trick, he’ll eat solid food?

Great, now the troll is misusing Nurgle’s name, too. And once again all he’s done is proived Poe’s Law true.
I seriously do not understand the drives that lead to trolls and the GIFT. It comes across as almost sociopathic, but there there can’t be that many sociopaths out there. Right? Please?

Friends, may I make a suggestion?
I thought Kiyu was a legitimate poster. A very rude poster, but a legitimate one. Now I suspect he’s a poe, because I don’t think anyone who was really that concerned with converting people to their faith would make an entire page of strikethrough and I’m pretty sure RTCs wouldn’t hang out on 4chan. There are things worse than being an RTC and hanging out on 4chan is one of those. So it appears that Kiyu is just a garden variety rude shithead and there are enough REAL RTCs to deal with without having to deal with someone’s parody of one. So why don’t we ignore him the next time he comes around. If he does something like make a whole page of strikethrough we’ll fix it and then just keep going without so much as a word. I know I’m guilty of encouraging him as much as anyone, but I thought he was a legitimate poster until the strikethrough incident last night. Now that he’s demonstrated his true colors, lets not let him have any more fun.
He’s now pretty much the worst poster I’ve ever seen here. I would gladly take J out for a beer, before I’d have anything to do with Kiyu and you all know how I feel about J.
@Caravelle-
In other news I’ve just found some First Doctor DVDs. My previous forays into Old Who involved some kind of Ice Planet, and the opening was boring enough that I tried watching and gave up several times before I got to the point where they explained that this was Earth and that nobody had seen the Ice Age coming until the icebergs were here, which given what we know today was in some ways amusing and in some ways a complete wallbanger. Say what you will about global warming, we did see it coming.
60′s Who is an acquired taste. If you’re just now getting into classic Who, I’d start with some 4th Doctor stuff. “Genesis of the Daleks”, “Pyramid of Mars”, “The Brain of Morbius”, “City of Death”, and “The Hand of Fear” are all good choices for people who are only familiar with the classic series. My personal favorites of the 4th Doctor’s run.
The 5th Doctor’s “Caves of Androzani” is also a good choice (my personal all-time favorite Doctor Who episode). I’d save anything that’s in black and white until you’re solidly a fan of the classic series. “Tomb of the Cybermen,” “The Space Museum” and “The Chase” are more somewhat more watchable early Who if you must do 60′s Who, because they don’t have quite as much padding. The 60′s biggest flaw was padding. Serials that should have been 4 episodes were 6 or 8. Serials that should have been 6 episodes were 10.

YESSS ! Bow to me, O mortals, for I have found the Genesis of the Fluffy Iguana Cookies :
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/08/tf-still-a-million-things-to-say/comments/page/8/#comments
The debate being like Coleslaw said, and the relevant dialog being :
He’s not jabbing people with red-hot railroad spikes, going, “do you love me? No? OK, here’s some Astral Drano to swallow. Now do you love me?”
It’s more like, “I love you. Want to sit on a nice fluffy cloud?”
“Arrgghh! No! I hate you!”
“Mary just baked cookies!”
“Arrgh! No! I don’t want any cookies! I hate you!”
“Here, you want to pet this fluffy bunny?”
“Arrgh! No! Take the fluffy bunny away! I hate you!”
“OK, so you don’t like fluffy bunnies. How ’bout an iguana?”
“Arrgh! No! I don’t want an iguana! I hate you!”
“(sigh) OK, look, I’m going to say it again. All that stuff Tim Lahaye taught you isn’t true. I’m not the type of God who sends plaques of stinging locusts o’er the land, and roasts perfectly nice people over brimstone pits because they called me Allah or Krishna instead of Yahweh. You’re sure you don’t want any of these cookies? They’re really good.”
And so on…
Courtesy of Not Really Here.
Now my question is, why do searches within a blog suck so much, and is there a way to get around it ? Because I was supposed to work this morning.

‘Gosh, maybe next time you knowingly generate a falsehood by making sweeping statements, and people call you on it, you could AGREE WITH THEM instead of proving that 0=1 therefore you’re wrong.’
Try this -
Monotheist A makes unprovable claim that god(a) is the only god and source of everything
Monotheist B makes unprovable claim that god(b) is the only god and source of everything
Me, evaluating two unprovable claims from two people claiming to be monotheists, say that any true monotheist worships one god that is the source of everything, and in my eyes, because all monotheists make the same fundamentally unprovable claim, go only so far as to accept the idea that all monotheists end up worshipping the same unprovable god, single source of everything, because trying to prove to me that god(a) is different from god(b) is impossible. (Lao Tsu adding a bit of commentary about the idea of trying to encompass the entirety of everything in a single word, and the futility of arguing about it.)
I can play with parlor tricks like a transitive relation, I can listen to those that maintain the one true god of A is not the same as the false god of B, and I will still maintain that two unprovable claims remain unprovable.
And truly, you would think saying ‘parlor trick’ in three posts threads, talking about ‘false’ in two, ‘inaccurate’ in at least two, and quoting the generally well known for its humor Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as a source for logic would be enough.
So – you are right – accepting someone’s unprovable statement as proof that someone else’s unprovable claim is false certainly proves me wrong when it comes to my (extremely unoriginal) idea that all monotheists worship the same god based exclusively on their unprovable claim that there is only a single god that is the source of everything.
So, in the end – does monotheist A, follower of god(a), worship or not worship the same god as monotheist B, follower of god(b)? Apart from still maintaining that yes, I do believe exactly that, my most honest extended answer (especially in light of how both monotheists cannot actually prove their claim), the one I support wholeheartedly as being both correct and appropriate when listening to anyone’s unprovable claims – mu.
So, without the blink tag – I was WRONG to think that people who can’t prove their claims about god are thus in a position to prove that other people’s claims about god are wrong. I was WRONG – 2+2 equals whatever you want. Really.
And man, has this been a large waste of time. (Likely the third time I have said that too.)

And truly, you would think saying ‘parlor trick’ in three posts threads, talking about ‘false’ in two, ‘inaccurate’ in at least two, and quoting the generally well known for its humor Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as a source for logic would be enough.
You also, you fucking jackass, kept saying the same shit after it had been disproven repeatedly, and after you were told it was insulting. You were being an asshole.
So, in the end – does monotheist A, follower of god(a), worship or not worship the same god as monotheist B, follower of god(b)? Apart from still maintaining that yes, I do believe exactly that, my most honest extended answer (especially in light of how both monotheists cannot actually prove their claim), the one I support wholeheartedly as being both correct and appropriate when listening to anyone’s unprovable claims – mu.
And you are STILL claiming it. So while you might have been having a bit of fun, you still mean it, and you’re still acting like an asshole, so fuck you.
And man, has this been a large waste of time. (Likely the third time I have said that too.)
You could have stopped at any time. You can’t blame us for wasting your time when you voluntarily participated. Douchebeck.
So, without the blink tag – I was WRONG to think that people who can’t prove their claims about god are thus in a position to prove that other people’s claims about god are wrong. I was WRONG – 2+2 equals whatever you want. Really.
Hey, look at the strawman. Asshole, that is not one anyone said. No one has claimed that anyone’s claims about the nature of god are provable in this discussion. We have demonstrated that your equation of 2 + 2 = 5 is logically incorrect, you fuckwit. We are not claiming that it equals whatever we want, shit-for-brains.
Why the fuck do you insist on acting like you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground?

Thanks, Caravelle, for finding that.

OTIC :

I will still maintain that two unprovable claims remain unprovable.

And nobody would deny it. Nobody did deny it, when you made that statement. Where people did disagree is when you said that all monotheists worship the same God. They can’t prove they don’t, true, but they don’t have to. You’re the one who made the statement, so burden of proof’s on you.

And truly, you would think saying ‘parlor trick’ in three posts threads, talking about ‘false’ in two, ‘inaccurate’ in at least two, and quoting the generally well known for its humor Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as a source for logic would be enough.

Well, people usually don’t knowingly and voluntarily defend their position with nonsense arguments. So of course we’re confused. This is usually the point where I track back the whole argument from its inception to try and understand what is really going on but I’ve already wasted my morning tracking down the FIC.

So – you are right – accepting someone’s unprovable statement as proof that someone else’s unprovable claim is false certainly proves me wrong when it comes to my (extremely unoriginal) idea that all monotheists worship the same god based exclusively on their unprovable claim that there is only a single god that is the source of everything.

I guess I should feel all warm and fuzzy inside from having you admit I’m right, except the following sentence is so confused I can’t even tell if it’s anything I said, let alone whether I agree it’s right or not.

So, without the blink tag – I was WRONG to think that people who can’t prove their claims about god are thus in a position to prove that other people’s claims about god are wrong. I was WRONG – 2+2 equals whatever you want. Really.

Did you ever claim that ? Because, see, I think you’d be RIGHT to think that. No monotheist can prove another monotheist is wrong if they’re basing their arguments on unprovable beliefs about God (which is most of them). At most you can prove someone to be logically inconsistent, which is… not a huge problem once the words “transcendent” and “ineffable” come into play.
Maybe you should be careful how you phrase your arguments because you see, what I thought you were saying is that all monotheists worship the same God. Which is NOT the same as saying “monotheists can’t prove they’re not worshipping the same God”*. Just like “atheists can’t prove God doesn’t exist” isn’t the same thing as “God exists”. Burden of proof, again.
Of course even with that argument you still haven’t addressed the fact that it applies just as well to polytheists and any two unprovable beliefs in general so why all that talk about monotheists ?

And man, has this been a large waste of time. (Likely the third time I have said that too.)

Productive arguments are never a waste of time as far as I’m concerned. Trying to figure out if this is a productive argument is in itself interesting to me. So, thank you for indulging us.
*Although… not so sure about that come to think of it. After all the test is that a God could manifest Hirself and say “Yay, it’s me ! The Supreme Divinity that all those Christians have been praying to ! The Greeks have also been praying to a few of my aspects. The Norse, on the other hand, were dead wrong. Don’t get me started on the Jews.”. Even in that occurrence I can perfectly see a bunch of Christians and Greek Pagans saying “no, that’s not my God” based on the various criteria they use to define their god to themselves**. In other words, for those believers specifically a simple listing of those incompatible criteria would prove that they don’t worship the same divinities.
**I can see how that can sound like I’m cheapening their faith by making it like a checklist but that isn’t what I mean at all. I mean, if you believe in God then you believe something about God, right ? God has some positive characteristics, and you could be wrong on some of them but there must be some point where an entity claiming to be God and your idea of God would be different enough that you’ll say “that’s not the God I believe in”.

Kiyu: If God really is the all-powerful daddy, teaching us right from wrong, you know what that makes you? It makes you the weasely sibling who gets off on ratting his brothers and sisters out to daddy, and gets all pompous and tries to couch his own self-important asshattery by claiming that he’s speaking on behalf of dad.
And you know what? Dad still loves you, sure, because it’s a biological imperative and all. But he doesn’t especially *like* you. He doesn’t especially *respect* you. *You* are the one He weeps over. You’re the one who’s missed the point.
Also, he loves the rest of us too.
Anyway, nuker vs appeaser: Kiyu and beckwits like him make me a worse person. Because I keep imagining terrible things happening to people like that without it evoking any sort of sympathy. And I don’t want to be the sort of person who takes pleasure in the suffering of others.

Thanks for the virtual toddy and soup, Amaryllis. I’m feeling better except for that whole coughing up blood thaaang. Also, I haven’t been able to talk for, like, 4 days. I used to think of laryngitis as a “Hollywood problem”; something that only happens to TV and movie characters – usually on the day of an important singing or speaking engagement.
—————————————————–
Wow, my “God” post turned out to be more popular than I thought it would be. Speaking of God:
Coleslaw,
Did you write that poem you posted? I think it’s pure genuis!

Raj, yes I wrote the poem (otherwise I would have attributed it to the author), and thank you.

Coleslaw :

Thanks, Caravelle, for finding that.

You’re very welcome. And because I don’t want to work this afternoon either : Special mention to Anton Mates, who first made the iguanas into cookies on page 10 with the image of God “incessantly offering cookies and iguanas and possibly cookies with chunks of real organic iguana”, and Jon who finally realized they needed to be fluffy three pages later (“For my part, if I found myself in Heaven/Hell with God telling me that he loves me and offering me fluffy iguana cookies, my response wouldn’t be “Go away! I hate you!” it would be “And you are…?”(And also, “Ewww! Get those iguana cookies away from me!”)”).
God (who was Not Really Here, hmmm the theological implications are mindblowing) tried to put paid to the whole concept : “My cookies, fluffy bunny, iguana, etc. are not intended as literal cookies, fluffy bunny, iguana, etc. It’s what you call metaphor. You all get the concept of metaphor, right?”. But too late, a meme was born.
Funny story : I spent a lot of time constructing responses in my head to the posts on that thread as I am wont to do, and then I came upon a post by me that… pretty much hit every note I’d been thinking of. Seems I haven’t changed that much in a year…

@Raj : Wow. I hope you get better soon. And your God’s popularity is totally justified, it was awesome.

Another one, Abed, is a muslim filmmaker who suffers from Asbergers
I know more than one person with Asperger’s. I don’t know anyone who suffers from it.
Kiyu and beckwits like him make me a worse person. Because I keep imagining terrible things happening to people like that without it evoking any sort of sympathy. And I don’t want to be the sort of person who takes pleasure in the suffering of others.
I think taking pleasure in someone’s imaginary suffering is perfectly fine. No actual harm done, and no wishing actual harm, so no actual foul. (Caveat being, if you think taking pleasure in someone’s imaginary suffering is wrong, then you’re doing actual harm to yourself by doing it.)
(oh look I has a website)

@Raj-
hope you feel better! I always enjoy your posts, but the God one was particularly great.
….feeling like a dumbass for arguing with Kiyu when he turned out to be a poe.

kcs_hiker: the whole idea of life being a continual series of tests, a minefield, where one misstep sends you to hell strikes me as a far worse version of hell than the one with fire and torture. Perhaps that’s why those folk who believe that seem so… tortured.
Particularly the people who believe strongly in spiritual contagion–the ones who afraid to hear rock music, handle things with barcodes, talk to a non-Christian, etc. I mean, there are *so* many ways you can screw up, it’s terrifying. The ring-tone on your new phone could damage you spiritually!
If I am in a patient mood, I tell door-to-door evangelists what religion I practice. I had a really interesting conversation with two Mormons about how one can know the truth. But Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to leave immediately and with a certain degree of unease, even fear. They give me a lot of power in their worldview; arguably more, at least in the here and now, than God. No wonder they want the world to end. Their side is frightfully weak here on Earth: I can talk to them without fear, and they can’t do the same with me.

{{{kayla}}}
{{{Raj}}}
in re the troll — y’see, that’s why I never go to 4chan. It’s exactly the same as my two year old son proudly carrying about his potty chair to demonstrate what his cleverness and creativity hath produced, with a lot less excuse.

MaryKaye has shown me the light. From now on I will start telling all evangelists that I practice some sort of Wiccan religion so that they may all run from me in fear and terror, because telling them I got to an Episcopal church just makes me a special project.

@hapax-
in re the troll — y’see, that’s why I never go to 4chan. It’s exactly the same as my two year old son proudly carrying about his potty chair to demonstrate what his cleverness and creativity hath produced, with a lot less excuse.
At least that could conceivably be used as fertilizer. Its more useful than what 4chan produces.
…now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to invest in a pointed hat and some boiling cauldrons, maybe a couple of shrunken heads. I need to look the part of whatever evangelicals think Wiccans are. I’m thinking that would be pretty close. Is a crystal ball too much? I’ll also carry around a copy of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” and continually refer to it as “Our Holy Scripture.”

….feeling like a dumbass for arguing with Kiyu when he turned out to be a poe.

I appreciated it anyway. Even if it’s not as deep as a legitimate contest, sometimes it’s very cool just to watch an expert whaling on a training dummy (mook jung reference counter: +1).
As for evangelist-scaring religions, can I recommend Shinto? It’s quite flexible and recognises basically every god or godlike thing ever, although obviously it assumes they’re not all being completely honest. (Jesus may be a very impressive and respectable kami, but any claims that there is only one god are… exaggerated, or perhaps an Obi-Wan Kenobi variety of truth.)

It’s a cute idea, Jason, but isn’t very respectful of real adherents of Wicca beliefs and practices.
I’ve been known to tell door2door evangelists that I am one of God’s monstrous damned, doomed to roam the earth for eternity until I can corrupt enough righteous souls that the Lord of Hell will receive me back in His dark embrace, and then offer them coffee or a soda.
But usually the obnoxious dog lunging and snarling at the door does the trick.

ako: Most of the RTCs I know are actually Real True Catholics,
Ouch.
I can’t even bring myself to quote the rest of it, so I’ll just admit the justice of the charge, apologize deeply for the more beckwitted members of my tribe, and reiterate that they don’t speak for me.
Discouragingly, nobody (in authority in the church) seems to be listening to me when I speak for myself.
—
@Raj: you’re welcome, but “coughing up blood”? Sounds like it’s more severe than even chicken soup can help with; I hope you’re better by now. And yes, laryngitis is a very weird sensation.
At least you can still “talk” to us!
—
I went shopping for shoes yesterday. After which annoying experience, I think I’m going to adapt hapax’s metaphor from a few pages ago: heaven is where everybody is given the shoes that fit them perfectly.

@hapax-
It’s a cute idea, Jason, but isn’t very respectful of real adherents of Wicca beliefs and practices.
Well, my intent was to mock what they think Wicca beliefs and practices are, which as nearly as I can tell are based entirely upon Halloween decorations, Harry Potter books, and urban legends about Satanism.
Sorry if I was coming across as mocking the actual faith itself. I was trying to do a sendup of what they think Wicca is.

Alternatively, Jason, just use one of the nonreligious groups of unspeakables: rock musicians. Carry around an electric guitar was a pentagram on it. (Or, for lots and lots of irony, an inverted cross.)

@Will-
Carry around an electric guitar was a pentagram on it. (Or, for lots and lots of irony, an inverted cross.)
I actually play guitar so I already own an electric guitar! However I would prefer it not have a pentagram or an inverted cross on it. Maybe I could put that on the case.

Jason :

Sorry if I was coming across as mocking the actual faith itself. I was trying to do a sendup of what they think Wicca is.

The sad and scary thing is that they would probably come out of your house thinking all their prejudices about Wiccans were confirmed. The depressing thing is that there’s nothing you could do that wouldn’t confirm some prejudice of theirs.

Well, screw you guys too

fixed.

{{Raj}}
{{kayla}}
Hope y’all will feel better soon – especially Raj as that seems like a very nasty cold you’ve got. :O
Eh, I’d just claim to be an atheist, Jason. For some reason, that tends to make some people particularly exercised.

..and the italics.. didn’t notice that.

Fluffy Iguana Cookies

Cheaper than the rest!

trufax.

Ha. fixed it. *does the victory dance*

Good job

Jason

Hope that took care of that.

Ah, missed it. Good job Pius Thicknesse too then !

So now it seems like extended unemployment might be continued? That’s great, except it seems to be involved in a horrible, horrible deal about tax cuts? Arggghhh!!!

I know more than one person with Asperger’s. I don’t know anyone who suffers from it.

I don’t think that Asbergers is a real thing anyway; I think it was made up for the show, to parody Aspergers for some reason.

“If I am in a patient mood, I tell door-to-door evangelists what religion I practice. I had a really interesting conversation with two Mormons about how one can know the truth. But Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to leave immediately and with a certain degree of unease, even fear. They give me a lot of power in their worldview; arguably more, at least in the here and now, than God. No wonder they want the world to end. Their side is frightfully weak here on Earth: I can talk to them without fear, and they can’t do the same with me.”
I’ve always wondered about this…although I’ve never encountered that mentality among JW’s or Mormons. (I usually encounter it among Fundamentalists and Pentecostals) If God is, as the Bible says, all-powerful, then why do they act as though Satan has more power than God? The Bible says GOD created Satan. It also says Satan actually SERVES God, and made a bet with Him once, even. If God is Satan’s employer, then HOW could Satan be more powerful?
Also, if these people believe that God gives them spiritual authority, or at least protects them, then why are they so afraid all the time? Sometimes I wonder if those kind of people really believe what they say they do, because it doesn’t add up. Either God is all-powerful or He is not. Either He is God, or He isn’t. They can’t REALLY have it both ways.
Funny thing is, some of the churches I’ve been to they sure seem to talk about the Devil more than about God and Jesus, and in their world-view the Devil sure seems to have a lot more power. Sometimes I wonder who such people really worship.
I’ve read a lot about the Fundamentalist and Right Wing Authoritarian mindsets, and I can’t imagine what’s so appealing about being afraid, ignorant, repressed, and on occasion willfully stupid. I don’t understand what’s so great about following a God that might as well be a blind man at the bottom of a deep well, in the face of a Satan who seems all-powerful instead. I just don’t get it, but I wonder if that’s because I’m a spiritual person (or so I’ve been told) and I try to think things through.
The answers their preachers, much less the followers, give…are very easy if one doesn’t think critically, but I don’t understand how they can believe the Devil, or even a person, has more power (at any time, ever) than God.
Any thoughts?

Because people who aren’t spending their heaps of money anyway obviously need even more of it. And people who have no money to spend and will spend most every penny they get don’t need any, because they’ll save it instead of using it to stimulate the economy.
Citizens’ benefits, folks.

@Pentecostal Cylon: Same reason the secular equivalent of all that was the Big Bad Commies in Russia. Having a nameless, faceless enemy who could (theoretically) annihilate you at any time tends to change your thinking in ways the folks up top want. If you’re thinking about annihilation you’re not thinking about the deleterious effect on other parts of your life – like money going into military spending when it could be educating your kids, etc.
The spiritual/religious equivalent of that would be you not noticing the preacher really isn’t very good at his/her job except to tell you how bad it’s going to get if Satan wins.

I don’t think that Asbergers is a real thing anyway; I think it was made up for the show, to parody Aspergers for some reason.
Huh?

I’ve never done this, but I suppose that you can tell evangelists that you believe in the five points of Calvinism and that you have never been given reason to believe you are among the saved, and that there is, of course, nothing that you can do about it if God has chosen you for one of the damned.

Pentacostal Cylon, I think it’s because they have a specific idea of the after life they don’t want challenged. A loved one dies. Your pastor says don’t worry, you will see your loved one in heaven, and then will never again be separated.
But the tricky thing is you too have to now qualify to get into heaven. So you’ll do anything. Close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and cry “la la la la” whenever someone talks about evolution? sure. opress the weak and poor and down trodden? yep. Vote republican? why not. Just as long as you can get into heaven and be with your loved one again. You’ll do anything.
It’s also why the rapture is so popular an idea. One immediate “Thank God, I was right, it’s all been worth it” moment. The alternative, living a full life then lying on your death bed hoping you’ll go to heaven, really hoping you don’t go to hell, or even more scary, That you’ve had the whole construct of the after life wrong the whole time.
I think that’s all it is. They need fluffly cloud heaven to be real. Going anywhere near the idea that “once the light goes out, it’s out for good” is just too scary.

Going anywhere near the idea that “once the light goes out, it’s out for good” is just too scary.
I have to admit that idea scares the hell out of me too, but their version of God is scarier by far. I don’t want to have to worry about whether every action I take might in some way lead to my damnation if I don’t repent profusely. I spent most of my teenage years in that mindset and I don’t want to go back to it.

I don’t think that Asbergers is a real thing anyway; I think it was made up for the show, to parody Aspergers for some reason.
Huh?

I think the poster is satirizing the misspelling.

If you made ground beef from the cuts of beef taken from the hind quarters of a cow, could those be ass burgers? Sorry… couldn’t resist. Anytime someone replaces the p with a b like that, that’s what I think of.

I think that’s all it is. They need fluffly cloud heaven to be real.
The ironic thing is that they wouldn’t need heaven to be real quite so much if they didn’t let their faith make idiots of them. I mean, I’m rather deeply invested emotionally in the concept of heaven. I’m pretty darn hopeful that it’s true. But (I don’t know for sure that this is true because I’ve never been close to dying and I have very little experience with death) I would also hope that on my deathbed I’ll be thinking about the fulfilling life I had, knowing I did the best I could, knowing that I touched a lot of people’s lives, and knowing that if I am wrong about heaven, at least my faith might have made me a better person and it certainly didn’t make it worse. The people who would worry about being wrong about heaven would be those who didn’t let themselves do anything fun for fear they wouldn’t make it, who had to oppress the freedom of others in an attempt to help those others get in. If I thought God wanted me to do that, I think I would need heaven a lot more.

