Mixed Nuts 2
Email from 2007 (and some older stuff I found while digging around too)
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Mixed Nuts 2Email from 2007 (and some older stuff I found while digging around too)
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I guess they don't teach people very well in your part of the world if you could read that article and come away with the impression that the author was actually American. -- Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/
Do you just think that it is simply a coincidence that you believe in the same god as the last people to beat the crap out of your ancestors and instil in them the logic-defeating thought protocol known as faith? -- Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/
How would you describe the way that faith is used to change people's thoughts? Please draw clear distinctions between faith in things you think are worthy of it and faith in things which are unworthy and explain why the results appear identical, e.g. faith that Catholicism represents the true church allows people to burn with a smile on their face as does the faith that Protestantism is the true Christian faith or indeed that Hirohito is a divine emperor. What do you judge God on? Killing every living man, woman, child and animal except for a few hand-picked exceptions. Is that a good act? Or was that allegorical, like Jesus dying for your sins? If God doesn't approve of something why does he allow it to happen? Why does he allow false religion? Why does he allow people to feel empowered by faith in false religion? Why don't you know? Why do you trust such slippery answers? Faith is a technique of self-brainwashing. It is a self-reinforcing concept. It is the single most dastardly thought anybody has ever had. No evidence is required to buttress any idea held to be worthy of faith, and faith itself can be used to believe that the idea is worthy of faith. Any idea can be upheld indefinitely against all contrary evidence, that is how faith works. How screwy an idea can be held with faith? Virgin birth. The Trinity. The miracles of Jesus and Moses. The idea that it is God that makes America great. 72 virgins awaiting the martyrs in paradise. All that and much more. Why are you following the genocidal sky god of a foreign tribe? Are you absolutely certain it has nothing to do with that religion being imposed on Europe by the Roman Empire? You wouldn't trust a man who claimed to be the Son of God if he was born in Wichita in 1958, would you? What makes you think different rules applied in "The Holy Land" in "Biblical Times"? You weren't even there. You are relying on a chain of hearsay of at least 70 generations, and every link in that chain was brainwashed by the idea that having faith was good in and of itself. A billion lemmings can be wrong. Just like a billion Muslims. It is faith that kills in huge numbers. Not just faith in sky-pixies, faith in other ideas too. Faith allows people to murder with a smile on their face and the name of their god on their lips completely assured of the rightness of their destruction. How many terrible and inhuman deeds have been done in the name of doubt? What have I got to defend my description of Jesusland against? It is my
opinion. Yup, and It is still my opinion. Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/
I don't think it is reasonable to say that everybody has faith in something, there is a huge difference between working assumptions and ideas you will happily destroy the world to defend. To use the same word for both concepts is unhelpful. Yes, everybody does have working assumptions or they can't negotiate life at all. If you ever meet anybody who denies the existence of everything and claims that everything is an illusion, including and starting with you, I suggest you drink their beer and see how they react, I guarantee they will reveal that they too have some working assumptions in common with most of humanity. Working assumptions are necessary to function. You cannot do scientific experiments if you cannot assume that your equipment is what it seems to be and your measuring devices are meaningfully calibrated. Negotiating life is rather like climbing a rock face, to prevent yourself falling off you need to rely on some grasp on something solid, but you don't make any progress if you simply hang on to the one safe hand-hold. The scientific approach is to question all things, but not all at the same time. The religious approach is to never question the one apparently safe hand-hold. As a result religious people find science a real stretch. Faith is always going to be dangerous. Faith allows people to act unreasonably and to think better of themselves for doing so. I will assume you understand and know the feeling of pleasure that can be obtained when you have proved yourself right and somebody else wrong. Vindication is a great buzz - "There! I told you I hadn't eaten the last chocolate. There it is. Do I hear a sorry?" Exhibiting faith is a similar thing but with the