Horrifying Planet - Zebra: Nature's Ultimate Prey

When it comes to the philosophical problem of evil (the question of how an omnipotent and benevolent God would allow unnecessary suffering to exist), religious believers tend to argue that suffering is a necessary consequence of our having free will: sure, our freedom does tend to produce all kinds of nightmares every now and then, but overall, the net benefits of having free will outweigh the bad.

Whatever merit that answer may have (it doesn't), it's a great distraction from what philosophers call "natural" evil: the suffering created by non-human related causes: things like disease, animal suffering, earthquakes, etc., and the suffering and destruction experienced by non-human animals. So how do you explain that?

Well, The Onion thinks that you can do it through Intelligent (but evil) Design :)

I bet zebras hate giraffes and ostriches :)

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William Lane Craig vs Peter Millican - Does God Exist?

While there is a venerable history of philosophical inquiry into the question of God's existence, debates geared for lay audiences out there tend to display a painful and embarrassing lack of philosophical sophistication. To begin with, the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology, between truth and justification, is so often overlooked that the opponents usually don't realize they are each talking about something completely different from each other. But even when they are not ships missing each other in the dark, the performances leave much to be desired.

Believers tend to assert that God exists because they don't know how else to explain certain phenomena, or because life would meaningless otherwise, or because it's part of their cultural tradition and upbringing. Whatever their merits, such arguments have nothing to do with the question of whether God actually exists or not. Skeptics, on the other hand, tend to turn scientistic, and argue that the only way to know something is through science, and since the claim that God exists is either unfalsifiable or has actually been falsified (and let's ignore the logical inconsistency in those claims), the God hypothesis cannot even get off the ground. Needless to say, both camps tend to embarrass themselves, and each other.

But what if we have two professional philosophers, such as Peter Millican and William Lane Craig, argue the question? I have to admit that I find Craig fascinating... and disturbing. He's an interesting case study of a very intelligent and learned man who will use the most state-of-the-art scientific and philosophical scholarship to support the mutually contradictory beliefs that are the legacy of the virtually illiterate goat-herders who gave us Christianity (the ultimate cult of child sacrifice), but he's really good at this, and he knows how to stand his ground against very smart people. His rhetorical skills and his careful word choice usually takes his unsuspecting opponents by surprise (probably because they're used to debating ignoramuses), and whatever merit their views may have, they usually fumble and stumble in his presence. But Peter Millican is no ordinary thinker, and that can only mean that we are in for a fascinating exploration of philosophical issues that must be addressed even before touching on the question of God's existence.

For instance, who carries the burden of proof? The believer or the skeptic? It makes more sense to me that the person making the affirmative case (the believer in this case) should satisfy the skeptic's standards of evidence, and that the skeptic has every right not to believe until those standards have been met, but as you'll see, Craig is a master at challenging this position in really ingenuous ways...

And another thing we can learn from such a debate is that disagreements even about such a fundamental question as this, can be carried out with complete civility, and with each party taking the other seriously enough to provide a robust and productive dialogue from which everyone can benefit.

Are you feeling smarter now? Or does your brain hurt?

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Tim Minchin - Thank You God

Plenty of religious believers believe in God because they've had some personal experience of a 'miracle'; that is to say, they've been confronted with something that (in their own minds at least) could not have happened by any natural means, and so they take this 'mystery' as evidence for a transcendent explanation. That's what I call water-tight logic :)

As we all know, it is impossible for anyone to win the lottery, for a football team to win the Supberbowl, or for people who may have been misdiagnosed to be cured of their non-existence disease... just as it is equally impossible that our judgments may be clouded by cognitive biases, by the power of expectation and by our uncanny ability to reinterpret data to fit in with our beliefs.

So, when some bloke by the name of Sam told Tim Minchin that God had cured his mom's cataracts, Minchin had to admit (with an awesome song) this proved not only God's existence but his benevolent awesomeness :)

Now what I want to know is why God hates amputees :)

If that was somehow too fast for you, you can follow along here:

I have an apology to make.
I’m afraid I’ve made a big mistake.
I turned my face away from you, Lord.

I was too blind to see the light.
I was too weak to feel Your might.
I closed my eyes; I couldn’t see the truth, Lord.

