Existential Ennui

~ Searching for Meaning Amid the Chaos

Existential Ennui

Category Archives: Non-Believers

From Whence Came We?

12 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by Sherry in Astronomy, Evolution, fundamentalism, God, Human Biology, Inspirational, Non-Believers, Paleontology, Philosophy

≈ 4 Comments

titles-in-evolutionary-biology-L-5dgnEbFrom an early age, I wondered about where I came from. Perhaps it is why fairy tales failed to trigger my imagination, for I took such things literally and soon discovered that they didn’t live up to logical expectations.

Take Santa Claus. I loved Christmas more than any holiday as a child, and of course I believed in Santa as all young children do who are raised in the Christmas culture. I was not plagued by older siblings who told me it was phooey, or well-meaning adults who “slipped” and brought that belief to a screeching halt.

No, I figured it out all alone, one pre-Christmas night as I lay in bed, trying to will Christmas morning a more hurried arrival. Ignore all that problem of reindeer and flying, and just how much any sleigh could carry, the time just made no sense. Even with a full 24-hours across the globe, Santa would have to travel faster than fast to visit all us boys and girls. I started with just my own “neighborhood” of about one square mile. Why it would take at least an hour, but even it only took 15 minutes to visit a few hundred homes, why there was the city, and then the state, and then all the states, and then ALL of Canada, and then Europe, and even those awful Ruskies had children, and that was a BIG country too.

Well, that is one story, but eventually that grew to all the other questions that needed answering about how the earth came to be, and how the moon came to be, and how humans came to be. I systematically investigated all these things from childhood to adulthood, getting more and more sophisticated answers surely. I became a student of sorts of astronomy and later cosmology, and paleontology. I read books about these subjects for fun, marveling at great mysteries.

I became of course no authority, and understood only up to a point, for sooner or later much of this turns into mathematical equations far beyond my learning. But I got the scientific answers for the most part. As I matured, and developed some sense of a spiritual life, God entered the equation as well, and over the years I discerned that these are really two questions. One demands reproducible proof; the another a philosophical elegance of argument.

Of course the argument rages on, with fundamentalists entering where they do not belong, and atheists peppering them with irrefutable logic at most turns. Both are wrong, because as I said, one does not really relate to the other except when one (the fundamentalists) demands that the Bible be used as a scientific text, and the other (the atheist) insists that all believers are fundamentalists.

Science, in the area of cosmology does posit that there may be unknowables, forever unknowable. Brain scientists question the ability of the brain to know itself in all it’s complexity. There may be limits therefore to human knowledge. If there are, then God has the place of “unmoved mover” as Aristotle suggested.

Fundamentalists fundamentally don’t understand or don’t choose to understand things like the 2nd law of thermodynamics for instance. Sooner or later, in an attempt to sound scientific, a fundamentalist while draw herself up and point out that Darwin’s evolutionary theory violates it. Now, if pressed, she would not have a clue as to why, but she read it somewhere in one of her “how to stump your evolutionary friends” and prove Darwin wrong. Of course it does not, because entropy only works in closed systems. The earth is not a closed system because it is being bombarded continuously with solar radiation (energy).

This is only their second best argument, for their first is always, “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” Well, my fine airhead, it’s because we didn’t evolve from monkeys, and nobody ever said we did, except another uninformed fundamentalist. First, we are related to apes, not monkeys (and there is a rather big difference), and second we are not evolved from them, but actually share way way back, a common ancestor. We both branched off in different directions (picture the fork in the road), one leading to life in the savannah and mountains, another covering the earth and developing bigger and more complex brains.

Why do I rehash all this?

Why because there has been a significant breakthrough as of late. And it’s worth your time to learn about it. The results are far from in, and it may not prove to be what the author thinks it may be. But it has the scientific world of evolutionary biology and probably physics as well in a tizzy as other research facilities begin the wonderful process of devising experiments to test out the new hypothesis.

