Comments by BaronOchs

Comment #141262 by BaronOchs on March 10, 2008 at 8:04 am

Old Joke. A farmer was showing his farm to a catholic priest. As the priest gazed across the fields at the beautiful looking crops he remarked "You know my son, God and you have made a wonderful job of this farm!" to which the farmer replied "Yes, but you should have seen the land when I first took it over, when God had it to himself!"

That's a crap joke really. It would work if the farmer irrigated a desert, but not exactly if he cleared a forest or drained a meadow.

2. What's the Point of the Archbishop of Canterbury?

Comment #139048 by BaronOchs on March 5, 2008 at 4:42 am

Poor Colin Pillinger. First his Beagle crashes then he gets mistaken for an Archbishop!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Pillinger

3. Fleabytes

Comment #134103 by BaronOchs on February 27, 2008 at 8:53 am

Steve Zara it's certainly interesting are there six due to a kind of mathematical necessity? perhaps the others are important in other universes . .types of universe . . ?

4. Fleabytes

Comment #134098 by BaronOchs on February 27, 2008 at 8:39 am

just about everything we see in the universe is only made using two of these quarks. In fact, you only need two to make the universe, and our planet, and life. But there are six. The universe is more than is needed for us.

God: "hey our order just arr. . .Jesus wtf I said two you ordered six o' these damn things I got pay for these!"

5. Over half of Britons claim no religion

Comment #132058 by BaronOchs on February 24, 2008 at 4:28 am

dragonfirematrix sure testing the intolerance of zealots would be good.

Your original post though seemed to suggest denying clean water, medicine and even food to people just because they hold religious beliefs, that could quite easily work out as genocide.

Science should be used to improve life for everyone on the planet shouldn't it not be one side in an global war?

6. Over half of Britons claim no religion

Comment #131711 by BaronOchs on February 23, 2008 at 3:52 am

well dragonfirematrix glad to see you've lost the too common irrational belief in Human Rights. . .

7. Cutting Edge: Baby Bible Bashers

Comment #129420 by BaronOchs on February 19, 2008 at 5:10 am

Oh that poor little boy that is awful

8. A match made on RichardDawkins.net?

Comment #128214 by BaronOchs on February 16, 2008 at 2:39 pm

Congratulations V and Yorker!

9. Council pays psychic for exorcism

Comment #126473 by BaronOchs on February 13, 2008 at 10:20 am

This family was absolutely distraught and believed what was happening - that is not to say that the council believed
Housing manager Andrew Burnip
Andy Burnip

Well that was a well proofed article . . .

10. Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science

Comment #125771 by BaronOchs on February 12, 2008 at 2:44 am

My vote would be for V. S. Ramachandran, Larry Krauss or Stephen Pinker

Steven Pinker would be just right but he is already Johnstone Professor at Harvard so this might be at best a step sideways for him.

11. Why multiculturalism must be abandoned

Comment #125767 by BaronOchs on February 12, 2008 at 2:32 am

I say this to you Dave - get off my Island and take your backward thinking with you.

Would that be called reverse fascism?

12. Bill Maher on Larry King Live

Comment #125572 by BaronOchs on February 11, 2008 at 3:51 pm

sarah95 cheers as ever! I can't get quicktime to work on my PC.

Great shall be your reward in heaven!

. . .wait oh this is the other site scratch that . . .

13. Exorcism undergoes a revival across Europe

Comment #125568 by BaronOchs on February 11, 2008 at 3:48 pm

"How else can you explain how a wife, in the space of a couple of weeks, could come to hate her own husband, a man who is a good person?"

Jankowski said that an archbishop granted him the authority last October to perform exorcisms and that he's been busy ever since. As for the afflicted wife? "We're still working with her,"

Uhh uhuh oh dear where are the feminists?

14. Why multiculturalism must be abandoned

Comment #125148 by BaronOchs on February 11, 2008 at 2:56 am

this article is really good, she makes a lot of sense.

He might have manboobs but he isn't a she.

