1. Send In the Clergy!

Comment #65772 by mspatriot9 on August 26, 2007 at 12:56 pm

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to be from Shreveport. I was listening to the Moon Griffon show on the radio yesterday morning where this story was discussed and at least from the call-ins, people were mortified, disgusted, but pleasantly refreshingly, not about to put up with it...the "when it happens" scenario had many voicing their intent to refuse to tolerate it.

I rarely watch local news anymore so the video I just now saw. The religious nuts around here are a plenty. I'm one for the refusal to cater to them and the readiness to just "intolerate" them right back. Enough is enough already. It's dangerous now...it's time to ignore and dismiss political correctness for a straight up, no holds barred, refusal to put up with it. Run THEM out of town.

On behalf of the sane people here in Shreveport (myself and about 12 others) I heartily apologize that our state is incapable of making it to the 21st century and insists on regressing back to such times. If anybody bombs us to wipe out the ignorant stupidity gene, I can't say I'd blame them. We totally deserve it.

2. Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #63418 by mspatriot9 on August 14, 2007 at 5:22 am

PS....I hate when I get itchy submit finger.

I wrote...

...the slime pool of bacteria.

And for you religious sorts that gasp in shock and horror at anyone who suggests our origins dating back to a sludge pool...and refusing to accept any such thing.

Sorry, wrong again. Your shock to that is your head up your ass thinking you as a human are part of the masters of the universe. It's arrogance keeping you in denial. In reality, so our origins came from a sludge pool critter. So what?

That life EVOLVED to THIS state is a good thing, doncha think? But the same is true for the rest os living things. Perhaps instead of arrogantly presuming you're too good to be attributable to sludge, you should consider yourself lucky that the line that spawned you managed to not get eaten...

We're not "special."

We're just lucky.

And another evolution is taking place in the psychology of humanity: it's realizing in massive numbers that there never was a god, we've all been brainwashed and misled, and the chief perpetuation of this dangerous delusion IS RELIGION, and thus the fight to abolish it in any manner has erupted with passion.

Your religious apocalypse will happen. It's just not gonna happen with 4 horsemen and a big sky show with devils and angels.

It's gonna happen right here all around you when your fellow man has been enlightened and reufses to put up with anymore delusional uneducated fools running the show...and we'll put an end to it before RELIGION MAKES HUMANITY EXTINCT.

3. Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #63409 by mspatriot9 on August 14, 2007 at 5:01 am

Late to the party...still must be done since nobody else went there...

To Darwin2

But I believe it is unrealistic and unscientific to use the atrocities and stupidities of organized religion as a proof against the existence of God.

Then you don't quite understand the point being made. Nobody with a firing brain cell suggests that bad religion proves no god. At best, it's just supporting circumstantial evidence.


I disagree with Dawkins who proposed that the preponderance of scientific evidence demonstrates that the possibility for the existence of God is very low, almost zero. I am perplexed that scientists can actually come to this conclusion.

Then you should consider a legitimate education in science. Here's a suggestion and a little background. I was raised in a strong religious environment and for years, despite the absurdity of things, still accepted a god. My focus on the conflict had always been, not is there really a god, but "which god is the actual right god"...

I read about a book online that seemed interesting on its face, called The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom. I bought it. I could not get passed the first chapter for it begins with Chinese history and I could care less about that. Finally I made myself read that and then I couldn't put it down, once I understood the context of the information. By the time I closed that book, I'd learned more about the human body than I had imagined, how we function - and I'd always studied how we function for years. This reading yanked the question out as irrelevant and solved: there isn't any god one way or the other and we've got it all assbackwards. That one book opened the door and I've been hungry for every piece of written or spoken material every created about science, the body-brain, our actual origins, evolution, and it all makes sense.

The reason you do not understand it is because you are under the flawed assumption that something must be "made" in a creative sense, and you assume evolution has to be something that creates life. Evolution is not the creator. It's the created. It's what happened. Not what makes it happen. Evolution is the explanation of what has happened between one change to another change. And in a natural sense, it's adjusting.

It did not need a creator. The law of supply and demand (or natural selection) is this: if there is no need for a thing, then that thing goes out of existence. There is no place in the chain of life for any outside creator, not to kick it off, not to direct it, not to make it happen or start and stop it - all long since factually proven in many fields of science. Because of that, no "god" could exist. The only place it does is in the imaginations of humans.


