This is the first of the podcasts I’ve been cutting over the past few days.
It’s a lot of fun to switch gears as a broadcaster into new mediums.
Though it’s become clear to me that the fun part of doing the recordings is getting addictive versus the boring part of doing the editing.
These are going to get a bit … wild … in coming updates.
If you’re catching me here then consider linking up with me over on the YT as well.
Some less than spectacular people out there on the Inter-webs are calling for vocal atheists and anti-theists to own up to the Chapel Hill Shooting being our version of the Charlie Hebdo Massacre. No, we won’t be doing that. At least not at this time. Should the available facts on record change, such as a confirmed manifesto being released, any reasonable person would adjust their views to include this. But what we have here is a horrible tragedy with no clear motives, nothing more. Charlie Hebdo was killing in the name of religion being held higher in importance than freedom of speech and human life; no comparison.
Standards of acceptance of evidence is probably the core difference between atheists and theists. For instance: I don’t see any evidence that is at all compelling for a historical Jesus of Nazareth nor for a God of Abraham. The commonly used “personal experience” routine is crap on multiple levels but mainly because people lie to further their own goals all the time and religious labels don’t instantly cure a person of unethical behaviors.
I’ve studied the Bible at length, researched non-canonical texts, applied the standards of historical veracity to both the Old and New Testaments and none of it amounts to the claims of “divinity” and “divine truth” made by Bible-believers. At the most, and this is being very generous, there was a Jewish rebel priest put to death by the Romans that had a chain of hearsay turn him into a demigod in the eyes of certain men who were all born around a hundred years after his execution.
Islam and the Quran are different in the sense that the central figure is much, much more so a verified historical figure but shares in the same issues of the Torah and the Bible where none of the claims to divinity and ultimate truth are any more compelling than when the Greeks, Egyptians or the Pagans wrote of their mastery of the ethos of life and contemplation. The endless contradictions anyone can find with enough time spent with almost any “holy book” placed to the side, the issue with any form of religious extremism boils down to dehumanizing those who will not conform to the point where an act of torture or murder upon them is not only acceptable but mandated from on high.
Thing to remember here is some people believe in UFOs and anal probes but it’s rare to the point of being unheard of that one of them would go shoot up a skeptic conference in the name of being unhindered to spread the message of the coming alien overlords to the masses. But both radicalized Christians as well as Muslims, and even the heavily pacifist Buddhists, have done exactly these kinds of actions in both isolated and organized acts of violence. All this in recent decades and not even bothering to dredge out old history books citing violence over the centuries committed in the name of religious “purity.”
No respected atheist anywhere is advocating you solve your disputes with acts of murder or that the best way to silence an ideological opponent is to kill them in their home or place of business. But I could troll the right-wing radio Christian waves for awhile and bring back some moron who is doing exactly that and same with the nationalistic Islamic newsgroups and forums. This would not in turn implicate all Christians and all Muslims in those statements but only those who identify with the speaker’s views which is not an easy thing to assess unless someone declares it to be so.
As always when I cover tragic stories my deepest condolences go out to the family members and friends of the victims of this horrible event. I do not speak merely for myself when I say that this man should face the full force of the legal justice system and hopefully this will bring you some measure of peace.
I just don’t compose much that goes into blog format these days. Sorry about that if were around back when I posted like wildfire. I do a lot of writing and have been plagiarized the times that I posted my best work. However, I’m leaving Web-impressions somewhere if not around here and I thought I might share a decent argument I wrote against the notion that God created the universe.
In my Internet wanderings I came upon a rather interesting YouTube channel
hosted by Jake & Hugo called “The Bible Reloaded.”
They take a unique approach in how to use their channel in the ambitious
attempt to read the narrative of the entire Bible (NIV) on the Internet.
Not only this but most importantly they provide context for the topics
they raise and even have done a video outside of canonical texts to
provide further context still.
This ongoing project has caught my attention and is a worth a look.
For the first time, surgeons have injected a spinal cord injury patient with human embryonic stem cells in a federally approved experiment, a biomedical firm said Monday.
Food and Drug Administration officials approved the start of the privately funded safety trial in July, allowing a long-awaited test of the cells, which were grown from a single embryo to resemble forerunners to spinal cells.