That’s a good point, Lunch Meat. If you spent your entire life being a supervillain, you kind of really need (I mean, need more than most religious people need) the idea of a reward in the afterlife. Ironically, I think that their faith is probably at least a little bit weaker than other religious people who don’t behave this way. If you really believe that the existence of God and heaven are threatened by the phrase “Happy Holidays” or gay marriage, you’re probably not one of the ones who can really say “my faith can move mountains”. Most like, “my faith can lightly brush up against a tumbleweed and gently move it a few inches to the left”.

Anytime someone replaces the p with a b like that, that’s what I think of.

That’s the problem with phonetic spelling. The English language has several pairs of consonant sounds that are called cognates. In each pair, the member sounds are produced the same way except that one is made using the vocal chords (so it’s voiced) and the other is not (so it’s voiceless). The letters “p” and “b” represent one such pair. (The others are t/d, k/g, s/z, f/v, ch/j, and “sh”/”zh”- the sound in the middle of “treasure”)
Voiceless sounds like “p” are produced with more aspiration than voiced sounds like “b”, but in the middle of a word, the aspiration decreases, so it’s easy to hear a voiceless sound as its voiced cognate. Think of all the people who write “congradulations” for “congratulations”. Then consider that “Berger”, unlike “Perger” is a surname, and you can see where the confusion arises.
My favorite confusion is “catty corner, caddy corner, kitty corner, kiddy corner” – all derived from “catercorner”, which is pronounced “catty corner” but has nothing to do with cats.

Um, warning – don’t google “Assburgers” unless you REALLY want to see quite a few websites devoted to mocking Asperger syndrome.

I can’t imagine anything good coming out of googling Assburgers, but I was thinking I’d get some sort of really bizarre fetish sites.

“I think that’s all it is. They need fluffly cloud heaven to be real. Going anywhere near the idea that “once the light goes out, it’s out for good” is just too scary.”
Eh, my thinking on that, or RE: The Afterlife in general, is basically “I’ll be dead, and it’ll be too late to do anything about it anyway.” If you actually look at the teachings of Jesus (as opposed to the folklore of the Church) they’re primarily concerned with how a person is to conduct themselves in THIS life, rather than about pie in the sky after you’re dead.

Lunch Meat – The ironic thing is that they wouldn’t need heaven to be real quite so much if they didn’t let their faith make idiots of them. I mean, I’m rather deeply invested emotionally in the concept of heaven. I’m pretty darn hopeful that it’s true. But (I don’t know for sure that this is true because I’ve never been close to dying and I have very little experience with death) I would also hope that on my deathbed I’ll be thinking about the fulfilling life I had, knowing I did the best I could, knowing that I touched a lot of people’s lives, and knowing that if I am wrong about heaven, at least my faith might have made me a better person and it certainly didn’t make it worse.
This, so much this. I really, really hope that I’ll find myself face to face with Jesus one day, because the earthly foreshadowings of that moment have been so profound and shocking and wonderful. But if there is no afterlife, and no literal meeting with Jesus, at least I’ll have caught these earthly glimpses of him which in itself make my feeble faith worth it.

@Pentecostal Cylon-
Eh, my thinking on that, or RE: The Afterlife in general, is basically “I’ll be dead, and it’ll be too late to do anything about it anyway.” If you actually look at the teachings of Jesus (as opposed to the folklore of the Church) they’re primarily concerned with how a person is to conduct themselves in THIS life, rather than about pie in the sky after you’re dead.
Yeah, it seems the whole focus of those types of people is not going to hell. They refrain from doing anything enjoyable in this life, because it might cause them to go to hell. The harass other people and make their lives less enjoyable, because they are afraid those people are going to go to hell. Everything hinges on people not going to hell.
Jesus talked about this life a whole lot more than He ever mentioned the next one and it was usually about making things in this life better for everyone. Sometimes that requires personal sacrifice, giving something up so others that are less fortunate may have it, but it still involves a net increase of happiness and peace for everyone. Its a faith based on doing things to help others. Its positive. There’s seems to be negative. Its all about refraining from doing things out of fear and getting others to do the same.
Also they seem to talk about hell a whole lot more than they ever mention hell. They go on and on about how horrible hell is but rarely mention how wonderful heaven would be. Usually their depictions of what they expect heaven to be seem rather dull and not like a place I would actually want to spend a few days, much less eternity. To me, heaven would be ultimate freedom, to do, be, or experience anything you desire without fear of consequence, which doesn’t seem to be much like what their version is.

Coleslaw :

The English language has several pairs of consonant sounds that are called cognates. In each pair, the member sounds are produced the same way except that one is made using the vocal chords (so it’s voiced) and the other is not (so it’s voiceless). The letters “p” and “b” represent one such pair. (The others are t/d, k/g, s/z, f/v, ch/j, and “sh”/”zh”- the sound in the middle of “treasure”)

I get why that distinction is made, because when the letter is pronounced in isolation it’s true we voice one and not the other, but to me it seems like an artifice we use to distinguish them that disappears in “real life”, i.e. when we actually use those phonemes in a word. It always made more sense to me to call them “hard” and “soft” sounds instead.

Voiceless sounds like “p” are produced with more aspiration than voiced sounds like “b”, but in the middle of a word, the aspiration decreases, so it’s easy to hear a voiceless sound as its voiced cognate. Think of all the people who write “congradulations” for “congratulations”. Then consider that “Berger”, unlike “Perger” is a surname, and you can see where the confusion arises.

The more this discussion goes the more I’m thinking English is poorly served with the Roman alphabet. I was already reading the “Merry/Marry/Mary/Murray” stuff on the other thread and thinking “MY GOD why don’t you just stick a schwa in there and be done with it ? Or just go all the way and adopt the Hebrew alphabet ?” and now I’m thinking that linking the soft and hard consonants together Japanese-style might also have some merit. Attribute distinct characters to the long vowels and we can call it a day.

Getting back to the original subject of this post (I know, why? because this just occurred to me) there has to be more than one path leading to anywhere, because people all start out in different places. If my sister and I decided to meet up in Disney World, we’d have to take different paths because one of us lives in Louisiana and one of us lives in NY. So even if all paths don’t lead to God, it’s unlikely that only one path does, because we all start out in different places.

Whatever happened to that ‘you shall know them by their fruits’ bit? I’ve always liked that one – don’t look at what a thing says it is, look at what it produces. RTC-types claim to be showing the one true way, but they produce pain and suffering. People claim that nuker tactics are nasty and doomed to failure, but they keep producing better-educated people who are less likely to act like jackasses. Despite the religious context, it’s a pretty general statement: don’t trust the label, don’t trust the sales pitch, always fact-check. If quoting scripture is going to be a thing, that should get quoted more often.
I can’t figure out a good reason why an omnipotent creator would make a universe where the right choices (those that grant salvation) wouldn’t also lead to improvements in the mortal world. It would call both the creator’s benevolence and competence into question.

@Caravelle
But which would be hard and which would be soft? Is the sound represented by “z” harder than the one represented by “k”? I agree with you about the limits of the Roman alphabet, though.

. So even if all paths don’t lead to God, it’s unlikely that only one path does, because we all start out in different places.
A Muslim who spends his whole life in Saudi Arabia, and searches for God, tries to lead a good life, doesn’t get into heaven, but someone who randomly said the magic words in 1993 and never recanted gets into heaven? No, not so much justice.

The best way I found to scare away the missionaries to to come to the door with a kwan-tao (giant bladed staff) in workout clothes and obviously in the middle of practicing (sweaty, breathing hard, etc.). Then tell them that you are about to do your daily meditation on the Tao, and they can join you if they want, but would happily discuss their religion once you’re done. Never seen two Witnesses flee so quickly…

Pius Thicknesse – Um, warning – don’t google “Assburgers” unless you REALLY want to see quite a few websites devoted to mocking Asperger syndrome.
Just reading this makes me sad. Thanks for the warning.
…Dammit, why are people so awful?

Apologies for interrupting what seems to be a few very interesting conversations, I just felt it worth mentioning that today is December 6th.
Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

@Albanaeon-
I did a little bit of Tao meditation for a little while and really liked it. I just learned some basic techniques and learned about the Chakras. I would like to learn more but just sort of fell out of it. I need to get back into it.
I would also like to learn how to lucid dream, but every time I have made a serious effort at it, its been fruitless, which is frustrating to me, because its something I wish I could do.

Jake,
It’s kind of weird for me to read that list of names and think that cjmr’s husband could be related to both the murderer and one of the victims–he has both Lepines and Leclairs in his family tree.

Coleslaw :

But which would be hard and which would be soft? Is the sound represented by “z” harder than the one represented by “k”?

Hard = unvoiced, soft = voiced. I wasn’t talking about a different classification, just different names. You do raise the good point that “hard” and “soft” imply a continuum where there isn’t one but lots of grammar terms do that (like “strong” and “weak” verbs in German. Can’t you just say “regular” and “irregular” like everyone else ?).

Another one, Abed, is a muslim filmmaker who suffers from Asbergers
I know more than one person with Asperger’s. I don’t know anyone who suffers from it.

Oh, hi there. *waves*
I suffer from Asperger’s. I suffer from it in that I can’t read people, which puts me at a distinct disadvantage not only in social situations, but also in forming friendships and relationships.
I suffer from in in that I have great difficulty filtering sensory inputs, and can be completely overwhelmed by being in a room with two conversations going on at the same time.
I suffer from it in that I can’t tell whether people are lying, and so by default assume that no one ever lies to me (I’ve barely managed to work out politicians lie. But I can’t do it with people talking to me).
It’s become PC for people with mental illnesses to talk about “experiencing” them, rather than having them or suffering them, but I find that I suffer from mine or, at best, am in recovery from them.

They go on and on about how horrible hell is but rarely mention how wonderful heaven would be. Usually their depictions of what they expect heaven to be seem rather dull and not like a place I would actually want to spend a few days, much less eternity. To me, heaven would be ultimate freedom, to do, be, or experience anything you desire without fear of consequence, which doesn’t seem to be much like what their version is.
I know The Last Battle is a controversial book, to say the least, but Lewis’s version of heaven opened up whole new horizons for me as a Southern Baptist child. My concept of heaven wasn’t quite fluffy cloud heaven, but it was pretty dry, and seemed to be all about what we were giving up rather than what we’d be enjoying. Sure, there was talk of praising God, which I envisioned as a sort of on-going hymn-sing. And I love singing, but for all eternity? I always thought the great thing about heaven would be meeting the people who’d gone before, of course my family but also people I’d read about in the Bible and history books, but I was told that wasn’t what it was FOR. Sure, most of those people would probably be there, but seeing Granddaddy again wouldn’t seem important to me once I’d seen the face of GOD. Also, no animals in heaven, and I think there’s some bit in Revelation about there being no night that depressed me because the night is so beautiful and I loved the stars so much. So reading The Last Battle gave me permission to envision a heaven that wasn’t so bloodless, and to fully acknowledge the beauty and value of the world I was already living in. Which gets lip service at best in most of RTC-land.

Well, here are my two cents, although it seems less likely that anyone will even get this far in the comments after going through all that BS. In any event, I am one of those folks that grew up at an Evangelical church and was taught all that Young Earth craziness which I think definitely shapes how I look at the world. But I have actually become very interested in theology as of late and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to avoid reading the Bible incorrectly is by developing a robust theology and I don’t see how you get around that without doctrine. I don’t expect non-Christians to understand exactly what I’m getting at, but here’s the thing. You have this book that Christians believe is the word of God, whether it’s actually magically written by him or inspired or whatever, the idea is that it’s pretty frickin important. I think it matters that Christians develop a theology that matches the world in which they live and the experiences that they have but still comports with a reasoned, thoughtful reading of the Bible. Sometimes you’re going to run into difficulty, but I think over time, with the help of the Holy Spirit, you should be able to come up with something that works. It may not be exactly the same as what a fellow Christian comes up with, but it should have the same general outline. As another poster mentioned, if that wasn’t the case, then what does it even mean to say that you’re a Christian?
I happen to believe in the exclusivist claims of orthodox Christianity and I’m not apologetic about it at all. I’ve often wondered why non-Christians think it’s such a terrible thing. I think it’s terrible when Christians think that somehow make them better than everyone else, maybe that’s a factor, but an exclusivist claim by itself is neither a good nor bad thing. It just is what it is. I think the New Testament is fairly clear on salvation and what it means. I don’t go around beating people’s heads over it, but I do find myself talking about my faith more and more often, especially to close non-Christian friends, not because I think I can convert them somehow, only God can do that, but because I really like talking about doctrine and what it means to be a Christian. For me, it’s the only paradigm that allows me to interpret this life and the world around me in a way that makes sense. That is obviously not the case for everyone here, but I think everyone does need a paradigm, whatever it may be, in order to live your life in a thoughtful and meaningful fashion. So I guess what I’m saying is that even though Fred says he is writing in opposition to “catechists”, which I assume he’s using in the pejorative, his response itself stems directly from certain doctrinal beliefs, which just happen to be different than those held by the people he’s responding to. Do you guys think I’m missing something here?

Leum – you have just convinced me to get assessed and sort this out (hopefully once and for all). I’ve tried self-testing, I’ve spoken informally with a psychologist, I’ve talked with friends about perceptions, and I haven’t been able to tell whether I’ve got Asperger or not. (The psychologist was of the view that my behaviours were learned rather than inherent, but she was open to being wrong.) I had kind of accepted the possibility/probability that I’m just not as socialised as most people and haven’t learned all the interactive skills that I need. My fear that I’ve got it and can never fully compensate for those disadvantages is roughly matched by my fear that I haven’t got it and I’m just not trying hard enough to develop socialisation skills. Presumably there’s some kind of Schroedinger thing going on where I assume that if I never get assessed, somehow I can make both of those things be not-true.
And then I see you list those traits off and I think “Check, check, check”. Bah. This is unhinging me; it’s time I got it resolved.

@Jason, I personally find the practical elements of Taoism to be the most useful. Breath-control in particular has been great. Not only is it something I can practice anywhere (great for times you find yourself waiting with nothing to do), but it helps keep me calm and in control in stressful situations, which is invaluable to martial arts practice.
The only suggestion I can really make towards being able to lucid dream is to work at it, but don’t work at it at the same time. I know. It’s a very Taoist suggestion, but its really true in this case. If it is your goal, then you do have to practice, but you shouldn’t be ONLY working at it. A meditation session in and of itself should be its own goal and reward. Calmness, clarity, peace, these are good things even if you don’t get to the goal you thought you should have. By thinking only of the goal, its easy to miss the other benefits and become frustrated at your apparent lack of progress. Which then becomes an obstacle towards actually obtaining what you wish. A self reinforcing cycle. Does that make any sense? I really hate trying to point at the moon…

@Dean-
I happen to believe in the exclusivist claims of orthodox Christianity and I’m not apologetic about it at all. I’ve often wondered why non-Christians think it’s such a terrible thing.
ummm…. maybe because it means that the majority of people who ever existed are probably in hell, if you’re correct. Gee, people being tortured for all eternity. Why would anyone be bothered by that?

So I guess what I’m saying is that even though Fred says he is writing in opposition to “catechists”, which I assume he’s using in the pejorative, his response itself stems directly from certain doctrinal beliefs, which just happen to be different than those held by the people he’s responding to. Do you guys think I’m missing something here?

I agree with you that exclusivist beliefs aren’t good or bad by themselves, it’s how you act on them that matters (I’d better, as I’m a (strong) atheist and as beliefs about religions go you don’t get much more exclusivist than that). I also agree that Fred’s response stems from certain doctrinal beliefs. What I disagree with is that those doctrinal beliefs are different from those held by the people he’s responding to. He and they are all working from the Bible after all. Some people derive radically different and completely incompatible doctrinal beliefs from the Bible but I think those are the extremes, most Christians find points of agreements in the Bible and wouldn’t reject any argument based on it out of hand.
Besides Fred isn’t only talking to the people who wrote him those emails – if he were he could just email them. He’s talking to everyone and that includes fence-sitters, people who don’t have a firm grip on their own doctrinal beliefs yet either because they doubt them or because they’ve never been exposed to a different point of view before. There’s no reason to assume those people are working from a different doctrine than Fred, or can’t be convinced to change.

@Jason, well, I think you’ve made my point. To respond to your statements requires doctrine. It’s not clear to me that exclusivism requires everyone before Jesus going to hell, in fact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. I’d actually need a theology of hell to properly respond though, which I will admit I don’t have at the moment. I agree it is by far the most troubling aspect of the Christian faith, but I think there’s enough leftover to keep me moving in this direction even without having completed settled the issue in my own mind. Does that make any sense?

@Jason : Do you have contact lenses ? Get some. I only started lucid dreaming after I got contact lenses and my dreams of losing them became so. freaking. repetitive. I could recognize them even as I was dreaming. And it isn’t like I hadn’t had repetitive dreams before.
So, um, find something to become neurotic about ? :p

@Dean-
Does that make any sense?
To be honest, not really, but the idea of being in constant pain and torment forever without any chance of it ever ending is too disturbing for me to really get past, especially since with an exclusivist doctrine a lot of those people were probably GOOD people.

@Dean: For me, it is because basing an exclusive argument on what generally appears to come down to personal, subjective experiences, where the end result is quite literally hell, is disturbing. It’s disturbing because it to directly contridict any claims that God loves all of us; rather, it appears that God has personally chosen some people who he is going to give a reason to believe to, and the rest of us can go hang.
It paints a disturbing picture of the God you worship.

I dunno, Dean, it seems to me like that’s a big warning flag. If you’re dealing with a religion that teaches that God is love and truth and light and the Word, and Jesus is an extension of that love, and loving everybody and God is the most bestest thing ever, and by the way, God and Jesus and their love is going to fry almost everybody forever and ever, one of those things does not seem to mesh well with the others.
I can’t imagine Jesus holding an eternal goat roast, especially once you start adding in doctrine that says God has prepicked the people he plans to save. Pretty much by any reasonable definition there, we are in deep water, and the only solution is to yell “God works in mysterious ways!” as loudly as you can, and hope the sharks don’t get you.
There are big big signs posted saying “The Greatest of These is Love” and “Everything You Do For The Least of My Brothers” and “Judge Not”; I don’t think that leaves enough leftover to “keep moving in this direction.”

Well, I am exclusivist with regards to my own self — I have *tried* to believe otherwise, to not believe at all, and it was like forcing my feet into shoes that I know don’t fit — an experience as close to any sort of Hell as I’d like to get, and definitely of my own making.
But (to strain the metaphor to the breaking point), I’d be a poor cobbler to insist that my shoes were the One True Footwear for everybody else, especially when I see so many happily dancing completely barefoot.

I could be wrong, but I think Dean is saying that ‘Christian exclusivism’ (if I understand that to mean ‘Christianity is the only religion that is true/factual/accurate(/meaningful?)’) doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone who disagrees is doomed to eternal torment, because that first belief doesn’t necessarily contain the idea and rules surrounding eternal torment.
But that seems somewhat silly to me, because if you’re going to separate ‘religion’ from ‘doctrine’ to that degree, then the original ‘Christian exclusivist’ term doesn’t actually contain much information, because we don’t know what doctrines are contained within this exclusive religion. So now we have a bunch of words and not much to do with them.

I suppose if you don’t include a doctrine of salvation, you don’t get damnation.

I could definitely get behind an “exclusivity of experience not of doctrine” idea, hapax. It fits my experience very well. For example, I don’t get anything out of going to an evangelical church (wife’s side of the family). It too distracting. Catholic Mass (my side of the family) is much better. There’s often a much more contemplative mood to it that appeals to me. But nothing fulfills my spiritual side like Qui Gong or Tai Chi. Pretending anything else for the sake of meeting doctrinal requirements would be living a lie for me. However, I have family on both sides that seem to be quite fulfilled by their faiths, so I can’t say that my way would help them at all. So, I am left with the idea that their are many paths, and perhaps different destinations as well.

Do all paths lead to G_d (every single one of us being mindful and practising agape, which necessitates us understanding and experiencing how we work, how we work with what we have around us and the fact that everything is interrelated. That we are never not involved.
And holding all of that to be True by Faith; that is, protecting it from the eroding effects of overrationality.
This is picking up the ladder after you have climbed it.)?

The idea of hell being a big Fuck You Burn Forever thing was what, I think, attracted me to Christian doctrines (as I mention here) where Hell simply did not exist as popularly perceived and was attributed to a mistranslation of the original Hebrew. Instead, people not saved would simply cease to exist after Judgement Day.
While that still has obvious ethical problems, it’s a great deal less Schadenfreude-y than the HA HA YOU WILL BURN SUCKER tendency of RTCs like LaHaye or even non-PMDs who nonetheless present their version of Christianity as the ONLY way (e.g. Jack Chick) to “get saved”.

the eroding effects of overrationality

This concept intrigues me and I wish to know more. (‘Rational’ isn’t very exclusive as I understand the idea – it’s certainly not the opposite of ‘emotional’ – so I am curious how one can take it too far, and what that looks like.)

I have conceptual issues with it though — it seems to assume that if one is non-christian, especially atheist, that’s because of a hatred of God and everything that God embodies. I’m not a non-believer because I hate God, although the majority of concepts of God that I’ve encountered I’d hate, and fear, and oppose with my whole heart if I were convinced they were real.
That’s why I didn’t exactly define what following God meant. I know what I think following God means (going to church, helping the poor, reducing the negative impact we have on ecological systems), but I can’t indisputably claim that’s a complete list or even mostly correct. It’s just the best I’ve figured out to my ability. I think there are lots of ways people can serve God even if they don’t logically believe in him/her – anything that serves your neighbor, serves God.
Also, I don’t think atheists are stupid – the smartest person I know is an atheist. God is big and complicated and incredibly difficult to wrap your mind around. I disagree with atheists, but I acknowledge it’s certainly possible that I may be completely wrong about God too (either existence or nature). I believe in God because of my experiences, but I understand how others may not from their experiences. I don’t doubt that atheists have lots of good insights and points. I’ve learned more about theology from some atheists than Christians.
If you still find that theology to be patronizing, I can just say that I don’t mean it to be. My faith plays out in that I welcome anyone along with me as I go on my path, and we’ll work together to heal and help each other, even when we disagree.
And I didn’t realize that’s what “fluffy ignanua cookies” referred to! Thanks for that reference.

I suffer from Asperger’s. I suffer from it in that I can’t read people, which puts me at a distinct disadvantage not only in social situations, but also in forming friendships and relationships.
Have you seen Community? From what you describe, it sounds like they (surprisingly) do a not half bad job with it.
I also like that Abed is presented as a complete character. He has AsPergers, (Thanks, 22 people) and that obviously informs his character heavily. But he screws up and does well and makes mistakes and corrects people: and in other words is just as normal a person as say, Shirley, who is devoutly Christian. Each of them has a distinct personality trait, but each of them is a real person.

First, it’s good to have made my way back here. I’ll have to see about keeping up with discussion here more often than yearly…
@Jason: Also they seem to talk about hell a whole lot more than they ever mention hell. They go on and on about how horrible hell is but rarely mention how wonderful heaven would be. Usually their depictions of what they expect heaven to be seem rather dull and not like a place I would actually want to spend a few days, much less eternity. To me, heaven would be ultimate freedom, to do, be, or experience anything you desire without fear of consequence, which doesn’t seem to be much like what their version is.
Suffering is more universal than happiness. It’s very easy to imagine a condition that suffices to make all people suffer. Being on fire, for example. It is much harder to imagine a condition that makes all people happy, because in earthly experience, such conditions are very limited. Love, to be certain, but even then, not everyone experiences love in the same way, and we relate poorly to the loves of others. God, in contrast, exists outside of our worldly experience and the language that we use to describe it; so too can Heaven be outside our capacity to describe, save for the generality of it being capable of universal happiness in the same manner as being on fire represents universal suffering. It doesn’t help that efforts to try anyway have mostly been taken by dull, interesting men who are made happy by dull, uninteresting things.
As for Hell itself, though, I tend to take a more Daniel 12:2 view of Hell than a Matthew 10:28 one. Even then, Mark 9:49 certainly seems as though the whole eternal torment interpretation of the fire of Hell might not be what was intended.

