Really, you can’t make this stuff up. An angry letter writer hates those atheists who are making all that racket, and believes that Vox Day’s awful little anti-atheist book refutes them all perfectly. You’re probably already questioning his sanity and intelligence, but then he takes one more step to impeach his own judgment.
This brilliant critique clearly demonstrates why a mere anti-blasphemy law is not sufficient. In the interests of rationality and common sense, the legislation should go further and label atheism a thought crime.
Wait, what? Has he read 1984? Does he understand what a thought crime is? Does he understand that the book is a critique of totalitarianism? Most of us understand that the concepts of the totalitarian state described in that book were not presented as a recipe for a utopia, but a nightmare.
“Most of us” apparently does not include fans of Vox Day.
Time for more Annie Lennox, PZ.
Two words: Poe’s Law.
Two more words: Ebert’s Fallacy.
From the linked article:
“Well it turns out they are annoyed at the prospect that proposed legislation will make it an offence to gratuitously offend religion: in reality, Catholicism (their big bogeyman).“
Why is it that these sorts of people think that we’re specifically targeting their particular flavour of religion, as opposed to religion in general?
I wonder if he read the other atheist demolishing book by Vox Day’s fellow MENSA member?
I believe there is a dog and a blanky involved.
Most of us saw the illegal activities of Nixon as a kind of warning. Cheney and others were taking notes on how not to get caught next time. Kinda like 1984 ought not to be a blueprint for the future.
Enjoy.
This insane religious moron thinks atheists are the dangerous threats to society! Only to his own demented ilk does his thoughts and words, and potential threats ring true. Has he any inkling how his demented rantings sounds to a person, even if that person is only modestly religious? We scare with our appeal to reason and independence from imaginary gods? Mind boggling.
In his book, Theo also claims that he understands genetic algorithms because he used them in a game he designed. This does not withstand scrutiny and I suspect it’s a falsehood.
The challenge still remains for him to back up his claims, or retract.
Seems to me to be a perfect example of trolling?
he says:
what kind of ideology gets it kicks out of gratuitously offending the sincerely held views of others?
then:
In the interests of rationality and common sense, the legislation should go further and label atheism a thought crime
i’ll bet he cant see the irony here…
Why do the Catholics think we’re targeting them specifically?
Polly want a cracker?
http://blog.aflcio.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/specter.jpg
Enjoy.
Uh, any critic of movies, music or food? How about someone who’s probably a hero to you, Bill “Yell really loud and you win an argument” O’Riley? Everyone attacks “sincerely held views”, and religion really shouldn’t get any special treatment.
My favourite Vox Day moment was when he challenged PZ to a radio interview, claiming he had a irrefutable argument for God. When asked to put it up on here for all to see, his excuse was that he hasn’t written it down yet… so he has time to organise a debate on radio then spent time antagonising PZ about not doing it, but doesn’t have the time to write down the argument that I assume would only take a few minutes to say?
Is it not fairly obvious that this letter is a parody?
Bless Vox.
Here the DI tries to spin its claims into a “plea for academic freedom,” and Vox just turns around and states what a horrible cesspool it all really is.
Friends like these, indeed…
He’s doing exactly what an atheist should be doing to discredit ID’s agenda, except that I don’t think anyone could bear “thinking” like he does long enough to build up credibility.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Was it not Jesus who defined what a thought crime? Not just committing an action a sin, thinking about committing a sin is a sin.
I doubt if he has even heard of George Orwell much less read his book, 1984. His kind tend to be incurious and just plain not too bright or educated.
He has probably heard the term thoughtcrime somewhere. And thinks it is a good thing.
Quoted, with relieved approval, for truth.
Poe’s law.
I don’t know. I can see where it could be a parody, calling Vox Day “brilliant.” Then again there are people that stupid out there.
If it is a parody, it’s a competent one, and I can’t call it obvious.
Remember when Silver Fox (it may have been facilis) quoted from Vox Day’s book at us? That was lulztastic
The first line makes me guess it’s not a parody.
Some belligerent religionists do think that merely saying “God” offends atheists. It comes from that idea that we secretly acknowledge his existence and hate him.
I would think it difficult for an atheist to brainstorm that particular meme of atheists as so thin-skinned. It’s not one of the theist delusions that we commonly joke about.
Well, Vox’s fan, though Vox himself does well enough on his own.
Glen D
http://electricconsciousness.tripod.com
This is just another case of “Christians are a persecuted majority” whining by a Christian.
What proposed legislation? Is that the UN effort or something in the USA?
It couldn’t possibly be legal under the US constitution.
It’s apparent the author of said letter has baked his brain cells in Guinness.
I thought Poe’s Law applied to postings, not editorial letters, but I suppose that’s not a strict adherence.
While I am certain that religion of any kind requires a limited self-awareness of all it’s adherents, I find it hard to believe that the letter-writer is able to be that blind to the hypocrisy they’ve spewed forth.
I want this to be a Poe. It has to be a Poe. Not even cognitive dissonance can explain such glaring self-contradiction.
Why does the media even give these guys a voice? That was the most hatefull peice of shite that I’ve read in a long time.
“Why does the media even give these guys a voice? That was the most hatefull peice of shite that I’ve read in a long time.”
Isn’t the point that everyone should have a voice, even if you find their viewpoint reprehensible?
Nope. They can say whatever crazy shit they want, but newspapers don’t have to print it.
I think that’s satire, Vox Day I’ve only heard of on the net, I doubt anyone old enough to be an Irish Catholic has heard of him.
Anyway, here’s a far better take on the law in an irish paper
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0505/1224245943373.html
I’m not convinced that it shouldn’t be a sin really. I don’t believe in god but I think a Christian can justify that one.
Typical reverse tactics. It’s like the Christard’s attempt to put the onus of disbelief on the disbeliever. WTF?? Lolz.
And they think they’re so clever doing this.
Taaaaaaaaaaarded. Yawn.
Sounds a little too unhinged to be Poe’s Law. More like one part anger, one part raging hypocrisy and one part enraged howler monkey hitting him over the head as he was writing this, adding to the already searing fury…
At one point I CONSIDERED thinking about committing a sin, but I laughed it off–laughter being the best meta-sin of all, you know.
Oh, Oh, PZ has broken the sanctity of the blog site. The Name VOX DAY was never to be mentioned here. Or at least that is what was implied once when I posted here noting that VOX had dated Ann Coulter. Give me some feedback here, is Vox and Ann in good graces here?
Oh. Oh. Sorry about that. Forgot to identify.
#33 is mine.
I love the fact that one of the adverts that came up for me on said website was the following:
What is Atheism?
Find the true definition of atheismNever Stop Thinking!
http://www.BetterThanFaith.com
Hee!
When the hell was this on RTE? Dammit I missed it!
Wait, Harris? Why not Dennet? Idiot doesn’t realize there is no unholy trinity, since there isn’t a clear group of 3.
Haha, the dude’s from Naaaaaavan. I love it when my roommates make fun of them.
I like his use of demeaning big words for youthful ways (“juvenalia” and “puerile”.) Right, food, more study, then maybe sleep.
Irish blaspheme law..
Oh, Oh, PZ has broken the sanctity of the blog site. The Name VOX DAY was never to be mentioned here.
The silly old goat is making shit up again. Such a clear example of the sad creature’s lack of understanding.
Although I did enjoy the lampooning animations to children’s interpretations of bible stories tonight (RTE 2 I think).
Maybe Irish Catholicism just seems extra funny to a godless fur-ner, though I see them make fun of it too.
And with all the Christian-friendly shit I see on TV, he has no right to complain.
The thing about 1984 is: if I was the one in control, it would be a utopia for me.
I don’t think the author is misunderstanding the situation.
I imagine that the scary little creep is envisioning himself with the reigns.
Some guy named “Eric” wrote
Does no one else find the irony in this statement amusing?
If you can’t figure out why people might object to you romantically linking Vox and Coulter, you’re even more stupid than I thought previously.
Read the Irish Tines article Fintain O’Toole that Marc Abian@29 pointed to. This is exactly the sort of ridicule that will sink a law as stupid as a blasphemy law.
Among the last few lines are
“How brilliant of Dermot Ahern to mark this important event in Irish intellectual life by reminding us of the absurdity of blasphemy laws.
Does he really think that it should be a crime to offend members of the Jedi church (from census returns that includes 70,000 people in Australia; 50,000 in New Zealand; 390,000 in the UK) by saying that a light sabre makes you look like a dork? Of course not.
With one satiric touch he has honoured the memory of Shaw, Yeats and Gregory and reminded us that blasphemy laws exist to protect, not religions, but bigots.”
Wonderful.
Jenine:
“Such a clear example of the sad creature’s lack of understanding.”
I just assumed Vox’s name was anathema here since one of his favorite pastimes seems to be trashing PZ.
“Also, why is the publicly-funded state broadcaster giving these airheads a platform for their dangerous juvenalia?”
well I suppose it’s the same reason that your view was given a chance to be heard….The Bill of Rights, you know the 1st Amendment- read it.. or take a tour…
(read this in an over exhuberant tour-guide voice..it’s funnier)
Welcome to the tour of the Bill of Rights. Our first stop is the First Amendment ( ooooh , aaahhh) yes! This is why we can make fun of religion and express ourselves in a public forum about new ideas and old without being burned at the stake or subjected to torture by rats. But be carefull! Many people don’t like to be challeged by different ideas and believe their’s are superior and thus try to forget or even abolish this treasured amendment. Here at the Contstitution Coalition we believe that every voice is important and no one should ever live in fear of Big Brother or thought crime!
I did once consider musing over pondering contemplating thinking about how to envizage deliberating committing a sin…
I just assumed Vox’s name was anathema here since one of his favorite pastimes seems to be trashing PZ.
