Well, if we’re going to drag out the “god” category…
We can only hope that Mel Gibson’s upcoming work will keep in mind that Jesus had short hair! Who knows what sartorial sins today’s youngsters might go on to commit without appropriate guidance?
And in further… news [ahem]: a supposed recent bout of tornados in America is apparently Hashem’s idea of a communique that the US should not facilitate the creation of a Palestinian state. Maybe his email server is down.
July 15th, 2003 at 3:47 pm
Tell ya what, let’s not get into this “god” (small g, big G, does it really matter?) thing because then we atheists might just jump in.
Did Jesus have short hair? Did Jesus actually exist? The latter might be more relevant than the former. Since I’m going to hell anyway (if such a moral place exists) it’s all academic I suppose.
As for the tornadoes and “wrath of God” (big G, small g…), doesn’t it always strike one as odd that acts of god are always disasters? And it also strikes me as odd that a moral person can (1) believe in some supernatural being who doles out eternal punishment and (2)well…I might digress into the whole palestinian, Israeli thing, and comment on those who selfishly want to undergo rapture (via Revelations) and leave the rest to suffer torments beyond imagining(but I won’t go there).
Life really is good and Thoreau had it right “One world at at time”.
July 15th, 2003 at 3:50 pm
Jesus not only had short hair, but he built my hotrod, as well. Handy guy to have around, in a mechanical sense.
July 15th, 2003 at 4:01 pm
Well, the problems with the tornados-from-god thing is actually more fundamental. Presumably a god that can’t simply see what humans do in the future isn’t particularly omniscient. And a god that sends tornados rather than just directly changing the actions and/or opinions of all relevant humans is an odd kind of omnipotent.
Of course, the traditional argument about why god doesn’t just force all humans to be “good” is to allow for free will. But if there’s still a Right behaviour and a Wrong behaviour, and one gets rewarded or punished for choosing between them, that seems like a rather cheapass implementation of free will to me.
And the most common response to this is the “works in mysterious ways” gambit. “Oh, god does all these things for reasons we could never understand. We cannot hope to know the divine mind.”
Well, if you’re using that rationale, we can’t know _anything_ about the divine mind, including the veracity of things it had supposedly told us directly. If we’re supposing no knowledge of divine intent, it’s every bit as plausible that any “scripture” is directly false (whether to reward the rebellious, to abuse humans whom the god actually hates, or for some motive entirely beyond human comprehension).
So you get back to the only rational choice being to have one’s choices not be modified by the idea of a god one way or another, if no information from or about such a god is reliable.
July 15th, 2003 at 6:19 pm
It’s been a while since I’ve even said the word god…
The whole god thing gets on my nerves…without religion there would be no war…
July 15th, 2003 at 7:18 pm
“The whole god thing gets on my nerves…without religion there would be no war…”
I agree. Race also plays a factor (in the war thing) but this whole god thing is overblown.
For those intrested there’s the Freedom From Religion Foundation (www.ffrf.org). Their newspaper Freethought today is well worth the membership.
July 15th, 2003 at 10:01 pm
People fight over more territory than religious grounds. Heck, most organisms fight even if only humans have religion.
July 16th, 2003 at 8:54 am
I guess that Pier Paolo Pasolini had it right in his Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964. His Jesus had short hair. Critically acclaimed as the most beautiful and realistic film about the life of Jesus, and he was an atheist, a Marxist and homosexual, all opposites of Mel.
July 16th, 2003 at 11:36 am
I don’t think it’s true to say that there would be no war without religion, though it seems safe to say that there would be drastically less.
Religions are evolved memes, and there are some meme attributes that are evolutionary advantages; we tend to end up with these whether the human believers actually like them or not.
When one society develops a belief system that says, “all life is sacred, never kill anyone” and their neighboring society develops a creed including, “kill the infidels!” you know which meme is probably going to survive and reproduce.