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December 5th, 2018
They are risen.
Congrats to long-time patron Peter from Iowa on winning this month’s raffle prize – a signed, dedicated copy of the latest J&M book, Wrong again, God boy.
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There is no plan.
Well not one that involves invisible friends anyway…
When Peter from Iowa won this month’s raffle, was that part of Author’s devious plan?
(Author: of course not!)
SoG: I thought not!
The cargo cults of the pacific are a fascinating study. After the island hopping of WWII a number of pacific islanders, who had never seen white people, let alone airplanes before, started producing fake airplanes and landing strips out of bamboo to lure down the big metal birds with their amazing cargo. Some of them started worshipping John Frum, who may have been a real person once, we dont know. Anyway, one of the priests gets interviewed about this belief that Frum will come back with the cargo and is asked if 50 years is a long time to wait. He replies that you lot have been waiting 2000 years for your saviour. Hilarious! The interview is at the 37 min mark, but the whole piece should be required watching.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/15-worrying-things-about-crispr-babies-scandal/577234/?fbclid=IwAR34zN-uhZWq0F35tgCnLauPh6VB2Cvn5O-CgJl8QK2I8oN0VTFoROu4Rb4
The name John Frum…comes from the Yanks who would say I’m John from Milwaukee or I’m john from chicago etc….
Whenever I hear any mention of “The Plan” it always brings to mind what is probably the greatest science fiction short story title ever:
Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death
(You can find the story itself here).
So, Christians and cargo cultists are waiting for Godot?
jb thanks for that link. Quite the story, like a visit to the mind of a sentient spider. Brilliant stuff.
I’m always amused by the anthropocentric thinking of most people, especially Christians, who don’t seem to understand that our lives and sexuality are only one way that nature does things. There are many other ways. I’m sure i only prefer ours because it’s familiar to me.
Ah yes, the plan. Thanks again, Author. It takes a brilliant spin doctor to turn a crucifixion into a spiritual triumph. That’s one thing about Christianity that I can admire. That and having an ad campaign with no product to manufacture or distribute, yet still turning a darn good profit.
Ive said it before , the xtians nicked the whole jesus story from mythical men who existed long before the fictional Nazarene. Historians have proved to a very high probability that a real Jesus never existed….all myth. Those historians who cherry pick the evidence to prove his existance are xtian charlatans bout time the whole lot of them realise they are like alcoholics who will not face up to their addiction…self delusion is a very sad thing….
Darwin Harmless: “… having an ad campaign with no product …” Surely the same applies to every successful religion – there are quite a few around.
They do have a product…salvation and a promise of eternal life….
In my science fiction reading phase 1 1977 to 1985…I read many novels that had humans v sentient insects. Starship Troopers being the most famous as the Arachnids are space fareing arthropods. Greg Bear also had a sentient species made up of cooperating organisms, sort of cooperative conglomerate of creatures. Alan Dean Foster also had a species of slimy octopus like creatures in his brilliant book. The man who used the universe….
Rob Barnett: Yes, like Darwin Harmless said, “no product”.
Aye. We know that! But to billions the kings gown is resplendent with the jewels of heaven….
2 sent: Godot is a bilingual pun — pronounced God O — so yes.
They do have a product…salvation and a promise of eternal life…
I often buy a lottery ticket (never more than one) when the payout gets into the hundred million dollar range. The product I am buying for my $2 is the possibility that next week I might be stinkin’ rich. I wouldn’t buy the same ticket for $20, but for $2 it seems like a fair deal. I get to fantasize for a couple of days about what I would do with the money if I won, and who knows, actually winning is not totally outside the bounds of possibility.
You can think of religion the same way. You buy your ticket by obeying the rules, and you get to spend your whole life thinking about how great it will be if you win. Of course you have to consider if it’s worth the price, and some religions are more expensive than others. But then, part of the price is usually that you have to try to be a good person, and that could be considered more of a benefit than a cost. In fact it is not rare at all for someone to turn around a wrecked life by finding some version of God, and you could argue that they come out ahead even if if they never collect that great payout in the sky. If a reformed drug addict thug tells me that Jesus put him on the straight and narrow, I’m not going to be in any great hurry to talk him out of believing in Jesus. (Provided of course that he isn’t spending all his time trying to talk me into believing!)
I only recently found out that in Europe they pronounce Godot differently. In America everyone pronounces it gu-DOUGH.
jb: Americans mispronouncing “foreign” names – nothing new about that.
Well I would have expected theater people to be a little bit more cosmopolitan. Actually, according to the article I linked to, there seems to be dispute even today. Personally, having heard god-OH all my life, GOD-oh sounds way, way, way too obvious! Come on guys, let’s just spell it out why don’t we?
