"Begin at the beginning,and go on till you come to the end: then stop." (Lewis Carroll, 1832-1896)
Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked."Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat."I don't know," Alice answered."Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
"So long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation. "Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
"All right," said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. "Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!"
I am diagonally parked in a parallel universe. Like Arthur Dent from "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", if you do not have a Babel Fish in your ear this blog will be completely unintelligible to you and will read something like this: "boggle, google, snoggle, slurp, slurp, dingleberry to the power of 10". Fortunately, those who have had the Babel Fish inserted in their ear, will understood this blog perfectly. If you are familiar with this technology, you will know that the Babel Fish lives on brainwave radiation. It excretes energy in the form of exactly the correct brainwaves needed by its host to understand what was just said; or in this case, what was read. The Babel Fish, thanks to scientific research, reverses the problem defined by its namesake in the Tower of Babel, where a deity was supposedly inspired to confuse the human race by making them unable to understand each other.
"DIFFICILE EST SATURAM NON SCRIBERE"
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"Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat." - Sir Julian Huxley
"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes and ships and sealing wax; Of cabbages and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot; And whether pigs have wings." - Lewis Carroll
"Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" Alexander Pope
"The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal." Ann Oakley
"Some treat their longing for God as proof of His existence." Mason Cooley"The god of the Christians, as we have seen, is the god who makes promises only to break them; who sends them pestilence and disease in order to heal them; a god who demoralizes mankind in order to improve it. A god who created man 'after his own image', and still the origin of evil in man is not accredited to him." Johann Most
"In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words." Mason Cooley
"My philosophy is such that I am not going to vote against the oppressed. I have been oppressed, and so I am always going to have a vote for the oppressed, regardless of whether that oppressed is black or white or yellow or the people of the Middle East, or what. I have that feeling." Septima Clark
"Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it." Tom Flynn
"If the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape." Thomas Henry Huxley
Project Gutenberg is the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet. The collection was produced by hundreds of volunteers.
"Give the right man a solar myth, and he'll confute the sun therewith." James Russell Lowell
"Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone. Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon. Show me slowly what I only know the limits of. Dance me to the end of love." Leonard Cohen
"If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination." Mary Daly
"If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish - if a little more enlightened, religion would perish." Robert Green Ingersoll
"In other words (so to speak): not two and also not not two." Magellan's Log V
"History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology." W.H. Auden
"Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been." Jim Bishop
"To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth." Spyridon Marinatos
"Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed." Thomas Henry Huxley
"The place has changed but little since Diana received the homage of her worshippers in the sacred grove. The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough." Sir James George Frazer
"Babylonian king (1792BCE–1750BCE) who made Babylon the chief Mesopotamian kingdom and codified the laws of Mesopotamia and Sumeria." The American Heritage
"We are ourselves history and share the responsibility for world history and our position in it. But we gravely lack awareness of this responsibility." Hermann Hesse
"Astrology: do we make a hullabaloo among the stars, or do they make a hullabaloo down here?" Mason Cooley
"Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare." Harriet Martineau
"The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun." Thomas Paine
"Zoroaster was thus the first to teach the doctrines of an individual judgment, Heaven and Hell, the future resurrection of the body, the general Last Judgment, and life everlasting for the reunited soul and body. These doctrines were to become familiar articles of faith to much of mankind, through borrowings by Judaism, Christianity and Islam; yet it is in Zoroastrianism itself that they have their fullest logical coherence.†- Mary Boyce
"My esoteric doctrine, is that if you entertain any doubt, it is safest to take the unpopular side in the first instance. Transit from the unpopular, is easy ... but from the popular to the unpopular is so steep and rugged that it is impossible to maintain it." William Lamb Melbourne
"With reason one can travel the world over; without it it is hard to move an inch." Chinese proverb.
"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. Bribery and corruption are common. Children no longer obey their parents. . . . The end of the world is evidently approaching." Sound familiar? It is, in fact, the lament of a scribe in one of the earliest inscriptions to be unearthed in Mesopotamia, where Western civilization was born. C. John Sommerville
""La superstition est à la religion ce que l’astrologie est à l’astronomie, la fille très folle d’une mère très sage. Ces deux filles ont longtemps subjugué toute la terre." Voltaire
"The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago ... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands." Havelock Ellis
"It (myth) expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values... Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one." Ann Oakley
"Starry, starry night. Flaming flowers that brightly blaze, swirling clouds in violet haze, reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue." Don McLean
"NOT from the stars do I my judgment pluck, and yet methinks I have astronomy, But not to tell of good or evil luck, Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality..." William Shakespeare
"Moreover, the universe as a whole is infinite, for whatever is limited has an outermost edge to limit it, and such an edge is defined by something beyond. Since the universe has no edge, it has no limit; and since it lacks a limit, it is infinite and unbounded. Moreover, the universe is infinite both in the number of its atoms and in the extent of its void." Epicurus
"Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy." Hannes Alfven
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"When Christianity went to Athens, it became a philosophy. When it went to Rome, it became an organization. When it went to Europe, it became a culture. When it came to America, it became a business."