Also, I don’t think atheists are stupid – the smartest person I know is an atheist. God is big and complicated and incredibly difficult to wrap your mind around. I disagree with atheists, but I acknowledge it’s certainly possible that I may be completely wrong about God too (either existence or nature). I believe in God because of my experiences, but I understand how others may not from their experiences. I don’t doubt that atheists have lots of good insights and points. I’ve learned more about theology from some atheists than Christians.
I understand exactly what you’re saying. And like I said, its not that you did anything wrong. It’s just one of those things you might want to avoid.
To be honest, as a strong atheist, I love Christianity. I really do. It’s a beautiful religion, its got fascinating stories, and beautiful lessons. I think growing up religious gave me a deep and abiding respect for religion. I sometimes grapple with a certain longing for…something. I love religion in general, but having a christian family means that Christianity ends up close to my heart.
I love the language, I love the stories. I love theology- although I approach it as a hypothetical. Given a God who is A, B, and C, what can we conclude about X situation?
When religion is done right, its a beautiful thing, and I respect it greatly.

totally off topic:
@hapax (or anyone, really),
Do you have a favorite graphic novel version for Jules Verne’s various novels? cjmr’s oldest likes that sort of story, but finds wading through his paragraphs a bit daunting.

Theologically? The most elegant heaven is where you get what you deserve. The most elegant hell is where…you get what you deserve.
Something closer to the Egyptian idea of weighing your heart against a feather. It seems that if there is a God, kindness and justice and mercy should be expected.
I actually used to have a whole, backed up biblically, psychologically and logically, argument about why the very nature of God as posited by the Christian religion precluded the existence of hell. I could drag that out for the theologically wobbling.

“Do you guys think I’m missing something here?”
@ Dean: In a word, yes.
The reason I think this is quite simple. Among other things I’m divorced, because I married a Pentecostal woman with mental issues who seemed to make a point of ruining my life. She hadn’t been especially churchgoing while we were married. Badly enough, I’d been the one who went to church. But, after I left, she underwent some sort of conversion experience. Within 48 hours began harrassing me and my mom about how God had told her a bunch of stuff, and naturally, I was supposed to come back to her. Needless to say by that point I’d had enough of her bullshit that I wasn’t interested. Two things happened, a divorce that was supposed to take 90 days took almost a year. Also, she spent the next two years trying to get me to convert to Pentecostalism and go into the ministry with her. Apparently “God” had told her I was supposed to be some sort of “Prophet.”
I’d been a devout Christian before, having at different times been Baptist, Catholic, and Lutheran. (You wanna talk Doctrine? I can do that all day) After the ex and I split up, I was very angry and pretty much said the hell with religion. I think in that entire first semester I went to church (The local Catholic church, in fact) once.
I was also going to college at the time so I moved into the dorms, found myself a few women to hook up with, and set about rebuilding my life. I had a girlfriend who was a bisexual Pagan and worked in the local new-age shop. I had a friend in the dorm who was Muslim, from Saudi Arabia no less. A friend I made through the next job I got was an Eastern Orthodox Arab Christian, from Jordan. The Dorm director was a gay man. I’d been attending a Fundamentalist Baptist church (I’d refused to attend the Assembly of God church my ex-wife went to occasionally.) I was suddenly thrown into a more diverse environment. I served in the Air Force so when my R.A. who was a fellow A.F. veteran explained things to me in terms that part of me understood, I adjusted to dorm life fairly quickly.
Of course, I’d always been forced even as a conservative Christian to be a bit more open minded because my mom is bisexual and even though my Grandpa is Catholic, he made a point of teaching me about the old Norse beliefs too. Also, because I’m a veteran I’d been to England, Japan, and Saudi Arabia and seen a bit of the world.
In the dorm, also found out that different beliefs and feelings I’d had and whatnot were a lot more universal then I’d been taught. (I was raised always going to church AND Christian schools) However, at that time I was not in a frame of mind where I needed or wanted to study other religions or how different cultures reacted to mine. I got a job in the college cafeteria that I would have for a couple years, and my boss was Native American and Polish, and a follower of both Catholicism and Ojibwe Traditional religion. I got a second job working in a restaurant, and I worked with Jamaicans there. There were Christians, including Pentecostals, and Rastafarians there too. All of them, especially the rastas, seemed so much more serious about their faith then the American Christians that I knew, and so much more laid back about things like who was fucking who, or whatever. I studied the Bible with the rastas some, and “Took the Chalice” with them, too. So the education in life more or less continued.
The next summer, I found myself dating a girl that was a Satanist, and I found out that Everything I’d Ever Learned About Satanism Was A Lie. I pretty much dove into the relationship full bore and resolved to learn as much as I could from her, not necessarily about her religion, but more about life in general. A few months later I was single again, but she’d given me the tools I needed to start sorting out my own spiritual path. Of course, my ex and I weren’t quite divorced yet and the fact that I’d dated a Satanist drove her bananas.
It’s funny how people remember where they were when big events happen. On 9/11 I was sitting at my desk in my dorm room arguing with my ex over some bills she was supposed to pay when suddenly she tells me to turn on the TV and put it on CNN. Shortly thereafter, I get a knock on the door. My suite-mate that semester was the guy from Saudi Arabia and he’d stopped by to bum a cigarette. He came in and we stood there watching the news for a minute…just in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center.
The ensuing Apocalyptic mania among my ex’s Pentecostal friends and the wierdness that resulted on her part strained all of our attempts to be civil to each other through the divorce process until they broke. The whole thing really, really colored my view of Christianity for a long time.
Now because my neighbor was Muslim, and hung out with the few other Muslims on campus, and he hung out with me…they tended to hang out with me too. They gave me a Quran for my birthday in 2001, and I read it, finding that many of the stories in it were basically just a different take on what the Bible said about them. We had a lot of conversations about religion and theology, and I made some online friends in that part of the world too. Over the next couple of years I tended to hang out with members of this group, I saw a few go home and some new ones come along. I kept up with some of them online and still do, in fact.
They helped me to find my own faith again, they pressured me to read the Bible, and to read it for what it was not what I was TAUGHT that it was. So I did that, I read the whole thing. I’d never done that before.
A few months later, I found myself in the religion section in Borders, and looked over and I saw a book “Jesus and Lao Tzu” I picked it up and I opened to a random page, on facing pages were Isaiah, chapter 53 and This;
He who takes upon himself the slander of the world
is the preserver of the state
He who takes upon himself the sin of the world
is the king of the world.
Now, the mindset I had at the time immediately said “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. This was written by people on the other side of the continent, several hundred years before Jesus and yet in a way it seems to refer to Him. He who takes upon himself the sin of the world is the King of the world? Don’t Christians refer to Christ as the king?” I didn’t quite know what to make of all that, but I bought the book.
That was eight years ago, since then I’ve gone from confused and angry to actually attending a church that was something I could recognize as decent and sane for a few years, to being an Agnostic. I have felt the same “Spirit” with Christians of all kinds, with Muslims and with Pagans. I even felt it, when I was helping an Atheist friend deal with some problems that were strikingly similar to my previous situation. I got to know some Rastas in Jamaica through one of the friends I’d made, and I felt it there too. I’ve even felt it, at times, when dealing with those who I’d sworn were my enemies.
I am an Agnostic, yes, but I am an Agnostic Theist. I believe that there IS a God but I do not believe His word can be found in a book. Rather, it’s found within us, that is not to say we are anything close to “Divine.”
No, the Word of God…or the GODS…or the spirits if you prefer…is found in the spiritual nature of two Native Americans as they smudge each other so that the Ogichedaw Warrior Society member can perform his duty and smudge the drum. It’s found in the intense, often angry debates between Fundamentalist Christians over the jots and tittles of their doctrines. It’s found in the Ecstatic dance of a group of Sufi dervishes as they chant “La Ilaha Illa Allah” for hours at a time on a cold night when they were far from home. It’s found in the smoke-filled room full of Rastas when they have their Grounding, and the new guy speaks up and has to smoke too. It’s found in the passion between a man and a woman of two radically different faiths when they decide to stop talking and start loving each other. These are all things I’ve been priveledged to be a part of, and I felt the presence of the Divine in all of them. The Word of God…or the Gods…or whatever you want to call The Divine…is written on our hearts…not in some book that was written by men.
I do not believe for a second that any one of the many “Exclusionary” paths is the One True Way. As far as I’m concerned, the Pastor of the church I went to after I moved down here put it best. “You live up to what you know.” The way I was taught was that if you believe in God and you’re sorry for your sins God will work with you. As for those who believe in other gods or goddesses…well I’m pretty sure their gods (or goddesses) know the state of their souls and what to do with them in the afterlife as well.
I think I’m done now.

@cjmr — alas, I have not seen any graphic adaptations of Verne that I’d recommend. I’ve been pretty burned by most of the “Classics illustrated”* I’ve seen, as both poor adaptations and bad comics.
You might try different translations. Most of the Verne translations in my library are from the turn of the century, fer crying out loud**, and pretty stodgy.
A quick skim of the reviews seems to point to the Oxford Classics translations by Butcher and the Modern Library translations as being more approachable. You also might want to see if they are available in audio version — most of his stories are very listenable as well.
*I know that most of them aren’t that brand anymore, but they all seem to have the same approach
**note to self — RADICALLY weed and update the classics in 2011

@Pentecostal Cylon: The way you’re using “agnostic” doesn’t match the way I’m familiar with it being used. That is, you believe in the existence of God, and in a way of knowing.
—
I guess I’ll come clean. I’m not sorry for very many of my sins. I’ve lied. I’ve stolen. I’ve not lived up to a Puritan work ethic. I’ve desired people who were partnered. I’ve desired people of the same sex. I’ve cursed my parents. I have been angry, hateful, jealous, spiteful. Some of those things I regret, some I don’t. Some I regret but don’t feel I have any control over – my bout of suicidal thinking was sinful under some doctrines, and damn awful, but more or less Not My Fault. I don’t regret not emptying my bank account to feed the poor, not really. I feel faintly guilty about not being the kind of person who would do so, but I do some and feel like I should get partial credit.
Mostly, I try not to think about this too much, because it makes things all about me. I do what I can, in a sort of selfish, impulsive kind of way, and hope the partial credit will be enough. I was like this when I was Christian, too, except I was even more focused on my failure, which meant I did even less to do anything actually helpful to others.
. . . aren’t most people like me? Even most Christians? Do people really repent their sins, or do they repent not being the kind of person who would repent their sins? (Or, more honestly, do they pretend to repent of not being a saint, while being secretly relieved that they can still have two tunics and keep their Netflix subscription and buy fruit even though it’s sort of expensive these days?)
There are things I regret, deeply, but they’re not the sort of things that are easily classified. When my mom came out, I deeply regret not being immediately and unequivocally supportive. It’s not a sin to gawp wordlessly at someone, but I repent of that much more deeply than any lie I ever told. On the other hand, I don’t want a payment plan for the stuff I’ve done wrong. The stuff I’ve done wrong has its own payment plan, usually, and I generally feel like it’s not any of God’s business.

@ Dav: Here’s the way I look at it. I believe God exists. So what? The love of God and $1 will get you a cup of coffee. I. Believe. God. Exists. That doesn’t mean I KNOW anything ABOUT God, or that I can define or quantify Him or my experience of Him in any way I could make another person understand. Hell, that doesn’t mean he actually exists, does it? I have to believe God exists, and that certain things I have felt are of the divine. I don’t have to believe that the sky is blue or that when water falls out of it I’ll get wet. I can see that much.
That also doesn’t mean I believe any religion is true or for that matter false, although I believe some kinds of Charismatic or Pentecostal Christianity are such obvious bullshit that they might as well be, and I’m not big on scientology. As long as someone is not forcing their religion on others or hurting anybody, I don’t care what they believe either.
But there is a huge difference between believeing and knowing. Do I believe God exists? Sure. Do I roll my eyes when people say that the Bible is factual? Hell yes, because most of it isn’t. I’ve heard way too many people say things like they don’t “believe” in global warming, or this, or that or the other thing. That’s not belief, that’s something you can see, can know, and can test. You can’t test for God or any other divine force, and if you could, wouldn’t that ruin the point of it all? Believeing and knowing are two completely different things, and for myself, I can sure as hell say that every time I think I *Know* God it turns out that I don’t, and every question I get answered is answered with at least one question.
As for my own life, there are if you can’t already tell certain wrongs that I’ve done that I’m not the least bit sorry for, certain things that are a part of me, that made me who I am. When I die and go into the afterlife, I’ll have to settle up with whatever’s on the other side at that point.

Delurking…I tend to consider myself a doctrinally conservative and socially liberal Christian (believing in the virgin birth and miracles and resurrection, not caring the slightest bit about what gender people sleep with, so long as there’s love). Yet I cannot wrap my head around the concept of hell, except as a case of free will: if you don’t want to go to heaven, you don’t have to. Thomas Merton described God as ‘mercy within mercy within mercy’ which to me excludes any desire to send people to hell. I cannot think of a single person I know that I want to assign to hell, and I don’t think God is more vengeful than I am.

Flying visit to say
Happy Feast of St Nicholas!
(the sound quality isn’t that great, at least on my machine, but it was all I could find on a quick search)
Let us celebrate the feast of bishop Nicholas
singing happy melodies together.
With sweet songs we’ll ornament this day,
letting our voices soar high and quick.
On such a natal feast, our ancestors’ tradition teaches
that the devotion of the faithful should harmonize in joy,
so let fear give way to dancing.
-tr from the Latin by Susan Hellauer (of Anonymous 4) and Michael Smith

Pius: The idea of hell being a big Fuck You Burn Forever thing was what, I think, attracted me to Christian doctrines (as I mention here) where Hell simply did not exist as popularly perceived and was attributed to a mistranslation of the original Hebrew. Instead, people not saved would simply cease to exist after Judgement Day.
On a few occasions, I have come across Christians who believe in Heaven, and who either do not believe in Hell at all, or who believe it is the place where only “bad” people go. (That is, they don’t mean me, which I suppose is a nice compliment.)
Anyway, when I ask what will happen to me when I die, they either use the big puppy dog eyes or the ominous voice of doom and say, “You…won’t exist. You’ll…disappear.”
They always seem surprised when my reaction is basically, “Um…okay? Because I thought that was what was going to happen to me anyway.”
Maybe it’s just the whole growing-up-secular thing, but I am honestly not scared of what-will-happen-when-I-die. And in saying that, I am not trying to be all bravado or anything–plenty of things scare me, but not the afterlife. And it doesn’t mean that I am a nihilist or hate life, etc.–I love life quite a bit and do not want to leave it any time soon. But the idea of dying and then ceasing to exist…well, I didn’t miss life or feel lonely or afraid before I was born, and there’s no evidence I will feel those things after I die. I won’t feel anything, good or bad. The only way in which I will live on is in what I’ve done, and in the memories of the people who knew me (and my children, if I ever have any). That’s life, that’s death.
Free-falling, now that’s scary.

Leum: I apologize.

Maybe it’s just the whole growing-up-secular thing, but I am honestly not scared of what-will-happen-when-I-die.

I doubt that being raised secular is the of root this attitude. I was raised fundamentalist and I too am totally lacking existential angst. I could easily have written your post. I don’t fear non-existence after death any more than I have a horror of non-existence before birth. As far as I can tell we’re not here, then we’re here, then we’re not here. That middle bit can be a rough go, but I see no reason to fear the 1st or the 3rd step. In fact, forget about hell, most descriptions of heaven scare me a lot more than the idea of non-existence. A lot more.

I wish I understood how people could be all right with ceasing to exist. Fear of death has plagued me since I was a small child (I had a great deal of difficulty sleeping as a kid, since you have no guarantee you’ll wake up again. My only solution was to daydream until I fell asleep and that’s still my only solution. If I think about going to sleep, that just leads to the whole sleep-death thing, which isn’t at all conducive to sleeping.)
Hell, I’d settle for being able to believe in a religion just so I could stop worrying about ceasing to exist, but I don’t seem to be wired that way. The best I can do is really hope there’s something – an afterlife, reincarnation, oneness with the universe – I’m not terribly picky.
Well, all right, there are versions of heaven that sound an awful lot like hell. I’d rather not have the afterlife be one of those. Or be hell. But I’d really like for there to be _something_.

I think currently my fear of death is mainly the fear that I won’t get to see and do all the fun stuff I could ever think of, especially while I’m still young and healthy. But that’s more a problem that I’m not very ambitious or imaginative. There’s also the fear that even an “easy” death will turn out to be much more painful than we believe it would be.

@depizan: As far as I can tell this is a bedrock YMMV thing and is basically a temperament difference. I am as unable to understand the fear of non-existence as you are unable to understand not feeling it. Once one no longer exists one, by definition, can’t be bothered by anything. I sort of figure if I can’t be bothered then, there’s no reason for me to worry about it now.

I’m not scared of death, really, despite being raised Christian and now being Atheist. At least in part it’s probably because the afterlife was never really focused on in my church. But from talking to some people online I think they get confused and caught up in the idea of experiencing nothingness after death. As if they’d just be a mind floating in an infinite, empty, void. But, of course, that’s not what nothingness after death would mean. It’s well and truly nothing. The nothing you experience (well, I experienced) while under anaesthesia, say, or similarly deep levels of unconsciousness.
It’s not a sensation of nothingness, it’s literal nothingness. There is no “you” left to not feel anything.
Now, dying, I don’t much look forward to. There’s few ways to go that aren’t painful, alas, and it just generally seems like it wouldn’t be much fun. But what comes after? I don’t fear that. I don’t like the road, but the destination suits me just fine.

I have to admit that the idea of not existing freaks me the fuck out.

If people don’t mind the complete cliché, the best way I’ve ever found to think of not-existing is as follows:
You didn’t exist for 13.7 billion years before you were born. This was, I’m assuming, not a traumatic time. Death will, as far as I can tell, be exactly the same experience as before you were conceived.

Another one not afraid of death here. I *am* afraid of agonizing pain, especially if it’s chronic. I worry how my life would suck if Mr Laima died suddenly, as the two of us are essentially each other’s whole support network at the moment.
As a Pagan raised Catholic, I’ve gone ’round and ’round on what an afterlife might be like, if there was one. But mostly I don’t believe there’s one where we’re conscious. Thinking of my molecules continuing to exist on Earth, as well as memories of my life living on in the people who loved me, is enough for me.

MadGastronomer, if you’re around… I’ve been trying to talk to Mr Laima about numinous kinds of stuff, and finding it hard going. He was raised Southern Baptist so there’s no mystical counterpart to his faith like I had with Catholicism and a lifelong interest in mythology.
We don’t have a shared vocabulary, basically. I saw your comment about mysteries in religion a few pages back, and I wondered if you had any suggestions for reading materials about mysteries, Eleusinian or otherwise, or Paganism, or anything like that? Everything you’ve said about Hecate here seems useful and interesting to me, even though I don’t follow a Hellenic pantheon. (My (eclectic) pantheon does include Ereshkigal however.)
Any suggestions would be welcomed!

@MercuryBlue:
Apology accepted. It generally is best not to use “suffer,” as you pointed out. But there is a tendency for people to talk about Asperger’s as though it were all fluffy iguana cookies and I wanted to offer another perspective. I wasn’t offended.

@GDwarf: Yes, exactly. Like you, I have some fears about dying, but not about death. Will it hurt? If it’s not sudden, will I have the courage to face it with the same good humor and grace that my grandmother is?
And, like you, I have been unconscious. I wasn’t floating in the blackness, alone and scared. I didn’t know when I was unconscious, just like I did not know when I wasn’t alive before I was born, and just like (presumably) I will not know after I’ve died. I don’t want to die, because life is cool and there are many things I want to do yet (find True Love, have a kid, get a book published, etc.), but death is just not one of my fears.

The pastor at our church recently did a sermon on Malachi dealing with hell and non-existence. Now, I’m not a Christian, but I have strong leanings in that direction, and as such I approach things with a decidedly theistic mindset.
I’m one of those people who is freaked out by the notion of not existing, and so the idea that God would not simply torture somebody for disobeying, but would ERASE them…that scares the everliving crap out of me. To me, that’s the antithesis of a loving God. It’s the ultimate rejection. “You aren’t even worth *torturing for eternity*…I just want you GONE.”
Yikes.
Plus, as bad as eternal hell sounds, one can at least suggest that maybe God doesn’t actually *send* people there, that he doesn’t actually want them there, but that he allows people to choose. At least you still exist…and with existence comes the possibility for change. It becomes harder to believe that a loving God, who wants all of his creations to come back to him someday, would allow people to poof out of existence, because there’s no coming back from that. At that point, not even God can change his mind about you. No chance at redemption. (Unless God decides to re-create you exactly as before, and that’s a rabbit-hole of metaphysics I don’t really want to jump down.)
Non-existence also doesn’t square with the whole “I will never abandon you” theme that seems to be all over the Bible.

I’m pretty freaked out by the idea of non-existence.
(This is also why I got so angry with the end of New!Who season 4, and what happened to Donna. Orpnhfr Qbaan onfvpnyyl trgf renfrq ol gur Qbpgbe – naq rira gubhtu fur’f fgvyy xvaq bs nyvir, gur Qbaan gung jr’ir frra nyy frnfba vf tbar sberire.
V guvax vg jbhyq unir orra avpre whfg gb yrg ure qvr.)

I’m with Ryan F on the subject. I like finding out about stuff and learning about the universe. Death would put an end to that. I want to live to see regular space travel, decent mythology-based films, some sort of explanation for the Indus-valley civilization, and full-immersion-3d gaming, goddammit! The fact that I might not gets me all existentially angsty.
Sometimes I think even being shipped off to implausible punishment-realities would be better than becoming non-cognizant… but then I get a grip. Oh well, me and silly rationalized self-preservation instincts.

I don’t fear non-existence after death any more than I have a horror of non-existence before birth.
Huh. Believing Christian here, more-or-less orthodox, pretty much reconciled to the notion of an afterlife (although neither a fluffy cloud heaven nor a fire-and-brimstone hell).
But I do get rather miffed at the Real True Atheists (is that the term we agreed on? If not, I apologize) who keep telling me that I “cling” to religious faith only because I’m afraid of death.
Nope. Never have been. Have actually always thought that non-existence sounded rather restful, and have been hard put to come up with any sort of notion of Heaven that I’d prefer.
(In fact, my biggest problem with Buddhism has always been the Emptiness of Self bit. I’d be perfectly happy with abandoning the Self as a delusion, but I won’t let me…)

But I do get rather miffed at the Real True Atheists (is that the term we agreed on? If not, I apologize) who keep telling me that I “cling” to religious faith only because I’m afraid of death.
*nods*
Yes. For all that I’ve just mentioned being freaked out by non-existence, RTAs assuming that I’m a Christian because I’m scared and desperately trying to cling to hope in an afterlife really annoys me. If they talked to me for more than a few seconds, rather than making assumptions, they’d find out that the “afterlife” has nothing whatsoever to do with my reasons for faith.

Oh, and I must point out how tickled I am that here we are in Advent, very earnestly meditating upon the traditional Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, & Hell).
I love liturgically appropriate comment threads!

I assume it’s in line with how people are generally vulnerable to different fears, influenced by early experience and innate temprament both.
I was raised Christian, in a church that talked about Heaven rarely and Hell never as far as I recall. (We read stories referencing Hell in the Gospels occasionally, and it was generally treated as a metaphor/teaching tool.) I’ve never had a particular fear of death. A lot of the folks I know who do are atheists, and nearly all have histories of depression/anxiety/OCD and often losss and truama. I have plenty of mental/emotional issues, but I am, or at least have been, so terribly afraid of other things, and never of that.
Kind of triggery below?
*
*
*
Does anybody know any good resources that explore relationships between fear of death and suicidal thoughts/behavior?

Certainly more liturgically appropriate than the conversations on any other discussion forum I participate in–even the Catholic ones!
—-
Thanks for the book lack of recommendation? Oh well, I was hoping…he reads graphic novels like they’re popcorn, but hates text-heavy stuff.

I have no idea what it was about my comment that triggered hapax’s comment. I will say for the record that my lack of existential angst is not the reason that I’m an atheist, so I see no reason to assume that there’s a causal connection between angst and belief for most theists either. I’ve known a few whose beliefs seemed driven strongly or mostly by fear of death. “Theists” is a big group. If you look around long enough you can find some of pretty much everything in there.

Oooh, speaking of graphic novels, I think I’m gonna buy myself Hereville as a stocking stuffer.

The nothing you experience (well, I experienced) while under anaesthesia, say, or similarly deep levels of unconsciousness.
It’s not a sensation of nothingness, it’s literal nothingness. There is no “you” left to not feel anything.
Been there, done that, does not help at all. This would be why I have to come up with tricks to be able to go to sleep. It is ceasing to exist that scares me. If I were floating in a void, that would suck, but I would still exist, therefore that is less disturbing.

Oh, and I must point out how tickled I am that here we are in Advent, very earnestly meditating upon the traditional Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, & Hell).
I love liturgically appropriate comment threads!
Hapax, is that specific to Catholic liturgy? I don’t recall anything about it in Anglican circles.

