"You have a funny idea of reason. It would seem that you can 'reason' just about anything into being. Very specific. Why not have god wearing pink sneakers?"
Well, show me the argument for the god wearing pink sneakers, and we can compare notes... ---------------- All the silly arguments for god come from christians, and you haven't made this one. Yet. My point was, if you had, it wouldn't be any less silly than the ones that you DO make.
"Your reason is wrong, because it is not based on deductive logic. It is not based in the idea of the scientific method. You have introduced your desires and beliefs into it. Which invalidated it completely."
No, what 'invalidates' a line of reasoning is a logical fallacy (formal or informal), a false premise, or some other approach (e.g. showing that the conclusion logically entails a false proposition, or strong evidence that the conclusion is false, etc.). ------------------- I love it how you say "NO" as if you had any idea.
You have introduced your desires and beliefs into it, which CAUSES the following:
"logical fallacy (formal or informal), a false premise, or some other approach."
Because they're your desires and beliefs, you can't actually SEE how you've introduced them into the mix here. Nor can you tell that they're false. Most of your arguments are illogical because they assume a deity rather than postulating one. You do not argue from 'what is out there, what can it mean?' Instead you argue from 'God is out there, how do I prove it?' Talk about a FALSE PREMISE.
And besides, I said 'your reason is wrong' and not 'your reasoning is wrong.'
Your reason, your sense of reason, is wrong. It has been corrupted. Like a computer with a virus. Therefore you construct arguments that seem technically logical at each step, but are based in subtly false premises, and suffer from your unconscious bias toward the 'god answer.'
I think that you may have it exactly backwards. ----------------- -That is your psychosis. I have it right. You must deny it however. You have no choice. You would have one, but you've negated your ability to see it.
Here's Chesterton: Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. ---------------- I postulate that Chesterton himself was not sane.
I put forward all the recording artists that have crashed and burned, all the actors that have lost their sanity and destroyed themselves, all the authors that have killed themselves through substances or otherwise... Tell it to Amy Winehouse. Tell it to Michael Jackson. Tell it to Elvis. Insanity is born in the emotions, not the rational side, usually through a slanted or illogical/irrational perception of reality; sometimes though, through a very accurate, an uncommonly accurate, perception of reality, as seen through the emotions of a sensitive person. If you're really sensitive, and really smart and perceptive, reality itself is more than enough to fuck you up.
In fact, in order to be sane in our society, in order to be considered sane, one must have necessarily suppressed one's sensitivity to the pain of other beings somehow, usually in one's youth. Otherwise the pain of the world overwhelms a person. So in order to be sane, we must make ourselves insane! And then we can scoff at those 'weak' enough that they feel too much of the pain of the world, and lose their ability to cohere to society. In reality, they are our betters. They see what we refuse to. For that, we lock them up and study them as aberrations.
I guess Eric thinks cutting off one's own ear to give to a prostitute, is a sane and rational action. However, Einstein was a fucking nut, we all know that...
That's the beauty though of being a theology. You can just say whatever crap sounds good to you, and then goofballs will quote you on the internet as some sort of authority.
Chesterton sees it exactly backwards, and so Eric, channeling him, sees us as backwards. No surprises. I do find his certainty amusing. When he cites authority, he practically genuflects.
Hell, if recall, Chesterton was an art school dropout, which is not to say he wasn't intelligent, just that he was talking out of his ass concerning things like insanity. And presumably a lot more...
We cannot get away fro our emotions. Chess players do go mad at a higher rate than regular people. However one cannot say that it is their logical side that caused this. To me it seems much more likely that it is that they have forced themselves into a modality of extremely logical thought, and their emotions are stifled by it and must break free. Or perhaps they make themselves too logical to be sane in an insane world.
My objection to Chesterton is his denial of the huge proportion of artists/creative types of different stripes that lose their minds. He's trying to separate two things that cannot be separated, our emotional and rational sides, when it is our emotional side that makes the decision to use our rational side in the first place; they are inextricably linked, but the emotional side is the side in charge. Always. Even the most rational man in the world, is that way due to his emotional desire to be that way.
In western mystical thought, either extreme leads to insanity, either too much emotion, or too much logic. The former causes a person to be cowardly and ineffectual and impotent in the world, while the latter creates an inhuman monster with zero empathy. Eric, check out "Chesed and Geburah" Jewish mystical thought, relating to the very duality we're discussing here.
I guess what I was trying to say with the kaballah stuff there, is that insanity lies in both directions from the middle. If one is too logical, or too emotional, one moves away from what we call 'sanity.' The condition of sanity requires and implies 'balance.'
Yes Ryan, and it shows up in his theory of relativity... energy equals matter times the speed of an unladen swallow in centimeters per second squared...
Brian, if you're into Buddhism, you must take the hour or so ride North and visit the MFA in Boston, which has a very impressive Arts of Asia collection (one of the best outside of Asia, I've been told). Even the RISD museum in Providence (a delightful surprise to me) has some interesting Buddhist objects (including a nearly one thousand year old giant seated wooden Buddha which, if standing, would be sixteen feet tall!). The RISD museum is free on Sunday mornings from 10 AM to 1 AM, and the MFA has many free community days (the last one was on Columbus Day; I'm not sure when the next one is, since I have a membership, so I get in free whenever I want!).
Yes, thank you Joe Biden, for saying all the things that he needed to say. He didn't lie down. Obama did. I'm still pissed off over that, but I think Biden rescued him to some extent. I'm now hoping that Obama learns from this.... why am I not as confident as I should be here? Re-assure me, my droogies.....
My wife was laughing at me... early on Ryan mentioned Iraq having fissile materials, and I told her 'c'mon Biden, bring that up, puhleeeze!' referring to the fact that they don't have enough fissile materials and they don't have a delivery mechanism, I.E. a bomb... and like a minute later there was Biden saying the precious words 'fissile materials' and I knew it would be okay...
Brian, if you're into Buddhism, you must take the hour or so ride North and visit the MFA in Boston, which has a very impressive Arts of Asia collection (one of the best outside of Asia, I've been told). ----------- Why thank you Eric, and you're right, it is truly great. I've visited the MFA often. I like their Roman Mummies too... I also have a fascination with ancient Egypt. And their paintings of course. that's where I first acquired an appreciation for art. I was on an appraiser's workshop near Boston and one of my classmates was a Fine Arts Appraiser, and she offered to take whomever wanted to go on an informed tour of the museum... I learned more that day than most others in my life. She opened new vistas for me... I was an art philistine before that, and afterwards I actually went out and bought books on fine art and tried to educate myself as best as I could. It added to my quality of life considerably, I think.
I also have an inordinate fondness for the Pre-Raphaelites. I know, they're not every art critic's cup of tea, but I love the themes taken from mythology and poetry.
I like the Dutch Flower Painters too, more for their wonderfully accurate depictions of insects than anything else. What can I say, I'm a former bug nerd.
I don't know if I'm 'into' Buddhism. I do like many of their tenets, and I agree with most of what Gautama is credited with saying. I am of course most interested in their doctrine of 'Maya,' but that's just me. I would say that metaphysically the kaballah has had the most influence on my thought, although I see it now as what it is, a mere tool to expand the mind to encompass possibilities that are not apparent, especially effective with those who love terminology and such 'left-brained' things. I also take some things from various Magical documents, such as the writings of Paul Foster Case and Peter Carrol, and even a little from old Aliester Crowley, but not too much, because he was a crazy fuck... but mostly I borrow their mental imagery techniques, and more often lately I just make up my own. It gave me somewhere to start, though. I was experiencing events at the time that no other system seemed to address.... the coincidences and such...
The debate was more or less a tie on substance, but a Ryan win on style. He not only did what he had to do, i.e. show by his demeanor and by his responses that he was 'presidential' (and hence worthy of being "one heartbeat away from the presidency"), but he stood in stark contrast to Biden, who acted the fool throughout the whole debate, interrupting over eighty times, and smirking and chuckling while Ryan was speaking. This is only going to appeal to those who already liked him -- it's more likely to turn off those who are undecided (not that VP debate outcomes determine much, but every little bit counts in a close election). But the biggest problem in the coming weeks is going to be Biden's gaffes on Libya. This is a developing story, it has some serious legs, and it's nothing but bad news for Obama and Biden, who appear to have lied through their teeth about it for at least two weeks. As Krauthammer said:
"Look, we know that there was no demonstration. It was all a fiction. The question is when Susan Rice went out, did the White House know about what she was gonna say? Did the Secretary of State know? That I think is the ultimate question — who told her to say those fictions? And I think in the end, that’s what’s going to unravel this. The Watergate scandal was about who knew up high and when. And I’ll remind you that nobody died in Watergate."
"I've visited the MFA often."
When was the last time you went? It has expanded significantly since November of 2010 when the massive Art of the Americas wing was opened, and recently they opened the Linde wing for contemporary art. (Personally, I can't stand most of what passes for modern art. I try every time I go to give it a chance, but it all seems to me to be so point missing. I understand it, but I think that almost all of it is misguided. Basically, from what I understand, it started with Duchamp's attempt, via his ready mades, to displace what had been traditionally understood to be the center of art, viz. beauty, and to leave the point of the whole enterprise hopelessly vague and utterly personalized, to the point that a can of an artist's excrement counts as art as much as Michelangelo's Pieta does.)
Rev. Stoney Shaw,(on the Akin thing), "There's another guy that people turned against, Jesus Christ, but he prevailed."
So, there's Christianity at it's finest, misogynist and PROUD of it! Akin may be losing as far as the poles are concerned, but the 'good' Reverend, he's rooting for the anti-science assholes!
Ryan is a Catholic, he's an Objectivist while denouncing his own Objectivism, and, no doubt proud of THAT!
You can't hold a position based on your chosen philosophy, find out that that position is anathema to your sect, denounce said philosophy, then continue to hold that exact same position!
It's like someone being a proud thief, "Yea, fuckin' right, I steal from everyone, they'd do the same to me if they could!", then he finds out that his religion explicitly rejects stealing as a means of aquiring wealth, "Oh, um, didn't know that, well, I'm not a proud thief then!", but continues BEING a proud thief anyways.
And every Catholic, every Christian, who votes for Romney/Ryan is basically snuggling up in that Objectivist bed, right along with them.
These would no doubt be the same people who would declare that Hitler wasn't a real Christian based on how he acted, based on his philosophy, but they see nothing wrong with themselves.
"Putting aside Ryan's 'fuck the poor', 'fuck the old', and 'fuck the sick', 'bunch of whiney losers' attitude, he tells some great lies about how that isn't his attitude at all, pretends to have some great plan where everyone wins!"
"So vote for Romney/Ryan! Unless you're some kind of whiney loser, or one of those generous Christians we keep hearing about!"
"Not only. I think Bidens performance appeals to people who don't over value 'debate' as a format for getting to the heart of the matter."
But if you were truly undecided, you presumably wanted to give both sides a hearing, which is a bit difficult when one side interrupts the other over eighty times in the course of a ninety minute debate. Ryan spoke for forty minutes, which means that Biden interrupted him, on average, once every thirty seconds. Further, Biden's smirking and chuckling and mugging, and his used care salesmanship debate techniques, weren't exactly endearing. I don't think that any of this will go over well with most truly undecided folks, whatever they think about debates as such, but that remains to be seen.
"Putting aside Ryan's 'fuck the poor', 'fuck the old', and 'fuck the sick', 'bunch of whiney losers' attitude, he tells some great lies about how that isn't his attitude at all, pretends to have some great plan where everyone wins!"
Floyd, that's just plain stupid. The debate is about how best to provide for the poor, the old and the sick. As Ryan pointed out in the debate, Romney gives more of his personal money (in total and as a percentage) than Biden and Ryan combined, so please, let's not pretend that he has a "fuck the poor" attitude. Your political views are almost as uninformed and patently idiotic as your views on religion are. Honestly, look at the Right Wing analogy of the nonsense you're spewing:
Floyd: "Putting aside Ryan's 'fuck the poor', 'fuck the old', and 'fuck the sick', 'bunch of whiney losers' attitude, he tells some great lies about how that isn't his attitude at all, pretends to have some great plan where everyone wins!"
Right Wing Nut: "Obama and co. want to bankrupt the country so they can implement socialism across the board! They hate America and American values! They're commies! They don't care about the people, they only care about taking over the country by putting all the power into the hands of the federal government -- then they can control us forever!"
Congratulations, Floyd -- that's where you are politically right now as far as credibility and insight and common sense goes...
You have to love the dyed-in-the-wool 'free market' capitalists, who whine about their money and how the government is stealing their money to redistribute it among the poor, while their whole reason for existing seems to be to take money from everyone they can and stuff it into their bank accounts!
And 'free market', what a laugh, 'free' means 'my share' to them, and as soon as they have a share in a market they use government to make damned sure that as few as possible are allowed to give them any competition at all.
On a different topic, how can Romney and all his followers still be getting away with telling each other that the USA can be self-supporting when it comes to oil production/oil consumption?
This CEO, this businessman, this honest Mormon either knows nothing about the amount of oil that the USA can possibly produce, and/or, nothing about how the oil market is a Global market which will sell to the highest bidder.
Is it 'okay' to cheat people who have no clue, to just straight out lie to people, simply because they have no clue? Is it okay to lie to people so that they'll vote against their own interests, simply because you can?
S.E.Cupp really pisses me off when she declares stuff like, "We need to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters because there might be voter fraud somewhere." Doesn't she, and everyone with that position lose all credibility at that point? For the life of me I cannot see why not!
Any time she opens her smirky face and asks, rhetorically, "You know what I think?", the rest of the 'Cycle' co-hosts should chorus, "Of course we know what you think, you bigotted CUNT, of course we do!"
Guess it must be, but, hey, it's my 'theory' that this assholiness if fine because the USA is a 'Christian Nation'.
Think about it, Peter Popoff:- Holy man, or Assholy man?, Benny Hinn, Holy man, or Assholy man?
"We need to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters because there might be voter fraud somewhere."
This is amazing -- requiring an ID to vote? How dare we! LOL I'd LOVE to see a study of the voting habits of dead folks -- how much do you want to bet that dead Democrats outvote dead Republicans at least 5 to 1?
ERIC! Are YOU on that bandwagon too? So you're not just a republican, you're a lying scumbag republican piece of shit, trying to justify voter suppression? VOTER SUPPRESSION, REALLY? I honestly thought better of you. I really did. Thought you were smart enough to not be a piece of republican refuse. Figured you'd be above that. I've taken your lying shit for years now, and kept myself from totally losing it at you, but now as far as I'm concerned, you can just fucking drop dead. I can't believe I ever wasted time talking to you. I can't believe that I ever thought that you were intelligent. What a mistake. I am incredibly disappointed in you; I thought you were at least fucking HUMAN. I feel soiled by knowing you.
