BellGab.com Archive

Quote from: Billy Joe Mulgreavey on November 05, 2016, 10:24:21 PM
He may be trying to compensate for loss in his life.  It's sad, really.  I mean, it gets pretty sad when you show people the four pack of toilet paper you just purchased.  C'mon Falkie, come back to Bellgab, you have friends here.  Some may bust your chops from time to time but I doubt many here actually mean you any harm.  A few exceptions, of course.

He will ruin any situation, no matter how favourable it is for him. He was given his own sub-forum, which he ruined in a matter of weeks. He was given the opportunity to do solo podcasts, which he was too lazy to do any prep for, and then turned on the person who was trying to help him. He's never struck me as the sort of person you want to spend any time with, to say the least.

Quote from: K_Dubb on November 05, 2016, 10:23:44 PM

Hahaha I wondered how long it would take before one of us resorted to reductio ad hitlerum.  You did it gracefully, dear, without the slightest hint of irony, and I salute you.  I'll leave you to guess exactly how -- I'm pretty sure you can come up with something horrid.

You are absolutely right that I strain and sift.  Christianity is an immense, sprawling body of thought that has given us conquerors and pacifists, chaste ascetics and Rasputin's orgies.  Discretion is a prerequisite.  I'm glad you can enjoy its many beauties with due regard for its terrors the same way I do.  The difference comes down to that toothless old saw about Wagner you dragged out, to which the obvious reply is "of course you don't have to be pagan, but it sure helps."  It's about the only way you'd get me to sit through that again.

Do not imagine I shrink from the new or challenging; I watch you guys with your simulation theory where God is a programmer and you debate whether He is inept or cruel, quantum souls that live forever, and the multiverse where heaven is in our grasp, just on the other side.  But at this rate it will take a few hundred years for the ideas, then generations of artists to hymn them and distill to the kind of pithiness that can be on the lips of everyman.

Aesthetically, atheism to me looks like a sharp cliff with nothing but seething, puritanical anger at the bottom.  It's like joining up when they're still smashing windows.  I've never met a single one who tried to seduce with light and charm -- it's all insults and calling me stupid, at which even my feeble intellect rebels -- or seen any convocation that can get beyond congratulating each other for being there and glowering menacingly out the windows.  At least start singing about love and brotherhood and joy personified like Beethoven, or giving the people cold clear water instead of exotic, intoxicating drinks like Sibelius!  No thank you, give me the comfortable freedom and decadence of a dying culture with all the fight knocked out of it.

There's nothing fatuous in observing that the ideas of a few illiterate peasants, predisposed by their culture to arcane propitiatory rituals and xenophobia, suddenly swept all that away.  If anything in deserves to be called miraculous, that's it. St. Paul says God did it that way because He thought it'd be ironic.  You don't have to do anything you don't want to, dear, but it is in the spirit of true Christian charity that I suggest you guys start praying for a similar one.

Speaking of which, brave men of Britain,

I hope God smiles at our fun
(Though sure He mourns your loss):
The irony that Bloodaxe's son
Should chase you with a cross!

Even Jessica Christ herself said she wasn't going to bring peace but a sword, so I don't know where this idea of Christianity as being all hearts and flowers comes from. Polytheism was much more stable as a body of ideas than Christianity, which has led to countless bloody quarrels over the centuries. If you are going to believe in nonsense, I'd far rather you decided that they were all equally true/false and left it at that. The early Christians invited their persecution by the Romans, when all they had to do was burn a bit of incense in a temple and go about their business. The trouble with monotheism is that it wants to be the only onion in the stew and it has to be true to have any validity. If it were just a case of quasi-believing in a few myths I wouldn't care very much; it's the insistence that they are correct that leads to problems and divisions. The only reason Christianity caught on was because it had to import elements of polytheism to appeal to the barbarian conquerors of Rome, hence all your saints and all the rest of that bloody nonsense. It was calculated policy rather than anything innately convincing, otherwise it would have gone the way of Osiris and Marduk long ago.