I believe the opposite of what Dawkins says is true and that the preponderance of scientific evidence demonstrates that the odds are very high, almost 100% that God, the One Surpreme Being, Designer and Creator exists.

It most certainly does not....and you don't understand the evidence whatsoever. You are seeing in terms of this around you that you have no clue how it came into being and moving immediately to "therefore something smarter than you must've done it because you're not able to create this" - you assume there must be an intelligent entity involved at all and that is why you do not grasp science or why science suggests no god can exist.


Would a scientist conclude that the Space Shuttle, one of the most complicated aircrafts in existence, was made by natural selection. The obvious answer is that intelligence was behind its design and creation.

Actually, natural selection determined exactly how the space machines would evolve at all, and that they would, factoring in a variety of aspects from the workers, the red tape, the facilities, the financial backing - i.e. the environment itself. Had the environment not supported the existence of space machines, we'd not have space machines. Why is it shaped this way? Natural selection at work in the determination on which design worked best, which one fails, which one creates obstacles, which one moves better, safety and so on.

Nothing "designed" natural selection. It's NATURAL, it happens on its own and depicts the various influences on a thing within an environment.

And again. ONE PERSON didn't wave a stick our grab some mud and go "abracadabra a space shuttle"...thousands and thousands of people, individuals, working in networks, focused on small aspects and working in tandem, and within the environment, all collectively created the end product: the big ass ship.

The human/biological equivalent would be the trillions of individual cells clumped together in networks performing the same sorts of tasks that design the shape, size, abilities, restrictions of its housing: the end result is the human body, the human being itself...YOU.

No god does that. No god makes the cell. The cells before them make the cells all the way back to....the slime pool of bacteria.


The universe is infinitely more complicated that the Space Shuttle and must have had a Designer and Creator. So you atheists out there give me a break. Let's get scientific here and conclude that the probability that God exists is very high.

That's not scientific whatsoever. The universe being massive, the space shuttle being made up of parts with names you don't understand, to work in a way you can't comprehend is not evidence of "complexity"...it's evidence of your ignorance on how something works. Once you understand its components and how it functions, it's not complex at all, let alone complicated. It might require a lot more knowledge in a broader range, but complex doesn't mean it's inherently impossible.

It just means YOU don't understand...it's complex and complicated to YOU. And since you're not smart enough to build a rocket, it must be created by someone smarter than you. Sure, talking space ships.

But not at all regarding the trees, the universe, or the human body.

By the way...you are an animal...a real one. So keep that in mind when you protest about "real" animals being baseless creatures. So are you.

We all are.

And it's been presented countless times how the universe came to be...it's not the scientists fault you refuse to educate yourself. The information is widely available for free. You don't need to rely on school or college. You just need to do the study yourself.

4. Scopes Two

Comment #51483 by mspatriot9 on June 23, 2007 at 5:22 am

Did I miss a memo?

Wasn't Delay supposed to be in the slammer?

I am just shaking my head at his question of why bring this up, is this something the people actually care about?

Um YEAH.

I personally, as a natural American citizen, a taxpayer, a human, really prefer to know whether the candidates are sane, rational and properly educated OR if they're suffering from a delusional brainwashing that an invisible magician in the sky waved a wand and *poof* life happens....

5. The Future Forum Presents: Christopher Hitchens and Marvin Olasky

Comment #51423 by mspatriot9 on June 22, 2007 at 8:38 pm

Are you kidding me? Debate??

Olasky, while gentle and humble and pleasant, wholly bombed this "debate" by sweepingly missing the whole point.

His first rebuttal was spent, either conveniently or compulsively, yapping about countless boring examples of all the charity done by the church or religious....but that wasn't the point.

The point is and always was, regardless of poison, WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE, THE HARD, FACTUAL, SOLID EVIDENCE THAT A GOD EXISTS TO BEGIN WITH.

It appeared to me that he knows there is no such evidence so he conveniently danced around the point to waste time yapping about various people who did nice things because of religion and still could not comprehend that Hitchens was suggesting here that the religion itself was incidental - people aren't out of the womb guilty of sickness.