I'm done with you, you self-important evil lying little prick. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner you leave this plane of existence, the better off the world will be. In other words, DROP DEAD.
How in the world is requiring an ID when you vote voter suppression? Could someone please explain this to me? I have a friend in prison -- if I visit him, I need to bring an ID. If I use a credit card, I need and ID. If I want to drive, I need an ID. In all these and sundry more mundane situations, I need an ID, but I don't need one to vote? I have to show an ID when I donate blood, but not to vote? We've all heard about voter fraud; how is this minimal requirement, which will cut down substantially on voter fraud, suppressing the vote? You drank the kool-aid, my friend.
Floyd, Ryan, others... you still want this asshole here? I'm trying to hold myself back right now, and it isn't easy. I know you get something out of talking to him... but I'm reaching my limit.
"Floyd, Ryan, others... you still want this asshole here? I'm trying to hold myself back right now, and it isn't easy. I know you get something out of talking to him... but I'm reaching my limit."
Yep, the typical tolerant liberal! Don't worry, Brian, I'm through here myself. If you're too stupid and closed minded to see that others can disagree with you without being evil, then you're not worth talking to.
It's been an interesting few years, folks, but all good, and not so good, things must come to an end.
But if you were truly undecided, you presumably wanted to give both sides a hearing
Sure, I can see either uninformed folks (not you) or folks that value "winning" over honest discussion (you) preferring a format where one would not have a chance to respond to obvious falsehoods if they happen to be spoken after you have said your piece.
Further, Biden's smirking and chuckling and mugging, and his used care salesmanship debate techniques
You (assuming all the anonymous comments are Eric, the douche from MA) don't put nearly as think of a veneer on your biases when you are speaking about politics as you do with theology. Not saying either veneer isn't transparent, just that you don't seem to try as hard...
LOL I'd LOVE to see a study of the voting habits of dead folks -- how much do you want to bet that dead Democrats outvote dead Republicans at least 5 to 1?
Yes, that would be an interesting study*, but in the absence of said study, you seem to be operating under the assumption that your above statement is correct. So see my comment above about "veneers"...
*note that a study in my home state found only Republican voter fraud.
That bitch S.E.Cupp actually defended the picture I.D. laws after someone told her that there were only 80 cases of voter fraud found in whatever State they were talking about at the time, and none of those were 'in person' votes. Her reply, "Eighty cases is eighty cases too much!"
Now how retarded do you have to be to ignore the fact that the tiny bit of voter fraud that there was, picture I.D. could have zero effect on, since they weren't 'in person' votes?
Then there was the Governor of Pennsylvania bragging that the I.D. law would ensure a victory for Romney and the assholey right-wing judge refusing to strike it down since he couldn't say that 100% of right-wing assholes actually thought like the good ol' Gov.
It's fucking pathetic, and it speaks to their honesty, you cannot trust anyone who is willing to manipulate the system itself in their favour by underhanded laws. Surely laws are meant to ensure that people AREN'T being underhanded, no?
Oh man I'm confused again. Am I missing something about being required to have an ID to vote? Who doesn't have an ID? Is it more to prevent illegal aliens from voting? Or to keep individuals from voting twice? Don't they already have contingents to prevent that?
Oh man I'm missing everything entirely, aren't I? All the points.
Yea, I wasn't suggesting that you 'banish' Eric from this blog at all. I was pointing out to him that he's not the only one who can 'dismiss' someone like that 'Goodbye Floyd!' crap.
This ridiculous idea that because we're 'tolerant liberals' we're constrained to put up with bigotry and intolerance itself was beneath small 'b' brian when he tried it, and it displays a complete lack of respect for Eric's own portrayal of himself as the wise, philosophical mentor, frustrated at our stubborn refusal to understand.
Apparently Eric's politics is that it's just a game, just a perspective thing, but what Eric doesn't realise is that this reflects on everything he says about anything, including his philosphy about his god, that too being just a game, just a perspective.
We must suppose that being Christian means playing a good game that you feel there is a final arbitrator of your words and actions, while it should be obvious to anyone, especially yourself, that you're not serious about any of it.
I figured that he's religious so I gave him a pass pretty much on the constant lying because hey, these people can't tell that they're lying because they don't see real reality and deny everything to themselves. However the voter fraud thing is not in that category; it's craven, scurrilous, un-American lying that disenfranchises democrats, as in the poor, the elderly, and the young voters, and it does it under the pretense of solving a problem that *does not exist.* To lie about that sort of thing leaves no doubt as to the character of the person, and no amount of religious faith excuses the sheer evil of it. I can take him trying to lie god into being, but not lying to block voters getting to the polls. That's just a total scumbag, and frankly I don't even want to know the person. I am fine if he wants to still post, but I'm done engaging with him personally. I'll be fine to talk *about* him and his comments, but no longer *to* or *with* him. It degrades me to converse with him, makes me feel soiled now. I don't need that feeling in my life. I've got enough to keep me occupied.
It's an extremely weak and self-centred 'argument' to say that since you need picture I.D. for lots of things then why shouldn't everyone need picture I.D. to vote.
You really have to be imagining that everyone is in an almost identical postion to yourself, that you're a 'typical person' when it comes to this kind of thing.
It reminds me of Bush's reply to a woman who was complaining that she needed to hold down three jobs to make ends meet, "Isn't America GREAT!" He obviously was oblivious to her plight, and likely imagined she was bragging that hard work was getting her mightily ahead, and not complaining that hard work was allowing her to barely keep her head above water.
There must be some completely brainless donks out there who pass homeless people by thinking, "Why don't they just use their plastic to get some new clothes, an apartment, maybe a haircut and a sauna, and go apply for some jobs? What could be simpler?"
Well part of the issue was that in some states, 2 pieces of photo ID were required. Right now I only have 2 pieces of photo ID - my drivers license and my passport. That tended to be unfair to voters with lower incomes - which was the intent all along.
If you're too stupid and closed minded to see that others can disagree with you without being evil, --------------- Someone can. You aren't. You're literally trying to make up a story (or rather to help lie it into being) that can likely tip the balance of the election by disenfranchising voters too poor, too elderly, or too young to be voting democratic. That is CHEATING at our election process, a destruction of fairness and Democracy. You people should be going to jail for this, and if not for the level of ignorance in this country you would be. I'm not a schmuck! And you're not feeble minded. You know what you're doing. I know what you're doing. Stop fucking around with the very concepts of fairness and decency. I had some level of respect for you... no longer! I said that I wouldn't engage you anymore, but this I had to say to you: You sir, are a piece of shit. Get over yourself, you ridiculously Proud, lame tool.
My mother just died, my son is autistic, and I have had it 'up to here' with lying fuckwads that want to play power games with reality and don't give a fuck who they hurt. I'm sick of their PRIDE that allows them to shit on people and think they should be thanked for it. If Eric never comes back, somehow I just can't find it in me to give a shit. Sorry to all those that enjoy conversing with him... I guess I'm just not as generous anymore. I've reached my limit.
I just softened up my last Eric comment... I'm so angry that I don't even sound like me... I'm really fuming right now.... I'm not an asshole, but I feel like being one to him right now. I've deleted like three of my comments right after posting them, because they were too profanity laced even for me.
I am so sad to hear this, it must have been harsh to hear that diagnosis. ---------- Me too my friend, and it was. We already kinda knew of course... we're not the self-deluding types. He's absolutely beautiful, three and a half almost, and can't even talk yet. It's fucking sad.
Eric's crew would take away any state support for kids like him and go congratulate themselves for it at the club or whatever. Fuck them. Their pretend-morality makes me sick.
This is weird, now I'm answering your comment, Brian, apparently before you posted it up. ----------- Yeah, I told you, I was editing it... by deleting it, then re-posting the softer version. Confusing, I'm sure.
"But I certainly hope that we can agree that we have much better reasons for concluding that there is a god than we do for thinking that magic swords or dragons exist." -------------------
I generally don't engage in these religious proof conversations because I don't personally find them interesting, and I see little point anymore in arguing about other people's religious perceptions.
One thing I will comment on is that I often see here examples of the mistaken assumption that 'reasons for a belief in gods', is equivalent to the question of the 'existence of gods'.
It’s not the same at all. But I've become convinced that believers may not be able to get that distinction.
If they manage to pass a 'personhood' law, any illegal alien woman can simply claim she's pregnant and she's carrying a U.S.Citizen in her belly!
Oops!
Or are the Reps. willing to throw U.S. Citizens out of America, simply because they don't have a voice, the exact same kind of reasoning that they're using to push for such a law!
They would have to actually BE pregnant because they would definitely check.... so we'll soon have millions of really, really horny immigrant women on a desperate quest for viable semen.
Why couldn't that have happened when I was in college? Damn!
You're literally trying to make up a story (or rather to help lie it into being) that can likely tip the balance of the election by disenfranchising voters too poor, too elderly, or too young to be voting democratic. ----------- I meant to say, "who are voting democratic..." Not 'too poor etc *to be voting* democratic..."
"I ask the Christian world to-day, was it right for the heathen to sell their children? Was it right for God not only to uphold, but to command the infamous traffic in human flesh? Could the most revengeful fiend, the most malicious vagrant in the gloom of hell, sink to a lower moral depth than this?" - Bob Ingersoll
This is the great Robert Ingersoll on the Biblical passages where God decrees slaves are to be bought from the Heathens about.
I forgot to say, I'm rooting for you guys. ------------ Thanks, Ian. I appreciate that.
He doesn't talk, but he's amazing in other areas... he gets computers intuitively, his favorite toy is an I-Pod with tons of apps on it, and he can do all the games for kids, seems to recognize all his letters and numbers, can answer the games (or me for that matter) when they ask him to select a letter, or if he's typing I can tell him which letters to push and he does it... He tidies up, too! Last week he cleaned the whole living room, put all his (many) toys into his two toy boxes, and blew our minds. He categorizes the cans in the kitchen cupboard, puts like with like... But he also will drop into a tantrum at a moments notice, spinning around on the floor like a top and screaming when he isn't getting what he wants right away.... Needs constant supervision or he'll hurt himself.
He is lucky, because I can well imagine some disciplinarian type parent not "taking his shit" and just beating on him... and when I do that I get a little sick at the idea that anybody can be that heartless. We worry about school, since he can't tell us if someone abuses him. A lot of headaches, but of course he's more than worth it.
I don't have a Facebook acct. Never wanted one. Sorry. Or I'd have 'friended' you long ago.
My wife works for the state and knows how to navigate social services like few others. Part of her job is to tell parents with kids like ours where to get help. So there's that. I feel confident that we're doing most everything we can.
I am sorry about Conor's autism. I have friends who have autistic kids-- throughout it's broad spectrum. I hope you have the support of good friends/families... I got a smile @ hearing how your precious little boy works the IPAD... There's nothing quite like the bond of love between a child and his/her parent... Wishing you all the best...
And, I'm so glad to know Mary's got the 'in' on his behalf.
My little boy Mozie has watched me put Prettyboy Floyd 'to bed' for a while now, every night, I'll tell the bird, "It's beddy time!", and he may or may not like the idea depending on his mood.
I might get frustrated with the bird if he pretends to want to go to sleep but sneaks out of his cage in the dark.
So, last night, as usual, at 'beddy time', I tell the bird, pull the blanket over his cage.
This is the only 'lesson' the dog has 'recieved' on this, so I'm guessing you know what's coming.
The dog was chillaxing out in the, not sure what to call it, small 'hall'(?), an area that's 'there' where the two bedroom doors and the bathroom door, a closet door and the laundry niche doors are all around. The 'door' room.
Anyways, I say g'night to Emma, close her door and since we were joking about 'Beddy time', i clap my hands and say to the dog, 'Beddy time!".
I was amazed when Mozie picked himself up off the 'door room' floor and mosied on into his crate!
Emma sleeps in her room, the bird sleeps in his cage, so Mozie sussed it out that he should sleep in the crate, which has 'always' been 'there' with no pressure to him to go in or not, ever.
MI, one of the main reasons that I have never posted that my son was autistic, was to not get any false pity from the likes of you. I do not accept your 'kind' words, as I am aware of the fact that you are both evil and insane. In other words, please don't bother. You've adequately proven to us all, what you really are. No point in denying it now and pretending to be halfway decent. If you had wanted to be liked, you would not have been so very vile in the past. So live with the consequences of your actions. If Jerry Sandusky emailed me from prison and told me that he feels bad about my little boy, I would be just about as much creeped out as when you do it. Get it? Good.
Yes Pboy, I love all animals, but dogs are in a class by their own. Your little Mozie sounds wonderful. Have you had many dogs in your life? Some of the things that you relate about him, seem to be a pleasant surprise to you, so I was wondering if you'd had dogs before... My Walter knows if we call for take out, and as we hang up the phone he goes to the door and parks himself there to wait for the delivery person, 'wuffing' and barking every now and then. If food is involved, that dog can practically solve a quadratic.
One of the reasons that Emma decided to get a little dog is her stories of a doggie she loved and my stories of my little chiuaua cross Moosie, she was a doll. But I have bad memories of how I lost her. I had to leave her with my wife since we were splitting up, and my dad was a fucktard. 'Nuff said about that.
Mozie constantly surprises me, as does Prettyboy Floyd, with how much thinking is going on in their little heads.
Emma is of the opinion that I should be grooming the dog, we should leave it outside on a rope, I should be teaching it tricks, just random stream-of-consciousness stuff really, while I'm more interested in how they do their best to interact with us.
I'm still amazed at how much ol' Mozie loves his toys. Anything can be his new toy and he WILL come to me with it to make a judgement on it.
"Mama's slipper?"
"Sorry buddy, you can't have that!"
"How about this rock is secreted into the house and I'm now proceeding to create Bedlam with?"
"Sorry little guy, we cannot have that!"
"Okay fine, how about I hump this teddybear that looks a lot like me?"
"Well, if you can put up with me rolling my eyes at you!"
I wonder how much effort we put into challenging the worldview that we grew up with? I mean I know that there are some people who 'buck the trend', there's always going to be that, even down to something as basic as sexuality.
How do we reconcile the fact that guys are guys and girls are girls with a kid who insists that he/she is not of the gender that his/her body is?
I don't think that those who 'go along with the prevailing worldview' are 'stupid' or 'lazythinkers' or anything like that, it just seems to me that that part of their brain, their 'wiring' is 'set' one way, while guys like us, well clergy would say that we're perhaps not 'fully developed'.
Yes, I'm comparing atheistic thinkers with gays here, but of course this kind of thing would involve different parts of the brain and there'd be some that'd be gay but 'go with the prevailing morals/values' when it comes to religion, and of course, complete anathema(likely a burning offence in days of old) would be a gay who is also atheistic.
This idea came to me when I typed out the 'logical' steps involved, when you come to the conclusion that there must be a moral law-giver, starting from the premise that we all feel guilty of something.