But then like Saul on the Damascus road,
You sent a messenger to me, and so…

I have had the truth revealed to me.
Please forgive me all those things I said.
I’ll no longer betray you, Lord.
I will pray to you instead.

And I will say “Thank you, thank you, thank you God.
Thank you, thank you, thank you God.”

Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam’s mum.

I had no idea but it’s suddenly so clear now.
I feel such a cynic. How could I have been so dumb?

Thank you for displaying how praying works:
a particular prayer in a particular church.
Thank you Sam for the chance to acknowledge
this omnipotent opthamologist.

Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam’s mum.
I didn’t realize that it was so simple,
but you’ve shown a great example of just how it can be done.

You only need to pray in a particular spot
to a particular version of a particular god,
and if you pull that off without a hitch,
he will fix one eye of one middle-class white bitch.

I know in the past my outlook has been limited.
I couldn’t see examples of where life had been definitive.
But I can admit it when the evidence is clear,
as clear as Sam’s mum’s new cornea.

That’s extremely clear! Extremely clear!

Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam’s mum.
I have to admit that in the past I have been skeptical,
but Sam described this miracle and I am overcome!

How fitting that the sighting of a sight-based intervention
should open my eyes to this exciting new dimension.
It’s like someone put an eye chart on the wall in front of me
and the top five letters say: I C G O D.

Thank you, Sam, for showing how my point of view has been so flawed.
I assumed there was no God at all but now I see that’s cynical.
It’s simply that his interests aren’t particularly broad.

He’s largely undiverted by the starving masses,
or the inequality between the various classes.
He gives out strictly limited passes,
redeemable for surgery or two-for-one glasses.

I feel so shocking for historically mocking.
Your interests are clearly confined to the ocular.
I bet given the chance, you’d eschew the divine
and start a little business selling contacts online.

Fuck me Sam, what are the odds
that of history’s endless parade of gods
that the God you just happened to be taught to believe in
is the actual one and he digs on healing,
but not the AIDS-ridden African nations,
the victims of the plague or the flood-addled Asians,
but healthy, privately-insured Australians
with common and curable corneal degeneration?

This story of Sam’s has but a single explanation:
a surgical God who digs on magic operations.
It couldn’t be mistaken attribution of causation,
born of a coincidental temporal correlation,
exacerbated by a general lack of education,
vis-a-vis physics in Sam’s parish congregation.

And it couldn’t be that all these pious people are liars.
It couldn’t be an artifact of confirmation bias,
a product of groupthink, a mass delusion,
an Emperor’s New Clothes-style fear of exclusion.

No, it’s more likely to be an all-powerful magician
than the misdiagnosis of the initial condition,
or one of many cases of spontaneous remission,
or a record-keeping glitch by the local physician.

No, the only explanation for Sam’s mum’s seeing:
they prayed to an all-knowing superbeing,
to the omnipresent master of the universe,
and he liked the sound of their muttered verse.

So for a bit of a change from his usual stunt
of being a sexist, racist, murderous cunt,
he popped down to Dandenong and just like that,
used his powers to heal the cataracts of Sam’s mum – of Sam’s mum!

Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam’s mum!
I didn’t realize that it was such a simple thing.
I feel such a dingaling, what ignorant scum!

Now I understand how prayer can work:
a particular prayer in a particular church
in a particular style with a particular stuff
for particular problems that aren’t particularly tough,
and for particular people, preferably white,
for particular senses, preferably sight,
a particular prayer in a particular spot,
to a particular version of a particular god.

And if you get that right, He just might
take a break from giving babies malaria
and pop down to your local area
to fix the cataracts of your mum!

Hallelujah!

And if you want more, check out Tim Minchin's poem Storm, or watch him tell the Pope where to shove it.
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God Drops Steve Johnson's Ball

You may have noticed in the past that narcissistic and narrow-minded celebrities and athletes tend to attribute their victories to God. Of course, they don't seem to notice that while they're hogging all of God's short attention span, millions of people all over the world are suffering and dying from lack of divine intervention. That's okay, though... celebrities and their petty needs are more important.



Anyway, when Steve Johnson failed to catch a game-winning touchdown pass during overtime last week, he knew just who to blame :)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
God Drops Steve Johnson's Football Pass
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Check out more of Stephen Colbert.

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