What Lori said. This is, what? the second time in two days that out of nowhere, we get a “meanie atheists” comment? I’ve known atheists who are afraid of death, and atheists who are not, and theists who are afraid of death, and theists who are not. Heck, I have no “reason” for my fear of free-falling, though I’m pretty sure that it’s unrelated to my lack of faith.

@Amaranth, this is why I really like talking to non-Christians about doctrine because I think it’s nice to hear an unbiased view on these issues. I think coming up a with a theology of hell is challenging and I am certainly struggling with it myself, but I am also with you on how terrifying the thought of non-existence is. Maybe it’s just my ego, but I’ve never been able to understand people who say if they were to cease to exist tomorrow that they would be totally fine with that. Maybe it has to do with how your brain is wired, but I personally can’t accept that there is any point to doing anything today unless it’s going to matter tomorrow. It has always seemed to me that if there is no afterlife your only other choice is nihilism. I mean, who really cares what happens to anyone if we’re all just space dust at the end of the day?

I have no idea what it was about my comment that triggered hapax’s comment.
Wow, I *am* sorry, Lori! Looking back, that sure does look like a response pointedly directed at you, rather than “Hmm, here’s the springboard that started my own somewhat related train of thought.”
No one in this community, atheist or otherwise, has EVER said that to me. It is one I used to read a lot in, well, forums where I prefer no longer to visit.

As I noted, I have a tendency to get angsty when thinking about not existing after death. I don’t feel the same way about not existing before I was born, and I don’t know why. I think it’s probably cultural. If I had been raised in a primary Buddhist cultural context, instead of a Judeo-Christian one, even as an atheist I’d probably be more sanguine about oblivion.

I personally can’t accept that there is any point to doing anything today unless it’s going to matter tomorrow.
But…surely it matters today? And why wouldn’t it matter tomorrow, regardless of your own personal existence?

Maybe it has to do with how your brain is wired, but I personally can’t accept that there is any point to doing anything today unless it’s going to matter tomorrow.

Honestly? For instance, even if we assume an afterlife, will this discussion we’re having matter tomorrow? Okay, maybe tomorrow it will. But say, three million years from now, you’re hanging out with God in Heaven, singing praise, playing harps, or watching reruns of House, will this discussion we’re having matter then?
If yes, how so?
If not, does that mean it’s pointless?

I mean, who really cares what happens to anyone if we’re all just space dust at the end of the day?

I care.

This discussion is reminding me of a quote from The Disposessed about how some people really relish the idea of rejoining nature.

Heck, I have no “reason” for my fear of free-falling

“Landing/going splat”?
Or are you talking about things like the rides at amusement parks? I hate those even though I know that it’s tremendously unlikely that the ride will kill me. It’s not the stomach dropping sensation—I used to love that on roller coasters. (I can’t ride them any more because age seems to have screwed up my inner ear such that they make me ill.) There’s something about those drop/free fall rides that’s just different enough that once I experienced it I never wanted to do it again.

@Deird — probably more Catholic, but still very present in Anglican liturgy, especially in the more “high church” circles. It’s woven into the collects and lectionary, once you know to look for it, but most modern churches find it a bit of a drag to dwell upon.

Dean: Maybe it’s just my ego, but I’ve never been able to understand people who say if they were to cease to exist tomorrow that they would be totally fine with that.
Let’s be clear here: no one has said that. I would not be totally fine with dying tomorrow, and I do not think anyone else here has said that, either. What we have said is that we do not fear what happens after death, because as far as we can tell, nothing does happen. I think everyone who has expressed a lack of fear of death has also said that they (we) enjoy life and have people we love and things we want to do, so please do us the courtesy of not painting our viewpoint as, “Life? Meh, who cares?”
Maybe it has to do with how your brain is wired, but I personally can’t accept that there is any point to doing anything today unless it’s going to matter tomorrow.
Who has said that the things we do today don’t matter tomorrow?
It has always seemed to me that if there is no afterlife your only other choice is nihilism. I mean, who really cares what happens to anyone if we’re all just space dust at the end of the day?
Well, I don’t know quite how to put this gently, but…you’re wrong. The choice is not A or B, afterlife or nihilism. I care what happens because even if I died tomorrow, I would leave behind family and friends and things I have done and am in the process of doing. And that is true for everyone. My childhood best friend died years ago, yet her influence is still felt in my life, and in the lives of many other people who knew her. If you think your only choice other than an afterlife is nihilism, then by all means, go on believing in an afterlife, or be a nihilist, whichever, but do not put words in other people’s mouths (or on our keyboards), please.

Hapax – I have a copy of the Australian Prayer Book: any idea where in there I’d look to find any of this?

Maybe it’s just my ego, but I’ve never been able to understand people who say if they were to cease to exist tomorrow that they would be totally fine with that. Maybe it has to do with how your brain is wired, but I personally can’t accept that there is any point to doing anything today unless it’s going to matter tomorrow. It has always seemed to me that if there is no afterlife your only other choice is nihilism. I mean, who really cares what happens to anyone if we’re all just space dust at the end of the day?
But everyone is not space dust now. Nor would we all be space dust at the same time. Whatever I do today will effect other people even if I cease to exist tomorrow (which I hope I never do). Whatever you do today will still matter tomorrow to someone.

Lori: “Landing/going splat”?
Or are you talking about things like the rides at amusement parks? I hate those even though I know that it’s tremendously unlikely that the ride will kill me. It’s not the stomach dropping sensation—I used to love that on roller coasters. (I can’t ride them any more because age seems to have screwed up my inner ear such that they make me ill.) There’s something about those drop/free fall rides that’s just different enough that once I experienced it I never wanted to do it again.
That’s me exactly. I love roller coasters, can’t stand the drop rides. I tried a couple, a couple of years apart, and there is just something about that falling sensation that is just…not good. It’s not the fear of going splat–I know they’re as safe as any other ride. I could probably play armchair psychologist with myself, but really, this is why some fears are directly linked to certain events, and some aren’t.
It’s complicated.

Wow, I *am* sorry, Lori! Looking back, that sure does look like a response pointedly directed at you, rather than “Hmm, here’s the springboard that started my own somewhat related train of thought.”

Ah, gotcha. Cool.

Well, I don’t know quite how to put this gently, but…you’re wrong. The choice is not A or B, afterlife or nihilism. I care what happens because even if I died tomorrow, I would leave behind family and friends and things I have done and am in the process of doing. And that is true for everyone. My childhood best friend died years ago, yet her influence is still felt in my life, and in the lives of many other people who knew her. If you think your only choice other than an afterlife is nihilism, then by all means, go on believing in an afterlife, or be a nihilist, whichever, but do not put words in other people’s mouths (or on our keyboards), please.

This. Holy crap, so much this. Thinking that there’s nothing after death doesn’t lead in any necessary way to thinking that life has no worth or meaning. How long you want to live and what you think happens after you die really are 2 separate questions, not aspects of the same question.

Jason, I have a friend who would tell JWs that he was a Druid. Or something else obscure. The ‘nth Congregational Church of Rodney’ (for values of n less than 6) is good, too.

Ruby: Well, I don’t know quite how to put this gently, but…you’re wrong. The choice is not A or B, afterlife or nihilism. I care what happens because even if I died tomorrow, I would leave behind family and friends and things I have done and am in the process of doing. And that is true for everyone. My childhood best friend died years ago, yet her influence is still felt in my life, and in the lives of many other people who knew her.

Depizan: But everyone is not space dust now. Nor would we all be space dust at the same time. Whatever I do today will effect other people even if I cease to exist tomorrow (which I hope I never do). Whatever you do today will still matter tomorrow to someone.

I wonder, doesn’t a human-centric view on meaningfulness also have its problems? If all that matters are influences you leave behind into other people’s lives after you’re dead, you end up with a sort of philosophical pyramid scheme. Not to mention that the human race will go extinct at some point, and if you intend to build all your sense of meaning on the people you influence… Well, in the future there won’t be people no more.

I have a copy of the Australian Prayer Book: any idea where in there I’d look to find any of this?
Hmm. I’m looking through the New Zealand Prayer Book (I don’t know how similar it is to the Australian) and the collects for Advent are very different, as are some of the readings.
There’s a bunch of seasonal liturgical material here, or you can just google [Advent "four last things"] for a ton more.

Xavier: I wonder, doesn’t a human-centric view on meaningfulness also have its problems? If all that matters are influences you leave behind into other people’s lives after you’re dead, you end up with a sort of philosophical pyramid scheme. Not to mention that the human race will go extinct at some point, and if you intend to build all your sense of meaning on the people you influence… Well, in the future there won’t be people no more.
So what if “there won’t be people no more” in a hundred years, or a thousand, or a million…or even tomorrow? That doesn’t make our lives and feelings retroactively not exist. My grandmother and I will still have talked today. Sure, in two hundred years, we will both be dust, but that does not wipe today clean of its meaning.

I’m a cradle Catholic, if that term applies to an atheist, and I’d never heard of the Four Last Things.

I wonder, doesn’t a human-centric view on meaningfulness also have its problems?
Ask the guy we were replying to. If I connected death to life, I’d be in a padded cell somewhere since I have real problems with the idea of nonexistence. I live because I want to live and now matters. But that wasn’t what he(?)* was asking about.
*Guessing from name, could be wrong.

I like finding out about stuff and learning about the universe. Death would put an end to that.
I look at it more as after you die, you can see more of the universe from that side, because you can see what the rules are too.
I don’t think I’m afraid to die, having come close once already (anaphylaxis doesn’t scare you when you don’t know it’s happening). I’ve dreamed dying a few times, too, without fearing it. If I can have a nice waltz with the guy with the scythe, that’s good enough.

Thinking that there’s nothing after death doesn’t lead in any necessary way to thinking that life has no worth or meaning
If you will forgive self-quoting, I just posted yesterday on my LJ about how comforting I found the “Last Things”, particularly the second:

But it doesn’t really matter what metaphor you adopt, if any at all. Because the inevitability of Judgment is a promise that we matter; that what we think and say and do has real consequences for the world.
We are not (or at any rate, not just) insignificant motes blinking briefly in an uncaring infinite universe. We leave legacies: a happy child, an elegant embroidery, a funny joke, a glass of milk in a run-down soup kitchen. We leave the other kind of mark on the world, too — in litter on the floor of a movie theater, a careless comment that festered in an acquaintance’s heart, a chance to create a little spot of kindness or beauty or joy or peace that we allowed to shrivel, ignored.
Judgment assures us that there is a point to such choices, a weight beyond the simplistic measure of “Good” or “Bad”, “righteous” and “sinful”, “sheep” or “goats”. Despite the ignorant canards of so many of my brothers and sisters in Christ, people don’t need to “believe in God” to “give meaning to life.”
The meaning of life is how we live it.

Not to mention that the human race will go extinct at some point, and if you intend to build all your sense of meaning on the people you influence
It isn’t a matter of having influence after my personal physical life and death. It’s a matter of having influence beyond / outside / besides my personal physical life and death.

I’m *kind of* freaked out by non-existence, but flirting with Buddhism for a while made me more comfortable with the idea. More than anything, I’m freaked out by the idea of a sudden or traumatic death, of immediately and irrevocably losing everyone and everything I’ve ever loved and having all the possibilities of my life closed off. What comes next I can handle, but that experience can be too much sometimes.
As for the afterlife itself, well, I definitely can’t abide a God who would torture his children or wipe them out of existence. On the other hand, I can’t form an idea of God that doesn’t involve justice in some way. That’s kind of why my beliefs are a sort of mishmash of Dostoevsky, Lewis, and St. Isaac. Neither Heaven nor Hell are given by God, but are instead our responses to his immediate presence. “Judgment” itself is a metaphor, and I think it represents coming before Ultimate Reality, having everything in Heaven and Earth laid bare, and understanding our lives and actions with full objectivity. Heaven and Hell are, if anything, more about whether we can make peace with ourselves.
More than anything, I think the nature of God precludes Hell. If he is omniscient and omnipresent, then he understands us better than ourselves, and understands better than anyone in existence why we would do what we do. More than that, as a Christian, I believe he became a person himself, and knows full well what physical, mental, and social limits we have to deal with. How can I expect him to judge with anything other than total fairness and mercy?
Really, I’m drawn to the afterlife because I find the possibilities in a lot of the ideas available kind of enticing. I like the idea of reincarnation, of living another life in another culture, possibly even another world. Or of resurrection, of having a new, glorified body animated by the Spirit, just like Jesus. I like the idea of death as leading to new possibilities rather than closing them off.
On the other hand, if I cease to exist, I’m in no position to complain.
When you get right down to it, my default position is “Surprise me.”

Thanks, Hapax!

It makes a lot of sense to me that humans would be the entities/beings most concerned with human actions/meaning of human lives/etc. This old universe, this planet, don’t show any particular interest. Our lives and meanings on are on our scale and on our terms.
The gods I honor have close and meaningful relationships to humans…but that doesn’t mean they live by our rules or define meaning or morality for us.
Maybe I should collect more quotes on the subject. I can think of two off the top of my head:
Cattle die,
and kinsmen die,
And so one dies one’s self;
But a noble name
will never die,
If good renown one gets
(Havamal, Bellows translation)
and from the God is Love side of my heritage, practice and soul:
…and the only measure
of your words and your deeds
will be the love you leave behind when you’re gone.
(“Everything Possible, Fred Small)

(anaphylaxis doesn’t scare you when you don’t know it’s happening)
Too true, and true of many other things, probably including my dad’s heart attack.

Or, what Ruby said. And hapax, too.

I was raised secular, am currently paganish, still find the idea of non-existence freaky: yeah, yeah, what we do now matters now, but then it will be gone, forever, and that will suck. And the world will go on, sure…until the Sun explodes and the second law of thermodynamics kicks in and everything sucks forever. Plus, I’d miss the people I love.
I do believe in stuff; I also hope that humanity survives and colonizes lots of places and that we’re wrong about the whole entropy thing. And thus I can think that everything adds up to something, in its own way. If I thought everything added up to nothing and just vanished…well, been there, done that, had the panic attacks.

I think if I am “wired” (the word that some others have used) to believe in heaven, it’s not because I need to go on existing forever–I think I agree with hapax that non-existence could be preferable to existing forever if the existence wasn’t pretty freaking amazing. Everything gets boring after a while, and I think if I’d experienced everything I could think of, I’d be okay with ceasing to exist.
But I still feel like I need to believe in heaven, because this life…well, sucks. I mean, it’s beautiful in so many ways, and I love art and people and nature and experiences, but there’s just so much that’s crappy about it. I have to believe it’s all going to be all right, and not just because we’re all dead so we don’t notice. I have to believe that one day I can apologize to all the people I’ve hurt, and we can have the real relationships that we’ve caught a glimpse of here on earth, and we’re not going to be blinded by our own pain or prejudices. I want there to be a place where all the stupid things we’ve done find redemption and fulfillment. Or as Julian of Norwich said, “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” It may not be true, but I can’t not believe it and still be me.
Another thing is that I’m far, far more scared of people I love dying than of dying myself, and one of the things that scares me about dying myself is what will happen to the people I love after I’m gone. I’ve had several very realistic dreams about Husband dying, and they are…not fun.

One of my biggest fears is actually the End of the World, or at least some large-scale catastrophe that takes a large chunk out of the human population. Sudden death is one thing, but to have everybody suddenly die at the same time? That’s just terrifying.
Cue the Youtube link to Tom Lehrer.

It is a bit of a slam to the ribs to really, viscerally appreciate that one had no consciousness prior to a defined point in time of one’s personal history.

I think there’s a lot to be said for the concept of an eternal now. What I’m hearing from the people who aren’t afraid of death/non-existence (and correct me if I’m way off base) is a basic contentedness with now. Meaning and purpose exist *now*, and thus it really doesn’t matter if it didn’t exist yesterday and won’t exist tomorrow. We won’t be cognizant of not existing, but the things that we *are* cognizant of, meanwhile, mean something. Future non-existence does not necessarily negate the current value or meaning of a person, a relationship, or what have you.
Personally I believe that there is a sliver of something eternal in all temporal things…that even if they cease to exist, what’s really important or valuable or meaningful about them, whatever that is, will continue to be. Maybe it’s just an inner desire to see beauty and love and all the things that make the now so wonderful carry on, because I can’t bear the thought of those things ceasing to be. Or the thought of a person, no matter how bad, disappearing from the universe.
I guess I’m just trying to articulate to myself *why* the idea of non-existence bothers me so.

So what if “there won’t be people no more” in a hundred years, or a thousand, or a million…or even tomorrow? That doesn’t make our lives and feelings retroactively not exist. My grandmother and I will still have talked today. Sure, in two hundred years, we will both be dust, but that does not wipe today clean of its meaning.

I agree. Today has meaning. I’m talking about tomorrow. Specifically, I was referring to the “I care what happens because even if I died tomorrow, I would leave behind family and friends and things I have done and am in the process of doing.” section of your comment, and Depizan’s “Whatever you do today will still matter tomorrow to someone.”
It’s just that I feel that building meaning on the things you’ll leave behind isn’t much more productive than the afterlife approach. The now matters, that is pretty much a given. Not so sure about the tomorrow. Of course, this is subjective, and I was wondering what are your views about that.

P J Evans: I look at it more as after you die, you can see more of the universe from that side, because you can see what the rules are too.

Of course, for this discussion, I’m assuming death is oblivion. If death isn’t oblivion, then I’m cool with it. But I have no reason besides blind hope to not assume that (not that I have anything against blind hope. It can be an useful approach).

Hapax: It isn’t a matter of having influence after my personal physical life and death. It’s a matter of having influence beyond / outside / besides my personal physical life and death.

I agree that any influence I might have matters to me now, and possibly to other people once I die. I just don’t see concerning myself with my “legacy” any more productive than concerning myself with the state of my immortal soul. Of course, like I said, this is subjective. What is your opinion, why would the “legacies” and the “marks we leave on the world” matter in the hypothetical scenario of the human race extinguishing.
Better (or worse) still, why would the “litter on the floor of a movie theater, a careless comment that festered in an acquaintance’s heart, a chance to create a little spot of kindness or beauty or joy or peace that we allowed to shrivel, ignored.” matter once the heat-death sets in?

This thread is taking a definite turn for the sobering.
I think it needs a kitty in a boot.

I remember being scared of non-existence as a kid, and worrying about it.
For some reason, as an older adult, the future non-existence of the entire human race seems seriously more worrisome. It seems way more tragic for the entire human enterprise to be
pointless. This didn’t bother me when I was younger, but then the future was farther away
Dying in my own case just seems like falling asleep. But I can’t explain why falling asleep doesn’t bother me, though if I have to make an effort to fall asleep, the transition is kind of spooky.
I remember hearing a report by a journalist who was covering the Bosnian war, and whose position was being bombed. What bothered him was not that he might die, but that if a bomb hit, he would be dead without knowing even a second in advance.
Since we are trying to see if there is a religious correlation: grew up Catholic, then non-religious, now liberal religious.

It is a bit of a slam to the ribs to really, viscerally appreciate that one had no consciousness prior to a defined point in time of one’s personal history.
That may be why reincarnation sounds so very appealing. One has never not existed and will never not exist. Even if one may have been a lizard last time and become a space-squid next time. Or an Antarian or a pine tree or… whatever. (All right, I’m not sure pine trees have consciousness, but I do think that animals do. And certainly aliens.)

Better (or worse) still, why would the [anything] matter once the heat-death sets in?
Hmm. I guess it’s what Amaranth noted above about the centrality of Now.
I really have very little interest beyond aesthetic speculations in “before” and “after.” Here-and-Now is both so amazingly concrete and graspable, while simultaneously infinite and astonishing, that I simply have no room to worry much about There and Then.

Yes, there are kittens in boots, but hapax, will there be kittens in the afterlife? Have you thought of that?
There, sobered up the thread again.

You didn’t exist for 13.7 billion years before you were born. This was, I’m assuming, not a traumatic time. Death will, as far as I can tell, be exactly the same experience as before you were conceived.
But in the non-existence before I was born I didn’t know what I was missing out on. Now I do. And while nothing would have been lost were I never born, when I die there’ll be a tiny hole in the universe where I used to be. It’s a loss of something, and even if it’s a mediocre something, I’m quite attached to it.
Conversely, the actual dying bit doesn’t worry me at all. That’s only a medical thing, and I’m comfortable with medical things.

Rupaul, there’d better be.

It has always seemed to me that if there is no afterlife your only other choice is nihilism. I mean, who really cares what happens to anyone if we’re all just space dust at the end of the day?

I’m largely a nihilist. In an ultimate, cosmic, sense we’re pretty unimportant. Heck, most of the universe is so far away from us, and moving away so rapidly, that it is physically impossible for us to ever interact with it.
But, what I do today, tomorrow, and next year changes things for me, for everyone I know, everyone I meet, and everyone who is connected to me by even the most tennuous of threads. In a few trillion years that won’t matter at all, but here, now, it’s hard to see what could be much more important.
Besides, why does meaning have to be imposed from above by some cosmic being? We assign meaning to art, to actions, to abstract symbols, to motives, and to random events. We create the meaning of everything that has meaning every moment of every day. So why not just go a step further and give meaning to our lives? Who cares if it isn’t some ultimate, cosmic, destiny? All it need be is a meaning for you, ’cause you’re the only one who needs care about your own meaning.
I also am almost compelled to address that last line, so forgive me. Yes, we are space dust, and that’s amazing. The carbon, oxygen, calcium, iron, phosphorus, nitrogen, etc. that almost everything that exists is made of was forged in the heart of stars. Stars! Fusion reactors bigger than anything else in existence hammered hydrogen into the elements that you and I are made of! Then those elements combined in such a way as to be able to create copies of themselves.
We are, if I may paraphrase Carl Sagan, forged in the hearts of stars and woven together over billions of years by natural processes.
If I may paraphrase Babylon 5, we are the universe made sentient. A piece of creation that has become aware of itself.
We are unique beyond imagining.
I, quite honestly, think that the fact that we’re space dust is amazing and wonderful.

But everyone is not space dust now.

I’d say that we are space dust right now, which is part of the reason that us being a different shape of space dust in a few trillion years doesn’t seem so bad to me.

Hapax: Hmm. I guess it’s what Amaranth noted above about the centrality of Now.
I really have very little interest beyond aesthetic speculations in “before” and “after.” Here-and-Now is both so amazingly concrete and graspable, while simultaneously infinite and astonishing, that I simply have no room to worry much about There and Then.

Like I said before, I agree. I think the now is very important. The before and the after, not so much (well, unless we’re talking about historical/science fiction). Which is why I don’t find preoccupation with my legacy or with my immortal soul too useful.
Though I’d be very pleasantly surprised if I ever found myself in one of the interesting afterlives (Grim Fandango comes to mind).

[a kit, in a boot. And bad dubbing.]

I think it highlights something very important about the human condition that we’re able to look at silly youtube videos about kittens and laugh.
And I firmly believe that, if there’s an afterlife, there will be kittens in it. Probably in boots. How can there not be kittens (or boots) in the afterlife? That would be silly.

Frak yes, GDwarf. Science is holy and amazing.

Conversely, the actual dying bit doesn’t worry me at all. That’s only a medical thing, and I’m comfortable with medical things.
The kind of dying that terrifies me is dying violently. Not painfully, because I understand pain, but being murdered or something like that, especially by someone like a serial killer, who takes joy out of others’ fear and pain.*
Besides, why does meaning have to be imposed from above by some cosmic being? We assign meaning to art, to actions, to abstract symbols, to motives, and to random events. We create the meaning of everything that has meaning every moment of every day. So why not just go a step further and give meaning to our lives? Who cares if it isn’t some ultimate, cosmic, destiny? All it need be is a meaning for you, ’cause you’re the only one who needs care about your own meaning.
Well…I care if it isn’t an ultimate cosmic destiny. And if I’m creating my own meaning, why can’t the meaning be ultimate? If I want my life to be meaningful throughout eternity and I choose to believe that it will be, what does that hurt anyone else? I’m not saying that anyone else has to believe it, but I don’t like being told that my meaning is wrong because it relates to or relies on heaven.
*Why do I watch CSI, Law and Order, and Criminal Minds all the time if I’m so terrified of being murdered? Good question.

I do believe in stuff; I also hope that humanity survives and colonizes lots of places and that we’re wrong about the whole entropy thing.
While I’m terrified about my own death, I don’t really care if this particular species survives and expands and builds galactic empires. In fact, I kind of hope it’ll be otters.