christianity 
religion 
politics 
business 
capitalism 
evangelical 
fundamentalism 
america 
P.T. Barnum 
sucker
posted by beepbeepitsme | 9:44 pm
30 Comments:
Mostly, they laughed at Saul when he was in Athens.
Good to have you back, m'dear.
KA
Thanks. Good to be back too.
Business is good. I wish I could buy shares in Benny Hinn, or Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell. But maybe all I need is a good suit and a microphone and a well oiled spiel about God.
I need is a good suit and a microphone and a well oiled spiel about God.
Oh, & a bodacious set o' lungs, to boot.
Hope you enjoyed the break Beep...
I have a look at Benny on the xtian channel every now and then. What a showman that man is. I read once that he's possibly the greatest mass hypnotist to have ever lived, and I see no reason to dispute it.
lexcen
I wouldn't buy shares in them unless I had enough money to buy them out, and liquidate the assets. :)
plonka
Yeah, it was lovely. Went to the coast for about a week. Nice to get away from the daily slog.
If hypnosis is the art of persuasion, then some religious spruikers have it in spades.
Welcome back!
Seems like Christianity and most religions in general have always been about power -- so that's either business or politics -- or both at once!
Welcome back, Beep.
I've been meaining to do a post on Hinn for some time. Yours might be the impetus I need.
Beep: If hypnosis is the art of persuasion, then some religious spruikers have it in spades.
Yeah... It makes me wonder why some of them don't get into the entertainment industry where they so obviously belong. They probably wouldn't make as much, but when they get caught taking ice while having a homosexual liaison, they wouldn't have to give up their career...:)
plonka:
Yeah... It makes me wonder why some of them don't get into the entertainment industry where they so obviously belong.
Why do you think they call it...televangelism? ;)
Say hey to scooby-doo for me.
KA: Why do you think they call it...televangelism? ;)
Hehe.. Good point...:)
"When Christianity went to Athens, it became a philosophy. When it went to Rome, it became an organization. When it went to Europe, it became a culture. When it came to America, it became a business."
.
WooHoo! How TRUE!
.
Now, unfortunately, the revival tent is set-up in Washington, DC.
.
And the collection plate seems to be going to Halliburton.
.
Glad to have you back, Beep!!
"When Christianity went to Athens, it became a philosophy. When it went to Rome, it became an organization. When it went to Europe, it became a culture. When it came to America, it became a business."
Great quote. Who said it? I'll have to use that one some time.
thanks blueberry and dikki
Keebo and darwin
Not sure who said that quote. I will look it up and see if I can find some info on it.
The reference to the quote can be found here, but I dunno who said it.
Tele-Evangelist Lifestyles
http://www.inplainsite.org/html/tele-evangelist_lifestyles.html
"We are the Christians. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
Ok, not as elegant as your quote, and you have to be a Trekkie to fully appreciate it. It does however, explain why we have the Christian holiday of Easter and all manner of pseudo-voodoo incursions into certain South American religious ceremonies. It also explains how religion gets transformed into circus side shows in the US. Is it any wonder that Orthodox Jews and Fundamentalist Islamic types are dismissive of Christianity, and see it as a unrealistic alternative to their own faith? At least they are not continually reformulating their scam to fit the circumstances. Christianity in its modern application has become all about pushing hot buttons for fun and profit.
breaker
Yes, sometimes it does feel like the borg are coming and that they won't take "no" for an answer.
Breaker said: "Is it any wonder that Orthodox Jews and Fundamentalist Islamic types are dismissive of Christianity, and see it as a unrealistic alternative to their own faith? At least they are not continually reformulating their scam to fit the circumstances. Christianity in its modern application has become all about pushing hot buttons for fun and profit."