The unnamed patient received the cells at the Shepherd Center, an Atlanta hospital specializing in brain, spine and related ailments.
Despite religious objection of some the benefits of embryonic stem cells are already being applied to better the lives of others. I see this as a victory over religious insanity and unthinking, arcane dogmas that serve no purpose in the modern world.
In Madera, California, police and FBI are investigating a firebomb attack against a Planned Parenthood office that has been open for 20 years without incident:
Molotov Cocktail thrown at Madera’s Planned Parenthood.
This attack comes one week after a brick was thrown through the window of a local mosque and anti-Muslim signs posted on its walls, by a group using the name “American Nationalist Brotherhood.” One of the signs: “No Temple for the god of terrorism at Ground Zero.”
This is what the extremist rhetoric of the right-wing brings about with their constant hate mongering.
With the constant creation of straw men and paper dragons for righties to fear at night, eventually some of the wackos are going to go and get the boogey men with their own hands.
As a member of the religious moderate camp, I take issue with these statements. There is no question that fundamentalists betray reason, but a moderate does not betray faith nor reason and here is why: scientific facts are not rejected by a moderate as they are by a fundamentalist therefore that which accounts to the betrayal of reason for the fundamentalist is not true of the moderate; by drawing upon a more personal and perhaps more primal sense of faith and understanding the moderate is only leaving the confines of faith that are formed as preconceived misconceptions in the minds of others while never betraying the true nature of their own faith. By my logic, moderates are neither betraying faith nor reason. While there is nothing less than truth in the statement, “they half-believe the Bible” I believe the position is not “fence-sitting” in the least and here is why: The Bible is a flawed book, like trying to look at the truth through broken glass; if we draw a distinction between a precept or a series of moral teachings against certain stories that the vast majority of our number believe are purely allegorical in nature that is not failing to take a position but rather the act of taking the position that these pieces should be venerated while others diminished. The question posed by Dawkins is profound and requires a more lengthy response than I am willing to formulate at this moment. The short and witty answer is: arbitrarily. But that is mostly in jest and mainly meant to point out that there is no one definition of moderate religious belief so much as there is a loose grouping among many faiths and churches. It cannot to be answered to the satisfaction of Dawkins and others that would apply strict logical reasoning to the equation but the difference between allegory and literalist in the Bible comes from divine interpretation or, to use a less provocative term, personal spiritual guidance.
“We are privileged to be alive, and we should make the most of our time in this world.”
I could not agree more with Dawkins on this point.
Life is precious and should not be given any less value to every waking moment of it.
Where I divide greatly from Dawkins is centered around this conflict between God and science.
Religion, expressly organized and established religion, are in direct conflict with science. There is no doubt of this whatsoever.
But I and many others do not see God and religion as one in the same.
God exists as a metaphor for the unknown, in one mode of thought, and the very practice and essence of science relies entirely upon an unknown in order to exist.
The day we know everything, we will have little more use for science.
This is much the same I feel about God or more loosely the concept of a “higher power”: the day we control life and death, the flow of time, and have attained all power the universe has to bestow is the day none alive would see a use for a “God”.
The unknown itself, defines both science and faith.
Faith is irrational, and taken to extremes it is always dangerous. While science has no such pitfalls.
But I still do not advocate the eradication of faith, though I do agree with Dawkins in regards to religious upbringing not being a healthy psychological practice to put a child through.
I believe, and I shall surely write more of this in days and months to come, that faith combined with reason is not a flawed stance or lacking any amount of logical context.
I would also argue from a more emotional standpoint that a purely scientific view of the world, as I once held myself, is “sterile” and “overtly plain”.
Former George W. Bush presidential speech writer Michael Gerson has come out strongly in a recent op-ed against the use of the “r-word” in our commonly used dialectic.
The media is least attractive when it offers the pretense of fairness to cover a desire for self-serving controversy.
Professor Christopher Fairman of Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University takes to The Post today to defend the word “retard” against taboo, censorship and other forms of social repression. He argues that the r-word must be rescued from the terrible fate of the f-word. Even the n-word has “varied and evolving uses.”
Defending the r-word is not the protection of free expression; it is the defense of bullies.
There is a long tradition of religious and and moral reflection on the words we choose to speak. According to the Hebrew scriptures, “Death and life are in power of the tongue.” Jesus of Nazareth argued, “It is not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.”