15. Why multiculturalism must be abandoned

Comment #125133 by BaronOchs on February 11, 2008 at 2:32 am

We've heard this before remember? Trevor Philips said multiculturalism encouraged divisions in society and then people criticised him for "playing into the hands of the right".

Still good article.

16. Sharia fiasco

Comment #124884 by BaronOchs on February 10, 2008 at 11:46 am

joshuaslocum I don't understand that why are men claiming welfare for their wives in the first place? can't those women just claim their own individual benefits?

17. Christopher Hitchens on Books & Ideas

Comment #124869 by BaronOchs on February 10, 2008 at 11:32 am

Very good Steve I'll put you on the delivery waiting list for uhh Oil . . .it is currently moving rather slowly . . .

Hmm the Falklands is hardly of much use to Britain but it was arguably important that Argentina weren't seen to get away with that kind of land grab because all kinds of states may have been tempted to try their luck on the back of ancient treaties and so forth. Also it made us look tough in front of the Russians . . .and helped us keep military outposts around the world, which is good in a way . . .

18. Christopher Hitchens on Books & Ideas

Comment #124773 by BaronOchs on February 10, 2008 at 7:44 am

It is in their interest to maintain military and economic supremacy (surely that isn't controversial?). For which reasons it's better for them to get their own Oil rather than buy it from the middle east.

Enough fighting I can sell you a bottle of uhh Oil for £10 it will make your skin upto 20 years younger!

19. Christopher Hitchens on Books & Ideas

Comment #124754 by BaronOchs on February 10, 2008 at 6:46 am

you don't need Hawaii to be protected do you? Or Alaska?

Yeah like I can't think of a single instance when an attack on Hawaii caused the US any problems. And what does Alaska contain of any worth? Not like it has any uhh Oil or anything . . .

20. Inventor Doesn't Dare Say 'Perpetual Motion Machine'

Comment #124015 by BaronOchs on February 8, 2008 at 6:58 am

"What I can say with full confidence is that our system violates the law of conservation of energy,"

Sorry I'm afraid but not by the hairs on my chinny chin chin.

21. Ad 'likely to offend gay people'

Comment #123398 by BaronOchs on February 7, 2008 at 5:04 am

CCTV? I don't get it is that an intentionally Orwellian name or just a bizarre coincidence?

22. MySpace: No place for Atheists?

Comment #118495 by BaronOchs on January 30, 2008 at 5:44 pm

SPS beliefnet did host the Sam Harris/Andrew Sullivan debate and "Secular Philosophies" are included on their list of uhh "Faiths".

This might be brewing on Facebook as well. Search for "Fuck Islam" on the groups to see what I mean.

23. Scientists discover way to reverse loss of memory

Comment #118257 by BaronOchs on January 30, 2008 at 2:13 pm

As a very nostalgic kind of person I'd love to get the old memory circuits stimulated.

Perhaps we could have a future where we can go to something looking like a Barber's shop and have our brains played with as we like!?

24. Dawkins is third most prolific internet Briton

Comment #117933 by BaronOchs on January 30, 2008 at 2:45 am

clarification: I don't know if the term is used in the UK, but "non-traditional student" usually describes adults who go back to college later in life because they didn't get a degree when they were young.

We would say "mature student".

25. Loneliness Breeds Belief in Supernatural

Comment #116247 by BaronOchs on January 26, 2008 at 2:50 am

Godless I'm not sure apart from everything else you would get particularly lonely in a monastery because it is a very close tight-knit community. Also since everyone else there is doing exactly the same stuff at the same time as you I'd imagine that would reduce a sense of isolation?

Thomas Merton could probably alleviate loneliness by reading his fan mail also.

26. A Letter From Hell

Comment #115887 by BaronOchs on January 25, 2008 at 1:46 am

Apart from everything else that video is also hypocrisy because it says in the bible you can't communicate with anyone once you're in hell:

Luke 16:

[27] Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house:
[28] For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.
[29] Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.
[30] And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.
[31] And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

27. How Evolution REALLY Works

Comment #112965 by BaronOchs on January 18, 2008 at 10:43 am

Playing ride of the valkyries over and over isn't doing much for me . . .perhaps there's an ironic social darwinism reference in it??!