I think you are confusing interpretation from changing circumstances for a scam, not to mention overlooking the plurality of Christian traditions, some of which fight for issues that I suspect many here most likely sympathize. For example, Martin Luther King's prophetic orientation. Furthermore, Judaism reintreprets its ancient texts as Rabbis and scholars comment from changing circumstances, which is why the Pharisees were most likely once seen as hypocrites. Through the tradition of Hadiths, Islam also has an innate mechanism for change, not to mention Islamic legal traditions. Religious hermeneutics allows for traditions to change with the times, sometimes these changes manifest overwhelming terror, but sometimes they produce great leaders, such as King, Bonhoffer, Heschel, Al Ghazali, and many more. Let's not forget that many of the European wars/genocides of the twentieth century were not religious wars, but outgrowths of nationalism, which can also be satanic, such as Nazism.
Breaker, it's only a scam if demand that we be logically consistent in a Hellenic sense, and many logicians are as devoted to their allegedly inerrant logic as religious types are to their texts. I hope one does not throw all of one's cards in with any of these tradtions, for when one is too logical, one loses sights of the poetics which one finds in many religious texts, just as when one loses sight of logic, one runs the risk of losing critical thought. What scares me is when one argues that logic produces truth. One finds many atheists and theists trying to use logic to produce their notions of truth.
confused
And your methodology to ascertain truth is?
beepbeep, what do you mean by truth? And whay criterion are using to determine that it is true? Or, what do you mean be ascertain?
oops. I meant to say, what do you mean by truth? what criterion are you using to determine that there is truth? And, what do you mean by ascertain? Seems to me that your question presupposes lots of faith, not to mention, Beep, I'm wondering if you're a closet Platonist masquerading as an empiricist. :-)
confused,
I ask you because you used the word here. "What scares me is when one argues that logic produces truth."
So, obviously you have an idea of what you mean by it. What do you mean by it? And what methodology do you use to ascertain it?
Beep, I was responding to Breaker. He seemed to have a notion of truth in his critique of a Christian scam. How did he come to conclude there is a scam? In order to claim there is a scam, one has a notion of truth that is not a scam. How one derives or produces such notions of truth interest me. Many assume logic produces truth and I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that he was exercising logic. In answer to your question, I find that truth is contextual, some truths transcend contexts, such as mathematical and scientific ones, but they are never understood outside of a context. Furthermore, I normally do not ascertain truth, for if it is true, how would or why would I ascertain it, which is not to say that it might take time to understand that something is true, and if that is what you mean by ascertaining, I agree with your usage. With that said, there are contexts when it might make sense to say the truth is ascertained, such as in trying to discover what is the source of one's illness, or in discovering physical truths about the universe. But such discoveries involve doubt. Truth is a grammatical claim that involves doubt. Where there is no doubt, there is no discussion of truth. For example, you doubt theism - as do I - but where we part ways is that I do not find theism makes sense in a discourse of evidence and I do not understand why theists play the game. If I were a theist, I would say God does not exist, for existence presupposes an object that can be grasped. And if the Hebrew introduction to the infinite is taken seriously, one who is finite cannot possibly grasp the infinite. On that note, I believe Descartes was right. Where he goes off the deep end is in offering that as a proof for God. On the other hand, how one who is finite can even suggest there is the infinite is beyond my understanding, even though Kant tries to make a case for something similar in his deducing the noumenal truths from the phenomenal world.
Beep, Sorry for all the unpacked claims in the above post. If you feel a need to search the bags, I'm happy to unpack them.
confused:
In order to claim there is a scam, one has a notion of truth that is not a scam.
I dunno, when the results of the law of diminishing returns are zero?
krystalline, your comment assumces and, thus, asserts my claim. :-)
confused
RE: "For example, you doubt theism - as do I - but where we part ways is that I do not find theism makes sense in a discourse of evidence and I do not understand why theists play the game."
I don't think that theism makes sense in a discourse of evidence either.
And because of this, I think that theists should be honest about their beliefs and state that they have faith that something is true regardless of the evidence.
Many modern day theists seem quite unwilling to do this, as they don't have as much potential "advertising power" if they admit that they are theists through faith.
Even they realize that selling a product, (religion), through faith alone, limits the sales of their product, so they try to appeal to the evidence based community with unsubstantiated claims, appeals to ignorance and dodgy science.
What I mean by this is that if religion had to follow an advertising code, like the marketters of any other product, they would be called before a fair trade and practices tribunal often.
Shampoo companies are not allowed to say that using their shampoo will actually make your hair healthier and thicker unless it can be evidenced to do so. They are limited to being able to say that their product will make hair look healthier and feel thicker.
Unsubstantiated claims, like religion, need to comply with the advertising codes l;ike any other product.
confused:
krystalline, your comment assumces and, thus, asserts my claim.
????
Explain, please.
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