ATHEISM

Last Friday Bill Maher was prodding a Christian conservative on his program with the fact the Christians can be and have been as violent as Muslim fundamentalist. The panelist had obviously rehearsed her response before being a on his show: her answer to his taunt was that Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia were atheistic countries that basked in blood baths.




I am always agog at the simplistic, head in the sand bull shit these morons use to defend the violence of religion.



Again (earlier blog,) she was trying to invoking a negative: Atheism is not a religion or an organized movement with tenants to adhere to and believe in, so you can’t really identify anything as being atheist. It is simply that atheist can’t bring themselves to believe the fantastic lunacy that you are required to believe in as a member of an organized religion - a tenet of beliefs that the religious wish to inflict on all others.



Conservative arguments are usually summed up with ten second catch phrases; so I have an atheistic one for the Christian conservatives that pretty much explains atheism:

God and Jesus!
Are you nuts?


thanks to the blog Dumb Perignon for the link to the above clip.

the Ol'Buzzard

I DON’T CARE

I’m sick of it!

I’m tired of hearing about it.

Fuck the debt limit.

There is nothing I can do about it.

I voted Democrat.

Our party lost.

I’d vote third party,

But it’s throwing away my vote.

There is no sanity left.

Perhaps there never was.

We stumble along,

The blind leading the blind.

The asylum has been seized

The inmates are in charge

Chaos rules the day

Accept what can’t be changed

We are all along for the ride

The lunatics drive the bus

The destination is nowhere

Then we’ll go somewhere else

You put your right foot out

You put your right foot in

You put your right foot out

And you shake it all about

You do the hokey-poky

And you turn yourself around

That’s what it’s all about.

HUMOR FROM THE TROOPS

CAUSE AND (negative) Effect

PROVING THE NEGATIVE




When we think of negatives our mind goes to fourth grade math and the counting system:



-10  -9  -8  -7  -6  -5  -4  -3  -2  -1  0  +1  +2  +3  +4  +5  +6  +7  +8  +9  +10



With ZERO being the pivotal number, and any number appearing before the zero as a value of something that doesn’t exist – explain that to a fourth grade math student.




Actually the concept of Zero, as a place value, is probably the single greatest advancement in mathematics, allowing all present day calculations to be precise and possible.   Zero was devised by the Babylonians as a place value in their Base-60 counting system.

But let’s go back to proving ‘the something that does not exist.’   When Cheney bragged that George Bush’s enhanced interrogations policies prevented further terrorist attacks in the U.S after 9/11 he was postulating a negative: we did not have an attack therefore enhanced interrogation was responsible.



In order to verify this claim we would have to use the scientific method: specifically what actual attack plans were uncovered through enhanced interrogation; and of these which were at some level of execution; and exactly what counter measures were used to defuse these imminent attacks.



Postulating a negative is often used as a ploy to take credit for something that would have happened, or did happen, or did not happen as a natural result of cause and effect.



The problem with proving a negative is the unwillingness to present documented proof of the process and the verifiable results.



Some lies postulated as negatives:


1. Because we fight them over there, we don’t have to fight them over here.


2. Our nuclear plants are safe because we have had no major melt downs in the U.S.


3. The Patriot Act has kept us safe.


4. We are a free nation because our Constitution guarantees us the right to bear arms.


5. The Iraq war had made us safer.


6. Because we can not explain cosmology (or specific happenings) there must be a god.




Some negatives are verifiable: one thing that should have never been postulated as a negative was the statement that stimulus spending prevented the loss of jobs. The President has taken a lot of flack for postulating this as a negative when it would have been so easy to present the facts: saving the automobile industry and all the related suppliers actually prevented the loss of x-number of jobs – with the jobs listed; along with an actual list of construction jobs, teachers jobs, police jobs etc. that were actually saved as the results of stimulus spending incorporated in the budgets of identifiable states.

Specificity is preferable to postulating a negative; otherwise it should be suspect as a lie.

We may be falling down a rabbit hole when we blindly accept, and laud our government and societal leaders for things that did not happen.