Seems to me that that is totally dependent on the time and place, the prevailing worldview of your society.
Example. If we were brought up Viking in 1000 C.E., we may feel guilty if we didn't fight well enough, if we could have shown the appropriate ruthlessness but failed to show lack of empathy!
I mean, I can actually see our Eric's POV, it's just that I disagree. He absolutely HAS TO see my POV as a 'failure', my lack of understanding, my lack of education, that kind of thing.
I pointed out how the Gospels are obviously religious propaganda, trying to combine the notion that it is a historical account with the idea that it is a fullfilment of O.T. prophecy!
I used to think that some enterprising Jews had taken it upon themselves to see that the Jewish tradition wasn't completely wiped out by inventing Christianity, a mix of supposed O.T. prophecy and a new 3 in 1 God from the Greek and Roman traditions.
Now I'm more inclined toward the other way around. Religious of the Greek/Roman tradition, being much impressed with the 'base' of the O.T., noticing how it might be manipulated to conform and conjoin these two traditions, lending 'historicity' to platonism and like that, did what the Romans did, absorb and utilize!
How easy would it be for the freshly written Gospel to be tweaked this way or that to maybe try to shame Jews for not going with the program and finally to back-handedly blame Jews, to make the 'modern' Jew (circa 50 C.E.) poor uneducated, ignorant, superstitious fools, lacking understanding of their own Holy Books!?
I mean, "Come on!", how hard is it to understand that the O.T. version of God is an old-time tyrant, "You do what I say, a deal's a fuckin' DEAL, or I'll curse your damned ASS!
Now, what to do with that? It's got a lot of good points:- control the population, venerate authority, basically 'worship authority', and so on, but there's a down side to that, people kind of get the feeling that they're being subjugated when they're being subjugated.
So a fresh new version is just the ticket! God(the total BASTARD)'s SON(one helluva guy!), and the BASTARD(?), why HE gets to demand the sacrifice of his own SON, demand that his lovey-dovey SON sacrifice HIMSELF in HIS(the DAD's) 'honour'.
This is fucking perfect! Talk about 'confusion technique'! Believers are constrained to believe that God is LOVE, KINDNESS, MERCY and the like, and at the exact same time HE is the domineering BITCH HE's ALWAYS BEEN!
"LOVE your enemy! Unless you're warring with them, then KILL THE FUCKERS!" Doesn't make 'sense', does it? Well it DOES, if you're a Christian! Right Eric?
If you think about it 'culturally' and or 'societally', the N.T. is saying, "Okay, fine, love it, authority and prophecy, brilliant, but a bit behind the times, a bit too 'local'. We can fix this, we have the technology!"
Christianity takes the authoritarianism of the O.T. disguises it as socialism, "Nono, we're all in the same boat, we look after each other, help our poor, give them 'equal status', but hey, the boss is the boss, that's always how it's been, and you'll do what the boss says and like it, as always! But don't forget, we're all in the same boat here!"
I've been harping on THAT for years now. The OT total asshole sadist god and his nice nice son, the loving hippy pussy. Cognitive dissonance that leads to psychosis. A recipe for mental illness.
So any kid who notices the difference between God/Jesus and God/Yahweh is told, "No, you don't understand you young fool, they're the same GUY! It's the same GOD! Please just believe that that's true until you have the education and understanding to see it!"
"Look, we're giving you a chance to redeem yourself here, just believe that God came down to Earth to sacrifice himself to himself for you ungrateful bastards!"
God the Father is a lot more like God the Murdering Molester with no conscience. Some father.
Y'Ever wonder how many kids were beaten to death by their dads because hey, God does it, and he's the Father, so why not me? Beating children is a very christian thing to do, as it turns out.
I KNOW, that's absolutely ridiculous in this century, this fucktard wants to be allowed to kill his kids? I don't 'get' that at all.
He must have been being sarcastic, I can't wrap my head around anything else. Not, 'give my kid up as a lost cause, he's fucked up and I can't handle him', no.. kill the kid! My brain hurts when I think of that.
A man running as a Republican for State Representative in Arkansas published a book in which he endorses the death penalty for rebellious children and much, much more.
In his book "God's Law: The Only Political Solution," published in April, former Arkansas Department of Human Services attorney Charles 'Charlie' R. Fuqua explains that he supports killing wayward kids because that's what a Bronze Age tribe did in his favorite religious text.
"The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline," he wrote, according to an excerpt published by The Arkansas Times. "Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellious children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21."
He goes on to write: "Even though this procedure would rarely be used, if it were the law of land, it would give parents authority. Children would know that their parents had authority and it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents."
Fuqua's run is being bankrolled by established Republicans in the state, including the party itself and the House Republican Leadership PAC.
it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents." ------------ These fuckers can't earn real respect so this is what they mistake for it, per their religion. Terror.
A person like that, we as a society should find a way of institutionalizing. We're failing him. And us.
The religion thing is really getting a bit ridiculous. I guess they can tell that it's dying out slowly, and this is their desperation at facing the extinction they so richly deserve.
If you can think of killing your own kid, you do not love him or her. You have had your ability to love removed.
Is it wrong of me to HATE religion? I don't wish to be a hateful man, but how can one find the ability to not hate hatred itself? This puzzles me. I am not capable of not hating refined hatred.
No. It's asinine. Eric would criticize this guy for being an "ignorant literalist", but it is supposedly, literally what (an unchanging) god told a bunch of people to do at one point in history, so there is that...
I'm not at all sure which part of the 10 Commandments we're supposed to take figuratively. These mental midgets spend their 'hard earned' charity money on granite slabs with those Commandments chiselled into it, to put in or around courts of law, just to spite the separation of church and state idea.
It's beyond me how Eric could not but agree with the guy that killing your kids if they're uppity should be allowed, as God commanded!
What do most Christians say about this, "Out of context!", or something equally silly? Oh yea, in them good-old-days, when disease was caused by demons, and no doubt uppitiness of the kids too, stoning was too good for them brats, but NOW, well, that'd be unkind!
Eric would likely say that Jesus fulfilled the old laws or whatever the official tripe is, and ignore the fact that so many christians, catholics included, believe that you're supposed to believe in all of the Bible. It's a pat answer to dismiss a horrific problem that causes a lot of bad things to happen, but he doesn't care about that side of things. If the catholic church gave a shit about the mass misunderstanding of holy scripture, we'd have seen a real concerted effort by the catholic church to educate people as to how Jesus fulfilled all those old disgusting laws and so forth, which would do some good in the world... He just cares about arguing with atheists and disenfranchising liberal voters and such. He's a hater, not a lover, regardless of his posings to the contrary.
Since there's nothing in the bible that delineates the "types" of laws in the old testament, "moral law" basically just becomes stuff we think, now at this time and place, that we should uphold, and "civil and ceremonial law" becomes stuff we think, now at this time and place, that we should not uphold.
But that's a contradiction, that there are objective moral laws yet moral law is 'basically stuff we think'.
Still, I'm sure there are lots of english majors out there who could craft a paragraph or two which could say both, that morals are indeed just what we think and still somehow they are in some way 'objective'.
Hey, who knows maybe they've crafted a new meaning of objectivity especially for metaphysics.
I was talking to a guy who is going to vote for Romney, gave him the usual stuff, the empirical truth about Rep. Prezes, as if that made any difference at all.
Romney would likely have to name that guy as someone who he'd personally screw over, to lose his vote, maybe not even then!
Well, I have never paid so much attention to U.S. politics since G.W.Bush got in and everyone knew he is an idiot and everyone knew he was going to be a disaster and Clinton's policies, far from being harsh left were actually solid conservative.
No surprise to me that Obama got in, and over the course of the last four years we've seen the giant hate machine that the Republican party has become, in action.
My conclusion is that the 'right', the only purpose of the 'right' is to grab power. We might all look at the Bush years and point out the disastrous results of his policies, the complete lack of thought or reason for his election, but we'd be missing the point.
Point is, every time a right-wing politican is elected, that's a whole term(2yrs or 4 yrs depending) that the 'socialist hordes' have been 'kept at bay'.
It's the only thing I can think of that would account for the right wing politicians insistence that every single thing that Obama did was 'wrong'.
Obama represents 'the socialist hordes' no matter what he tries to do. If he tries to smooth the gears of the economy, it turns out that the 'right' don't want that at all costs.
So don't lose heart if Romney wins, why he's keeping the USA safe from democracy, keeping the socialist hordes at bay!
Big debate tonight... better format and I think perhaps a better choice of moderator in Candy Crowley. I don't much like her, but I don't think that she'd take shit from either candidate. I don't think she'd let obvious prevarications or dissembling just stand there.
Obama "won"? In any case, when Romney threw out the old "Gas prices were $1.83 when Obama took office" he moved firmly from "Guy I generally disagreed with" to "Complete Turd".
Good debate. Crowley was very good as it turned out. Obama was a different person. What happened last time? Well, I was thinking... It was Obama's anniversary on that very day... I'm betting that Michelle drained all his energy before the debate and left him barely standing upright.
At any rate, Obama clearly won it, and Romney clearly lost it. Perhaps this will stem the bleeding.
Out with the old trophy, in with the new! What the hell eh, he's rich, his rules for others don't count for himself!
I think that Dinesh-baby is gay, because obviously gayness matters so much to him. As a writer, he can harp on or be silent on, any issue he likes, the same as any preacher can focus on or simply ignore any of the topics-du-jour.
Then again, it doesn't bother me one way or another if he is, just his hammering home of the anti-gay POV, that somehow 'we can't have that' as if he's convincing himself.
I think it had to do with Obama focusing on the idea that Romney's math is non-existent, that there's just no there, there.
But how to pin Romney down? He tried, but it's like trying to grab smoke. Obama squared off with 'Shadow-warrior' Romney just like an atheist arguing with some asshole who already believes they've won because they're standing in front of the philosophy maze taking pot-shots hoping to draw you in.
This time, Obama was way more prepared to explain that we're dealing with a man who has no real substance to his policies! I hope he can hammer that home even more in the final debate!
With a face like that he could be hung like a bull and not be able to score in a whorehouse. Ugh. Hate to be so superficial but he looks like he chews down trees and makes dams.
I thought the 'binders full of women' was a bit chauvinistic, but not terribly so... it was the weirdness of the statement that struck me, more than it's informational content. Binders full? Seemed an odd way to say it. And if they had so many available out there in the workplace, why did they need some women's organization to supply them with the 'binders full?' They couldn't hire women before they got the binders? But I don't think the gaffe resonates enough to be really damaging to him. Obama didn't take his shit. I'm a happy guy. That *will* resonate.
I can't see Dinesh having any skill at making a woman feel good in bed. However, what I can see him doing is convincing the woman through extensive philosophical dialogue coupled with numerous references to noted authorities that he's an amazing lover and that she just had the time of her life. As long as she is confused enough to not remember that he never took his pants off, he's golden.
It is my understanding that the Gospels are to be considered four versions of a historical 'eyewitness' report about the life and times of Jesus.
But if we write down all the prophecies concerning the Jewish Messiah in order.
For example:-
Joseph was a descendant of David, 'because it was prophesied!"
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, 'because it was prophesied!'
Joseph, Mary and Jesus fled to Egypt, 'because it was prophesied that he come out of Egypt'.
It's easy to see that the Gospels are NOT a historical 'eye-witness' report, they're a collection of supposed prophecy fulfillments.
If you can imagine some eye-witnesses 'reporting' that they saw Mary and Joseph taking off for Egypt and the four Gospel writers simply 'noting' that it was prophesied, you're an idiot!
Or perhaps you're thinking that the four Gospel writers knew that Jesus was the Messiah, knew he had to 'come out of Egypt', as per 'the prophecy', and just assumed that that must have been what happened?
Either way, these guys stuck a bunch of O.T. prophecies*, and patched together to make, "The Legend of Jesus the Christ", with some actual, yet dubious, historical context and geography!
*whether they made sense or not(the Isaiah supposed prophecy about a virgin giving birth, where Isaiah talks about a young woman giving birth to a child she names 'Emanuel'(not Jesus)).
I'm thinking that anyone who starts to believe the above is constrained to stab their eyes with forks or at least turn off their computer and pray that Satan hasn't ruined their day! LOL
See, that's what I always talk about, in a way. The gospels and such, are all we know about Jesus Christ. Other 'sources' are suspect, and brief. So in my opinion, it's highly unlikely that he ever really lived and did any of those things... sure, there was likely one or several itinerant rabbis wandering around Judea at the time that lent themselves to the legend, and one or more of them might have styled himself 'Jesus the Christ,' but that'd be about all I can see being realistic here. I get such a kick out of people, nonchristians even, that say that his historical existence is not disputable. I mean, get real. It's tissue-paper thin, and when you factor in HUMAN NATURE, it becomes a will-o-the-wisp. Highly unlikely to be true, and may not even be partly true.
Christians think secular people decided Josephus was a forgery to spite christians or something, never considering that it doesn't match his writing style and didn't even make much sense, since he was not a christian. Of course it was a forgery! Christians love to lie, the more the better! They've lied their entire religion into being, and their triptych deity there. Adults shouldn't even have to have these conversations. There is not an argument. There is only a deception. Without lying, they would have nothing at all.
Yes, "I tried to hire more women" is no answer to 'what about equal pay for women?' Romney is a gifted prevaricator. And the American public is a bunch of nitwit chumps.
You know what happened, right? In the first debate. The public was convinced that Romney couldn't do well, that he would fail. When he didn't, they said to themselves 'I guess he's okay after all' and so his numbers went up. Now even though Obama won the second, it doesn't dim the victory in the first, where Romney passed the 'I can walk and chew gum' bar that everyone thought he would fail. So I don't actually think that the second performance will get those numbers back.
Frankly, I'm worried. I think the side of LIE AND LIE AGAIN, might just win this thing. The people are too stupid. They are too easily confused. If I see one more HuffPo poster say 'ahh, both sides are the same, so I'm not even voting" I will scream. Shit I just did. AAAAAAARRRRGGGGGHHH!
I wish I had the money to move to Amsterdam or somewhere that isn't too idiotic. Maybe Sweden. Highest percentage of atheists in the world. Sounds fucking good to me right now.
To be frank, I was surprised that the 'binders' thing got so much attention after the debate. Romney said a lot worse just describing his policies. More evidence that the American public is a bunch of idiots.
Top story on Google News this morning was 'Romney's economic plan is better than Obama's' by a "Libertarian Economist." Full of libertarian uncaring bullshit.
There is no such thing as 'News' anymore, is there? As in, 'reporting.' Doesn't seem to exist. When it shows up, it gets jumped on so hard by the right, as if it were un-American. Like Candy Crowley. Unreal. The 'fourth estate' is in receivership.
"I wish I had the money to move to Amsterdam or somewhere that isn't too idiotic."