Most of us here give no credence to anything VD has to say. Most of us mocked you because you use VD as some kind of authority figure who’s word carry weight. The use of VD’s name was never banned. You are making shit up. Nothing new for you.
No SF, wrong again. The only way for you not to be wrong here is simply to stop posting here. But that simple idea is beyond your meager understanding.
Vox Day is an illogical idiot, just like yourself. He gets into his imaginary deity and can’t explain anything with any logic, which is why your are attracted to him. Since we know logic and reason, we find both of you an anathema to this site.
Tis:
“people might object to you romantically linking Vox and Coulter”
You would be well advised Tis. to avoid listening to gossip, rumor and the like. Rash judgement is a no-no.
Tis:
“people might object to you romantically linking Vox and Coulter”
You would be well advised Tis. to avoid listening to gossip, rumor and the like. Rash judgement is a no-no.
I highly recommend Vox Day’s book. I particularly love the parts where he pulls out “Occam’s Chainsaw” and rubbishes those bad “New Atheist” arguments.
I read Dawkins (his section on Aquinas’ 5 ways is very bad. In fairness to Dawkins I thought Aquinas’ arguments were as absurd as he did when I first read them , but I have a friend who does research on Aquinas and his Aristotelian metaphysic and thought and he showed me they possessed much more depth that any modern thinker would not pick up on).
And in your case, even what you consider well reasoned judgment is still a laughable bit of reasoning. If you want us to quit laughing at you, cease posting here.
You would be well advised Tis. to avoid listening to gossip, rumor and the like. Rash judgement is a no-no.
Silly old goat, seeing that is was you spreading that bit of rumor, the advise you gave actually works. No one takes your braying seriously.
Wow. Judging by those poll results, James Dobson was right. America IS awash in reas..er I mean, evil.
And we consider you opinion not to be worth the electrons used to post it. You haven’t shown any physical evidence for your imaginary deity, so you are just a deluded fool to us. You will gain wisdom when you acknowledge you are a fool to believe in Yahweh, and not the tooth fairy or Odin.
Janine wrote (about Silver Fox):
There’s only one thing worse than a raving turd like Vox Day, and that’s a fawning, simpering, sycophant parroting the inane blather of a raving turd – i.e. you, Silver Fox.
And I don’t know why you bother; you seem to be able to come up with plenty of poorly thought-out and easily refuted rubbish for us to mock you for – and at least when you do that we might contemplate the possibility of perhaps having some very small amount of respect for you for at least being original in your stupidity.
Raven:
It’s Ireland, not the US. The letter’s printed in the Irish Independent (.ie is the country code for Ireland).
Tell it to the kids.
For the first time ever, between 30% and 40% of Americans under 30 have no religious preference.
I recommend Vox Day’s book too. It is a model of misdirection, distortion, obfuscation, faulty reasoning, and good old narcissistic ridiculousness.
I also recommend reading it side-by-side with Deacon Duncan’s sytematic chapter-by-chapter dismantling of it at evangelical realism:
http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/category/tia/
Well, its true that that moron does not have to worry about ever getting caught by a thought crime. He has never experienced a thought!
Ineffable at #51:
I invite you to go back and re-read what you wrote in the section quoted.
No kings,
Robert
Considering the pounding VD has received for that ill-thought-out book – much of it from those few more perceptive Christians whose distaste for him matches our own – you’d think that his obsequious sycophants might be less enthusiastic about reminding us their master’s well-documented failure.
@ #51: That means that your friend, being a modern thinker, could not possibly have picked up on on them.
I recommend VD’s (Veneral Distemper) book should be used as barf bags on airlines, when not being used as foot rests.
Ah yeah, so atheism is an ideology now… and bald is a hair color…
Then why don’t you share that depth with us?
You see, I don’t doubt Aquinas’s ability to logically derive conclusions from premises. He just assumed lots of premises instead of ever getting the idea of testing them.
They already have thoughtcrimes embodied in their 10 commandments, so why should they have problems with one more. Of course, for some of these people, like anyone who thinks Vox Day is more than a pathetic joke, all thought is a crime. After all, they have a book that tells them exactly what to think and do, or else they will be punished.
PZ blogged about this a few days ago. Was a huge thread. How did you manage to miss it?
Wouldn’t surprise me if that friend turned out to be a more medieval thinker…
Atheism is ideological when it assumes that all should share the same set of assumptions about the world and then draw the same conclusions, namely, there is no God.
1984 is a utopia, or, the logical end of what utopia is to do – create an environment of absolute sameness which can only be coerced to exist. Thus, it is a negative utopia since to achieve utopia individual freedom and identity must be subsumed to a collective ethos. The military to this degree functions like a utopia.
If atheists would allow religious people to get along and religious people would allow atheists to get along, then PZ Myers would have little to say, correct? Yet the consistent dovetailing of one’s epistemological preference with a political agenda of somehow quashing religion in the name of freedom of the intellect is indeed an ideological persuasion. Otherwise, why would you care if someone believed in God who really did not give a damn if you would not believe in God at all?
What is needed is for the religious/fundamentalist right to quit playing politics, shut up publicly on moral matters, and just retreat to their churches. Once that happens, we will be happy to leave them alone, since they are leaving us and public policy alone. Until then, they will be vilified as they should be.
AtheismAunicornism is ideological when it assumes that all should share the same set of assumptions about the world and then draw the same conclusions, namely, thereis no Godare no unicorns.Yep, you’ve got to hate all those mean ideological aunicornists out there, demanding that people shouldn’t believe in unicorns.
Janine the Obscure:
” Most of us mocked you because you use VD as some kind of authority figure who’s word carry weight.”
Wrong Oh obscure one. I consistently said that, on content, I found little to agree with re. Vox Day. What I said was that I admired his ability to use the English language with such ease and grace. So, if “most of us mocked you” because you thought I attributed some kind of “authority” to the Voxer, then “most” of you need to take a course in reading comprehension.
Drew Tatusko @ 68
That last sentence is not really an argument worth debating. It is bullshit because you believe in something that does not exist, and expect the atheist to accept this and your indifferent attitude to his nonbelief as totally acceptable and not worth arguing over. I may not believe in an imaginary god, but I sure as hell am not going to accept your nonsense and dismiss it with my damn indifference.
For example . I thought the “unmoved mover” argument was really stupid (me being ignorant of Aquinas’ metaphysic) but as another philosopher described the argument.
“But what does Aquinas really say?1 First of all, for Aquinas “motion” means “change,” and “change” means “reduction of something from potentiality
to actuality.” When Aquinas says that something “moves,” he means that something changes from being only potentially such-and-such (say, potentially hot), to being actually such-and-such (actually hot). And he thinks
nothing can be the cause of its own change. You need something that is already actually hot to heat up what is only potentially hot.So, anything that changes needs to be changed by something else. If that
“something else” also undergoes change, then it needs to be changed by something else again. But Aquinas doesn’t believe an infinite regress here is coherent. If stone A is heated by stone B, which is heated by stone C,
and so on forever, Aquinas doesn’t think we’d have any explanation for why any of these stones are hot.
To explain this wave of heat moving from stone to stone, you need something to start the wave. And something that gets hot only by the influence of another hot thing won’t do the trick. That just shifts the burden of explanation
back one level. It would be like explaining the movement of one train car by saying that it’s pulled by the one ahead of it, which is pulled by the one ahead of it . . . and so on forever. Since no train car in this entire infinite series moves by itself, where is this movement coming from?
The mere fact that the train goes on forever does not eliminate the need for a locomotive.
And so Aquinas thinks we can’t have an infinite regress. We need a starting point, something that initiated the whole series of changes. But what would such a “starter” have to be like? First of all, to change other things
it would have to possess already the property it produces in others. But if at some point it acquired this property from something else, then we’d be back in the regress. So, in order to end the regress, we need something that
doesn’t change, because it has always been fully actualized – something that,by virtue of what it is, has eternally possessed the properties that other things
only come to possess.
Presumably, each property that things come to possess could have its origin in a different eternal thing: an eternal flame for heat, an eternal genius
for intelligence, etc. But Aquinas has a simpler view. He proposes to explain “motion” by reference to a single source, something whose power
to move other things flows from itself, rather than from an outside source.
And what would such a being have to be like in order to have such power by virtue of its own nature? It would have to be a lot like God.”
(quoted from “Is God a Delusion?”)
“Just what is their gripe?”
Simple: idiocy. That’s all there is to it.
And Silver Fox, you need to take a reading comprehension course if you think your feeble opinions mean anything here. You need to stop embarrassing yourself by posting here. Your failure to understand that says all we need to know about your lack of intelligence.
Yawn, Ineffable the idiot thinks he has a point. It was refuted before he even made it if he cared to do the research. What a shithead.
Silly old goat, I am aware that you said you did not agree with everything that VD said. Yet for a while, you kept trotting his words, as if there were any worth to what he had to say. And all of this new bullshit does not push aside the older bullshit about VD’s name being anathema.
I am hardly being obscure. But, silly old goat, your are very fucking obtuse.
(Waiting to hear from concern trolls about my tone.)
You aren’t harsh enough. We need a fox roast…
Ineffable @ 73
All that mush and then we get what Aquinas thinks. I think of and have as much regard for Aquinas as I do for religious idiots. He may be VD’s idol but he is shit to me.
Such a shame that maggie took away her shining brilliance so that there would be someone to talk about Aquinas with Fucking Ineffable.
“He proposes to explain “motion” by reference to a single source, something whose power to move other things flows from itself, rather than from an outside source.And what would such a being have to be like in order to have such power by virtue of its own nature? It would have to be a lot like God.”
This is not in any way a novel or “more sophisticated” understanding of Aquinas. How exactly do we get from “something” to “a being”? So long as this step is no more explicit than it has ever been, the argument fails as always has.