Atheism isn't joyless, it just takes the view that happiness is to be found in this world rather than an imagined next. Religious people have trouble with that idea and get very defensive, in the way that Epicureanism was traduced by the Catholic church for being all about self-indulgence when it was anything but. Abstract ideas are hard for human beings to grasp intuitively so they resort to personifying everything to make it explicable. We'll pass through all this eventually, hopefully, but it will take a long time. There are far more stirring and absorbing mysteries to contemplate without having to reduce it all to the level of a simple-minded five-year-old. My biggest gripe about theism is that it's so boring, both intellectually and aesthetically. Who's to say that artists liberated from the need to circumscribe their minds within religious orthodoxies could not have come up with something far more sublime and challenging?

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on November 06, 2016, 07:09:27 AM
That's assuming, of course, that she doesn't abuse her power and pull a fast one to avoid prison.  If that's the case, then we no longer have a country, just a big crime syndicate that masquerades as a nation and it doesn't matter who is president at that point.

I'm sure you can see the circularity of that logic. On the one hand she's corrupt and deserves to be jailed, on the other hand the fact that she's not in jail proves just how fantastically corrupt she is. That's wandering into conspiracy theory territory, heads you win, tails I lose.

Quote from: K_Dubb on November 04, 2016, 01:05:35 PM
Your rhetoric is characterized more by the shouted hyperbole of the revolutionary than the considered tone of a scholar.  You are a perfect caricature of every Dawkins fanboy who ever forwarded me a vid for the pleasure of imagining me squirm.  I fancy I could churn out these things like madlibs.  Perhaps once you tire I will give it a shot just for fun.

People pay attention to it because its mark on western culture is indelible.  Plenty of contemporary texts lie splayed out on their archival backing like dead insects, picked over by a few rarefied academics, while the ideas in the Bible have inexplicably survived centuries of abuse and exploitation.  Your sullen, earth-bound perspective sees only the latter and does not bother to ask why they are powerful, let alone experience it.  You mock the dirty peasants while ignoring that what they said miraculously transformed their world.  That is the opposite of intellectual.

It is like the twentieth century's rebellion against tonality, counterpoint, sonata form, and everything else composers have come up with to make music euphonious.  What a thrill it must have been to hear those first forays into naughtiness, to throw off those horrible constraints!  I like some of it, too, just like I watch your Hitchens because he was funny and clever, unlike most of his acolytes.  But, we all know where that ended up -- tone clusters, shrieking dissonances, empty novelty, ugly noise for its own sake.  Nobody listens any more except a few hair-shirted ancient virgins peering about to make sure their penance is sufficiently public.  Modern atheism is in this phase -- it only knows how to rebel, not how to inspire.

As far as airy, that's why we call it that, silly.  Look it up.

I'd rather not hear about what sort of videos make you squirm; no doubt supplied by your little 'circle' under plain cover. I only hope you keep the curtains closed while it's going on and give those gerbils a thorough rinse afterwards.

Ah yes, those precious 'ideas'. Genocide, for example (the Midianites)? All those ridiculous rules about menstruation and shellfish? It's a good job we didn't decide to turn the other cheek in the 1940s or we would have been overrun by the Nazis. Where is the sense in taking no thought for the morrow? How about the Decalogue, which puts women on the same level as beasts of burden? No, best not to mention those; much better to strain out those bits and leave the residue. But then, once you do that, there is very little of 'religion' left, except some incense and a few nice buildings.

You talk about religion as though it were all Chartres Cathedral and Fra Angelico, but there's at least as much bad as good. I don't suppose the people who were slaughtered during the Thirty Years War were all that taken by the 'miraculous' transformation you fatuously refer to. I don't imagine that the people tortured and burned alive for daring to read the Bible in the vernacular were all that edified either.