Hey, you could get hired in your capacity as a gemologist there, but could you avoid going insane on account of the Quarter-pounder being called a 'Royale'?
What if it drove you to drugs? I mean, there right fucking THERE!
I can just picture you down some alley in a strange land, muttering, "But they could call it a 'Quarter-pounder ANYWAYS! Who cares if they're fucking metric, who thinks of shit like that? Why am I talking to this drain-pipe? What? Oh yea? Well I got a Quarter-pounder for you buddy, right here! I won, I fucking WON, the drain-pipe cannot MOVE...(batshit crazy laughter)... fade to black!"
What I meant was.. maybe you could just slough off the nutsiness of the ideologues. Hey, this is the world we live in, what you gonna do, change the world? I've said it before and I'll say it again, the only solution is to liquidate all your assets and mail the money to me!
maybe you could just slough off the nutsiness of the ideologues. ------------------ You have no idea how much of it I do 'slough off.' There's still too much remaining. Currently it's the fact that we could well be on the cusp of a Romney presidency. Hard not to be depressed.
This blog tends to talk mostly about christianity and it's foibles. However, I was mostly interested in your microbio where you state 'all is Maya"
I agree. Do you see the world that way, or was it a non-serious comment?
My view has been evolving for years now... I speak of things (on this homepage to the right) like 'The Big Brain Speculations' which essentially put forward the concept that all of perceivable reality is in actuality, thought. Consciousness.
I'd love to have a conversation about that, if you're interested. My 'Big Brain' post there, is several years old, and I've 'refined' that viewpoint somewhat.
My good friends here that you see posting, are not on that page at all. They are mostly realists, and I can understand that. I am one too, but I see that there is perhaps more to it than what meets the eye. So I attempt to retain a 'scientific method' mindset as I explore these concepts. So if we discuss this here, which I am of course open to, I suspect that they will also comment, and play the 'devil's advocate' position to us very well indeed. I think they keep me from going 'too far out there' but perhaps that's a handicap; no way to tell.
So let me know if you're interested in talking about it. Few people are of like mind, so I rarely find anybody that is worth having an in-depth conversation with about it. Plus, if you care to also talk about what we were discussing on HuffPo, as in, christianity and religion and politics in general, well, that's pretty much all we do here when I don't have my 'Mystic Hat' on.
Incidentally Lance, this blog is the archeological remnant, the 'fossil' of the old Dinesh D'Souza blog on AOL about five years ago, and so many of my 'friends' here were regulars on that blog.
Although, perhaps it's more accurate to call it a 'caprolith.'
I was looking up 'whom', that whole thing about which 'case' we're talking about.
Check it out if you like, 'funny thing', say you're looking at some photos with your significant other(or not, just someone who is 'there'), following the grammer nazi rules, we ought to say, "Oh look, there's we in that photo!"
I believe they're letting that slide these day because the person you're talking to might think there's a Wii console somewhere in the picture, or something!
Way cool toy... more powerful than my regular computer... 320 GB HDD, Intel graphics e.q.... 1 GB DDR3 memory... not much bigger than a book, great keypad... Gateway LT4008u. Awesome.
I needed something more personal... we have two laptops but they get used by my wife a lot because she runs the Ebay business, and my kid gets on them and screws things up so we have to take a half hour to unscrew them. This toy is just mine.
I've been meaning to write an article on Salvia Divinorum.. have a friend that can get it published... he's been bugging me so I think I'll do it now that I can type anywhere.
There's a British show that stars a doctor who has Asberger 's Syndrome: it 's called, "Doc Martin"... You should watch it... It's a really good show from BBC; it plays on our public television station. It's really done well with light humor laced throughout......
MI, stop trying to be my friend! You forfeited that right long ago. What The Fuck Is Wrong With You? Go do some good in the world, hell, taking a dump in a garden would be more productive in that you're at least helping plants. You'd do more good for this world if your deity turned you into a pillar of salt... and then, at least deer would lick you. You do not get to pretend that you are my friend. You have insulted me and my son in the past, and to me, you're a real piece of shit.
It's difficult to confine my feelings to pity when those pitiful people are striving to take over the country and are actually having some success at it. And also hard in the face of their irrational hatred, a loathing that is on the physical revulsion level, of me and the very way in which I think. That's the hard part for me. How not to hate back? How not to hate those who hate me so much that they'd love to see me fry eternally... but they'd settle for me just plain dying?
The best way (it seems to me) to avoid allowing people like MI to push you into feelings/behaviors/responses that you do not really want for yourself is to simply ignore them. To me, they are like little "no-see- ems", buzzing around my head and occasionally actually making superficial contact, but, in the end, of no more consequence than that. You may have noticed that, at least in the present situation, I have posted just such suggestions as to hpow to deal with MI and her ilk. If you simply don't notice them, let alone respond, they are rendered helpless and as insignificant as possible. If you need to "win", just such lack of recognition is a powerful weapon. Imagine how frustrated she will be if her occasional "pop-ups" are totally ignored. On the other hand, more serious examples of this sort of behavior (i.e. Christian privilege/proselytization/active takeover of our Constitutional rights, etc.), not only demand our notice, but appropriater responses, as well. Far better, I think, to channel or redirect the anger and other negative emotions that these people engender in us into action aginst them. One ccan even "save up" the angry responses for someone like MI and put them to real use in these more significant situations.
Needless to say, I agree that your characterization of people like MI is quite correct; evil, nasty, and hurtful (when you give her the opportunity. As tempting as it may be to "give it back", she will be more effectively put in her place by withholding the recognition she so desperately needs.
I was imagining God as a boss, your boss. Thing about this boss is that he has a split personality, three of them. He gets you to be his worker because he is your friend who guides you, "Come work for me, it'll be great!"
But you notice it's more than that, he'll tell you that you're working for a great cause, you have to love the cause, your job is to go out and tell people to come work for him, to look in their hearts and see if they can't find there a friend, guiding them to come and work for the cause.
But every now and then the 'boss' shows up. He makes the rules and you better be sticking by them, after all, you took the job and part of the job is accepting the rules!
But it's worse than that you find out. The real boss expects you to be like him, to have three personalities, just like him, and this boss, the one you know, is not the real boss, he is just one of many teachers of how to be like him.
You can be kind of like the boss right away! You can be someone's friend, explaining what a great job it is, and you can start filling your friend in on the rules!
The more people you can 'hire', the more people that you can convince, then the more like the boss you are, and you and your company can shed all this pretense of being a friendly guide or even a great P.R. guy who just works for the boss, you can start complaining loudly how it is that most people don't follow the rules, what's wrong with most people is that they won't listen, they refuse to accept the friendly guidance, the public relations and 'to hell with them then', they're damned well going to heed the rules and like it!
Surely once everyone is following the rules, whether they like it or not, anyway, they'll see that they might as well come on and be a public relations guy for the boss, they might as well take the job and love the rules.
Brian; my thought is that there are a lot of things in this world that you will affect in the positive. But you will never make MI smarter or less of a terrible person, and you will never pull the scales from Eric's eyes. And these people will vote in a way you do not agree with, but to plagiarizer and paraphrase one of our more delusional brothers, "let me find the strength to change the things I am able to, and let me find the grace to accept the things I cannot change and let me have the wisdom to know the difference between the two".
Thanks again, Ryan. This seems to be the path that I need to take in order to retain my sanity. It's frustrating that nothing can be done to dissuade the people like MI and Eric, but it's one of those things that I cannot change. I need to be of good humor. After I flamed MI yesterday I re-read my posts and asked myself 'if someone else online said that, would I respect them/ and I couldn't see a way to say 'yes.' More clearly than that though, I realized that I would definitely respect someone that kept it light and humorous and didn't descend to her level, as the better person. I keep bumping my head on this issue' it seems one that I need to keep learning the same lesson over and over before I truly understand it. It's a difficult thing, to change one's own nature, even when one clearly sees the need to. So I guess then that I can then better understand those that can't even see the need to, not being able to change it.
We humans are very complex creatures... it's a shame that many cannot realize that and attempt to think of our natures and simple black and white. We are all blind; it seems only the degree to which we are that varies.
"The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of him who reads. There was a time when its geology, its astronomy, its natural history, were inspired. That time has passed. There was a time when its morality satisfied the men who ruled mankind. That time has passed."
"You have a funny idea of reason. It would seem that you can 'reason' just about anything into being. Very specific. Why not have god wearing pink sneakers?"
ReplyDeleteWell, show me the argument for the god wearing pink sneakers, and we can compare notes...
----------------
All the silly arguments for god come from christians, and you haven't made this one. Yet. My point was, if you had, it wouldn't be any less silly than the ones that you DO make.
"Your reason is wrong, because it is not based on deductive logic. It is not based in the idea of the scientific method. You have introduced your desires and beliefs into it. Which invalidated it completely."
No, what 'invalidates' a line of reasoning is a logical fallacy (formal or informal), a false premise, or some other approach (e.g. showing that the conclusion logically entails a false proposition, or strong evidence that the conclusion is false, etc.).
-------------------
I love it how you say "NO" as if you had any idea.
You have introduced your desires and beliefs into it, which CAUSES the following:
"logical fallacy (formal or informal), a false premise, or some other approach."
Because they're your desires and beliefs, you can't actually SEE how you've introduced them into the mix here. Nor can you tell that they're false. Most of your arguments are illogical because they assume a deity rather than postulating one. You do not argue from 'what is out there, what can it mean?'
Instead you argue from 'God is out there, how do I prove it?'
Talk about a FALSE PREMISE.
And besides, I said 'your reason is wrong' and not 'your reasoning is wrong.'
ReplyDeleteYour reason, your sense of reason, is wrong. It has been corrupted. Like a computer with a virus. Therefore you construct arguments that seem technically logical at each step, but are based in subtly false premises, and suffer from your unconscious bias toward the 'god answer.'
I think that you may have it exactly backwards.
ReplyDelete-----------------
-That is your psychosis. I have it right. You must deny it however. You have no choice. You would have one, but you've negated your ability to see it.
Here's Chesterton:
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.
----------------
I postulate that Chesterton himself was not sane.
I put forward all the recording artists that have crashed and burned, all the actors that have lost their sanity and destroyed themselves, all the authors that have killed themselves through substances or otherwise... Tell it to Amy Winehouse. Tell it to Michael Jackson. Tell it to Elvis. Insanity is born in the emotions, not the rational side, usually through a slanted or illogical/irrational perception of reality; sometimes though, through a very accurate, an uncommonly accurate, perception of reality, as seen through the emotions of a sensitive person. If you're really sensitive, and really smart and perceptive, reality itself is more than enough to fuck you up.
Alternatively, insanity can be provoked, can be caused. The part above, about 'through a very inaccurate perception of reality.'
ReplyDeleteThat part, can be induced.
And we're back to Chesterton. And you.
Wait? Poets don't go mad?
ReplyDeleteIn fact, in order to be sane in our society, in order to be considered sane, one must have necessarily suppressed one's sensitivity to the pain of other beings somehow, usually in one's youth. Otherwise the pain of the world overwhelms a person. So in order to be sane, we must make ourselves insane! And then we can scoff at those 'weak' enough that they feel too much of the pain of the world, and lose their ability to cohere to society. In reality, they are our betters. They see what we refuse to. For that, we lock them up and study them as aberrations.
ReplyDeleteI know Ryan... it's pretty funny, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteChesterton the Molesterton is a riot!
I guess Eric thinks cutting off one's own ear to give to a prostitute, is a sane and rational action. However, Einstein was a fucking nut, we all know that...
ReplyDeleteThat's the beauty though of being a theology. You can just say whatever crap sounds good to you, and then goofballs will quote you on the internet as some sort of authority.
ReplyDelete...a theologian...
ReplyDeleteChesterton sees it exactly backwards, and so Eric, channeling him, sees us as backwards. No surprises. I do find his certainty amusing. When he cites authority, he practically genuflects.
ReplyDeleteHell, if recall, Chesterton was an art school dropout, which is not to say he wasn't intelligent, just that he was talking out of his ass concerning things like insanity. And presumably a lot more...
ReplyDeleteAn ART SCHOOL DROPOUT???
ReplyDeleteSo he IS the tortured artist that went batshit, and immediately tried to link insanity with reason and not emotion! HAH! He's denying HIMSELF.
We cannot get away fro our emotions. Chess players do go mad at a higher rate than regular people. However one cannot say that it is their logical side that caused this. To me it seems much more likely that it is that they have forced themselves into a modality of extremely logical thought, and their emotions are stifled by it and must break free. Or perhaps they make themselves too logical to be sane in an insane world.
ReplyDeleteMy objection to Chesterton is his denial of the huge proportion of artists/creative types of different stripes that lose their minds. He's trying to separate two things that cannot be separated, our emotional and rational sides, when it is our emotional side that makes the decision to use our rational side in the first place; they are inextricably linked, but the emotional side is the side in charge. Always. Even the most rational man in the world, is that way due to his emotional desire to be that way.
In western mystical thought, either extreme leads to insanity, either too much emotion, or too much logic. The former causes a person to be cowardly and ineffectual and impotent in the world, while the latter creates an inhuman monster with zero empathy.
ReplyDeleteEric, check out "Chesed and Geburah" Jewish mystical thought, relating to the very duality we're discussing here.
http://www.aish.com/sp/k/Kabbala_12_Chesed_and_Gevurah_The_Two_Sided_Approach.html
ReplyDeleteThis take on it isn't bad.
" Einstein was a fucking nut, we all know that..."
ReplyDeleteEvery hairdresser knows that Einstein was insane!
I guess what I was trying to say with the kaballah stuff there, is that insanity lies in both directions from the middle. If one is too logical, or too emotional, one moves away from what we call 'sanity.' The condition of sanity requires and implies 'balance.'
ReplyDeleteYes Ryan, and it shows up in his theory of relativity... energy equals matter times the speed of an unladen swallow in centimeters per second squared...
ReplyDeleteI know what you're thinking; African or European swallow? He never said. Boy, was he nuts!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/emptiness.html
ReplyDeleteThe Heart Sutra, as old as Christianity... my favorite Buddhist text, and part of my inspiration for my views on reality.
Just felt like bein' metaphysical for a minute... okay, it's over...
Brian, if you're into Buddhism, you must take the hour or so ride North and visit the MFA in Boston, which has a very impressive Arts of Asia collection (one of the best outside of Asia, I've been told). Even the RISD museum in Providence (a delightful surprise to me) has some interesting Buddhist objects (including a nearly one thousand year old giant seated wooden Buddha which, if standing, would be sixteen feet tall!). The RISD museum is free on Sunday mornings from 10 AM to 1 AM, and the MFA has many free community days (the last one was on Columbus Day; I'm not sure when the next one is, since I have a membership, so I get in free whenever I want!).
ReplyDeleteI love some Joe Biden!
