The second plane hitting the tower
[on The Guardian’s front page the following day]
Young people chat as the atrocity is acted out across the bay (see news comment)
* Re π=3. Since I posted this on my web-site, a friend (HS) has told me that the whole thing is believed to be a hoax. If so, I apologise to the lady. I have also read that in the U.S. state of Indiana π=4 by law, but maybe that’s another hoax. The trouble is that these people are so crazy that it is quite easy to believe that they really do hold these views! (See also the Indiana Pi Bill.)
I do not believe in the existence of any supernatural being who created the universe and, indirectly, everything in it. I have very little to say about religion that is positive. When I was about 13 I came to the conclusion that it was just bunk.
All I can think of it is that good or evil comes from people. Religion is just an excuse for someone’s goodness or wickedness. So religion should be relegated to a bookshelf along with other mythologies and fairy tales.
There is no need for religious ‘faith’ or the church. Just think of the inquisitions, religious wars, witch burnings, and so on, perpetrated in the name of religion in Europe, America and elsewhere. And like most people I find these matters disgusting and indefensible.
I was born and raised in a ‘Christian’ country, so Christianity is the religion with which I am most familiar; and of its various sects, Anglicanism is the one in the forefront for me. But even Anglicans, who share the same basic faith-book (the Bible) with Roman Catholics, Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians, Presbyterians, and many more, not only disagree about elements of their doctrines, but fight wars over them.
Of course, many of these conflicts also have an aspect that is tribal, sectarian or nationalistic. Does that warrant wholesale slaughter? (Consider the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia as an example; conflicts between Serbs, Croats and other factions; but also between Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims. The religious element was very much to the fore.) Similarly in the north of Ireland.
We also have the problems, similar in their way, with Islam, and the divisions between, principally, Sunni and Shi’ia. Can their suicide bombers, for instance, or their mass indiscriminate killings of civilians really be justified, except by those who hold a blind faith in the justice of their cause? And don’t talk to me of the abominable Shariya Law! (A fatwa on all of you!)
To me, never! If their interpretation of their ‘faith’ allows such abominations, that interpretation is evil and I can find no place for it in any civilized society.
Of course, there are so-called moderate Islamists, just as there are moderate Christians, Jews and whatever. But by finding excuses in their faith-book for the activities of the few, they invalidate their faith, in my view. The same can be said of just about any faith which has its fanatics.
Most of these separate faiths indulge in blatant proselytizing; the crusades (did George W Bush think before he opened his mouth after 9/11?) and ethnic cleansing (in post-independence India and Yugoslavia) are obvious examples, as is the holocaust.
Before he was assassinated by the United States, Osama bin Laden was probably considered by many, especially westerners, to have been the most evil person on the planet. My view is that that position was and still is occupied by the Pope, for his inhuman attitude, based on his faith-book towards women, gays, birth control and many other issues. See ‘Chile: where abortion isn’t an option’ for one of the evils of the Roman Catholic church, reported in The Guardian (both pro and anti viewpoints are given free rein in the comments following the article).
Other faiths, Judaism, for example, show total contempt for others. (In their case, the treatment of Jews in and around the Second World War may mitigate somewhat their treatment of others [two wrongs make a right?]; though exactly what the Palestinians did to the Jews in WWII is a mystery to me.)
Here’s a comment on a Guardian article about Harold Camping and his Family Radio predicting that the end of the world (The Rapture) would occur on May 21st 2011 at 6 p.m. (by the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, it didn’t):
There are no gods! Why do people invest actual mental energy in this nonsense? Is it because everyone around them does...? No gods, no special books of rules, no divinity, no prophets, no angels, no demons... It’s just ideas from before the scientific age, can’t we move on? Oh, I see, ...religion helps the plutocrats to subdue the masses..? Right.. oh well.
There is no passage in the Qur'an that forbids the pictorial depiction of prophets... Or drinking alcohol... Indeed... or FGM or women wrapped up like Darth Vader in drag... or tobacco... and a whole lot more. Nor anything about women not allowed to drive cars or read or study books...
It’s a patriarchal vestige of an antique world.
There is no line in the Bible either but religious nutters manage to read between the lines to suit their agendas be it blasphemy, race, abortion, homosexuality, etc. I thought we were more evolved than that.