He goes on in the next returns to yap about the overview of the bible and what god wants - proving precisely Hitchens' accurate assertion right out the gate that Olasky would, just as they all do, start professing to know the intent and mind of god...WITHOUT FIRST ADDRESSING HOW THIS GOD EXISTS TO BEGIN WITH.

If I want to know where Mars is, I can visit an astronomer and he can take me outside and point - with or without a telescope. If I want to know what happens post death, I can visit a mortician or medical examiner. If I want to know where babies come from I can shoot some tequila and play around in the back seat. (bad example).

If I want to know where god lives, where's heaven, I get a religious nut telling me "well it's god's will that we don't get to know this until we die and float there but it's up there in the sky somewhere" or "you will rise to the kingdom - provided you haven't pissed god off before then, cause despite this crap about god's enduring "love" it's up to fellow religious nuts to make the determination as to how pure and sinless you are when you die and whether you get to go or not, but saying you haven't then you'll go meet your family and friends who are there waiting on you, there is no hunger or sex, the streets are paved in gold yada yada"

I mean come on already.

Religious nuts can't even remotely comprehend the definition of EVIDENCE and that inherently prohibits them from telling the difference between facts and "inference" and outright delusion.

Before you tell us what god says, wants, feels, did, is gonna do, point out factual, solid, proof of the existence of one - or any.

God lives where? Show us factual coordinates of a location. God looks like what? Show us a photo. If you suggest it's god's mind/intent that he doesn't have to show us a damn thing, then show us instead, provably, where and how you know this is the fact, inclusive of how the hell you figure god has a 'mind' one way or the other if god's supposedly some ephemeral NON HUMAN entity.

And when you can POINT TO IT and it's irrefutable and faith is irrelevant(cop out card which means you don't know jack shit and are too stupid to figure it out), THEN we can worry about god's mystery plan and will and intent.

Here's evidence. If god wants me to know god is reality and not delusion, given this "enduring love" nonsense, then god can materialize out in the yard one good time - that'll clear it up right quick. Unless and until you can back up these claims, with FACTUAL EVIDENCE, the same kinda shit that would be expected in a court of law to keep you out the electric chair, then don't whine, piss and moan when we look at you and the word DELUSIONAL slips off into the air - referring to you and those who share your illness.

6. Richard Dawkins on his online alterego

Comment #51351 by mspatriot9 on June 22, 2007 at 12:57 pm

PS....

Is there a reward or prize if we can uncover the identity of the great professor's secret SL avatar?

Definition of Ironic: he's a furrie!!!!! ;-p

7. Richard Dawkins on his online alterego

Comment #51344 by mspatriot9 on June 22, 2007 at 12:09 pm

Greetings fellow SL addicts...(Cheri Mills in SL).

But...Richard Dawkins playing in Second Life too?

I'm sorry my atheist friends but that there may well be evidence there is a god after all!

That's just awesome. Now every time I log in SL and encounter someone I'll forever be wondering...is this Professor Dawkins? ;-p

And to you who couldn't find anything to do in SL...surely you can't be serious. There's more to do in SL than in RL! ;-p

8. The problem with secularism

Comment #14591 by mspatriot9 on December 23, 2006 at 3:13 pm

Okay good, it's not just me. I've been browsing all night and am, til my eyes are dripping out of my nose, (this place is addictive)....and come across these various posts and articles and there's a big part of me that's going *ohhh,okay I get it, this is a mock post, it's not really real, it must be a regular making fun at the typical religious sort's inevitable response...

And then gradually it becomes clear that nope, this isn't a parody, these people are completely dead serious. On the forum there's a 68 page thread about Noah's ark. I swear that I thought it was a silly parody of the silliness of the notion of Noah's Ark....but by page 3 it was pretty clear, nope, they're *really* arguing about this.

That's such a twilight zone sort of moment of *is this real or a spoof?* But when it sinks in that the people with a clue are indulging the truly uneducated over what amounts to what spiderman did in comic episode #45 and whether the webinator really could take out Dr Octopus, it makes me scared shitless for humanity.

We're in the 21st century for christ's sakes, debating Adam and Eve's "reality."

This would be funny if it was Stan Lee's site. It'd make sense.

Somewhere on one of these I commented that it's a sad, sad commentary on humanity when more people on the planet know who Paris Hilton is than they know who Richard Dawkins is. I fear if this does not change, the decree of the Red Queen shall come to pass.

