Yes. It’s true! After everything he has said, Sir Roger’s scepticism has been swept away by his discovery of a new, an alien, religion.
And who would not want to be part of such powerful theatre, such wondrous ceremony, gorgeous ritual and exotic, ultra-dimension beings from the infinite corners of the universe?
Two excellent talks that will give you good feelings and even hope! From the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
The truth about financial incentives:
How our human super power can save the planet:
You’re welcome
It seems so strange to realise that Dwight Eisenhower, a 5-star General and highly-respected Republican President in his day, would nowadays be regarded by most ordinary Republicans as a pussy, a commie and a traitor to “traditional” American values.
Values Australia has been saying for years that the American right is crazy mad. Now here is statistical proof:
Seems pretty precisely to map the Republican vs Democratic states.
But Eisenhower’s understanding of America’s role in the world is as relevant today as it was when he was President and the Republicans could do worse than to take another look:
“ The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs.
First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.
Second: No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.
Third: Any nation’s right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.
Fourth: Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.
And fifth: A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.
He also said in his “Cross of Iron” speech:
“ Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . .
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
~ April 16, 1953
Today, Sir Roger celebrates his 1,000th post in 1277 days – or exactly 3½ years – since the inaugural, ungainly, embarrassing post – Minister von Rock Opens Australian Refujesus Exhibition – on 15 October 2006. Since then he has improved marginally, been mentioned in the Press and on numerous websites, and been included in the top 40 blog posts for 2007 at On Line Opinion.
He’s been #1 on Google for over three years and, better than that, he’s consistently beaten out the #2, his arch enemy immi.gov.
He won the Australian election, unseating the sitting Prime Minister in the process, and caused a landslide in the US Presidential elections. Perhaps more importantly he got rid of Mick Keelty.
He’s been congratulated by some of the people he most respects including Richard Neville, Stephen Poole and Club Troppo collectively.
He’s been threatened with the big government stick of the Crimes Act by silly old Immigration Dept clown, Bob Correll, and survived. In fact possibly Sir Roger’s proudest moment was his reply to Bob and the response that received, especially from Ken Parish who Sir Roger likes to think still had his marbles when he called it “quite possibly the best piece of passionate, angry polemic I’ve ever read, certainly on a blog. ‘Roger Migently’ is roused to extraordinary heights of eloquence.”
Ah, the olden, golden days …
Sir Roger has attracted 127,838 spam comments, some of which he has celebrated. (Sorry, 127,839 127,840 127,841 127,842 . . . . )
And it all happened because Howard and Beazley were in a race to the bottom to hijack Australian values from the people who really own them.
Us.
And the giant Sir Roger was roused to fight.
So Sir Roger has waited a few days since Post #999, hoping for inspiration befitting the global significance of this occasion, wishing once again to elevate himself to the heights of grandiloquence of which he was once capable.
And then, you know, he realised that self-aggrandisement was out of place.
Instead, his deeply-felt gratitude, especially to his readers, yearns for expression.
It is simple, open, soul-bearing transparency that is called for.
And so he has chosen to mark this special moment in an understated way with a simple yet gloriously compelling message which quietly expresses his beliefs. This is the sauce of Sir Roger’s strength, his balm and succor:
Produced by TheThinkingAtheist.com
May the Sauce be with you and may His Noodly Appendage be upon you and guide you safely through pirate-infested waters.
RAmen!
I n her recent outing in Foreign Policy Magazine, noted apologist, Karen Armstrong, says Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins:
“ … are wrong … about human nature.
Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus.
As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures.
While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives.
Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues.
So God isn’t going anywhere.
And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults.
Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.
Or in other words, god may be dead but don’t let’s upset the natives – they’ve got guns and bombs and exploding underwear and if you’re unkind to them they might set them off.
So let’s pretend for the sake of a peaceful life that he’s not dead, okay? And after all, the human diddums is fragile and if we tell her there is no objective meaning “out there” diddums might cry.
I don’t know about you but when you read her article do you get the awful feeling of sly inauthenticity and wheedling manipulation all for the sake of her desperation for … what? Her own frantic need for a sense of her own meaning, probably. The fact that people may naturally, in a search for meaning, have conjured up an imaginary friend doesn’t make the imaginary friend either real, or worthy of respect or protection.