As people like myself, and hopefully you as well know, evolutionary theory does not purport to explain “how life began” a common mis-argument of the fundamentalist sort. Such a thing is called abiogenesis. Evolutionary theory has to do with how species change over time due to natural selection. However, a rather smart guy has offered an explanation of “how life began” in a sense, and it involves that 2nd law we talked about earlier.

He posits, by way of mathematical equations, that replication of cells may be a response to infusions of energy (the sun) into the primordial soup. In other words, life arises as a methodological answer  to the desire to “even” out or reduce the heat of the energy. Because the 2nd law suggests that energy dissipates across the spectrum of the system seeking equanimity, replication of cells actually fosters that law England claims.

If this is true, then it is the underlying foundation of Darwin’s theory, and of course it means that life is what is to be expected in the universe, and not at all a rarity.

Of course, not everyone agrees that Jeremy England is right.

That is what science is all about. There is and will be, as I said, plenty of testing and experimentation to determine whether his hypothesis is correct. But it’s exciting news to anyone who, like I, is always wondering and asking “how and why”.

*Do read the article. It’s not that long.

primordial-soup_02

 

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Idiots

08 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by Sherry in Crap I Learned, fundamentalism, Humor, Non-Believers, Satire, science

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

absurdity, atheism, faith, fundamentalism, God, religion

arknutsMy utter disgust and disregard for fundamentalist is well documented on this blog. I make no apologies for it, though I would argue that I am no zealot in this regard, and I am not on a campaign against them as a mission. My mind is far too eclectic in its selection of “things of interest” for that to be so.

I write of politics and my utter disgust and disregard for much of the GOP as well. It is not a mission with me either.

I believe totally in evolution as the means by which life has changed over eons of time. I believe that climate change is real and we are a major causative factor.  Similarly I believe that today is Thursday and that the sun will set in the West.  These are all factually provable items, available to be tested by a variety of reality-based mechanisms.

None of these things so I obsess about, for as I said, much else in the world interests me, such as who is the killer in the new show The Bridge, who will get kicked off Big Brother tonight, and what restaurant shall we eat lunch at today. I am a liberal or progressive, and I heave mightily to the left side of those spectrums, but sometimes extreme liberals/progressives piss me off with their short-sightedness from my point of view. I don’t obsess about that either.

As I said, I’m not a zealot, but a jack-of-all-trades. I likes what I likes and don’t likes what I don’t likes and I’ll tell you about most of them, and defend them until I get bored and move onto something else. I figure I’m fairly sane, fairly smart, and fairly normal and average.

But some folks ( religious fundamentalists for sure, and atheists of the newer type) are zealous. They are on a mission. And I’m here to tell you, that when viewed from the psychological lens, then are very hard to tell apart. I have almost always referred to fundamentalists as religious in nature. But that is not correct. Fundamentalism is a mental disorder or at least is thought so by some. It relates to a type of mind that is fearful of the world and thus creates a reality that is comfortable. It gathers “facts” to support its desired outcome, and is largely impervious to new facts that might contradict the contrived reality. It takes comfort in being a “minority”, being special, in the know, and therefore “better” than others. It regularly trashes non-believers as hell-bound, or not intelligent. It is a cultish worship of a world that works for it.

And folks it applies to the “New” atheist as much as the religious fundamentalist. Having spoken to a few dozen of these new atheists, I think I can safely speak about them. Almost universally they were either once fundamentalist believers, or were raised atheistic to begin with. But in each case, a traumatic occurrence happened and they became crusaders out to crush religion as some evil creation and one that is responsible for literally every bad thing that has ever happened in the world.

But let’s examine the patient. Atheists are fond of turning the tables in any discussion with them by asserting that the “one who asserts God exists must prove that existence.” And then they go about demanding that God be proven by a methodology that is designed to work in a physical universe. This would be fine if of course God was discernible by test tubes and spectroscopes.