added flavour of serving an external worthy cause: vindication, personal triumph but seen (from inside) to be sincerely altruistic. Pride without guilt. It is not blowing your own trumpet, it is causing the heavenly host to blow it for you. It is a pure reward, guilt-free cerebral masturbation. But only if you believe that what you have put your faith in is good, which of course pretty much by definition you do. Seeing faith as being a good thing, which all religions do, is the start on the road to justifying any kind of action. Faith has been used to justify some of the most evil acts the world has ever seen. Indeed you can just about guarantee that behind all the most gruesome and evil acts ever performed is a smug git who thinks he's a hero for acting on his faith: the Crusades, the mythical Abraham and his listening to the voices in his head telling to murder his family (and all the thousands who have followed suit since), the Oklahoma and World Trade Center bombings and so on and Pol Pot murdering in the name of his faith in communism. People who don't know what they are doing or why they are doing it tend not to wreak as much havoc as those who have a very clear idea about why they have to do it and why it doesn't really matter if people get killed along the way. I agree with you about personal responsibility, an abusive background does not excuse abuse, and neither does a faith background excuse anything either. Having faith that abortion is murder does not justify murder. Having faith that God blesses America does not make being an imperialist aggressor right or allow Americans to fly over foreign countries abusing their national sovereignty as if that was their God-given right. What car would Jesus drive off the road? I really should start selling
t-shirts with these slogans. Does the sweet passage you found in Leviticus refer to how Jews should treat gentiles with respect and honour? There is nothing sweet about keeping yourselves to yourselves and making up a whole lot of ridiculous rules which make spending any time with any outsider almost impossible. How much of a friendship can you build up with somebody who eats abominable food and keeps abominable animals? When the outside world is full of abominations you can easily cut yourself off from it, like the Amish do. For any meme, any infectious idea, isolation provides protection, while limiting the ability to spread. Christianity was a mutation of the Judaism memeplex that allowed it to spread while simultaneously surviving isolated in a pure form. Does the journey you are on allow detours and a change of destination in the light of wisdom gained? Are your wheels well-trod rubber or flanged steel, useless off the rails? You can't explore anything on rails, all you can do is follow. Don't you ever tire of being compared to and called a sheep? Do you ever intend to grow up? Are you happy doing what your father says for your entire life and then for eternity? Since when has "because I say He says so" been a satisfactory answer to any person's question? The answers about free will and being too small to understand God were exactly the slippery answers I anticipated. Christianity has survived for centuries, of course it has effective defences, all philosophies that survive have defences. To survive the defences need to be good enough to convince the already convinced, there is no need for the defences ever to be good enough to convince outsiders, which is just as well when you consider some of the lame ideas that religious people have come up with. No doubt you can squirm with sympathetic embarrassment when you hear Catholics trying to justify the idea that priests (and only proper celibate Catholic priests) can make wine become the same substance as blood shed over nineteen centuries ago or Mormons trying to explain why it is perfectly reasonable to postulate Jews settling America and dividing into a wholly evil tribe and a wholly holy tribe. I squirm with sympathetic embarrassment for you trotting out such defences too. The fact that people you respect seem to accept those excuses as reasonable helps you to believe in them too, that does not mean that reasonable and fair-minded people accept them as plausible answers. Faith can be self-induced brainwashing just as an elephant can be a large grey mammalian herbivorous quadruped but it is absurd to draw the conclusion that it always is. Well, actually no it isn't. It is up to you to explain what else it can be and why the same label can be fairly applied to two different kinds of thing. What research have you done into the historical reliability of the Bible which was not written by people who believe in the special revelation of the Bible? By that I mean people who believe in the Bible as the word of God at the time they wrote their book, not who claim to have started the project with an open mind or a contrary agenda. I recommend that you read The Unauthorized Version by Robin Lane Fox, a book written by a respectable academic historian of the period (from the time just