I remember being told the parable of the widows’ mite; tho poor, she gave all she had (“…for God loves a cheerful giver.”). Having later studied Scientology, and MLMs, and other repressive belief systems, it gets clearer and clearer that “you never give a sucker an even break” – and get that last penny…
I was often told “Remember what happened to Ananais” as a child when my mother suspected shenanigans in some explanation I had offered. Fortunately, I had the evidence of my own and my siblings survival following specific events of mendacity to assure me the Big Guy no longer used such enforcement methods, and so never admitted to falsehood under the threat of deistic intervention.
Having read today’s panels, I realize that the real danger to Ananais was not God, but a cult that knew he had come into a large quantity of cash. Truly, the love of money is the root of all evil, both for men and cults alike.
I vaguely remember my nana mentioning this story many years ago. She told me far more interesting stories about her youth. The malaria outbreak in flixton in 1923 was more believable than any of the bullshit in the bible…
Godfellas, starring Ray Liotta as Jesus Christ and Joe Pesci as Peter The Fisherman. “You know why theycall me The Fisherman? Because if you don’t pay up I’ll feed you to the fishes! Now where’s my fuckin’ money!?”
The falsity of the Ananias much shouldn’t discourage people from truthfulness. Just because there isn’t a spirit that kills liars, that doesn’t make lying an appropriate thing to do. (I’m not talking about lying to those who would hurt you, I’m talking about lying for convenience.)
Too many ordinary virtues are becoming rarer. Respect for people, truthfulness, integrity, sobriety, industriousness, thrift … I don’t see them often anymore. Were they never really there in general?
Holy shit Laripu….what the fook do I say when my wife next asks me…”Does my bum look big in this?…I am destined to burn in hell…at least it will save on the fuel bills…
M27, here are some options for you:
“Looks like the back of a shire horse.”
“Take them off so I can compare against you bum without them.”
“Aliens, where have you taken my wife?”
“Not bigger than normal!”
and for my fave, you take out your, ahem, thingie, wave it around and approach her from behind saying …
“Lunar module, prepare for landing!”
In the previous post someone (I forget who) asked about what counted as anti-semitism in the Labour party. Today I open the internet and Rachel Riley (yes, her off of Countdown) goes into some detail about the abuse she’s had. The Labour party needs to clean house, but this is a problem because a lot of its support comes from the muslim community and a lot of the muslim community is pretty anti-semitic (apart from George Galloway, who is wholly and thoroughly anti-semitic). https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=29&v=y-f6suP-Ojo
M27 : their are no possible answers to that question that don’t involve pain but my usual response
Seems to work for any question from my wife.
“They/it/you look lovely and remember that I have excellent taste because I married you, your taste isn’t so good- you married me”.
It’s kept me alive for 30+ years of marriage so far.
When Mrs Coat (I know that I pinched that from Haggis) complained about getting fat, I told her she was just getting more luscious. She took that to heart and look at her now. That’s what you get for lying.
Helena, I don’t know anything about Rachel Riley, other than that she’s pretty, but I’ve read that she got support from Stephen Fry. That says a lot to me. I like and respect Stephen Fry.
Laripu: Well, the celebrity thing is kind of tedious. But people trot out the “Chomsky is smart and Jewish and he hates Israel so it must be ok to do that” trope.
So, given that the only thing going for Chomsky in this regard is his celebrity (its not like his politics is peer-reviewed) its worth countering fire with fire. Chomsky is the product of Judaism, and he hates it. Fine. But he’s also the product of liberal capitalist democracy and he hates all those things as well, so I’m not sure how far any of that gets us. Imagine him trying to peddle his anarchism in any other society but western democracies and what the likely results would be. He wouldnt last the weekend.
It’s not that I think RR nails all of it. It’s that the moment she voiced some concerns about some of the people Jeremy Corbyn gives house room to, then a whole bunch of people that any sane individual might fear that Corbyn gives house room to, came pouring out from under their stones to issue her with rape threats, death threats, doxing and all the hideous panoply of the modern version of the village ducking stool.