Drew Tatsuko writes:
Atheism is ideological when it assumes that all should share the same set of assumptions about the world and then draw the same conclusions, namely, there is no God.
Since both theism and atheism make contradictory assertions about objective reality, either one is right and the other wrong – or there is no objective reality. It’s that simple.
Put differently, it’s not a matter of opinion. Unless you’re a postmodernist. :D
Ineffable:
That extended form of the argument is exactly what I understand the unmoved mover argument to be, and quite obvious. It is still flawed, in many ways. On a pedantic level, a chemical reaction can produce more heat than was put into it. More abstractly, it suffers from the flaw that it assumes the argument it intends to make, or by assuming premises not shown to be true or likely (depending on how you view the argument). The first time is by assuming that there needs to be an original mover, the second time by assuming that there is only one original mover, and the third time by assuming that if there is an original mover it would need to be like god (whichever one you choose).
The fact that Aquinas spent a lot of time on something, and that many people base their philosophy/theology off of him, does not make him good at what he did, or make what he said true, or even mean that his work has hidden depths not possible for others to easily see and/or critique.
You didn’t read the book, but you listened to your pastor who told you what George Orwell meant to say.
Oceania is not about sameness. The war exists to serve the interests of the Inner Party members, who enjoy an excellent standard of living. The Outer Party gets a completely different lifestyle and different responsibilities, providing the Inner Party with a functioning bureaucracy. And the Proles get still another lifestyle, considerable freedom, access to the culture and books of the past (not that they would read them), opportunity to live their lives any way they like, as differently as they like, as long as they do not threaten the Party structure.
The book is many things, but not an indictment of utopianism. The primary theme is how war can be used as an excuse to oppress the citizen of one’s own nation.
Such religious people, who do not care to spread their religion, are so rare that it’s dishonest to imply the conversation ought to be about them.
ineffable@73:
Profound as it may seem to you, that argument is simply:
1. Things happen because of energy transfer.
2. The energy must come from somewhere.
3. I don’t know where the energy comes from.
4. Therefore some sort of god exists to provide the initial energy.
5. It must, obviously, be the Christian God.
Steps 1-3 are reasonable. But assuming a god because you can’t explain something is ridiculous in modern times, now that our knowledge has expanded somewhat.
Assuming that the god is the Christian god is the height of arrogance.
I thought he was very nice for an xian because he didn’t say that all muslims, jews, buddhists, other xian cults, pagans, and so on need to be murdered to please his god; on the other hand is there any doubt that he doesn’t believe that but just won’t say it?
SF have you done your homework?
I responded to this once before, along this line:
The big question is, though, what kind of ideology gets it[s] kicks out of gratuitously taking offense at the factually supported views held by others? It seems sophomoric, soporific, tres fantastique* and vulgar.
*pardon my French if I spelleded it rong
“I want this to be a Poe. It has to be a Poe. Not even cognitive dissonance can explain such glaring self-contradiction.”
Reminds me of a guy on the news once who said, (re some graffiti problems) “These kids have no respect for human life. They should get the death penalty.”
Really. No Poe. He meant it.
Drew Tatsuko #68
When religious people do and say stupid, irrational and evil things then they should not be given a pass. When fundie ministers insist that a 2,500 year old creation myth be taught in public schools in place of science, they should not be allowed to get along. When the Mormon and Catholic churches give millions of dollars to a campaign to deny rights to a minority, they should not be allowed to get along. When an archbishop complains about a nine year old rape victim having an abortion, he should not be allowed to get along. When Muslims stone a rape victim to death they should not be allowed to get along.
In case anyone’s looking for a good dose of ID and YEC craziness check out this out this thread:
http://www.redstate.com/settingsun/2009/05/06/the-two-sentence-response-to-chris-matthews-on-evolution/
Christians do believe in thought crimes. Lust is the same as physically committing adultery. Hate is the same as physically committing murder.
Ineffable @73 uses the metaphor of a train, and how the cars follow one another.
He says, “. . . like explaining the movement of one train car by saying that it’s pulled by the one ahead of it, which is pulled by the one ahead of it . . . and so on forever.”
Now, I know it’s a small thing and in everyday business it matters not, but the lead car or the locomotive does not pull the car behind it.
If you examine how train cars are coupled you will plainly see that the key part of the coupling of the leading car is behind the key part of the following car. Thus the transmission of force from the leading car to the following car is a push.
Yeah, I know it’s just a tiny detail; out of such is reality made.
@15-
Thank reason I saw through that at an early age.
Nerd:
“And Silver Fox, you need to take a reading comprehension course if you think your feeble opinions mean anything here. You need to stop embarrassing yourself by posting here. Your failure to understand that says all we need to know about your lack of intelligence.”
Fallacy ad hominem
#58 is mine.
Don’t want PZ to charge me with morphing into anonymity
Drew at #78, you seem to be somewhat reasonable so I will ask you this. How can you justify your ideological persuasions by pointing at someone like me and saying that I have ideological persuasions as if that was something dirty? Does my fault (or enhancement) make your identical one somehow more more desirable and less offensive? If so, how? The process does not appear to work in reverse. At least from my perspective.
I ask because it is clear to me that one who holds and defends a position based upon ideas is , perforce, an ideologue IF they ignore the fact that any idea can be negated by new knowledge. I don’t see how it could be otherwise unless someone thinks that a considered world view based on observable evidence is purposefully antagonistic to those who don’t hold that view, or who lack the facts to support a valid world view. Someone might then exhibit many of the signs of imaginary persecution.
Up through about 1984, the book was indeed generally viewed as a cautionary portrayal of Hell on Earth. We got the first real inklings that there is a segment of our population that may hold a different opinion when Stephen Colbert gave his talk at that dinner and it was pretty clear most of those present thought Colbert was “one of them”. Well, a recent poll discovered they still feel that way, i.e. think his show is a documentary. So they probably do think 1984 is a prescription for how things should be. Very scary that they got hold of the reigns, very lucky for everyone on Earth that we wrested them back. Assuming we survive the aftermaths, economic, political, climate….
Big Dumb:
“SF have you done your homework?”
Yes, months ago, and I posted it. You didn’t have the good sense to understand it then, and, apparently, still don’t.
Silver Fox has been repeatedly and soundly refuted with solid logic for almost a year now. After all these months, we can insult him all we want until he takes the hint and stops posting here, or actually gets a clue as to what is required for a real argument. Since the latter is unlikely to happen, he needs to do the former.
Sorry, you failed then because we didn’t notice you actually making a cogent answer. So repost it.
Why not? I’ve seen some incredible cognitive dissonance in my life. Especially from mentally-ill people such as psychopaths.
First, the psychopath’s brain really just doesn’t process emotion like yours and mine. It can understand it in our way. It can mimic it and the psychopath can pantomime normal emotional responses. But it just doesn’t really, truly experience it through the normal human experience.
Second, cognitive dissonance is, essentially, an EMOTIONAL process where noticing the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which can be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other negative emotional states.
If you suffer from psychopathy, you may be damaged enough that you’ll be extremely unlikely to feel cognitive dissonance.
Personally, I think Vox Day is a narcissistic psychopath. I really can’t recollect ever seeing anyone so stuck on his self-perceived brilliance yet suffer such an amazing lack of actual, serious accomplishment to “prove” his brilliance while, simultaneously, proffing so many rambling, shoddy, incomplete and incompetant articles/columns in which he routinely demonstrates bizarre thinking, inappropriate emotional expression and a distinct lack of empathy for his fellow man.
Seeing all that… I have no reason to believe Vox Day would see the irony of his contridictory positions or suffer from any sort of cognitive dissonance for them. He’s just… broken and defective. A product of his horrible environment.
Sorry bud, but no the hell you did not.
And the thread in question wasn’t months ago, it was less than one month ago.
Did you read the link I gave you on 501c3 from the IRS? And were you able to pick out the parts that specifically address your idiocy in the Christan Nation thread.
You incredible ignoramus.
Wow. Fractal wrongness at it’s best. It was, simply put, a dystopian warning of the totalitarian state and the dangers of government propaganda.
Ahem.
Posted by: Silver Fox | January 8, 2009 11:54 AM
Posted by: Silver Fox | January 8, 2009 1:05 PM
Posted by: Silver Fox | January 23, 2009 11:02 PM
Oh boy. I got a new client last week. He runs a 501(c)(3). A different CPA gave him some advice. He followed it. Now he’s run into me.
And has learned that even, supposed, professionals (this one wasn’t trained in this area at all) may not know the law. In this case, his 501(c)(3) has run afoul of Section 511 (Unrelated Business Taxable Income) because neither he nor the other CPA understood the “substantially related” provisions of the Regulations in 1.513-1.
Now he’s freaked out…
He’ll probably find a different CPA. One who doesn’t actually know the law. Like most CPAs. And will do the return wrong.
Wrong, of course, won’t matter right up until he gets audited and there is no 990-T attached to his 990. Then he’s doomed. OTOH, if he takes my advice and controls the presentation of the information, he still won’t have any tax and the IRS, if he’s audited, will pass on any adjustments for various complex reasons in the audit process.
Anyway, my point is that providing a link to Sec 501(c)(3)… Ah, people don’t get tax law. Including those you think would.
So I would doubt anyone sold on some particular wacko belief would really interpret the law and regulations properly in that case. Sort of casting pearls in front of swine…
Standard boilerplate atheism-as-worst-thing-ever bullshit.
The violent, irrational, foaming-at-the-mouth reaction that the mere mention of atheism/atheists can elicit in these sorts of people is a shining example of the proverbial lady protesting too much.
