Colbert

I noticed that Jesus managed to go about his business with minimal third party collateral. He tossed some money changers around, but he did't stop them changing money, in fact, its unclear exactly how much weight he really tossed around. Otherwise he managed to go about his kingdom of god without hurting or destroying people, without leaving sadness and/or destruction in his wake. Pretty elegant for the most well known political rebel before Che Guevara and the Founding Fathers.

What happened to this technique? pretty sordid history from Augustine onward on that whole application of force, and breaking people down to save their souls thing.

Paganism, And Christianity. Dates and Theory.

While this guy isn't exactly tactful, or even necessarily correct on where all these names come from, he does bring up a good point. So much of what we think of Christianity today was co-opted from pagan rites. The best known, and most beloved is the Christmas tree. The tree was originally a druidic tradition, meant to celebrate mother nature. Ever wondered why Christmas falls when it does? nobody knows the exact age or birthdate of Christ, so why celebrate it then? ever noticed how it sits right on the winter solstice? yet another pagan ritual grabbed for PR in Christianity's early days. The list goes on, incense was a largely pagan tradition before it was used by christianity.

Also one last thing, a "theory" is a set of observations or processes which we have a solid evidence base or logical train of conclusions that heavily suggest they are true. What separates it from a law is scope applicability, a law is simply an observation and is undeniably true, a theory explains things and could potentially be false, but the observations it rests upon must be true.

Seriously, where do you dig these people up? Every time I see one of these wackos like red crossed out man here, it just drains a little more of me and replaces it with cynicism and bad attempts at dry wit.

When in Rome, Hope the Ancient Romans are Gone.

I don't think people often do enough justice to what a political rebel Jesus truly was. he didn't come from a position of power politically, he didn't have laws (the laws of nations anyways) or armies (human armies anyways) backing him up, he just went out there and stuck it to the Romans because Rome was the America of then. Those guys you love to hate they were oppressive and hegemonic. Can you imagine how happy he'll be to see those guys are gone and now we're here?

Saturday morning breakfast cereal for everyone

I wouldn't feel right without leaving some Saturday Morning Breakfast cereal lying around, so here's a relatively new one.

has anyone ever really considered what a weird dude Jesus really was? People are hungry? He decides to bust the rules of division instead of like, enriching Palestinian farm land. Got some free time? goes around touching people's feet and washing them. About to endure brutal death at the hands of an indifferent empire when you supposedly have the entirety of heaven on speed dial? "Nah guys, it's cool, I got this.", he couldn't have thought of something... i dunno... less torture to go through for his kicks and giggles? Not to mention, a crown of thorns is really just tacky with robes. Personally I don't find this comic so far out of the range of possibility.

Commedy, Social Message, and Deadpan Snarking. What's not to Love?

Going along with that little West Wing clip with snarky crap I wish I could get away with,here's Russel Brand taking on the Westboro Baptist Church, those wonderful people who trash tolerance and love, and funnily enough get none. Take 'em down a peg for me please Russel.

They should've known better than to try and take on a guy who could likely beat Jesus in a Jesus-Look-Alike contest.

MC Hammer time:

Have a giggle on the house with some mormon doctrine put to that most famous of 90's songs. man why did the 90's stop?

Alan Alda

Speaking of Alan Alda in a post or two back, I though I should do some credit to the man I count as my hero in life. He gave this brief essay in response to the question, "What have you changed your mind about":

Until I was twenty I was sure there was a being who could see everything I did and who didn't like most of it. He seemed to care about minute aspects of my life, like on what day of the week I ate a piece of meat. And yet, he let earthquakes and mudslides take out whole communities, apparently ignoring the saints among them who ate their meat on the assigned days.  Eventually, I realized that I didn't believe there was such a being. It didn't seem reasonable. And I assumed that I was an atheist. 

As I understood the word, it meant that I was someone who didn't believe in a God; I was without a God. I didn't broadcast this in public because I noticed that people who do believe in a god get upset to hear that others don't. (Why this is so is one of the most pressing of human questions, and I wish a few of the bright people in this conversation would try to answer it through research.) 

But, slowly I realized that in the popular mind the word atheist was coming to mean something more: a statement that there couldn't be a God. God was, in this formulation, not possible, and this was something that could be proved. But I had been changed by eleven years of interviewing six or seven hundred scientists around the world on the television program Scientific American Frontiers. And that change was reflected in how I would now identify myself. 

The most striking thing about the scientists I met was their complete dedication to evidence. It reminded me of the wonderfully plainspoken words of Richard Feynman who felt it was better not to know than to know something that was wrong. The problem for me was that just as I couldn't find any evidence that there was a god, I couldn't find any that there wasn't a god. I would have to call myself an agnostic. At first, this seemed a little wimpy, but after a while I began to hope it might be an example of Feynman's heroic willingness to accept, even glory in, uncertainty. 

I still don't like the word agnostic. It's too fancy. I'm simply not a believer. But, as simple as this notion is, it confuses some people. Someone wrote a Wikipedia entry about me, identifying me as an atheist because I'd said in a book I wrote that I wasn't a believer. I guess in a world uncomfortable with uncertainty, an unbeliever must be an atheist, and possibly an infidel. This gets us back to that most pressing of human questions: why do people worry so much about other people's holding beliefs other than their own? This is the question that makes the subject over which I changed my mind something of global importance, and not just a personal, semantic dalliance.

Do our beliefs identify us the way our language, foods and customs do? Is this why people who think the universe chugs along on its own are as repellent to some as people who eat live monkey brains are to others? Are we saying, you threaten my identity with your infidelity to my beliefs? You're trying to kill me with your thoughts, so I'll get you first with this stone? And, if so, is this really something that can be resolved through reasonable discourse? 

Maybe this is an even more difficult problem; one that's written in the letters that spell out our DNA. Why is the belief in God and Gods so ubiquitous? Does belief in a higher power confer some slight health benefit, and has natural selection favored those who are genetically inclined to believe in such a power — and is that why so many of us are inclined to believe? (Whether or not a God actually exists, the tendency to believe we'll be saved might give us the strength to escape sickness and disaster and live the extra few minutes it takes to replicate ourselves.)

These are wild speculations, of course, and they're probably based on a desperate belief I once had that we could one day understand ourselves. 

But, I might have changed my mind on that one, too.