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Thursday, March 31, 2011

Just So You Know

It's useless to try and convert E@L to a belief in

a) any one or any combination of god or gods, devils or spirits
b) Traditional Chinese Medicine
c) any other "new (as in old)" age alternative treatments (acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, Aryan purity, sword swallowing, the application of mustard plasters, butter on burns, etc...)*
d) the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the boogey-man, etc...
e) karma
f) an after-life (heaven, hell, purgatory, limbo, the guff, River Styx, etc...)
g) corporate take-overs being good
h) Ayn Rand and her crude and joyless "philosophy"
i) "wormholes" in space
j) "ironic" quotation marks
k) splitting infinities (the multi-universe theories)
l) not splitting infinitives (not something to assiduously avoid after all)
m) tethered computing gadgets (anyone want an iPhone 4? - came with my new phone contract, still in the original wrapping. For you, special price.)
n) more than 50% of Americans being dumb. Dumb ain't the word(s). They are merely "insufficiently educated"
o) people who lack charity or empathy
p) sweeping generalizations - as a rule...
q) benign dictatorships being all that benign
r) truth being contained exclusively in any allegedly sacred text
s) ghosts
t) the need for more than two types of USB connectors
u) the end of the world being nigh (certainly not 2012, )
v) ebooks boding the death of print
w) Lamarckian evolution
x) letting them get away with it
y) country music (except for the more bluesy kinds)
z) the scientific method being bettered as a way of learning about and testing the limits of the universe and everyone and everything in it, at least not in the foreseeable future (does not include that wormholes crap)
a-a) stopping at arbitrarily imposed limits
a-b) the CIA having killed President Kennedy (it was James Ellroy)
a-c) going out of his way to offend people - but if they would care to line up outside...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

E@L

* That Russian breath-holding technique (to build up CO2 in your blood and initiate broncho-dilatation) for asthma might work - it used to help me when I had some mild bronchitis, he says anecdotally!

8 comments:

Paula said...

We'll see about that!

It is noted that you have added even more to your "FAITHFUL/ FAITHLESS" column...

Would love to see your take on ISLAM... ?

Unknown said...

You should believe that garlic keeps vampires away. You are living proof of that. You eat garlic and have never been troubled by vampires. Ergo the above statement is true.

expat@large said...

But I DO believe in Vampires - spawn of an evil combination of ancient malevolence and a hunger of domination and eternity in depths the human soul, they prowl the dark recesses of our poorly lit streets! Only funding for more UV street lights can save us!!

expat@large said...

Paula: I have an Holy Roman Church upbringing in case you weren't aware. The shortcomings and irrationality of other religions can be taken on by those who, like me, have had a lifetime of experience of whatever absurdities that *they* once were expected to mindlessly accept.

All religion have texts and/or traditions, somewhere in there, which show wisdom and compassion and provide comfort and support, just as much as they have points of contradiction, absurdities and contain threats of violence which completely infuriate me .

I wonder if you can point out the parts of the Qu'ran that speak of love and of compassion for the poor? I can't either, but I know they are there. Why else would Islam be the fastest growing religion in the world?

However, for all that, there is no god.

Isabella said...

Given an infinite amount of time, do you believe that the complexities of the natural world surpasses the understanding of all sentient life in all possible universes?

And don't pick a bone with wormholes just because it's beenused in every Sci Fi story as a cop out :P I personally am a wormhole agnostic.

expat@large said...

Iz: ask Shakespeare about the worth of giving typewriters to monkeys. a) time is not infinite necessarily and as I am multiverse agnostic ... um ... whatever Carl Sagan says. b) see a).
Yeah surely if you enter a wormhole it must be through a point in the middle of a VERY dense object and you would hav to exit on the same way. According to Einstineian physics your mass woud be converted to energy (as in explode) way before such reaching a point was possible.

Everyone wants to cop out on Einsteins laws, what is with that?

Tom said...

Given a (large, but) finite time, aren't we all going to turn in to entropic soup in the heat-death of the universe anyway?

expat@large said...

And the soup will slurp itself back into a singularity.

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