August 8, 2007

Google is my new God

Posted at 10:15 pm by Richard and tagged fsm, god, googlism, humour, pastafarianism, proof, search. Popularity: 24% [?]

I always knew the Christians had it wrong, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. 9 Proofs of the REAL God:

1. Google is the closest thing to an Omniscient (all-knowing) entity in existence, which can be scientifically verified.
2. Google is everywhere at once (Omnipresent).
3. Google answers prayers.
4. Google is potentially immortal.
5. Google is infinite.
6. Google remembers all.
7. Google can “do no evil” (Omnibenevolent).
8. According to Google trends, the term “Google” is searched for more than the terms “God”, “Jesus”, “Allah”, “Buddha”, “Christianity”, “Islam”, “Buddhism” and “Judaism” combined.
9. Evidence of Google’s existence is abundant.

Although, now I’m confused - is Google God, is is it the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Oh noodley/googley one, please give me a sign, so that I may know who to worship!

(via Williamely)

Permalink 1 Comment Share This

Scott Adams, Again

Posted at 8:50 am by Richard and tagged atheism, dilbert, scott-adams, stupidity, thought-experiments. Popularity: 13% [?]

I’m really struggling with the fact that Scott Adams continues to display a dogmaticly ignorant view of atheism. I realise he’s generally writing just to stir people up (or, as the about atheism blog describes it: trolling), but that doesn’t make it acceptable.

I like Dilbert. I often enjoy Scott Adams’ blog posts, because they do make you think. Sometimes he actually comes up with some really good thought experiments. As another commenter on my blog wrote:

I always liked thought experiments that went beyond “I saw the flaws in this argument when I was three years old.”

If he stayed away from things he clearly has no idea about, or actually took on board someone else’s opinion every now and then, it would be fine. But I’m finding it harder and harder to stay away from the “unsubscribe” button…

Permalink Comments Share This

August 5, 2007

What Would Jesus Believe?

Posted at 1:19 pm by Richard and tagged belief, eclecticism, einstein, god, hippy, jesus, red-dwarf, religion, truth, wwjd. Popularity: 34% [?]

Last week, I mentioned that science could be a way to “religious experience”, and I discussed in one of my earliest posts (Religious Eclecticism) the idea that all religions could be based on some element of truth. Don’t misunderstand me, I believe whatever truth they may be based on has been utterly distorted, but that doesn’t mean there’s no truth to be found.

I think that all the “prophets” and religious leaders believed in the message they preached, but they didn’t expect (or want) their messages to be accepted as divine and unquestionable truth - they wanted people to think for themselves. I believe that Jesus, if he was a real man and if his message hadn’t been distorted by religion, would still be revered today without needing needing to claim that he was “God”¹.

Christians often ask themselves, “What Would Jesus Do?”, and I think if Jesus lived today, he’d be amazed by the magic all around us, and might even “find God” in a similar way to Einstein:

Sometimes he was really using God as just a sort of convenient metaphor. But he did have, I think, a genuine cosmic religious feeling, a sense of admiration at the intellectual ingenuity of the universe. Not just its majesty, but its extraordinary subtlety and beauty and mathematical elegance.²

I think Jesus, today, would be more like a modern Buddhist or perhaps a “hippy” (jokes are often made about Jesus being the first hippy, but I think all jokes aside there’s a lot of truth to that).

If we ask ourselves the question, “What Would Jesus Believe?”, whatever the answer is, I definitely don’t believe he’d be a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim, for that matter. It makes me think of the Cat’s religion in Red Dwarf…

1. As far as I’m aware, there’s not a lot of evidence that he actually claimed that he was God, but even if he did, perhaps he meant it in an entirely different way. [↩]
2. Davies, Paul (2007) Einstein’s God [↩]

Permalink 3 Comments Share This

August 1, 2007

20 gram Links for July 31st ‘07

Posted at 10:32 am by del.icio.us and tagged atheism, bible, buddhism, cat, catholicism, christian, christianity, comparison, computer, creationism, death, ethics, evolution, god, humour, Links, lolcats, morality, programming, proof, religion, simulation, soul, starwars, summary, translation. Popularity: 53% [?]

Here are some of the sites I’ve been looking at recently, that I wanted to share:

• 7 Proofs That We Live in a Computer Simulation - or Why Proofs of Gods Existance Are Unconvicing
• Why I took so long to accept evolution - a.k.a. Why every christian should read their own bible. “part of what helped me along was actually reading the Bible in high school, being horrified by much of it”
• denialism blog : I can has souls? - There is a god, and it’s a cat.
• Religion and Sexual Ethics - A nice summary of the moral position of various religions. Interesting to compare catholicism and buddhism side by side! (I think I’m with the Buddhists, here)
• LOL cat Bible - Personally, I hate this pathetic LOLspeak crap, although this picture is funny… “In teh beginning, Invisible Man make univerz. Invisible Man say, I can has light. Gots light.”

Permalink 1 Comment Share This

July 30, 2007

Scott Adams on Atheism

Posted at 2:41 pm by Richard and tagged atheism, belief, certainty, dilbert, god, pascal, scott-adams. Popularity: 22% [?]

I think Scott Adams (Creator of Dilbert) needs a bit of an atheist education. In his post “The Atheist Who Thought He Was God“, he makes two common misunderstandings/fallacies relating to Atheism. Can you spot them?

Perhaps there are more, but I think they boil down to the following:

1. Few, if any, atheists claim to be 100% sure that God does not exist. (99.99999% IS good enough)
2. Pascal’s Wager (which Adams’ post is based on - although perhaps not knowingly) doesn’t account for the multitude of beings which claim punishment for non-belief. Of course the other fallacies of Pascal’s wager are equally present in Adams’ post.

Permalink 6 Comments Share This

“Atheist” as a label

Posted at 11:15 am by Richard and tagged atheism, belief, deaf, god, labels, negative. Popularity: 20% [?]

I started thinking after reading this comment - why do atheists feel the need to call themselves atheists at all? Certainly a hard/strong atheist would be justified in doing so since they have a specific belief to describe, but since most of us do not explicitly deny the possibility of God’s existence (and rather, claim that we simply “have no belief in God”), why should we have a label like this at all?

I don’t go around calling myself an “a-redhead” or an “a-woman”, or saying that I have “a-green” eyes, I’m not “a-artistic” or “a-Swahili-speaking” (feel free to translate these words into Greek for the proper effect). Similarly, a Deaf person wouldn’t go around calling themselves “a-hearing”¹. Why, then, do atheists insist on using a commonly misunderstood negative label² to describe their lack of belief in God? Aren’t we just “not theistic”?

What other positive words or terms could we use to describe ourselves?

1. Although “hearing impaired” is a commonly used term, a “culturally Deaf” person who uses sign language and associates with the Deaf community would never use this term to describe themselves. [↩]
2. ”a-theism” means, “without a belief in God”, which, one would assume should be the default position. [↩]

Permalink 8 Comments Share This