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Post by lonelocust on Jun 12, 2009 6:27:30 GMT -5
Yaweh needs to get more nekkid in iconography in honor of his Jovian roots.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 12, 2009 4:23:35 GMT -5
Does anyone know where the god as an old man with a beard image came from? Someone must have put academic research into that topic, but I'm failing at Googling any meaningful answers. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with a painting that someone made, depicting God creating Adam, or something. Nah, that visual was in use before Michaelangelo.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 12, 2009 0:09:43 GMT -5
For all the people not having a problem with this (and from the tone, some of you are serious-if I've misread it, I apologize), are you really saying it's okay to kill people you don't like? There were at least two threads on the mainsite where we were bashing fundies for saying they approved of the murder of Dr. Tiller-who, by their definition, is just as distasteful as we find fundies to be. Murder is wrong. I don't care how hateful the victim is, they have the same right to live as anyone else. Yes, I realize Megan's talking about a fictional character, but she's vocally wishing bodily harm on people she doesn't like. That's not a nice thing to do, no matter who you are, or your target is. Marc I wouldn't condone a serious wishing of mass death on people. I certainly wouldn't condone actually having any sort of mass destruction occur upon the parts of the world that most heavily hold a type of person whose actions are incredibly destructive and bigoted. That includes serious giant-robot-based destruction. However, I think there's a disconnect from reality if you think someone joking about a GIANT FUCKING SPACE ROBOT destroying the Bible Belt is actually the same as someone calling for religious genocide. I suppose for people that really believe that an invisible angry all-powerful being sometimes destroys cities because he doesn't like the gays (I don't think that's actually what the Bible says, but RR certainly does), it may not seem as far-fetched. However, to me, there is no Megatron, and so he really can't go around massacring the Deep South because of fundies because he doesn't exist. So saying that's what he should do is pretty flippant. If you're not cool with being flippant about death, I can understand that. However, I think there's a big difference in "Imaginary giant robots should kill the fundies NO I DON'T REALLY THINK SOMEONE SHOULD KILL THEM" and "This real live person totally KILLS BABIES and is worse than HITLER and is a total mass murderer NO I DON'T REALLY THINK SOMEONE SHOULD KILL THEM." But if a previously-unkown real life giant space robot kills a bunch of people because he's actually been picking up FSTDT forums or Megan Fox on TV and thinks that what we're saying is dead serious, then I'll eat my words and feel bad.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 12, 2009 0:02:26 GMT -5
Does anyone know where the god as an old man with a beard image came from? Someone must have put academic research into that topic, but I'm failing at Googling any meaningful answers.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 11, 2009 6:46:01 GMT -5
Really, there's no way to "know" that induction is valid. ... OF course we don't have ot go beyond any doubt before we can say our decision was correct. That was the entire point of my post. You have to START at a point of doubt ad absurdum to doubt whether observation and logic (and thus the scientific method) are valid. Given that they are valid, we can be reasonably sure of our correctness. Some people feel the need for an unrealistic ontological certainty and/or think that a lack of such unattainable certainty means that all possibilities are equally likely. (They do not, however, in general feel the need to jump off of tall buildings because it's just as likely that they will suddenly start flying as that they will fall.) The original poster, whether trolling or in good faith, was presenting a question relevant to such a point of view.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 11, 2009 2:11:10 GMT -5
I don't see that as any more of a serious wish of death upon anyone than posting "DIAF" to a message board. Rather less, in fact, since fires are a lot more likely to kill someone than a giant evil alien robot.
And of course the bigot's she's wishing Megatron on would just wish him on Carbombia.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 11, 2009 2:08:17 GMT -5
While I believed specifically that God did not actually have a set physical form, I usually had an image of a shiny man in a white robe, though my personal image was a bit younger and more androgynous than the ubiquitous old man in a white robe image.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 11, 2009 1:04:10 GMT -5
There are tons of taxa that were thought to be extinct and were found alive today (though generally, like the coelacanth, the currently-living species have observable differences than the fossil variety), or that were thought to be extinct, then later fossils were found with the same varieties of creatures before they disappear again from the record, presumably still extinct today, but needing their date of extinction to be amended. These are called Lazarus Taxa and Zombie Taxa respectively. And though fundies like to jump on such things, remember there are orders of magnitude more extinct species of which we have fossil record than there are Lazarus taxa.
Remember that because an inconceivably tiny fraction of creatures that live and die become fossils, the fossil record is necessarily incomplete. We will indefinitely continue finding more pieces of it, but it will certainly be "incomplete" even if we one day find every extant fossil on the earth. It becomes more and more complete as we find more of it, but by the fundie definition of "complete" i.e. an example of every species to every live found, it will never be complete.