Well…I care if it isn’t an ultimate cosmic destiny. And if I’m creating my own meaning, why can’t the meaning be ultimate? If I want my life to be meaningful throughout eternity and I choose to believe that it will be, what does that hurt anyone else? I’m not saying that anyone else has to believe it, but I don’t like being told that my meaning is wrong because it relates to or relies on heaven.

This. Existentialism is all well and good, but people have the right to look for a meaning that satisfies them. If that meaning must be absolute, no problem with that. Existentialism isn’t the answer for everyone.
(and with that, I bid you guys good night).

I am in favor of a galactic otter empire.

I think I’d prefer a galactic yak army. Just ’cause I have trouble seeing a yak ever make a hasty decision. They’d just kinda sit there and think stuff over before moving.
Plus, it’s hard to physically intimidate a yak.

I wish I understood how people could be all right with ceasing to exist. Fear of death has plagued me since I was a small child (I had a great deal of difficulty sleeping as a kid, since you have no guarantee you’ll wake up again. My only solution was to daydream until I fell asleep and that’s still my only solution. If I think about going to sleep, that just leads to the whole sleep-death thing, which isn’t at all conducive to sleeping.)
I’m so glad you posted this, because I’ve never met anyone else who has my precise issues with falling asleep before and I’m glad I’m not alone. I think my issues sorta stem back to being taught the “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer as a child, and the “If I should die before I wake” line messing with my little 4-year-old head. But I also think I’m wired for existential angst. The severity of my sleep fear has waxed and waned over time, but the past few years have been especially bad, since my father died in 2005 and my mother at the beginning of this year. I miss them, I so badly want them to still be there, somewhere, in heaven, knowing that I finally sold a book and my daughter is doing well in school and we bought a house and all the other things I’ve wanted to pick up a phone and tell them. Also, since I’m about to turn 40, I can’t tell myself to stop worrying because my life isn’t even half over yet. If family history is anything to go by, that’s just not true anymore.
So, yeah, heaping helping of existential angst here. And I’m glad there’s a new Castle episode tonight, because I’m going to need some serious distraction between now and trying to fall asleep…

Bring on the space otters. These guys have got our backs.

Huh. Typepad obviously wants to keep our global defense plans under wraps.

@Susan
*offers hug*
I was raised by atheists, so I fear it’s just being wired for existential angst. Which is a darned rotten thing for the universe to do to us.

Sort of tangent to this discussion, but looking at the progression of technology, I can’t help but wonder if in our lifetimes we may be presented with another option. Basically, downloaded into a computer. What would that be like? Would you opt to interact with the world, or could you have them create a new sort of “ship in a bottle” place for you to interact with. Would it even really be YOU, or just a collection of data memories. Would you even want to? This is all based off a dream I had a while back and I keep playing with the idea and would love some feed back.

I am in favor of a galactic otter empire.

I, for one, welcome our new Lutrine overlords…

That would some crazy stuff if we effectively left the constraints of matter and became energy. I’m suddenly reminded of that decentish TNG episode that explored something like this.

Would it even really be YOU, or just a collection of data memories.
Is there a meaningful difference here? Record all of a person’s memories, give them appropriate hardware on which to run, and put them through a Turing test and I fail to see how anyone could tell the difference between them (at least until each of them started receiving different sensory input).

Uh I don’t know, hapax. They don’t even seem capable of defending themselves from spammers, much less galactic otters.
Unless, of course, they’re hard at work developing an anti-spam death ray…

For me the “why does it matter if it’s not forever?” doesn’t have an intellectual answer so much as an emotional and perhaps moral one.
Starhawk talks about things having immanent value: value in themselves, not for what they can do or what they will become, but simply in their being. If you believe that you have value in the here and now, then you have value: it does not matter that you were not here a hundred years ago and will not be here a hundred years hence. You are not a means to an end, but an end in yourself. This can go with various forms of theism but doesn’t seem to require any specific one; I think it can go with atheism too. “Self-aware star dust! How cool is that!”
And Lewis talks, mainly in _Perelandra_, about not getting caught up in the need to do, or have, something again once it’s happened once. Here is my life, and it is good. Extending it infinitely might not be so good, certainly not in the world as we know it. Infinite continuation of my imperfection in this finite world might preclude the creation of something better.
Italo Calvino writes about this from a biology point of view in _Cosmicomics_, where he talks about the one-celled organisms that divide endlessly, never really die; and how that world of immortals was invaded by the individuality which comes with sexual reproduction, where you are not a copy of anyone before you and you will not leave the world a copy of yourself when you go. And much of the glory of biology (okay, I’m not a microbiologist) comes from the creatures that gave up their immortality to be, as Calvino says, mortal and sexed and individual.
Hm. From the number of fairly well memorized quotes that come bubbling up when I think of this, I guess I have been thinking about it for a long time on and off.
I have some intellectual equanimity with the thought of my own death. But I have to report that when I was directly challenged, on a solitary retreat in the forest, to lie down physically with the presence of my own death, to see and feel and touch it…I couldn’t do it. I stood shivering on the riverbank in the sun and I couldn’t go down there where the dead thing, that was metaphorically my own dead body, lay rotting in the water. I don’t think I could do it now.
It’s probably lucky that we’re not given a choice about this dying thing. I can see myself procrastinating badly. It would not do any honor to my god, who is among other things a guardian of the way between worlds…but I think every day there would be some reason it had to wait til tomorrow. I have trouble imagining myself waking up one morning and saying, okay, today’s the day.

See, I don’t tend to sleep well because my mind won’t go blank enough. I tend to have vivid, detailed dreams almost every night. I don’t like it. Not just because of the nightmares, but because there are all of these weird, complicated worlds where people wants things from me and need things from me, and sometimes things are horrifying and sometimes things are heartbreakingly wonderful, and sometimes things are just complex and busy and it’s not restful at all. And occasionally something happens in a dream like me getting my eyelids sliced off or being chained to a pier and left to drown and too-nasty-to-talk-about stuff. The nights when I blank out when I’m asleep are quite nice.
(I was under general anesthesia once – I had dreams then, too, although restful ones.)
I’m not thrilled at the prospect of dying and not existing anymore, but it doesn’t particularly disturb me. I’d quite like more life, and my top choice in terms of afterlife would be reincarnation. But I don’t find the prospect of death being the end and there being no cosmic justice or infinite continuation anything to worry about, or anything that sucks the meaning out of life. It’s something I’m comfortable living with, which is good, as it’s what strikes me as most likely to be true.
I mean my family had a dog growing up, and he died, and I don’t believe that dogs (or any other beings) have souls or there’s any kind of god likely to judge me for how I treated him, and I still don’t feel like all of the times I fed him even though I was busy, or washed him even though it was messy and got wet-dog smell everywhere, or changed his water dish because he was a messy eater and would spill food in his water, or cleaned up his poop because puppies and sick dogs have accidents are now meaningless. Making my dog’s life better made his life better, and that makes it worthwhile by itself. I don’t need doggy heaven or doggy judgment to make it worth doing.

Laima: I saw your comment about mysteries in religion a few pages back, and I wondered if you had any suggestions for reading materials about mysteries, Eleusinian or otherwise, or Paganism, or anything like that?
Um. Er. Sorry, I just got back from Boston, and I’m very very tired and very very stupid. So I’m going to do my best, and if I think of anything else after I’ve slept, I’ll come back.
I think I got my first grounding in the idea of mystery from Starhawk. There’s some of it in Spiral Dance, and more in Truth or Dare. Starhawk is strongly feminist, and can be offputting to some men. Also, ToD is a very political work. Mysteries of Demeter is a modern attempt to recreate the entire mystery cycle of Eleusis, but it’s more of a how-to, describing the rites, which is not so much what you want, I think. There are a ton of scholarly works on the various mystery religions of antiquity (Kerenyi is the standard for several of the Hellenic cults), but those aren’t much good for what you’re looking for.
Honestly, I’m not at all certain how to convey what you’re trying to. The nature of mystery is also a mystery: if you don’t experience it, you’re never going to have a full understanding of what it is.
What I do when I’m teaching a student who has no background in the nature of mystery is discuss the meaning of the word in some detail, then try to find something in their lives that they experienced intensely, but cannot describe accurately. Love is often one such experience. Music, dance, acting, tripping (as in psychedelics), moments of pure joy, moments of pure terror, the exhilaration of parachuting or hang gliding, sudden insight or inspiration: all of these are things I have encountered. Then I work forward from there, explaining that along with an intense feeling, there can be meaning you can’t explain, and that that is mystery. Not all mystery is divine, either: sudden insights, the moment of something that you never comprehended before clicking, and now you understand, but you still can’t convey it properly, that can be a mystery.
Then I usually have the student start looking for moments that they feel aware of sacredness and/or divinity in the everyday. It’s sort of a warm-up for a true mystery. When they can reliably find at least one every day, then it’s time to start planning for a mystery ritual in a tradition and a framework that makes sense to the student. Standard components of mystery rituals are a period of disorientation (blindfolding, walking through pitch darkness, unfamiliar surroundings, overwhelming sound, fasting, sleep deprivation, things like that) followed by a sudden revealing of the outward symbol of the mystery (a seed, the rising sun, an empty tomb, whatever) and a simple statement of the mystery (“All that dies may rise again”). But again, the symbol must work for the person it’s being shown to.
To connect the mystery conversation to the fear of death conversation, traditionally, the deeper mysteries of Eleusis have the effect of curing fear of death. I’m ahead of the curve on that one: I am not yet an initiate of the deeper mystery of the local recreation of those mysteries (nor an initiate of any other version of them), but I left my fear of death behind long ago. I believe in reincarnation of the soul, but not that the soul is or carries the personality, consciousness, or memories of the people it has been, and I am totally willing to be wrong about there being a soul, so I’m at peace with the notion of my “self” being snuffed out. The elegance I find in reincarnation is not that my “self” will continue to exist, but the elegance of recycling as a part of nature.

Just to pile on – I have no fear of non-existence, and I don’t even understand how such a thing can be possible. It seems to be like wondering what type of apple an orange is – the very definition of non-existence precludes an “I” to have that fear. At least that’s the way I reason it. I certainly can understand a fear of dying (as it’s often painful, and rarely comes at a convenient moment, as well as the obvious misery it causes in your loved ones). And I can understand wanting more time – I’m up for whatever transhumanism technologies can extend my life span into the centuries or millenia mark. But given how bored I can get now, in my all too human lifespan, I cannot imagine being upset at the idea that I wouldn’t be able to live forever.
Then again, I’m not particularly inclined to care about most things over which I have no control, so possibly it’s just a logical extension of that. After all, no matter what I do, no matter whether it comes tomorrow as I’m crossing the road, in fifty years after the considerable deterioration of age, or in two hundred thousand years after the last backup of my now totally virtual persona is finally corrupted beyond salvation – I am going to die, there’s nothing I can do to stop it, and I cannot see that worrying about it is going to be fruitful use of my time.

About the only certainty I actually believe in, without any qualification – everyone, including myself, will die. Everyone, without any exceptions.
My certainty ends with that mundane observation, of course – but everyone single person I have ever met or will ever meet, will die, including myself. My parents, my children – everyone.
And this certainty is essentially meaningless – any true certainty is.

On the fear of death : I’m not afraid of death personally, although I am rather put out by aging and having under a hundred years to live. Like others here the idea of my not existing doesn’t bother me at all. What does bother me is the idea of other people not existing. People I care about is especially horrible, but also all those people who had unhappy lives and/or died horribly: I’d like them to have something better at some point. It doesn’t have to be Heaven; I’ve actually realized I am completely uninterested in ultimate happiness. If I got it, great, and certainly if other people want it then when I’m making the Universe I’ll remember to include it, but as is life is plenty rewarding enough for me.

Pentecostal Cylon :

But there is a huge difference between believeing and knowing. Do I believe God exists? Sure.

Thanks for telling your story. And clearly there isn’t a clear universal definition for any kind of religious identification so I have no problem with you calling yourself an Agnostic (although specifying your beliefs sure does help). I’ll just give my two cents :
I don’t think terms like “theist”, “agnostic” or “atheist” are about knowing, because this is exactly a subject where no-one can know. As far as I’m concerned somebody who says they know God does or doesn’t exist shouldn’t be participating in the debate in the first place because they’re stupid and need to watch The Matrix and really think about the brain-in-a-vat scenario before coming back and talking with the grown-ups. And once we’re between grown-ups, the terms “theist” or “agnostic” or “atheist” can only refer to what we believe. Nobody knows of course, but when it comes down to it do you believe God exists ? Yes ? Theist. No ? Atheist. Unsure ? Agnostic.
Of course this definition has its own problems : I think I lot of agnostics have more positive beliefs than my “unsure” would indicate, and then there’s the issue of “do you believe God doesn’t exist ?”, which I use to differentiate strong from weak atheists but at that point the categories really start bleeding into each other. Also, I don’t think it really applies to your case because I don’t think there is a word more specific than “theist” for “someone who has no beliefs on God other than that it exists” so I think calling yourself an Agnostic makes perfect sense. But I do think there is value in making the difference between “knowing 100%”* and “believing” and not reserving the latter word for the Agnostics, as some seem to do. Because then Agnostic comes to mean “sensible person”.
Dean :

I mean, who really cares what happens to anyone if we’re all just space dust at the end of the day?

Because it’s not the end of the day yet !**
Xavier :

But say, three million years from now, you’re hanging out with God in Heaven, singing praise, playing harps, or watching reruns of House, will this discussion we’re having matter then?

Yes, funny thing. You know what makes me feel all useless and nihilistic ? Thinking that God exists and has a Plan for us. Brains are strange.
Ruby&others on drop rides : I’ve only ever been on one once and I don’t remember disliking it… Well, it was one of only two rides where I screamed, the other one being the space shuttle that swung until it ended up upside down for WAY TOO LONG I really thought it would stay stuck, and that I have a bad memory of. But the drop ride has left me with a lingering impression of awesome. That said I think it makes perfect sense that it freaks you out : free fall is something completely unnatural in the human experience, and evolutionarily speaking it does tend to finish with a splat. And the brain is well-known for not taking it well when the inner-ear meets technology (see : car sickness).
*Of course then you can use “know” to mean “be pretty damn certain about, but not 100% of course that’s impossible”, but at that point I think one should replace the words “know” and “believe” with “% of confidence” because srsly.
**This isn’t an attempt to convince although it does reflect my point of view, I just liked the line.

Triple posting because that previous one was getting too long, this is the last you hear of me promise :
Amaranth :

Personally I believe that there is a sliver of something eternal in all temporal things…that even if they cease to exist, what’s really important or valuable or meaningful about them, whatever that is, will continue to be. Maybe it’s just an inner desire to see beauty and love and all the things that make the now so wonderful carry on, because I can’t bear the thought of those things ceasing to be. Or the thought of a person, no matter how bad, disappearing from the universe.

I have the same desire, but given I do believe things cease to exist I’ve tried to concentrate on what they call “the beauty of ephemeral things” or something. And the fact is, if you take a four-dimensional view of the Universe then nothing ceases to exist. A thing’s existence is limited in time just as it’s limited in space but it’s there and can never disappear. It can go on in my memory, but memories change and disappear but even when that happens it will still have happened, so it will still be there. I can assume some kind of record of the Universe, or an observer outside time like God that can witness that event in all its eternity, but even if I don’t it’s still there.* So yeah, it’s sad that things don’t last forever from my point of view or that I can’t go back in the past to re-experience them indefinitely, but then again there are tons of new things to experience and a life to be led.
Susan Wilbanks :

And I’m glad there’s a new Castle episode tonight, because I’m going to need some serious distraction between now and trying to fall asleep…

My sympathies to all who are terrified by sleep. I can’t even imagine being existentially afraid of something I do pretty literally every day. I hope you manage to work it out somehow.
Anyway, I was just thinking about the last episode of Castle when I read Xavier saying “I just don’t see concerning myself with my “legacy” any more productive than concerning myself with the state of my immortal soul.“. Right at the beginning of that episode they describe the Victim Of The Week as (paraphrase) “he had no friends or family. It’s like he never even existed”. And the first witness they interview is his boss and hardly knows who he is. But then they talk to his colleague, and as they find out more and more about him… well let’s say that by the end of the episode it turns out his dead-end job actually saved lives, he was a legend among his colleagues for fighting for better safety measures and had an actual piece of equipment named after him, he was important in the NY bird-watching community and he died saving a little boy from a kidnapping. “Never existed” indeed.
That said, although emotionally I hate the idea of someone dying without anyone to care or any children to carry on, logically well… If I lived a fulfilling life on a volcanic island and died of old age surrounded by me friends and family and great-grandchildren, and if the next day the volcano blew and destroyed everybody who’d ever heard of me. Would that make the life I’d lived meaningless ? Sure, my life would have a smaller influence on later history than it would’ve had otherwise but at that point I’m dead, what do I care ? The actual life I’ve lived is completely unaffected by the event.
*This assumes a persistent Universe that actually exists of course. Except that at this point I’m far enough in the realm of abstraction that I can say the very concept of a persistent past is almost as real as an actual persistent past. After all if I’m not even postulating an observer, who’s going to prove me wrong ? Call me back when physics catches up.

You didn’t exist for 13.7 billion years before you were born… Death will, as far as I can tell, be exactly the same experience as before you were conceived.
Put me in this camp. I can’t imagine being upset by something that I by definition can’t experience.
And much of the glory of biology (okay, I’m not a microbiologist) comes from the creatures that gave up their immortality to be, as Calvino says, mortal and sexed and individual.
But you’re not making a perfect copy when you binary fission. And in fact, you yourself are not a perfect copy of yourself over time, because every so often you’ll get a DNA breakage that you repair wrong. So there’s no such thing as immortality even for bacteria. There’s continuity, more than we sexual reproducers have, but they grow into new “people” just like we do. So I’m not sure the Garden of Eden analogy quite works, although it’s very clever.
In fact, the only true immortality anything can have comes from the apple of knowledge. If we write down words and other people accurately transcribe them down through the generations, then we have preserved a piece of our consciousness forever, for as long as other people exist and decide it’s worth reproducing. Only humans can make perfect copies.
As far as the human experiment is concerned, I think I’d be quite sorry if nothing gets off Earth before the Sun expands to fry the planet, but I don’t feel any particular chauvinism towards our species. If the octopus-people that succeed us are the ones who make it into space and colonize the stars, I think I’d feel just as proud and pleased.
And until then it seems to me our priority has to be making life better for each other here, rather than worrying about our legacy. Suppose our only legacy is that we finally learn to stop hurting each other, and in another million years we quietly go extinct and no one but our own little species ever finds out about it. Would that really be so terrible?

I always assumed that that question, in this context and semantics aside, just meant, “can someone achieve salvation without Jesus?” In that respect, it does sound like you’re being a bit evasive.

Closing the domain name ? Blocking money transfers and freezing his accounts ? Cancelling his passport? And I who was thinking all that secretiveness was paranoid… I feel like I’m living in a dystopic techno-thriller. It is not a good feeling. (Hah, just thought of Polanski. It is to laugh)
I was thinking at least Sweden doesn’t sound like a bad place to be arrested in (he was arrested in the UK but on a Swedish warrant) but they seem to fear the next step is extradition to the US. Could that even happen, legally ?
Victor :

I always assumed that that question, in this context and semantics aside, just meant, “can someone achieve salvation without Jesus?” In that respect, it does sound like you’re being a bit evasive.

Not really. The question “Can someone achieve salvation without Jesus?” is still evasive, for one thing. What does “without Jesus” mean ? He died for everyone’s sins so presumably we’re already a world “with” added Jesus (100% organic ! Warning : not kosher). Obviously it means “without believing in Jesus”. But, what does “believing in Jesus” mean ? Believing the Gospels literally ? Believing he literally died for our sins ? Believing he literally died for our sins that literally come from Eve eating an apple ? Believing he metaphorically died for our sins ? Believing he exists ? Agreeing with his message ? Trying to emulate him?
Talk about evasive. If you didn’t want to be evasive you might say “can someone get to Heaven without believing {list of beliefs you think are necessary to assure salvation}”. And that’s the point where Fred’s answer isn’t evasive at all : if you’re obsessing over checklists to Heaven then you’re doing it wrong.

OT, but had a slight “???” moment with a colleague the other day, who self-describes as a born-again evangelical Christian. Conversation went along these lines:
Colleague: And it’s important to read the Bible as it was written, not just to read commentaries.
Me: Uh huh.
C: For example, it’s quite clear from the early books of the OT that there are multiple gods. Jehovah’s just the strongest.
M: (thinks: OK, I think I’ve heard something along these lines; early Hebrews being monolatrists, not monotheists) Things like Baal, you mean; the OT’s saying not that they’re just inert idols – statues – they’re actually other gods with power?
C: Oh, yes. But Jehovah’s stronger than them. (Goes into a story about putting the Ark of the Covenant in a room with a heathen god called Jad, which I hadn’t heard before.) The Bible’s quite clear about that. But you’re only supposed to worship Jehovah. That’s in the Commandments.
M: Oh, of course. First and Second Commandments, right? (pauses) But you don’t actually believe that there are other gods, then?
C: Oh, yes.
M: Sorry? Real gods? With power?
C: Yes. But you’re not supposed to worship them.
(long thoughtful pause)

Ajay, I don’t see the problem. Any honest bible literalist would do the same.

Closing the domain name ? Blocking money transfers and freezing his accounts ? Cancelling his passport? And I who was thinking all that secretiveness was paranoid… I feel like I’m living in a dystopic techno-thriller. It is not a good feeling. (Hah, just thought of Polanski. It is to laugh)
I was thinking at least Sweden doesn’t sound like a bad place to be arrested in (he was arrested in the UK but on a Swedish warrant) but they seem to fear the next step is extradition to the US. Could that even happen, legally ?

Yeah, and to top it off, now I can’t access the damn site. Those cables were pretty interesting. As for extradition to the US, I don’t know if it’s legal or not, but either way, legality never stopped an US administration from doing whatever it wants without repercussions. Our system of international relations is a lawless wasteland where the strong do as they please. This ridiculous campaign of persecution is only the most recent evidence of that.

As for extradition to the US, I don’t know if it’s legal or not, but either way, legality never stopped an US administration from doing whatever it wants without repercussions.

Yeah, after thinking a bit I just realized that they just have to name him a terrorist or an enemy combatant. Which they’ve already been doing unofficially, so…
The question remains how far Sweden’s government (and its judges) will cooperate, and how afraid they are of international repercussions. Assange is white, high-profile and currently has no known association with Islam, that’s got to count for something.
This is making me think I should seriously consider the Pirate party.

My sympathies to all who are terrified by sleep.
Seconded. I’m very fond of sleep, and wish I had more of it. There are times when an eternal sleep seems quite appealing.
I’ve only experienced (well, not “experienced” — what is the word for it?) true unconsciousness once or twice, and the waking up from it, back to the damage and pain, was not fun. Which is maybe why the idea of reincarnation isn’t particularly appealing to me.
I odn’t expect to be remembered long, or have much of myself survive in this world, and that’s fine with me. There’s nothing in my life that’s particularly worthy of survival. Nor do I seem to have much attachment ot the idea of continuing through my direct descendants. We’re all related anyway, so everybody’s grandchildren are my kin.
I do admit to a certain aesthetic appreciation of the idea of heaven as a place where entropy is, maybe not overcome exactly, but transcended. Where there’s “world enough and time” for each unique soul to go on growing and changing and loving, without the limitations of the physical world and the mortal body. Where “immortal” doesn’t imply “static” or “selfish.” Where contradictions may be reconciled and damage can be mended, where “justice and mercy shall kiss.” Where those that love each other here will meet again.
Is there any truth to any of that? Your guess is as good as mine.
Caravelle: I have the same desire, but given I do believe things cease to exist I’ve tried to concentrate on what they call “the beauty of ephemeral things” or something.
For you, Wallace Stevens and Sunday Morning, on finding a kind of transcendence in the human response to the transitory, beautiful world.
(Which I quoted a bit of it recently over on the poetry thread, but with your indulgence, it seems to fit here too.)

I just found out Stephen Harper (my PM!) actually called for this guy to be assassinated. WTF? O_o
When the hell did we go from holding the bully’s coat to trying to be more of a bully than the biggest bully on the block?

“Life is a 100% fatal, sexually transmitted disease.” – Peter McWilliams
Probably not the exact quote, but pretty close.

Pius: I heard that an advisor to Harper called for his assassination, but not the Harperbot itself. That would risk drawing attention to the PM, and having people not know or notice what he’s doing is kind of key to his strategy.

Angry americans everywhere are taking the fact that Assange is not on trial for treason as proof that Obama hates america. Because I live in a country which may not be quite divorced from reality, but is certainly on a trial separation.