Ok, so it might be that all these people are really in the pay of Mossad to discredit its enemies. Maybe. But if it turns out that George Galloway was really a Mossad agent in deep cover–going to all the trouble of marrying a Palestinian and converting to Islam to help his cover– then I guess that we really would be better off turning off all electrical devices and pulling our tin-foil hats down firmly over our ears, because the world no longer makes any sense at any level.
Fnord
Rachel Riley has a 2:1 in maths from Oriel College Oxford. So her symmetrical good looks and gorgeous eyes are complimented by an well trained intellect. She is the Dan Brown herioine incarnate! She also.supports the same football team as me as well. I am as much a slave to my promordial instincts as any man and would obviously like to trade bodily fluids with her….Then talk a bit of science as pillow talk with football as well….
The best selling author of “The Davinci Code” which I read in Spain years back. The protagonist always has a scientifically brilliant girl in tow who is also devastatingly beautiful as well…
Helena, I’ve heard that Chomsky was a fine linguist in his day. I don’t know much about him, but I do know that it’s possible for smart people to develop weird opinions.
Despite being an excellent physicist, he now believes that parapsychological phenomena (telepathy, psychokinesis and other paranormal themes) are real.
A while ago I exchanged email with him, suggesting that if you had neural interfaces that could marry brains to cell phone tech, you’d have the functional equivalent to telepathy. He agreed, but said it wasn’t the kind of thing he was interested in. He was interested in – real telepathy – I suppose. (Rolling my eyes.)
But I suppose that, having read my mind, you already knew that. 😉
I wonder why, having also been, sort of, a product of Judaism, I don’t really hate it. I think it’s mostly silly, and mostly wrong, but equivalent to any other antique religion.
Maybe it’s because I was raised by an atheist and an agnostic who merely practised some traditions. My mother lit candles on Friday, but said no prayers. My father, on Jewish holidays, didn’t work, but never went to synagogue either. Instead he’d have a few shots of Seagram’s VO with some socialist friends of his.
Nothing was really forced on me, except circumcision and to formally participate in the Bar Mitzvah ceremony. (Of course I don’t remember the former, but I kind of enjoyed the latter.) I was never told what to believe. I came to agree with my father, that religion was made-up fairy-tales.
Because of my upbringing, I like eastern European food, and speak multiple languages (none as well as English). That’s about it.
Maybe Chomsky’s hatred of Judaism comes from being compelled to do things he hated.
My parents didn’t really bring me up as I spent a lot of time before I was 11 with my maternal grandmother who got jesus fever about the time I was born. She didn’t force her religion on me, however and my upbringing was more influenced by my book mad paternal grandmother who was strangely superstitious and believed in goblins and fairies but didnt believe in gods or an afterlife. I would have been resentful of any organised religion forced upon me as I hated RE at school and was very disruptive in such classes, preferring to be taught practical subjects or sciences! I would have been tempted to cut off my parents noses had they had me circumcised! So I see where Chomsky is coming from!
I went to elementary school in Montreal, and at the time there were private schools (for $), or government-run public schools, free. The public schools at the time were either Catholic or Protestant. Typically, secular Jews (and other non-Catholics, Greeks, Chinese, etc) sent their kids to the Protestant schools. (Orthodox Jews often went to private schools that cost $.)
The upside was that I learned about different cultures and religions from age 5 on. The downside was that we were all forced to sing every morning. After god save the queen it was Christian hymns. I still remember the words to “Mothers of Salem”, “O Come All Ye Faithful” i.e. Adeste Fideles, and “Jesus Loves Me”. It wouldn’t take much to remind me of others. That made for interesting conversations with my atheist father, in which he often used the Yiddish word “bobbeh-meiseh”, which is literally “grandma-story” or old wives tale. Some of my best memories of him. 🙂
About god save the queen: we were rather disrespectful, and sang “God shave our gracious queen, shave her with shaving cream, god shave the queen. Send her to Halifax, make her pay income tax. God shave our gracious queen, god shave the queen.” Teachers didn’t like that.
Anyone here who was brought up in a religion other than Christianity, Judaism or Islam?