Ok suggestions for the perfect evolution soundtrack?

28. This deadly religious resistance to vaccinations

Comment #96917 by BaronOchs on December 11, 2007 at 5:03 am

Vaccinations are perhaps the greatest achievement of humanity: using this scientific tool, we have literally eradicated Smallpox � a disease that caused hundreds of millions of people to die in howling agony � from the human condition. It will never kill another person, ever.

Hopefully not but it is still sitting around in various government laboratories if you know what i mean.

29. Richard Dawkins - Science and the New Atheism

Comment #95411 by BaronOchs on December 8, 2007 at 9:42 am

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7132124.stm

"The gods have been asked to appear before the court on Tuesday, after the judge said that letters addressed to them had gone unanswered."

Lol this is gold!

30. Colouring book warns kids of pedophile priests

Comment #95197 by BaronOchs on December 7, 2007 at 2:44 pm

Is anyone here actually concerned about child abuse? Other than to just use it to hit the church? If this colouring book keeps just one child safe it's existence is praiseworthy.

31. Secret Swami - About Sai Baba

Comment #95191 by BaronOchs on December 7, 2007 at 2:32 pm

mint_tea I am lost for words over mcsekhar's post, he basically says "my conspiracy theory is so evidently plausible I'm not going to subject it to the actual evidence presented in the documentary that these allegations are true!

So much for caring about evidence, or perhaps he/she still has some lingering resistance to admitting supposed godmen are all too human?

32. Secret Swami - About Sai Baba

Comment #94978 by BaronOchs on December 7, 2007 at 5:10 am

What an evil man.

33. Papal encyclical attacks atheism, lauds hope

Comment #94803 by BaronOchs on December 6, 2007 at 3:34 pm

Jon_Sociologist it is also the case that the CDF under Ratzinger were ruthless to a degree that can only be described as evil.

Theologians who deviated from the official church line (usually with laudable reasons and on the whole sounding more sense) were subjected to terrible psychological bullying as well as the very real threat that if they didn't submit the Vatican would do everything possible to ruin their lives.

Many victims of the CDF managed to survive as academics or writers thankfully, for instance Matthew Fox who was thrown out of the Dominicans discusses all this here:

http://www.matthewfox.org/sys-tmpl/htmlpage18/

From that article this gives a good idea:

That is what he did over a twenty-three year period. One prominent and elegant theologian, Father Bernard Haering, who was the first one attacked by Ratzinger, had also been interrogated by the Nazis during the second world war. He reported that his interrogations in Ratzinger's office were far more scary.

34. Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Comment #94405 by BaronOchs on December 5, 2007 at 3:54 pm

Well ADH I have to say I can't stand the sentiment in My Way, stick with Bob Dylan.

So you're saying something like this:

Whatever we do we will never have autonomy, we will always be victim to some power or other outside ourselves. So we might as well submit ourselves to the Christian God, he's the best!

Well feel free to correct that. It isn't deliberately a caricature!

I very much interested to discuss this but perhaps you could be clear about precisely what "autonomy" you are denying and why you're so sure it doesn't exist?

35. Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Comment #94398 by BaronOchs on December 5, 2007 at 3:27 pm

Thanks for your response ADH. I guess the impression I got from your post [86]was that a philosophy/religion that simply seeks to make sense of our everyday experience is actually inferior to one that claims to reveal facts about supernatural goings on.

Also the notion that there is some moral worth in losing ourselves in enthrallment to a deity. It would seem to me there is a kind of natural human attraction to power, and to being the subjects of power. If people don't agree think about kinky sex or the success so many demagogues have had throughout history.

We don't have any autonomy you say? That sounds like Sartrean bad faith, I think we do and that it is "spiritually" valuable.

36. Interview with Christopher Hitchens

Comment #94377 by BaronOchs on December 5, 2007 at 2:11 pm

ADH [comment 86] I rarely here(read) such a clear statement of exactly where I think christianity has gone wrong.

At least I know where you stand!