If science tells us anything, it tells us that at the truly small end of things, the laws don’t operate quite the same as they do on our sensory levels. A thing can be at two places at the same time, and observing a thing can alter its behavior. There are posits of more planes of existence, some eleven I’m told, and that each may have its own laws, utterly alien to our own. But they continue to demand that God be proven to their satisfaction by human scientific standards.

They refuse (a no-information zone) to accept that they cannot prove to anyone’s satisfaction that God does not exist. All they can point to is a lack of scientifically generated evidence that he does.

Let me ask it another way.

Prove that the universe is a meaningless existence. Prove that it has no purpose whatsoever. Prove that it just came into being somehow, and is going through this process of evolution and that it all will end somehow and maybe or maybe not start again, in the same unendingly mindless way.

For you posit such a universe.

We are here by a series of accidents, we live for a short period, and we dissolve into nothingness, which billions of others perhaps on billions of other “earths” do the same, all for no purpose whatsoever. This is the world of Albert Camus, life is absurd.

If it is absurd then what is the point? What has ever been the point? Why have we crawled from the cave to get into our Prius’s and drive to work creating balance sheet profits for companies who will fight to avoid giving us a pension all to sit in the sun watching the balance of our lives fade with the sun? How have we found the guts and fortitude to deny ourselves, to be honest, to help others, if only to die inevitably?

Leave a legacy? Give my kids a better life? You have no ability to feel the satisfaction after you die. You have no legacy to watch mature and give birth to your great-great-great grandchildren. You can claim the satisfaction now, but is that but a joke you play on yourself? If you find life to be hard, filled with obstacles, potholes and down-right evil meanness at least some of the time, why not save your progeny that suffering by not bringing them into the world?

Seeing it from your perspective, why feed the homeless man? You but prolong his misery? The end remains the same. Oblivious death?

Or is it as Camus suggests to you? That accepting all of the above is the final freedom–the freedom to not give a damn? But of course you claim that not to be true, for you claim a morality that is as good, nay better than the religious believers you call names and make such fun of. Your freedom cannot be of the Camus variety.

Yes, you are moral people. Morality is I believe a genetic trait that we have found conducive to life. But you have no corner on intelligence my new atheist friends. You like to think you do, but you don’t.

You hold onto this religion of yours, for indeed it is that, because it makes you feel superior. You smugly look down upon others who believe in God as some sort of child who doesn’t have the presence of mind to know a fact from a fairy tale. Yet you who proclaim the scientific method and profess to understand the rigors of research inquiry, utterly refuse to even consider that the bible you ridicule can be read ANY OTHER WAY THAN THE SAME WAY THE FUNDAMENTALISTS YOU HATE READ IT.

That is rich indeed, for you give them the license to dictate the terms of the debate. And the truth is, you can’t allow that there are other, scholarly ways to interpret scripture, for then your fun would be over. You don’t see it that way of course, because you are on a mission, a mission to destroy religion.

And I’m not utterly opposed to that. Religion is an institution, and institutions need people to run them. And people who are beholden to institutions for their livelihood, are inclined to want the institution to grow bigger and richer, for that makes them more powerful and richer. Lots of nasty things happen as a result.

But faith is another thing entirely. You understand only one perverted facet of it and then extrapolate it to the rest because it works for you that way. That is not reality, but you are information proof.

But don’t get me wrong here. I don’t want to convert you. You are fine in your atheism as far as I’m concerned. No God that I understand wishes to punish you for your lack of progress. Humanity is a work in progress. Not all are as enlightened, and that doesn’t mean I’m somehow better than you because I see the world differently. It will all go as it is supposed to, for evolution is always upward. If we don’t blow ourselves to smithereens with our constant bickering.

I don’t seek to convert you but you seek to convert me. And that is a problem. I don’t seek to convert religious fundamentalists either, but I do seek to prevent them from homeschooling their children into their disease. And I do seek to prevent them from making me live in a society of their making. Minding one’s own business is the key, if you get my drift.

And that is the sad thing.

