PZ Myers complained that atheists don’t have any good pamphlets. Here are some I designed a year or two back.
The Eye of Sauron Looks Down and Sees … Dogs
Okay, that’s it.I just read a story in the Washington Post about a new CBS TV show, “Greatest American Dog.”
Look, to begin with, I don’t like “reality” TV. I don’t watch it. But I’m okay with it if a bunch of idiots want to go out on national TV and eat cow anuses or climb out on narrow beams above pits of broken glass, all for the remote chance of winning money. Not only do I think they’re more than welcome to do that, I know they don’t even have to care about my opinion. I’m fine with it, seriously. For all I care, as long as they’re adults, and they’re freely choosing to do those stupid things, they can all wind up in wheelchairs. Yeah, it would hurt me to see something like that happen to a fellow human being, but tragedies happen every day and I don’t think I have any right to interfere in other people’s private decisions. Heck, I’m the guy who thinks suicide should be legal. And at least they get a chance at the money, unlike all those people who have crippling injuries while skateboarding or riding motorcycles.
Continue reading “The Eye of Sauron Looks Down and Sees … Dogs”
A Sunny Optimist, Darkly, on Planet Earth
For a guy who gets nervous when he has to call in to work and tell somebody he’s going to be five minutes late, I have a hard time even imagining what it’s like for a doctor to tell a patient he has cancer.
And yet they do. And I doubt they sugar-coat it. After Sen. Ted Kennedy’s recent diagnosis, I’d bet Kennedy and his family heard it in blunt terms that same day. A doctor came right out and said “You have a large tumor in your brain.”
If I was the patient, I know some part of me — the wishful part that wouldn’t want it to be true — would desperately NOT want to hear it.
Continue reading “A Sunny Optimist, Darkly, on Planet Earth”
Ninnyhammer
I’m conflicted.As I often am. I guess you can’t BE broad-minded and open, which I flatter myself I am, without often finding yourself stretched between this value and that, one conclusion and the other. Because things are complex, yes, but also because you can’t ever be sure you have full information on which to base a rock-solid conclusion.
And so you have to deal in multi-valued awareness, and conclusions that retain — sometimes forever — some measure of tentativeness. That means you can never see heroes as just heroes, you can never see villains as just villains.
Flying Monkeys of Jesus
The Shreveport Times (writer Kristi Richie, June 7, 2008) reports:
Pornography, Harry Potter books burned at monthly meeting
About 30 people gathered for a regional revival Friday night that included a book burning as a statement to reach out to local residents.
Because nothing “reaches out” to people like a good book burning.
“It is allowed for Harry Potter to be taught in our schools, but not the Bible,” International House of Prayer pastor James Crawford said during the Shreveport Regional Unity of Faith Revival.
New Name, Same Blog
You’ll notice the name at the top of this page is now “Earthman’s Notebook,” instead of www.patheos.com/blogs/acitizenofearth. (I know it’s a bit hard to read. I’m trying to figure out how to add a drop shadow or something, to make it more readable.)
I’ve been thinking about the name for a while now, first in relation to a book I’m writing (at the pace of a handicapped snail), and second in relation to the blog. I put it here to establish whatever copyright it gives.
Growing up, I passed through a number of tribal identifications: member of my specific family, Baptist, Texan, Houstonian, Astros fan, male, bookish nerd, cowboy, Deep Souther, American — all of which I held to with one measure of pride or another.
But … you grow beyond things. There came a point where I didn’t really even think of myself specifically as human. I mean, I’m undeniably Homo sapiens, but I felt more like a … dang, I’m not even sure there’s a good word for it.
Years back, I wrote a piece about kinship, the shared heritage we humans have with animals, and the writing of it changed me.
Xen Living: The 30,000
Let’s say someone gave you $30,000, in cash, and the deal was, you had to live on it as long as you could. You couldn’t do any other income-producing work in that time, you just had to live on the 30 grand.
You’d have to pay all your bills on it, provide for all your daily needs. You’d have no additional money coming in, and all your entertainment needs, your health needs, your travel and leisure needs, all would have to come out of that one chunk of money.
How long could you live on it?
Man and Animal
I’m carrying on a mostly-cordial argument over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable with a fellow named Michael M, an Objectivist and admirer of Ayn Rand.
I’ve been an admirer of Ayn Rand too – I think she was brilliant in the extreme – but I don’t revere her, as some people surely do. Some things, in my opinion, she simply got wrong.
This is my most recent answer to one of Michael’s points, that humans have reason and free will whereas animals have nothing but instincts.
…
Okay, this is absolutely, positively my last 2,000 words on the subject. 🙂
Seriously, one of the problems with replying to the arguments of a, for instance, anti-evolution type, is that they can pop out with a single sentence that contains three major mistakes, each of which can take pages to explain and correct.
So I’m focusing again on a single issue:
What do you have to be afraid of?
Everything is deep. Everything.
The simplest thing you can imagine – a grain of sand, or the fact that you have five toes on each foot – is filled with unimaginable complexities.
Even something as simple as sunlight, taken for granted for thousands of years by humans, turned out, once someone invented the prism, to be a mix of colored light. Strange to think that when you look into a bright white light, you’re also looking into a bright blue light. And a bright red light. A bright yellow light, and so on. But you are.
Light is deep, and so is everything else.
Atheists should grow some.
Jonah Goldberg is the author of “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning,” which I haven’t read, but which has one of those woo-woo doublespeak names – something on the order of “The Anti-White Genocidal History of the Murderous, Hateful American Indians, from the 1500s to the Present” – that doesn’t exactly inspire me to want to rush out and buy it.
I’m pretty sure I’ve also seen one or two atheist-bashing articles in the past by the guy. So when I saw this bit in the LA Times Opinion page online, I figured it wasn’t an April Fool’s Day joke, despite the April 1 date on it. (Evidently he liked the piece so much he repeated it in the National Review Online on April 2.)
Just FYI, it’s editors who typically choose the titles for articles, so I don’t blame Goldberg too much for the header, but the piece is called “Evolution of religious bigotry: The cowardice and intolerance of slapping a Darwin fish on your car bumper.”
Ahem. Yeah.