Red Queen being the virtual AI in Resident Evil who warned them:

*You're all going to die down here....*

9. Merry Mithras

Comment #14557 by mspatriot9 on December 23, 2006 at 7:45 am

Okay, so it's pretty well established that the use of the word "virgin" in the contemporary version of the bible is the thing that causes Christians to insist that Jesus was born of a virgin...as if to suggest, she was not privy to sexual reproduction or intercourse, yet we now know that this was a mistranslation and the actual reference was simply "young woman."

Christian's putrid hatred of all things sexual would underscore the necessity of running off the deep end and embracing the unlikely event that no, Mary was a virgin, no sexual intercourse happened, it was divine conception.

Basically, they got it wrong. A mistranslation.

(Even as a teenager I couldn't help wonder did it not occur to these people that the whole notion of "virgin birth" did not necessarily mean no sexual intercourse but simply she'd never had sex before, she was a virgin, and THEN, like all of us, had intercourse, since it'd mean the same thing...and yet they opted to go with the most absurd interpretation.)

Now there are others but to keep it simple, here we are with the Christian version of Jesus being the son of god...and Mithras being the Sun God. Both the light of man, yada yada.

Okay I can't help but wonder if all of this drama, trauma and genocide and mass delusion confusion sprang from something as banal as the guy that interpreted the ancient texts was just dyslexic, (or drunk)...and he meant to write SUN god but it came out SON (of) god and it all went to hell from there.

It's not that big a stretch - there are many many mistranslations in the bible, the version the christians run with is probably about 85% disingenuine anyway based entirely off misprints over several hundred years and a whole other language translation. Somebody's bound to get it wrong, screw up a letter or an assumed definition, and now look at what they caused...massive delusion, people running around making assinine claims of women getting pregnant by invisible entities, breaking the laws of physics at every turn, and screwing up the SUN GOD to mean the son of god.

THAT would be the greatest irony of all time.

10. I'm an atheist, BUT . . .

Comment #14517 by mspatriot9 on December 23, 2006 at 12:38 am

When someone asks me why I don't believe in god, amusingly it's always with some inlaid presumption that I actually DO believe in god, but I'm pissed off at him because I never got the pony or some BS. It's as if there's a piece of their brains that malfunction to the comprehension that it's entirely possible to not buy the god thing at all - so when someone asks me why, usually what I ask in return is why should I?

I don't go in asking them to prove it, just ask them instead, *Why should I?* and then wait for the stock answers as to why I need to believe in god...

Because...don't you want to go to Heaven when you die? Don't you want your sins to be forgiven? Without god you'd be some baseless animal without morals, etc.

My response then is to laugh (AT them) and in a somewhat mocking fashion explain that those aren't good enough reasons, actually, because I'm not that useless of an individual that I can't get through a day without a crutch of some sort.

Why do you need it? Are you that pitiful and useless that you can't function in a single day otherwise? If not, then you don't need it either. If so, then you're probably not fit to reside among society anyway and will probably end up locked up before it's over with.

11. It is possible to respect the believers but not the belief

Comment #14513 by mspatriot9 on December 22, 2006 at 11:43 pm

On a lighter note, perhaps we could round up all the "faithful" (oh come all ye faithful, yada yada) and take them all to a remote island somewhere far away, and let them all just duke it out once and for all = figure out which god and dogma you believe in, however long it takes until only one remains.

Then have all those people institutionalized.

Problem solved ;-p

Point being, I think we're missing the point trying to pacify and understand their beliefs or respecting them one way or the other. The underlying issue is the individual buying into it because 1. he was brainwashed from birth into it and 2. there's nothing to substitute.

You're dealing with the paradigm and we are wired to protect and defend that paradigm as much as the physical body - because that's the well from which all of our assumptions about our environment are drawn...if that goes, we're lost and this is an immediate prevailing threat to every one of us.

We are also missing the solution in attempting to correct problems from the outside in. We know this in theory but ignore it in application. We do not work that way, we're not 'wired' that way, and no matter how ignorant we are to how we function, the bottom line reality is that at all times, 100% of the time does the inside cause the outside. Most everyone continues presuming that external events (or people) have any power whatsoever to cause or effect change internally and it is not possible. Everything out here, including us is the end result of the internal processing, period.