Epithets gain and lose currency. Which means that standards of morality, respect and tact must be constantly reapplied in new circumstances — not that all standards should be abandoned entirely.
What the Special Olympics is proposing is not government censorship, it is social stigma. In this case, such stigma is a sign of moral maturity.
I have signed the pledge at www.r-word.org. I hope you do as well.
I also encourage you to sign the Special Olympics pledge against using the derogatory label “retard” against any person for any reason.
I would also challenge any person of any variety of partisan politics, which includes myself as well, to try and refrain from personal attacks and all statements that most people would honestly agree is a simple lack of “standards of morality, respect and tact” as Gerson describes it.
I have two reading suggestions for you today:
“Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson
I have but scratched the surface of this science fiction novel that has been recommended to me many times over. I am fast seeing this book as one that sits in the all-time-favorite pile for me, as well as just being a lot of fun.
“Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market” by Eric Schlosser
I have also only just begun to read this book but it is obviously a highly informative, if somewhat outdated (2003), observation of the American Black Market. This is the “unspoken” piece of the economy as a whole.
—
There are strange parallels between these two books that I am only just being to piece together.
Not only would Jack Kerouac have had a weblog, but he would have been blogging on Open Salon.
I feel that his writing techniques and contributions to Modern Literature are mirrored in the so-called “blogosphere” of today. I also feel that Open Salon is the only blogging-platform that is the home of artists of all stripes and the bastion of free expression in the mania of the web.
I would never go so far as to say that this little weblog here, that you currently reading, is anything close to what Jack Kerouac might contribute artistically to the community.
I only to seek to draw out that I am influenced, in part, by the same elements that influenced him to drive away from the cautious roads of standard-literature-procedure and drive boldly forth into the deeper forms of thought and real life observation.
The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text teaching avoidance to the extremes of mental attachment, has long held deep meaning to me and I am returning to it again after many years to seek it’s truth once more. Every verse of The Diamond Sutra begins “Thus I have heard.”
Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
Jack Kerouac defined his “method” of writing in way that also effects my own blogging efforts greatly in terms of raw influence:
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside your own house
Be in love with your life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You’re a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
This is the driving force of today’s cognitive-blog interlay system
I am the Writer-Director of the Earthly Enterprises
I struggle the stretch of the flow that never ceases, even as I command it to do so
Pure crazy, pure declarations, pure honesty
Not fear nor shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
—
There is only so much I take away from Kerouac, as I have made more clear in bold.
And to any thinking whatever I am doing is wise … This is not the case.
I believe “edgy” is the term that keeps getting ascribed to the end result of this practice.
That and getting banned from websites.
So I invite everyone who already was live-journal blogging to keep doing your thing because this noise over here is usually taken as throwing firecrackers at people.
Fair warning to the curious.
Joel Morton of Alan.com deserves my apology.
I will not re-post it here but I made a very rude joke at his expense when this little piece of blow-back hit me after loosing my cool while commenting on the blog of another. I am very sorry about such shameful behavior on my part and have since apologized via email to Joel.
My point is not that I won’t continue to confront the opposition via the internet, my point is that in the future when I have some ultra-radical, edgy, hyperbolic, partisan rhetoric to share I will do it here and not on the original posting.
Here is the piece of internet that has sparked this:
John Galt:
does he [Joe Lieberman] really want to stand in the way of reform?
Most likely he doesn’t wanna sign on to the biggest financial disaster we have yet seen.
EricG Reply:
October 27th, 2009 at 4:55 pmYou mean the Iraq War?
Oh wait, you mean saving thousands of American lives that die every year from lack of care.
You disgusting monster.
I hope you get H1N1 and then lose your job and then have your insurance revoked.
then all of a sudden you’ll be “pro-reform”.
When you are getting screwed, you will change your tune.
just because of that, I wish that on you.
Joel Morton Reply:
October 27th, 2009 at 6:02 pmEric, cut it out. If you can’t argue your point without name-calling or wishing harm on others who comment, perhaps you shouldn’t comment at all.
John Galt Reply:
October 28th, 2009 at 12:00 amHat tip
Posted by John Galt
October 27th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I negligently did not search long enough with in the Alan Colmes website to notice my insane and downright inflammatory remarks had reached the response of an administrator.
