"Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action. One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissue and fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation."
- a passage which sounds like it inspired Deepak Chopra's entire career, from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shunned House
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(alternate titles: Canadian Godfriend or Gap of the Gaps)
I rarely bother with all those youtube religious/atheist debates because they inevitably require me to listen to some home-baked Alabammy Foghorn Leghorn trying to sound condescending to us heathens yet spouting something so utterly moronic from his very first syllable that it invalidates anything he could possibly say afterward.
And the top syllable on that list is:
"god"
Now me, I base all my arguments on the principle of blarg. The electricity which runs through this computer is directed by blarg, the national budget should be balanced by blargonomics, all my mathematical equations resolve to the blarg quotient, I sprinkle a bit of blarg on every meal and we should colonize Venus 'cuz blarg said so. And don't ask me what? who? huh? blarg is, blarg works in mysterious ways. Blarg!
If I told you my parakeet has solid platinum feathers and edits all my blog posts, you might reasonably ask to see the beast.
If I told you my car goes 500 km/h you might skeptically launch into convoluted arguments based on how few vehicles terrestrial or aerial achieve such speed, where did I acquire its fuel, where exactly I've clocked it, what my qualifications are as a stunt driver, etc. But the unspoken query behind all that is: wait, wolfman, do you even have a car?* Where is it?
There's a step zero before allowing anyone to base any argument on what a god did or what a god wants: produce your deity. Then we can chop the fucker up and see what he's made of, or maybe buy him a coffee and ask what he wants. The above examples are in fact far more reasonable than any faith; parakeets and cars exist as categories, but no religions have ever produced even one angel, oni or yaksha, much less one of their magic sky-daddies.
I could bring up the Sagan Standard or Hitchens' Razor, but really you don't need to read Hume and debate any bishops to call bullshit on the all-purpose religious pig in a poke.
If I say my car goes 100 km/h, sure, consumer-grade vehicles are expected to.
If I say it goes 200 km/h... well, okaayyyy, theoretically, but you might raise an eyebrow. Have I actually tried?
If I say 400, you'll laugh in my face and tell me to pull the other one.
But if I say my car goes warp ten, suddenly you fall to your knees and worship me as a prophet of the almighty grille?
HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT WORK?!?
In bitching out left-wing insanity over the past decade (be it gender Lysenkoism or moral superiority by melanin quotient or especially female supremacism) I've repeatedly pointed out that the same capacity for reason which allows one to disbelieve the existence of fairies allows disbelief of special claims to personal experience and entitlement by special interest groups. Well, reverse the polarity. If you call bullshit on the notion that perfect angels of light and goodness march down Halsted in Chicago for the gay pride parade every year, you're even less able to show they marched around the Dead Sea two thousand years ago. At least the ones on Halsted leave some glitter behind. The same bullshit-sense that allows you to discern a Nigerian prince scam applies if I claim to be in good with some omnipotent prince in the sky.
And always, when calling the gullible out on their feeblemindedness, you hear a recurring fall-back position from otherwise well-educated, comfortably middle-class suckers. From centuries ago it might've been electricity, relativity, radiation, or more recently "dark matter" or "quantum" whatever. Mind blown; everything now real. The universe is weird, therefore, well, anything might be possible, you can't prove there's no god. Umm, I don't have to, any more than you somehow have the duty to prove I don't own a quantum platinum parakeet and a quantum Corolla that goes warp ten. (Quantumly.) Not only should you assume hoofbeats come from horses, not zebras, but the existence of zebras in no way proves the existence of unicorns, and even if you found a unicorn it would in no way prove the existence of Yahweh. The fact you or I don't know how the universe works proves nothing except our own ignorance. That negative is not positive evidence of anything, much less of the preferences and demands of some imaginary lawgiver whose existence you've never demonstrated in the slightest. And you have no more excuse for going along with the faithful's big lie than you would with phrenology or the Piltdown Man or the Fiji mermaid - except that priests have been playing you for a much bigger fool than P.T. Barnum ever dreamt, and for far longer.
The religious effort to destroy science ignores the fact it would do nothing to prove the existence of their idiotic fairytales - much less justify the demented pretense that you're getting specific instructions on how the world should be ordered. Even if we had no scientific explanations for the world whatsoever, even if we were all Homo erectus a hundred thousand years ago just learning how rocks work, belief in a supernatural agency would still be stupid if its proponents cannot produce the object of their worship. Disproving Australopithecus or carbon-dating, even if you could pull it off, would not achieve that. The proposition that the universe has a creator is no different from saying rivers always flow uphill or pandas write novels. It is a statement about the world around you, and it's up to those making such statements contrary to observable reality to produce said river, produce said panda or
produce
your
deity!
"In any case such a monster must of necessity be in our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty with every man not an enemy to the world’s life, health, and sanity."
Blarg be with ye.
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* Yes I do and it's a hatchback. Shut up. (And the parakeets died decades ago. (They were green, blue and white-with-blue and they loved millet, very adorable. No platinum.))
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