Thursday, July 15, 2010

Skipping Stones on Lethe's Waters

A poster calling himself "Uber Dawks" has exchanged emails with Vox Day, in which he champions the idea of dragging "Christards" -- a hallmark epithet of intellectual rigor -- "kicking and screaming from the Dark Ages into the modern secular age, whether you like it or not."

Below are my thoughts posted in the comments section, as well as additional observations:


PZ afraid to debate you? Why should he debate delusional fundies like you? You wanna know why he doesn't have to? Courtier's reply. All you Christards have to contribute is philosophical flatulation about your phony baloney sky daddy.


I never understand questions like this. PZ is one of many militant atheists who proselytizes his faithlessness to the world. His claim to fame is his opposition to religion -- particularly Christianity. He wants people to throw off their religious blinders, flee the shadow thrown by their "phoney baloney sky daddy," and stride into the bright klieg lights of atheism.

Yet it never occurs to PZ or Uber Dawks that crushing a "fundie" with a large audience like Vox in an open, honest debate might accomplish exactly that.

Isn't the goal winning converts to atheism? Especially if all this requires is defeating some ignorant "fundie" who isn't fit to lick Richard Dawkins' boots?

If the answer is "Yes," then Uber Dawks has his answer as to why PZ and others like him should participate in such debates.


You have no objective proof of god's existence at all. I challenge anyone on your site to give me one thing -- one tiny piece of objective evidence for god that cannot be better and more fully explained by natural science.


How does one provide "objective" evidence of God's existence to an atheist? Am I expected to believe that someone who is closed to the possibility of God -- who made this decision, not based on evidence, but arrogance -- who doesn't even comprehend the conventional definitions of "objective" or "evidence" -- who changes the meanings of words to suit his agenda, sometimes multiple times within a single conversation -- will magically change his mind and become a theist?

Now I understand what is meant by "blind faith."


Best of luck. When you die, you pass into nonexistence. That's it. Get over your fairy tales now and do something worthwhile like help save the environment.


Filed under the heading, "Optimism." Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow, we die. Our souls do not travel through the aether and into Heaven, dwelling forever with the Lord. Nope. They plummet downward to the Earth, where they pass into Oblivion. Just like that of the lowly cockroach or nightcrawler. How appealing. How egalitarian.

Of course, Uber Dawks offers no explanation for why I should give a Gaian Gorebasm about the environment. Even if I live to a ripe old age and die of natural causes, chances are that environmental degradation won't progress to the point of affecting me to a significant degree. Unless I'm killed by an angry, naked-pink polar bear for imbalancing Mother Earth's chi.

"But what about posterity?!" Uber Dawks might cry. "It's for the children!"

Hello, my name is Wes, and I'm in Oblivion. Remember? I won't care, because I won't know, and soon you'll share my obliviousness. In a few short decades, posterity will join me in my atomic dispersion. Forty-leven zillion years** from now, so will the Earth.

If we can sum up atheism in one word, that word is "futility." There is no transcendancy of meaning. Meaning is personal, and varies from one individual to another. Thus a concise, accurate description of "meaning" within the atheist framework is one that requires subjectivity and contradiction.

So in honor of atheist logic, let me reveal a new rallying cry for our sophisticated secular age:

"Embrace nihilism, BUT save a whale!"


** I believe this is the proper scientific timeframe, as calculated by the evolutionarily elevated.

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