You are not stupid. But you are willfully ignorant. You cannot make it go away by refusing to examine it. Isn’t that kinda basic to a science-based belief system?

atheism_motivational_poster_12

Related articles
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  • Is Moderate, Rational Atheism a Fallacy? (hebrewhutong.wordpress.com)
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My Head Swims With New Factoids

06 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by Sherry in Crap I Learned, Election 2012, Evolution, Gay Rights, GOP, Humor, Mitt Romney, Non-Believers, Satire, science, Women's issues

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

atheists, evolution, gay rights, GOP, Mitt Romney, reality TV, science, Women's issues

I learned that the “new atheists” are largely just religious fundamentalists with a different “religion”–the idolatry of mankind.

I learned that they have no interest in joining forces with believers for the purpose of ensuring that our schools teach science in science and not religious doctrines of creationism and intelligent design.

For they have a second goal–eradicating ALL religion. And so any believer is condemned at the start as an idiot. People like Robert Wright who advocate a more nuanced argument, are deemed dishonest.

I learned that it is as worthless to try to have a rational discussion with them as it is with a fundamentalist in religion.

I think I learned this once before, but hope springs eternal that the blind will see as it were.

¶

I learned from Ellen DeGeneres that there is a new reality show that I’ve been missing–a family of shall we say, rather “countrified” who happened to be sitting over a natural gas pocket or something. Anyway, they are now billionaires and have a reality show. Ellen was showing a clip from when the daughter and dad got “teeth”. Anybody have the name? Doomsday preppers are beginning my attention as it’s the same old same old every week mostly.

¶

I learned that Republican men continue to “not get” women. Willard refers all “lady issues” to the Missus, who promises to show us his junk to prove he’s not stiff–is that a Mormon thing?, while Rinsed Penis (Rience Priebus) says we are like caterpillars.

I learned that golf men in Georgia like their women to serve drinks in the bar, and don’t think they look particularly good in green–jackets that is. It’s understandable of course when you think about it. How else to pee off to the side in the middle of the course when there might be a woman about.

¶

I learned that sexual orientation is a lot more complicated than I thought.

I wonder what “other” would be?

Let me see.

“Straight woman, but married, and old enough to be less interested in sex than I used to be, but not a dried up prune quite yet, except when I’ve seen a Johnny Depp movie and feel a bit more randy than usual”, but almost never aroused by Victoria Secrets ads, unless you can jealousy arousal.”

And that is not a representation of me, just so you know. The reference to Mr. Depp is purely so that I get more hits on this post.

(h/t to Joe.My.God)

¶

I learned that Willard is a bold liar. He now accuses the President of “having spent too much time at Harvard” and thus being out of touch with America. Except that Willard spent one more year there than did the President, and they’ve given him something like $32,000 in campaign donations so far.

Yesterday Willard told some potential voters in PA that “Obama said that we live in an unlimited land of plenty and we can spend whatever we want.” What the President actually said is “IF we lived in an unlimited land of plenty we could spend whatever we want. But that is not the reality. We don’t and therefore. . . .” 

For a man who is by all claims a very religious one, who supports his church with large amounts of cash, and who have served for OVER A DECADE as a pastor, the lack of morality this man expresses is breathtaking.

¶

I learned that a journey of a thousand miles does indeed begin with a single step. When we first determined to move to New Mexico, the task ahead seemed almost too huge to accomplish. For months I felt stuck between home plate and first. But bit by bit, and step by step, I’m nearly third and can see home plate at last.

¶

I learned that some of my blogging friends are standards by which I can judge my own sanity. Read that however you wish. Always running in that race are Jimmy from OKJimm’s Eggroll Emporium and Hansi’s Hallucinations. Hey Hansi, I liked the tumor one today!

¶

I learned that while Republican led legislatures throughout the country are assaulting women in various ways as part of “getting our freedoms” back, Connecticut is poised to abolish the death penalty. Some of our legislators appear to have brains inside those big things on their shoulders.

