A hole-shaped hole.

Greta Christina hits the nail right into the wood again, with her piece "There has to be somethng more": atheism and yearning.

Toward the end, she takes her argument to a conclusion that I found particularly striking (maybe it works better in context):

We don't have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. We have a hole-shaped hole in our hearts.

I think there's something profound in that little epigram.

Jerry Coyne aptness

Jerry Coyne said something I have been struggling to express so concisely in many recent discussions. I liked it so I figured I would quote him.

And here we have the real difference between faith and science, for, unlike faith, science can answer the question, “How would I know if I were wrong?” And if you can’t answer that question, how can you know if you are right?

On not fooling yourself

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool" -- Richard Feynman


(not fooling yourself is a favourite theme of mine - on my personal blog as well as here - so I found this quote particularly appropriate)

poetic PZ

"...your finest thoughts are made from well-ordered meat" - PZ Myers

What a fantastic way of putting it.


(Yeah, yeah, I know, you all read Pharyngula already. Tough.)

Quote

"My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good." - Philip Pullman

I haven't given up blogging - I'm just keeping very busy indeed. My mother even emailed me wondering what was wrong.

Nobility must be earned

A random post.

Annoyance #99:
My state government has a "don't offend the Catholics" law in place. I have to fork over *lots* of my hard earned cash (via the government) to support the stupidly-named World Youth Day (a lovely little convention where altar boys from all over the world can compare their sodomization stories), and I can't even wear a FUCK THE POPE T-shirt?

Well, fuck the pope and this government.

Next election, if I have to vote for those fetid arsewipe Libs in order to get rid of this lot, I will; of course, I'd vote against them next time around - maybe giving the current mob a few years in opposition will do some good. This mob has been in too long, and the Liberals don't stink quite so much just now. It would make me puke just to vote for them, but if I'm going to puke either way, it might as well be in the service of getting some new blood into the government.

Who knows, maybe the Libascists can get the trains running on time.


[Aside added in later edit]: More on WYD over at The Thinkers Podium.

Maybe I need a T-shirt like this.

Something like this - the second part shows what it would look like if I put a bit of tape over the middle, rather than folding it. It's a bit subtler, I think:


Now, to be really subtle, just have the first line and cover the bottom half. If they read something into that, well, that's their own evil mind, innit?


More T-shirts at Five Public Opinions
[end of edit]




On an almost completely unrelated matter, PZed said:

We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned.

I'd like to put that on a t-shirt. Except the pope would be offended and I'll be out $5500 and get strip-searched.

Time again for the triple quote

Hmm. I've almost hit the 8 month mark with this blog. This will be my 71st post, so that's...say (1/5)/(2/3)... 0.3 posts per day on average. (Which is better than I originally thought I'd manage.)

I haven't done the "Three quotes" thing in a while (and sometimes it's not three, anyway - it's not like it's a rule). So I guess it's time to dust it off.

In honour of the just-posted Carnival of Elitist Bastards #1, here's three quotes relating to knowledge and truth ... and their lack.

"I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin

"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true." –Carl Sagan

"If I look over my life, every single step of maturing for me, every single one, has had the exact same common denominator, and that was accepting what was true over what I wished were true." –Julia Sweeney

Seen at Pharyngula

In the comment thread on P-Zed's liveblog of the NOVA Judgement Day program:


Posted by: Ex-drone | November 13, 2007 9:33 PM

cdesign proponentist n. a transitional evolutionary form between creationist and IDist


[By way of explanation - it comes out of a stuffed-up global edit of the creationist book Of Pandas and People, when they converted it to an ID textbook by attempting to replace "creationists" with "design proponents" and a variety of similar label substitutions, without changing the actual content, and cdesign proponentsists remained in the text as evidence of the mangled substitution.]

Three Quotes

Three quotes from Australian comedian, social commentator and master interviewer, Andrew Denton:

(selected from: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/andrew_denton.html )


"A poll earlier this year showed that 42 per cent of Americans believe we're in the End Times."
Andrew Denton

"Absolute faith can blind you to the consequences of the actions you allow. It can tell you it's okay to drop bombs on another country, or that it's okay to hate a group of people such as homosexuals."
Andrew Denton

"I have deep respect for people's individual faith, but when faith gets connected to the machinery of state, or the machinery of hate, I find it very confronting."
Andrew Denton