If you want to be dourly diatonic all your life then that's your prerogative, but you are missing out. You probably think John Adams is edgy. All you are displaying is a sort of ingrown conservatism that blanches at the thought of any kind of idea that happens to be new and challenging. It's parochialism, pure and simple. You sound like you'd fit in very well in Anschluss Austria, condemning all that 'Entartete Musik'. If  you don't move forward, aesthetically, you move backwards. You might be happy to smugly sit there on your pampered posterior, listening to Palestrina, but that doesn't means the rest of us have to.

Quote from: theONE on November 04, 2016, 08:27:58 PM
haha ha ha, so finally I managed to bring SV to his knees and got him fuming like a rear end of a camel,........lol
you boi are just as weak as your voice on Gabcast, you just sound tough here typing but when you speak you sound like
a little pissy bitch with you feminine delicate voice ..... LOL

The retard doth protest too much, methinks. Your coping strategy is there for all to see. I bet listening to me was the first time you got an erection that didn't involve farm animals.

Quote from: theONE on November 04, 2016, 11:25:29 AM
how is UK doing these days

Not bad, and your whore of a mother is keeping well, I trust?

Quote from: K_Dubb on November 03, 2016, 01:51:17 PM
"That's all", again, as after "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", as though you would sum up the topic on which men have scribbled away furiously since history began?  You will never make a poet, dear.  I think that just because you can not write a poem with feet that don't fright on subjects numinous, the corpus voluminous suggests that you might just be trite.

I'm surprised you didn't throw in spiritual not religious in that cliché-ridden fashionable pose.  Thou appear'st as Aesop's crow, bedecked with others' feathers!  When you guys whip all that stuff up into something coherent I can pop into when I need a quick fix, lemme know and I'll give it a whirl.  Maybe let it age a bit first, like a millennium or two, just to get the bugs out, and develop a nice patina.  In the meantime, I'll go back to singing about the little town of Bethlehem with a sweet, sweet smile.

Yep, once you jump off that horse and acknowledge the numinous (like the rest of your absurd modern semantics, it's just a way of saying that spooky God-feeling), you have to find a way to cut people like me out of the rest of Christianity for convenience -- we're too reasonable to fit your image, too uncomfortably like you in the way we approach the transcendent, and you'd rather keep harrying the stupid for sport.  It's an intellectually dishonest distinction that would bisect parishes, pews and cloisters, now and back through time.  All because we are intellectually curious and agile enough to interpret multiple meanings and figurative language that wouldn't baffle a fourth-grader and know about big-T and little-t.  Can you really be from the same race that produced those wonderful Elizabethan sonnets that manage to say two things, one gracious and classical and lovely and one very lewd, at the same time, in an acrostic?

I might not make a poet, but you are a poetaster to the life. Just because you think you can rhyme 'moon' and 'June' you think that makes you better than the rest of us. Pshaw! Not to say 'forsooth'. You might see it as cliche-ridden, but we aren't likely to come to blows with each other about the meaning of spirituality, unlike your mob who will commit any sort of atrocity over some pettifogging issue like infant baptism or the transubstantiation. I can well imagine you singing about Bethlehem, in your thin, effeminate falsetto, and trying to molest a few farm animals in the manger scene.

I don't think you are one to accuse us of incoherence since you wrote the bloody book on it! The only reason people pay it any attention is because it was written so long ago. If it had originated recently their followers would have been scorned for the irrelevant, malodorous, shiftless, sandal-wearing blisters they so obviously were.

This culinary approach to faith simply won't do, for it reduces all of your ludicrous positions to airy nothing. Nail your trousers to the mast for once, and stop climbing down.

The time will probably come one day when we can feed all of the relevant data about a prospective world leader into a quantum computer and then run a simulation to see what would happen. We could even throw in a few international crises to see how they would respond in different situations. Part of me is intrigued by the thought of Donald Trump as President, I just wish we could do it in 'safe mode' so that we could press the reset button once he's brought us all to the brink of armageddon.