ReplyDeleteYes, thank you Joe Biden, for saying all the things that he needed to say. He didn't lie down. Obama did. I'm still pissed off over that, but I think Biden rescued him to some extent. I'm now hoping that Obama learns from this.... why am I not as confident as I should be here? Re-assure me, my droogies.....
ReplyDeleteMy wife was laughing at me... early on Ryan mentioned Iraq having fissile materials, and I told her 'c'mon Biden, bring that up, puhleeeze!' referring to the fact that they don't have enough fissile materials and they don't have a delivery mechanism, I.E. a bomb... and like a minute later there was Biden saying the precious words 'fissile materials' and I knew it would be okay...
ReplyDeleteBrian, if you're into Buddhism, you must take the hour or so ride North and visit the MFA in Boston, which has a very impressive Arts of Asia collection (one of the best outside of Asia, I've been told).
ReplyDelete-----------
Why thank you Eric, and you're right, it is truly great. I've visited the MFA often. I like their Roman Mummies too... I also have a fascination with ancient Egypt. And their paintings of course. that's where I first acquired an appreciation for art. I was on an appraiser's workshop near Boston and one of my classmates was a Fine Arts Appraiser, and she offered to take whomever wanted to go on an informed tour of the museum... I learned more that day than most others in my life. She opened new vistas for me... I was an art philistine before that, and afterwards I actually went out and bought books on fine art and tried to educate myself as best as I could. It added to my quality of life considerably, I think.
I am a Caravaggio fan, btw. "M"
ReplyDeleteI also have an inordinate fondness for the Pre-Raphaelites. I know, they're not every art critic's cup of tea, but I love the themes taken from mythology and poetry.
ReplyDeleteI like the Dutch Flower Painters too, more for their wonderfully accurate depictions of insects than anything else. What can I say, I'm a former bug nerd.
Incidentally, and I don't know if they still have it, but have you seen the MFA's collection of Japanese Netsukes? Fucking amazing.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I'm 'into' Buddhism. I do like many of their tenets, and I agree with most of what Gautama is credited with saying. I am of course most interested in their doctrine of 'Maya,' but that's just me. I would say that metaphysically the kaballah has had the most influence on my thought, although I see it now as what it is, a mere tool to expand the mind to encompass possibilities that are not apparent, especially effective with those who love terminology and such 'left-brained' things. I also take some things from various Magical documents, such as the writings of Paul Foster Case and Peter Carrol, and even a little from old Aliester Crowley, but not too much, because he was a crazy fuck... but mostly I borrow their mental imagery techniques, and more often lately I just make up my own. It gave me somewhere to start, though. I was experiencing events at the time that no other system seemed to address.... the coincidences and such...
ReplyDeleteI will say that after getting familiar with the kind of thought that the kaballah taught me, Buddhism made a lot more sense. So there's that.
ReplyDeleteearly on Ryan mentioned Iraq having fissile materials
ReplyDelete------ From a few posts up-----------
Um, I meant to say 'Iran' of course. Oops.
And as to metaphysical artists, I am basically down to only one. Austin Osman Spare. I find his work... haunting.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.google.com/search?q=austin+osman+spare+art&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvnso&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=OaZ3UJf_FYqqywG224H4Ag&ved=0CB4QsAQ&biw=1138&bih=509
"M".. The secret codeletter of Caravaggio fans, btw.
ReplyDeleteThe debate was more or less a tie on substance, but a Ryan win on style. He not only did what he had to do, i.e. show by his demeanor and by his responses that he was 'presidential' (and hence worthy of being "one heartbeat away from the presidency"), but he stood in stark contrast to Biden, who acted the fool throughout the whole debate, interrupting over eighty times, and smirking and chuckling while Ryan was speaking. This is only going to appeal to those who already liked him -- it's more likely to turn off those who are undecided (not that VP debate outcomes determine much, but every little bit counts in a close election). But the biggest problem in the coming weeks is going to be Biden's gaffes on Libya. This is a developing story, it has some serious legs, and it's nothing but bad news for Obama and Biden, who appear to have lied through their teeth about it for at least two weeks. As Krauthammer said:
ReplyDelete"Look, we know that there was no demonstration. It was all a fiction. The question is when Susan Rice went out, did the White House know about what she was gonna say? Did the Secretary of State know? That I think is the ultimate question — who told her to say those fictions? And I think in the end, that’s what’s going to unravel this. The Watergate scandal was about who knew up high and when. And I’ll remind you that nobody died in Watergate."
"I've visited the MFA often."
When was the last time you went? It has expanded significantly since November of 2010 when the massive Art of the Americas wing was opened, and recently they opened the Linde wing for contemporary art. (Personally, I can't stand most of what passes for modern art. I try every time I go to give it a chance, but it all seems to me to be so point missing. I understand it, but I think that almost all of it is misguided. Basically, from what I understand, it started with Duchamp's attempt, via his ready mades, to displace what had been traditionally understood to be the center of art, viz. beauty, and to leave the point of the whole enterprise hopelessly vague and utterly personalized, to the point that a can of an artist's excrement counts as art as much as Michelangelo's Pieta does.)
This is only going to appeal to those who already liked him...
ReplyDeleteNot only. I think Bidens performance appeals to people who don't over value 'debate' as a format for getting to the heart of the matter.
Inturrupting is appropriate if someone is saying something that is obviously incorrect.
Rev. Stoney Shaw,(on the Akin thing), "There's another guy that people turned against, Jesus Christ, but he prevailed."
ReplyDeleteSo, there's Christianity at it's finest, misogynist and PROUD of it! Akin may be losing as far as the poles are concerned, but the 'good' Reverend, he's rooting for the anti-science assholes!
Ryan is a Catholic, he's an Objectivist while denouncing his own Objectivism, and, no doubt proud of THAT!
You can't hold a position based on your chosen philosophy, find out that that position is anathema to your sect, denounce said philosophy, then continue to hold that exact same position!
It's like someone being a proud thief, "Yea, fuckin' right, I steal from everyone, they'd do the same to me if they could!", then he finds out that his religion explicitly rejects stealing as a means of aquiring wealth, "Oh, um, didn't know that, well, I'm not a proud thief then!", but continues BEING a proud thief anyways.
And every Catholic, every Christian, who votes for Romney/Ryan is basically snuggling up in that Objectivist bed, right along with them.
ReplyDeleteThese would no doubt be the same people who would declare that Hitler wasn't a real Christian based on how he acted, based on his philosophy, but they see nothing wrong with themselves.
"Putting aside Ryan's 'fuck the poor', 'fuck the old', and 'fuck the sick', 'bunch of whiney losers' attitude, he tells some great lies about how that isn't his attitude at all, pretends to have some great plan where everyone wins!"
"So vote for Romney/Ryan! Unless you're some kind of whiney loser, or one of those generous Christians we keep hearing about!"
"Not only. I think Bidens performance appeals to people who don't over value 'debate' as a format for getting to the heart of the matter."
ReplyDeleteBut if you were truly undecided, you presumably wanted to give both sides a hearing, which is a bit difficult when one side interrupts the other over eighty times in the course of a ninety minute debate. Ryan spoke for forty minutes, which means that Biden interrupted him, on average, once every thirty seconds. Further, Biden's smirking and chuckling and mugging, and his used care salesmanship debate techniques, weren't exactly endearing. I don't think that any of this will go over well with most truly undecided folks, whatever they think about debates as such, but that remains to be seen.
"Putting aside Ryan's 'fuck the poor', 'fuck the old', and 'fuck the sick', 'bunch of whiney losers' attitude, he tells some great lies about how that isn't his attitude at all, pretends to have some great plan where everyone wins!"
ReplyDeleteFloyd, that's just plain stupid. The debate is about how best to provide for the poor, the old and the sick. As Ryan pointed out in the debate, Romney gives more of his personal money (in total and as a percentage) than Biden and Ryan combined, so please, let's not pretend that he has a "fuck the poor" attitude. Your political views are almost as uninformed and patently idiotic as your views on religion are. Honestly, look at the Right Wing analogy of the nonsense you're spewing:
Floyd: "Putting aside Ryan's 'fuck the poor', 'fuck the old', and 'fuck the sick', 'bunch of whiney losers' attitude, he tells some great lies about how that isn't his attitude at all, pretends to have some great plan where everyone wins!"
Right Wing Nut: "Obama and co. want to bankrupt the country so they can implement socialism across the board! They hate America and American values! They're commies! They don't care about the people, they only care about taking over the country by putting all the power into the hands of the federal government -- then they can control us forever!"
Congratulations, Floyd -- that's where you are politically right now as far as credibility and insight and common sense goes...
You have to love the dyed-in-the-wool 'free market' capitalists, who whine about their money and how the government is stealing their money to redistribute it among the poor, while their whole reason for existing seems to be to take money from everyone they can and stuff it into their bank accounts!
ReplyDeleteAnd 'free market', what a laugh, 'free' means 'my share' to them, and as soon as they have a share in a market they use government to make damned sure that as few as possible are allowed to give them any competition at all.
On a different topic, how can Romney and all his followers still be getting away with telling each other that the USA can be self-supporting when it comes to oil production/oil consumption?
This CEO, this businessman, this honest Mormon either knows nothing about the amount of oil that the USA can possibly produce, and/or, nothing about how the oil market is a Global market which will sell to the highest bidder.
Is it 'okay' to cheat people who have no clue, to just straight out lie to people, simply because they have no clue? Is it okay to lie to people so that they'll vote against their own interests, simply because you can?
S.E.Cupp really pisses me off when she declares stuff like, "We need to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters because there might be voter fraud somewhere." Doesn't she, and everyone with that position lose all credibility at that point? For the life of me I cannot see why not!
Any time she opens her smirky face and asks, rhetorically, "You know what I think?", the rest of the 'Cycle' co-hosts should chorus, "Of course we know what you think, you bigotted CUNT, of course we do!"
Guess it must be, but, hey, it's my 'theory' that this assholiness if fine because the USA is a 'Christian Nation'.
Think about it, Peter Popoff:- Holy man, or Assholy man?, Benny Hinn, Holy man, or Assholy man?
"We need to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters because there might be voter fraud somewhere."
ReplyDeleteThis is amazing -- requiring an ID to vote? How dare we! LOL I'd LOVE to see a study of the voting habits of dead folks -- how much do you want to bet that dead Democrats outvote dead Republicans at least 5 to 1?
Geez Eric, which part of 'Goodbye Floyd!', am I 'getting' that you're not? Fuck you Eric, drop dead.
ReplyDelete"Fuck you Eric, drop dead."
ReplyDeleteSpoken like a tolerant, open minded and caring liberal!
ERIC! Are YOU on that bandwagon too? So you're not just a republican, you're a lying scumbag republican piece of shit, trying to justify voter suppression? VOTER SUPPRESSION, REALLY?
ReplyDeleteI honestly thought better of you. I really did. Thought you were smart enough to not be a piece of republican refuse. Figured you'd be above that.
I've taken your lying shit for years now, and kept myself from totally losing it at you, but now as far as I'm concerned, you can just fucking drop dead. I can't believe I ever wasted time talking to you. I can't believe that I ever thought that you were intelligent. What a mistake. I am incredibly disappointed in you; I thought you were at least fucking HUMAN. I feel soiled by knowing you.
I'm done with you, you self-important evil lying little prick. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner you leave this plane of existence, the better off the world will be. In other words, DROP DEAD.
How in the world is requiring an ID when you vote voter suppression? Could someone please explain this to me? I have a friend in prison -- if I visit him, I need to bring an ID. If I use a credit card, I need and ID. If I want to drive, I need an ID. In all these and sundry more mundane situations, I need an ID, but I don't need one to vote? I have to show an ID when I donate blood, but not to vote? We've all heard about voter fraud; how is this minimal requirement, which will cut down substantially on voter fraud, suppressing the vote? You drank the kool-aid, my friend.
ReplyDeleteFloyd, Ryan, others... you still want this asshole here? I'm trying to hold myself back right now, and it isn't easy. I know you get something out of talking to him... but I'm reaching my limit.
ReplyDelete"Floyd, Ryan, others... you still want this asshole here? I'm trying to hold myself back right now, and it isn't easy. I know you get something out of talking to him... but I'm reaching my limit."
ReplyDeleteYep, the typical tolerant liberal! Don't worry, Brian, I'm through here myself. If you're too stupid and closed minded to see that others can disagree with you without being evil, then you're not worth talking to.
It's been an interesting few years, folks, but all good, and not so good, things must come to an end.
Valete
But if you were truly undecided, you presumably wanted to give both sides a hearing
ReplyDeleteSure, I can see either uninformed folks (not you) or folks that value "winning" over honest discussion (you) preferring a format where one would not have a chance to respond to obvious falsehoods if they happen to be spoken after you have said your piece.
Further, Biden's smirking and chuckling and mugging, and his used care salesmanship debate techniques
You (assuming all the anonymous comments are Eric, the douche from MA) don't put nearly as think of a veneer on your biases when you are speaking about politics as you do with theology. Not saying either veneer isn't transparent, just that you don't seem to try as hard...
LOL I'd LOVE to see a study of the voting habits of dead folks -- how much do you want to bet that dead Democrats outvote dead Republicans at least 5 to 1?
Yes, that would be an interesting study*, but in the absence of said study, you seem to be operating under the assumption that your above statement is correct. So see my comment above about "veneers"...
*note that a study in my home state found only Republican voter fraud.
That bitch S.E.Cupp actually defended the picture I.D. laws after someone told her that there were only 80 cases of voter fraud found in whatever State they were talking about at the time, and none of those were 'in person' votes. Her reply, "Eighty cases is eighty cases too much!"
ReplyDeleteNow how retarded do you have to be to ignore the fact that the tiny bit of voter fraud that there was, picture I.D. could have zero effect on, since they weren't 'in person' votes?
Then there was the Governor of Pennsylvania bragging that the I.D. law would ensure a victory for Romney and the assholey right-wing judge refusing to strike it down since he couldn't say that 100% of right-wing assholes actually thought like the good ol' Gov.
It's fucking pathetic, and it speaks to their honesty, you cannot trust anyone who is willing to manipulate the system itself in their favour by underhanded laws. Surely laws are meant to ensure that people AREN'T being underhanded, no?
"Valete"
ReplyDeleteGuess our good buddy is practicing being dead, talking at us in a dead language! LOL
Oh man I'm confused again. Am I missing something about being required to have an ID to vote? Who doesn't have an ID? Is it more to prevent illegal aliens from voting? Or to keep individuals from voting twice? Don't they already have contingents to prevent that?
ReplyDeleteOh man I'm missing everything entirely, aren't I? All the points.
Fuck. This is why you refresh BEFORE you post.
ReplyDeleteThat's one question answered and now I look like a dumbass, lol.
Shitty.
Floyd, Ryan, others... you still want this asshole here?
