This post is really a reply to an unfeasibly large comment (ref is to Viz, for UK readers) but it grew unfeasibly large itself, so I thought it would have to grow up to be a post

“Rafael” is sadly neither a Mutant Ninja Turtle nor a Renaissance painter. Even more sadly, it’s not one of the supreme beings from the obscure CU_T pantheon to which Black Sun Journal often refers.

He/she is some sort of Christian who posts incomprehensible and unreadable comments. This blog got two from him/her today. I can only assume the words get copied and pasted from some central store, which is by definition a waste of hard disk space. The comments don’t relate to the posts, at least as far as I can see.

(To be honest, I just assume that s/he is mentally ill, but I decided to try to treat the comment seriously, because I feel guilty about dismissing someone just because they aren’t clever or rational. OK, I couldn’t stop some sarcasm seeping in but nobody’s perfect right.)

Rafael

I am impressed that your comments achieve the length of shortish novellas.

All the same, I have to say that ” the monkeys with typewriters” idea clearly has some way to go before it produces the complete works of Shakespeare. Props for trying, anyway..

I have decided to treat you as a human being, on a temporary basis, and actually address some of your points. I am even going to get sickeningly preachy. This annoys the hell out of most people but I guess religious folk must be used to it.

1. THE PURPOSE OF MAN’S EXISTENCE
Who we are? Why are we in this world? Where are we going?

This is a silly question. Your answer is even sillier.

2. GOD’S PLAN God has a plan.

Why do I think this? Can I count the ways? Here’s a few, anyway…

I think it is tragic that people can’t find meaning in life without having to take it secondhand from an old book and/or from an imaginary friend, in whose galactic program they are a minor sub-routine.

It is depressing to see how little value our species attaches to the astonishing facts of the existence of the cosmos or biology or consciousness.

It is baffling that religious people have such a hopelessly degraded view of their own supreme being that they see it as a firm but (un) fair big Sky Daddy.

Even more baffling is that the big Middle-Eastern SkyDaddy – who can supposedly do ANYTHING in the miracles line, somehow chose to communicate with humans only through words that got written down centuries ago. This seems particularly mean to his human subjects, given that literacy wasn’t exactly universal then.

This Supreme Being is even so bizarrely twisted as to set up a whole planet just to play silly games with its human inhabitants. Like creating imaginary fossil records because he knew that, in a few thousand years, his human serfs would come up with scientific theories about them. This, apparently because he was setting humans up for a test to check that they would believe the magic book over the evidence of their rationality… And so on. (I am not saying that you believe this, given that I haven’t read more than the start of your comment, but it’s a common fundy YEC “explanation” for the inconvenient evidence.)

If you can’t see how amazing the real world is and need to follow someone’s words, I am going to quote the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. ” [My emphasis]

I know this is anthropomorphising “life” but it’s poetry, not a holy book, so YOU DON’T HAVE TO BELIEVE IT. It’s a metaphor. It just expresses a feeling that life is its own purpose. (This feeling is generally enough soul-food for those of us who don’t fear/worship BigSkyDaddy.)

If there was a creator entity, it would be so infinitely beyond human comprehension that we could never even begin to imagine it, let alone follow the workings of its “mind” and assume it has some “purpose.” Purpose is a human construct. What “purpose” could an infinite, ubiquitous, all-knowing Being have? It’s everywhere, remember. There’s nothing it can’t do. There being only one of these, it wouldn’t even have its own kind to relate to. Why would it even need any means of communication then? Htf could it even be conscious in any meaningful sense. Our human consciousness develops through interaction. We’d clearly have the advantage over it, there.

If there was a big entity that could control the movement of galaxies and order the behaviour of electrons inside the atom, wtf would we imagine for one minute it was also mad enough to create conscious beings just to get them to say how great it was?

We are nowhere near even knowing what is in the Universe or within ourselves e.g. what is a dimension? what is space? what is matter? what is energy? what is consciousness? where is our consciousness? The only way we can approach these ideas is through the amazing human capacity to think.

Why would we throw away ways of thinking (rationality, science, skepticism) that actually work to develop our understanding the workings of the universe, (i.e. purpose, as conceived in human terms – the only purpose we can conceive of) to go for big skydaddy myths? Especially, when the use of our minds can bring us some of the greatest pleasures in life?

And why would anyone base their morality and belief system on someone’s interpretation of a few old books? I love fairy stories and myths, myself. However, I find it usually helps to be able to distinguish between stories and reality. The average pre-school child can do this quite easily.

If your god existed, it would be truly malevolent, so it’s lucky that it doesn’t, really. It’s still a pity that most of the planet believes in some variant of the evil sky daddy and bases the actions that would be hardest to justify in human moral terms on it.

Like a proper doorstep god-botherer, I am going to suggest that your life is empty and that you can only fill the spiritual void by appreciating your real existence. 🙂

If you would like me to leave you with one of these handy leaflets….

Well, it’s good news, in one sense. “Saudi king pardons rape victim” according to the BBC.

You read that correctly. The headline did indeed say victim, not perpetrator.

The Saudi king has pardoned a female rape victim sentenced to jail and 200 lashes for being alone with a man raped in the same attack, reports say.

This man and woman were in a car when they were abducted and raped by seven men.