Quote from: albrecht on November 03, 2016, 11:24:30 AM
Ha. True, same here. It is interesting how jokes change over time based on immigration patterns and societal changes. Though the ridiculous social police are wrong about banning books or editing old films because of changing thoughts and opinions.

If you've ever seen the film 'The Dambusters', about Barnes Wallis and the bouncing bomb, you'd see an example of that where they had to change the name of the dog. Let's just say it was an opprobrious slang term for 'African American'. Or Agatha Christie's 'Ten Little Indians'. I have the original paperback and they weren't Indians back then, lemme tells ya! Actually, they probably wouldn't be able to use 'Indians' these days either. They would need to be something gender neutral of mixed ethnicity.

Quote from: albrecht on November 03, 2016, 10:51:48 AM
If you substituted another stereotype, say Jew or Scot, there you would be criticized and even maybe be in violation of your "hate speech" laws (since free speech no longer exists there.) I find that odd. Is stereotyping of different types of Englishmen still legal under your system and only "others" are protected? (Assuming you published or made those comments on your home turf and not on a website in the USA about a radio-host that no longer hosts a show.) Though your comment and dig at YP was funny.

We used to tell a joke at school back in the days when the IRA were making a nuisance of themselves: "what do you do if an Irishman throws a pin at you? Run, because he has a grenade in his mouth". I wouldn't have any qualms about making jokes about the Scots, Welsh or Irish. They used to tell jokes that started "An Englishman, an Irishman and a Jew" but they ended up substituting the Scotsman for the Jew. Anyway, the biggest tellers of Jewish jokes are Jews themselves, like the one about the Yiddisher momma who was on the beach and noticed that her son was in difficulties and cried out, "help, help, my son, THE DOCTOR, is drowning!".

Quote from: theONE on November 03, 2016, 10:47:26 AM
There is this wise saying..."if you want to beat the dog you will always find the stick"

Really, Grasshopper. Well, I prefer the one that says, "don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining."

Quote from: theONE on November 03, 2016, 10:36:51 AM
what's so difficult for you to understand in the Bible ??

Apart from being a concoction from multiple translations, starting with the original Greek before going through Hebrew, Latin and finally English, with all the inaccuracies that would involve (ever play telephone?), not to mention all the events in the New Testament being written down by unknown authors many years after these 'events' supposedly happened. People used to think Moses had horns before it was pointed out to them that it was a mistranslation from Hebrew. In other words, it's an epic fruit salad of time-wasting bollocks.

Quote from: theONE on November 03, 2016, 10:05:00 AM
* The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God," * -Psalm 53:1

It's not a very subtle distinction but it seems that it's still too subtle for you to grasp. Nobody can say that there is no God, they merely say the case is unproven, therefore there is no sense in believing something when you have no evidence for it.

I'd eat pate, if only because I wouldn't need to waste any time on the marinade. He comes pre-soaked in bourbon.

Quote from: K_Dubb on November 01, 2016, 11:37:41 AM
Don't think I didn't see you try to jump off that tired old atheist horse you rode in on a few posts ago.  Now you are at pains to persuade me you're not like the rest of that silly, earth-bound lot and awe me with cheap knock-off unbranded mysticism.  Get back on that sway-backed, fleabitten nag!  I'm not finished with you yet!

You have been unhorsed fair and square, sir.  I say that not to gloat, but to point out that if you guys tried to pull that sorry game you use to annoy the poor wretches on here with a real, honest-to-God churchman with six years of seminary instead of a dumb American of no particular education pounding out this drivel while trying to keep from laughing into his pipe, he'd tear you limb from limb, have you for lunch, and wipe the floor with your britches.

Again you wave that word "evidence" around as as though science has actually addressed the Word made flesh, how the light shone in darkness and was not overcome, how His blood covers every sin, and how Death is swallowed up in victory.  When it does, you may claim to have taken an axe to the foot of the tree.  But until then, it's an empty, vainglorious boast used to frighten the feeble-minded, and I contemplate the mysteries of faith in perfect serenity.