My bad on that one.
But let’s examine this a little closer.
This user “John Galt” has personally attacked me several times prior to my degrading myself to his level on previous postings at the same website.
This name “John Galt” comes from an Ayn Rand novel (“Atlas Shrugged“) and I know Ayn Rand as a woman who spread intellectual-poison in the form of anti-compassion mentalities and narcissistic views of all not within this same selfish and frankly what I find to be a completely un-Christian mode of thought.
There is no doubt to anyone who is sane that wishing H1N1 on someone was downright low of me.
But look at what I’m saying.
“because of that, I wish that on you.”
I was speaking in haste and un-Christian hate. I was wrong to attack this person with whom I do not hold a high opinion of.
But mark my words, there was truth in what I said.
Those who truly face these the crisis of a loved one falling ill and cannot pay the bills because one of the earners of the house is the one who is sick therefore cannot work.
Those who have insurance but only can barely afford it so they cannot save each month, better their living environment or pay for better schools for their children.
These people do not advocate this kind of anti-reformists screeds and illogical stances on the functions of government. They cannot afford such wild ignorance any longer, if they had it in the first place.
Nancy Reagan, wife of Ronald Reagan, was formerly against embryonic stem cell research until the time in which Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and she was shown data that proves stem cell research could be an avenue to a cure.
Endless other cases like this are true.
My bitterness was wrong.
And I am beginning to see that name-calling only detracts from me arguments lately.
I see now why.
The McCarthy Era is upon us again and if nobody can ask: “Have you no sense of decency?” Then we are really in trouble.
I didn’t want to play that role, I’m a lot better at impersonating lunatics. But fine, okay, whatever.
I can’t be out here calling people monsters when they say monstrous things and wishing for intellect to win over vanity.
Things are so bad, that it’s hard to see the middle anymore.
I won’t make things any worse from here out.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. knew well of what he spoke when he addressed a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4 (1967) in regards to the Vietnam Conflict:
“Come home, America.”
In Harper’s Magazine, Andrew J. Bacevich made the connection between Dr. King’s words and the current war in Afghanistan. I wholeheartedly agree, and would press further this point by taking a look at the heading-titles from the speech itself:
1. “The Importance of Vietnam [Afghanistan]”
I believe it well past the point in terms of the expenditure of American Treasure to the nation of Afghanistan to set a clear withdrawal strategy, and then hold to it.
2. “Strange Liberators”
We are not the nation to spread liberty and justice for all across the Mid-East. Whatever preconceptions one may have, the fact remains that stabilization efforts that operate outside U.S. Military influence remain intact while U.S. facilities are destroyed and rebuilt in a constant cycle within Afghanistan.
3. “This Madness Must Cease”
We cannot afford to throw lives and money into a nation with no clear estimation on how long it will take to achieve this lofty goal of a “terrorist safe-bed” being prevented from being formed. The bottom line is we are pointlessly infrastructure-building and policing Afghanistan, and this madness must cease. Sooner rather than later.
4. “Protesting The War”
At this stage, in November of 2009, I do not believe there is a valid anti-war protest platform to take. President Obama is weighing the decisions carefully. However, should his decision-to-come be something to nature of huge troop increases with no time line for withdrawal I believe the voice of the people should be known in the streets.
5. “The People Are Important”
The people of Afghanistan are who are important in this issue. The constant fighting takes more and more innocent lives every day. Without a time line and an attainable mission statement, the continued occupation of Afghanistan is nothing but a quagmire. A quagmire that not only costs American lives, but the lives of those caught in the crossfire.
—
If truly we seek to build up nations that have systemic problems that may effect our national security agenda then as Bacevich reminded us the nation of Mexico would be of primary interest to those in Washington D.C.
The U.S. could take part in other “humanitarian invasions” under these same circumstances.
The entire concept that we can “fix” another nation with increased troops and increased involvement is absurd.
Andrew J. Bacevich:
“Fixing Afghanistan is both unnecessary and impossible. Rather, we should be erecting and maintaining a robust defense.”
I find it rare to find people willing to make the pro-defensive military argument. I applaud Bacevich for this recent article in Harper’s. Worthy of your attention, to be sure.
Eric Lightborn's Blog 