ReplyDeleteOh I don't really care. He's entertaining from a psychological point of view.
I just wish he could be bothered to not post anonymously.
Yea, I wasn't suggesting that you 'banish' Eric from this blog at all. I was pointing out to him that he's not the only one who can 'dismiss' someone like that 'Goodbye Floyd!' crap.
ReplyDeleteThis ridiculous idea that because we're 'tolerant liberals' we're constrained to put up with bigotry and intolerance itself was beneath small 'b' brian when he tried it, and it displays a complete lack of respect for Eric's own portrayal of himself as the wise, philosophical mentor, frustrated at our stubborn refusal to understand.
Apparently Eric's politics is that it's just a game, just a perspective thing, but what Eric doesn't realise is that this reflects on everything he says about anything, including his philosphy about his god, that too being just a game, just a perspective.
We must suppose that being Christian means playing a good game that you feel there is a final arbitrator of your words and actions, while it should be obvious to anyone, especially yourself, that you're not serious about any of it.
I figured that he's religious so I gave him a pass pretty much on the constant lying because hey, these people can't tell that they're lying because they don't see real reality and deny everything to themselves. However the voter fraud thing is not in that category; it's craven, scurrilous, un-American lying that disenfranchises democrats, as in the poor, the elderly, and the young voters, and it does it under the pretense of solving a problem that *does not exist.* To lie about that sort of thing leaves no doubt as to the character of the person, and no amount of religious faith excuses the sheer evil of it. I can take him trying to lie god into being, but not lying to block voters getting to the polls. That's just a total scumbag, and frankly I don't even want to know the person. I am fine if he wants to still post, but I'm done engaging with him personally. I'll be fine to talk *about* him and his comments, but no longer *to* or *with* him. It degrades me to converse with him, makes me feel soiled now. I don't need that feeling in my life. I've got enough to keep me occupied.
ReplyDeleteIt's an extremely weak and self-centred 'argument' to say that since you need picture I.D. for lots of things then why shouldn't everyone need picture I.D. to vote.
ReplyDeleteYou really have to be imagining that everyone is in an almost identical postion to yourself, that you're a 'typical person' when it comes to this kind of thing.
It reminds me of Bush's reply to a woman who was complaining that she needed to hold down three jobs to make ends meet, "Isn't America GREAT!" He obviously was oblivious to her plight, and likely imagined she was bragging that hard work was getting her mightily ahead, and not complaining that hard work was allowing her to barely keep her head above water.
There must be some completely brainless donks out there who pass homeless people by thinking, "Why don't they just use their plastic to get some new clothes, an apartment, maybe a haircut and a sauna, and go apply for some jobs? What could be simpler?"
Well part of the issue was that in some states, 2 pieces of photo ID were required. Right now I only have 2 pieces of photo ID - my drivers license and my passport. That tended to be unfair to voters with lower incomes - which was the intent all along.
ReplyDeleteIf you're too stupid and closed minded to see that others can disagree with you without being evil,
ReplyDelete---------------
Someone can. You aren't. You're literally trying to make up a story (or rather to help lie it into being) that can likely tip the balance of the election by disenfranchising voters too poor, too elderly, or too young to be voting democratic. That is CHEATING at our election process, a destruction of fairness and Democracy. You people should be going to jail for this, and if not for the level of ignorance in this country you would be.
I'm not a schmuck! And you're not feeble minded. You know what you're doing. I know what you're doing. Stop fucking around with the very concepts of fairness and decency. I had some level of respect for you... no longer! I said that I wouldn't engage you anymore, but this I had to say to you: You sir, are a piece of shit. Get over yourself, you ridiculously Proud, lame tool.
In Texas, a student ID is no good, but a Gun Permit, sure, go ahead.
ReplyDeleteToo fucking obvious, but half the electorate are fucking morons so it is sliding by.
I.. is this the first time that you've mentioned that your son was autistic? I am so sad to hear this, it must have been harsh to hear that diagnosis.
ReplyDeleteAnd as far as Eric goes, Eric who? Oh you mean that anonymous troll who thinks he's so fuckin' smart? Fuck him.
My mother just died, my son is autistic, and I have had it 'up to here' with lying fuckwads that want to play power games with reality and don't give a fuck who they hurt. I'm sick of their PRIDE that allows them to shit on people and think they should be thanked for it. If Eric never comes back, somehow I just can't find it in me to give a shit. Sorry to all those that enjoy conversing with him... I guess I'm just not as generous anymore. I've reached my limit.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I didn't mention it.
ReplyDeleteI just softened up my last Eric comment... I'm so angry that I don't even sound like me... I'm really fuming right now.... I'm not an asshole, but I feel like being one to him right now. I've deleted like three of my comments right after posting them, because they were too profanity laced even for me.
This is weird, now I'm answering your comment, Brian, apparently before you posted it up.
ReplyDeleteI am so sad to hear this, it must have been harsh to hear that diagnosis.
ReplyDelete----------
Me too my friend, and it was. We already kinda knew of course... we're not the self-deluding types. He's absolutely beautiful, three and a half almost, and can't even talk yet. It's fucking sad.
Eric's crew would take away any state support for kids like him and go congratulate themselves for it at the club or whatever. Fuck them. Their pretend-morality makes me sick.
This is weird, now I'm answering your comment, Brian, apparently before you posted it up.
ReplyDelete-----------
Yeah, I told you, I was editing it... by deleting it, then re-posting the softer version. Confusing, I'm sure.
"But I certainly hope that we can agree that we have much better reasons for concluding that there is a god than we do for thinking that magic swords or dragons exist."
ReplyDelete-------------------
I generally don't engage in these religious proof conversations because I don't personally find them interesting, and I see little point anymore in arguing about other people's religious perceptions.
One thing I will comment on is that I often see here examples of the mistaken assumption that 'reasons for a belief in gods', is equivalent to the question of the 'existence of gods'.
It’s not the same at all. But I've become convinced that believers may not be able to get that distinction.
If they manage to pass a 'personhood' law, any illegal alien woman can simply claim she's pregnant and she's carrying a U.S.Citizen in her belly!
ReplyDeleteOops!
Or are the Reps. willing to throw U.S. Citizens out of America, simply because they don't have a voice, the exact same kind of reasoning that they're using to push for such a law!
They would have to actually BE pregnant because they would definitely check.... so we'll soon have millions of really, really horny immigrant women on a desperate quest for viable semen.
ReplyDeleteWhy couldn't that have happened when I was in college? Damn!
(male chauvinist pig moment, sorry)
You're literally trying to make up a story (or rather to help lie it into being) that can likely tip the balance of the election by disenfranchising voters too poor, too elderly, or too young to be voting democratic.
ReplyDelete-----------
I meant to say, "who are voting democratic..." Not 'too poor etc *to be voting* democratic..."
Brian; a lot of great people have had autism.
ReplyDeleteYea, the only stuff I could add would be if I did an internet search and I'm sure Brian and Mary have done plenty of that.
ReplyDeleteKeep us up to date if there anything new and/or promising that develops!
I forgot to say, I'm rooting for you guys.
ReplyDelete"I ask the Christian world to-day, was it right for the heathen to sell their children? Was it right for God not only to uphold, but to command the infamous traffic in human flesh? Could the most revengeful fiend, the most malicious vagrant in the gloom of hell, sink to a lower moral depth than this?" - Bob Ingersoll
ReplyDeleteThis is the great Robert Ingersoll on the Biblical passages where God decrees slaves are to be bought from the Heathens about.
I love Bob Ingersoll, God, not so much.
I forgot to say, I'm rooting for you guys.
ReplyDelete------------
Thanks, Ian. I appreciate that.
He doesn't talk, but he's amazing in other areas... he gets computers intuitively, his favorite toy is an I-Pod with tons of apps on it, and he can do all the games for kids, seems to recognize all his letters and numbers, can answer the games (or me for that matter) when they ask him to select a letter, or if he's typing I can tell him which letters to push and he does it... He tidies up, too! Last week he cleaned the whole living room, put all his (many) toys into his two toy boxes, and blew our minds. He categorizes the cans in the kitchen cupboard, puts like with like... But he also will drop into a tantrum at a moments notice, spinning around on the floor like a top and screaming when he isn't getting what he wants right away.... Needs constant supervision or he'll hurt himself.
We bought all child-proof latches for our cupboards and draws... which took him all of three minutes to learn how to open. So that was useless.
ReplyDeleteSounds like autism is a real puzzle. Your little guy doesn't know how lucky he is that he has you guys for parents!
ReplyDeleteHe is lucky, because I can well imagine some disciplinarian type parent not "taking his shit" and just beating on him... and when I do that I get a little sick at the idea that anybody can be that heartless. We worry about school, since he can't tell us if someone abuses him. A lot of headaches, but of course he's more than worth it.
ReplyDeleteWell, I hear that (I hate to say 'they') can get good at typing and let you know what's happening and what they're feeling.
ReplyDeleteThere's some facebook pages on autism, some video and I don't know what else. You guys should try it, and 'friend' me while you're at it!
ReplyDeleteI don't have a Facebook acct. Never wanted one. Sorry. Or I'd have 'friended' you long ago.
ReplyDeleteMy wife works for the state and knows how to navigate social services like few others. Part of her job is to tell parents with kids like ours where to get help. So there's that. I feel confident that we're doing most everything we can.
.. or should I say, it's not public at all, like this is.
ReplyDeleteHi, Brian,
ReplyDeleteI am sorry about Conor's autism.
I have friends who have autistic kids-- throughout it's broad spectrum. I hope you have the support of good friends/families...
I got a smile @ hearing how your precious little boy works the IPAD...
There's nothing quite like the bond of love between a child and his/her parent...
Wishing you all the best...
And, I'm so glad to know Mary's got the 'in' on his behalf.
Here's a story of empathy.
ReplyDeleteMy little boy Mozie has watched me put Prettyboy Floyd 'to bed' for a while now, every night, I'll tell the bird, "It's beddy time!", and he may or may not like the idea depending on his mood.
I might get frustrated with the bird if he pretends to want to go to sleep but sneaks out of his cage in the dark.
So, last night, as usual, at 'beddy time', I tell the bird, pull the blanket over his cage.
This is the only 'lesson' the dog has 'recieved' on this, so I'm guessing you know what's coming.
The dog was chillaxing out in the, not sure what to call it, small 'hall'(?), an area that's 'there' where the two bedroom doors and the bathroom door, a closet door and the laundry niche doors are all around. The 'door' room.
Anyways, I say g'night to Emma, close her door and since we were joking about 'Beddy time', i clap my hands and say to the dog, 'Beddy time!".
I was amazed when Mozie picked himself up off the 'door room' floor and mosied on into his crate!
Emma sleeps in her room, the bird sleeps in his cage, so Mozie sussed it out that he should sleep in the crate, which has 'always' been 'there' with no pressure to him to go in or not, ever.
MI, one of the main reasons that I have never posted that my son was autistic, was to not get any false pity from the likes of you. I do not accept your 'kind' words, as I am aware of the fact that you are both evil and insane. In other words, please don't bother. You've adequately proven to us all, what you really are. No point in denying it now and pretending to be halfway decent. If you had wanted to be liked, you would not have been so very vile in the past. So live with the consequences of your actions. If Jerry Sandusky emailed me from prison and told me that he feels bad about my little boy, I would be just about as much creeped out as when you do it. Get it? Good.
ReplyDeleteYes Pboy, I love all animals, but dogs are in a class by their own. Your little Mozie sounds wonderful. Have you had many dogs in your life? Some of the things that you relate about him, seem to be a pleasant surprise to you, so I was wondering if you'd had dogs before...
ReplyDeleteMy Walter knows if we call for take out, and as we hang up the phone he goes to the door and parks himself there to wait for the delivery person, 'wuffing' and barking every now and then. If food is involved, that dog can practically solve a quadratic.
In fact, if I recall, the last time MI dropped by she insulted my son's mental health and mine, on purpose.
ReplyDeleteIt all comes back to me...
It takes a lot of gall to just drop by after that and offer false sympathy.
One of the reasons that Emma decided to get a little dog is her stories of a doggie she loved and my stories of my little chiuaua cross Moosie, she was a doll. But I have bad memories of how I lost her. I had to leave her with my wife since we were splitting up, and my dad was a fucktard. 'Nuff said about that.
ReplyDeleteMozie constantly surprises me, as does Prettyboy Floyd, with how much thinking is going on in their little heads.
Emma is of the opinion that I should be grooming the dog, we should leave it outside on a rope, I should be teaching it tricks, just random stream-of-consciousness stuff really, while I'm more interested in how they do their best to interact with us.
I'm still amazed at how much ol' Mozie loves his toys. Anything can be his new toy and he WILL come to me with it to make a judgement on it.
"Mama's slipper?"
"Sorry buddy, you can't have that!"
"How about this rock is secreted into the house and I'm now proceeding to create Bedlam with?"
"Sorry little guy, we cannot have that!"
"Okay fine, how about I hump this teddybear that looks a lot like me?"
"Well, if you can put up with me rolling my eyes at you!"
Here's me, at 17, 40 years ago!
ReplyDeleteI was 12 then. Good pic. You're kind of a more handsome version of Ron Weasley, huh?
ReplyDelete(just kidding!)
LOL, I guess. Doesn't bother me, we can't all be Brad Pitts.
ReplyDeleteNah, you were a good looking kid. And Brad Pitt just looks weird now, with the goatee and so forth...
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much effort we put into challenging the worldview that we grew up with? I mean I know that there are some people who 'buck the trend', there's always going to be that, even down to something as basic as sexuality.
ReplyDeleteHow do we reconcile the fact that guys are guys and girls are girls with a kid who insists that he/she is not of the gender that his/her body is?
I don't think that those who 'go along with the prevailing worldview' are 'stupid' or 'lazythinkers' or anything like that, it just seems to me that that part of their brain, their 'wiring' is 'set' one way, while guys like us, well clergy would say that we're perhaps not 'fully developed'.
Yes, I'm comparing atheistic thinkers with gays here, but of course this kind of thing would involve different parts of the brain and there'd be some that'd be gay but 'go with the prevailing morals/values' when it comes to religion, and of course, complete anathema(likely a burning offence in days of old) would be a gay who is also atheistic.
This idea came to me when I typed out the 'logical' steps involved, when you come to the conclusion that there must be a moral law-giver, starting from the premise that we all feel guilty of something.
Seems to me that that is totally dependent on the time and place, the prevailing worldview of your society.
Example. If we were brought up Viking in 1000 C.E., we may feel guilty if we didn't fight well enough, if we could have shown the appropriate ruthlessness but failed to show lack of empathy!
I mean, I can actually see our Eric's POV, it's just that I disagree. He absolutely HAS TO see my POV as a 'failure', my lack of understanding, my lack of education, that kind of thing.