And if the Vespers don't move you, you're a wicked reprobate anyway.

My atheist horse is a glossy thoroughbred, and will canter to the finish line serenely while you're holding your sides and wheezing like an elderly walrus with pneumonia. The reason I don't care for the word 'atheist' is that I don't feel obliged to define myself according to whatever made-up entity some bunch of people are fat-headed enough to believe in. I don't believe in unicorns either, but I don't think I ought to have a special name for my unbelief in them. The chances of God existing are on about the same level of probability as a Yorkshireman buying a round of drinks, and I act accordingly. Also, the word 'atheist' has an unattractive sibilant quality that allows people to hiss it at you, and it jars my sensitive nature.

I was talking about metaphysics rather than mysticism before, in the Kantian sense, dontcha know. There are simply some things that we can't know, and won't know, that's all, but it doesn't mean that I am talking about a realm of the quasi-paranormal. You can study a Bach fugue all you want on the page, but there is something in performance that eludes all description or musicological analysis. If you think that's 'divine', fair enough, but it evinces a lack of imagination. The same is true for most aesthetic experiences I can think of. Likewise meditation - it can put you on a another level of awareness, but the experience remains firmly rooted in the sublunary sphere.

I don't think I need fear a clerical debagging. I'm a bit too old for one thing. I think you must have let your riper fantasies stray a bit too far. I know you are a regular subscriber to 'Choirboy Chronicles', indolently flipping through each issue on your paintpeeling porch clad in nothing but a sequinned posing pouch and a feather boa, so no doubt the association of ideas was too strong for you to resist.

You're just a culinary god-botherer. A canary-fancying, mimsyish stick insect, who secretly realises that religion is all a big put-up job but doesn't have the nerve to admit it. Your view of religion amounts to nothing more than the salt in the stew. Time to go on a low-sodium diet.

Quote from: K_Dubb on November 02, 2016, 11:25:54 AM
No Shreddy today? 

No mind, I shall taunt him -- perhaps that will draw him out yet.

I haven't finished with you, you impertinent young jackanapes. It takes more than a bit of doggerel to scare me away.

Quote from: Yorkshire pud on November 02, 2016, 08:45:03 AM
Very true my good man. Always amuses me when Americans use 'faggot' as an insult, and believe it is. Oh, Limey is a good one too.

Not to mention remarks about the royal family, as though it's our Kryptonite and we all wilt like salted slugs whenever someone says anything nasty about Queen Elizardbeast.

Quote from: Value Of Pi on November 02, 2016, 12:30:22 AM
I've avoided calling Brits "Brits" since I heard they really don't like it and I don't want them to stop sending us new episodes of "Doc Martin." Canadians obviously believe in living dangerously.

I've never heard that before, I think someone may have been pulling your leg. Our version of the Grammys are called The Brits, not to mention that irksome phenomenon known as Britpop. It takes a lot to wind us up, that's why some of the attempts on here to try to rile us are so amusing, although not in the way it was intended. Aussies call us 'Poms' incidentally, for occult reasons of their own.

Quote from: Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost on November 01, 2016, 11:04:50 AM
Not plane porn, but it pertains to a significant event in the history of aviation. It sounds like Amelia Earhart's skeletal remains might have been found seventy-five years ago, but were disregarded because they were mistakenly identified initially as belonging to a man.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/11/01/new-evidence-could-prove-amelia-earhart-died-castaway/93103232/

Can't you at least post a picture of Concorde or something, together with a needlessly unpleasant description of what you'd like to do the naughty little Anglo-French filly when you got her back to your place? Just to get into the spirit of things a bit?

