Comments by Cantonakenobi

Comment #258294 by Cantonakenobi on October 1, 2008 at 6:56 pm

Yes he is an intellectual. I have trouble with his support of the war. I do not approve of the oil issue, Halliburton, and war profits.

But I "DO" approve of killing religious nutters who want to destroy my Constitutional freedoms.

I have a hard time accepting the war while at the same time being opposed to it. Its crazy to hold two opposing realities. It gives me a great deal of intellectual discomfort.

2. Turkey bans biologist Richard Dawkins' website

Comment #250012 by Cantonakenobi on September 18, 2008 at 9:12 pm

TurkishAtheist, the way things are headed, I am forced to hope you're right. That secular military is the only reason Turkey isn't a basketcase.

Imagine if you will a military based completely on RELIGION..?????..No not the US Military (although it fits the soldiers; the average soldier is very religious) because all of our equipment (tanks, planes, etc.) is based on science.

I remember how everyone looked down on me at Basic because I refused to go to Chapel on Sundays. Instead I washed and ironed my fatigues and polished my boots. I knew if there was a God he would want me to keep my Drill Sgts off my ass instead of listening to nonsense.

3. Turkey bans biologist Richard Dawkins' website

Comment #250004 by Cantonakenobi on September 18, 2008 at 9:00 pm

Why do I envision the "Atlas of Creation" being the product of many used Crayons?

4. Pope condemns 'pagan' love of money, power

Comment #247682 by Cantonakenobi on September 14, 2008 at 7:19 pm

That kcufer wears "PRADA" shoes. So when is the big Catholic yard sale for the poor?

5. Anthropologists Develop New Approach To Explain Religious Behavior

Comment #246829 by Cantonakenobi on September 13, 2008 at 11:00 am

Bush did admit exactly who he works for and represents.

Republicans will not admit it in reality but they only work for the top 5% of the population of the US, their point is that if they cater to big money, it will have a trickle-down effect on the country as a whole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4daYJzyls

6. Autism and Vaccines: Why Bad Logic Trumps Science

Comment #245322 by Cantonakenobi on September 10, 2008 at 1:57 pm

In response to Comment #243787 by mordacious1 on September 7, 2008 at 11:04 am

I'm still wishing for the Jenny McCarthy/Jenna Jameson sex tape. McCarthy once said on American television if she ever needed the money bad enough she would consider a sex-tape with Jameson.

I think she should do the video and donate all proceeds to autism research.

7. Dawkins on Darwin

Comment #238263 by Cantonakenobi on August 27, 2008 at 9:50 pm

I just finished watching "The Genius of Charles Darwin" by Richard Dawkins.......and my favorite power quote of the entire 3 hour series and a quote which has changed my worldview:

"We are descended from ancestors who were winners, adapting in any way possible to survive and pass on their genes. You and I and every living creature can make the following proud claim. Not a single one of my ancestors died young. Not a single one of my ancestors failed to copulate."

- Richard Dawkins

Well done. 3 of the best spent and enjoyable hours of my scientific life. He has mastered Darwin in a way which will help educators around the world to deliver Natural Selection in the best possible educational light. The light of reason above superstition and mysticism. One can not watch this without feeling giddy about the future of science. It should be mandatory in every school throughout the world.

8. How to reconcile Richard Dawkins?

Comment #175512 by Cantonakenobi on May 5, 2008 at 2:21 pm

The "openmindedness" is the part that religious nutters often miss.

9. Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda

Comment #174777 by Cantonakenobi on May 3, 2008 at 1:00 pm

Dear Mr J
Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein's mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.
1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don't think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer.
Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!
Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I'll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.
2. Hitler's horrible opinions were not all that unusual for his time, not just in Germany but throughout Europe, including my own country of Britain, by the way. What singled Hitler out was the fact that he somehow managed to come to power in one of Europe's leading nations, which was also one of the world's most technologically advanced nations. Hitler had a lot of support in Germany. His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many (like Hitler himself) were Roman Catholic. Very few were atheists, and whatever else Hitler was he most certainly was not an atheist. It is sometimes said that Hitler only pretended to be Catholic, in order to win the Church's support for his regime. In this he was very largely successful. So, whether or not Hitler was himself a true Catholic (as he often claimed) the Church bears a heavy responsibility for what happened. And Hitler himself used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
Hitler's obscene anti-Semitism was able to hold sway in Germany because there was a deeply embedded history of anti-Semitism in Germany, and indeed in Europe generally.
3. Going further back in history, where do we think the toxic anti-Semitism of Hitler, and of the many Germans whose support gave him power, came from? You can't seriously think it came from Darwin. Anti-Semitism has been rife in Europe for many many centuries, positively encouraged by most Christian churches, including especially the two that dominate Germany. The Roman Catholic Church has notoriously persecuted Jews as "Christ-killers". While, as for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that "All Jews should be driven from Germany." By the way, do you hear an echo of those words in your own letter to Michael Shermer, "We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States." Don't you feel just a twinge of shame at those truly horrible words of yours? Don't you feel that, as a Jew, you should feel especially regretful that you used those words?
4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact. It is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically or morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my very first book, The Selfish Gene, that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. Darwin himself said the same thing, in various different ways. So did his great friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley.
5. Darwinism gives NO support to racism of any kind. Quite the contrary. It is emphatically NOT about natural selection between races. It is about natural selection between individuals. It is true that the subtitle of The Origin of Species is "Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life" but Darwin was using the word "race" in a very different sense from ours. It is totaly clear, if you read past the title to the book itself, that a "favoured race" meant something like 'that set of individuals who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation" (although Darwin would not have used that language because he did not have our modern concept of a genetic mutation).
6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some of Darwin's ideas, without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand Darwin's ideas, as some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly be described as a Social Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost literally without exception, have been vocal in their condemnation of Social Darwinism. This of course includes Michael Shermer and me and PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary scientists whom Ben Stein and his team tricked into taking part in his film by lying to us about their true intentions.
7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin's great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realise that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: "natural selection", the "survival of the fittest". Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidiently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler's eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.
8. Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about all over the Internet, persuade me that they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception. You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.
With my good wishes, and sympathy for the losses your family suffered in the Holocaust.
Yours sincerely
Richard Dawkins
PART DEUX

10. Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Comment #171682 by Cantonakenobi on April 28, 2008 at 5:12 pm

Comment #166201 by Adam Morrison on April 23, 2008 at 1:59 am

Might not God disapprove of this much more?

Might I give a flying f$%&?

If Dennett is wrong and even if there was a god and you were judged not by your actions, but by wether or not you believe, I'd sooner spend an eternity in tartaros then one minute living in a celestial dictatorship. So, in short, if the theists are right, god can piss off and leave me in hell. For a Canadian, eternal fire doesn't sound so bad, plus I can hang with Socrates, Plato, Juilius Caesar, Spinoza, etc.

Yo yo this hardcore ghetto gangster image takes a lot of practice
I'm not black like Barry White no I am white like Frank Black is,
So if man is five and the Devil is six than that must make me seven
This honkey's gone to heaven
But if I go to hell well then I hope I burn well
I'll spend my dayys with J.F.K., Marvin Gaye, Martha Raye, and Lawrence Welk
And Kurt Cobain, Kojak, Mark Twain and Jimmy Hendrix' poltergeist
And Webster yeah Emmanuel Lewis cuz he's the anti-christ