Atheism poses an inherent challenge to any theistic belief system, and goodness knows, your average theist doesn’t deal well with challenges to his precious intellectual house of cards. It seems ridiculous to consider atheism as a “belief system” — a term that inevitably suggests all sorts of woo and irrational “faith” — but fine. Even playing by their rules, atheism should be as protected and respected as any other “belief” (ugh), and it’s telling that these folks who are always bleating about persecution and intellectual freedom and whatnot are more than willing to shut down, shun, hate, deride, and consider a “thought criminal,” any atheist. Very telling indeed.
I just threw up in my mouth.
getting to be about time for a new set of finely inscribed stone tablets by you know who.
Yes, and lets be clear, IANAL but the link I provided, at least to my non lawyery self, explains in easy to parse language exactly why the arguments Silver Fox was trying and failing so miserably to make in that thread were shit.
To the point that I’m curious if SF was even aware of what 501c3 was.
But your point is taken.
Is there anything called pulling that doesn’t break down the same way? Isn’t this to say that there is no such thing as “pulling”?
In that sense….
Magnets pull.
Vacuum cleaners don’t.
Silver Fox, amongst your homework assignments was the task of disproving the existence of all the gods of other human religions which you don’t subscribe to – because you yourself claimed that atheism is invalid because it can’t disprove the Christian god.
Where, exactly, did you post your disproofs of all the other gods? There are a lot of them; surely such a large post wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.
Or are you referring to your laughable attempt to avoid that task by arguing that there could only be one god and that one god had to be your version of the Christian god? Sadly – for you – since that argument consisted only of you spouting unsupported, wildly speculative claims regarding your supposed god’s alleged qualities, it was not accepted by anyone here.
If you want to resubmit – assuming you can come up with more than ‘I believe in my god and only my god because the bible and lots of other people say so; here’s some drivel that I’ve found to try and justify it’ – then maybe we’ll pass you on the assignment.
Until then you’ve got FAIL written on every line of every page.
Janine, OMnivote @ # 15: Was it not Jesus who defined what [is] a thought crime?
If you really wanna get into that, there’s a commandment about coveting which apparently holds precedence.
Kseniya | May 7, 2009 11:24 PM
Precisely, Kseniya.
I mentioned this minor fact in the same spirit in which someone once mentioned the conundrum of the cart before the horse.
The meaning is clear to most, that a cause must precede an effect. This is still an imperfect art due to the difficulty of determining which actually came first. Minds predisposed or preprogramed to accept magic’s authority over plain evidence are at a loss to explain natural processes. Thus the angst that accompanies ignorance. I suppose it is unavoidable by virtue of the fact that ignorance is so endemic. In the same fashion as the task of making consumer products fool proof nearly impossible due to the fact that fools are so ingenuous.
Putting the cart behind the horse would be perfectly OK if carts were built backwards. But they are not. Still, a horse pushes the cart, whether ahead or behind. One of those pesky restraints of physics.
strange gods before me asks a reasonable question,
Hell, I dunno. One would have to map the transference of energy between all known and theoretical particles at all possible energies. But the thought experiment could be done.
The notion I entertain here is that the ability to do so at will is just like the notion that one can petition the lord with prayer. Extreme expectations based on scant data have a habit of falling face down and not mentioned any more by their former shills.
One time, when my brother and I first built some Estes model rockets, we seriously discussed the means of achieving orbit. With models that reached the wondrous loft of a half mile.
Such sweet faith reminds me of good old Revival Tabernacle, where nothing was too good. (As long as the elders buffaloed the congregation and judged merely on doctrine. Or personal failing and prejudice. (Which was frequently observed by me.))
Crudely, I do see your point (or some sense, anyway) in your splitting the push-pull continuum in a non-intuitive place, but there are other ways to do it. When you pull your chin up to a bar, your fingers are actually pushing on it; the pulling is what your muscles are doing, where the work is being done. The train-car or horse-cart examples, the ‘pulling’ makes sense in terms of parts of the linkage being under tension. But back in the misty roots of our language and intuition, push : pull :: motion away : motion towards, regardless of the actual mechanics. ‘Come/go’ and ‘bring/send’ make the same sort of distinction without implying mechanical details. Some languages undoubtedly dispense with the distinction (or leave it to prepositions and adverbs), just as we can do by using other verbs (force, cause to move, etc.).
We cannot and should not make inferences regarding the fundamental physics or ontology of a situation by analysing the linguistic properties of a proposition. ‘Unmoved mover’ is as valid an argument as one of those trick demonstrations that 1 = 0, based on a fudged-over division-by-zero.
Nerd:
“Sorry, you failed then because we didn’t notice you actually making a cogent answer. So repost it.”
That was my point. Big Dumb didn’t have the good sense to recognize a “cogent” answer then. He still doesn’t since he continues to ask for “homework”. As I recall, the “homework” was posted more than once.
Silver Fox, you never once posted anything that was even remotely like a demonstration of how Faith In GOD is the foundation of all knowledge, nor did you ever post anything that demonstrated that you have special insights superior to those of atheists thanks in part to your faith.
Moses of Yewhew:
“Actually Vox is one of the last of the Renaissance men. He is an explorer of the vast repertoire of human knowledge.”
It should be clear to you that there is nothing in that statement to suggest that I support Vox’s conclusions. His “explorations” are exquisite in language, unique in perspective and mostly incorrect. That is exactly what I have stated before on several occasions.
…because, of course, that’s all that muscles can ever do (tension). Well, that and “squeezing,” in the case of sphincters and circular muscles, which I guess is a form of pushing (compression).
Sven, you’ve overlooked the people who use their muscles for thinking.
His “explorations” are exquisite in language, unique in perspective and mostly incorrect.
which puts him, if you really think that, one step above the drivel you post, which I will grant is uniquely loony and entirely incorrect.
Big Dumb:
“And the thread in question wasn’t months ago, it was less than one month ago.”
It was posted several times but that begs the question. If you weren’t able to understand it less than one month ago, what difference does it make how many times it’s posted. You have a mindset that is impenetrable.
Fallacy ad hominem
only applies if the description is, in fact, a fallacy.
In this case, it’s entirely accurate, and readily supported.
You.
are.
a.
delusional.
moron.
It was posted several times but that begs the question. If you weren’t able to understand it less than one month ago, what difference does it make how many times it’s posted. You have a mindset that is impenetrable.
This, coming from a silly old goat who is incapable of braying a coherent statement. You are in no position to claim that anyone’s mindset is impenetrable. You never been about to explain how there is but one deity and that the deity is, by default, the one you believe in.
It was posted several times but that begs the question.
no it doesn’t.
If you weren’t able to understand it less than one month ago
nobody is able to really comprehend your inanity, other than the fact that that’s obviously what it is.
aren’t you done yet?
You haven’t posted anything original since your first day on Pharyngula, nobody has been swayed by your nonsense (unsurprisingly), and there is no evidence that you learn anything while here.
Isn’t it time for you to move on?
Wow:
“Where, exactly, did you post your disproofs of all the other gods? There are a lot of them; surely such a large post wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.”
Actually WOW what I did was to demonstrate that there could be only ONE God. That being the case there was no need to disprove ALL the other Gods, since by the corollary principle there could be no OTHER Gods. That is what Big Dumb did not have the ability to understand. Since there is only ONE God, whatever different names that are used reference subjective epistemic senses of deity; they do not in any way effect the objective ontological mode of existence of God as ONE.
look here is for me the part where it all falls apart into egoism!
Ok you can go back to first causes or use any other God dam phrase you feel expresses it for you fine.
Just what gives you the gall to try and define and describe all the attributes of this “first cause” as a BEING of any sort when no one has any experience or objective knowledge what so ever such a thing.
Why yes of course, it should have been so clear to everyone that what you said bore no correlation to what you supposedly intended!
So when you say “He is an explorer of the vast repertoire of human knowledge“, you meant to imply that he wanders off, gets lost & never actually finds his destination; but he writes so prettily about the dank little alley he finds himself in?
And you go to your “science consultant, Vox Day” for wrong answers presented attractively?
And you go to your “philosophy consultant, Vox Day” for meaningless drivel spoken with a flourish?
Then I hope you will forgive us for misinterpreting your clear and cogent arguments for Vox Day’s apparent lack of relevance to anything but a discussion of literary style!
Your comments become plain as day now, and can therefore be seen to have had nothing whatsoever to do with the topics at hand. Well done sir!
Tosser.
No. You did no such thing.
You asserted it, and demanded that we accept your assertion as a conclusion.
Argument by fiat is a fallacy. So too is begging the question.
Fallacious arguments FAIL.
No. You didn’t.
1) You asserted a set of attributes for godhood, but failed to demonstrate they were necessary attributes for godhood. For example, you did not show that it is necessary that a god be benevolent, nor that any of its attributes be ‘infinite’.
2) You asserted, but failed to demonstrate, that a god with said attributes must be singular.
3) Even given a singular deity, different religions ascribe different attributes and motivations to their deity; so you therefore failed to demonstrate that other religions are just using different names for the same entity.
Do over.
“something to take up with my science consultant, Vox Day.”
“checked in with my philosophy consultant, Vox Day.”
“My literary consultant?
My theology consultant?
My engineering consultant?”
And none of the above struck you as irony?
From anyone else? Probably.
From you? Given — among many other gems — you think you had a bulletproof logical argument not only for god, but for your god?
No.
Er, no, you didn’t.
You asserted there was only one god; you most certainly did not demonstrate it. Your arguments consisted of nothing more than making assumptions that your god possesses certain qualities and then claiming that that meant you could argue that this means there is only one of them.
I asked you on multiple occasions to provide evidence, or – at the very least – objective references for the source of your knowledge regarding your god’s qualities and you provided nothing.
