"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.
Beepbeepitsme has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts.
"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
"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
It has been a long time. I haven't posted here for ages and it certainly doesn't help when one forgets the password in order to access the blog and moderate it. If there is anyone out there who tunes in occasionally to see what I have to warble on about, I am here and contemplating what article to write next as well as intermittently contemplating my navel.
Hmmm - Maybe Adam and Eve didn't have navels? A-hah, perhaps that is the next post! As forethought on this, I shall post an attractive artistic representation concerning said subject.
Not a navel in sight. Though they do appear a little "artificial."
Hello heathens, miscreants, agnostics, atheists, skeptics, free-thinkers and assorted other human beings who do not wish to be so titled. Those of you who have watched my youtube presentation of my last holiday Hats, Holidays and Halitosiswill have listened to a track from the Australian band Powderfinger which hails from Brisbane, Queensland. Bernard Fanning, who is singing the song, "Wish You Well" is the lead singer of this band and the song is from his solo album called "Tea And Sympathy." The lyrics for the song can be viewed here. The latest album by Powderfinger is called "Dream Days at the Hotel Existence."Bernard Fanning is a very talented singer/songwriter and homegrown so all the better. Anyway, I just want to wish you all well, even lapsed catholics. ;)
It was that time of the year again when I wandered off on holiday; usually somewhere up or down the coast. This year it was to Rainbow Beach which used to be a quiet, secluded part of the Queensland coastline but has recently seen much more development. I will miss the innocence of these places in Australia. There used to be literally hundreds of undeveloped areas of coastline and now with the ability to make lots of moolah, Queensland's coastline will mimic the tourist destinations of the rest of the world. That is, they will be filled with overweight, pasty people frying themselves in the hot Australian sunshine. Most of us like the tourist dollars but still manage to suffer from Nimby Syndrome. (Not In My Back Yard)
Even though it is winter here, hat wearing, or at least cap wearing is recommended. The mornings might be crisp and cool, but the sun is unrelenting and will fry many an unsuspecting tourist to a crisp before they can say, "Oh, how Cuuutteeeeee." In the typical Australian way of seeing the positive in a potentially dire situation, the response to "What do you think of global warming?" is likely to be " Well, now the sausages will cook themselves." Potentially this leaves Australian men more time at the BBQ to do what they do best - holding a stubbie of beer in two hands instead of one. ;)
So where does the halitosis fit in? Well, after 4 glasses of champagne, 2 glasses of red wine and a steak the size of a cricket pitch, YOU wake up the next day and smell your own breath. (Too much information probably.)
Anyway, watch the video and have a glimpse of the Queensland coast.
Firstly, I would like to apologise for not posting on my blog for a while. I have been lazy and should be severely chastened. So, if there are any regular readers left out there please accept my apology for not being here to discuss the controversial subjects which you know I do like to do.
Anyway, back to the game at hand. This response of mine on a blog triggered a few responses.
"It amazes me sometimes that theists will fight tooth and nail to protect a bundle of cells, but dropping thousands of bombs on sentient adults doesn’t seem to pose much of a problem."
Is an acorn the same as an oak tree? Should we ascribe the same rights, value and meaning to a bundle of cells as we do to a fully formed sentient human being? I think that the majority of people who are opposed to abortion are opposed to it because of a religious belief that a clump of cells contains a soul. People do disagree with abortions for many reasons, but the primary reason I think is because of a religious belief associated with the idea that a clump of cells has a soul. Under those circumstances of belief, I would suggest that those people who believe that should not have abortions. However, if their primary reason for opposing all abortions is a religious one, then they are by default, requiring that everyone share that religious belief if they demand abortions to be illegal on that basis. I agree that there are times when it is right to take life. And so do most people on the planet. War certainly wouldn’t be as popular as it is, if human beings didn’t find ways to justify it. Capital punishment wouldn’t be as popular if people didn’t believe for various reasons, (many of them religious ones) that they were doing the right thing.
There may be reasons why I would oppose the termination of pregnancy but a religious one wouldn’t be persuasive for me. And I suspect that the reason that the majority of people oppose the termination of pregnancy IS a religious one. So, any ideas other than religious appeals to the supernatural, would be considered - but not perhaps accepted. If, you believe that there is NEVER an instance where it is appropriate or right to kill another human being including that of self-defence, capital punishment or during times of war, then I can accept the consistency of your position even though I may not agree with it myself. I don’t believe that people have souls. So, if you oppose all killing on that basis, then I wouldn’t agree with this reason - perhaps I would find some other reason acceptable though.
If the major reason you have for all abortions being illegal is your belief that a soul inhabits each or most human beings, then you are in effect demanding that I also have faith in said supernatural concept. It is within your rights to believe that demons inhabit trees, rocks, and people if you so desire. I have no legal desire to remove this delusion from you. If, however your major reason for opposing abortion is because of your faith that human beings have an incorporeal mind which survives death you may not demand that I also consider this to be a valid or true reason to ban abortion. Otherwise, you are in effect demanding that religious beliefs which I do not share, should be able to decide for me.
If a belief in the supernatural is a persuasive argument for you, then you really should be doing your outmost to make sure that not only men, but women also lead responsible sexual lives. But the argument that tikki tikki tembo inhabits a bunch of cells is not persuasive to me. As abortion in the majority of circumstances is legal, it is not up to me to provide reasons why it should be illegal. That job is for those who disagree with it. Until then, no supernatural appeals to souls will be considered a persuasive argument by myself.
And what does the Bible have to say about abortion?
Very little, except:
22 “If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely [or, as the endnote says, she has a miscarriage] but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. 23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. (Exodus 21:22-23)
And God doesn’t seem to have any trouble with abortions, as Numbers 5 says.
Perhaps in its crudest terms of expression, the topics of abortion, euthanasia, suicide, infanticide and rape are basically asking the question - “who owns what?” (A crude way to express it perhaps, but I think it may devolve to this concept.) A person who believes in a god would probably say that god owns us and our individual lives. A person who believes in god and the state reflecting the wishes of said god, might believe that god owns our individual lives and that the state acts on god’s behalf. A person who doesn’t believe in a god or gods might say that the state, as highest authority, owns our individual lives. For me, I don’t believe that a god owns my individual life, nor do I believe that the state can act on a supposed god’s behalf. I also don’t believe that the state can own my life. As a result, I would neither support laws (either from a god or the state), which made abortion compulsory or illegal.
What authority outside of yourself, do you believe has the ultimate say over your life, if any? If you do not own your own life it would seem to me that you are in servitude to either a god or the state. Neither of those ideas appeals to me much.
Apparently, I am much older than I thought. Shocking I know. And I mean MUCH older.
"Skeletal remains from a 220-million-year-old dinosaur reveal a prehistoric road runner of sorts, whose svelte figure and long legs allowed it to evade predators lickety-split." (I must say that I hold my age remarkably well under the circumstances. 220million years old, who would have thunk it? It appears to be so much like me that I am gob smacked.)
"The creature stood about 12 inches tall at the hips and weighed just 4.4 pounds. Its head-to-tail length was about 3 feet, with about half of that taken by the tail. The new species is aptly named Eocursor parvus, meaning 'early little runner.'" (Obviously I won't be requiring that people refer to me by my latin name of Eocursor parvus. Perhaps only on formal occasions or at fancy dress balls. It is also evidence of how the vocalization of this particular dinosaur has changed over time from the classic "meep meep" to the more modern, "beep beep."
Anyway, I am ecstatic that my predecessor has been found and so rigorously identified, after all, as a dinosaur, I would hate to have a type of primate as my common ancestor. We dinosaurs have our pride, you know.
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