The “Qatif girl” case caused an international outcry with widespread criticism of the Saudi justice system

The words “laughably named” could fit snugly in that sentence between Saudi and justice.

The less “good news” aspects of this story are that the halfway-sane outcome is only the result of pressure from the west and that the pardon does not imply that there was any error on the court’s decision. There is no reason to assume that such sentences won’t be passed in the future.

The custodial sentence plus 200 lashes was imposed after the woman, who has not been named, appealed against an earlier sentence of 90 lashes.

She dared to appeal. Her sentence was more than doubled. The man – who you will note was also raped – was also sentenced to 90 lashes. The BBC doesn’t know if he was “pardoned” too and I wouldn’t hold out much hope on this showing.

The pardon was said not to imply any criticism of the sentence. It was just supposed to be the King expressing some seasonal goodwill for Eid al-Adha. Well done, your highness. According to the BBC, he’s been criticised on some conservative websites for the pardon, which is seen as kowtowing to the west. Words fail.

I was trying to ignore this – partly because every post here seems to be turning out to be a crap version of some other atheist’s blog post and I never find out until I’ve posted. But, hoping that the Daily Mail Online is too distasteful for the more faint-hearted in the atheosphere, I’ll present this story.
The Daily Mail headline says:

Wife ‘cured’ by prayer can’t get benefits stopped because government computer doesn’t recognise miracles

….With the Government pledging to crack down on “sicknote Britain”, it seems remarkable the 56-year-old received more than £3,500 she did not even want.

(Stop sniggering at the back!!! Of course, she had to withdraw it………)

What? The government has a sceptical computer? And it’s forcing public money on Christians against their will?

The “story”: A woman got disability payments for 6 years after she had to stop working because of the damage to her “hip, pelvis and spine” (Maybe I’m being too pedantic, but aren’t these all more or less the same place?) She got better but didn’t tell the Social Security (/Department of Work and Pensions or whatever it’s called now.) Then she did. They said she needed confirmation from a doctor before they could stop her claim being processed. But now they have stopped it and she has to pay a few months’ money back.

Simple story. Twisted by the Daily Mail and the people involved into a piece of journalistic excrement that manages to claim evidence of a religious miracle, at the same time as insulting the government.

It’s a little out of character for the Daily Mail – the fearless scourge of the dole-scrounging workshy – to be putting a case that it’s somehow the fault of the government that someone claimed disability allowance when they weren’t disabled.

Was it the spirit of Christmas that prompted this surprising change of heart toward benefits claimants? No, it’s the spirit of Christianity or, at least, of one of its odder forms.

Her husband Stuart, 58, a pastor at Hooe Baptist Church, said that he prayed every day after the accident that God would “bring my wife back”.
The prayer seemed to be answered when his wife attended a Christian conference in January last year.
Within hours, Mrs Clarke was able to fold away her wheelchair and stop taking painkillers. When she realised she was permanently cured four months later, she contacted the Government’s Industrial Injury Department to put a stop to her benefits.
… But the department continued to give her £600 a month – and she ended up being paid £3,600 in incapacity benefits for a period when she was in perfect health.

Oh, so she has to pay back benefits to which she wasn’t entitled, then? (I assume her husband is working, unless it’s a voluntary pastor thing. So she probably wouldn’t have got social security benefit at all – which is a lot less than £600 a month if she wasn’t a permanent invalid. But I digress.)

Ignore the legal aspects or even the sequence of events that must have led to this story.

(Picture an embarrassed civil servant – who is trying to get out of a conversation with a woman who says “I’ve now been healed by a miracle” – saying “Oh good. I just need to see some confirmation from a doctor before I stop the computer payments.” Woman phones Daily Mail in horror.)

What about the confused and confusing theology here? The injury apparently had nothing to with god, (unless the deity wanted this couple to get some invalidity cheques and decided to injure her. Mysterious ways, etc…) But the healing itself came directly from their deity. Well, OK, not actually directly, as such. I mean, it took 6 bloody years to work. The pastor can’t be very good at it, can he? Or god just didn’t care.

She was healed after attending a service? Well, a matter of “hours” after attending a service. Granted there is no time too large to be considered a matter of hours, but I’ll take it this as meaning “a day or so.” He’s a pastor and this is the only service she’s attended in 6 and a half years? Seems unlikely. In fact, it seems unlikely that there are any times in their lives that aren’t a matter of hours removed from attendance at a service.

So, where is the miracle even supposed to be here? God had been too busy fixing the results of World’s Strongest Man competitions and Hollywood awards, that he forgot to take all his calls. But one day, he suddenly switched on his prayer-answerphone, heard the 6 year-old message and decided to do what this one pastor asked. (The selfish bugger could have prayed for world peace or dying babies or at least healing a few amputees, if it was going to work.)

A cynic might see it as the miracle of the new anti-Invalidity Benefit moves by the government – very much spurred by the Daily Mail and its ilk – which involve following fake physically disabled people and photographing them walking to the pub or even (in one recent case) running marathons. This sort of activity can cause great stress to mentally and physically ill people but that cuts no ice with the Daily Mail or its middle-England readers.

Miraculous healings seems to soften their hard taxpayers’ hearts indeed. Soften their heads too, it appears.