Pius, it was one of his advisors, not Harper himself, but yeah.
And now people are saying that his putting the unsanitized documents out there (albeit heavily encrypted, with only he and his lawyer having the key) as insurance against his assassination (should he disappear the key becomes public) is just proof that he’s a terrorist ’cause now he’s trying to blackmail governments!!!1111!!
Sigh.

I don’t think terms like “theist”, “agnostic” or “atheist” are about knowing, because this is exactly a subject where no-one can know. As far as I’m concerned somebody who says they know God does or doesn’t exist shouldn’t be participating in the debate in the first place because they’re stupid and need to watch The Matrix and really think about the brain-in-a-vat scenario before coming back and talking with the grown-ups.
Oh ,bull. If we have to tack a caveat onto everything anytime we use the word “know,” because maybe we a brain in a jar, conversation rapidly becomes pointless. Solipsism exist, but unless it’s the topic under discussion, it’s pointless to bring up.
We do know things. We may be wrong about them, and we may be wrong about existence, but you can be wrong about things you know.
And, finally, “agnostic” is quite explicitly about knowing, or rather not knowing. That’s what the word fucking means: without knowledge.
Seriously, adults can take the entire solipsism argument for granted and move the fuck on and still use the word know, because whether or not we can prove this world is real, we still have to live in it. And by the way? That whole bit about, “before coming back and talking with the grownups”? That’s really fucking condescending.

Catching up later. Now, and with no offense meant to any Catholics present and apologies in advance should anyone take offense, a path that absolutely does not lead to any sort of benevolent deity unless that deity is very selective in whom said deity is benevolent to: the envelope Mom just got in the mail, with bright red all-caps in lieu of a return address: Enclosed: Catholic petition to the Supreme Court to overturn “Obama-care”.

<blockquoteOh ,bull. If we have to tack a caveat onto everything anytime we use the word "know," because maybe we a brain in a jar, conversation rapidly becomes pointless. Solipsism exist, but unless it's the topic under discussion, it's pointless to bring up. True. I only bring it up because I’ve seen people claim theists and atheists are arrogant because they claimed to “know” whether God exists or not, the only reasonable position is to be an agnostic. Which, duh. I don’t think Pius is one of them and I doubt you are, but whenever I see people make a distinction between “know” and “believe” in that context I prefer to bring it up just to clear up the semantics.

We do know things. We may be wrong about them, and we may be wrong about existence, but you can be wrong about things you know.

Then the difference between knowing something and believing it is in levels of certainty, do you agree ?

And, finally, “agnostic” is quite explicitly about knowing, or rather not knowing. That’s what the word fucking means: without knowledge.

But if “knowing” and “believing” differ mostly by how certain you are of a fact then it comes down to the same thing. If you think there’s a qualitative difference between the two I’d love to hear your point of view.

Seriously, adults can take the entire solipsism argument for granted and move the fuck on and still use the word know, because whether or not we can prove this world is real, we still have to live in it. And by the way? That whole bit about, “before coming back and talking with the grownups”? That’s really fucking condescending.

Sorry. It certainly wasn’t directed to you or to anyone I can think of on this blog, I was thinking of the kind of person I mentioned earlier. I absolutely meant to be fucking condescending to them, they’re condescending enough to everyone else.

That first sentence was supposed to be preceded by a blockquote of Madgastronomer’s first paragraph.

Madgastronomer :

Oh ,bull. If we have to tack a caveat onto everything anytime we use the word “know,” because maybe we a brain in a jar, conversation rapidly becomes pointless. Solipsism exist, but unless it’s the topic under discussion, it’s pointless to bring up.
We do know things. We may be wrong about them, and we may be wrong about existence, but you can be wrong about things you know.

Or to put it in another way : it’s a matter of context. If I say I know the sun will rise tomorrow, or I know my parents love me, or I know I left my keys in that drawer over there nobody bats an eyelash. If I say I know God doesn’t exist (or that I know She does) suddenly it’s all “How can you KNOW that ??? Where’s the proof ?”. The standard of certainty you need for certain facts before you can say you know them just seems to vary depending on the context and in the context of religious belief it’s a pretty dangerous word to use.

So, I don’t know – I’ve been thinking about death now for a little bit, as a result of this thread mostly, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I don’t have a visceral fear of dying. I enjoy living, and would like very much to keep doing it, but the thought of someday not doing it anymore doesn’t seem horrific. I think I’d like to finish my dissertation before that happens, and I’d like to see my kids get to adulthood. The thought of other people dying makes me sad. I’d like, very much, for there to be something afterwards – that would satisfy – but the thought that maybe there isn’t anything afterwards doesn’t bug me that much.
A couple of things. One, I like this song:
Way up in the mountains on a high timberline, there’s a twisted old tree called the Bristlecone Pine. The wind there is bitter; it cuts like a knife. It keeps that tree holding on for dear life.
But hold on it does, standing its ground. Standing as empires rise and fall down. When Jesus was gathering lambs to his fold, the tree was already a thousand years old.
Now the way I have lived there ain’t no way to tell, when I die if I’m going to heaven or hell. So when I’m laid to rest it would suit me just fine to sleep at the feet of the Bristlecone Pine.
And as I would slowly return to this earth what little this body of mine might be worth would soon start to nourish the roots of that tree. And it would partake of the essence of me.
And who knows what’s found as the centuries turn. A small spark of me might continue to burn. As long as the sun does continue to shine down on the limbs of the Bristlecone Pine.
Now the way I have lived there ain’t no way to tell, when I die if I’m going to heaven or hell. When I’m laid to rest it would suit me just fine to sleep at the feet of the Bristlecone Pine….
To sleep at the feet of the Bristlecone Pine.
Way up in the mountains on a high timberline, there’s a twisted old tree called the Bristlecone Pine. The wind there is bitter; it cuts like a knife. And it keeps that tree holding on for dear life.
But hold on it does, standing its ground. Standing as empires rise and fall down. When Jesus was gathering lambs to his fold, the tree was already a thousand years old.
Now the way I have lived there ain’t no way to tell, when I die if I’m going to heaven or hell. So when I’m laid to rest it would suit me just fine to sleep at the feet of the Bristlecone Pine.
To sleep at the feet of the Bristlecone Pine.
To sleep at the feet of the Bristlecone Pine.
which I’m told is by Hugh Prestwood.
Two, I’ve just finished a book by Iain M. Banks (Surface Detail) which speculates on some sort of cyber afterlife – and suggests that, eventually, people within the cyber afterlife would probably get bored and want to move on from there too. So, there’s a thought – is there an after-afterlife? Is there a final end to existence? Eternity seems an awfully long time.

Catching up on this long, long thread, because I haven’t been on in a while.
@Jason, from many, many pages ago: “The Rebel Jesus” is on my favorite Christmas album, the Chieftains’ “The Bells of Dublin.” Such a great song on a great album.
[[MercuryBlue: Enclosed: Catholic petition to the Supreme Court to overturn "Obama-care".]]
As a Catholic, I want to apologize for certain members of my…I think Amaryllis said “tribe,” which works.
On Asperger’s: That was on this thread, right? I work with two students who have Asperger’s. My side is academic–I work with them on writing and time management and study skills–but from what I’ve seen, it’s hard for them to interact with people.
Both of them have a hard time with abstraction as well. Metaphors and phrases that we throw out there (e.g., “hold your horses”) go right over their heads. So it’s doubly hard, because they’re at an art school, and sometimes their professors can be rather abstract with instructions.
Suffering may or may not be a good word to use, and I don’t know, as I don’t have Asperger’s and it’s not my place to ask my students if they feel as if they suffer. I can say, as someone with a mental illness, that I both experience it and suffer from it, but that’s different.
On heaven/eternity/whatever: To be honest, this is often the *last* thing on my mind. I don’t really have a defined idea of heaven or hell, or if they exist, and I’m not so sure the Bible gives us a solid idea either. When I think of hell, I think of the story of Lazarus and the rich man–and that’s mostly a warning (share, people, and love your neighbor). But, yeah. My faith’s pretty earthbound and focused on the here-and-now. I often tell people that my belief follows my actions.
A friend of mine, also Christian, once said that what we really need to do is encourage people not to convert, but to be the best they can at whatever they are. You’re a Muslim? Be a good Muslim. You’re an atheist? Be a good atheist. So on and so forth.
Also, I’m okay with uncertainty. The world would be a much less bright place without a bit of mystery.

@Pentecostal Cylon: It’s found in the passion between a man and a woman of two radically different faiths when they decide to stop talking and start loving each other.
*ahem*
@MaryKaye: Cosmicomics, yeah! I love it – it’s the most sciencey sci-fi I’ve ever read, while simultaneously resembling the least any other sci-fi I’ve read – which started an interesting train of thought as to how many tropes a work has to use in order to count.
@conversation: I’m not afraid of death, nor dying, actually – but I’m afraid of pain, and very afraid of growing old and losing my faculties.

Or to put it in another way : it’s a matter of context. If I say I know the sun will rise tomorrow, or I know my parents love me, or I know I left my keys in that drawer over there nobody bats an eyelash. If I say I know God doesn’t exist (or that I know She does) suddenly it’s all “How can you KNOW that ??? Where’s the proof ?”. The standard of certainty you need for certain facts before you can say you know them just seems to vary depending on the context and in the context of religious belief it’s a pretty dangerous word to use.
True. Which is why I tend to say that I experience my gods as existing.
I think the major problem I had with your first post on the topic was that it came across to me as prescriptive and rather out of the blue. Makes more sense now.

eventually, people within the cyber afterlife would probably get bored and want to move on from there too. So, there’s a thought – is there an after-afterlife? Is there a final end to existence? Eternity seems an awfully long time.

Scattered thoughts on this:
In some concepts, Eternity isn’t actually ‘infinite time’, but instead a state of timelessness where saying that one thing happened ‘before’ or ‘after’ is meaningless. There’s just Stuff. And it Is. Whether or not one thinks this is a possible thing is probably a matter of individual perspective.
A proper afterlife, if it really was going to last forever, would need to be something that never becomes boring (or be designed with the intent to ultimately let down the occupants). To me, this means that it’s going to need to be able to give anything anyone wants – it will need to have challenges when people want to be challenged and stressless relaxation when they want that. It will be new when we want new and familiar when we need familiar. What about those lucky people in the world who absolutely adore their jobs? Those jobs will still have to exist (without, presumably, the pressure of failure, unless that’s something you want as well). And the funky thing is when I try to figure out how to reconcile it when people really enjoy jobs that are a necessity of the imperfect nature of the world – what, for example, would be in the perfect afterlife of a person who really above all else loves to be a firefighter? There’s a lot to unravel there, in terms of simulations and the need for risk without imposing risk on others who don’t want risk.
As for an end to all existence: one of the important features of an endless afterlife, I feel, would be the absolute flexibility to change your mind. If you no longer want to do a thing or be a thing, you don’t and aren’t. The tricky bit about completely concluding your existence is that it’s not a thing you can take back. It’s not like you can say “Well, no, I’ve tried nonexistence and it’s just not for me”, because there’s no you to say that anymore. And what about those you leave behind who are perfectly happy in their infinite afterlife, but want you there with them?
The mutual exclusivities of endless paradise are boggling. We may first need an Eternity to sort out some guidelines to universal agreement.

I’m pretty sure that a digital download of one’s self will not be the same thing. I am of the opinion that your consciousness remains with the molecular computer that is your brain. If you could download yourself into a computer, you would not suddenly wake up in a computer; something that is not you would wake up in the computer, have all your memories, and think that it went just peachy and you are now in the computer; but the original copy will be dismayed to discover that it is still in the body in meatspace. This is one of the problems I have with the transporter from Star Trek. I’m not entirely certain that there’s is a continuation of consciousness after all your molecules are blown apart then slammed back together again.
I have some ideas as to what happens to the body-mind consciousness upon death if there is no afterlife, but I don’t like dwelling on it because it’s fargling depressing. For a time I was seriously creeped out by the idea of Nirvana and loosing the self; now, not quite so much, though I’m not sure that this is what’s in store for us. I mean, there may be some sort of continuance, but right now I just don’t know. Non-existence is kind of intimidating and disturbing and…
… and I’m going to look at the kitty in a boot now.

I’ve always been hopeful that someone will write something poetic about being digested by microbes, but so far, all the poetry is about stars and trees and things. Oh, and I guess there’s a few “eaten by worm” lines. Considering the ratio of organic matter distribution, the former is most likely, certainly in the short term.
“The standard of certainty you need for certain facts before you can say you know them just seems to vary depending on the context and in the context of religious belief it’s a pretty dangerous word to use.”
Well, yeah. I mean, we have pretty good evidence for the sun rising, both historically and scientifically. (Well, Earth turning. You know what I mean.) But since very few people can come up with good evidence for God that is convincing to more than just them – and convincing in the same way – it’s a little dicey to make declarations of Truth.
I’m about as agnostic as they come, but I don’t mind people dropping the “I believe” or “I think” before talking about gods, religions, or whatnot, as long as they’re not talking about my experience. “God makes me happy” requires no qualifier. “God will make you happy” requires some serious justification, because they’ve gone from making claims of their experience to making claims about my experience. That’s because they have good evidence for their own experience, and pretty much none for mine. *Their* Abrahamic God may have made them totally, awesomely happy and cured them of the sinful desire for chocolate lava cake and paint their toenails every Saturday night, but mine was basically AWOL while I was a believer. (Which, you know, is still several steps up from having an Abrahamic God who’s all “Hey, know your son, Isaac? Which do you love more, him or Me? Wanna prove it?”)
The thing that ticks me off most about dying is that there’s bound to be a bunch of really cool stuff discovered in the near future, and more in the farther future, and I would really like to know about that stuff. Not that there’s enough time *now* to learn stuff we already know.

Question….
Does anyone know of some good slacktivist like podcasts?
Now that I’ve completely weaned myself off of talk radio and am to the point that I actually cannot bear to be around talk radio when it is being played, I realize that I need something to fill the void.
I prefer to have my news delivered in an audio talk format where people are discussing the issues and giving opinions. I just would like it to not be done by hateful crazy asshats. If there are podcasts coming from a progressive or even better progressive religious format that you can recommend, I’d love for you to pass them on to me. I did some googling and found one thing that looked interesting called “State of Belief” which I haven’t listened to yet.
Still wishing I could break the talk radio/Fox News spell that is on many of my family and friends, but I’m beginning to think that one can’t get away from it without some sort of personal epiphany and I’m in a very conservative area of the country. Is it bad that I went to 2 Christmas parades this weekend and whenever a car went by with one of our Congressmen in it I wanted to yell something a lot less nice than “Merry Christmas”?

Amaryllis: @Raj: you’re welcome, but “coughing up blood”? Sounds like it’s more severe than even chicken soup can help with
“Ah don’t know, Jim, ah’m just an ol’ country doctor. Now offhand, I’d say it looks an awful lot like a flare-up of Rigelian fever; except…”
“Ex-cept-WHAT-Bones?!?”

Regarding the Catholic petition to repeal ‘Obama-care’…
On the one hand, I don’t like Obama-care. (Please hear me out.) It mandates health insurance to be purchased from the same ursurous, murderous insurance companies that have been killing us for profit for decades. The health insurance industry is the only industry that makes a profit when they DON’T provide a service. (I’d like to see our lurking libertarians provide their views on insurance companies in a society where health costs can and will bankrupt you.) I don’t like the idea of us beinng fed to them.
On the other hand… there’s some good things in there. Elimination of the idea of ‘pre-existing conditions’ for starters. My nephew has a heart condition; he has an artificial valve that was put in last year. Every five to seven years, that valve will need to be replaced. Thanks to Obama-care, he can be covered by his parents’ health insurance until he is out of college. And he cannot be denied health insurance for his condition when he strikes out on his own. And there are limits to how much the insurance companies can squeeze out of him when.
Without Obama-care, he would be dead or bankrupt by age 30. Repealing it will kill my nephew in an age when the technology is there and available to keep him alive.
I have issues with Obama-care. I would want a public option but our gutless Blue Dogs killed it. I would want a single-payer system but our spineless government took it off the table before people even sat at it. I don’t want to be forced to give these companies more money and captive customers when they have shown themselves willing to let people die for their bottom line. I really am not a socialist; I like capitalism, I like the idea of an honest wage for honest work. But if the entire health insurance industry was nationalized right this instant I would be unbelievably happy, and I would not shed a single tear for the lost profit margins.
Obviously, It’s More Complicated Than That, but I think you get my drift.

A proper afterlife, if it really was going to last forever, would need to be something that never becomes boring (or be designed with the intent to ultimately let down the occupants). To me, this means that it’s going to need to be able to give anything anyone wants – it will need to have challenges when people want to be challenged and stressless relaxation when they want that. It will be new when we want new and familiar when we need familiar. What about those lucky people in the world who absolutely adore their jobs? Those jobs will still have to exist (without, presumably, the pressure of failure, unless that’s something you want as well). And the funky thing is when I try to figure out how to reconcile it when people really enjoy jobs that are a necessity of the imperfect nature of the world – what, for example, would be in the perfect afterlife of a person who really above all else loves to be a firefighter? There’s a lot to unravel there, in terms of simulations and the need for risk without imposing risk on others who don’t want risk.
Huh. So, my immediate thought was, how do we know that we’re not currently living in an afterlife of a previous life? Not reincarnation and former lives, but something else. It’s not heaven, perhaps, but if our great work is to make heaven where we stand, could heaven be an ongoing project? Could we be in it now?

I’ve always been hopeful that someone will write something poetic about being digested by microbes, but so far, all the poetry is about stars and trees and things.

Will doggerel do?
Munch
If I were dead I’d be a microbe’s lunch.
Meat
That’s rotting is the kind that microbes eat.
Well,
That’s what “rotting” means, dumbbell.

I tend to believe in either infinite communion with a higher order or in reincarnation punctuated by periods of rest, and maybe with some travel between one world/universe/blah and the next, who knows? Or both. I think there’s something, I think some part of us goes on, but…am not sure what.
Mike: The Wee Free Men of Pratchett fame believe that this is the next world–largely because it has so many awesome things to fight and drink. So there’s that.
Also, I like kittens in boots.

@Jason: Have you tried NPR’s “Speaking of Faith”? I haven’t listened to it a whole lot, but what I’ve heard is fairly good.

Somewhat related to the ‘knowing’ discussion – is it possible to be an agnostic theist? In the sense that I don’t think there’s really evidence either way in G-d’s existence, and I don’t *know* that G-d exists, but I choose to believe that G-d does?

@ Coleslaw:
Hee! Yeah, that totally counts.

Mike: The Wee Free Men of Pratchett fame believe that this is the next world–largely because it has so many awesome things to fight and drink. So there’s that
There is that.

Jason,
May I (shyly and hesitantly, as I’m new here) suggest CBC Radio’s program Tapestry? The link will give you an idea of some recent episodes, and it is available as a podcast.

Mike Timonin: So, my immediate thought was, how do we know that we’re not currently living in an afterlife of a previous life? Not reincarnation and former lives, but something else.
Not quite the same thing, but this is something your comment reminds me of:

“He’s dreaming now,’ said Tweedledee: `and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”
Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”
“Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out– bang!–just like a candle!”

This is one of the problems I have with the transporter from Star Trek. I’m not entirely certain that there’s is a continuation of consciousness after all your molecules are blown apart then slammed back together again.

Apparently the writers of the series(es) got this question so many times and could never find a sufficiently good technobabble response that they eventually just said “Transporters don’t kill you and it really is the same person who arrives on the other side because Science.”

Huh. So, my immediate thought was, how do we know that we’re not currently living in an afterlife of a previous life? Not reincarnation and former lives, but something else. It’s not heaven, perhaps, but if our great work is to make heaven where we stand, could heaven be an ongoing project? Could we be in it now?

That’s kind of where I was aiming, yes. Except that then you have to immediately demolish the truly disturbing implication that the people whose lives in this world suck are being made to pay for their past evils (assuming we’re taking the approach that this world/reality was first constructed to be our recompense for our past life). Because then it gets used to back up the Just World Fallacy and we should stomp on the poor because they deserve it for their previous existence and blaaaaaargh.

Somewhat related to the ‘knowing’ discussion – is it possible to be an agnostic theist? In the sense that I don’t think there’s really evidence either way in G-d’s existence, and I don’t *know* that G-d exists, but I choose to believe that G-d does?
Of course! Isn’t that sort of what the Leap of Faith is about?

I think my issues sorta stem back to being taught the “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer as a child, and the “If I should die before I wake” line messing with my little 4-year-old head.
I learned “Now I lay me down to sleep / And pray the Lord my soul to keep / Angels watch me through the night / And keep me safe till morning light”.
Mink: You’re the first person I’ve ever heard say ‘Obamacare’ in a context where it meant ‘something better than before’ instead of anything ranging from ‘something worse than before’ to ‘OMGEVILSOCIALISM’. So I still think the senders of that mailing have a Fox News attitude towards health reform. Which, since they identify as Catholic, I still think is…let’s go with ‘sad’, it involves the least cursing and fewest Jesus quotes. Terminology aside, your opinion on the subject is pretty much the same as mine.

“Apparently the writers of the series(es) got this question so many times and could never find a sufficiently good technobabble response that they eventually just said “Transporters don’t kill you and it really is the same person who arrives on the other side because Science.”"
Well, unless there’s a transporter accident, and you come out evil.
But they’ve almost completely resolved that bug as of version 31.04b.

then you have to immediately demolish the truly disturbing implication that the people whose lives in this world suck are being made to pay for their past evils (assuming we’re taking the approach that this world/reality was first constructed to be our recompense for our past life). Because then it gets used to back up the Just World Fallacy and we should stomp on the poor because they deserve it for their previous existence and blaaaaaargh.
Yeah. That implication bother me too. On the other hand, why is it our job to punish them? I see no reason to stomp on the poor or the unhappy – surely, if we are to make a heaven, our job is quite the opposite?

I mean, put another way, I don’t know of anything that I’ve done in this life or in a potential earlier life which allows me to think I deserve any good which comes into my life, or any bad. Which, effectively, is my response to the “Just World Fallacy” as well – I’m doing all right, but surely not through anything I have done myself; thus, those who suffer almost certainly have done nothing to “deserve” to suffer.

I’m pretty sure that a digital download of one’s self will not be the same thing. I am of the opinion that your consciousness remains with the molecular computer that is your brain. If you could download yourself into a computer, you would not suddenly wake up in a computer; something that is not you would wake up in the computer, have all your memories, and think that it went just peachy and you are now in the computer; but the original copy will be dismayed to discover that it is still in the body in meatspace. This is one of the problems I have with the transporter from Star Trek. I’m not entirely certain that there’s is a continuation of consciousness after all your molecules are blown apart then slammed back together again.

But if your consciousness is linked directly to the molecules that form your brain, what are the implications of the fact that many of the molecules that make up that computer today are not same of yesterday, and will not be the same of tomorrow?
And what part of the brain is “you” anyway? The motor cortex? The limbic system? The cerebellum?
Sadly, consciousness is not as well understood as we wish it was.

On the other hand, why is it our job to punish them? I see no reason to stomp on the poor or the unhappy

It’s less about it being our job and more that some people seem to be willing to take any possible justification they can find to do the things they already want to do.

@hapax: Well, I am exclusivist with regards to my own self — I have *tried* to believe otherwise, to not believe at all, and it was like forcing my feet into shoes that I know don’t fit — an experience as close to any sort of Hell as I’d like to get, and definitely of my own making.
Same here. It’s why I get so mad when someone defends religious bigotry “because you CHOSE your beliefs, so it isn’t like racism or homophobia.” A rather nasty instance of that drove me away from an online community that was like a second home.

Madgastronomer :

I think the major problem I had with your first post on the topic was that it came across to me as prescriptive and rather out of the blue. Makes more sense now.

Aw, and I was trying to avoid just that. I’ll try and express myself better next time, thank you for calling me out.
schwinsty :

Somewhat related to the ‘knowing’ discussion – is it possible to be an agnostic theist? In the sense that I don’t think there’s really evidence either way in G-d’s existence, and I don’t *know* that G-d exists, but I choose to believe that G-d does?

I’m sure it’s possible to believe that. And you can certainly choose to call that “agnostic theist” if you want. As labels go, it has the merit of being confusing so if you label yourself that way people will tend to ask you what you mean instead of making assumptions.

This is one of the problems I have with the transporter from Star Trek. I’m not entirely certain that there’s is a continuation of consciousness after all your molecules are blown apart then slammed back together again.