You failed to explain why there must only be one god because you could not justify your claims regarding your god’s qualities. Since you were simply assuming that your god possesses certain qualities (omnipotence etc.) your argument is flawed and therefore invalid.
Remember, as I pointed out to you numerous times, ‘because I say so’ doesn’t count as evidence or a valid argument.
And none of the above struck you as irony?
Once more, I knew that you meant it as irony. But that does not negate the fact that you were dragging in VD’s statements as if they were worth anything. And it does not negate the fact that you thought that the mention of VD’s name was verboten. But please keep trying to defend yourself, the funny shapes you twist yourself into makes for great low comedy.
“Fallacy ad hominem
only applies if the description is, in fact, a fallacy.”
Wrong. It makes no difference whether the description is a fact or not. Ad hominem literally means “to the person” and refers to an attack on the presenter without addressing the argument at all.
When I cited that fallacy Nerd had said the following:
“your feeble opinion”
“Your lack of intelligence”
“Stop embarrassing yourself”
Nerd was directing his argument “to the person” not to the issue in question. That is what makes it an argument ad hominem. Whether the assertions are true or false does not effect the fallacious nature of his argument.
You were caught in the spotlight with your lips firmly affixed to VD’s ass, Silver Fox – and we can still see the shit on your chin.
Show some character for a change and admit it.
Unless I say it, of course.
My objective ontological mode of uniqueness… thingy, whatever, is self-evident, and therefore requires no rhetorical argument.
So there, too!
Indeed. We must tremble at Your… uniquely… transcendent intellectual prowess.
Isn’t that the argumentum ad baculum? Or perhaps the pons asinorum?
Kag:
“You asserted, but failed to demonstrate, that a god with said attributes must be singular.”
Let me say, Kag, that I’m glad that I didn’t demonstrate that God was “singular”, because God isn’t. What I did demonstrate was that God is “simple” meaning God is, by necessity, indivisible, not composite or compounded and consequently, by simplistic necessity means these is only one God. This is a logical imperative. It is not an inferential assertion. It is not literally true that God HAS attributes since by nature God is simple. God doesn’t have the attributes, He is the attributes. Attributes as description are metaphorical personifications, an attempt, albeit inadequate, to comprehend the nature of God.
Yes, got to love the theists who will argue that god is simple. Yet this simple being is more powerful, has more knowledge than anything complex in this universe. Nevermind that consciousness is a by-product of an evolved brain, such an entity is conscious and cares about the human race because being omnipotent and omniscient are meaningless terms when understood as humans understand the terms… apologetics is a load of wank, you can say anything you like and get away with it because all you have to do is give god an attribute then say it is “just so”
Are you going to come back and finish arguing in the last thread you were in Silver Fox?
Also, have you considered that your argument for simplicity doesn’t hold in the eyes of atheists because the attributes you give god by all that we know cannot be simple? It’s not that we are oblivious to the notion that theists think God is simplicity, it’s that what they say God is by all accounts cannot be simple. Unless that is the terms we use to describe God don’t follow from the real world, and thus are meaningless to attribute to God in the first place.
‘Simple’ is really the wrong term to use.
The word you are searching for, Silver Fox, is ‘magic’.
I don’t think anyone is going stumble over the phrase “thought crime” by accident. If this was written seriously it would just say “label atheism a crime”. This a parody; a good one.
SF.
This actually reminds of something. In one of my classes my professor began the talk of simple groups by saying:
“If there ever was a misnomer, this is it”
I don’t know what you are trying to say by your definition of “simple”, but if it describes an omnipotent, omniscience intelligence that created the entire universe then pick a different word. Such a being would be vastly complicated.
This is not even wrong.
Honestly, Apologetics reads like people making up shit while high. The only constraint is that you have to put words in a (semi)grammatically correct order. If sentence ends up being semantic nonsense, then that’s alright. All I think of when I read the above quote from SF is:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
You’d expect someone high to do something better. Apologetics reads like they go to bed at 7:30. No imagination whatsoever!
Feymanoac: You’re saying God is the Monster? That’s makes as much sense as any other description, I’ve heard.
That doesn’t even come close to following. Consider:
GodA quark is “simple” meaningGoda quark is, by necessity, indivisible, not composite or compounded and consequently, by simplistic necessity means these is only oneGodquark.anyone who can say “thought crime” and mean it is seriously fucking deranged and quite possibly a carrier of one of the most insidiously dangerous memes out there, only slightly more dangerous than the idea of blasphemy and a holy war.
Ah bollocks! Now I have to write a complaining letter to the Indo. *shudders* Why don’t I go for full contamination and send copies to the Daily Mirror and the Weekly World news as well. Ick!
Bit late to this party,but some of us have to work….
As to the post @ 68,
I dont think atheists are opposed to religious people getting along,or vice versa…
But,syntax issues aside,and the question-begging in the conclusion aside,this is a rather amusing statement to make in a thread about someone suggesting to make atheism a thought-crime.
The problem with things like “thought-crimes” is always,who gets to decide?
I’m certainly fine with religious people having religion. As my workmate says “it’s a crutch for people who need it.” My conjecture is that there are a lot of people who use the crutch for more than just supporting themselves, that they fashion it into a weapon and use that as a way of getting others to submit to their will. It’s trying to control both thoughts and behaviour through fear and conformity, and even if that percentage is a small minority – it is a vocal one with much influence.
If the moderates wanted to practice their religion freely, then they need to stop the extremists from bastardising the concept. They need to be the ones to stand up and call others out, the problem is the old expression about casting the first stone when your house is made of glass…
How does one detect a thought crime, anyway? Do they use some sort of new brain-wave reading technology? Implants? Spies (eg Stazi)?
Or does god send down Thought Crime Task Force: Angels Unit with their flaming swords and their mighty voices. Wait, that doesn’t happen until after the second coming, though, right?
Goodness.
SF @ 137,
Will people here that use those big latin words like “ad hominem” ever get it what those words actually mean?
SF,if i call you a braindead moron,thats not an ad hominem.If Nerd says you lack intelligence,its not an ad hominem.
If I say your argument for the simple god is wrong because you fuck sheep and piss in your washbasin at night,thats an ad hominem.
Please learn what things mean before using them.
SF does lack intelligence, but that’s what he gets when he thinks that all knowledge is divine revelation gained through subjective experience of the holy spirit…
First. No it was not. There is not a single post from you after my comment #159 where I give you the link.
Go back and read the thread you lying dumbass and show me where you answered my #159.
Second, it doesn’t “beg the question”. Please look that up to know what the correct usage of that phrase is.
Are you a liar or just stupid?
Or both?
PZ, you really should debate Vox Day, it would be worth it for the entertainment value alone. Or maybe just give some of his book a fisking?
Thats the Chris Matthews approach,and that didnt work out so well.
Scientists and un-muddled thinkers in general tend to do worse with audiences when faced with aggressive quote-mining,lying,nitpicking,obfuscating counterparts,in terms of audience perception.
In short,no,he shouldnt.
“In short,no,he shouldnt.”
Scientists should never engage in serious debate with opponents who accept the use of lying as part of their debating technique.
INGOT WET RUST
Nasty letter writer hateses us precious!
Silver Fox #141:
No, no, no: God is, by necessity, made of pasta and meatballs, with noodly appendages, and by simplistic necessity this means that God is a Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is a logical imperative. It is not an inferential assertion.
Once again, we have vivid evidence for why Stupid Fuck needed to be the among the castoffs during Survivor: Pharyngula. He is a bottomless pit of stupid.
SF, you still haven’t established that your space buddy is the only space buddy. You’re asserting it. As always.
Actually, it’s more like you’re pulling it out of your ass. How you can reach around your head stuck there, I have no idea.
I loved that in the last thread, SF basically admitted that God was a construct of his mind. Sorry SF, but if you admit that the only way to know God is to believe in him in the first place, then you are conceding that God is indistinguishable from pure fantasy.
Yawn, another night of remedial logic failed miserably by Silver Fox. He still misses the main point. He has nothing cogent to say to us, therefore he shouldn’t post here.
#73–do you really think we didn’t “get” that point with one reading? I got it the first time I read Aquinas when I was 19 years old. And I laughed out loud at the whole fucking argument. I hadn’t even heard of “logical fallacy” at that age, but I understood that he was basing his logic on the wrong fucking assumption.
If you call that deep, you’ve spent way too long in an intellectual kiddie pool.
Oh–but you’re a theist. That explains everything.
Liar
At no point in that thread did you make a cogent answer to my points. Especially when the topic turned to taxation of churches where you demonstrated that not only did you not have a clue about some of the reasons for tax exemption for 501c3 religious organizations but it appears that you had no clue what they were. Your incredibly moronic statements (on this subject, you have many other moronic statements) beginning at #128 and your failure to read the link I posted to the actual IRS page on 501c3 and respond to it demonstrates this.
Gee,SF mate,tough crowd here for a startup comedian like yourself hey…..:-)
He still has to come back and finish his argument here. Just espousing that God is knowledge and that subjective experience is a valid way to knowing things doesn’t cut it. Come back and defend your ideas damn it!
Yeah Kel that’s the same argument he was trying to assert months ago as well.
And he failed to support it then too.
He still has to come back and finish his argument here. Just espousing that God is knowledge and that subjective experience is a valid way to knowing things doesn’t cut it. Come back and defend your ideas damn it!
Aw, Jesus on a pop-tart, Kel, don’t tell me this guy is wandering over to Anselm territory now?
Stupid Fuck, please–stop now. Seriously. Aquinas I can understand using. Despite what some might say, I believe he was quite intelligent–for his day. Intelligent enough that he must look positively brilliant to the likes of you.
But to go from a fatally flawed argument that made some genuine effort at making sense to toying with the batshit crazy arguments of Anselm? Dude–please–you’re in danger of proving that you’re even dumber than I thought you were. And I didn’t think that was possible.
