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Vox Fati
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| I've never really liked little kids very well, nor do I like how people are always making excuses for them--"He doesn't know any better" and all that. No, to me, most of them are just stupid, selfish little assholes, excellent models for everything that's really wrong with the world. For basically anything that's wrong with anything, its cause is that one or more persons never bothered to grow out of childhood in one or more important ways: greed, ignorance, cowardice--we call such things childish and immature for a reason. I've long felt this way.
Turns out, I was more or less right. Obviously, that's not a professional study or anything that I've linked, but if it's even in the ballpark, my distaste for kids is pretty well justified.
High rates of infant mortality throughout history: evidence that there is a god after all? | Comments: 1 +   |
| | This is very amusing. | | Comments: + |
| Roasted fig.
Wrapped in bacon.
Stuffed with blue cheese.
Had a couple with dinner and, even though each one probably took a few months off of my life, they were about the tastiest things I've ever eaten.
Kickass. | | Comments: 4 + |
| There's an unstated (and unwarranted) assumption at work in many social matters: everyone is a sadist.
Let me elaborate. Last month, I posted about how apologizing doesn't make much sense to me: apologizing is basically saying that you feel bad for wronging someone, and I don't see what the wronged party is supposed to get out of that if not some sort of enjoyment/satisfaction/peace of mind over the transgressor's feeling bad (assuming, of course, that the apology is even genuine)--and, for all my frequent bluster that suggests the contrary, I don't really want people to feel bad or to suffer, for any reason. Now consider that punishing someone for wrongdoing is essentially coercing an apology from him--making him feel bad for wronging someone; what is the wronged party supposed to get out of that, exactly? Of course, there's the "keeping others safe from harm" side of punishment, too, but that doesn't seem to be the only reason we punish wrongdoers.
It's a damn shame that we rely on the institution of punishment so much in keeping the peace: as just noted, it reinforces people's sadistic urges (which, even if the urges are innate and so unavoidable, isn't good), and enforcing order by fear (of punishment for transgression) isn't different enough from terrorism for my tastes. So how should we ensure social order? I've said this before, and I'll say it again: we need, at a very deep level, to be less reactive about how we do things. I take that to imply, first and foremost, that we should focus way, way more than we do on making people good. Something rather like punishment might enter into that as a corrective measure, but the idea is to make people good enough that they wouldn't commit (as many) punishable transgressions; a society in which you'd ever have to punish someone probably has deeper problems, since it's not doing a good enough job of making people decent in the first place. Taking that thought a little further: that we even think of punishing wrongdoers--that we're willing to hurt people when it's convenient to do so, however allegedly noble our end in doing so--is already a sign of problems. (This is sort of related to a comment I once made on the abortion debate: no one seems to notice that a society in which a woman would ever need an abortion in the first place has deeper problems than what to do about abortion; clearly, it's not doing enough to make people sexually responsible, to provide for unwanted children, etc.) | | Comments: 18 + |
| | Vegans try not to use any animal products: no meat, no dairy, etc.; and also, no leather, no wool, etc. (Puzzlingly, though, I doubt that many of them give a thought to what goes into the organic fertilizers that are used to produce the organic vegetables that they love so much.) I'm sure that many extend this out to not using any products tested on animals, including many cosmetics and medicines. Something just occurred to me the other day, though: aren't fossil fuels (coal, oil, etc.) animal products? Of course, plenty of vegans buy into a broader environmentalism that would have us limit/eliminate our use of fossil fuels, but an awful lot of things that we all (including vegans) use rely on the use of fossil fuels at some point; life in the modern world essentially requires their use--and many vegans, I suspect, don't have a big problem with that, which seems inconsistent. And I somehow doubt that a sick vegan who can only be cured by Medicine X (which, let's say, is an "animal product" in some sense) isn't going to agree to die on principle; nor, I suspect, would a (literally) starving vegan turn up his nose at a cheeseburger. It's always struck me as a silly religion (I see no reason not to call it that), and one that's not consistently followed; why they're not all out living in mud huts, hunting and gathering, is beyond me. | | Comments: 10 + |
| Okay, tell me that this isn't utterly retarded: [link] [link].
It's good that a public school's worrying about that, since every other problem in the public school system has been fixed. Oh, wait... | | Comments: 6 + |
| | Wow. Just...wow. | | Comments: 2 + |
| I decided I needed an avatar to reflect my allegiance to the Red Lantern Corps. Also, this is lovely:
"People are fleshy boxes of stupid with mouths and most of them should be kept silent and in the dark as often as possible."
--from here | | Comments: + |
| | In answering a question on the problem of evil on our last exam, one of my students said something to the effect that atheists tend to be more materialistic and overall worse people than religious people. That's equal parts funny and disturbing, I'd say. So that I don't lose them--and so that you can enjoy them if you wish--here are a couple of links that tell otherwise:That's all. | | Comments: 6 + |
| - "Jesus died so that sins could be forgiven. You have to accept his sacrifice to avoid eternity in hell."
- Really? A perfectly good God, being perfectly merciful, couldn't just forgive people's sins whether they accept Jesus's sacrifice or not?
- "No, he couldn't. Perfect goodness implies perfect justice, which includes just punishment, and eternity in hell is just punishment for sin."