ReplyDeleteI pointed out how the Gospels are obviously religious propaganda, trying to combine the notion that it is a historical account with the idea that it is a fullfilment of O.T. prophecy!
I used to think that some enterprising Jews had taken it upon themselves to see that the Jewish tradition wasn't completely wiped out by inventing Christianity, a mix of supposed O.T. prophecy and a new 3 in 1 God from the Greek and Roman traditions.
Now I'm more inclined toward the other way around. Religious of the Greek/Roman tradition, being much impressed with the 'base' of the O.T., noticing how it might be manipulated to conform and conjoin these two traditions, lending 'historicity' to platonism and like that, did what the Romans did, absorb and utilize!
How easy would it be for the freshly written Gospel to be tweaked this way or that to maybe try to shame Jews for not going with the program and finally to back-handedly blame Jews, to make the 'modern' Jew (circa 50 C.E.) poor uneducated, ignorant, superstitious fools, lacking understanding of their own Holy Books!?
I mean, "Come on!", how hard is it to understand that the O.T. version of God is an old-time tyrant, "You do what I say, a deal's a fuckin' DEAL, or I'll curse your damned ASS!
ReplyDeleteNow, what to do with that? It's got a lot of good points:- control the population, venerate authority, basically 'worship authority', and so on, but there's a down side to that, people kind of get the feeling that they're being subjugated when they're being subjugated.
So a fresh new version is just the ticket! God(the total BASTARD)'s SON(one helluva guy!), and the BASTARD(?), why HE gets to demand the sacrifice of his own SON, demand that his lovey-dovey SON sacrifice HIMSELF in HIS(the DAD's) 'honour'.
This is fucking perfect! Talk about 'confusion technique'! Believers are constrained to believe that God is LOVE, KINDNESS, MERCY and the like, and at the exact same time HE is the domineering BITCH HE's ALWAYS BEEN!
"LOVE your enemy! Unless you're warring with them, then KILL THE FUCKERS!" Doesn't make 'sense', does it? Well it DOES, if you're a Christian! Right Eric?
If you think about it 'culturally' and or 'societally', the N.T. is saying, "Okay, fine, love it, authority and prophecy, brilliant, but a bit behind the times, a bit too 'local'. We can fix this, we have the technology!"
ReplyDeleteChristianity takes the authoritarianism of the O.T. disguises it as socialism, "Nono, we're all in the same boat, we look after each other, help our poor, give them 'equal status', but hey, the boss is the boss, that's always how it's been, and you'll do what the boss says and like it, as always! But don't forget, we're all in the same boat here!"
I've been harping on THAT for years now. The OT total asshole sadist god and his nice nice son, the loving hippy pussy. Cognitive dissonance that leads to psychosis. A recipe for mental illness.
ReplyDeleteSo any kid who notices the difference between God/Jesus and God/Yahweh is told, "No, you don't understand you young fool, they're the same GUY! It's the same GOD! Please just believe that that's true until you have the education and understanding to see it!"
ReplyDelete"Look, we're giving you a chance to redeem yourself here, just believe that God came down to Earth to sacrifice himself to himself for you ungrateful bastards!"
God the Father is a lot more like God the Murdering Molester with no conscience. Some father.
ReplyDeleteY'Ever wonder how many kids were beaten to death by their dads because hey, God does it, and he's the Father, so why not me? Beating children is a very christian thing to do, as it turns out.
And hey, one GOP asshole thinks we should make it LEGAL for a parent to kill their kids if they do not behave.
ReplyDeleteGod the Father strikes again!
How'd you like to be that guy's son? I'd run away.
ReplyDeleteI KNOW, that's absolutely ridiculous in this century, this fucktard wants to be allowed to kill his kids? I don't 'get' that at all.
ReplyDeleteHe must have been being sarcastic, I can't wrap my head around anything else. Not, 'give my kid up as a lost cause, he's fucked up and I can't handle him', no.. kill the kid! My brain hurts when I think of that.
A man running as a Republican for State Representative in Arkansas published a book in which he endorses the death penalty for rebellious children and much, much more.
ReplyDeleteIn his book "God's Law: The Only Political Solution," published in April, former Arkansas Department of Human Services attorney Charles 'Charlie' R. Fuqua explains that he supports killing wayward kids because that's what a Bronze Age tribe did in his favorite religious text.
"The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline," he wrote, according to an excerpt published by The Arkansas Times. "Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellious children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21."
He goes on to write: "Even though this procedure would rarely be used, if it were the law of land, it would give parents authority. Children would know that their parents had authority and it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents."
Fuqua's run is being bankrolled by established Republicans in the state, including the party itself and the House Republican Leadership PAC.
http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/265630.html
-------------------------------------------------
I would say that he's deadly serious, Pboy.
My brain hurts when I think of that.
ReplyDelete-You are not insane.
it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents."
ReplyDelete------------
These fuckers can't earn real respect so this is what they mistake for it, per their religion. Terror.
A person like that, we as a society should find a way of institutionalizing. We're failing him. And us.
The religion thing is really getting a bit ridiculous. I guess they can tell that it's dying out slowly, and this is their desperation at facing the extinction they so richly deserve.
If you can think of killing your own kid, you do not love him or her. You have had your ability to love removed.
ReplyDeleteIs it wrong of me to HATE religion? I don't wish to be a hateful man, but how can one find the ability to not hate hatred itself? This puzzles me. I am not capable of not hating refined hatred.
Is it wrong of me to HATE religion?
ReplyDeleteNo. It's asinine. Eric would criticize this guy for being an "ignorant literalist", but it is supposedly, literally what (an unchanging) god told a bunch of people to do at one point in history, so there is that...
I'm not at all sure which part of the 10 Commandments we're supposed to take figuratively. These mental midgets spend their 'hard earned' charity money on granite slabs with those Commandments chiselled into it, to put in or around courts of law, just to spite the separation of church and state idea.
ReplyDeleteIt's beyond me how Eric could not but agree with the guy that killing your kids if they're uppity should be allowed, as God commanded!
What do most Christians say about this, "Out of context!", or something equally silly? Oh yea, in them good-old-days, when disease was caused by demons, and no doubt uppitiness of the kids too, stoning was too good for them brats, but NOW, well, that'd be unkind!
LOL
Eric would likely say that Jesus fulfilled the old laws or whatever the official tripe is, and ignore the fact that so many christians, catholics included, believe that you're supposed to believe in all of the Bible. It's a pat answer to dismiss a horrific problem that causes a lot of bad things to happen, but he doesn't care about that side of things. If the catholic church gave a shit about the mass misunderstanding of holy scripture, we'd have seen a real concerted effort by the catholic church to educate people as to how Jesus fulfilled all those old disgusting laws and so forth, which would do some good in the world... He just cares about arguing with atheists and disenfranchising liberal voters and such. He's a hater, not a lover, regardless of his posings to the contrary.
ReplyDeleteSince there's nothing in the bible that delineates the "types" of laws in the old testament, "moral law" basically just becomes stuff we think, now at this time and place, that we should uphold, and "civil and ceremonial law" becomes stuff we think, now at this time and place, that we should not uphold.
ReplyDeleteThey're system is bulletproof.
But that's a contradiction, that there are objective moral laws yet moral law is 'basically stuff we think'.
ReplyDeleteStill, I'm sure there are lots of english majors out there who could craft a paragraph or two which could say both, that morals are indeed just what we think and still somehow they are in some way 'objective'.
Hey, who knows maybe they've crafted a new meaning of objectivity especially for metaphysics.
I was talking to a guy who is going to vote for Romney, gave him the usual stuff, the empirical truth about Rep. Prezes, as if that made any difference at all.
Romney would likely have to name that guy as someone who he'd personally screw over, to lose his vote, maybe not even then!
Well, I have never paid so much attention to U.S. politics since G.W.Bush got in and everyone knew he is an idiot and everyone knew he was going to be a disaster and Clinton's policies, far from being harsh left were actually solid conservative.
ReplyDeleteNo surprise to me that Obama got in, and over the course of the last four years we've seen the giant hate machine that the Republican party has become, in action.
My conclusion is that the 'right', the only purpose of the 'right' is to grab power. We might all look at the Bush years and point out the disastrous results of his policies, the complete lack of thought or reason for his election, but we'd be missing the point.
Point is, every time a right-wing politican is elected, that's a whole term(2yrs or 4 yrs depending) that the 'socialist hordes' have been 'kept at bay'.
It's the only thing I can think of that would account for the right wing politicians insistence that every single thing that Obama did was 'wrong'.
Obama represents 'the socialist hordes' no matter what he tries to do. If he tries to smooth the gears of the economy, it turns out that the 'right' don't want that at all costs.
So don't lose heart if Romney wins, why he's keeping the USA safe from democracy, keeping the socialist hordes at bay!
Of Republicans and Race Cards: Why I Used to Believe That Voter ID Laws Really Were Just Common Sense
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremiah-goulka/republicans-voter-id_b_1966848.html
Great article that I wish Eric would read, but of course he'd disagree with it somehow.
Big debate tonight... better format and I think perhaps a better choice of moderator in Candy Crowley. I don't much like her, but I don't think that she'd take shit from either candidate. I don't think she'd let obvious prevarications or dissembling just stand there.
ReplyDeleteLet's hope.
Obama "won"? In any case, when Romney threw out the old "Gas prices were $1.83 when Obama took office" he moved firmly from "Guy I generally disagreed with" to "Complete Turd".
ReplyDeleteI mean that was barely above MI quality.
As everyone is already aware, Dinesh is a buffoon.
ReplyDeleteGood debate. Crowley was very good as it turned out. Obama was a different person. What happened last time? Well, I was thinking... It was Obama's anniversary on that very day... I'm betting that Michelle drained all his energy before the debate and left him barely standing upright.
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, Obama clearly won it, and Romney clearly lost it. Perhaps this will stem the bleeding.
Out with the old trophy, in with the new! What the hell eh, he's rich, his rules for others don't count for himself!
ReplyDeleteI think that Dinesh-baby is gay, because obviously gayness matters so much to him. As a writer, he can harp on or be silent on, any issue he likes, the same as any preacher can focus on or simply ignore any of the topics-du-jour.
Then again, it doesn't bother me one way or another if he is, just his hammering home of the anti-gay POV, that somehow 'we can't have that' as if he's convincing himself.
I think it had to do with Obama focusing on the idea that Romney's math is non-existent, that there's just no there, there.
ReplyDeleteBut how to pin Romney down? He tried, but it's like trying to grab smoke. Obama squared off with 'Shadow-warrior' Romney just like an atheist arguing with some asshole who already believes they've won because they're standing in front of the philosophy maze taking pot-shots hoping to draw you in.
This time, Obama was way more prepared to explain that we're dealing with a man who has no real substance to his policies! I hope he can hammer that home even more in the final debate!
ReplyDeleteSNL should do a sketch where the actor playing Romney sings, "If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring..."
ReplyDeleteI think Dinesh is a rodentosexual. His true love is a capybara but he won't 'come out.'
ReplyDeletehttps://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQQloc8MB8YuBFnKOy0uXg2YRe9qjTzXe8GNQf6sFgYF_vck0ON
ReplyDeleteOld Wife
http://cdn.theatlanticwire.com/img/upload/2012/10/16/dinesh-fiancee_1/large.png
New Fiance
Looks like an even trade to me.
Actually looks like he traded down.
ReplyDeleteI cannot find any woman that lets Dinesh crawl on her attractive. So they're both hags, to me.
ReplyDeleteWhat's poor Dinesh going to do when he finds out she's not a real blonde?
ReplyDeleteCome on, you know he sleeps with her in the dark and dreams of Romance Novel hunks while he's bone-ing her!(if at all)
Oh yea, where's MI with her obligatory, "What about the children?"
ReplyDeleteThat's a valid point.
ReplyDeleteOTOH, maybe Dinesh-baby is such a lover, such a fantastic cocksman, that he has binders full of women!! LOL
ReplyDeleteWith a face like that he could be hung like a bull and not be able to score in a whorehouse. Ugh. Hate to be so superficial but he looks like he chews down trees and makes dams.
ReplyDeleteI thought the 'binders full of women' was a bit chauvinistic, but not terribly so... it was the weirdness of the statement that struck me, more than it's informational content. Binders full? Seemed an odd way to say it. And if they had so many available out there in the workplace, why did they need some women's organization to supply them with the 'binders full?' They couldn't hire women before they got the binders? But I don't think the gaffe resonates enough to be really damaging to him.
ReplyDeleteObama didn't take his shit. I'm a happy guy. That *will* resonate.
I can't see Dinesh having any skill at making a woman feel good in bed. However, what I can see him doing is convincing the woman through extensive philosophical dialogue coupled with numerous references to noted authorities that he's an amazing lover and that she just had the time of her life. As long as she is confused enough to not remember that he never took his pants off, he's golden.
ReplyDeleteIt is my understanding that the Gospels are to be considered four versions of a historical 'eyewitness' report about the life and times of Jesus.
ReplyDeleteBut if we write down all the prophecies concerning the Jewish Messiah in order.
For example:-
Joseph was a descendant of David, 'because it was prophesied!"
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, 'because it was prophesied!'
Joseph, Mary and Jesus fled to Egypt, 'because it was prophesied that he come out of Egypt'.
It's easy to see that the Gospels are NOT a historical 'eye-witness' report, they're a collection of supposed prophecy fulfillments.
If you can imagine some eye-witnesses 'reporting' that they saw Mary and Joseph taking off for Egypt and the four Gospel writers simply 'noting' that it was prophesied, you're an idiot!
Or perhaps you're thinking that the four Gospel writers knew that Jesus was the Messiah, knew he had to 'come out of Egypt', as per 'the prophecy', and just assumed that that must have been what happened?
Either way, these guys stuck a bunch of O.T. prophecies*, and patched together to make, "The Legend of Jesus the Christ", with some actual, yet dubious, historical context and geography!
*whether they made sense or not(the Isaiah supposed prophecy about a virgin giving birth, where Isaiah talks about a young woman giving birth to a child she names 'Emanuel'(not Jesus)).
I'm thinking that anyone who starts to believe the above is constrained to stab their eyes with forks or at least turn off their computer and pray that Satan hasn't ruined their day! LOL
See, that's what I always talk about, in a way. The gospels and such, are all we know about Jesus Christ. Other 'sources' are suspect, and brief. So in my opinion, it's highly unlikely that he ever really lived and did any of those things... sure, there was likely one or several itinerant rabbis wandering around Judea at the time that lent themselves to the legend, and one or more of them might have styled himself 'Jesus the Christ,' but that'd be about all I can see being realistic here. I get such a kick out of people, nonchristians even, that say that his historical existence is not disputable. I mean, get real. It's tissue-paper thin, and when you factor in HUMAN NATURE, it becomes a will-o-the-wisp. Highly unlikely to be true, and may not even be partly true.