“You need something that is already actually hot to heat up what is only potentially hot.” – Ineffable, interpreting Aquinas
So on this interpretation, you need something actually spotty to make something potentially spotty become spotty. The measles virus is not spotty, but makes people spotty. Aquinas is thus refuted.
(Slightly more seriously, Aquinas’ view, if you interpret him correctly, is closely akin to sympathetic magic. There are reasons Aristotelianism has been abandoned by all but those several centuries behind the times intellectually, you know.)
What I did demonstrate was that God is “simple” meaning God is, by necessity, indivisible, not composite or compounded and consequently, by simplistic necessity means these is only one God. This is a logical imperative. It is not an inferential assertion.
Courtier’s Reply. You are babbling about properties for something that you have no fucking evidence for. You are just making shit up. That’s all you do. Ever.
Where is your stupid God?
Where is your evidence?
Bring it, Stupid Fuck.
That sentence itself is a crime against logic.
God is “simple”
Well, his followers are.
“God doesn’t have the attributes, He is the attributes.”
Your MOM is the attributes.
Ineffable, thank you for comment 73. Except towards the end, Aquinas’s argument follows completely logically and coherently from a premise that he couldn’t possibly have known is false – but it is false, and this was found out about 100 years ago, so your friend and you should really know about that. In fact, I was taught it in the last year of highschool (that wasn’t in the USA, though, where the public schools are so horribly underfinanced).
Here goes: Aquinas thought there was no such thing as an uncaused event. He was wrong.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation permits everything to happen that isn’t outright forbidden, at a certain probability. And that’s exactly what’s observed. No radioactive decay was ever caused. No vacuum fluctuation (creation of a particle-antiparticle pair ex nihilo*) was ever caused, yet together they cause the observable Casimir Effect. And so on.
* This pair then goes on to annihilate itself and “repay” the “borrowed” energy; on average, the first law of thermodynamics still holds strictly. The time between creation and annihilation is, on average, inversely proportional to the amount of energy that was “borrowed” ex nihilo. Because it appears that the total energy of the universe is zero, some wonder if the Big Bang was just such a quantum fluctuation… in other words, uncaused; it happened simply because it could…
Gravity always pulls, electromagnetic forces can pull; but all mechanical pulling is electrostatic repulsion, in other words pushing.
Wondering if this was a “Poe’s Law” thing, I ran a Google search for the words Eric Conway Navan Co Meath, and found numerous other letters posted by this guy. He appears to be the kind of guy who blames abuse by Catholic priests on the boys themselves. His arguments sound like the ravings of a street preacher.
Silver Fox @118 said:
It amazes me how religious idiots only ever state half of an argument.
Big Dumb didn’t have the good sense to recognize a “cogent” answer then (or I didn’t make one).
If science contradicts the bible, then science is wrong (or the bible is wrong).
Rorschach:
That wouldn’t apply to fisking his book though, would it? Or to a written debate, which would make it far harder for either side to evade the other’s points. For full disclosure, I’m an atheist who thinks Vox would destroy PZ in debate, but whatever the result, it would be entertaining for at least one side, and provide great ammunition to shut the other side up. If Vox isn’t shut up, letters like the one in the Irish Independent will only become more common.
“In short,no,he shouldnt.”
Scientists should never engage in serious debate with opponents who accept the use of lying as part of their debating technique.
How is Vox Day a liar that is a bit rich considering the bollocks that is talked about on this site all day long.
Basically The Irrational Atheist sits like a big red elephant in the living room of the new atheists and in typical fashion the attitude is ignore it and it will go away or throw s*** and hope some of it sticks – very scientific. If PZ et al are so confident in their position why not debate VD and slap him down.
I think that the bollocks herein includes your grammar.
Debates such as the one proposed above do not determine facts or who has the better supported position.
These types of debates only determine who is a better debater or who can filibuster more successfully.
Period.
Dawkins Lapdog
I think you are VD’s lapdog. The only place for a scientific debate is in the peer reviewed scientific literature. Where it is vigorous and ongoing, and totally evidence based. VD won’t go near the scientific literature with a gun to his head. He knows he has no science to back him up.
The typical debate mentioned by those like yourself the rhetorician will always “win”, due the tricks they play to score points with the audience. VD promotes nothing scientific. Debate is useless, and just gives him credence with the general public that he shouldn’t have.
The small number of believers who don’t give a damn that other people don’t believe are not who PZ targets.
PZ isn’t trying to quash religion. He’s trying to convince believers to abandon it.
Ohhh… All you needed was to bypass double-dog dare and go right to triple-dog dare and surely you’d have gotten that debate!
Dumbass…
The only proper debate would be one refereed by people who know the issues, would keep score and take points away for incorrect statements. In that type of debate, asshats like Vox Day would be crushed.
Which is why they refuse those debates. And prefer to debate with the ignorant audience as judge. People that can be hoodwinked.
Yep.
Good night.
truthspeaker said
Or, as PZ has previously stated, at least demote it to the point where it would have no more significant to an individual than a hobby would, knitting being the particular example used.
Yes, because debates and not written scholarship is the best vessel for truth to come out. It’s how we know that creationism is better than evolution because Creationists smack down those so-called experts every time there is a debate on the matter…
Btw,
in case this gets read by any relevant Scienceborg person,since the update the “recent posts” widget has a lag of,like,5 minutes or something,has anyone else noticed that?
Rev. BigDumbChimp #184:
Add to that the way that in one sentence a Vox Day can emit enough compounded nonsense to take a hundred sentences to unravel and refute. It’s like a competition between one person flicking paint and another cleaning it up at the same time. And at the end the paint-flicker can point to the mess and say “I won”.
Yes, I’ve noticed a delay. It’s like the software is only updating the recent posts every few minutes instead of every few seconds.
You… do know what “singular” means, right?
(Yes, I am using the word as a grammatical number, to head off whatever annoying pedantry you’ve got up your sleeve. Though I’m surprised you’d deny god could be described as “curious” and “remarkable”, too)
And no, you did not demonstrate that at all.
“God is, by necessity, indivisible” is a textbook example of a bald assertion! Hell, it’s even contradicted by the Christian doctrine of the holy trinity!
People are less divisible than that. You can chop someone’s hand off, but you’ll get a person and a hand, not two people.
How do you contradict yourself with only a single word separation like that? It must take practice.
Take a sentence of the form “God is ______”. What do you think it does?
Here’s a list of god’s known attributes, not including those made up from whole cloth:
1) God does not leave any evidence behind from which we can infer any other attributes, or even its existence
2)
A debating technique known as the Gish gallop.
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2009/05/snipe-and-scoot.html
You should see his response, all I can really say is that the man is a wiener…
Because it bears repeating: 1984 was not a how-to manual
my god you people ARE confused there you get a better quality of atheist at Dawkins’ forum. Have any of you read The Irrational Atheist? It is a very good rebuttal to the claims made by the so called ‘new atheists’. Funny though with all of the ‘rational’ philosophers on this site and other sites including Richard Dawkins’s ‘I am the light of the World’ forum nobody has given a real response to it other than the usual Ad Hominem attacks.
Josh: my grammar died last year, god rest her soul and I would thank you not to swear about her memory
MosesZD: Oooh so you think that if all the judges were atheists and all of the audiences were atheists then maybe just maybe PZ might win?
, you sound like a godbot. Do you have any physical evidence handy for your imaginary deity? Nothing short of physical evidence will convince us of your delusions being real.
Wow Dawkins Lapdog seems to share the same speech patterns and attitude as Vox Day himself. I’m quite amused by that actually, perhaps I am wrong but hey at least I’m willing to look at the evidence.
Wait, this was in Ireland as well? What the fuck?
I’m going to have to move if this crap keeps up.
Debating the mentally ill isn’t worth the time and effort. Vox Day just babbles incoherently and has been voted most likely to shoot up a shopping mall several times.
Speaking of mentally ill, what is your diagnosis? You have yet to say anything that isn’t vacuous but insulting.
Nerd of Redhead, OM
A godbot? Oh I see, you think because I question the hallowed grounds of atheism I am a godbot I have no delusions of god being real. Do you understand how juvenile your question is? Do you have any physical evidence that gravity is real? nothing short of physical evidence will convince me of your delusions being real. Do you now see how dumb that question is?
Dawkins Lapdog. Jump off a tall building. Gravity will be proven. You know that, so you used it as a straw argument to try to claim it equal to mine. You failed big time. Eternally burning bush or nothing. Put up the right information, physical evidence for god, or shut up. Welcome to science.
Matlock: I am not Vox Day if that is what you are implying I am a bemused onlooker in the roadcrash that passes for debate on this website.
Raven: I am sorry if I am being vacuous and insulting maybe I should be more like you and call people mentally ill and accuse them either of mass murder or heroin addiction (sorry ‘shoot up’ has two meanings where I am from). I am sorry I cannot match your your indepth commentaries maybe its because I am a godbot not a PZbot.
But I mean come on, HAVE YOU SEEN VOX DAY’S SWORD!?!?!?
He’s sooooo dreamy.
Dawkin’s Stalker is crazy but doesn’t seem bright enough or original enough to be entertaining.
Boring. Cut to the bottom line.
“All you cannibalistic, baby killing, pseudointellectual atheists are going to hell. {Insert favorite death threats here} Add, jesus loves you and I’ll pray for you here.”
Cut and paste it and you are done for the day. Spend the rest of the day cruising adult interent sites and telling undressed women they are going to hell. Who says being a xian is hard work and no fun? LOL
The significance to an individual is not the issue — if someone wants to be a rabid knitter and live their life in the pursuit of yarn and needles, that’s their personal choice — but religion should be demoted to the point where its place in public discourse is on par with other hobbies and private pursuits.