I also had never heard that horseshoe crabs were ever thought to be extinct, though there are examples of now-extinct horseshoe crab types. The deal with them is that the oldest fossil examples that are clearly in the family of horseshoe crabs are really fucking old indeed. Or at least, that's all I know, and a quick Googling doesn't show much more.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 11, 2009 0:53:00 GMT -5
Really, there's no way to "know" that induction is valid. We think that the universe is consistent and that past phenomena indicate present and future phenomena because it always has in the past. We think that when we drop a book it will fall because it has billions of times before, and it has never hovered, fallen up, disappeared, or turned into a fairy and granted us three wishes in the past. However, it COULD just all be a coincidence. We could be living in a billions-years-long (or conservatively, hundreds-years-long) period of coincidence in a truly random universe.
Likewise, we can't PROVE that deduction is correct. Maybe if A=B and B=C then A doesn't necessarily =C. Maybe A ->B does not actually mean that !B implies !A. We believe these things because they are "obvious", they make sense to us, AND they cause our actions to produce predictable results. Or so our perceptions tell us.
What keeps us from descending into ontological madness is that to doubt the veracity of observation and logic is to doubt the thing that is letting one doubt. If I don't think my perceptions or my ability to reason are valid, then that very doubt is also invalid, as it stems from the same source. It's a pointless exercise to doubt the mechanism of doubting. The RR people MIGHT be right, and I MIGHT be the only sentient AI in a very complex alien computer made of peanut butter on a flat planet which is the center of a closed universe and around which the sun which shines darkness literally travels in a chariot. However, I will choose to go on the evidence that I have, which is to say perception and logic.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 10, 2009 23:48:36 GMT -5
And perhaps some of you would appreciate the parody I once wrote, "Isn't it Redundant."
An old man Turned ninety-eight He won the lottery And had a lot of money.
It's the white wine In your chardonnay It's the death row pardon That keeps you alive
And isn't it redundant? Don't you think? It's like raiiiiiin on a rainy day It's a free riiiide when you don't have to pay It's the good adviiiiiice that you really should take And who would have thought it figured?
Mr. Play-it-safe was afraid to fly. He packed his suitcase And put it in the car. It took a really long time To get where he was going. That's because He didn't take the plane
And isn't it redundant? Don't you think? It's like raiiiiiin on a rainy day It's a free riiiide when you don't have to pay It's the good adviiiiiice that you really should take And who would have thought it figured?
It's the traffic jam That makes you late Going out to smoke On your cigarette break It's like ten thousand spoons In a 70-gross pack And who would have thought it figured?
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 10, 2009 23:39:31 GMT -5
It is impossible to purely semantically define irony. All dictionary definitions (that I have seen) can easily fit a variety of things that are not ironic. Irony is also not an all-or-nothing quality, and things can be a little bit ironic. I think there's some amount of irony on censoring software blocking sites about censorship, but Tiger's example of a censoring software blocking pro-censorship sites would be much more ironic.
I am in fairly strong agreement with Tiger's posted site. However, it should be mentioned that sarcasm is often defined as a sort of irony, and fits almost all symantic dictionary definitions of irony, and has been historically called irony. I however think that "sarcasm" as a word has taken on its own definition and fallen out of the educated useage of the word "ironic", and thus that it is no longer appropriate to consider sarcasm to be necessarily irony.
Re: everyone saying there's no irony in Alanis Morisette's "Ironic". I have always disagreed. While there are many non-ironic items mentioned, I think some of them carry some irony. The guy who refused to fly from fear for his whole life and then dies in a plane crash the first time he flies is certainly ironic, because in fact statistically driving is far more dangerous than flying. Someone forcing themselves to overcome what they know to be an irrational fear (due to statistics) and then actually having what they were irrationally afraid of happen the one time they do it is ironic. However, since most of the mentions in the song (a fly in your chardonnay, rain on your wedding day) are not ironic, yet that song brought about a lot of heavy use of the word "ironic", I certainly agree that it is itself ironic.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 10, 2009 18:29:09 GMT -5
I have a very similar sweater.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 10, 2009 5:33:44 GMT -5
I'm not sure about caitsidhe's friend, but girl in that pictures does look like me on a less superficial level. If we changed our hair colors and styles to something more conventional we'd still look fairly alike, though I'm not sure if that's apparent from the two pics I've posted.
But if cait's friend's dreads are dreads, I assume that's not actually her. The girl in the picture on closer inspection has dreads made of yarn. But I was hoping it was because that would be one of the craziest small world things evar.
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 10, 2009 0:39:41 GMT -5
I am greatly tempted to start posting, but only ever post direct Bible quotes and never actually say anything of my own at all. I wonder how well that would go over to that group of "Biblical literalists". I did that and they said I was interpreting it wrong. I wonder if they'll figure out that reading the bible literally actually IS an interpretation; an interpretation that was never meant to be. Ever wonder why there are so few Jewish creationists? Oh Lewis Black, how I love you. See, that's about the reaction I would expect. The temptation comes from anticipating the hilarity that is having direct quotes with no commentary be called "interpreting it wrong" but extensive commentary off of a few verses called "literal interpretation with no additions."
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Post by lonelocust on Jun 10, 2009 0:05:23 GMT -5
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