Why I can’t link to your site anymore: FriendlyAtheist.com
Saturday, 11 August 2007
…we can’t be sure “there is no God.” Atheists can only say they “don’t believe in God.” Friendly Atheist
We may not be sure that the Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” wasn’t the single direct revelation this potentially real God has given to mankind either but I sure as fuck can say whatever I want about it including that it definitively was not. I can be so sure about it because it’s exactly as likely—and as ludicrous, though infinitely less dangerous—as the proposition from which it stems. I don’t have to qualify that jazz with any version of “belief.”
«·Addendum to the sworn affidavit given by one Max Cady –or– I can out diff youRejected because I’m gay?·»
Discussion
Comments
Re: Why I can’t link to your site anymore: FriendlyAtheist.com
The existence or non-existence of a major dude deity is something I tried to consider ages ago. But I kept running into con artists, people who had to outsource their consciences and thinly disguised boosterism for political parties. I eventually decided it was a red herring, even though some of the thoughts and philsopophizing were and remain worth considering. I would neither negate nor affirm at this point, anymore than I would seriously consider the prospect of being eaten by werebadger from another galaxy. Of course now that I consider that, I'd have to say that my enemies are likely to become intergalactic werebadger food -- because they're evil and stupid.
A certain amount of metaphysical irrationality remains appealing, however. It adds spikes, edges, corners and twists that I find essential for keeping the rest of life fresh. But that ain't the kind of thing you go to people's doors and push and the less I put of it into words, the better everything is. Not least for the people glancing around for escape routes.
By Vagrant on 11 August 2007 · 22:21
comment link · reply to this
Re^2: Why I can’t link to your site anymore: FriendlyAtheist.com
Si, a punto. I’m actually very religious in my own way. You can see it in my buildings.
I’m not in fact an atheist but it’s easier than trying to explain; to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson on the same subject, there is no word for what I am.
By Ashley on 11 August 2007 · 22:52
comment link · reply to this
Re^3: Why I can’t link to your site anymore: FriendlyAtheist.com
Buildings? Hey, to digress a lot (a real lot), I love unique, strange or simply competent building work, of any kind, including tool sheds and remodeling existing structures. Got any posts here about the stuff you do?
By Vagrant on 12 August 2007 · 08:06
comment link · reply to this
Re^4: Why I can’t link to your site anymore: FriendlyAtheist.com
Me too. It’s amazing how important architecture is to daily life and how abysmal most of it is.
Sad to say, some drafting and a 400 level class on presentation/elevations aside, I have no real architecture skills. It was an allusion to The Fountainhead and one of two or three parts which make it a much better book than Atlas Shrugged; the former specifically allows room for the magic bits of human psychology, the latter descends into recursive prescriptions largely divorced from the bazaar.
The lines are used to trick Roark into building a “church” by conflating his deep sense of reverence for the world, its materials, its forms, and his art with reverence for God. There is a good essay in Rand’s attempts to retrieve the ideas of reverence and the sacred from the jaws of church and state histories.
By Ashley on 12 August 2007 · 11:15
comment link · reply to this
Re^4: Why I can’t link to your site anymore: FriendlyAtheist.com
Took two readings to get the “lot” pun. And to really fly off the wheel, the “digress” brings this on–
By Ashley on 12 August 2007 · 12:51
comment link · reply to this
Re^5: Why I can’t link to your site anymore: FriendlyAtheist.com
That's one wild set of lyrics. And if percocets are part of being in the "he-man left", well. . . I think I can find my way clear to affiliating.
By Vagrant on 12 August 2007 · 15:45
comment link · reply to this
Re: Why I can’t link to your site anymore: FriendlyAtheist.com
I'm curious how you'd respond to something like this.
It is rationally extremely unlikely that a god exists, and on top of that I *believe* that no god exists. That is, rationality and logic takes me only to the point of agnosticism. So I say I personally believe there is no god to make people like Adams shut up.
I'm wicked tired... maybe I'm not making so much sense. :-P
By Jen on 14 August 2007 · 15:18
comment link · reply to this
Re^2: Why I can’t link to your site anymore: FriendlyAtheist.com
I gave Adams a pasting two years ago over similarly shoddy mental processes in Scott Adams’s mother, Part 1. PZ Myers repeatedly laid any remaining questions to rest.
“The Atheist Who Thought He Was God” is nothing but the echoes of the stoners I knew in the dorms at school. It relies on a couple of rhetorical techniques he can’t seem to escape, making the reading, even without the content, rankle. Bringing in Pascal’s Wager, without naming the “philosotainer,” is either plain weird, intentionally misdirecting, or deeply ignorant. Paul Tobin has an excellent site called Rejection of Pascal’s Wager: A Skeptic’s Guide to Christianity which takes that tired old dog in back for a .30-06 lullaby.
A Scythian shot–
Weak. If it’s the only intellectually defensible position then either put it into intellectual terms, perhaps in a web post one won’t have to remove because it ends up being widely ridiculed by one’s betters, or (as you wisely have tried to help him and his clan do) shut the fuck up.
Get some sleep. :)
By Ashley on 15 August 2007 · 01:41
comment link · reply to this