Imagine the aknottist protests when the president says, “I don’t think someone who doesn’t knot yarn should be considered a citizen, no”, emphasizing his tolerance of crochet and tatting, while he himself is a True Knitter who abjures the gaudy cable stitch in favour of the simplicity of purl. The Reverse Stockinetters? Well, they’re from the lunatic fringe, you know, not your average moderate knitter who defends anyone’s right to knit in his or her own way. The aknottists bemoan the sad reality that, although the progressive knitting clubs are beginning to relax their historical attitudes toward double-pointed needles, it’s still nigh impossible to get elected to high public office without affirming your commitment to two single-ended needles and unbleached yarn. This is, of course, because of the public perception that politicians who don’t openly support knitting, or at least some form of knotting yarn, lack the moral foundation that derives solely from the Ten Stitches (Patterns 20:2–17).
Uh, yeah we…do.
What’s next–physical evidence of microwave radiation?
Is this dude a POE?
Nerd of Redhead, OM
Oh so you are saying there is other evidence other than physical evidence? Sorry I misinterpreted your question I thought for a minute you didn’t believe in gravity. My question was the same as yours I could argue like you and demand physical evidence for gravity. I also don’t know why you think I should post physical evidence for god, I am sorry I thought this was a place for rational debate I didn’t realise you had to be religious to criticise your arguments. Oh this is also scientific sorry I mistook it for inane ramblings.
Yep, just another godbot with the brain turned off. We aren’t PZbots, in that we must toe to PZ’s ideas. We are free thinkers, and bow to no man. We may follow PZ to a degree, since we have a lot of the same ideas.
As the god Rev. BDC said, your work here is done. Time to move on.
I remember that thread. I believe it was the same one in which I conclusively proved that for a diety to be perfect and complete, it needs to be dual
*headdesk*. Spellcheck fail. #211 last paragraph: As the good Rev….
(Waiting to hear from concern trolls about my tone.)
I don’t like your tone.
I fail at knowing how to quote things properly, so…
Dawkins Lapdog: “If PZ et al are so confident in their position why not debate VD and slap him down.”
This reminds me of those kids in junior high who pick fights with people to prove how tough they are. If you refuse to fight, on the grounds that fighting is asinine, they’re all “waaaah you’re scaaaared.” To this sort of mentality, any refusal to play along is an admission of defeat/weakness. There’s just no reasoning with people this stunted.
Raven: are you alright you seem to be raving? I am not sure what you are talking about. sorry I can only stick to inane vacuous ad hominem attacks so do not have the intellectual ability to respond.
Josh:
I am not sure UH we do. you see Josh I am not questioning gravity I am questioning your reasoning. Sorry for the long words anyhoo kids love to stay and chat but I think its beddy byes for the horrid confusing man you guys ought to go over to RD’s forum and pick up some tips at least they put some thought into their lamea*** arguments
So far you are irrational. Try an actual argument with logic and evidence to back it up. If you are going to posit god somewhere down the line, you will be called out to supply physical evidence for one. So maybe you need to find another forum for your insipid ideas.
Okay, here is our litmus test. Whomever is going to play you, Nerd, simply must be able to say this line appropriately*.
*As measured by how it’s currently playing in my head, of course. Duh…
Exactly, might makes right. It’s the same tactic Hovind, Ham, Gish, et al. employ and it’s no less transparent with Vox Day than it is with them.
Perhaps the author of the letter should try reading “The Handmaid’s Tale” next time. It seems a “utopia” much more to his taste: overtly christian and without all those messy commie overtones. He’d love Gilead.
And yet another troll accuses us of not being able to discuss points rationally while simultaneously refusing to answer direct questions.
A good first step, if you’re going to do that, would be learning how to frame questions.
Also, can I just say: lololololololooollllll this vox character refers to a daily mail article to support his arguments?
Reliable news source FAIL.
Sorry I missed this.
At no point in that thread or this one or any others did you support your assertion that there can be only one god.
You just kept repeating yourself.
Repetition of an unsupported assertion != supporting an assertion
We are free thinkers, and bow to no man.
Some of us have even turned pro. I hope someday to be not just a free thinker, but an expensive one.
I would like to say I totally support a move to make atheism a crime punishable by exile.
Because then Europe, where I live, would have more scientists.
Win win. For me.
What a shithead.
How mature!
Oh dear. I have just read the link, and noted that this man is from Europe.
Screw this, I’m moving to the moon.
hmmm…. I wonder if in that case (atheism being grounds for exile from the U.S.)my boyfriend would be able to get asylum in Germany?
this might turn out to be useful, after all…. :-p
being kicked out of Ireland for being an atheist on the other hand would not be useful to me at all
What I did demonstrate was that God is “simple” meaning God is, by necessity, indivisible, not composite or compounded and consequently, by simplistic necessity means these is only one God.
Um, if you are a Christian, what about the trinity? I know it’s one god, but a triune god is definitely not simple and sounds compound with Daddy, Junior and The Spook being its respective composites
my god you people ARE confused there you get a better quality of atheist at Dawkins’ forum.
My god! I AM confused by that completely incongruent sentence. Stop, think, take 10 seconds to compose your thoughts. Use your punctuation, and don’t jam sentences together. Geez, Lapdog, if you’re going to act like a smart-ass, write like a smart-ass.
No, why? The only mistake in that sentence is the missing comma. The “about” is most emphatically correct (…even though it destroys the entire argument). :-)
No, we want to have the debate in writing, so that every mistake can be documented and the Gish Gallop becomes impossible.
If you like, we can start right here. Take any of the arguments of the self-proclaimed Voice of God, post it here, and try to defend it here. We’re waiting…
*shrug*
For want of a hyphen the spacecraft was lost…
Admittedly, I was being a dick. But if you’re going to come in here all puffed up about how we can’t conduct a rational discussion, then I reserve the right to exploit any and all chinks I happen to find in your armor.
@205 “I am a bemused onlooker in the roadcrash that passes for debate on this website.”
A godbot criticizing the quality of debate on this site is like a vegetarian criticizing the quality of a filet mignon. (No offense to vegetarians.)
Brian, I live in ROME. We’ve got an ongoing exhibit celebrating Darwin’s 200thingie, and no rabid crazy fundie wingnut protesting is happening anywhere (and we’d notice. the city gets jammed by protests/demonstrations that stop traffic and make everyone late for everything every five minutes, so if there was anyone around who hated science enough to gather en masse to bitch about it, we’d notice).
Again, I live in ROME, and I don’t mean NY. Even in Catholic Central ™, no one is up in arms about “oh noes evilution,” and there was no one protesting the lovely little table the UAAR (“Unione degli atei e degli agnostici rationalisti” or “the union of atheist and agnostic rationalists”) had set up at the Primo Maggio (First of May, our version of Labor Day) festivities last week, either.
We’re not lacking in wingnuts of other kinds, mind you, and I’ve got plenty of gripes about Italy, but at least all is more or less quiet on THAT front.
For those looking for a fisking of The Irrational Atheist:
http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/category/tia/
Oh I see, you think because I question the hallowed grounds of atheism I am a godbot I have no delusions of god being real.
Whafu? What magical third position does this clown occupy then?
@Dawkins Lapdog:
There already is a perfectly sufficient response to TIA. Deacon at Evangelical Realism has already performed said fisking with unmatched thoroughness:
http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/category/tia/
Seach back through the “older posts” to get to the beginning, or to find those posts pertaining to a given chapter. This critique is devastating, and Vox has yet to addressed it.
Atheists aren’t ignoring Vox’s argument; it is Vox and his sycophants who are ignoring this response.
I think this is great. Atheism should be a thought crime, if only for the Pythonesque interactions with the cops that would ensue.
Cop: “Hey, you!”
Atheist: “Me, Sir?”
C: “Yes, you! C’mere.”
A: “Is there something wrong, Officer?”
C: “I dare say there is. Do you, perchance, happen to believe in God?”
A: “God, Sir?”
C: “Yes, God. You know, Yahweh, Jehovah, God the Father, the Lord Almighty, the Big Guy, Jesus’s Papa, Our Father, The Father, Abba, the King of Kings, Elohim, El-Shaddai, Adonai, Gitchimanitou, the Creator, and the Man Upstairs?”
A: “Uh, no Sir.”
C: “Well then, how about Allah?”
A: “Nope.”
C: “Krishna?”
A: “Uh-uh.”
C: “Odin?”
A: “Nay.”
C: “Zeus?”
A: “What? No.”
[Forty-five minutes later]
C “…Zhi-Songzi, Zhong-Liquan, Zhou-Wang, Zhu-Rong, Zhu-Yi, Zhuang-Lun-Wang, Zi-Gu, Zipacna, Zocho, Zorya, Zosim, or Zvaizdikis?”
A: “A thousand gracious ‘No’s, iie, nyet, nyet, and ne.
C: “Russell’s teapot?”
A: “You’d better ask him.”
C: “The Invisible Pink Unicorn?”
A: “Do you see one around?”
C: “The Flying Spaghetti Monster?”
A: “Only when I’m hungry.”
C: “So, no gods at all, then?”
A: “Nary a one, so far.”
C: “You do realise that not-believing in God is a crime, don’t you?”
A: “What? A crime?”
C: “Yep. Thoughtcrime. Very serious. Very serious indeed.”
A: “Really? With jail time?”
C: “Even worse. Execution.”
A: “For not believing? Execution?”
C: “Yes.”
A: “Oh, dear.”
C: “Look, you seem to be a nice enough fellow, and I’d hate to write up all that paperwork, so what say you start believing in some sort of god and we forget this little conversation ever happened?”
A: “Yes, uh, I guess I’d better. But which god, and how?”