Quote from: K_Dubb on October 31, 2016, 01:32:13 PM
Ah here he comes, waving his telescopes at me, brandishing his digital pictures like icons, though the spiky modern epithets with which he lauds them, "obective" and "verifiable", do not caress the ear like "holy".  Nothing whatever prevents me from looking at your pictures, dear, and feeling what you feel.  But you can not possibly hear Rachmaninoff's sublime Nunc dimittis the same way I do.  You may appreciate the artistry or tonal beauty, but the words will not stir your soul the way they do mine.

I am trying to imagine what sort of person you think you are debating -- a child of two, with a closed mind, incapable of the joy of discovery, afraid of new information, a formidable dancer -- it is a caricature, sir, your own hobgoblin.  It bears little resemblance to a human at all, let alone the heroic intellects with which I struggle.  Let us leave him, and the fallacy he represents, behind, and say no more.

I shall now demolish the charge:  I want it all.  All that science can discover, plus the wisdom of generations of holy men on those subjects that science, for all its current hubris, even now blushes to consider.  If I patch the gaps with recourse to symbols and metaphor, well, we religious invented that sort of thing; it is as mother's milk.  You flourish the threat of "new information" with a sneer as though some Jerusalem potsherd might suddenly undo everything, or Hubble might actually show us the gates of the celestial hall with a "To Let" sign on them.  This is child's play.  You are dealing with myths, which are not thin, vapory things but intrinsically powerful ideas for which men die.  I welcome your new information boldly and unafraid, having drunk deep from the same well that nourished my forefathers.  While you lack even the moral basis to oppose the horror of eugenics, which everything we've learned about evolution and genetics should endorse, my "image of God" rings with the authority of four thousand years.

Both of us face the future armed as best as we can with what wisdom we've been able to glean.  But one of us has willingly lopped off that portion of his brain which deals in symbols and the intangible, the emergence of which is widely held to have heralded the first modern humans by their art, and the development of which has preoccupied our finest minds.  Oh Shreddy, history has laid a vast banquet for you, but you subsist on what paltry nourishment you can suck through the small end of a telescope.  And I have the closed mind.

NATURE and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:   
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

'Objectivity' isn't a dirty world, young fellow. 'Cunnilingus' is a dirty word, and, to some extent, 'constitution', but I think we are wandering beside the point with this shilly-shallying. Art, just like science and philosophy, is a search for truth pure and simple.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” â€" that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Your daintily coiffed head is straining so far into the empyrean that you can't see what's staring you in the face, causing you to trip over your ruby slippers ("there's no place like Rome, Toto") and look the most frightful arse. You don't name anyone in particular, so I will assume that you were talking out of the back of your neck again, but most great minds of the past had a religious bent simply because there was no alternative explanations on offer. I'm sure most of them, confronted with the evidence, would have concluded that it was all a load of horse feathers and changed their views accordingly, and realised that the cracker they were chomping down on wasn't JC's big toe after all.  You can appreciate religious music while being an atheist as easily as you can listen to the Ring Cycle without being a pagan, dear boy. Perhaps if you adopted a more dispassionate attitude then you'd recognise real music, rather than some sort of synthetic tosh like Rachmaninoff.

I don't deny the numinous, I just don't think of it as though I were a wambling 5-year-old frightened of the dark. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", that's all. If you don't have any words for it then you're not entitled to say anything, as Wittgenstein said. We don't have to make up stories about what we don't, and almost certainly never will, understand. Don't confuse religion and myth, they are two separate things. You don't need to believe a myth as literally true to imbibe some wisdom, in the sense that you can read the Upanishads without having to subscribe to it. Om. You are getting religion and philosophy mixed  up. People only follow the New Testament on the understanding that JC was divine, otherwise all that "take no thought for the morrow" stuff would be dismissed as the ravings of a fanatic. Which they obviously were.

Evolution doesn't 'endorse' eugenics. Darwin was observing what he saw and reported accordingly; you don't have to approve of something to recognise its basis in fact. Just because something is nasty doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Religion can't teach atheists about morality because believers would slaughter an infants school if they thought God told them to do it. They have abrogated any moral sense of their own and will do just what it says in their little book. We have an innate sense of right and wrong because that's what is wired into us over the course of many generations. Any society that was predicated on rape and murder would have died out aeons ago, obviously.