You cannot change behavior using external means (force, threat, etc) because we're not wired this way....the behavior is the end result, never the catalyst.

When you perceive a situation out here, someone behaving however, and you respond, they didn't make you do anything. They're no more the cause of how you feel, they no more influence you than the easter bunny. You still perceived the event, and from there, the perception is processed into those assumptions about your environment, as true or false, as threat or banal...and then when the result comes, the entire flavor and nature of your response is colored 100% by the pre-established well of assunmptions YOU have collected up to then.

Nobody makes you respond but you. You're not influenced by external events. Nothing out here is an influence - this is all a myth and a flawed one. It sails over the very core mechanism of how we function and why and until we are grounded with this understanding we'll never find solutions when dealing with conflicts with others.

There are no external causes or influences because the perceiver still has the stage of taking in the input and processing it in terms of how he already views the world anyway, for better or worse. His paradigm may be such that everything is a threat to him so his response will be entirely predictable, he'll go into threat removal mode until he's perceived the threat to be neutralized. But nothing outside of him "caused" him to choose that behavior. It's already built into him to choose based on what's in there already.

This is why debating science and religion with a religious person is going to fail. Everything you point out, no matter how sane, lucid and reasonable is going to be rejected because it threatens the paradigm itself, the person's entire security zone for being in the world. Unless he can replace it with compatible data, he's not going to ever do anything but reject and resist.

You all know this in theory, but how many have this worked into daily application. As long as you say things like "you make me mad" or "he won't let me" or "they always hurt my feelings" or "X external event made me crazy" then you're not grasping the totality of the function...still tending to fall into the presumption external causes internal.

The solutuion is not for YOU to challenge their beliefs - you can't, you have no power to effect change in them one way or the other - you can't change their minds, can't make them feel anything or not feel it, can't impact their beliefs, no matter how they might want to attribute it to you or something else.

The ONLY person who can challenge their beliefs is the person himself...and threats, forces, ultimatums are going to be resisted as a direct threat to their paradigm, which is why this problem continues.

Why did you 'convert' from religion to atheism?

Did anybody make you? Nope. YOU challenged your beliefes yourself. You began to recognize the snags in logic, the failures of god to come through, this or that issue that bothered you and YOU began to resist the data based on what you learned...and then YOU changed your mind, it was always an internal event and the END RESULT of that would be the atheist point of view and all you do in respect of that.

That's the only way to solve the problem. Instead of challenging their beliefs, challenge them to challenge it themselves, or work out a solution for them to replace the useless BS with something better, preferably *empowerment* - education about how they function will more and more naturally eliminate the need to invoke god as a cause. If you understand how you function well enough, you'll recognize naturally no room for any god and eventually will reach a place where it becomes an issue of god's usefulness at all.

Once you've got that sort of self empowerment, you have essentially "become as gods" and eliminate the whole nonsense.

First thing is to really learn how you function, and in practical terms - and that means to do away with these myths once and for all - such as the sinfulness of sex. Our sexuality and mating is NOT antithetical, there is no gender war, it's all completely compatible. But we've been miseducated into thinking sexual behavior is wrong or immoral, when we're wired to behave this way to secure mates for the very reason we're here.

Understanding the brain chemistry involved when we are excited, and understanding that nothing out here got us excited - the reality of the event was we perceived it based on the existing paradigm and understanding, and THAT signaled the relevant areas of the brain as threat or goal, which then releases the dopamine and happy juice....we make ourselves happy, sad, excited.

The reason I point to this is because until we learn this on a practical level, we will continue causing drama and trauma for ourselves in the form of making everyone else accountable for how we react and feel and respond, and that is a threat to people, who will then, as wired, go into threat removal mode - and depending on the crap they've been taught, particularly religious, how they handle that threat could be anything from simple productive restraint to widescale genocide.

If people understood what was factually taking place in their own bodies MAKING them feel this and that, they'd be able to root out the actual cause (perceptual) and examine whether the perception is flawed or not - long before they pick up a bat and beat somebody to death with it.

Religious people can still learn how they function...and the more they are properly educated, the more empowered they become, the less dependent they are on outside validation (because they cause it from within), and as this expands, the need in them for a "savior" evaporates...and they challenge themselves, their beliefs, and then eliminate it.