Myself, I was brought up in a Protestant Christian background (Church of Scotland); I swallowed all the bullshit when young, but “achieved enlightenment” around age twenty. (Without having to sit under a particular kind of tree to do so, like Gautama, aka the Buddha.) Unfortunately, my close family are all, at least nominally, still C of S; we have come to avoid certain subjects rather than get into pointless arguments which neither side can win. I still have hopes for my youngest relative, a seventeen-year-old grand-nephew, who is about to go to uni to study Chemistry.
Chemistry eh? Good luck I scraped a C at A level as it seemed way harder than the physics and maths papers I passed with A. Yes RE is religious education. What a waste of time, better learning to tile a bathroom or hang a door than basically learning about fairy stories that somehow gain credence through culture. RE Is basically another form of Literature for the mentally retarded…
Laripu: Thats all very interesting.
Chomsky is a very smart guy, but being smart doesn’t prevent you having your own brains used against you in a sort of mental judo. E.g. Watch smart folk falling for conspiracy theories right and left and being able to easily out”think” the others in the room (and incurring confirmation bias every time they do it). I dont know Chomsky well (I used to box with one his students) but I do know that he harbors a deep and abiding hatred for America, to the point of being somewhat blind to equally bad/ obviously worse regimes.
Re the physics prof bit. Thats fascinating. The need to believe in a particualr form of telepathy transcends the demonstration that a particualr formmight actually exist? That reminds me of Dennetts friend who was wiritng a book on magic. “Real magic?” he was asked. “Well, the stuff that conjurors do”. He realized that the magic you could actually do was not real magic. I think th ere is a gap in a lot of brains due to overwhelming success of material science. They want there to be something else. Call it spirit, call it mind, call it krishna consciousness, its something non-material that many folk really feel to be there
Which brings us back to Dan Brown, who claims in one of his books that science has proved that a soul leaves the body at the point of death. Apparently a body weighs 0.000000001g less a nano second after the brain dies, thus proving that the soul leaves the body…sounds plausible non?
Re Dan Brown quote: You need pretty fancy scales and a pretty accurate clock to achieve such accuracy. I’d have thought that simple evaporation of water content would be enough to explain such figures – if such figures actually exist!
Surely if there were such a thing as a soul it would be without either mass or volume (or temperature, or magnetic field, etc etc.)
Helena, I think you hit the nail on the head with this: “its something non-material that many folk really feel to be there”.
People yearn for three things: love/sex, unending life without suffering, and transcendental meaning. If they’re lucky they get the first one for a short time. The other two are obviously impossible.
Leonard Cohen made a whole career singing about those yearnings. 🙂
Haha. I LIKE that sculpture. A 3D banksy definately! Laripu, ypu should know that anybody mentioning Adolf Hitler or Leonard Cohen loses the argument immediately. Its the rules….haha
1 billionth of a gram? Given that each breath is about 500 ml and air weighs 1.3 kg/m3 that is almost literally nothing. Its certainly below measurement error thresholds
Someone Says, thanks for that link to the McJesus article. Respect to the Museum director Nissim Tal for resisting the pressure to censor art due to political or cultural pressure.
I wish I could be there to pitch a tent next to that protester with the sign reading: “respect religion”. My sign would read: “Why?”
Son of Glenner, now you’ve got me wondering whether the soul could be made up of neutrinos or the like.
Someone, thanks for the link to the McJesus article. I hadn’t heard about this controversy before. I was surprised that there was no mention of whether McDonald’s has sued Jani Leinonen (the artist) for trademark infringement, but maybe they don’t want to provide more evidence to support Leinonen’s derisive comment on the “cult-like worship of capitalism.”
When his sects rules were layed down in scripture presumably men could not fly. Is this a clear sign that his god is real? After all he told his followers that they would eventually fly over cemetery land with powered flight, is that not clear proof that the law was made by an all knowing deity? Or is it simply a mad interpretation of a vague portion of esoteric bullshit?
Interesting article, Laripu. You learn something new every day.
I don’t know much about the Orthodox except for the gender segregation and the rumors regarding their sexual habits.
But this? Well, that just epitomizes the phrase “holy shit”.
