God Wants You to Be Confused Friday, May 29 2009
singularity 6:31 pm
Steven points us to a humorous page on one of our favorite religious sites, Rapture Ready, that shows that the Rapturist Christians are on to us. As always, this means shits and giggles all around. Fun for the whole family.
Here’s a quote from the piece, quoting the Bible:
“At one time the whole world spoke a single language and used the same words. As the people migrated eastward, they found a plain in the land of Babylonia and settled there. They began to talk about construction projects. ‘Come,’ they said, ‘let’s make great piles of burnt brick and collect natural asphalt to use as mortar. Let’s build a great city with a tower that reaches to the skies – a monument to our greatness! This will bring us together and keep us from scattering all over the world.’
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘If they can accomplish this when they have just begun to take advantage of their common language and political unity, just think of what they will do later. Nothing will be impossible for them! Come, let’s go down and give them different languages. Then they won’t be able to understand each other.’
In that way, the Lord scattered them all over the earth; and that ended the building of the city. That is why the city was called Babel, because it was there that the Lord confused the people by giving them many languages, thus scattering them across the earth.” Genesis 11:1-9 (NLT)
Thanks a lot, God. Why you gotta be like that?
Another quote:
“Why do the nations rage? Why do the people waste their time with futile plans? The kings of the earth prepare for battle; the rulers plot together against the Lord and against His Anointed One. ‘Let us break their chains,’ they cry. ‘And free ourselves from this slavery.’ But the one who rules in heaven laughs. The Lord scoffs at them.” Psalm 2:1-4 (NLT)
Could this passage describe an attempt by post-biological humans to overthrow the rule of God? Could the chains which hold them in bondage be the “severe limitations of their biological form”? Remember, when this event occurs, Satan and his fallen angels are also inhabitants of the earth:
How can we defeat God when he won’t even show himself and fight like a man? Oh, maybe because God is completely made up.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:35 am
All I’m afraid of is that the folks taken over by the memes we call religions, do one or all of the following:
1) take away money from tech development
2) criminalize tech development
3) criminalize anything that has no valid reason to be illegal (i.e. does no harm to anyone, but someone’s superstition)
4) prey on my kids (not pray, though I don’t want that either, because it looks plain crazy and therefore scary; I don’t want a witchdoctor throwing chicken bones around either) and turn them into mumbojumbo-spitting memeoids like themselves
5) hurt me
6) kill me
All of these are valid concerns that their memes are documented to have made them do. Anything else they do I can just ignore. Anything to add?
Clearly, anyone who today falls for the dumb old memes’ tricks that were developed by unscrupulous persons for their own personal status and gain (Hello Pope! Life is sweet eh? Just throw a bit of sand in their eyes and ask for money…), in pre-scientific, ultra-violent, misogynistic, life-and-reality-hating cultures (sort of understandable, because in those days life really was a pain in the… all places), doesn’t have a robust and intelligent enough a mind to be worth my time or concern. To anyone who says “Oh you’re so wrong, these memes are totally true, and give my life so much meaning and happiness. Please take my meme to your brain.” I say the dirtiest word known to them “Science”.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:17 am
To Me and My Memes. A coupla questions.
Why do you consider religion and science to be mutually exclusive? By what definition of religion? And do you think religion itself is the problem, or merely ‘bad religion? Can religion be improved upon like other aspects of our lives?
May 30th, 2009 at 6:46 am
You could ask me:
Why do you consider fairy tales and science text books to be mutually exclusive?
By what definition of fairy tales?
And do you think fairy tales that just turn your brain off and make you smile stupidly is the problem or fairy tales that command you to do evil deeds and make people feel bad about themselves for no good reason?
Can fairy tales be improved upon like other aspects of our lives?
There’s a thing called evidence (which some intransigent people, who take no story for an answer, we call scientists, gather by repeatable, verifiable observations of reality) one of them has and is based upon and one of them hasn’t and spits upon - or do you know of a religion that seeks evidence? (Yeah, you can call science a type of religion. You can also call health a type of terrible debilitating sickness, zero in the bank a type of immense wealth, and baldness a type of flowing, lustrous, curly thick hairstyle.)
May 30th, 2009 at 8:50 am
But see… I didn’t ask those questions. And the fact you think they’re interchangeable illustrates my point, which is that those who criticize religion by reducing it to the level of fairy tales do so in error. My intuitive response to the use of such rhetoric is the same as my reaction to closed minded religious superstition — both make my skin crawl for their banality and their stupidity. As someone who (like many others) is alarmed by the destructive power religion possesses, I’m pretty disappointed to see these kinds of lightweight arguments are so in vogue. The mainstream religious traditions are complicated, sophisticated and (often) subtle. …They are worthy of smarter critics.
Also, why would I call science a type of religion? I didn’t even hint at such an opinion.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Ok, let’s have it - what makes them other than fairy tales - stories, judging by their content, made up by illiterate, unscientific, ignorant, stupid, fearful, oppressive, procreational activities-obsessed, coercive, bloodthirsty, murderous, genocidal, infanticidal - must I go on… - oh and of course explaining-everything-by-magic-and-miracles, people in ancient (and modern) times?
