Category: General

While I’m feeling un-wordy and meh, here’s a new video from Radiohead to enjoy.

And… I still got nothin’.

It’s gonna be that kind of day.

Aw, I got nothin’ today. Sorry.

I’m borrowing this from my new favorite atheist site Evangelical Realism, because it really is the bottom line for me and many others (my emphasis added):

Notice, the reason given for why people believe in God is because of the more or less complicated arguments of men—many of which even believers no longer find credible. The claim of the Gospel, however, is not that men decided God must exist because of centuries of abstruse philosophizing. Biblical stories are about the existence of a type of concrete, objective evidence that you don’t need a Thomas Aquinas to elucidate for you.

That evidence, however, consistently and universally fails to exist outside of the stories, superstitions, and subjective feelings of men. It is absent even from the experience of believers like Vox, which is why he must appeal to complicated (and fallible) human arguments as being the justification for Christian faith. And if even Vox must dismiss as irrelevant “the reasons some people used to believe in God 700 years ago,” imagine how irrelevant the 2,000 year old arguments must be!

Truth is consistent with itself. The evidence Vox appeals to, and which he castigates Dawkins for not considering, and which he lacks the courage to offer as a defense of God’s existence, is evidence which is not even the same type of phenomenon as the purported evidence the Bible claims as the basis for belief in God. There is one type of evidence in the stories, and an entirely different sort of “evidence” in actual experience, even among believers. The Bible stories simply are not consistent with what we see in real life, which is why Vox has to grasp at bizarre straws like the “over 30″ ageism he opened with. Thus, he “refutes” atheism by demonstrating its fundamental correctness.

I would love to hear the harrumphs and fumfuhs of theists defending that little statement of fact. Anyone?

This video goes to Charles Lewis for what I thought was the most sincere and honest moment from last night’s Candidates Gone Wild.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg2n039txnk&hl=en]

Everything’s gonna be all right.

If the Discovery Institute is so intent on showing that “intelligent design” is science, why are they targeting elementary school curricula instead of, y’know, doing some actual research and experiment?

I walked past my neighbor’s house carrying a couple of bags of groceries. Had walked up to the store and back. I was on my way home.

Election coming, I had decided to do my share, so I’d stopped at the Post Office and picked up voter registration forms. This coming Tuesday is the last day to register in Oregon.

Sitting on Peggy’s front stoop was Old Barfy and a buddy, 40 ouncers of cheap beer in their hands. The dark-haired one, who always wears sunglasses, used to live in the building but hasn’t for a year or so. I think he got evicted. I don’t pay a lot of attention to the drama in my building.

Remembering the forms in my bag, I turned to the older men and shouted, “Hey, are you guys registered to vote?”

Old Barfy nodded, and the other guy said “Yeah,” so I kept walking.

But Sunglasses continued “…but we’re registered Republicans!” He said it in a challenging way.

I turned back, stopped. “Huh?” The answer confused me. Or maybe his attitude about it. Or the underlying assumption he’d made. I wanted him to repeat it.

There was an awkward pause.

“Are you askin’ from the left, or the right?” he said, again making assumptions that I didn’t really get.

I shouted back, laughing. “I don’t give a fuck! I just wanted to know if you were registered.” I turned away, my question answered, and wanting to make a larger point. “There’s an election coming up. Just wanted everyone to have their say.”

And besides, joke’s on them. The country is largely progressive.

Generally speaking, Democrats win when more voters participate. Heh, heh.

I’m volunteering this weekend at the Stumptown Comics Fest. I’ll be there on Sunday. I’ll probably swing by on Saturday, too, and poke around.

I’m the A/V guy.

I think that qualifies me for the title of “geekiest of the geeks”.

I got street cred. Geeky street cred.

Word.

In response to Kevin’s comment on my previous post, I have three points.

I must have miscommunicated my analogy if anyone got the idea that I was saying that “intelligent design” has the same goals as science. ID is a car, science is a house. Any similarities between ID and science are deliberately inserted and magnified (dishonestly) in order to advance a political goal, not advance our understanding of the world. See the “wedge document” from the Discovery Institute for details on that particular subterfuge.

Any “flaws” in our current understanding of the world will be corrected by application of… the scientific process, logic and rationality. That’s the single best method of advancing our understanding; indeed, it’s the only thing that works to date. Unlike, say, fundamentalist religious beliefs, which remain exactly the same, stubbornly resisting centuries of being proven wrong, non-predictive, and even detrimental in the face of new evidence.

Science is the filter that separates out what actually works and best describes all the data available, from the infinity of things a human mind is capable of believing but which are wrong, non-predictive and even detrimental. Science is not strictly a “majority rules” situation.

Thanks for helping me clarify my message.

Forcing a comparison between evolution, a well-documented and supported story of how species have differentiated over the millennia, and intelligent design, a cart-before-the-horse religious doctrine with no logical standing and no predictive ability, as an example of “freedom of thought” is…

…well, it’s like someone shopping for a house, and having a friend shoving car want ads in front of them, and arguing about how they haven’t really shopped for a house without considering all the options, like houses, say, and who are they to suppress the right of people to buy houses! That’s repression, man!

Sure, people spend lots of time in both houses and cars, and you have to provide fuel for a car just like you have to heat a house, and yes, they both have storage space and entertainment value, but, in the end, they’re just, well, completely different things.