Quote from: theONE on October 31, 2016, 11:06:09 AM
SV , you amuse me with your ............... luck of CREATIVITY Sir

If you want to worship a guy who spent his time sashaying around the middle east with a bunch of dudes, be my guest. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on October 31, 2016, 10:55:04 AM
I've often wondered this myself. Why would anyone want eternal life? I understand that death is something some people fear, so it's helpful for them to have something that takes the edge off it. But I personally find the notion of not being able to die no matter what a bit terrifying. Welcome to heaven and no matter what you do, there's no way out ...

I can understand the fear of dying, as a process, but not death itself which is not an actual experience. I suppose it began as a way of consoling people for their miserable lives, to let them know that it gets better in the end as long as you put up with all the crap that this world throws at you and you don't rock the boat. But, as you say, if you really consider the concept of eternal life, it's a life sentence with no possibility of parole.

Quote from: malliard on October 31, 2016, 09:39:32 AM
I have a Goal of 500 #YouTube #subcribers for The Malliard Report - The Fastest Hour in Paranormal Talk Radio by #Halloween goo.gl/ANKAOQ

I think you hit the 0 key a couple of times too many there. I admire your optimism. A man's reach should exceed his grasp.

Quote from: K_Dubb on October 30, 2016, 12:04:37 PM
Hahaha hypocritical pompous dandy I own completely, as I contemplate the lily in my medieval hand.  But we are down to charges of wasting time, so I shall sum up:

The idea that we can walk out our front doors every morning with a closed, comprehensive intellectual system based on materialism is a modern one, and has been achieved only by jettisoning questions of duty and purpose, or reducing them to interpersonal ethics.  This is a cheap substitute for the rich inner life our ancestors enjoyed.  It is attractive because it is comprehensive, but it is comprehensive because it is simple.  And uninspiring -- you guys really need to come up with some better eucharist than the daily trudge to the recycle bin.

Where you see hypocrisy, I see the inevitable consequence of trying to make absolute truths that spring from a universal Intelligence, in my poor understanding of them, fit my imperfect world.  If everything suddenly popped into place, I'd be sure I'd done something wrong.  Thankfully, my world-view (as you call it) is a great, cluttered library of often-contradictory sources I consult to inflame or console as needed -- it is glorious.  Yours is a powerpoint presentation.

It is a very strange creature indeed who will abandon the contemplation of the Divine, to which he set his brightest intellects for centuries, just because his new toys don't show him some kindly father figure peeping back at him from a distant Kolob.

Keats once accused Newton of unweaving the rainbow, of reducing all that subfusc mysticism to cold hard facts. That's usually the reaction of people like you, who get their velvet pantaloons in a twist if they have to reassess their views about the world. Alan Watts used to say there are two sort of people: prickly and gooey, and you are so gooey you drip all over the place.

Atheists (not a term I like, incidentally) don't say there is no god, they merely say that the case has not been proven. Which it hasn't, categorically. Theists do so much limbo dancing to try and prove their point that it's a wonder they don't get a crick in the neck. Science is gradually filling in the blanks, and if you find objective, verifiable information about this planet and the universe dry and lacking in poetry then I feel sorry for you. If you can look at the images from the Hubble telescope without awe then you are the one lacking imagination. Yeah, I'd far rather contemplate the approximations of a bunch of illiterate peasants two thousand years ago!

And to say that this 'closed intellectual system' as you call it is attractive because it is simple just shows how little of it you know or understand. Religion is popular because it can be taught to a child of two, and people struggle to develop their intellectual horizons beyond that elementary stage. The appeal of a science-based approach is the joy of discovery, of having an open mind. Religion doesn't want that at all, in fact it fears new information that will force them to do a bit more tap-dancing to shore up their shaky position.