“Follow the money” may be right. It’s almost certainly someone’s propaganda. The Pauline “Collection for the Saints” may be background. Schism was in the air, and several main factions are represented: in Jerusalem Peter and James, and in Antioch Paul and Barnabas. The Jerusalem sect appears to have been dependent on the Antioch center.
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
Jesus and Mo cartoons are wonderfully funny and true. Richard Dawkins
Jesus and Mo make the world a better place, bless their little hearts. Ophelia Benson
In a world defined by outrage and offence and liberal spinelessness, Jesus and Mo is a treasure, whose value we should never fail to recognize. Read them. Laugh. And think. Kenan Malik
The brilliant, celebrated, freaking hilarious atheist comic strip ... Greta Christina
...rays of sanity in a befuddled world. Keri Hulme
The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available... Malise Ruthven
J & Mo is the funniest and most consistently thought-provoking cartoon strip on the Net. In a saner world, it would run in a major newspaper. Nelson Jones, Heresy Corner
Consistently amusing, frequently thought-provoking and often heart-warming. New Humanist
Jesus & Mo is one of the most wonderful things on the internet.. JT Eberhard
Wittily captures much of the absurdity of religious apologetics. Mano Singham
I love jesusandmo.net cartoons - witty and sharp! Katha Pollitt
Often hilarious, frequently wry, these cartoons do what all the best cartoons do: they tell the truth through humour. Terry Sanderson, NSS President
...a wonderfully acid British cartoonist... Nick Cohen
I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and
any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly Richard Stallman
...empowering, important and deeply progressive, not to mention hilarious... Council of Ex-Muslims
September 9, 2009
yeah, this god guys seems like one vindictive fellow.
I’d suggest following the money, as in all murder cases.
Money is no direct use to a god, but it would be to the apostles. So, god didn’t do it, the apostles did it.
“Bone-sawed their own heads off and then disposed of themselves in baths of acid you say? Sounds entirely plausible…”
I remember being told the parable of the widows’ mite; tho poor, she gave all she had (“…for God loves a cheerful giver.”). Having later studied Scientology, and MLMs, and other repressive belief systems, it gets clearer and clearer that “you never give a sucker an even break” – and get that last penny…
Is the Peter at 5:49 the same Peter mentioned in the passage, who appears to be a mind-reader?
I was often told “Remember what happened to Ananais” as a child when my mother suspected shenanigans in some explanation I had offered. Fortunately, I had the evidence of my own and my siblings survival following specific events of mendacity to assure me the Big Guy no longer used such enforcement methods, and so never admitted to falsehood under the threat of deistic intervention.
Having read today’s panels, I realize that the real danger to Ananais was not God, but a cult that knew he had come into a large quantity of cash. Truly, the love of money is the root of all evil, both for men and cults alike.
I vaguely remember my nana mentioning this story many years ago. She told me far more interesting stories about her youth. The malaria outbreak in flixton in 1923 was more believable than any of the bullshit in the bible…
New one on me, Author. Thanks for that.
Godfellas, starring Ray Liotta as Jesus Christ and Joe Pesci as Peter The Fisherman. “You know why theycall me The Fisherman? Because if you don’t pay up I’ll feed you to the fishes! Now where’s my fuckin’ money!?”
The falsity of the Ananias much shouldn’t discourage people from truthfulness. Just because there isn’t a spirit that kills liars, that doesn’t make lying an appropriate thing to do. (I’m not talking about lying to those who would hurt you, I’m talking about lying for convenience.)
Too many ordinary virtues are becoming rarer. Respect for people, truthfulness, integrity, sobriety, industriousness, thrift … I don’t see them often anymore. Were they never really there in general?
And still fools insist that Christianity sets a good example to us of how to conduct our lives. Certain (most?) politicians seem to agree.
Holy shit Laripu….what the fook do I say when my wife next asks me…”Does my bum look big in this?…I am destined to burn in hell…at least it will save on the fuel bills…
M27, here are some options for you:
“Looks like the back of a shire horse.”
“Take them off so I can compare against you bum without them.”
“Aliens, where have you taken my wife?”