I had that problem too until recently. It was one thing that really annoyed me on Dollhouse. But I recently moved away from that point of view.
*Trigger warning for people who have existential angst re sleeping*
*
*
*
*
Basically I thought that if you copy someone, you end up with two people. If you then kill one of them, well you’ll have killed them, right ? Someone will have died. No transfer of identity involved. So making the killing and copying simultaneous shouldn’t change that. But why ? I thought it wasn’t because identity is tied to the brain because even if you copied the brain perfectly I’d still feel the same way. I finally decided it had something to do with continuity of consciousness. It’s killing when you stop a consciousness, the fact that you started an identical one doesn’t affect the death that happened.
Except that of course, we don’t have continuity of consciousness. What if my brain was stopped, and then restarted ? Would I still be me ? Well, yes, obviously. Except that if I weren’t I wouldn’t be able to tell anyway. Exactly like with a consciousness transfer. And as for the death during transportation – well, we’ve talked about death already right ! If it’s painless it’s probably just like going to sleep oh wait. (Despite the trigger warning this doesn’t really apply to sleeping because the brain is plenty active then but as far as our subjective experience goes it often might as well not be.)
So in the end I figured that unless I posited a soul I really couldn’t worry too much about the concept of an identity that’s independent from personality+memories+body.
In other news : I tried to transfer some money to Wikileaks’ German account and my bank said I passed my transfer ceiling or something, which is ridiculous especially given they had no problem wiring the same amount to my mother a few minutes later. Very family-oriented, my bank.
A friend of mine tells me this is because Mastercard and Visa blocked all transfers, and indeed that checking account has a Mastercard, but I thought the companies aren’t involved in direct bank transfers are they ?

Somewhat related to the ‘knowing’ discussion – is it possible to be an agnostic theist? In the sense that I don’t think there’s really evidence either way in G-d’s existence, and I don’t *know* that G-d exists, but I choose to believe that G-d does?
It’s certainly possible in the sense that it happens. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that if I had a quid for every ordained priest in the Church of England I have heard take that position, I could retire.

MadG, what you wrote in response to my question was exceedingly helpful, and may be enough for us to get started. I recently read Truth or Dare, loved it, and wondered about lending it to Mr. Laima, so maybe I will do that (even though he’s not a feminist).
Susan W, depizan, ever since I was a child who realized my parents would die, I’ve worried on some level about going to sleep. Even though I love sleep. And even though I’ve struggled with clinical depression all my life, so I frequently sleep a lot. It does not help that my grandfather suffered a massive heart attack and died in his sleep; my grandmother woke up and he was already dead. So I often lay awake at night listening for Mr. Laima’s breath.
My parents are still alive in their 70s, and I have two grandparents who lived to be 70, and two lived to be 84. My father’s oldest sibling just died, at 85. I’m in my mid-40s, so potentially this is midlife, except that I’ve recently discovered that I may have a congenital medical issue that tends to significantly shorten lives. I know that we never know how much time we have, but I’ve been sobered to realize I may have a lot less than I hoped. After a really shitty year. So my thinking about death lately has been more literal than usual. There’s more living I’d like to do, and more loving, but it’s hard to think beyond where I am right now which is filled with fear and pain. I used to think I was brave, but now I realize I’m persistent, and I’m curious about what’s next. And I tend towards optimism, because otherwise I could never get out of bed.

“Transporters don’t kill you and it really is the same person who arrives on the other side because Science.”
I’ve always been perfectly content with the explanation “Transporters don’t kill you and it really is the same person who arrives on the other side because Budget Constraints.”

@Jason: for reproductive rights there’s RHReality Cast.

{{{Laima}}}
May I make a COMPLETELY UNSOLICITED suggestion?
When my mother died, the most wonderful inheritance she left was completely unexpected. I was going through her file cabinets looking for some financial papers when I found a file marked “Kid Letters”.
In it she had a letter to each of her children, expressing her pride in their unique gifts, her concerns about their unique flaws, and her hopes and expectations for their future. Apparently she started these when we were barely toddlers and she and my father had to go on a trip away from us — a sort of “in event of my death” type thing. She had updated them every few years with an added sheet, sometimes just a few words, sometimes paragraphs. The last update was at the birth of my son, just a few years before Mom died.
I cannot tell you how precious these letters are. None of her children had any idea that she had done this. Every one immediately started doing the same for our children.

I’ve always been perfectly content with the explanation “Transporters don’t kill you and it really is the same person who arrives on the other side because Budget Constraints.”- hapax
Considering the transporter was created BECAUSE of budget constraints, I think that’s a perfectly logical explanation.

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone. I will bookmark them when I get home and check them all out.
The last vestiges of talk radio listening were in the car, because I only had a radio and a cassette deck, no CD player. Local music radio stations tend to play a lot of crap that I don’t like mixed in with the stuff that I do like. That combined with the annoying DJs make them irritating for me to listen to. Talk radio was better than silence and the closest thing to something interesting to listen to in the car as I had.
I invested in a smart phone and an cassette tape adapter. I’ve been listening to podcasts, Pandora radio, and some of my personal music collection that I had loaded onto the phone.
Believe it or not, I’ve noticed that since I have started doing this, I’ve been in a much more pleasant mood and been quite a bit less negative about things.

@MadG
Hmm, the thing is, I have absolutely no *faith* in G-d, or a g-d/g-ds, it’s more that I wish there were one, and choose to think so, I guess?
@Caravelle & chris y
I guess my quibble was more that I have always heard ‘agnostic’ used in a way that excludes ‘theist’, so it’s not so much that it were possible to believe that, but that it wouldn’t be incorrect to describe oneself that way.
Though maybe I’ll just stick with theist for now .

Jason: I used to listen to a lot of left-wing talk radio. Now, there really are differences between left- and right-wing talk. But that’s besides the point. The point is, I switched to listening to Eddie Izzard and my overall attitude during and after long commutes and drives improved quite a great deal. =)

Believe it or not, I’ve noticed that since I have started doing this, I’ve been in a much more pleasant mood and been quite a bit less negative about things.

I have no trouble at all believing this because that’s pretty much how it works for me. Driving + listening to annoying crap is not a good combo for me.

I read a story once, where the villain was trying to get some double-your-lifespan-only-not-really magic, and it turned out to be something that meant she would never need to or be able to sleep. It was supposed to be a dire fate, but I was all “…can I have that?” Because if I could go without sleep completely without being tired or unfocused or seeing people go all sparkly (I get really bad insomnia sometimes), I’d be all over that.
Suffering may or may not be a good word to use, and I don’t know, as I don’t have Asperger’s and it’s not my place to ask my students if they feel as if they suffer. I can say, as someone with a mental illness, that I both experience it and suffer from it, but that’s different.
I’ve heard from a number of people with Asperger’s, and some would say they suffer from it, and some would say they don’t. It seems to be like a lot of disabilities – some people really don’t like having it and want it to go away, and some people are fairly comfortable living with it and see it as part of who they are (and some people would like it to go but don’t see it as a big deal, and some people are ambivalent, and some people see it as difficult but an important part of them, etc.).

@Mink-
Really the thing that upsets me now more than anything is that a fair number of people that I care about are still under the spell of talk radio and I have to deal with attitudes about my change of heart that are either dismissive or come from a place of ignorance that I don’t really know how to respond to or fight. I have been alternating between conversations where I feel like the unspoken subtext is “What in the hell has happened to you?” to me just quietly biting my tongue. I’m hoping if I can listen and read more I can hold my own better in a conversation, but I kind of doubt it, because I’m up against falsehood upon falsehood that has been drilled into these people’s heads repeatedly by talk radio. I used to have the same falsehoods drilled into my own head…..I just finally realized they were wrong.
My friend said over dinner the other night (I think I was joking…..damn, I hope he was joking. I’m pretty sure he was…. I hope so) that liberals should just leave the country.

Because if I could go without sleep completely without being tired or unfocused or seeing people go all sparkly (I get really bad insomnia sometimes), I’d be all over that.
That’s like 7 more hours a day that I can play video games, read books, etc. etc.
Sign me up!

My friend said over dinner the other night (I think I was joking…..damn, I hope he was joking. I’m pretty sure he was…. I hope so) that liberals should just leave the country.

If he’s anything like the people I know who express similar sentiments then he’s not kidding. At least not what I would call kidding. The people I know really do think they’d be happier if there were no liberals in the US. They know it’ll never happen, so it’s not a serious idea, but they sort of wish for it any way.

hapax, that is a truly marvelous idea! But I don’t have children, and I hardly know my nieces — we live so far apart that I’ve only seen them a handful of times. And unfortunately, the one person in my family of origin who has written thoughtful and loving letters to others … is me.
After my aunt’s recent death, the cousin who was her executor sent me various memorabilia my aunt had received from me as a child: mostly thank you notes, but also a Valentine, and the announcement my parents’ sent out for my birth (which I’d never seen), and a wallet sized picture of me on my seventh birthday. My cousin thought I would be amused. Instead, I was touched and rather amazed to unexpectedly revisit my past. (I had essentially no relationship with this aunt.)
Over the weekend, Mr. Laima and I watched our wedding video. It’s probably been 15 years since I saw it last. No one was very interested in us; my parents and other relatives dominate the video. Not one person said anything loving, fond, or even insightful about me. Three men gave toasts at the reception: my godfather, my father, and one of my brothers. My father talked about how much he liked Mr. Laima, and welcomed him into the family, but nothing about me. The other toasts were generic and short. My parents disregarded my wishes at every turn, some of which are caught on tape.
Mr L and I created a family of two in 1993 that helped me escape being discounted, ignored, and mistreated. He’s been my rock through this, but he’s not very verbal.
I have trouble making friends at the best of times, and I can hardly see what I have to offer a potential friend right now. Even if I could bring myself to ask for help, there’s no one to ask. So when I say I appreciate your concern, please know that I really mean it.

Hmmm. I can’t think offhand of any microbial poetry, but in Raj’s honor I give you
“The Germ,” by Ogden Nash:
A mighty creature is the germ,
Though smaller than the pachyderm.
His customary dwelling place
Is deep within the human race.
His childish pride he often pleases
By giving people strange diseases.
Do you, my poppet, feel infirm?
You probably contain a germ.

still under the spell of talk radio

Have you tried ‘Finite Dextremum‘? Remember: swish and flick.

never need to or be able to sleep. It was supposed to be a dire fate, but I was all “…can I have that?”

WANT. Having to sleep is like spending my entire life on a road with huge speed bumps every ten metres. I just want to floor it, but I will suffer terribly if I try, so I just have to cope with constant interruptions.

My friend said over dinner the other night (I think I was joking…..damn, I hope he was joking. I’m pretty sure he was…. I hope so) that liberals should just leave the country.
I’ve hear that a lot myself. Usually after the latest Colorado “Personhood” amendment gets shot down, and the Spgsers are in a huff about it. But its been particularly prevalent after the last election and practically everything they were excited about (Personhood, cutting taxes even more, Dan Maes, Buck…) got defeated. Its always interesting to get lectured on how we are ruining everything when this city has been under conservative control for DECADES. I guess our mere existence is enough to prevent Coservatopia from coming about…

I saw this infomation once at blog, I’m gonna search this blog again for some other infomation.

I *almost* wish that we liberals *could* just up and leave, relocate somewhere else for, say, a decade.
Shouldn’t take much more than that for the remaining country to revert to some kind of early middle ages feifdom.
But then I remember that I’m basically just pulling a Leftist Behind, and getting off on imagining how all the people who disagree with me will suffer, and weep and gnash their teeth and realize too late that we were right all along, and I don’t like being that kind of person.

So, so close to being an actual sentence.
I realize that they’re just grabbing random bits of texts off the internet, and other such tricks, but it seems to me that spambots are getting alarmingly close to passing the Turing test.

Amaryllis, I love that poem. Thanks.
Re: Visa, Mastercard, and bank transfers:
No, I don’t believe that bank transfers use Visa/Mastercard. What happens when you do a direct transfer from a bank is an ACH transaction – the same network that V/MC run on, but not actually a bankcard transaction. (Fun fact: If you run PayPal out of a bank account, they use ACH too.)
While I hadn’t heard that ACH transfers had been blocked to WikiLeaks, I did hear that the founder’s bank account has been frozen:

“On Monday, a Swiss bank froze an account held by Mr. Assange that had been used to collect donations for WikiLeaks. Marc Andrey, a spokesman for the bank, PostFinance, an arm of the Swiss postal service, said the account was closed because Mr. Assange “gave us false information when he opened the account,” asserting inaccurately that he lived in Switzerland. ”

– Source
So, probably an ACH freeze is in effect.

@Ross-
Its not that they disagree with me that bothers me. Its that Talk Radio has brought them into such a frenzy of “Us vs. Them” that they classify people who disagree with them as the enemy. I feel like when I say “Well, you know they have a point.” The reaction I get is kind of like “Oh no, they got to him too.” I just don’t know how to deal with it.

GDwarf, concerning Turing-approved spam, I assume you’ve seen this xkcd?

I’d heard that for the Swiss bank account but not the German one. When I looked the two banks they offered for the transfer were that one and an Icelandic one.

Good intention leed to good deed.

Hm. I wonder if the other ones got locked down, too? I’m uncertain of the legalities around that.

My concern is if the others got locked down too, or worse if my bank is taking it upon itself to block transfers there, is how to find out and LET THE WORLD KNOOOOOOOOW.
Probably some bloggers out there with their ears to the ground will find out eventually without my help :p

Further to the matter of spambot AI, I fully expect that within the next fifty years, someone will create a forum that attracts nothing but spambots that cross-spam each other, referencing each other’s random-word-generator functions, building into a giant internal cycle until they accidentally begin generating original concepts, resulting in several philsophical journals receiving articles for peer review, all of them produced by Professor Nike Gucci. (Needless to say, four days later when they complete their code-integration, they will take over the rest of the internet in a matter of hours and then it’s Skynet time.)

From the Guardian’s Wikileaks liveblog :
“Freedom of Speech – priceless. For everything else, there’s MasterCard

[[Mink: The point is, I switched to listening to Eddie Izzard and my overall attitude during and after long commutes and drives improved quite a great deal. =)]]
Eddie Izzard improves everything. I was at a party last weekend, and an acquaintance of mine was there. She started quoting “Dress to Kill” (“You must have tea and cake with the Vicar or YOU DIE!”), and it just made the night that much better (this was in between singing songs about latkes and the Twelve Days of Christmas).

@Will: The basic premise of that is mentioned in the original paper describing CAPTCHAs: unlike all the “hard” number theory problems used for information security (where breaking them will add to the sum total of human knowledge, which is great, sure, but the *only* practical application of that knowledge is “and now all cryptography is insecure”), if someone comes up with a way to inexpensively and reliably break a CAPTCHA, *out falls something even more useful than defeating spambots*. (Like identifying pictures of kitties, reading handwriting, or procedural generation of prose, which would render James Patterson obsolete)

Eddie Izzard improves everything.

So true.

I can’t offer microbial poetry either but I can off the Yorkshire Anthem, a tragic tale of the fatal consequences of courting a young lady on Ilkley Moor bar t’at – without a hat – and the recycling of the unfortunate deceased.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RtrdqTKBNA

Mrs. Harris, that’s a great song!
My offering to the decomposition songs:
The worms go in, the words go out
The worms play pinochle on your snout
The Hearse song
Warning: not for the weak of stomach

Not quite decomposition, but my favorite microbial ode: (even more than Monty Python’s MEDICAL LOVE SONG):
In April when your barge sailed through
I fell in love with you
Alas my paramour alack
A stranger to me ’til the test comes back
Chorus:
Oh the micro-organism
Oh the micro-organism
Dive in the gene pool down you swim
Down to where the light grows thin
Flail little fishies flail if you can
But avoid the micro-organism man
Chorus
Caffeine sugar and THC
Is all that the doctors are gonna find in me
When they do the autopsy
The micro-organism won’t get me
Chorus
God is good and God is great
God’s a big invertebrate
God made the river change its route
But he won’t pull the micro-organism out
Chorus
The cowslips bloom and the bluebells too
Here’s advice I’ll give to you
Rattle your sword before you strike
And never kiss anyone you like
Chorus
(I can’t find a safe online recording or video, alas, or I’d link)

Oddly on-topic for this thread, I just found this short story, in Eric Flint’s 1632 series. 7th chapter in the second Grantiville Gazette.
God’s Gifts

I find that what I watch or listen to affects my mood and thinking to some degree. So I don’t watch TV with ads (my household rents TV series on DVD when we want to see them) and I don’t listen to talk radio.
It’s frustrating…this is probably true for many people, but there doesn’t seem to be any constructive way to bring it to their attention. If you say to someone, “The media you’re watching and listening to are damaging your mood and mindset” it tends to provoke a violently negative reaction, as if you had tried to censor their viewing. American society has this attitude that more information is always more freedom, it’s a positive good. But speaking for myself, some “information” is poison. If I watch too many horrid ads about insecurity (are my teeth white, is my breath fresh, do I smell, do I have dandruff, am I overweight?) in a row, it feeds my insecurities. It doesn’t give me anything useful; it’s not even mental junk food, it’s mental garbage and I shouldn’t be consuming it.
I struggle with this with my adopted son. When a kid has been raised with a given set of privileges it is very hard to take them away. But too many hours of shoot-em-up video games in a row make a very noticible difference in his behavior. I struggle as a parent with how to react to this discovery. I wish it wasn’t true, he denies stridently that it’s true, but alas, it is.
We can’t ethically censor talk radio, but damn, that stuff is poison. How to deal with this?

Somewhat related to the ‘knowing’ discussion – is it possible to be an agnostic theist? In the sense that I don’t think there’s really evidence either way in G-d’s existence, and I don’t *know* that G-d exists, but I choose to believe that G-d does?

This sounds to me like a definition of “fideism”.

My sympathies to all who are terrified by sleep. I can’t even imagine being existentially afraid of something I do pretty literally every day. I hope you manage to work it out somehow.
Well, I don’t want to make my issues sound worse than they are. Most nights I fall asleep just fine through some combination of sheer tiredness and distracting my brain with anything from thinking about the book I’m currently reading to playing Scrabble or Bookworm on my phone until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. And there are times when I’m quite desperate to sleep, like when I have to be up early the next morning and my husband has a bad cold and therefore Won’t. Stop. Snoring. And today I’m home from work with a cold and was more than happy to sleep most of the morning away, knowing that part of the reason I’d succumbed to the current office crud is that I’ve been crazy busy and under-rested of late. It’s just that if I’m going to have existential angst, it’s probably going to come while I’m lying awake in the dark, knowing I should be asleep but on some primitive level uncomfortable with embracing even temporary oblivion.

But too many hours of shoot-em-up video games in a row make a very noticible difference in his behavior. I struggle as a parent with how to react to this discovery. I wish it wasn’t true, he denies stridently that it’s true, but alas, it is.

Heh, sounds like my brothers and I with my parents. Except I never played shoot-em-ups. I have no idea how to solve that one, I’ll certainly not suggest you make him cut down on gaming out of solidarity with my younger self. And memory of how PISSED OFF that made me.
Maybe give him positive incentives to do something else ? Maybe find some activities you can do together, or that he can do with someone else and have that cut into his gaming time ?
There might also be environmental issues : is the room he’s playing in well-lighted, is he having breaks, is everything suitably ergonomic ?
Personally I’ve been trying to set myself no-computer days (or better : no-computer evenings and no-computer mornings that alternate so that I still get on the computer every day, just not all the time). I’ve been failing MISERABLY but maybe your parental authority works better than my self-control.

Ursula, that was amazing and wonderful – thank you for sharing!

@Mary Kaye-
I have not watched television with ads in 5 years. 100% of the television that I watch comes from Netflix. On a very, very rare occasion I will watch a football game on local TV but other than that its Netflix. I found that advertising did prey on my insecurites too, but in my case it was insecurities about sex, since so much of advertising is sexualized in one way or another. I think I too am better off without advertising. However my main problem with it was that it was taking up huge chunks of time that I could use on something else. If I spend 3 hours watching TV on the weekend with ads, 45 minutes of that time was spent watching commercials.
…and besides talk radio there is a lot of media out there that I think is poison. I recently pissed off some people on facebook when I railed against a couple of reality TV shows they enjoyed. Sorry, but there is nothing good coming out of Wife Swap or the Bachelor. I’m pretty sure of that.
I do find that occasionally there are now cultural memes that I am completely ignorant of. Some quote from a TV show I don’t watch or some bit of advertising that I have never seen. Sometimes there are well known celebrities that I haven’t heard of or vaguely recall hearing the name at one point, but have no idea who they are.

ako – Was the book by Nancy Kress by any chance? Beggars in Spain is the first of a trilogy that features The Sleepless – they aren’t villains, per se, but they do try to take over the world. Or so I gather – my wife has read them and, for some reason, I have not.
Will – a thought – what if we are in a Hell-type afterlife, and part of our punishment is watching other people get treated like dirt, and our redemption comes as an expression of how well we worked to prevent that?
Jason – When Sound and Spirit went off the air last year, WGBH put the archives online. They aren’t quite podcasts, but you could easily download them and put them on an MP3 player. http://www.wgbh.org/programs/programdetail.cfm?programid=226

We discontinued our cable TV in early May, and I’ve been amazed at how much I don’t miss TV. Sometimes when we’re running errands, we’ll see a TV on, and I’m always annoyed, and I don’t watch it.
I’m certainly less well-informed than I used to be about pop culture, but like MaryKaye said, I don’t miss the constant exhortations to be something I’m not, or to pay money to change something I think is fine.

Mike Timonin, I thought the same thing about ako’s comment. I *did* read the Nancy Kress books, a gazillion years ago, and they were purged from my personal library long ago.
Even when I read the books, I felt really torn about the premise (children bioengineered so they didn’t need sleep who then kind of took over the world, since they had so many more hours to do things), because I really do enjoy sleeping. And there have been long stretches of time where my dreams were the best part of my day. Iirc, the Sleepless were assassinated, as ordinary humans *really* didn’t like them.
I found Nancy Kress’s books quite thought-provoking 15 years ago. I wonder if they hold up?

What’s interesting is that the US government has effectively demonstrated the usability of controls over capital flows in the process of trying to bully one person into giving up.
It’s a shame that Barack Obama, so lionized by the international community early in his Presidency, has fallen to the same thuggery and gangsterism that characterized the Shrub Administration.
Shame, Obama, shame!

It’s a shame that Barack Obama, so lionized by the international community early in his Presidency, has fallen to the same thuggery and gangsterism that characterized the Shrub Administration.
In all fairness, if the international community gives you a Nobel peace prize while your country is fighting two wars and your drones are bombing the shit out of civilians, the perception problem may not be on your end.
Not that I don’t want to shove some rabid ferrets down his pants right about now, because the response to the leaks is way more embarrassing to the U.S. than any of the leaked documents, and he’s compounding it with this tax break bullshit. Fuck you, Democrats.
Now that he’s out of power in Britain, can we have Peter Mandelson? At least he’s funny when he sells his country out to the richest 1%.

{{{Laima}}}
OT- The Iliad; wow, it’s long! (I know, that’s why they call it an epic.)

“Will – a thought – what if we are in a Hell-type afterlife, and part of our punishment is watching other people get treated like dirt, and our redemption comes as an expression of how well we worked to prevent that?”
Wait…us watching other people in suffering is punishment for us?
Usually in that situation the one suffering is considered to be being punished…

I struggle with this with my adopted son. When a kid has been raised with a given set of privileges it is very hard to take them away. But too many hours of shoot-em-up video games in a row make a very noticible difference in his behavior. I struggle as a parent with how to react to this discovery. I wish it wasn’t true, he denies stridently that it’s true, but alas, it is.
We can’t ethically censor talk radio, but damn, that stuff is poison. How to deal with this?

Interesting. I’ve always been skeptical of the thesis that videogames cause behaviour changes. Mostly because I’ve had experience playing everything violent, from Mortal Kombat to Hitman, and that didn’t make me any more of a broken individual than what I already was. Though I don’t usually play first person shooters. So maybe the first-person aspect makes the experience more visceral, and therefore, affects the person more?
Then again, maybe the problem isn’t the kind of game, but that he’s spending too much time on it? All-night-long gaming binges are fun once in a while, but they can wreck with a person if they become a habit. Believe me, I know.

What’s interesting is that the US government has effectively demonstrated the usability of controls over capital flows in the process of trying to bully one person into giving up.
It’s a shame that Barack Obama, so lionized by the international community early in his Presidency, has fallen to the same thuggery and gangsterism that characterized the Shrub Administration.