DILEMMA

I profess to be a Buddhist – of sorts: that is I look at the teachings of the Buddha as a guide for living a life of fulfillment in chaotic times. I don’t belong to a Buddhist community, or dress in robes or chant. I do meditate (on occasion) and find it calming and a way to clarify my daily existence.




The Buddha taught compassion, and unlike the Christians, a Buddhist actually tries to live compassionately. Here is my rub. It is difficult not to be judgmental and there are people that I feel resentment toward: I have strong political leanings and prejudice against organized religions; I dislike mean people and stupid people.



AMBIVALENCE

I was in the Hannaford Food Market today in our little town of about seven thousand. Usually there are between twenty and seventy people in the market at one time. Not for the first time I noticed hugely obese women riding around in electric shopping carts buying food. These women (and usually there are more women than men) are too big to walk and shop. Their legs are as bigger than my wife’s waist, their asses hanging over both sides of the seat and their bellies hang down between their legs when they stand – and they are riding around in electric carts to buy more food? This begs for a George Carlin comment.



So where does this leave me in Buddhist philosophy? I focus on my daily life and try to remain impassive to those things in the world I can not change; but, I’m not really successful.

the Ol’Buzzard

WHAT THE FUCK!

You ever have one of those days and you look at the world around you and say “What the Fuck!” Going through Blogs today and seeing rants about religion and politics – child killing and mistrials – global warming and genocide – corporate malfeasants – war and soldiers dying – government corruption – pandemics and environmental destruction; and in general stupid people doing stupid things.







The fact is that 400 children die every hour from cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, hepatitis; every year millions of people – most are children – die from starvation; there is a rape every three minutes and a murder every twelve minutes. These are things we could correct, but we don’t give a fuck. We are focused on petty politics, inconsequential news and sports.






You get what you pay for; or in this case you get what you deserve. We celebrate death and war, we focus on the trivial, we make up gods to tell ourselves we are special and we ignore what we don’t wish to deal with.






The human race is a producer – but other than the ability to make things we are a pitiful and destructive life form. In fact we have produced ourselves into a technological dark age where common sense and basic intelligence no longer applies. We walk around with cell phones and i-pads absorbed in the fantasy world of the World Wide Web.






We need to go out and touch base with reality: do physical work – fuck somebody – get drunk. I think that’s a prescription I need.


Have a good day


the Ol”Buzzard

GEORGE ORWELL'S 2011

IF YOU HAVEN'T READ GEORGE ORWELL'S 1984 YOU SHOULD READ IT;  IF YOU HAVE READ IT YOU SHOULD READ IT AGAIN

In the world of 1984 George Orwell portrays a chilling parody of today. We are more controlled and manipulated than we even know. Government never has been about the people, and today it has truly morphed into a corporate oligarchy.



WAR IS PEACE


FREEDOM IS SLAVERY


IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

“If all others accept the lie which the party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became true. Who controls the past, ran the party slogan, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

“Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version. A great deal of the time you were suppose to make them up out of your head.”

“The aim of the high is to remain where they are. The aim of the middle is to change places with the high. The aim of the low, when they have an aim – for it is an abiding characteristic of the low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of any thing outside their daily lives – is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.”

“It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favored some individuals against others.”

"Imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public execution, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the

Headless corpses in the desert...

Build the Damn Fence.

deportation of whole populations not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."

“In the past, no government had the power to keep it’s citizens under constant surveillance.”



  Who is watching you?

“The essential act of the party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty, to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any facts that have become inconvenient.”











“The proles (people) are only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is in the ranks of the party, and above all the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasms is found.”

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end."

NEW SPEAK: (a sound bite) is designed to diminish the range of thoughts.



INGSOC (the controlling oligarchy): “(like religion) successfully manipulated the mind to the point that a person thinks the opposite of what is true.”



DOUBLE THINK: reality control – i.e. thou shall not kill, but glorification of war.

We have been told to be afraid so that we might be less protective of the constitution,less mindful of international law, less respectful toward allies, less discerning in our search for facts, less rigorous in questioning what our leaders tell us; all of this to avoid being accused of aiding our enemies.

From Memo to the President Elect

by Madeleine Albright.