Fish in Space

Someone I can only describe as a troll posted a video of Alan Watts giving his speech beginning with "You are a fluke. You are a separate event, and you run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and that's it." He goes on to scold non-believers for envisioning such a cold, dark world where nothing we do matters so we may as well just commit suicide now and get it over with. It's a very dreadful speech focusing on the inevitability of death and how non-belief gives us nothing to live for. This is my answer. Did you ever enjoy a meal or a dessert? An event or activity that gave you pleasure? But what's the point, it's over now. The impermanence of the things that give us joy is a reason to not go on living according to the worldview of this troll. Only a god invented by humans is sufficient to give us a reason to live, a god that tells us not to live for this world but the next one. I enjoy a good meal or a dessert. I look forward to activities or ev...

Years after the issue should have been settled, I'm still hit with claims that the Establishment Clause in the US Constitution isn't really there because it wasn't explicitly stated as a "wall of separation" as Jefferson's letter clarified. I find it ironic that so many people who complain about my criticisms of the Bible or their religious beliefs being "out of context" are nevertheless willing to ignore the context of the US Constitution.

I am so tired of presuppositional arguments, whether or not they're acknowledged as such. One of the fundamental flaws I criticize about religious belief is when believers want their cake and eat it too. More to the point, their arguments rely too heavily on special pleading. And no, adding caveats to the definition of a god does not bypass special pleading. For example: if a god does not leave any traces for us to observe, then we have no reason to assume that anything we see supports the existence of this god. If this god is unknowable and incomprehensible, then we have no reason to assume anyone understands anything about it and can accurately represent it. So which is it? Is a god knowable or not? If not then the discussion is closed. If so then show us examples that clearly demonstrate how this knowledge is valid and not human bias.

Blogger has some basic tools for tracking posts, listing comments (when it occurs to me I might have any) and seeing how popular they are. Most of my posts average between five and fifty pageviews, some browsing in from reddit.com or twitter and some I'm sure from webcrawlers and other technologies. But one post in particular stands out. None of my posts have more than two hundred views except this one: it has over two thousand. So if I ever decide I want my blog to become popular or start up some ad revenue, I have to remember to post a silly comic with every entry. I find that both amusing and saddening.

Liberal religious beliefs came up again today, this time with the assertion that religious texts like the Bible aren't meant to be read literally. Mostly. Sometimes. Whenever we have verifiable evidence that whatever is being discussed has been debunked. Furthermore, someone claimed to me that most religious believers don't take their scriptures literally. Naturally, this required some verification. Nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe in angels. Literally. Why? It's largely driven by religion. 64% of Americans believe Jesus literally died and was resurrected. Not metaphorically but literally. 46% of Americans believe that humans were created, not evolved, in their present form within the last ten thousand years. Nothing metaphorical about it. 80% of Americans believe in miracles. Not allegory, not metaphorical miracles. Miracles on par with what's recorded in the Bible. Tell me again why I should assume religious beliefs and texts aren't being taken l...

When we describe something as "objective" what we mean is that it is "not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: 'an objective opinion'" or "of or pertaining to something that can be known, or to something that is an object or a part of an object; existing independent of thought or an observer as part of reality." Since morals are value statements they are necessarily abstract concepts rather than material objects. They cannot be said to exist as part of objective reality. Furthermore, morality varies greatly depending on culture and circumstance which means it is never free of influence by personal feelings, interpretations or prejudice. By way of contrast, what are examples of objective reality? Those things that can be confirmed through empirical observation: physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology and so forth. Standing on the surface of our planet means that gravity will pull you and everyt...

One of the most common claims made by Christians is that the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God. How do we know that the Bible is divinely inspired? Why, the Bible says this about itself. Of course, what this means varies depending on the Christian you talk to. For some it means the Bible is perfect and inerrant, that any time we find something wrong in the Bible it's us who is making the mistake because the Bible can't be wrong about anything. For others it means only parts of the Bible are divinely inspired and the confusion comes because we have to sift the human error in the Bible to find the parts that are genuinely inspired. The first claim, that the Bible is perfect and inerrant is easily refuted. Looking at the conflicting creation accounts in Genesis, the story of the Hebrews in bondage to Egypt , the prophesied destruction of Tyre by Babylon or the attempts to tie both Herod the Great and the Census of Quirinius to Jesus' birth in spite of Herod d...