disappointing so far but i'm hoping it'll improve as more knowledge is introduced, plus it's very US-centric at the moment, which is frustrating but understandable at this point. finally, the fact that it doesn't know the answer to this question baffles me. all the world records should've been inputted a long time ago.

and half a million daily page views per day for vs?! if that's true you chaps should be making a fucking fortune.

lol... classic sift comments.

Not to 'feed the trolls' too badly, but to the last poster its dubbed 'climate change' for a reason, and have you not heard of global dimming, or metric tons of climate related research you just pretend doesn't exist? Oh wait, a dozen studies can be interpreted to agree with your views, while merely thousands very clearly disagree? yeah,... ok... obviously its a conspiracy and we're all sheeples... its the only logical answer!

And then the energy note... the many ideas you avoid include reducing current demand for energy (incentives to address energy inefficiency in homes and businesses, for instance), encouraging private power generation (incentives to install solar hot-water deal on the roof), and transmitting power from areas like offshore or 'wind belt' areas, high solar areas, etc. efficiently to neighboring areas via huge, buried, crazy-insulated cables. Anyhow, I acknowledge there are misconception about nuclear, but until fusion ushers in a new atomic age there are good reasons why Americans have repeatedly rejected fission power plants dotting the country... and if you don't know them and address them in your argument its odd to even argue for nuclear in the first place. I mean, would you not agree that China and France have histories of doing dumb shit in the past? So, yeah, an odd way to argue your point.

"Is Israel not simply a response to outright hostile actions purported by the States of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon?"

The short answer is, no. Israel is a classic settler nation with all the existential attributes and brutality of a colonial ruler.

Sometimes an article deserves reprinting in full.

(copyfree)

Date : 2004-01-29
''Diagnosing Benny Morris: the mind of a European settler''

By Gabriel Ash - YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)

Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949" is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Haaretz - ( http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/380986.html,
Hebrew original at
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/objects/pages/PrintArticle.jhtml?itemNo=380119). The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil … The native is declared insensitive to ethics … the enemy of values. … He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it … the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from "The Wretched of the Earth"). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an "Arabenrein Palestine," he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Haaretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book "Righteous Victims," Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to…Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. … At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state…[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. … Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two…" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Haaretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and cliches. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, there is the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Haaretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. Most of what he says hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to rule the Middle East from behind tall walls and barbed wire.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel.

The U.S. judicial system is broken. The U.S.A. incarcerates more people than any nation per capita, surpassing China and The Soviet Union. The onset of all anti-drug laws in this country stem from racism and profit; i.e opium in California and marijuana in the deep South.
Nixon made drugs Public Enemy #1 in an effort to hoodwink the population from focusing on Vietnam. The 80s saw a drastic increase in resources to combat a ghost problem. Minimum mandatory sentencing and three-strike laws ushered in the prison-industrial complex nation we live in today. Fortunately, minimum mandatory sentencing and three-strike laws are unraveling.
The waste of money to incarcerate non-violent drug offenders is staggering and shameful. Something must be done hastily.

hahahaah - "On the other hand, maybe this will put an end to all the shitty “tribute to Johnny Depp with music by usher” type videos that keeps being uploaded. When you think about it, most of the user uploads with copyrightet music in them, sucks. I guess freedom has to take a bow for this one."

Just the kind of hard hitting journalism the conservative movement needs right now to usher in a republican win in 2012.

"Shawty" is nothing more than the "cool" way to say shorty in the rap world (also, most of them seem to be from the south... whose folk music their songs are LITERALLY all based on... even "The Chronic").

Remember, it's not Usher... it's "Urshur".

I have been listening to Chanticleer for many years and love them. I ushered at one of their concerts and was able to meet most of them. My brothers and sister had the opportunity to sing with them, and Joseph Jennings himself regularly comes and works with a choir I was a member of for 2 years, so I met him, too. SO you can imagine that I love Chanticleer. And yet, although I love their version of Shenandoah, I am partial to this one (not the choir, the arrangement).

This choir is awesome and I don't mind the mispronunciations at all. The only one that is mildy distracting is when the men pronounce "valley" like "vallay," but it doesn't bother me. I actually think it is charming when foreign choirs sing English songs and mispronounce a little bit.


In reply to this comment by Wynder:
This arrangement was adapted by Chanticleer -- a mens choral ensemble. This is a great version, although some of the mispronunciations make some parts disconcerting.

I have been listening to Chanticleer for many years and love them. I ushered at one of their concerts and was able to meet most of them. My brothers and sister had the opportunity to sing with them, and Joseph Jennings himself regularly comes and works with a choir I was a member of for 2 years, so I met him, too. SO you can imagine that I love Chanticleer. And yet, although I love their version of Shenandoah, I am partial to this one (not the choir, the arrangement).

This choir is awesome and I don't mind the mispronunciations at all. The only one that is mildy distracting is when the men pronounce "valley" like "vallay," but it doesn't bother me. I actually think it is charming when foreign choirs sing English songs and mispronounce a little bit.

>> ^quantumushroom:
By itself, atheism is not a bad thing. But since the human
heart is infinitely deceptive, atheism solves nothing either.