“Not bigger than normal!”
and for my fave, you take out your, ahem, thingie, wave it around and approach her from behind saying …
“Lunar module, prepare for landing!”
In the previous post someone (I forget who) asked about what counted as anti-semitism in the Labour party. Today I open the internet and Rachel Riley (yes, her off of Countdown) goes into some detail about the abuse she’s had. The Labour party needs to clean house, but this is a problem because a lot of its support comes from the muslim community and a lot of the muslim community is pretty anti-semitic (apart from George Galloway, who is wholly and thoroughly anti-semitic).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=29&v=y-f6suP-Ojo
M27 : their are no possible answers to that question that don’t involve pain but my usual response
Seems to work for any question from my wife.
“They/it/you look lovely and remember that I have excellent taste because I married you, your taste isn’t so good- you married me”.
It’s kept me alive for 30+ years of marriage so far.
I have a hunch that the last suggestion of Laripu may have a less favourable ending than Apollo 13….
When Mrs Coat (I know that I pinched that from Haggis) complained about getting fat, I told her she was just getting more luscious. She took that to heart and look at her now. That’s what you get for lying.
Helena, I don’t know anything about Rachel Riley, other than that she’s pretty, but I’ve read that she got support from Stephen Fry. That says a lot to me. I like and respect Stephen Fry.
Laripu: Well, the celebrity thing is kind of tedious. But people trot out the “Chomsky is smart and Jewish and he hates Israel so it must be ok to do that” trope.
So, given that the only thing going for Chomsky in this regard is his celebrity (its not like his politics is peer-reviewed) its worth countering fire with fire. Chomsky is the product of Judaism, and he hates it. Fine. But he’s also the product of liberal capitalist democracy and he hates all those things as well, so I’m not sure how far any of that gets us. Imagine him trying to peddle his anarchism in any other society but western democracies and what the likely results would be. He wouldnt last the weekend.
It’s not that I think RR nails all of it. It’s that the moment she voiced some concerns about some of the people Jeremy Corbyn gives house room to, then a whole bunch of people that any sane individual might fear that Corbyn gives house room to, came pouring out from under their stones to issue her with rape threats, death threats, doxing and all the hideous panoply of the modern version of the village ducking stool.
Ok, so it might be that all these people are really in the pay of Mossad to discredit its enemies. Maybe. But if it turns out that George Galloway was really a Mossad agent in deep cover–going to all the trouble of marrying a Palestinian and converting to Islam to help his cover– then I guess that we really would be better off turning off all electrical devices and pulling our tin-foil hats down firmly over our ears, because the world no longer makes any sense at any level.
Fnord
Rachel Riley has a 2:1 in maths from Oriel College Oxford. So her symmetrical good looks and gorgeous eyes are complimented by an well trained intellect. She is the Dan Brown herioine incarnate! She also.supports the same football team as me as well. I am as much a slave to my promordial instincts as any man and would obviously like to trade bodily fluids with her….Then talk a bit of science as pillow talk with football as well….
M27Holts: Who is Dan Brown – a Man U official?
The best selling author of “The Davinci Code” which I read in Spain years back. The protagonist always has a scientifically brilliant girl in tow who is also devastatingly beautiful as well…
Helena, I’ve heard that Chomsky was a fine linguist in his day. I don’t know much about him, but I do know that it’s possible for smart people to develop weird opinions.
As another example, I’ll cite Nobel-prize winning Brian Josephson, of the famous Josephson junction of superconductivity.
( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson ).
Despite being an excellent physicist, he now believes that parapsychological phenomena (telepathy, psychokinesis and other paranormal themes) are real.
A while ago I exchanged email with him, suggesting that if you had neural interfaces that could marry brains to cell phone tech, you’d have the functional equivalent to telepathy. He agreed, but said it wasn’t the kind of thing he was interested in. He was interested in – real telepathy – I suppose. (Rolling my eyes.)
But I suppose that, having read my mind, you already knew that. 😉
Helena, to continue to comment on your post:
I wonder why, having also been, sort of, a product of Judaism, I don’t really hate it. I think it’s mostly silly, and mostly wrong, but equivalent to any other antique religion.