If there are no gods then there are no gods – end of story. No point in the prolonging the fantasy. And, by the way, there is no evidence that there is one.
Anyway, we can’t respond to the Armstrong nonsense nearly as neatly as Sam Harris’s reply:
“ In her article (“Think Again: God,” November 2009), Karen Armstrong discovers that Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and I have mistaken “fundamentalism” for the totality of religion. (Sorry about that.) But do Richard and Christopher really hold religion responsible for “all human cruelty”? That is a surprise. I hadn’t realized that they were idiots.
In any case, I am hopeful that Armstrong’s winsome depiction of Islam will shame and enlighten them, as it has me. They will discover that Hassan al-Banna and Tariq Ramadan are paragons of meliorism and wisdom, while we are ignorant bigots who know nothing of theology (of course), politics (Christopher, are you listening?), human nature (what’s to know?), or the proper limits of science (um … narrower?).
[ … ]
But in Kenya elderly men and women are still burned alive for casting malicious spells. In Angola, unlucky boys and girls have been blinded, injected with battery acid, and killed outright in an effort to purge them of demons. In Tanzania, there is a growing criminal trade in the body parts of albino human beings — as it is widely believed that their flesh has magical properties.
I hope that Armstrong will soon apply her capacious understanding of human nature to these phenomena.
[ … ]
People will torture their children with battery acid from time to time anyway — and who among us hasn’t wanted to kill and eat an albino? I sincerely hope that my “new atheist” colleagues are not so naive as to imagine that actual belief in magic might be the issue here.
[Armstrong’s response to Harris is upsettingly whining, disingenuous, special pleading, illogical and just nonsense. She seems to want a “dialogue” about the existence or not of a god but the existence is not open to question.]
After all the hard work of so many people Australian politics is looking like Howard Lite, iSuck 2.0 déjà vu all over again. Boat people – “Aaaaarrrggghh! Foreigners! Tough on Queue-jumpers [but not on the causes of queue-jumpers]”.
“Let’s pretend to be doing something about climate change. We have to do something. We have to do something. I know! Let’s play tiddlywinks! That’s “something”. Hey, youse guys, the world is going to burn to a cinder unless we do something about it! So what we’re doing is, we’re playing tiddlywinks. If you don’t play tiddlywinks too, the world is going to burn to a cinder.”
“Okay, well, um … wait on … we don’t believe in tiddlywinks but we’ll play if Johnno and Wayne don’t have to play but you promise they will win.”
“But if Johnno and Wayne don’t play the world will burn to a crisp! No-one will win!”
“Okay, well…well…well get fuckin’ stuffed then! Let the world burn for all we fuckin’ care! … Fuckin’ lower class upstarts! Fuckin’ fairy eggheads!”
Palestine.
Israel.
Obama (what a fucking disappointment).
Russia.
Burma.
Sri Lanka.
China,
Tibet.
Fucking arrogant, corrupt and criminally-incompetent Indonesian politicians, bureaucrats, police and judges.
Walls everywhere.
Hatred.
Religious madmen in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia.
And the United States, which is terminally fucked in the collective head.
Democracy movements being crushed everywhere.
Freedoms, rights and privacy being shredded even – especially – by the good old Brits, eh, what?
Stupid global refusal to listen, based on creaking, long-ago-discredited, Industrial-Revolution-era social-political-religious theories that date back – even in their most recent versions – more than 200 years in the West, and on 4000-year-old, crazy, murderous, hate-filled, tribalist, racist, desert-engendered cruel religious fantasies in the rest of the world.
The hopes of “peace and love” from the last five decades crumbling like the naïve hallucinations they so pitiably were.
Young people who will “look after” things in a few years unable to think or care about anything but how some fake and shallow, talentless celebrity flashed her cunt, and what eyeshadow to wear …
And the people who actually care. the people with answers, who could possibly do something about it all, are sneered at and ridiculed.
It’s enough to make you want to just give up and forget it all and look at some funny cat video.