I do love that assertion about the human heart, stated as
fact... makes little to no sense, but let's continue.

Let me rephrase, because I want this to be crystal clear: the
atheist, by default, has declared him or herself to be the
sole judge of what is right and what is wrong, and no other
standards other than their whims or how they're feeling at any
given moment defines morality, goodness, evil, etc.

Even if they do not do so, atheists still must believe that
they are free to pick and choose which laws to obey, the
same exact way those hypocritical religious people pick and
choose which parts of their religion they will follow.

Atheists' highest authority is...themselves.



Religious superstition is replaced by moral relativism and
"rationality" that is masterful at hiding its own emotional
drives. You're in the same boat as everyone else.

No, completely missing the point. People who blindly follow
the bible do so with no reason. They don't stop and think
"Hmmm, is it wrong to hate gay people? On what grounds am I
actually hating them?".

Who is to say you're not blindly following the people
declaring that, 'Christians all hate gays?'

Whereas when you're an atheist you base your morals and are
open to discourse, rather than the blanket 'nope, not talking
about it, the bible says it... end of story'. Trying to
suggest that this is somehow hiding emotionality is bullshit,
emotions can come into said discourse just as much, in fact
moreso than in religion, which teaches to SUBDUE your
emotions, IGNORE your feelings... if you're a man and you feel
love for another man... well, that's wrong buddy, the bible
says so.

The Bible has many passages about slavery, yet it was the
political movements of religious people the world over that
freed the slaves. To blanket-condemn the Bible or even the Quran seems a tad harsher even than the false assertion that all Christians must hate gays.

I understand atheists' contempt for the blind obedience of
fundamentalists, but if you're declaring all religion as evil
because of one segment of an infinite human endeavor, I'd
suggest you're being a tad closed-minded.



I don't think beings who cannot see germs or x-rays with their
plain eyes or past the 13 billion light year "edge" of the
universe with technology have any business announcing with
certainty that, "There is no God." My opinion.

STOP DOING THAT! Gah, I hate that fr*cken bullshit of
saying 'you can't be certain there's no god'... WE DON'T SAY
THERE'S NO GOD. We're saying there is no evidence to suggest
there is one, so to spend every sunday worshiping something
that by all accounts doesn't exist seems a bit silly. We're
happy to be shown to be wrong by SOME SORT of evidence... ANY
would be nice. Stop saying that we are saying for certain that
there is no god. We are saying that we THINK there's no god,
but those with an open mind are happy to accept further
evidence on the matter.

I understand what you're saying, yet the definition of an
atheism is "The doctrine or belief that there is no God" and
"Disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings". I
could be wrong, but you have stated in other words that
atheism is "The doctrine or belief that there is no
God...until proven otherwise."


Atheists remain a tiny minority and their bases for
eliminating all traces of religion from American society are
plainly wrong. Whether you accept it or not, religion has
always been a vital force in countries' historical DNA,
usually with a surplus of goodness over evil.

OK, firstly... Atheists are hardly a 'tiny minority', you
may wish to think so, but sorry, it ain't true. First link off
google on the matter 16% are non religious. That's not a 'tiny
minority' by any stretch of any imagination. Then, if we look
at the wikipedia entry we can see that just getting any sort
of number is fraught with problems in classification, self
identification etc.

I agree it's hard to quantify atheists. You could've just
said, "China makes up one-quarter of the world's people and
they're atheist."

THEN secondly... it's HARDLY that anyone is trying to
eliminate all traces of religion from a country... it's a case
of everyone is perfectly free to believe what they want... BUT
when ONE religion starts enforcing IT'S beliefs on the
populous via government THEN things are wrong. Passing law
based on the bible, making Creationism be taught in science is
all absolute bullshit and SHOULD be stopped. But that in no
way is trying to suggest that people can't go to church, be
religious, pray or whatever and do so without fear. It's the
religious folk who are making those without religion feel
fearful because of the way they are being treated.

You bring up many issues here, most of them political. The
ACLU is trying their damnedest to remove all traces of
religious expression from public life. Not all atheists are in
the ACLU, but there are zero I know of protesting the ACLU's
bullying either. Government schools are screwed from all
sides. Not to make light of your plight, but everyone claims
to be persecuted these days.

As an atheist you must accept that all actions have no bad
consequences except when discovered by others.

This is such tripe. What you're saying is that religious
people are only good because they fear for the repercussions
of a vengeful god. The way I live my life is that I don't do
bad things because I wouldn't like those things done to me, so
why should I inflict them on someone else. To me that's
FAIR... if the only reason you're 'good' is due to fear of
repercussions, then really... you're not good at all.

But what happens when you meet an atheist who thinks what's FAIR isn't what YOU think is FAIR. There's no ultimate authority, even something as open-ended as the golden rule may not apply.

As an atheist you must accept that Hitler and Mother Teresa
both ended up in a void of nothing.

Um... yep. I see no issue here.

Then why be "good?" Why punish evildoers at all?

I don't believe "the gods" condemn anyone for being an atheist
but I do believe all are subject to laws of karma. Again, an
opinion.