The one thing about religion that is worthy of praise is the good that institutional religion can do and has done throughout history. It saved Western civilization at the fall of Rome.
The church was in many places the only source of law and order for many decades. Without the scriptoria, almost the whole of Roman and some part of Greek literature would have been lost. The Moors could have overrun Europe and there may never have been an Enlightenment.
Nevertheless intellectual honesty demands we recognize all aspects of anything brought under serious scrutiny. I don’t know whether faith does more harm or more good, but I can’t deny that it can do good.
For some people, who perhaps don’t think the matter through, or haven’t the intellectual capacity to do so, religious faith is rather like Linus’s blanket in the Snoopy cartoons by Schultz. Linus is almost never without his blue blanket, which he holds over his shoulder while sucking his thumb. In the earlier cartoon strips, Linus’s relationship to his blanket was one of intense emotional attachment to the point of manifesting physical symptoms if deprived of it even for a short while. He suffered weakness and dizziness, for example, when Lucy took it from him only long enough to have it laundered, spon-taneously recovering when it was restored to him. On another occasion, Lucy snatched his blanket away and buried it in an effort to break Linus of his habit. Linus searched the neighborhood for days trying to find it, until Snoopy dug it up. Lucy won a first prize in a school science contest when she took Linus’s blanket away and recorded his ‘withdrawal symptoms’ — and as proof entered Linus and his blanket as a exhibit!
Religious faith can be the same.
Finally from 1 Kings 7:23 in the Bible (King James’ Version): ‘And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: [it was] round all about, and his height [was] five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.’ The rest of this drivel can be found in several places on the internet. This is typical. So, according to the holy scriptures, π is 3 (not 3.14159... or anything else). Accordingly the moronic Congresswoman Martha Roby Republican—Alabama) is sponsoring HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act, declaring the Euclidean mathematical constant of pi to be precisely 3.* [see left] Thank god [sic] President Obama has promised to veto this nonsense!
Russell’s teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot or the cosmic teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 — 1970) to illustrate the idea that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion. Russell wrote that if he claimed that a teapot were orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it would be nonsensical for him to expect others not to doubt him on the grounds that they could not prove him wrong. Russell’s teapot is still referred to in discussions concerning the existence of God.
In an article titled Is There a God? commissioned, but never published, by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell wrote:
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy as a reason for his own atheism:
I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.
The concept of Russell’s teapot has been extrapolated into more explicitly religion-parodying forms such as the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
[Left] Touched by His Noodly Appendage, a parody of The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, is an iconic image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
See also here for the meaning of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’
So the “Roman Catholics” have installed a new ancient as their ‘Pope’. Let’s see if he’s any better than his predecessors, though I doubt it! Inviting mega-dictators like Robert Mugabe to his inauguration augurs well for the future. I DON’T THINK!. Mugabe is another Hitler or Pinochet who could, apparently, do no wrong in the eyes of the church of which they proclaimed membership. Why he wasn’t arrested and thrown into a War Crimes jail is beyond belief! – Let’s go and exterminate a few million more Jews – (not that I’ve much sympathy with their State of Israel, I’ll admit) – and gypsies and gays.
And, “as it ’appens” even that paragon of charity Jimmy Savile was born and raised as a Roman Catholic! “Jim’ll fuck it!”.
As a gay person (and abhorred by the RC Church, of course), I am not at all surprised at the hypocracy surrounding it all.
It seems to me that, on reaching puberty, a male in the Church who is gay is sent to “marry the Virgin Mary” (i.e. abstain from sex with a woman or officially anyone else); and a woman (that most wretched kind of person) who is gay has to become a nun or other female slave of the church. Of course, the (obviously male) priests or, at most lay teachers, at RC schools, can’t keep their hands off the choir-boys. Could you? It is said that the “straightest” of men in a prison regard gay men as “fair game” so what chance does a poor boy stand against a man of god? If I chose to “molest” a boy, it all rests on my shoulders – I haven’t got a god to hide behind!
“Straight” Roman Catholics, on the other hand, are exhorted to “go forth and multiply” (without using condoms, of course) to increase the World’s population of Catholics. And coincidentally to increase the numbers of poor ignorant third-World people who innocently follow their leaders’ commands, and throw themselves into deeper and deeper poverty and reliance on their ‘saviours from god’ by the goodness of their god.