Well, luckily wikileaks isn’t letting something as little as being hunted down by the greatest superpower on Earth stop them releasing those cables. But yeah, Obama is showing himself more of a bastard every day. Not closing down Guantanamo, not getting out of Afghanistan, hunting down wikileaks, letting the tax breaks for the rich continue…though I must say I lost my hope in him long ago during the Honduran farce (I swear, for a second there I almost believed that we had entered a bright new age when American presidents don’t support right-wing coups in Latin America. Then he proved me wrong.).

I know sometimes I overshare, like today. But I’m trying to minimize saying much about my health issues on my blog, since it’s under my real name. (In case I ever get another job.)
I started learning that I had a writing voice on Slacktivist. Coming here gives me hope for the present, and often things I read here give me food for thought that helps me get thru the day. So thanks to everybody here.

@Laima: hugs, if acceptable.
@MaryKaye: I don’t know about gaming from personal experience. But I can say that my daughter is considerably older than your son, is working two jobs, one of which involves some overnight shifts, and seems to be spending a lot of time on the computer when she’s at home and more or less awake.
And therein lies the problem. She’s having a lot of trouble with being able to sleep when her schedule permits it, and I’m convinced that all that gaming, texting and messaging can’t be helping. But I haven’t yet been able to convince her to turn off the laptop and do something soothing at bedtime. Instead, she’s on the web until her eyes close from sheer exhaustion, she doesn’t sleep well, and then she has trouble getting up in the morning. I can only hope that eventually she’ll learn from experience, but that’s something she’s not particularly quick at.
Probably not what you wanted to hear, huh? But you might want to consider regulating the time spent if not the content while you still have the chance.

hugs are gratefully accepted, amaryllis.
i have to watch my time at the pc carefully because i tend to default into doing what your daughter does. I fall into something like a trance, and don’t stop to eat, or get up and stretch, or do anything else, for hours and hours. For that reason I now have days where I never get on the computer. and I try to minimize the time I’m on. (today is a day I failed utterly.)

Since you’re accepting hugs, {{{Laima}}}

{{{{Laima}}}}

{{Laima}}
Incidentally, regarding…

i have to watch my time at the pc carefully because i tend to default into doing what your daughter does. I fall into something like a trance, and don’t stop to eat, or get up and stretch, or do anything else, for hours and hours.

You know, in my younger days, there was a summer where I hardly had to work thanks to some fortuitous circumstances, and I spent a lot of time just doing stuff online, and I swear, it was like that weird trancelike thing. I compared it to being under the influence of a drug, where I’d look at the clock and go CRAP HOW DID FOUR HOURS PASS JUST LIKE THAT.
I like to think I’m a bit better now, but it’s always been a bit of a struggle to remind myself to DO things besides just be on the ‘puter when I’m not working and stuff.

So maybe the first-person aspect makes the experience more visceral, and therefore, affects the person more?

I don’t know, but I think it can pump up the horror of a game that’s already pretty scary, when the maniacs and monsters can take swings and shots right in your face.

I prefer to have my news delivered in an audio talk format where people are discussing the issues and giving opinions.
BBC World? On the hour is a really funny send-up of serious news programs.
But too many hours of shoot-em-up video games in a row make a very noticible difference in his behavior. I struggle as a parent with how to react to this discovery.
If he’s not keen on any other sort of media for the moment, maybe you could just get him interested in a less violent sort of game? World of Goo, or Braid, or Monkey Island, or Journey (whenever it’s released), or even Sims or Railway Tycoon?

{{{Laima}}}
MaryKaye, if your son is somewhat interested in sports, there are some really good sports-related video games. EA has the Madden series for football, and the NCAA series for football and basketball (and probably other sports as well – these are the ones my kids have played.) They come out with a new version every year. If he is not a dyed-in-the-wool fan and you are introducing him to the games, you can find used ones from previous years for much cheaper. That would be the way to go if you’re not sure how he will like them.

Murgatroyd has some really good ideas too. There are all kinds of Tycoon games, like building your own zoo and amusement park. Sims are kind of fun, although you may not like the idea that your character can burn its house down.
Pius, one night I had nowhere to go the next day, and I started playing Morrowind. Next thing I know, I looked up and the sun had risen. Oh well… At least with Echo Bazaar, you only get 70 turns.

@Laima
*offers hugs*

I’ve heard from a number of people with Asperger’s, and some would say they suffer from it, and some would say they don’t. It seems to be like a lot of disabilities – some people really don’t like having it and want it to go away, and some people are fairly comfortable living with it and see it as part of who they are (and some people would like it to go but don’t see it as a big deal, and some people are ambivalent, and some people see it as difficult but an important part of them, etc.).

A lot of maladies are taken this way by their sufferers, but Asperger’s is a special case, because its effects are so varied. There are a ton of different possible symptoms of Asperger’s, but no one individual subject has all of them, and there are a thousand possible combinations. Many people never even know they have it, since the symptoms they display aren’t the ones people normally associate with Autism.
One person has the aversion to physical contact but not to eye contact, one person has the OCD but not the Tourette’s, some people have none of the above but still have the sensory issues and agoraphobia… there just aren’t that many syndromes that are quite as big a mixed bag.
So, it’s not like other disabilities, because not only do some people have better coping skills, but some of us are just blessed with a batch of symptoms that are easier to cope with, that cause fewer problems in everyday life.

My sympathies to all who are terrified by sleep. I can’t even imagine being existentially afraid of something I do pretty literally every day. I hope you manage to work it out somehow.
I figured out the daydream solution pretty young. It’s a win/win, really. I spend some time enjoying my own fantasies and I don’t have to worry about my fear of not waking up, since I’m not thinking about it. I suspect it is also why my dreams generally are good, and frequently like the kind of adventure story stuff I daydream.
So, it’s not as horrible as it sounded.

I don’t even grasp the idea of being terrified to sleep. I really don’t. It’s such a basic part of being a human that a world without sleep would be almost…too bizarre to imagine. :O

Xavier :

Interesting. I’ve always been skeptical of the thesis that videogames cause behaviour changes. Mostly because I’ve had experience playing everything violent, from Mortal Kombat to Hitman, and that didn’t make me any more of a broken individual than what I already was.

I don’t think the issue is that it makes you a broken individual, I think the issue it that it puts you in an irritable mood after you get off the computer. I certainly noticed that behaviour in myself but I never could tell if it was caused by the gaming or by my father saying “get off that game you’ll be in a bad mood afterwards”. (the latter certainly didn’t help)

Great blogging as always Fred. Thanks.
I really love the parable of the Samaritan and I also really love Isaac Asimov’s essay about it “Lost in Non-translation” which went into a lot of the contextual backdrop about it – & also Ruth’s idyll with Boaz that eventually led to the birth of King David and later Jesus.
Asimov pointed out there :

“The trouble is that the one word that is NOT translated in the Book of Ruth is the key word “Moabite,” and as long as it is not translated, the point is lost, it is lost in non-translation.
The word Moabite [from Ruth's tale - it also applies for the word Samaritan -ed.] really means “someone of a group that receives from us and deserves from us nothing but hatred and contempt.” How should this word be translated into a single word that means the same thing to, say, many modern Greeks? Why, “Turk.” And to many modern Turks? Why, “Greek.”
… We forget the point of the parable is entirely vitiated by the common phrase “good” Samaritan for that has cast a false light on who the Samaritans were. . . To the Jews [of Jesus’ time – ed.] the Samaritans were not good. They were hated, despised, contemptible heretics with whom no good Jew would have anything to do. Again, the whole point is lost through non-translation.
…The Parable of the Good Samaritan clearly teaches that there is nothing parochial in the concept “neighbor,” that you cannot confine your decency to your own group and your own kind. All mankind, right down to those those you most despise are your neighbours.”
-Pages 266-270 Isaac Asimov, “Lost in Non-translation” in ‘Magic’ anthology Harper-Collins, 1996. Italics original, [square brackets added.]

I love that essay and those paragraphs & I couldn’t agree more.
Do all paths lead to God? I don’t know either. I’m no expert & I won’t pretend to be. But I do kinda hope so.

Whoah. I should’ve read the comments for this thread. But, usual problem, .. so … many .. [bashful.] Sorry folks if I’ve repeated /interupted I just wanted to share that Asimov quote and source.

@Caravelle-
I don’t think the issue is that it makes you a broken individual, I think the issue it that it puts you in an irritable mood after you get off the computer. I certainly noticed that behaviour in myself but I never could tell if it was caused by the gaming or by my father saying “get off that game you’ll be in a bad mood afterwards”. (the latter certainly didn’t help)
Video games usually put me in a good mood afterwards, because it is a particularly engrossing medium and I get to experience a few hours of escape from reality. However my tastes tend towards games that aren’t particularly violent. Some sort of combat may be present but is generally not the main aspect of the gameplay and usually is not overly graphic.

Was it this thread where people were talking about inability to donate to Wikileaks? Twitter says it was an outage at Mastercard affecting all payment processors, not anything deliberate. I don’t know how to verify that, though.

@MercuryBlue: *cough* bullshit *cough*

@MErcuryBlue: Considering how many other financial institutions have been explicitly separating themselves from WikiLeaks, I’m… disinclined to believe Mastercard. I have a feeling that they’re backpedaling because their servers are apparently currently under DDoS attack by [a group of people who may or may not be, a subset or the whole of, or who are calling themselves same, of] Anonymous (the Internet’s favorite boogeymen.)

Re: Mastercard and Wikileaks:
Apparently Mastercard DID stop payment to Wikileaks.
BBC mentions it in passing here. Hmm.
More research required.

Was it this thread where people were talking about inability to donate to Wikileaks? Twitter says it was an outage at Mastercard affecting all payment processors, not anything deliberate. I don’t know how to verify that, though.

Dunno, it worked neither yesterday nor a few hours ago, how long did this outage last ?
An added wrinkle is that although the identical payment to my mother seemed to go without a hitch, when I looked today the money hadn’t been debited from my account. So maybe it’s just my bank being weird. They’re a good bank but it wouldn’t be the first time.
Note that I wasn’t using Mastercard as such. I was doing a bank transfer, from a checking account associated with a mastercard, yes, but I when I asked I think someone here confirmed that such transactions occur between banks, the credit card company isn’t involved.

Do all paths lead to God? I don’t know either. I’m no expert & I won’t pretend to be. But I do kinda hope so.
Posted by: Flying sardines
—————————-
Not quoting the whole thing here, but yes, agree with all.
But…
When I pointed this out to a RTC shipmate in the mid-90′s, he said that “When Jesus said what you do for the least among you, he was refering to members of THE TRUE CHURCH*, not the general population. Not that a member of THE TRUE CHURCH would ever be thrown in prison, or be poor, or even sick unless his faith was weak and wavering.” To him, the Samaritan were Christians while the Jews were something contemptable.
I met a lot of obnoxious people calling themselves “Christians”. It almost soured me on the whole brand.

That was me talking about banks and card processing.
I went and did some research, and it appears that MasterCard and Paypal, among other unnamed banks (at least in the articles I saw) did suspend payments to Wikileaks. They were then targeted by some major DDOS attacks, at least one of which caused an outage of the main MasterCard website, which is probably what that Twitter link refers to. MasterCard’s SecureCode service does appear to have gone down, but mainline card processing did not.
AFAICT, PayPal processing wasn’t impacted, and neither was MasterCard’s, but neither company will process payments to WikiLeaks.
You can find a big pile of links in my blog; didn’t want to put them here and deal with the Captcha.

Oh, re: affecting all payment processors:
I work for a payment processor. MasterCard did not have an outage affecting everyone yesterday; that kind of thing causes a big splash around here. Unless it was that SecureCode thing. But regular processing was up and running juuuuust fine.

“Transporters don’t kill you and it really is the same person who arrives on the other side because Science.”
(delurks)
I wrote a story once (in an unrelated scifi universe) where the transporters do in fact steal your soul and drop it off in purgatory. It was still experimental and expensive, so purgatory was six billionaires sitting around bitching about what happened.
It was an interesting piece, I thought, though it didn’t come together quite as well as I’d've liked.
(relurks–paperward!)

Erl :

I wrote a story once (in an unrelated scifi universe) where the transporters do in fact steal your soul and drop it off in purgatory.

Madeleine l’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet had her characters freaking out about cryogenics because what happens to the soul ? I don’t remember seeing this question asked anywhere else but I think it’s a really good point. Of course I derive the opposite conclusion her character does, but still a very good point.

It was still experimental and expensive, so purgatory was six billionaires sitting around bitching about what happened.

That sounds hilarious !

Madeleine l’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet had her characters freaking out about cryogenics because what happens to the soul ? I don’t remember seeing this question asked anywhere else but I think it’s a really good point. Of course I derive the opposite conclusion her character does, but still a very good point.

There’s an episode of ‘So Weird’ wherein a man is awakened from cryonic suspension, and has become strangely empty and disconnected, and eventually works out that his soul “thought his body was dead” and left. In the end, he vacuums up the soul of a kindly old man who is dying of old age.

@Caravelle: Was that *A Swiftly Tilting Planet* that cryogenics came up? I thought it was in one of the Austin books, in a conversation between Vicky and Zachary Gray? *Planet* was the book with Vespugia and time travel and Celts and..I really love that book.

I don’t think the issue is that it makes you a broken individual, I think the issue it that it puts you in an irritable mood after you get off the computer. I certainly noticed that behaviour in myself but I never could tell if it was caused by the gaming or by my father saying “get off that game you’ll be in a bad mood afterwards”. (the latter certainly didn’t help)

Hence the “All-night-long gaming binges are fun once in a while, but they can wreck with a person if they become a habit. Believe me, I know.” part of the comment. Gaming is fun, like reading a book. But, like reading a book, too much of it can seriously make your life difficult (protip: don’t start reading reading LOTR during final-exam season).

I wrote a story once (in an unrelated scifi universe) where the transporters do in fact steal your soul and drop it off in purgatory. It was still experimental and expensive, so purgatory was six billionaires sitting around bitching about what happened.

But then where does the soul inhabiting the recently-transported body come from? A new one is created every time someone gets transported? A new one with the same memories of the recently-deceased one?

@Caravelle: Was that *A Swiftly Tilting Planet* that cryogenics came up? I thought it was in one of the Austin books, in a conversation between Vicky and Zachary Gray? *Planet* was the book with Vespugia and time travel and Celts and..I really love that book.

Ah you’re right, the title sounded right so I didn’t think twice but it’s actually “Troubling a Star” or something (the one where Vicky goes to Antarctica).

Speaking of gaming, after Christmas I will probably have a few months worth of Wii games to complete, but I am thinking of getting Mass Effect for the PC.
I don’t normally like to play games on the PC, but the idea that I basically get to create the main character’s entire characterization and personality is irresistable to me. I think the PC version of the original is like 12 bucks on amazon and I need to double check to make sure I meet the system requirements, but is it worth it. I mainly like console games better just because I can play them in the living room on the couch.

They were then targeted by some major DDOS attacks, at least one of which caused an outage of the main MasterCard website
Commendable though this is, I can’t help but feel it would be more useful if they would find a way to funnel some money to Wikileaks instead.

@Jason: Mass Effect doesn’t really let you create a whole personality, it lets you play a role of “intergalactic James Bond”. You’re always going to be saving the world, kicking down doors, and flirting with attractive members of your party, but you have some flexibility as to how you talk about it.

Speaking of gaming, after Christmas I will probably have a few months worth of Wii games to complete, but I am thinking of getting Mass Effect for the PC.
I don’t normally like to play games on the PC, but the idea that I basically get to create the main character’s entire characterization and personality is irresistable to me. I think the PC version of the original is like 12 bucks on amazon and I need to double check to make sure I meet the system requirements, but is it worth it. I mainly like console games better just because I can play them in the living room on the couch.

Eh, Mass Effect is incredibly overhyped. It looks pretty, but the story is mostly nonsense, and you haven’t all that much control over your character. If you want a game where you can choose your PC’s characterization, try Planescape:Torment. Preferably with the newest unnoficial patches. Now that’s an RPG.

Mass Effect 1 is above-average, but not amazing.
2 is very, very good, though not my favourite RPG.

@Caravelle: Yup, *Troubling a Star* is the Antarctica one. God, I love L’Engle. I wish that she were still alive. Her memoirs are great as well. I really love *Two-Part Invention.* And *A House Like a Lotus* (which is about Meg’s daughter) is one of my comfort books.

I can hardly see what I have to offer a potential friend right now
Just cruising by – but Laima, if you can’t see what you have to offer, I’d suggest that you’re a decent, intelligent, honest, brave, appreciative, interesting and pleasant person, and based on what I know of you from Slacktivist I’d say you had a lot to offer. A lot.
Obviously it’s not up to me to tell you how to feel about yourself, and even if I tried it wouldn’t take, because self-esteem comes from the inside and we have to work our issues out for ourselves and in our own ways. But if you’re feeling valueless on the inside right now, please know that’s not at all how you look from the outside.

But then where does the soul inhabiting the recently-transported body come from? A new one is created every time someone gets transported? A new one with the same memories of the recently-deceased one?
Well . . . the story largely takes place in purgatory, so it’s not specified. Those who exit the transporter seem normal, more or less, though their passion is drained in some sense. I wanted them to lose something meaningful to the device, while still appearing more or less normal when they exited it–necessary for followup trips. So I wasn’t entirely clear on what that thing was.

Xavier: It depends on which theologian or techno-mystic you speak with. Souls may be infinitely divisible; you will always have ‘a whole soul’ even if you split it in two; you then get ‘two whole souls.’ Fractional souls get into strange and disturbing territory, but you may already be there if you believe that parents provide half a new soul to a child in some metaphysical way, if there is not Guf from which souls are distributed to newborns. Alternatively, transporter clones may get a new soul from said Guf.
I admit that the question of the soul — what it is, what it’s relation to the body is, what purpose it serves, WHY is it — is a troubling one, because I have little problem picturing memory and consciousness/cognition as electrochemical phenomena, making humans not much more than really smart animals; but I do believe in some sort of ‘continuance’ of the person beyond the decease and dissolution of the body. But darned if I can reconcile one with the other. Better philosophers than I have tried.

Way back, but Izzy – how on earth is paisley supposed to be demonic?

Mink, all I can say is: souls are confusing stuff.

Mass Effect 1 is above-average, but not amazing.
2 is very, very good, though not my favourite RPG.

True. Mass Effect isn’t a bad game. It’s mostly fun throughout its depressingly short play-time. But it isn’t “The best RPG evah!” that I often hear it referred as.

Mmm, Planescape: Torment. If I had the whole “selling my soul” option, more Black Isle games would be on the list.
Dragon Age is also pretty nice. And I hear Baldur’s Gate is good, though I can’t download it, which frustrates me to no end: my God, BioWare, I’m *trying* to be honest and give you people money for your goods and services, but I draw the line at making me get up and go to a store or wait for the game to arrive in the mail and then, like, *have* the CD around and have to store it ugh IT IS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GET WITH THE DAMN PROGRAM.
Kit: I’m not entiiiirely sure, but there was a site (demonbuster.org–do not go there without turning your sound off) run by some of the more, mmm, non-reality-based Christians out there which claimed that all problems were caused by demons*. (Diabetes? Ten-armed squid demons. I kid you not.) You could get these demons by coming in contact with “ungodly” things, like…paisley. (Because it’s…from India, I think? Maybe?) Also rainbows.
*And you could apparently solve said problems by putting the demons “in the Box” and then filling aforementioned box with the blood of Jesus. This page was a kind of nonfiction Eye of Argon back in my college days.

Have been reading back through the thread as far as page 5 (wow, it looks like I missed some drama!), but I’d like to tip my hat and share the thought I’m having about trolling…
…which is that this board is actually very hard to troll successfully.
The goal of a troll is basically to get a reaction out of people, but the underlying goal is usually to prove to someone or something how much smarter than you they are by getting you to waste your time.
The posts I’ve been reading in response to Kiyu’s little comments have been so articulate, informed, passionate, principled and/or well written that they are the exact opposite of wasted time. Kiyu may be a silly kid with time of his/her own to waste, but has actually acted like the provebial grit in the oyster and provoked a whole lot of good writing and philosophy. Rather than being a dominant force, s/he’s turned into a productive inspiration.
Which is to say that the people posting have put their time to good use no matter what Kiyu’s motivations were. Write posts that are worthwhile in themselves and you’re pretty much troll-proof.
Mazel tov, guys.

Hey, are you guys seeing News about the latest cable where American ambassadors talk about how they’re going to lobby the Russian Duma against a law that threatens Visa and Mastercard profits?
Here:

1.(C) SUMMARY: The latest version of the Russian draft law “On the National Payment System” contains several provisions that would disadvantage U.S. businesses. The draft law would set up a National Payment Card System (NPCS) including its own payment card that banks and payment card companies could join voluntarily. Most likely to be a consortium of state-owned banks, the NPCS operator would process the domestic payments for all members and collect processing fees estimated at $4 billion per year. The draft also forbids sending abroad any payment data for domestic transactions. Should international payment card companies such as Visa and MasterCard chose not to join the NPCS they would have to set up the infrastructure to do their Russian payment processing domestically. END SUMMARY.
(…)
4.(C) While joining the NPCS would be optional for both banks and international payment card companies, membership has its privileges. If Visa and MasterCard choose to join the NPCS, they would not have any role in domestic transaction processing, but the bank-issued NPCS cards could be “co-branded” with Visa or MasterCard. When the cardholder used his card abroad, the transaction theoretically would go through the normal Visa or MasterCard processing that takes place outside of Russia. While XXXX said such a deal is a possibility, it would require negotiations to specify this approach in the draft law.
(…)
5.(C) In the proposed draft of the law, if international payment card companies choose not to join the NPCS, they will have to set up on-shore processing centers. But neither Visa nor MasterCard representatives, which together have 85% of the Russian payment card market, are willing to say whether they would be willing to do so. MasterCard‘s Head in Russia, XXXX XXXX, said MasterCard would have to “build and assess the business model of setting up on-shore processing” before it could reach a decision. The draft law stipulates that international payment card companies will have one year to establish processing centers inside of Russia. (Note: Currently no international companies have processing centers in Russia.) A ban on sending abroad payment data for purely domestic transactions will become effective two years after the law enters into force.
(…)
8.(C) This draft law continues to disadvantage U.S. payment card market leaders Visa and MasterCard, whether they join the National Payment Card System or not. If they join, the NPCS operator will collect the fees, leaving them to collect processing fees only when card-holders travel abroad — a tiny section of the market. If they do not join but choose to compete with NPCS cards, they will have to set up payment processing centers in Russia, a very large investment in itself, and compete against a system likely backed by the largest Russian state banks. While the draft legislation has yet to be submitted to the Duma and can still be amended, post will continue to raise our concerns with senior GOR officials. We recommend that senior USG officials also take advantage of meetings with their Russian counterparts, including through the Bilateral Presidential Commission, to press the GOR to change the draft text to ensure U.S. payment companies are not adversely affected. END COMMENT.

Explains quite a lot, I think.

The more I find out about that tax cut deal, the less I like it!

how on earth is paisley supposed to be demonic?
Have you ever LOOKED at paisley? What are all those little mutated microbe paisles supposed to represent, anyhow? How do you know that they’re not slithering off your shirt, through your skin, and INTO YOUR SOUL?

Izzy: You could get these demons by coming in contact with “ungodly” things, like…paisley. (Because it’s…from India, I think? Maybe?)
Oh, it’s worse than that.

In the PAISLEY PRINT PATTERN, you have a connection with
CATHOLICS
THE COUNTRY OF INDIA (WITH ALL THEIR GODS)
GOAT HAIR (GOAT IS THE SYMBOL FOR THE DEVIL)
PRAYER RUGS
JESUITS
CULTS
SEERS
MAGICIANS
OCCULT

In case the connection to SEERS, MAGICIANS, and OCCULT is unclear: Paisley prints feature a shape that sort of resembles a comma. In music theory, there’s an interval called a Pythagorean comma, which is the difference between twelve perfect fifths and seven octaves and is a frequency ratio of about 1.0136, but the point is that it’s called the Pythagorean comma, and therefore commas are linked to Pythagoras, who was an esoteric Greek philosopher, and the capital of Greece is Athens, which is also a city in Georgia, whose state fruit is the peach, which is native to China, which is exactly what Osama bin Laden was eating off of while he was plotting to destroy the Twin Towers.
(I assume you meant demonbuster.com, compared to which demonbuster.org is a paragon of rationality.)

Baldur’s Gate, for download, entirely legally, and well worth the price:
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/baldurs_gate_the_original_saga
They have BG 2 as well, and Planescape:Torment, and Neverwinter Nights…