¶

Just in case you were at all confused:

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It’s Saturday, So It’s Philosophy 101

24 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by Sherry in Gay Rights, God, GOP, Humor, Non-Believers, religion, Satire, teabaggers, What's Up?

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

atheism, faith, gay rights, God, GOP, Humor, Republicanism

I just love it when I’m proven to be right. Or should I say that someone who has some real intellectual creds agrees with me.

Jonathan Rée, writing for The New Humanist, has a really lovely article on atheism. Writing as one, he points out a lot of the misconceptions of what the word means and has meant over the centuries.

Moreover, he chastises the “new, new Atheists” as he terms them, for not knowing the history of atheism, and engaging in a petulant and childish game with believers.

He points to the philosopher William James and says of him:

He hated the belligerent secularism that treats religion as a childish superstition which we will all put behind us once we reach the age of reason.

Much could be said of the new new atheists of today, he argues.

James spoke of faith in this manner:

Becoming religious was like falling in love, he said: not a process of intellectual persuasion, but not a delusion either, and it lent new aspects to the world, “an enchantment which is not logically deducible from anything else.”

I don’t think it can be better said or explained frankly.

While Rée certainly comes down in favor of atheism as being the more reasoned choice, he certainly does so in a gentle and non-judgmental way.

This is the stuff of real discussion. Read it and see if you don’t learn a thing or two.

♦

The chicken enchiladas? Pretty much of a bust. The recipe sounded good, but it failed on a number of levels. I’ve been pondering for some time, and think I may have a solution. I can’t tell you why I want a “perfect enchilada” but I do. So I’ll try my own hand in a week or so. You never know, the Pulitzer may be on the horizon. Surely they have one for cooking?

♦

I snatched this directly and entirely from Joe.My.God. simply because it needs to be said, and it’s said succinctly and with passion:

If you’re a Christian who believes that being gay is a morally reprehensible offense against God, then you share a mindset, worldview, and moral structure with the kids who hounded Jamey Rodemeyer, literally, to death. It is your ethos, your convictions, and your theology that informed, supported, and encouraged their cruelty. We Christians who believe that God created gay people as much in His own image as he did straight people are begging you to reconsider your theology — to do nothing more than be open to an alternative, fully credible, scholastically sound interpretation of one or two lines from Paul. How can you be unwilling to do something so simple, when you see the horrible ultimate cost of that refusal?” – Christian author John Shore.

♦

And this seemed to say it perfectly well too:

When the rich rain economic bombs on upon ordinary folks, that’s just capitalism. When ordinary folks point out the bombs, that’s Class Warfare ~Roshi Bob

And the beat goes on.

♦

I picked this up on Roger Ebert’s blog today, and thought it apropos.

♦

Brendan Beery is one very thoughtful guy. Please go read his latest post called, The Inelegance of Republicanism.  He writes a gentle but firm rebuke that could not fail to shame a rational person, but of course, for just that reason, it probably won’t.

♦

Humor is a necessity every day

. So get your daily dose from Political Irony and the best nuggets from the late night circuit. Actually he got all his stuff from Bill Maher today.

Frankly one of the funniest things I read yesterday was Billy Kristol’s remarks in his article about the latest GOP “debate”. Seems he got an e-mail from a “young and bright” Republican who was watching his first debate of the season.

“Why they ( meaning the field of GOP candidates) make us look stupid!”

Well, yes they do. Take a look at the House and Senate GOP, and you can add insane to the mix.

♦

From LOL God

Now go out and have one fine weekend!

Related articles
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Back to Disgusting Politics

29 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by Sherry in fundamentalism, Humor, Individual Rights, Michelle Backmann, Non-Believers, poverty, religion, Rick Perry, Satire, What's Up?

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

atheists, fundamentalism, Gadsden Flag, Humor, liberalism, Michele Bachmann, Ricky Perry, social security, teabaggers

Ya see, it’s fairly insidious. You start out quite innocently going to read one blog, and they turn ya on to another. So you think, okay, one more in the old reader won’t hurt.

