a smite at the museum.

By Challi

Does anyone else just find this adorable? A museum has been opened in America that tries to scientifically explain Creation and other completely understandable things like how Noah had dinosaurs on board the Ark with him! Oh yes, wood was really strong back then.



Now look, I understand how frustrating it is for Catholics to be believed by pretty much anyone that aren't them, but this stupid museum isn't exactly helping. I mean c'mon, dinosaurs on the Ark? Not even most hardcore Catholics are that fucking stupid. Besides, why do Catholics even feel that they have to explain themselves to the scientific world? Isn't God supposed to be some super all-powerful magic being that defies such restrictive boundaries like logic? If there was no evidence available to support otherwise, then wouldn't that prove that point more, and thus restore the majesty of God for the followers who would want to believe it like that? It's much better than trying to find a systematically sound reason as to how eating fruit from one particular tree made us ashamed of our nudity or how an old guy parted the sea with a magic stick, isn't it?

So likewise, I'm also annoyed that there were party-pooper protesters outside the museum with signs like "DEFCON SAYS THOU SHALT NOT LIE".



Yes, sure the museum is stupid and pointless, but that doesn't give them the right to ruin the creation idea for believers anyway. Do Catholic priests go around telling the little kids they lured into their confessional booths that the Easter Bunny and tooth fairy doesn't exist? Hell no, and they shouldn't do the same.

-C

a useful self-deception?

By PJK

Sloth: one of the seven deadly sins. Also a large tree-dwelling mammal (see above). We may not be living in trees just yet, but perhaps it's possible that through the former we might in fact be evolving (or is it devolving?) into the latter...

Who knows, maybe it's the absurd over-abundance of modern conveniences in our consumer-driven lifestyles, or maybe it's the legacy of 20th Century counter-culture movements. Or something. In any case, in this day and age laziness is not uncommon and is certainly no longer something to be frowned upon. I would go as far as to say that laziness is now almost seen as a virtue. Thanks to the Simpsons, lazy people are chic; the energetic are to be pitied. Calling someone a 'try-hard' is a term of derision amongst the youth of today; if something takes effort it is not considered cool, no matter how cool it might be.

I for one have adopted laziness as a way of life, taking the great hedonists of Ancient Greece as my mentors. I won't even look at an assignment until at least a week before the due date, and many of my peers are even more adept at putting things off than I am. This should hardly come as a surprise; students are born procrastinators. In fact, we go to such great lengths to avoid studying that paradoxically, we end up performing a lot more activity on impulse than we would ever manage otherwise. It's why this blog exists, it's why all these posts were written, it's probably the very reason you're reading this right now.

This is precisely the phenomenon that Marc Abraham discusses in this week's Guardian:

Critics say modern philosophy is a useless waste of time. They are wrong. At its best, modern philosophy tells us how to waste time usefully. Philosophy's great recent achievement, in this respect and perhaps overall, is the theory of structured procrastination.

In a 1995 paper, Structured Procrastination, John Perry, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University, explains: "I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, a National Science Foundation proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish, and the good use they make of time."

Perry's notion is to channel an ostensibly bad habit ... "Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list."

...

Perry points out that "structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is, in effect, constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself ... This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills . And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?"

I couldn't agree more. Perhaps there is a better means of coping with the rigorous, boredom-inducing workload of academic life, rather than resorting to the masochism of procrastination. But if there is, I'll look into it some other time. Right now I'm going to go sort my entire wardrobe by colour. Maybe when I'm done I'll arrange my DVD collection alphabetically...

imagine no religion...

By PJK

"The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most destructive to the peace of man since man began to exist."

Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason.

Atheist opposition to religion should be unnecessary in principle. It makes no difference to me whether you believe in an omniscient creator, or whether you believe in the tooth fairy. As readers may have noticed, I am firmly against the idea that anyone's beliefs (political, religious, cultural, etc.) should be grounds for discrimination in a democratic, secular, and pluralist society. But this is not the same as saying that belief should be immune from criticism, and when it comes to religion there is certainly a lot to critique, even oppose.

For one thing, my tolerance is certainly strained after having personally encountered (on no less that two occasions in the past six months) representatives of organised religion who have either directly stated or implied that I am going to Hell.

Sure, we could ignore them. We could just walk away. But should we? Shouldn't we be opposed to this kind of hateful bile as a matter of principle? The idea that 'sinners' and 'unbelievers' will be subjected to a divine punishment (especially the Christian and Islamic conceptions of Hell) is an archaic and poisonous one, particularly when what is considered 'sinful' is based on ancient and erroneous notions of morality. But sadly this view continues to have an emotional stranglehold on millions around the world. Even simply implying that the godless will have no place in an eternal afterlife is in my opinion emotional blackmail of the most sickening kind. While there exist people and organizations that continue to espouse these views, they MUST BE OPPOSED by all rational and tolerant people.

So too must religious interference in politics. The faith of a political figure is one thing; it's as personal as my preference for coffee over tea. But when the leader of a secular democracy openly promotes the religious views of one sect over all others, then our liberty (in the Enlightenment sense) is compromised. This means no references to 'God' in official documents and ceremonies. No 'Day of Prayer'. No public money for pushing 'abstinence' or 'intelligent design' into schools. These are all aberrations. Thomas Paine would've been appalled.

Enforcing secularism and promoting tolerance is a noble cause, but I would suggest that it alone is not enough. Rational people have a duty to oppose intolerant faiths. When Churches and Sunday Schools evoke the concept of Hell and divine punishment, they are blackmailing and threatening people. Worst of all, they are blackmailing and threatening children. If I threatened or blackmailed a child, shouldn't I be prosecuted? And if there is any justice in the world, shouldn't I be punished for it? People are easily led astray by hateful rhetoric. So why let religions get away with propagating the worst threat of all? (ie. an eternity of the worst suffering imaginable!)

Finally, I have this to add. People object to the way 'militant' atheists such as Richard Dawkins attack religion. You might be inclined to think he is just as bad. I would disagree. Dawkins is not threatening anybody. Unlike many religious believers, Dawkins is not suggesting that if you don't adopt his beliefs, you will be eternally punished. And though I haven't read The God Delusion, from what I've heard it mainly targets the fundamentalist God (ie. a bearded man in the clouds), and this I have no qualms with. If anything, Fundamentalists should be attacked more often and more harshly by noteworthy intellectuals, and their ludicrously primitive and dangerous beliefs like 'creationism' should be exposed for what they're truly worth (ie. nothing).

And if this argument sounds one-sided, understand too that my tolerance for 'Islamic sensibilities', particularly the hypocrisy involved in responding to cultural offences with senseless violence, is wearing thinner by the day.

Islamic sensibilities or Islamic double standards?

yes, Virginia, there is a bodycount.

By Challi

I was actually going to talk about this while it was still relevant but, hey, that's procrastination for you. Besides, I think we who weren't affected at all personally by the Virginia Tech Massacre has gotten over the shock of it by now so we can just look back on the event and laugh.

...

Ok, that was kind of tasteless, but at least it's been long enough to at least get away with the title and the rest of this post without a lynch mob waiting within the comments section.

Anyway, I think that the perpetrator of this most heinous act, Cho Seung-Hui, was clearly a bit of an attention-seeking drama queen who wanted to go out with a bang (sorry) which is why he sent those videos of him talking about why he was about to kill all those innocent hedonists to NBC, so that he could be seen as some sort of awesome martyr on national TV rather than just some angsty acne-ridden nutjob, not that it worked. In fact, all he really did was seem like a jealous kid who hated everyone who had a better life than him. He is like a lot of Uni students in that respect, except not in regards to the "killing 33 people" part, most of us only get to about 12 and then we get back to finishing that damn 2500-word essay. I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

Fear my wonky eyes and overbite

What I really want to mention, though, is how this weirdo decided to compare himself to Jesus Christ in one of his videos, here's a transcript:

"You thought it was one pathetic void life you were extinguishing, but thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ to inspire generations of the weak and defenseless people."

Umm...huh? You died like Jesus, did you? I don't recall that bit in the Bible where Jesus walked into a university and shot 31 people on top of the 2 he shot a few days before and then put the gun in his mouth and shot himself. I'm pretty sure he died while nailed to a cross and died for our sins without killing other people in the process. Sure, the New Testament was written to make Jesus look good, but I doubt the writers stretched the truth that much.

Ah, and you did what you did to inspire the weak and defenseless did you? Is that a small price to pay for killing 33 defenseless people, or are you just unfamiliar with your own hypocrisy? or both? I know these questions I ask will not be answered because the person I'm asking them to is too much of a coward to answer them...and he's also dead.

In the rest of that video, he also mentions the future victims being a bunch of hedonistic brats who couldn't live without all those material goods. The irony of that is that he couldn't kill that many people without his own material posession, his guns and he wouldn't bother with killing the other 31 people without taping himself on another material possession, a video camera, because otherwise he wouldn't be as infamous. So he's as bad as everyone else, except that he killed people so he's a little worse.

I'll end this post with one final irony: Does anyone else find it strange in this picture below that he looks like he's trying to shoot someone when he's clearly being sniped himself?

Ok, I'll shut up now
-C