- So there's something that an omnipotent God can't do, then: God can't forgive just anything.
- "Right. God's omnipotent, but that doesn't imply that he can do what's logically impossible, and it's logically impossible for sinners who don't accept Jesus's sacrifice not to go to hell."
- Really? It's necessarily the case that a finite amount of sin, however vast, leads to (and deserves) infinite punishment?
- "Yes."
- And how does Jesus's finite amount of suffering pay this alleged infinite debt of sin for everyone who accepts his sacrifice?
- "It just does. That's not going to make sense to you unless you have faith."
- And there are no sinless people in the world?
- "No."
- So even small children who've had no chance consciously to understand and accept Jesus's sacrifice go to hell?
- "I don't know, though it's probably not important that they consciously understand it--only that they accept it."
- How about adults who've never heard of Jesus due to geographical accident and therefore never get the chance to accept his sacrifice?
- "Either we have to spread God's word to them before any more of them go to hell or they already know about Jesus from the obvious intelligent design of the world."
- Suppose that they don't see it that way--that they don't take kindly to missionaries trying to convert them or don't (or aren't able to) infer anything about Jesus from the world's intelligent design. What then?
- "They have no excuse. These things are obvious."
- Suppose that they're decent people, though, in spite of their lack of faith.
- "Good works don't help one avoid hell. Only faith in Jesus does that. Relying on good works is trying to bribe God."
- Really? Even if you aren't doing good because you expect it to help you avoid hell--even if you're just doing good for good's sake, without any expectation of reward?
- "No."
- So then what motivation does someone with faith have to be good? No, forget that question. Here's another: if God's existence and the importance of Jesus are so obvious, how is there any sincere lack of faith in the world?
- "There isn't: people are too stubborn and want to do things their own way, not God's way. In particular, they choose not to believe because they want a world with no morality where no one suffers the consequences of their sins."
- God made them stubborn and could easily correct it. No, forget that. How do you know that that's what they want? No, forget that, too. Those are two different issues--whether there's objective moral truth and whether evil is ultimately punished in all cases.
- "No, they aren't: morality requires a moral lawgiver and a moral judge to impose sentence.
- You said just a bit ago that it's necessarily the case that sinners go to hell, so they'd end up there whether God imposes the sentence or not.
- "Well, morality still requires a source."
- Why? And if it does, why does that source have to be God?
- "It just does. That's something else that's obvious."
- Is its being necessarily the case that sinners go to hell part of morality?
- "I suppose so."
- And God's will is the source of morality?
- "Yes, that and everything else--except for evil, of course."
- And the necessity that sinners go to hell constrains what God can do--God can't just forgive them--even though that constraint is the product of God's own will?
- "Yes, but it's a good constraint. God can only will what's good."
- But you just said that God's will determines what's good. Saying that God wills what's good becomes completely meaningless if there's no standard of goodness apart from God's will; it's no different from saying that God wills what God wills.
- "But God only ever wills what's good; that's God's nature--perfect goodness."
- So if God had decided that rape and torture are good, they would've been?
- "If he had, then yes--but his perfect goodness ensures that he'd never have done that."
- And his will determines what goodness--including perfect goodness--consists of, so God's will constrains God's will. But anyway. How do you know he hasn't willed that rape and torture are good? How do we know what God has and hasn't willed to be good?
- "That requires faith, too--specifically, faith in the Bible's accuracy."
- Of course.
--
I could go on, but that's enough. The odd numbers seem to me to come from a really ugly place; I doubt that that's just me. Some people really do want others to suffer forever and then claim that a perfect being wants the same, often enough in the same breath that they claim that we don't understand the ways of a perfect being all that well. Amusingly, the existence of that level of malevolence is one thing I'd probably cite in an argument against God's existence.
I can understand wanting the world to be a fair place. Really, I can. But trying to make it fair by introducing the very idea of everlasting punishment is questionable for all sorts of reasons, not least because relying on fear to make people believe seriously cheapens belief: whatever exactly you take goodness to entail--acting virtuously, believing in Jesus, etc.--being good only out of fear of punishment is morally questionable at best and gutless at worst. I'd hope that God doesn't want us to be so cowardly. | | Comments: 2 + |
| Is it me, or does apologizing not make much sense?
Suppose that someone wrongs me in some way and then apologizes for it. "Sorry, man." I'm not intentionally being dumb to make a point here; I'm really not sure that I know what that means. Is he saying that he feels bad about screwing up? But why should I care if he feels bad? Am I supposed to enjoy the fact that he feels bad? Sorry, I'm not a sadist; the implication that I should feel good about someone else feeling bad is, frankly, a bit insulting. Is he saying that he has some excuse for screwing up? But, again, why should I care if he does? He wronged me; his (allegedly) having good reason for doing so doesn't change that. Is he assuring me that he'll try not to screw up again in the future? I don't see why that should matter to me unless I'm dealing with him again in the future--and then, whatever his words say, his actions have already proved his incompetence (or whatever exactly led to the wrong). Is he doing nothing more than acknowledging the screw-up? Well, then he's stating the obvious; that's not all that impressive. And I'm not sure that apologizing for causing an accident is any different from apologizing for a more obvious wrong: true accidents are very, very rare--compared to voluntary inattentiveness and carelessness, anyway. | | Comments: 4 + |
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