Above all, I don't think atheists are necessarily happier than
anyone else. That's probably why there's never been any kind of mass
"conversion" to unbelief, except at gunpoint by evil
governments.

I don't think atheism is an instant trip to being happier
either, never said it was. I also don't think that you are
necessarily unhappy if you're religious. I know plenty of
lovely religious people... I have no issue with them being
religious, I go to their religious ceremonies, quite like
their pastor in fact... they don't try to convert me, and I
don't try to convert them... everyone is happy.

And how many of those lovely religious people would be upset
by your approval/endorsement of this obnoxious video? Some might get "the joke" but then others may not...

Geeze... trying to suggest that 'evil' governments have
converted people to atheism... man... firstly where the hell
does that come from, and secondly don't even start on that
unless you want to defend the crusades and violent
missionaries 'converting' savages to Christianity... don't
even go there, that's just nuts...

Communism makes the state the highest authority, therefore any
and all religious belief and expression was banned in those countries by human monsters, inflicted a nightmare on their own people. These dictators were atheist NOT because they wanted to usher in an Age of Reason but to
maintain their power.

The Crusades were an anomaly compared to the 100 million murdered worldwide by communism.

And no, I'm not saying all atheists are commies, but when one form of "control" like religion dies, another fills the void. Maybe we should all just honor each others' delusions instead.

>> ^NetRunner:
If all this happens, it will be because conservatives under Bush damaged this country beyond repair, not because Obama might raise taxes on the top tax bracket by 3%.


Leftist child, your conspicuous insinuation about taxes isn't going to work today, tomorrow or ever. The more you run it out of your mouth without thinking, the more obvious it is you understand nothing about taxes in this country. Let's not use tired old lines, and let's usher in a new era with this new leader of ours, mkay?

evil_disco_man - The analogy to a reception isn't right. There's no aspect of possession here. Or else a player could just bat the ball out of bounds without catching it and always get a penalty on the kicking team. Or bobble the ball repeatedly while ushering it to the sideline.

It shouldn't matter whether the player is in bounds or out of bounds. The current rules lead to this weird situation where a kickoff is about to land in bounds (say near the goal line where it wouldn't be a penalty even if it bounced straight back), but the receiving player touches it (he doesn't even have to catch it) and leaps far enough to touch a piece of the sideline. Actually, the ball could have already bounced. It could be slowly rolling to a stop 3 yards from the sideline and a player gets a running start, taps it, and dives out of bounds. Penalty on the kicking team. Does that still seem intuitive to you?

The more intuitive set of rules in this situation would be based on "breaking the plane". If the ball breaks the out of bounds plane untouched: penalty. If it's touched by anyone before breaking the plane: not a penalty.

Yet I believe that logic and reason disprove determinism and prove the existence of a god. This is not necessarily a personal god. Einstein, for example, believed in a pantheistic god of which we are a part. Many philosophers claim that because the devastation of determinism proves that there is another substance other than matter and energy (a.k.a. the mind or soul or whatever you want to call it) that a god of some sort must exist. Determinism claims that all events are caused, yet we know that the existence of the cosmos is either an uncaused event or a supernaturally caused event.

I am not offended by your responses. I expected you to see it that way. You say that I remember that instance because something actually did happen that time. My mother has never gotten a feeling that she should do something illegal in the past. She is not a superstitious person and does not regularly break laws because a voice told her to. She doesn't up and do irrational things on a whim. But the one time that she did it saved our lives. Frankly, I think that your answer is a bit of a stretch in that case, but I see your point and it could be reasonable if my life hadn't been filled with things of this nature. I hink I would quit doing things that I am prompted to do if I didn't see a pattern of divine help.

Many of the men who wrote the bible knew Christ personally, although they wrote their books some time after his death. Either he didn't exist or he was crazy and/or a liar or they were crazy and/or liars. It's irrelevent but I just thought I'd point that out.

How could our most intimate human experience be an illusion? I cannot see how that can be true. Why would our energy and matter act in the way that it does if agency were not involved? Do you really believe that your career was not your chioce? To believe that we have no choice is to believe that our entire experience is some kind of elaborate hoax. We do not love we do not have personalities we do not choose who to vote for etc., etc. I could go on and on but I cannot make you understand how wildly my sense of reason beats against the assumption that we are experiencing and interacting within an extremely complex illusion.

What is consciousness if not choice? I'm sure you have a good answer.

You probably think that people are religious because we have an emotional need that is being satisfied through religion. But to me determinism is the same thing. It takes all of the burden of being moral away, doesn't it? It ushers in moral relativism. But this whole conversation is irrelevent because my agency does not really exist and I am only typing these words because I have no choice. Every ounce of reason and feeling that I have tells me that determinism is bologna, not to mention that it is philosophically unsound.

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*ushers you into your meeting* Yes darling, I love you too. And i'll be there waiting at the 12th step, naked, with a glass of fruit juice

Dance moves from Michael Jackson and Usher. Music from Craig David.

The dance, the style, the song, all familiar, yet can't quite put your hands on it. Koreans are sneaky like that lol