37. Highway to hysteria

Comment #93914 by BaronOchs on December 4, 2007 at 12:52 pm

that is hilarious!

38. Daniel Dennett Debates Dinesh D'Souza

Comment #93090 by BaronOchs on December 2, 2007 at 7:08 am

I think what he's basically trying to say is that there is probably something greater than ourselves out there and science doesn't provide sufficient answers to the really big questions.

There certainly is something greater than myself out there: the world/the universe/ all the rest of life apart from the little bits I've seen . . .

Do we need some magisterial discipline like either Science or Religion to answer the "big questions". The answer is only the way we find to make sense of and find value in our personal experience.

39. Daniel Dennett Debates Dinesh D'Souza

Comment #92897 by BaronOchs on December 1, 2007 at 5:22 pm

Right I'm onto Dinesh's speech, well i'm not loving his frenetic high-pitched delivery at any rate . . .

40. Double-checking Dawkins

Comment #92884 by BaronOchs on December 1, 2007 at 4:42 pm

So it's true?

I feel strangely moved

41. Sudan demo over jailed UK teacher

Comment #92473 by BaronOchs on November 30, 2007 at 3:18 pm

It says I need to download something else to play the vid, then the page crashes.

Oh well, what do the whiny islam lovers like Karen Armstrong say to themselves about all this?

42. Banishing the Green-Eyed Monster

Comment #91871 by BaronOchs on November 29, 2007 at 1:32 pm

Lifelong heterosexual monogamy I'm sure is brilliant, but it won't work for everyone and it's not some kind of golden ideal towards which everyone must aspire or count themselves a failure.

This is where the churches go wrong, they idolise marriage, they're marriagolaters.

43. Banishing the Green-Eyed Monster

Comment #91867 by BaronOchs on November 29, 2007 at 1:27 pm

dgr8test97:

When a man marries a women (any relationship for that matter)and swears to the women that he would not have sex with someone else than he needs to follow up on it.

But why is it regarded as so crucial that couples must commit themselves to this for the rest of their lives when there is no obvious reason to, and like you say they can be "polygamous/polyandrous" or whatever and be honest with each other about it.

This article reminds me of Bertrand Russell's essay "On Catholic and Protestant Freethinkers" (published in Why I am not a Christian) where he muses on a type of post-protestant atheist who will reject religion but cannot bring themselves to abandon various protestant mores.

Dawkins it seems is not that kind of atheist. I'm glad he will not refrain from writing this kind of thing for some suppossed tactical reason.

44. In the name of God: the Saudi rape victim's tale

Comment #91719 by BaronOchs on November 29, 2007 at 4:35 am

Time to shut down that Saudi funded London Academy. Quite clearly all their attempts to export their perverse values should be opposed.

45. This Friday: Debate between Dan Dennett and Dinesh D'Souza

Comment #91575 by BaronOchs on November 28, 2007 at 3:18 pm

here is part of a Dennett/D'Souza exchange:

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/Dsouza.htm

I'm not going to say Dennett is guranteed victory but is it not correct that D'Souza's usual tactic is to bandy about some quasi-philosophy, he will have to think of something else for this one because whatever else he will not out philosophise Dennett!

46. Turkey probes atheist's 'God' book

Comment #91574 by BaronOchs on November 28, 2007 at 3:10 pm

clunkclickeverytrip 6000 > 0, it would be worth translating it even if only one person read it . . .well not financially worth it, but morally worth it.

47. Turkey probes atheist's 'God' book

Comment #91418 by BaronOchs on November 28, 2007 at 9:06 am

Until they stop torturing Kurds and supressing books they shouldn't be let anywhere near the EU (uhhh except in the obvious geographical sense). If they ban TGD and these offences are whitewashed by Brussells I think I would join the UKIP or whatever.

48. My life under a fatwa

Comment #91180 by BaronOchs on November 27, 2007 at 1:29 pm

villageidiot lol I like the avatar!

49. Golden Compass author hits back

Comment #91178 by BaronOchs on November 27, 2007 at 1:24 pm

Fanusi Khiyal: