I want someone to go on television and say, “Well, the Republicans are fascists.” I want one of these pundits to discuss how the GOP is synonymous with the German Nazi Party. It’s a discussion that needs to be had. I just wanted to get that out there, in the blogosphere. In my opinion if you put a Republican Party activist and a Nazi with no german accent into a dark room and then asked them both to tell me what they believed, I don’t know that I would be able to tell which was which. The Republican Party is the Nazi Party of the United States, in my humble opinion. Period.
I’ve had the opportunity to tune in to a couple of the keynote speeches of the GOP convention now just ending. I watched Fred Thompson, Guilliani, Sarah Palin, and of course Mr McCain, the Republican Party’s nominee for President. I’ll dispense early with the speech I preferred of those four. John McCain’s speech was even. I noted a few jabs at his opponents, and the standard Republican fare we have all become accustomed to: More jobs, lower taxes, better schools, more money to religious institutions, against reproductive choice, middle class, Country first, military blah blah blah (notice he didn’t talk about immigration. That issue sort of lost salience when Tom Tancredo exited from the race). Not much new there. McCain’s speech, probably because he isn’t really that good a speaker (especially when compared to Obama), but more likely because I will bet he used his own speech (unlike Palin) was a decent speech, a nice rousing speech that I can’t find much fault in except it is for the Party of white millionaires Read the rest of this entry »
It has been appropriately referred to as a mania: The tendency of supporters of Senator Barack Obama to WILDLY and illogically support their candidate, the tendency for his rallies to turn into something like religious experiences, where the people who witness his speeches experience a sort of ecstasy, and the tendency for people to measure their support for him in terms of charisma rather than his positions on policy. You hear it in the news, you see it on Saturday Night Live, you read about it in a million idiotic blogs written by Democrats in our country. And yet, few seem to know what he actually believes. Without wasting my time finding a citation, this has been one of the many criticisms leveled at the Senator by those who have apparently been able to resist the mania, usually because they support one of his opponents, or nobody at all.
And of course the criticism is fair. Only recently, Obama shifted from talking less like an inspirational speaker and more like a politician seeking nomination for the Presidency. Perhaps he finally got the message. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not making this up: Here is the link. Jerry Falwell has gone on to see if he was right about the existence of God. Let’s hope, if God does exist, that he is a forgiving one, for the sake of Mr. Falwell’s immortal soul. If he truly is vengeful, as Mr. Falwell seems to claim, Falwell will not be in Heaven for too long, long enough I suspect for God to remember that Jerry Falwell is a hypocrite, or that Falwell claimed that September 11th 2001 was God’s answer to homosexuality. I would imagine that God looks more harshly on hypocrisy than he does homosexuality. Good Luck, Mr. Falwell, and I sincerely mean that.
There is bit of an urban legend concerning becoming an ordained minister by filling out a form and sending it in.
Well, I am here to report that it is not an urban legend. As of this morning, February 6, I have become an ordained minister with the power to marry people, baptize kids (or adults) and absolve sins. You heard it: I am not a reverend of the Universal Life Church. And I did it for free.
The Universal Life Church apparently has ordained millions of folks since 1959. It’s theology is relatively simple, something we can all pretty much get down with: “Do only that which is right.”
While they charge money for a lot of bells and whistles, they will ordain you for free. You have to visit their site and agree to “do what is right”, (but they say that you are free to determine this for yourself). It is so post-modern it is silly. But nonetheless, they will then ordain you a minister, and you can get to starting your own church, marry people, do legit baptisms, and absolve every last one of the sins of every person you know. You can conceivably walk down the street absolving sins. There are articles online to let you know how to do all this officiating.
The website is here. Feel free to join, and get to the God’s, god’s, or gods’ work here on Earth.
Serenely,
Reverend William “Doc” Stodden
Ladies and Gentlemen: Posted below is a comment from a recent email exchange between myself and an ardent Marxist. Pretty succinctly, it describes my position on Marxism, and I think it does a pretty good job poking holes in Marxist methods. While it is not as polished as most of my writing, remember it is from an email exchange, and was not “for a grade” so to speak.
To protect the innocent, the other side will not be named. Just know that everything except the innitial sentence fragment was written by me.
so long as we rely upon anyone but your own personal gurus, Morales and Chavez (there are probably others),
These are not my personal “gurus”. I don’t follow Chavismo like you follow Marx. I am sorry if you misunderstand. Hopefully I can compose this without too much condescension: I have only always said that these two individuals provide AN example (not THE example, I have NEVER argued this) of what course we could consider for our country. I have never claimed to support a chavista programme for the United States, but I sure support it for Venezuela. The things Chavez does in Venezuela would not work in the United States.
His methods, however, could work and are something we should explore, because we should want to look at ALL options available to us. Similarly, I have always said that where Marx works in the United States, we should utilize his method. Where he does not fit,
just like where Chavez does not fit, we should not use them. I have said it before and will probably say it a hundred times more until you feel the need to stop attacking me because I think seizure of political power (in WHATEVER way possible) before economic power is dealt with is a good idea.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ladies and Gentlemen,
A while back now I began a discussion delving into the problems I saw with Christianity, and started by pretty much attacking the creation story. I didn’t get much past there because the person I was debating the topic with chose to descend into vulgar semantics and modern forensic tactics of not addressing the basic essence of the arguments but just the substance (the structure, the words I chose etc…) So I lost all stomach for the fight and abandoned the field.
Now, I have had the fortune to come across the “Skeptic’s Annotated Bible”. It is the KJV online with skeptical commentary in the margins. VERY interesting just how many holes and questions there are in only one chapter of one book that I took the opportunity to look at. I can imagine how many there are with every single book of the bible.
I should let it be known that I am not against the philosophy of God. I am a Christian, still even though I have a million problems with how the Church has truely distorted the teachings of Jesus, and use them to control people. I still follow the philosophy of Jesus. As a philosopher, then, I am entirely comfortable with having faith in Jesus’ teachings, and still being able to question just about everything writen about him (like Socrates, he can not be proved to actually have written anything himself…). We should always question things, even our most deeply held beliefs.
So without further ado, here is a link to the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. It is not to convert people away from religion, just provoke the sorts of questions people need to address for themselves before they put their faith in something as serious as “religious belief”. Only when you are able to comfortably say you are alright with religion even though these questions are all very valid, do you truely have faith…
Hopefully, this rebuttal will be shorter than either the introductory post or Cody’s response.
There are a few things I would like to start with. First of all, I would like to point out that Cody has chosen to rely on some source materials while I have chosen not to rely on any. And admittedly I lack formal training in rhetoric. These two factors serve to put me at a disadvantage in this discussion. I would just like to report that I am aware of this disadvantage, and while I don’t necessarily like being disadvantaged, the discussion is on my thoughts on organized religion (that is, I am not attempting to disprove the existance of God, the divinity of Christ, as Cody claims, or any of this. I am merely presenting my reflections on organized religion and the teachings of the modern church, and this of course is what Cody should be responding to, just as a matter of context) and so therefore I feel that the strength of my commentary will help me make up for the disadvantage I suffer as a result of my presentation of reflections rather than some conversion attempt I might have been otherwise attempting. Read the rest of this entry »
Setting up a dangerous, but non-binding precedent, a District Court in Central Pennsylvania today issued a ruling stating that “Intelligent Design” is not a scientific theory at all, but teaching it is tantamount to teaching religion in schools.
Read the AP story on Yahoo
While this ruling is merely a confirmation of what any thinking person who has been exposed to even the most perfunctory overview of the theory already knows, it is not binding on any other court where the issue is being raised. Read the rest of this entry »
On Religion, Chapter 1
In picking up my series on religion, I want to begin at the beginning.
Let’s take the creation myth.
If I may, the judeo-christian creation story may be recounted as follows: At first there was nothing, except God. John put it as “In the beginning there was the Word and the word was God…” We’ll say God was all that existed. At some point, God decided it was time to create a universe. It took him all of six days, and on the seventh he rested. He created the entire universe, as well as all the laws of physics in this time (!) that held planets in motion, that caused capillary action to occur, that essenially made everything that we see work and describe as physics, earth science, biology, chemistry, and a whole host of other natural sciences work as it did. He also created Earth, a special little place with animals, plants, amoebas, viruses, marijuana and the like, all good and bad, but all serving some sort of rational purpose (even mosquitos have a purpose, which is to feel spiders). Read the rest of this entry »
On Religion, Introduction
I want to start a series of writings about Christianity. Some background is necessary first.
I grew up a Christian, a Luthern, a Missouri Synod Lutheran to be precise. After I left my mother’s house I tried to keep going to church, but something didn’t seem right about leaving my church community and just going into another one. It really sort of sucked, so I left the Church. Read the rest of this entry »