Quote from: K_Dubb on October 30, 2016, 12:04:37 PM
You will note (if you step back a minute) that, though I've adopted rhetorical excesses here for entertainment's sake, the posture is one of humility -- I'm not the one chucking Milton out as a childish fable.  O tremble, Shreddy, tremble for that arrogance!

I don't know who you were entertaining, presumably yourself. This whole screed is redolent of the sort of masturbatory self-indulgence appropriate to someone who presumably flounces about their bed-sitting room dressed as cardinal, giving blessings to the sparrows and squealing the Miserere in a thin, reedy tenor. I'm sure those buskins look simply divine on you.

Nunc dimittis

Quote from: FightTheFuture on October 30, 2016, 12:20:56 PM
Christianity saved my life and made me whole again. I was a horrid person with murderous proclivities, drowning in a sea of evil until Jesus took hold of me.

I can`t worry about the unbelievers, but I do pray for all of them.  You seek life insurance...health insurance? How about ETERNAL LIFE insurance? 

You were a horrid person? Anyway, who wants to live forever? What an awful thought. It's only because something is perishable that makes it valuable in the first place. Perhaps you prefer plastic flowers, but most people don't. And just try to imagine what eternal life would mean in the first place: unbearable boredom, listening to angels singing hosanna all bloody day. No thanks. Eternal life is a curse not something to be wished for.

Quote from: theONE on October 30, 2016, 10:08:12 AM
So Mr. know it all -where did they come from?

OK, the chemicals were planted on Earth by a large invisible kangaroo called The Pooka McPhillimey. That's how it started. But, before he departed to reascend to Heaven he took a massive marsupial dump, and the people who believe in the god bullshit descended from that. Coincidentally they also tend to have about the same IQ as kangaroo shit. Happy? I bet you must be feeling pretty silly now.

Quote from: Dr. MD MD on October 30, 2016, 09:14:56 AM
Never do...other than you, I mean. You're special.

Hmm, methinks you be suffering from an irony deficiency. You ought to prescribe yourself some pills before it turns fatal, chop chop!

Quote from: Dr. MD MD on October 30, 2016, 09:09:06 AM
I'm kinda old school, usually just relying on my hands. Boring? Maybe but it gets the job done. You still using that old woodchipper?

Fair enough, tiny hands, short eyes. You use what works, girlfriend, and don't take no notice of the nay-sayers.

Quote from: Dr. MD MD on October 30, 2016, 08:57:11 AM
Even though my dick head is massive it doesn't actually stand for that. Thanks for noticing though. 

I guess sticking it in between those school gates and rubbing it up and down as often as you do (we all have our hobbies, I don't condemn you for it) must make it swell rather painfully at times. It's a good job your residential address is the doorway of a pharmacy, so you can whisk away some ointment when they're not looking.

Quote from: K_Dubb on October 29, 2016, 11:56:27 AM
That is utterly simplistic, even for you.  That old and mellow faith which celebrates holidays with all the joy and solemnity they mark, gives deference to those moral authorities which inspire, lends a certain spice to sin, and eases the pain of death, but is kept in abeyance where critical faculties are required or my purse is consulted has been the bane of churchmen for generations.   I am pretty sure I share my selective observance with most modern Christians, if not most Christians throughout history.

You sound like one of those Ronald Firbank types who like the dressing up and the smell of incense but aren't all that keen on the doctrinal obligations. I smell the stench of hypocrisy, ranker than a dead weasel. You are an Anthony Blancheflower, you pompous dandy.

I don't see how it eases the pain of death if you are worried you might end up in hell. The sort of comforting bromides you have in mind are only suitable for children, not adults. There's no lack of joy or solemnity involved in life simply because you don't accept the fairy tale interpretation of it. It's liberating more than anything else. Too many people don't treat life here with the importance it deserves because they think there is something else that's going to be better. If they realised that this was all there is then they might value their time rather than fritter it away on trivial disputes that don't matter a jot.