Maybe it’s because I was raised by an atheist and an agnostic who merely practised some traditions. My mother lit candles on Friday, but said no prayers. My father, on Jewish holidays, didn’t work, but never went to synagogue either. Instead he’d have a few shots of Seagram’s VO with some socialist friends of his.
Nothing was really forced on me, except circumcision and to formally participate in the Bar Mitzvah ceremony. (Of course I don’t remember the former, but I kind of enjoyed the latter.) I was never told what to believe. I came to agree with my father, that religion was made-up fairy-tales.
Because of my upbringing, I like eastern European food, and speak multiple languages (none as well as English). That’s about it.
Maybe Chomsky’s hatred of Judaism comes from being compelled to do things he hated.
My parents didn’t really bring me up as I spent a lot of time before I was 11 with my maternal grandmother who got jesus fever about the time I was born. She didn’t force her religion on me, however and my upbringing was more influenced by my book mad paternal grandmother who was strangely superstitious and believed in goblins and fairies but didnt believe in gods or an afterlife. I would have been resentful of any organised religion forced upon me as I hated RE at school and was very disruptive in such classes, preferring to be taught practical subjects or sciences! I would have been tempted to cut off my parents noses had they had me circumcised! So I see where Chomsky is coming from!
M27, I assume that RE was Religious Education?
I went to elementary school in Montreal, and at the time there were private schools (for $), or government-run public schools, free. The public schools at the time were either Catholic or Protestant. Typically, secular Jews (and other non-Catholics, Greeks, Chinese, etc) sent their kids to the Protestant schools. (Orthodox Jews often went to private schools that cost $.)
The upside was that I learned about different cultures and religions from age 5 on. The downside was that we were all forced to sing every morning. After god save the queen it was Christian hymns. I still remember the words to “Mothers of Salem”, “O Come All Ye Faithful” i.e. Adeste Fideles, and “Jesus Loves Me”. It wouldn’t take much to remind me of others. That made for interesting conversations with my atheist father, in which he often used the Yiddish word “bobbeh-meiseh”, which is literally “grandma-story” or old wives tale. Some of my best memories of him. 🙂
About god save the queen: we were rather disrespectful, and sang “God shave our gracious queen, shave her with shaving cream, god shave the queen. Send her to Halifax, make her pay income tax. God shave our gracious queen, god shave the queen.” Teachers didn’t like that.
Anyone here who was brought up in a religion other than Christianity, Judaism or Islam?
Myself, I was brought up in a Protestant Christian background (Church of Scotland); I swallowed all the bullshit when young, but “achieved enlightenment” around age twenty. (Without having to sit under a particular kind of tree to do so, like Gautama, aka the Buddha.) Unfortunately, my close family are all, at least nominally, still C of S; we have come to avoid certain subjects rather than get into pointless arguments which neither side can win. I still have hopes for my youngest relative, a seventeen-year-old grand-nephew, who is about to go to uni to study Chemistry.
Chemistry eh? Good luck I scraped a C at A level as it seemed way harder than the physics and maths papers I passed with A. Yes RE is religious education. What a waste of time, better learning to tile a bathroom or hang a door than basically learning about fairy stories that somehow gain credence through culture. RE Is basically another form of Literature for the mentally retarded…
Laripu: Thats all very interesting.
Chomsky is a very smart guy, but being smart doesn’t prevent you having your own brains used against you in a sort of mental judo. E.g. Watch smart folk falling for conspiracy theories right and left and being able to easily out”think” the others in the room (and incurring confirmation bias every time they do it). I dont know Chomsky well (I used to box with one his students) but I do know that he harbors a deep and abiding hatred for America, to the point of being somewhat blind to equally bad/ obviously worse regimes.
Re the physics prof bit. Thats fascinating. The need to believe in a particualr form of telepathy transcends the demonstration that a particualr formmight actually exist? That reminds me of Dennetts friend who was wiritng a book on magic. “Real magic?” he was asked. “Well, the stuff that conjurors do”. He realized that the magic you could actually do was not real magic. I think th ere is a gap in a lot of brains due to overwhelming success of material science. They want there to be something else. Call it spirit, call it mind, call it krishna consciousness, its something non-material that many folk really feel to be there
Which brings us back to Dan Brown, who claims in one of his books that science has proved that a soul leaves the body at the point of death. Apparently a body weighs 0.000000001g less a nano second after the brain dies, thus proving that the soul leaves the body…sounds plausible non?
