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If you have not been keeping up with the ytube drama that is going on with Thunderfoot and his tangle with Islam I suggest you check out his channel as the smack is being laid down with great alacrity.
Wow a double video post. Crazy, I know, but you really cannot have one without the other. The following is the more scary and less funny of the two.
This is the basis for a good deal of the argumentation in Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. The facet that I wish to point out that is that so called “moderates” of any religion are still responsible for what the crazy whack-a-loons do as they are part of a bullshite system of delusional belief that propagates an irrational view of the world.
Thunderfoot ran into some censorship issues with ytube about showing some southpark footage in one of his videos. Thanks viacom, your spineless twerpitude is noted. Thunderfoot’s video is a good approximation of my feelings toward religion and why I treat it with such disdain.
This is the age of reason, not the age of religion and we should act accordingly.
Bonus: The incensed Thunderfoot comments after all the censorship drama.
I figured I needed a video today, I just did not expect it to come via the Canadian Cynic, who is quite resplendent in dispensing snark, but as of late propagating important cultural work as well :)
The New Testament is all about love. Sure, there was some practices promoted in the old testament that could be considered a bit brutish by today’s standards, but Jebus fixed all that, not by recanting any of those barbarous edicts, but by saying ‘love your neighbor’. So you see, all you christian naysayers, the new testament represents a much nicer and loving image of god. Oh, yeah, one more thing, he also invented hell.
I was quite shocked to learn that the old testament doesn’t speak once about a lake of fire or eternal suffering anywhere within its dreary pages. Brimstone and torture that lasts forever was introduced by the new testament. Now up until I learned that, I was of the mind that the new testament was just as horrible as the old, but with this new tidbit of knowledge I find that the new testament is far worse than the old in terms of brutality and moral perversion. Allow me to illustrate.
For this thought experiment, we need to be able to quantify the amount of suffering, or evil, that a person could do in his or her lifetime. Just for the sake of humourous triviality, I will call the units of this quantification “sin points”.
Let’s say we have an absolutely wonderful person, a real saint. Nice to everyone, very giving goes the extra mile to make the world a better place. Now, people being the fallible entities that they are, it wouldn’t be realistic to say that this person would acquire zero sin points throughout his life, so let’s say someone like that would only get one. The average person, let’s say, would get something like 1000 sin points in their life (that first guy was really REALLY nice) and your average rapist murderer type person would get 1 trillion.
Now, since we imagined one of the best people that could exist (only one sin point, for goodness sake!) lets also imagine the worst. This individual not only hates people enough to do horrific things to them, but through some unlucky circumstance, he also acquires the longevity and resources to take out this hate on more people over a longer period than anyone ever has in history. Imagine if, say, a Hitler type decided that anyone who did not have green eyes deserved much worse than death. So, this super Hitler successfully creates a worldwide totalitarian regime wherein he lives a long life of torturing billions of people death in the most excruciating ways possible. Even after his death, it takes the globe about 3 generations to recover from super Hitler’s reign of terror. Now this is one bad hombre. How many sin points does he get?
Well, a murderer gets 1 trillion. If the murderer uses torture, let’s say, it’s upped to 1 trillion squared. Multiply that by the number of people Super Hitler tortured to death (let’s say 10 billion people, just to say he was extra mean) and square that for all the suffering involved in the global recovery (a bit excessive, but we are making this guy the worst possible person) and just for good measure, lets square it again. Grand total that’s 1X10 to the power of 128 sin points (that’s 1 with 128 zeros after it, in case it’s been a while since your last math class).
Christians everywhere awed by magical blanket, now with the image of Jesus. It is proof, proof I say of all the malarkey I have been force fed and child and led to believe. The CBC reverently intones:
“The Shroud of Turin, believed by many Christians to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, went on public display Saturday for the first time in a decade.
Confirmation bias anyone?
Over the next six weeks, about two million people are expected to view the linen bearing the faded image of a bearded man.”
Oh fantastic. Sheeple to the ramparts, the magic cloth has arrived!
“Each visitor will be allowed five minutes to stand before the bulletproof, climate-controlled case containing the cloth inside northern Italy’s Turin Cathedral, where it has been kept for 500 years. In that time, the public has been allowed to view it on only five different occasions. The last time was in November, 1998”
And then the Jebus blankee along with the disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs go back into the vault. So do not delay!
“Pope Benedict XVI will visit Turin on May 2 to pray before the 4.3-metre-long, one-metre-wide shroud.”
2010. 21 century here, we really need to stop propagating foolish dangerous mythology.
From his Skeptical Essays, published in 1928:
“I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and political system. Since both are at present faultless this must weigh against it.”
Pretty straightforward but more importantly, hopeful!
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