So then you go to capture a picture and in the background of the picture you see the website it came from, and you think, “hey that looks interesting, and so you go and take a look and then say, “okay, I guess I can add another.

That’s how you end up with 259 damn blogs in your reader folks. Remember that, and beware!

Figured I’d give you the full size of this gem since the fine print is funny too.

Anyway, I was over at “we are respectable negroes” and that led to this site called Random Walks, and he, (being John) had a well done piece on the TeaNutz® and the use of the Gadsden Flag. And while you are at it, stop by 3CHICSPOLITICO and see if you like the offerings there.

♦

Most of you know that I have little truck with the New Atheism. I rather like the old frankly. There is an amazingly good article in the Guardian about the subject and why the New Atheist is pretty much just as fundamentally literalistic as the fundamentalist Christian. Here’s a nice quote that might whet you appetite:

This from a former but still believing parish priest:

 “It is impossible to be a serious Christian and believe in heaven and hell.” When I, who as raised in a strongly and conventionally religious home, expressed surprise and suggested that once one stops believing in heaven one might as well stop believing in God, he said, more vehemently: “It’s exactly the opposite: not believing in heaven and hell is a prerequisite for serious Christian belief.”

As James Woods points out, the New Atheists have no argument to make against this group of Christians. Nor with other mainstream Buddhists, Hindus or Muslims either.

♦

Meanwhile, back at the Casbah, Michele “Who’s your crazy now?” Bachmann is all up in arms. Isn’t it perfectly clear that GOD has spoken in the guise of earthquake and hurricane? I mean isn’t this down right obvious? And Michele of course has his ear, and purports to speak for his Supreme Being.

You see, GOD Almighty wishes to be heard, and he wishes politicians, and most particularly one Barrack Hussein Obama would listen to the PEOPLE. So she says.

Except, that the INSANE minority that Michele wishes to represent, ain’t exactly the definition of “the people” as we see it. The people would seem to suggest some sort of BARE FREAKIN’ MAJORITY doncha think there doll?

Anyways, I got not nearly the satirical game as Juanita Jean’s take on the Bachmann thing, so go read her biting commentary.

♦

Me is much likin’ the great double down of Ricky “aw shucks” Perry. He’s gonna drive that Ponzi scheme Social Security argument right into the La Brea Tar Pits. I’d love to be around in a few million when they dig up his bones and put him on display in the Natural History Museum as a “TeaNutz® relic” known only to a very few political scientists who like really really obscure subject matter.

SmartyPants says it all with this great cartoon:

♦

And then SmartyPants led me here to this which I must say, says it all too.

That which I cannot study empirically I do not understand.  If there is nothing for me to have observed and I have either not sought or not been persuaded with evidence, then my answer is I do not know.

My peace is not in knowing; it is in wanting to know.  And my bliss is not in knowing; it is in trying to know.

This makes me a liberal.  Evidence is not something I fight against, and answers are not something I require.

That which one cannot study empirically the conservative claims to understand anyway.  Even when there is nothing to observe and the conservative has neither sought nor been presented with evidence, the conservative’s answer is I know.

The conservative finds peace only in knowing the answers to questions that she has not even asked.  And once she knows, she will not be persuaded by evidence; hers is to defend her truth, not to find nature’s.

And this of course means that Beeryblog must also go into my reader.

♦

And humorously speaking, if they weren’t so darn sick in the head, here is what the Blaze nincompoops which you to know today:

The Blaze’s Jonathon Seidel, a pretence of a journalist, wants you to know that Bernice King, daughter of MLK just might be a racist, or perhaps she just made an honest mistake. More fun to think the former though rich Jonathon? The Blaze racists don’t know the definition of racism of course.

And Jon stumps for the nearly forgotten Glenny *I’m gettiin’ out of my straight-jacket soon” Beck, and urges you to watch his “rousing human rights speech” at some church in Texas.