Re Dan Brown quote: You need pretty fancy scales and a pretty accurate clock to achieve such accuracy. I’d have thought that simple evaporation of water content would be enough to explain such figures – if such figures actually exist!
Surely if there were such a thing as a soul it would be without either mass or volume (or temperature, or magnetic field, etc etc.)
Helena, I think you hit the nail on the head with this: “its something non-material that many folk really feel to be there”.
People yearn for three things: love/sex, unending life without suffering, and transcendental meaning. If they’re lucky they get the first one for a short time. The other two are obviously impossible.
Leonard Cohen made a whole career singing about those yearnings. 🙂
The McJesus art scandal in Israel is hilarious.
Perhaps if the protesters set it on fire, they’ll just claim it spontaneously combusted.
Story here:
https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/mcjesus-sculpture-sparks-outrage-for-christians-in-israel-20190115-p50rdy.html
Haha. I LIKE that sculpture. A 3D banksy definately! Laripu, ypu should know that anybody mentioning Adolf Hitler or Leonard Cohen loses the argument immediately. Its the rules….haha
1 billionth of a gram? Given that each breath is about 500 ml and air weighs 1.3 kg/m3 that is almost literally nothing. Its certainly below measurement error thresholds
M27, lucky for me then, that I wasn’t arguing, I was agreeing and expanding on the idea.
About McJesus, everybody wants it gone, even the Finnish artist, because he’s a BDS supporter.
I’m going to argue that sapiens is programmed to want shelter / food / sex then the address of the nearest pub…
Someone Says, thanks for that link to the McJesus article. Respect to the Museum director Nissim Tal for resisting the pressure to censor art due to political or cultural pressure.
I wish I could be there to pitch a tent next to that protester with the sign reading: “respect religion”. My sign would read: “Why?”
And I would be sat next door but one, with a simple message…”Jesus Saves, but Rashford nets the rebound!”
Son of Glenner, now you’ve got me wondering whether the soul could be made up of neutrinos or the like.
Someone, thanks for the link to the McJesus article. I hadn’t heard about this controversy before. I was surprised that there was no mention of whether McDonald’s has sued Jani Leinonen (the artist) for trademark infringement, but maybe they don’t want to provide more evidence to support Leinonen’s derisive comment on the “cult-like worship of capitalism.”
Our esteemed author ought to be able to do something with this. I never heard about it before, saw this idiocy today for the first time:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2307713/Pictured-Orthodox-Jewish-man-covers-PLASTIC-BAG-flight.html?fbclid=IwAR0JLD4xbVd7t2h5WQ_dXuSWrhR3rj_ix-MndxsZj7XbmvNrejSh2pa2BDo
Somehow the plane’s metal body doesn’t protect him enough from “impurity”, but a flimsy plastic bad does.
This must be an example of the “piety spiral”. Deserves a Darwin award if he suffocates.
When his sects rules were layed down in scripture presumably men could not fly. Is this a clear sign that his god is real? After all he told his followers that they would eventually fly over cemetery land with powered flight, is that not clear proof that the law was made by an all knowing deity? Or is it simply a mad interpretation of a vague portion of esoteric bullshit?
Interesting article, Laripu. You learn something new every day.
I don’t know much about the Orthodox except for the gender segregation and the rumors regarding their sexual habits.
But this? Well, that just epitomizes the phrase “holy shit”.
Laripu. “Remember, bigots can suffocate in plastic bags”. Another good tip is to forget to remind them to put in air holes
“Follow the money” may be right. It’s almost certainly someone’s propaganda. The Pauline “Collection for the Saints” may be background. Schism was in the air, and several main factions are represented: in Jerusalem Peter and James, and in Antioch Paul and Barnabas. The Jerusalem sect appears to have been dependent on the Antioch center.