ReplyDeleteChristians think secular people decided Josephus was a forgery to spite christians or something, never considering that it doesn't match his writing style and didn't even make much sense, since he was not a christian. Of course it was a forgery! Christians love to lie, the more the better! They've lied their entire religion into being, and their triptych deity there. Adults shouldn't even have to have these conversations. There is not an argument. There is only a deception. Without lying, they would have nothing at all.
ReplyDelete"I thought the 'binders full of women' was a bit chauvinistic, but not terribly so..."
ReplyDeleteWhat was this anecdote in answer to? People are so interested in the silliness of this story that they didn't notice him totally ducking the question.
Yes, "I tried to hire more women" is no answer to 'what about equal pay for women?' Romney is a gifted prevaricator. And the American public is a bunch of nitwit chumps.
ReplyDeleteYou know what happened, right? In the first debate. The public was convinced that Romney couldn't do well, that he would fail. When he didn't, they said to themselves 'I guess he's okay after all' and so his numbers went up. Now even though Obama won the second, it doesn't dim the victory in the first, where Romney passed the 'I can walk and chew gum' bar that everyone thought he would fail. So I don't actually think that the second performance will get those numbers back.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I'm worried. I think the side of LIE AND LIE AGAIN, might just win this thing. The people are too stupid. They are too easily confused. If I see one more HuffPo poster say 'ahh, both sides are the same, so I'm not even voting" I will scream. Shit I just did. AAAAAAARRRRGGGGGHHH!
ReplyDeleteI wish I had the money to move to Amsterdam or somewhere that isn't too idiotic. Maybe Sweden. Highest percentage of atheists in the world. Sounds fucking good to me right now.
ReplyDeleteTo be frank, I was surprised that the 'binders' thing got so much attention after the debate. Romney said a lot worse just describing his policies. More evidence that the American public is a bunch of idiots.
ReplyDeleteTop story on Google News this morning was 'Romney's economic plan is better than Obama's' by a "Libertarian Economist."
ReplyDeleteFull of libertarian uncaring bullshit.
There is no such thing as 'News' anymore, is there? As in, 'reporting.' Doesn't seem to exist. When it shows up, it gets jumped on so hard by the right, as if it were un-American. Like Candy Crowley. Unreal. The 'fourth estate' is in receivership.
I'm so sick of these people trying to morally justify greed. Libertarians are the real parasites.
ReplyDeleteNEWSFLASH! NEWSFLASH! NEWSFLASH!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/dinesh-dsouza-resigns-kings-college_n_1980614.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
Dinesh D'Souza Resigns As President Of King's College Amid Scandal
-Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Apparently there was a feud between Dinesh and Marvin Olasky, another religious whackaloon who I sometimes read over at townhall.org for laughs.
ReplyDeleteI think given the time lines and what Dinesh actually did, he's not in the wrong at all (hypocrisy aside), but this Olasky guy had it out for him.
Christian love. You know they all have an indwelling of the holy spirit, right? Obvious, isn't it...
He who judges first - is the victor.
ReplyDeleteI think I read that somewhere is some sophisticated theology discussion.
Judge you™
ReplyDeleteDoH! hope Harry doesn't see this...
ReplyDeleteFor Eric or whoever that anonymous troll was…
ReplyDelete"I wish I had the money to move to Amsterdam or somewhere that isn't too idiotic."
ReplyDeleteHey, you could get hired in your capacity as a gemologist there, but could you avoid going insane on account of the Quarter-pounder being called a 'Royale'?
What if it drove you to drugs? I mean, there right fucking THERE!
I can just picture you down some alley in a strange land, muttering, "But they could call it a 'Quarter-pounder ANYWAYS! Who cares if they're fucking metric, who thinks of shit like that? Why am I talking to this drain-pipe? What? Oh yea? Well I got a Quarter-pounder for you buddy, right here! I won, I fucking WON, the drain-pipe cannot MOVE...(batshit crazy laughter)... fade to black!"
What I meant was.. maybe you could just slough off the nutsiness of the ideologues. Hey, this is the world we live in, what you gonna do, change the world? I've said it before and I'll say it again, the only solution is to liquidate all your assets and mail the money to me!
ReplyDeletehttp://mmcelhaney.blogspot.com/2010/12/responding-to-saint-brian-godless.html
ReplyDeleteLook what I just found! Was this Eric I wonder? It was two years ago... gee, they never told me about it....
On second read, no, it's not Eric. Not that smart, not that twisty, not that much of a liar. Just another believer believing that they can think.
DeleteNo, that's Marcus. He's a fucking retard.
DeleteWhat if it drove you to drugs?
ReplyDelete---------
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Short drive.
The "113.5 Gram Burger?"
ReplyDeletemaybe you could just slough off the nutsiness of the ideologues.
ReplyDelete------------------
You have no idea how much of it I do 'slough off.' There's still too much remaining. Currently it's the fact that we could well be on the cusp of a Romney presidency. Hard not to be depressed.
Marcus is hands down one of the dumbest people on the internet, which is saying something.
ReplyDeleteI'm dumber for ever having engaged with him.
So you know him? He did mention you, come to think of it... Well, his 'rebuttal' was a bouquet of kleenex. Doesn't seem too bright.
ReplyDeleteYou ask for a reach out, here I am.
ReplyDeleteWhat would you like to talk about?
Hello Lance. I was wondering if you'd show up.
ReplyDeleteThis blog tends to talk mostly about christianity and it's foibles. However, I was mostly interested in your microbio where you state 'all is Maya"
I agree. Do you see the world that way, or was it a non-serious comment?
My view has been evolving for years now... I speak of things (on this homepage to the right) like 'The Big Brain Speculations' which essentially put forward the concept that all of perceivable reality is in actuality, thought. Consciousness.
I'd love to have a conversation about that, if you're interested. My 'Big Brain' post there, is several years old, and I've 'refined' that viewpoint somewhat.
My good friends here that you see posting, are not on that page at all. They are mostly realists, and I can understand that. I am one too, but I see that there is perhaps more to it than what meets the eye. So I attempt to retain a 'scientific method' mindset as I explore these concepts. So if we discuss this here, which I am of course open to, I suspect that they will also comment, and play the 'devil's advocate' position to us very well indeed. I think they keep me from going 'too far out there' but perhaps that's a handicap; no way to tell.
So let me know if you're interested in talking about it. Few people are of like mind, so I rarely find anybody that is worth having an in-depth conversation with about it. Plus, if you care to also talk about what we were discussing on HuffPo, as in, christianity and religion and politics in general, well, that's pretty much all we do here when I don't have my 'Mystic Hat' on.
Welcome, in other words.
Incidentally Lance, this blog is the archeological remnant, the 'fossil' of the old Dinesh D'Souza blog on AOL about five years ago, and so many of my 'friends' here were regulars on that blog.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, perhaps it's more accurate to call it a 'caprolith.'
Wouldn't that be "coprolith" (petrified shit)?
ReplyDeleteWhy yes, I guess my version was a petrified goat.
ReplyDelete(I used to deal in fossils, so I did know that at one time... Getting old.)
See the proofreading power of my friends!
ReplyDeleteThey know their shit.
Fear the proofreading power of I, the self appointed grammar nazi!
ReplyDeleteThere, their, they're! Just kiddin'.
Actually, GearHeadEd made the call. Or should I say 'Herr Gear?'
ReplyDeleteThat last answer was pretty creative, Ian. Funny.
I was looking up 'whom', that whole thing about which 'case' we're talking about.
ReplyDeleteCheck it out if you like, 'funny thing', say you're looking at some photos with your significant other(or not, just someone who is 'there'), following the grammer nazi rules, we ought to say, "Oh look, there's we in that photo!"
I believe they're letting that slide these day because the person you're talking to might think there's a Wii console somewhere in the picture, or something!
Before Wii, they let it slide because so many people were looking in the picture for puddles on the carpet!
ReplyDeleteI just got a netbook... a really cool little laptop computer about ten inches across... this is my test post to this blog...
ReplyDeleteWay cool toy... more powerful than my regular computer... 320 GB HDD, Intel graphics e.q.... 1 GB DDR3 memory... not much bigger than a book, great keypad... Gateway LT4008u. Awesome.
ReplyDeleteI love this thing!
ReplyDeleteI needed something more personal... we have two laptops but they get used by my wife a lot because she runs the Ebay business, and my kid gets on them and screws things up so we have to take a half hour to unscrew them. This toy is just mine.
I've been meaning to write an article on Salvia Divinorum.. have a friend that can get it published... he's been bugging me so I think I'll do it now that I can type anywhere.
Cool
ReplyDeleteThere's a British show that stars a doctor who has Asberger 's Syndrome: it 's called, "Doc Martin"... You should watch it...
ReplyDeleteIt's a really good show from BBC; it plays on our public television station.
It's really done well with light humor laced throughout......
MI, stop trying to be my friend! You forfeited that right long ago. What The Fuck Is Wrong With You? Go do some good in the world, hell, taking a dump in a garden would be more productive in that you're at least helping plants. You'd do more good for this world if your deity turned you into a pillar of salt... and then, at least deer would lick you.
ReplyDeleteYou do not get to pretend that you are my friend. You have insulted me and my son in the past, and to me, you're a real piece of shit.
Now pay attention MI:
You. Are. Not. My. Friend. Fuck. Off.
To my kind readers, sorry. It needed to be said.
ReplyDeleteAgain, I cannot seem to not hate hatred. It's a failing I'm sure, but I can't seem to evolve beyond it.
Understood. Evolve the hate to pity?
ReplyDeleteThat actually sounds like a good call, Ryan. Thank you. I will endeavor to do so.
ReplyDeleteI've just set out 44 chapter headings/summaries on the Salvia Article, with more likely.
ReplyDeleteIt might become a book at this rate.
It's difficult to confine my feelings to pity when those pitiful people are striving to take over the country and are actually having some success at it. And also hard in the face of their irrational hatred, a loathing that is on the physical revulsion level, of me and the very way in which I think.
ReplyDeleteThat's the hard part for me. How not to hate back? How not to hate those who hate me so much that they'd love to see me fry eternally... but they'd settle for me just plain dying?
Any advice on that last one? I'm being serious.
ReplyDeleteBrian:
ReplyDeleteThe best way (it seems to me) to avoid allowing people like MI to push you into feelings/behaviors/responses that you do not really want for yourself is to simply ignore them. To me, they are like little "no-see- ems", buzzing around my head and occasionally actually making superficial contact, but, in the end, of no more consequence than that. You may have noticed that, at least in the present situation, I have posted just such suggestions as to hpow to deal with MI and her ilk. If you simply don't notice them, let alone respond, they are rendered helpless and as insignificant as possible. If you need to "win", just such lack of recognition is a powerful weapon. Imagine how frustrated she will be if her occasional "pop-ups" are totally ignored.
On the other hand, more serious examples of this sort of behavior (i.e. Christian privilege/proselytization/active takeover of our Constitutional rights, etc.), not only demand our notice, but appropriater responses, as well. Far better, I think, to channel or redirect the anger and other negative emotions that these people engender in us into action aginst them. One ccan even "save up" the angry responses for someone like MI and put them to real use in these more significant situations.
Brian:
ReplyDeleteNeedless to say, I agree that your characterization of people like MI is quite correct; evil, nasty, and hurtful (when you give her the opportunity. As tempting as it may be to "give it back", she will be more effectively put in her place by withholding the recognition she so desperately needs.
I was imagining God as a boss, your boss. Thing about this boss is that he has a split personality, three of them. He gets you to be his worker because he is your friend who guides you, "Come work for me, it'll be great!"
ReplyDeleteBut you notice it's more than that, he'll tell you that you're working for a great cause, you have to love the cause, your job is to go out and tell people to come work for him, to look in their hearts and see if they can't find there a friend, guiding them to come and work for the cause.
But every now and then the 'boss' shows up. He makes the rules and you better be sticking by them, after all, you took the job and part of the job is accepting the rules!
But it's worse than that you find out. The real boss expects you to be like him, to have three personalities, just like him, and this boss, the one you know, is not the real boss, he is just one of many teachers of how to be like him.
You can be kind of like the boss right away! You can be someone's friend, explaining what a great job it is, and you can start filling your friend in on the rules!
The more people you can 'hire', the more people that you can convince, then the more like the boss you are, and you and your company can shed all this pretense of being a friendly guide or even a great P.R. guy who just works for the boss, you can start complaining loudly how it is that most people don't follow the rules, what's wrong with most people is that they won't listen, they refuse to accept the friendly guidance, the public relations and 'to hell with them then', they're damned well going to heed the rules and like it!
Surely once everyone is following the rules, whether they like it or not, anyway, they'll see that they might as well come on and be a public relations guy for the boss, they might as well take the job and love the rules.
But it's your choice, it really is, isn't it?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/girl-mistaken-for-skunk-shot_n_2000340.html
ReplyDeleteNine year old Pennsylvania girl in Halloween costume shot by relative that thought she was a skunk.
How wonderful. I am sure the NRA approves. If it were Wayne LaPierre, he would have finished her off and had her mounted.
At least he didn't shoot her 'cos he thought she was dressed as an atheist!
ReplyDeleteBrian; my thought is that there are a lot of things in this world that you will affect in the positive. But you will never make MI smarter or less of a terrible person, and you will never pull the scales from Eric's eyes. And these people will vote in a way you do not agree with, but to plagiarizer and paraphrase one of our more delusional brothers, "let me find the strength to change the things I am able to, and let me find the grace to accept the things I cannot change and let me have the wisdom to know the difference between the two".
ReplyDeleteThanks again, Ryan. This seems to be the path that I need to take in order to retain my sanity. It's frustrating that nothing can be done to dissuade the people like MI and Eric, but it's one of those things that I cannot change.
ReplyDeleteI need to be of good humor. After I flamed MI yesterday I re-read my posts and asked myself 'if someone else online said that, would I respect them/ and I couldn't see a way to say 'yes.' More clearly than that though, I realized that I would definitely respect someone that kept it light and humorous and didn't descend to her level, as the better person. I keep bumping my head on this issue' it seems one that I need to keep learning the same lesson over and over before I truly understand it. It's a difficult thing, to change one's own nature, even when one clearly sees the need to. So I guess then that I can then better understand those that can't even see the need to, not being able to change it.
We humans are very complex creatures... it's a shame that many cannot realize that and attempt to think of our natures and simple black and white. We are all blind; it seems only the degree to which we are that varies.
ReplyDelete"The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of him who reads. There was a time when its geology, its astronomy, its natural history, were inspired. That time has passed. There was a time when its morality satisfied the men who ruled mankind. That time has passed."
ReplyDeleteThey're BA-A-CK!
Oh God.... it's coming..... oh God.... ulp..... um.... no..... no.....
ReplyDeleteBLECCCCCHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
Damn... I just threw up another post!
NEW POST IS UP...................................................