Meanwhile, a “possible” and “maybe illegal” uncle of President Obama’s “might” have been arrested in Massachusetts last week for DUI.

Have a good one!

Related articles
  • Atheists, Muslims More Popular Than Tea Party (Also, Tea Party’s Just a New Name for Racist Christian Right) (alternet.org)

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Everything I Say is a Lie. . . .I’m lying

25 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by Sherry in African American, American History, Creationism, Evolution, fundamentalism, Humor, Individual Rights, Non-Believers, racism, Rick Perry, Satire, Sociology, teabaggers, Uncategorized, What's Up?

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

atheists, civil rights, creationism, Darwinism, David Barton, Dawkins, evolution, MLK, Obama, renewed Darwinism, Rick Perry, rightwing nuttery, teabaggers

Note that the cartoon pictured at left carries the “Answers in Genesis” website. I believe that these are the same people who bring you the “Creation Museum” in Kentucky and are building the Noah’s Ark as their next “reality” project.

I am generally not a big fan of atheists, at least the mocking types. It’s all well and good to conclude that there is no proof of God and that you are content to let it be, living your life by perfectly good standards of conduct, without resort to any religious faith. I tend to be in agreement with atheists who take on the fundamentalists, because they don’t represent any kind of believing that I can understand nor accept and their actions are damaging for the most part.

I do tend to get rather pissy with atheists who lump all believers, of ANY faith into the same basket and make fun of them, such as referring to their belief in “faeries” and boogie men. It tends to belie your own faith in your own beliefs of “there is no God” when you are so insecure as that.

So, I’m not, generally speaking, a great fan of Richard Dawkins, though I certainly have no quarrel with his evolutionary statements. I find them compelling and utterly credible, as the entire field of evolution seem to be to me. But recently, Dawkins had some words for our new pal Ricky Perry and the field of GOPers who adhere to the “safe” haven of “it’s ONLY a theory.” (By the war, Al Gore points out in An Inconvenient Truth, that “it’s only a theory” is the intentional plan of attack of those who wish to confuse any issue, be it global warming or evolution.)

My thanks to Joe.My.God for the quote:

There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.” – Famed atheist Richard Dawkins, responding to Rick Perry’s denouncement of evolution.

♦

Speaking of evolution, there is a rather fascinating book published in 2010 about what the author calls RD or “renewed Darwinism“. Paul Lawrence area of expertise is in business, and he was near retirement from the Harvard Business School when he became dissatisfied with the “agency model” of business leadership, finding that it seemed to relate only to making stockholders happy. He began to investigate other fields and found in Darwin his answer.

Lawrence posits that man is evolutionarily driven to four things: acquisition, bonding, defense, and comprehension. We are, he suggests, constantly engaged in the activity of balancing these four things. He claims that things appear out of whack now because a “few bad apples with an outsized drive to acquire and no moral conscience” have prevailed, because they have no apparent need to bond.

So far, studies looking at Lawrence’s model of leadership tend to confirm it. Those companies who exhibit a healthy balance of all four things, tend to show good results, those that don’t, don’t.

♦

I must say I’m good. I read this headline in my reader: “Perry retreat co-host MLK deserved no credit on civil rights.” Well, I knew it could be none other than our ubiquitous TeaNutz® faux historian David Barton. Yes, Perry continues to double down in his unity with all things wingnut crazy, alienating all non-Christians and not a few Christians, and now African-Americans.

It seems that Barton is of the belief, that while MLK is a deserves a “place” in history, “Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society.” Barton is almost too stupid to attack. I mean, dude, seriously, your “analysis” is childish.

Barton and others have done their level best to rewrite history books for Texas schools, seeking to minimize such folks as Thurgood Marshall and César Chávez. This all in an attempt to glorify white Christians, to the exclusion of all others in the history of the US.