What makes them other than stories that have transformed and migrated from one mind to another over millennia until put into books where they still won’t stand still, but are subject to ongoing revision, leading to wars between believers of story version 1.0 and version 1.5?
This understanding of what religions are is based on evidence of what exactly has, and indeed must have happened, for us to now have the range of interrelated stories with a clear succession of versions of the exact same basic stories, with the same characters and events. The fact that we can witness this simple process of meme evolution continuing today unabated is evidence of this process having taken place in earlier times. We may not be able to observe biological evolution in real-time, but we can observe memes being created, being changed, and being forgotten all the time. You, too, can name not a few infamous persons who have contributed to this process in modern times. WW II was largely the result of one guy getting infected and infecting a nation by really nasty memes and turning them into his own more virulent version.
What makes you discount this view? What evidence do you have for them being anything else but exactly that - stories evolved over millennia in people’s minds, without a shred of evidence to ever support even one of their claims? Not then, not now, not ever.
If not evidence, what logical train of thought can lead you to come to a different conclusion?
I’ll, of course, become a believer if you succeed in convincing me - all you need to use is evidence and logic - in whatever version of whatever story you fancy. But I won’t update my beliefs when the story, inevitably, changes. I’ll, of course, think of v. 1.1 as heretical, worth fighting against, with my life, as any true memewarrior must.
Be my meme.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
I for one can’t understand how one can consider a story as true without evidence. It’s like someone telling you
-This thing flies (pointing at a thing that I’ve never seen fly and which doesn’t seem to be able to fly; a mountain - that’s my analogue for a god, a supposedly big big thing, that’s supposedly capable of doing big big things)
-Cool, show me.
-No, I can’t. You must believe it does.
I’m supposed to believe it does without ever seeing it fly. I can’t. I don’t know how to trick the mind to do that. It’s utterly beyond me.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
God or science? A belief in one weakens positive feelings for the other
May 30th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Just Me and My Memes,
Thankyou!
You have successfully (more or less) argued against intolerant fundamentalism. I still feel that even fundamentalist religious doctrine is more sophisticated than most fairy tales, and that we have to account for more than mere irrationality in our attempt to understand its persuasiveness, but then I’m really splitting hairs. You and I agree on the basics!
So… why do you equivocate between fundamentalism and other forms of religion?
You seem especially hung up on belief, even going so far as to invite me to convince you of the facts of any religion I choose, as though I could, or would want to. Hint: I don’t believe in any of it either.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:49 am
God is alive and real and we have yet to subject him to the Guillotine.
How many generations of robust selection pressure caused by angry mobs with ranged weapons do you need to make healthy tigers and wolves terrified to attack bipedals?
How many generations of dictatorship would you need to instill in humans an instinctive urge to obey a real or absentee tyrant, ‘more terrified of a society without the constant sadamic cohesion imposed by ruthless, indiscriminate patriarchal rage’ than they would be of the risk of a really bad and incompetent tyrannical heir.
My hypothesis is that most of humanity has a bred psychological surrender reflex towards a old-testamental angry bearded man dictatorship and acts with acute existential confusion if for some reason the dictator is absent. Humans have an inbred need for this fear and this genotype has made societal complexity, as well as the insanity of largescale warfare, possible.
How big a slice of humanity were excluded from breeding to beget a result such as this? 10%? 90%?
May 31st, 2009 at 9:59 am
‘My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.”
–Governator in a 1990 interview with U.S. News
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:05 pm
I’m not against belief, I’m against belief in lies. Belief and faith are necessary features of a cognitive system that have been hijacked by the memes or more accurately memeplexes called religions. Belief in unproven and particularly unprovable things is a waste of time and keeps your neurons from doing something useful. There are much more productive beliefs, such as ones that can be verified by experiment. If you think the truth hurts, try lies. (”If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”)
All forms of religion are just a bunch of memes tricking your mind into giving them a place to live and multiply. The problem with these particular memes is that they do not represent reality, but are arbitrary false data that has been generated by their ignorant and often violent hosts in a time when accurate data, science, was missing. They lead to conflict with reality which always hurts.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:20 pm
At the core of every belief system, aka memeplex, is not a truth, but a lie. A belief system is a lie system. An organized system of lies, lies that support other lies, a memeplex of memes that support other memes.
Memes don’t care whether they represent reality, i.e. are scientific knowledge, or misrepresent it, i.e. are lies. All they care about is that you “take them to your heart” and spew them around because that’s how they survive - when the host dies, they must have been copied to a new host or stored in some way or they die.
June 7th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
“TRIBULATION INDEX” becomes “RAPTURE INDEX”
For 18 centuries all organized churches and all official Christian theology embraced the “Tribulation Index” (that is, the essence of it without using the label). In recent years a Nebraska “rustler” has been changing it into the “Rapture Index.” For more info Google “The Rapture Index (Mad Theology)” and “Open Letter to Todd Strandberg.” For some background on “rapture rustling” read “Pretrib Rapture Dishonesty” on the “Powered by Christ Ministries” site. But, pardner, you’d better take some tranquilizers before you lasso any of the above items!