Comments on: Stop It Or You’ll Go Blind (Brown Stain Pt 2)

By: wanderer

wanderer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:39:11 +0000

The leap I was suggesting was certainly beyond the rightly ridiculed interventional deity of the usual suspects, but not intended to imply a simple creator/deserter either. On the current evidence, there’s nothing here, except the infinite possibilities you suggest. Nothing has no creator except nothingness itself.

An infinite variety of possible gods I don’t see as the problem, but rather the criteria for those who get to go into the barrel and of course then there’s the barrel girl.

Meanwhile, school boards in the USA are being stacked as we speak; scientists the subject of a new McCarthyism. It’s just beginning.

By: roger migently

roger migently — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:59:26 +0000

Well of course if you migrate from Theism and its insupportable concept of an interventionist god to Deism and the simple creator who peremptorily left like a deadbeat dad then it’s a very small step indeed to abandoning the whole thing because frankly who needs it?
There is no path to absolute knowledge so anyone who is “absolutely” certain that there is no god is as making the same mistake as a fundamentalist Xian. You are right – there is an infinite variety of possible gods which means your chances of choosing the correct one are 1 over ∞, which odds are infinitessimally small and less even than winning lotto on the same day you were struck by lightning when the asteroid hit. Or remembering your wedding anniversary two years in a row.

One is equivocal about Hitchens. On the one hand we like some of his opinions about religion, while we abhor his position on Iraq. And then, as one said somewhere before, “Approaching a piece by Hitchens is like walking into an airless room that smells of decades of stale farts”.

By: wanderer

wanderer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:00:32 +0000

Dear Sir Roger

This is a letter I sent to Ms Dix (I am a friend of Dorothy) but no response has been published so I hope you can help me.

I know someone who is absolutely certain there is no god. In fact they are as absolutely certain about that as other people I know are absolutely certain there is a god. My friend says there is no proof there is a god and lots of proof there isn’t a god. I suggested that just because there was no proof that there is a god and lots of proof and commonsense and stuff like that that there is no god didn’t mean that there wasn’t some other sort of god that my friend hadn’t even thought about (it’s about here I lost Ms Dix I think), like a really nice god who didn’t even know about my friend and I, and Ms Dix, being here because this god didn’t make the world or even know about simple things like time and space.

What if my friend and I and Dorothy are making all this up by ourselves? Very Clever (your friend, Mr Smart).

I think Mr Feynman is right. Certainty is the devil and the devil is fundamentalism. I am starting to wonder if my friend is a no-god-fundamentalist. What do you think?

Yours in defence of doubt,
wanderer

PS Mr Hitchens still believes the Bush/Blair/Howard Iraq invasion justified and moral. I started to watch but the sound of his voice soiled my keyboard.

PPS I’m going blind.

By: Barbara C

Barbara C — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:57:01 +0000

Imposing beliefs of a cold, punishing God, an all-seeing God and using these as threats of hell and damnation for ‘sin’ is a form of child-abuse. It is indeed a remote control way of controlling children (and populations) in absentia. Why is it so? Ignorance, fear of the dark and the unknown and an authoritarian way of looking at the world – ‘I must be right, otherwise I must live with doubt’. Some people cannot live with the uncertainty principle, which is fine but not when they elevate their beliefs into a righteous crusade and as a justification for punitive interference at the family, village, state and national level.