♦

Ya know, Jebby Bush warned ’em when he was last interviewed on Faux Noise. He said, it’s fine to criticize the President’s policies, but hey, lay off challenging his motives. But of course, no, that would not be cool would it? The National Review, long since sunk in a cesspool of what else? poo, has decided that the President’s VACATION READING FARE is not appropriate! Angry Black Lady Chronicles has the story (Not sure if they got it from Think Progress?) 

 

Related articles
  • It’s a Theory That’s Out There (sydiot.com)
  • The strength of Dawkins, and the murk of accommodationism (scienceblogs.com)
  • Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact (chasdarwin.wordpress.com)

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Who Popped All My Balloons?

05 Tuesday Apr 2011

Posted by Sherry in African American, Economy, fundamentalism, Humor, Individual Rights, Non-Believers, poverty, racism, Satire, social concerns, Sports, teabaggers, Uncategorized, What's Up?

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

African Americans, basketball, Bryan Fischer, Butler, class, economy, elections, judges, racism, right-wing crazies, UConn, Wisconsin

It was a yawner, a dud, it was Much Ado About Nothing. Close your eyes, and miss nothing. You might have confused it for a high school state championship game.

About the best you can say, is that UConn played good defense. Butler? Where they even there?

Two jokes I came across. One is a WordPress blog post entitled:

“They should have shown Hawaii-5-0. There was better shooting.”

or this one:

‘If you compared Butler’s shooting percentage against the sobriety meter, you could have legally driven.”

After all the great games leading up to the final, this just didn’t deliver. UConn “won” mostly because they were there, occasionally putting the ball into the hoop. It won’t be one people “talk about” in future decades.

Wonder what’s happening in hockey? Are my Redwings doing anything?

♦

It comes as no surprise that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Vanity Fair puts it in some perspective with a nice piece. Our lopsided rich/middle/working/poor scale is akin to that of Russia and Iran, while Western Europe is much healthier. Yeah, lets keep gutting programs for the poor, and keep reducing taxes on the rich. That’s the ticket.

♦

Today is a biggie in Wisconsin. They are voting on judges. Self-defined conservative David Prosser is trying to keep his seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where he can “maintain the conservative” control and be a “complement to Governor Walker and the GOP controlled legislature”. Prosser called the Chief Judge a “bitch” and explains why that was not really his fault to Fox, you know, the place all the GOP comes to pitch their “fairness.” A left-leaning assistant attorney general is running against him. Apparently as of now, the numbers voting are extremely high. We are keeping our fingers and toes crossed.

♦

It always seems to me that the Uber Right hate just about everyone. Everyone that is except whites and the right kind of Christians. Super hater, Bryan Fischer is at it again. Now he wants the entire welfare system ended. In him pea brain, the increase in poverty is because we have welfare. And get this, it just encourages those people to “rut like rabbits.” Yeah, he actually said that. Read the full remarks at Right Wing Watch.

♦

Here’s an interesting question. If you  could  “be” someone else for a day or so, who are some folks you’d like to see from the inside out? Angry Black Lady Chronicles has some interesting choices. For me, Cleopatra, Hypatia, Mary Magdalene, Katherine Hepburn, Socrates, Einstein come to mind.

♦

I’ve said it a dozen times here at least. The extremist right-wing Christians are no different from radical Islam. Both want to force their religious views on everyone else. Br. Dan at Dating God, makes precisely this argument about Terry Jones, the moron who burned a Qur’an and undid a whole lot of progress in Afghanistan in one moment of madness. When hate is your mantra, you simply have turned your back on God.

♦

Chauncey DeVega poses a very interesting question about black pride and white prejudice. In a new world where Fox and tea parties turn racism on its head accusing blacks of being racist and portraying whites as the new black, how do we judge these terms. What do they mean? Are they different for blacks and whites? It has been the contention of most African-Americans I know, and something deeply instilled in my from years of working for African-Americans, that only white people can be racist. As DeVega says, blacks can be mean and awful in every prejudiced way, but never racist. Read and see what you think.

Carry on!

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  • Sarah Palin endorses hard-right Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate David Prosser (americablog.com)

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