Well, at least everybody can agree on the silent “T”. Now I’m wondering how I would have pronounced the name if I had never seen it before and had been told it was English rather than foreign. Maybe GOD-it?
English can be strange
The ancestral name Featherstone-Hall is pronounced “Fan-shore”….
I read a lot, and all my life I would find myself running into words that I never heard spoken and didn’t know how to pronounce. In recent years though I’ve found that YouTube is an excellent resource for this problem. When I have a name or technical term I want the pronunciation for, I’ll search YouTube for a lecture by some sort of expert, who presumable knows the right way to say it. On occasion even the experts don’t agree, but even then I at least have a menu of respectable options.
“Fan-shore”??? Surely it’s “Fan-shaw”!!!
Phonetically the same…
Not phonetically the same.
Well it is with my Manc accent…
JB. You have just described the logic of Pascal’s wager. Blaise Pascal, the famous mathematican put it thusly in his Pensees
“Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists”
There are several responses to this
1) God might hate hypocrites (although looking around, he clearly doesn’t vent His wrath on them in this world)
2) God is usually depicted as jealous. There are 1000s of versions of religion, many seem mutually exclusive, not to say actively persecutory of even minor variants. Is he (or she, at this point) forgiving if you bet on the wrong one? The evidence for this is not compelling
3) $2 might be a relatively low cost, and the process of delusional fantasy is pleasurable and worth $2. Enjoy. However, a lifetime of believing in bs is not low cost. It actively connives at preventing you believing in other things that you ought to believe in. Examples include human justice in the here and now, evolution, anthropogenic climate change, abortion, gay rights: I’m not picking these at random as might be obvious–there is a non-accidental connection between theocratic beliefs and being a disgusting individual right here and now.
Or, as one wag put it
“When Christians use Pascal’s Wager on me, I just tell them that they are right, and ask for directions to the nearest mosque.”
In England, the quaint polite xtian maiden aunt type of religiosity is benign….Islam is currently killing thousands every day….world of difference! tho its all bollocks there is benign bollocks and dangerous bollocks….
Well, here’s my $0.02 worth:
I wonder if anyone can
Explain how that there is a true plan
To explain all that’s tragic
Through means that are magic
When the only real actor is man.
And the peculiar thing is that a whole raft of men have given firm dates based on Biblical anal lysis. Butt, ignoring the plain words attributed to Jesus Haploid Christ Himself that “No man knoweth the hour.” Some were sincere and others no so much. Doom predictions do reduce the size of your flock, but the ones that remain will do _ANYTHING_ for you including their wives, daughters and sons.
The record of such predictions from women is no better.
Biblical analysis! Nice one Centurion. Many a scholar (sic) has wasted his life trying to find meaning in the pile of steaming horseshit that was cobbled together in the 4th century CE….May as well try and analyse the lyrics of a prog rock band….????
M27Holts, I don’t know as you could call it, “analysis,” but Steve Wells has combed through the Bible, Book of Mormon, and the Koran and done a pretty fair job of dismantling the bunch of ’em. You can find his handiwork at:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/
As well as in print form.
M27Holts, I’ll give this to prog rock lyrics, they’re generally nowhere near as pretentious as any biblical passage.
Walter “The ones that remain will do anything”. You interest me strangely…
Care to elaborate? Are you suggesting that the millenarian predictions strengthen faith after they have been shown to be flase by weeding out the less faithful–like Festingers cognitive dissonance? Or some other mechanism?
There is a book on it, “When Prophecy Fails” Duck Duck Go it or read the NYT article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/opinion/krugman-when-prophecy-fails.html
The mayan calendar prophecy…I had forgotten about that…Funny. I watched an old video From about 1985 about the French prophet Nostradamus….Interestingly they made a lot of past historical events fit the quattrains that were laughingly and tortuously interpreted to fit those past events. But the predictions for FUTURE events made by the experts from those quattrains not attributed to past events were all completely wrong as I watched in 2018. Apparently Nostradamus predicted a Nuclear strike on Jerusalem in the year 1999..He wasnt even close….
Walter: Cheers. Yes, thats Festingers work. Very inspirational. Lots of people think they know what cognitive dissonance is (go over to Scott Adams’ blog for some egregious examples of why a little learning is a dangerous thing). Its pretty much an empirical test of some of Freuds posited defence mechanisms, and its brilliant.
I work in IT. DILBERT is spot on in a lot of the strips…comedy gold occasionally…
M27Holts, I understand that much of the content in Dilbert is generated by Scott Adams’ fan base, which would explain why it is often spot on. I have a couple of fabourites. The one the first comes to mind is this one: https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Budget+Numbers
As for Scot Adams, I find him totally insufferable. Can’t stand to read or listen to him any more. He may be fairly smart but he’s also a condescending jerk with an inflated opinion of his own intelligence.