C: “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you believe in at least one. Anything less is improper, and dangerously stupid.”
A: “Dangerously stupid?”
C: “Yes. It has to do with the anthropic principle, something can’t come from nothing, no morality without god, and all that. The universe exists, therefore it must have been created, therefore there must be a Creator, therefore atheism is dangerously stupid, therefore you’d better start worshiping, and pronto.”
A: “But that doesn’t make–”
C: “Look, are you going to start believing, or am I going to have to bring you in?”
A: “Can it be a god I just made up?”
C: “What do I look like, a theologist? Hurry up and pick one.”
A: “Alright then, I believe in….”
It just makes so much sense.
Atheists aren’t ignoring Vox’s argument; it is Vox and his sycophants who are ignoring this response.
As usual, Internet atheists can be relied upon to even get the most basic facts wrong. Deacon is maleducated nitwit; the fact that you don’t realize this doesn’t speak well for you either. This response suffices to show why there’s no need to respond to his hopeless attempt at fisking that which he’s clearly incapable of understanding.
The critique is only devastating in that it is devastatingly stupid. Even PZ could do much better.
Old European saying: If you speak of the devil, he will come.
Hi VD. How is the mall shootup project going? Got one picked out yet? How about timing? I suggest the winter. That way you and your future victims can at least enjoy one last summer.
35% of Americans don’t follow any religion these days. Once crazy people like this die off, the world can finally focus on Science and we can move out into space. These people are holding back our destiny.
Still no real physical evidence for your imaginary god VD. That makes you delusional. There is something about physical evidence that scares the theists. Wonder what that is? Maybe they are delusional, since philosophy without physical evidence is sophistry. Than means theists are all sophists.
You still haven’t learned to spell — and pronounce — populi, I see. Still don’t admit that there are atheists in foxholes and pretends everyone lets their mind wander around when in a dangerous situation, instead of concentrating on the situation itself. Still preoccupied with irrelevant details — some of which you even get wrong: while the EU is not a country, it’s just laughable to claim it’s not “a political entity”, for example.
If you’d post here more often, you’d be banned for insipidity, o self-proclaimed Voice of God.
…pretend…
So… you don’t believe in a god, but you believe in a destiny? Like… fate? Or how are you using that word? ~:-|
Unfortunately, Vox, you failed to notice Deacon responded to your useless wankery immediately:
http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/2008/03/19/tia-the-best-strategy-is-an-incompetent-enemy-vox-day/
Of course, this response, like the entirety Deacon’s critique, is rather more sophisticated, penetrating, and enlightening than anything to be found in your book.
The critique is devastating and your book is shit. Any further questions?
You ignored the entire
and your a useless wanker.
Egads…meant to say:
“you ignored the entire rest of Deacon’s review, and you’re a useless wanker.”
Posted by: VD
Imposter Poe! Unless Vox DEI (I seriously hope he doesn’t actually spell it DAY) is really so stupid that he doesn’t realize the meaning of his initials.
If your name were Stanly Thomas Davidson or Aldritch Simon Stevenson you wouldn’t do that would you?
Vox Day is his shoite Pun. If you go between greek and latin, you get THEOS, or Theo’s voice. 2/10.
Vox be careful. There are women here.
Well, from Navan anyway :o)
The whole sorry tale just goes to show that… wait for it… super pious catholistic T.D.s are atrocious.
Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
The guys and gals and After the Bar Closes have been mocking Vox Day relentlessly since last summer on this thread: http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=4a04b8a0d677eab2;act=ST;f=14;t=5752;st=0
It’s pretty goddamn funny. You have to check it out just for the picture of Vox with his big flaming sword. What. A. Tool.
“The big question is, though, what kind of ideology gets it kicks out of gratuitously offending the sincerely held views of others? It seems both immature and vulgar.”
It depends on the sincerely held beliefs, now doesn’t it? I can’t avoid the paradox of even just mentioning Godwin’s Law, but that exact same question might be asked about people that gratuitously offended slaveholders by suggesting that they were evil scum.
Unless Vox DEI (I seriously hope he doesn’t actually spell it DAY) is really so stupid that he doesn’t realize the meaning of his initials.
VD is that stupid (hello? theist!), and his self-image is so inflated that I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought his initials struck fear in the hearts of his enemies, when all they do is make us giggle at him and his flaming vorpal sword that’s a plus nine against atheists. VD slays me.
He-Man would look more cool carrying a flaming sword than VD.
(So sorry Ken. It had to be said.)
It’s laughably obvious that the letter-writer cannot distinguish between “thought crime”, which, even in it’s most feared nefarious effects, actually requires a bit of thought, and the sort of “thinking” the writer evidently inhabits, which requires absolutely no thought at all.
It is therefore easy to see that, in the muddled mind of this letter writer, thought IS the crime.
He-Man would look more cool carrying a flaming sword than VD.
Well, he already did, for one thing. He-Man was a pansy in pink and purple tights who held aloft his mighty sword, said the magic woids that turned him into a leather queen (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).
Little known fact; when we needed to to find somebody to go through some He-Man moves for some live-action reference, otherwise known as rotoscoping (tracing blow-ups of filmed footage frame by frame instead of going to all the trouble of animating) we went up the street in Reseda, just past the very same church parking lot with the big mural in the background of Marky Mark getting rolled in his truck in Boogie Nights, you know, Sherman Way at Reseda) to Gold’s Gym, and found some muscle-bound steroid abuser and filmed him. The problem is that superheroes are about 8 heads tall, and Weightlifter Lad was about 5 feet. Hell’s Belles, Shera looks better than VD with sword.
Thoughtcrime?? Are you kidding me?
RT
http://www.privacy-web.net.tc
VD is that stupid (hello? theist!), and his self-image is so inflated that I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought his initials struck fear in the hearts of his enemies…
Well, they kinda do, just not in the way he intends. I would sure be afraid of it.
Hey! A visit from Mr. Venereal Disease himself. Tell me, Mr. Disease, do you identify most closely with syphilis? Gonorrhea? Genital warts? Genital herpes? AIDS? Or are you, as I suspect, a disgusting compendium of them all?
Hey, Venereal Disease, you may want to prop your back up against a wall or something; it’ll help you get that much closer to being able to fellate yourself physically in addition to continually doing so verbally.
Er, uh, or so I’ve heard.
Holy shit, Ken. You’re the one who did that Ozma piece? I’ve had it on my PC for like five or six years now.
Are you talking about the one with Glinda? I’m glad you like it.
Yeah. I’m a huge fan of that piece. I went through a phase a few years ago where I was re-reading the books and obsessing over what I imagined Ozma to look like, and when I found that picture I was like “wow, this is basically it exactly”. I actually drew her very similarly to your vision several times back then.
Of course, the stuff I’m doing now (see link) is a lot different, but I guess you could say that I learned how to draw from the kind of work you’ve done all your life.
Neato.
P.S. Vox Day is like a Christian doppleganger of this pagan guy I once knew. I’ve found that generally, people who think they’re hot shit seldom are.
It’s great to find people who even know who she is, especially in a forum like this (not to mention flattering!) I’m still trying to work out what Ozma looks like. I just delivered a presentation in a class full of GLBT speech students, where I defined Ozma as “a friend of Dorothy” and explained why. Finding those books in the library got me to fall in love with reading, and when I found them again in the eighties I had to start collecting them all for the work of John R. Neil. When I noticed that Andreas Deja, in his office at Disney, had pictures up on the wall by Heinrich Kley, he advised me to find my own favorite artist and emulate what inspired me about their work. Neill is one of my favorites, but when I try to draw like him I can’t shut off my Seuss filter. In a film class, another student did a presentation on filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, presenting this quote:
It’s a great quote. I have trouble sometimes remembering that something was derivative, so I think I’ve quashed the impulse to borrow. However, I think my original views of Ozma were heavily influenced by the film version of her in “Return to Oz”; it was a very simple design, but combined with all the mirrors and glass windows in her setting, it made a simpler, sparklier version workable.
Still, I like the white/gold trim/poppy-integrated design in your piece. I always thought that was so clever, but of course, I’m a girly-girl that way and anyone who can combine royal finery and flowers will win me over. I think a lot of people believe you can’t mix metal and organics in the same design, and I find that combining them is always fruitful.
You’ll laugh to find out that, even though I knew I was bisexual when I was seventeen in high school, I wasn’t very worldly, and I was playing the role of Dorothy in a school play that was -not- the Wizard of Oz (it was a children’s play called “Beanie and the Bamboozling Book Machine” that featured the characters from Oz, Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White). My classmates informed me of the signifiance of Dorothy in the gay community by mentioning that our very small town’s only out gay couple was supporting us in the front row. (Photo in link.)
Mind you, this was a very small town in the Bible belt, but of course the theatre group — while still rife with Baptists — was also generally open-minded enough to allow this sort of discussion to go on. About as liberal as any conversation in that school was going to be.
So I, suddenly believing that I had taken up a mantle far too heavy and important for me, promptly had a mini-panic attack before the show and just barely managed to put the idea aside long enough to perform.
Sheltered teenagers… :) But I’ll always remember it.
-HD
So I, suddenly believing that I had taken up a mantle far too heavy and important for me, promptly had a mini-panic attack before the show and just barely managed to put the idea aside long enough to perform.
If you don’t have butterflies, you probably don’t have the energy necessary to drive the pace of the show. I like that they went with Art Babbit’s Wicked Queen. Please drop a line offline so we can talk more shop.
Forgive me, I’ve not read many of your posts.
But what you seem to be so upset about is an outburst of sarcasm by a like-minded thinker who is disagrees with the anti-blasphemy law and has written a letter saying it is going too far?
It seems odd to me that his sarcasm is interpreted by you as a vote against atheism. How peculiar.