before the rise of Alexander the Great to the end of the Roman Empire, across from Persia to Rome) who understands what counts as historically reliable material. Robin Lane Fox is an atheist but fundamentally he is seeking after the truth. He looks at what the Bible is and what it isn't, who wrote it and why. It is very fair-minded, you will probably find it quite novel. It is certainly not written to convert people or to convince people that Jesus is a myth. He is an historian who is atheist, not an atheist who became a historian to further an agenda. If you asked Lee Strobel or Josh McDowell what the marriage customs of Persia were at the time of Christ or which gods were worshipped in Rome in 400 BCE they wouldn't be able to answer, Robin Lane Fox would, because he's a historian not a polemicist. Is your one and only one true god the fairest of ten thousand gods? If so in what way? Most just, most beautiful, blondest or most real? And how many non-existent gods Jehovah is jealous of can dance salaciously on the head of a pin? What do the gods he is jealous of do when they are not existing? Why is worshipping the wrong god or the right (only) god by the wrong name or wrong prophet so heinous a crime that it is punished by an eternity of pain starting only at the end of this indeterminate bail period we call life? Why is your dishonest lord, liar, lunatic false trilema so cut and dried? Why cannot Jesus be a combination? Have you ever met anybody who could summed up by a single word? Lots of people have claimed to be the Son of God, or the son of a god. Starting with the original, Alexander the Great. Was Alexander Lord, liar or lunatic? Fulfilled prophesies are meaningless unless you can guarantee that 1] The prophesy identified is a prophesy of the Messiah, many of the passages claimed as fulfilled prophesies are nothing to do with any Messiah. 2] The people writing the Gospels didn't know what was written in the Scriptures. This is obviously a non-starter. Jesus wasn't converting ignorant atheists, he was preaching to observant and knowledgable Jews who would know their Scriptures better than modern Americans. 3] The gospel writers never made anything up. Only a self-deluding Christian could read the gospels and conclude that this was history as it happened written by an impartial observer. A child just starting out as a historian or literary critic could spot passages which describe events which had no witnesses which nevertheless are written up in the same detail as events which were witnessed by several people and the bias of the author is apparent to anybody who is allowed to use their brain without asking prior permission. The Jewish Messiah was supposed to rebuild the temple, rule the Jews as king, bring them all back to the true faith and be king of the world. Not even close. He hasn't even got the right name. The nativity story is shameless myth-making fiction designed to show that prophesies came true, I find some of Bart Simpson's stories more credible. Many men have been reported to have performed miracles, by their supporters. After seventy generations of faith-empowered biased hearsay what possible weight can an unbiased fair-minded person put on these claims? There is no evidence from any non-Christian source of any of the miracles. The simplest explanation for them is that they did not happen. Don't you have any experience of what happens when cults are young? Look into the matter. Don't assume that the people mentioned in the Bible belong to some different species incapable of error or being inspired by a charismatic man into doing unusual things. People don't change, all cults are different but they all have a lot in common too, all cults are new religions started by the followers of charismatic men. Most don't survive very long, but if a cult survives seventy years the chances are it is still around today unless it was crushed by the huge momentum of a new religion. Once a cult has survived a hundred years why should you ever expect it to die? With every passing year a cult becomes more respectable and people talk less and less of deceiving widows out of their savings and supreme leaders engaging in orgies or drinking the blood of babies. Nero's attitude to Christianity is very similar to Dubya's attitude to Scientology or the Moonies. Religious persecution never has anything to do with fearing that those you are persecuting are right and you are wrong, only gullible faith-heads could swallow that absurd concept. There is no archeological evidence for any events of the New Testament, not that we should expect any. There is no evidence for any settlement in Nazareth at the time. You wouldn't trust a man from Wichita making exactly the same claims, having exactly the same claims made about him. You cannot look into or verify anything about Jesus. You could go to Witchita, but you wouldn't even do that. Because you know you don't live in the Holy Land in Biblical Times. In the here and now everybody who claims to be a prophet or the son of a god is a lying charlatan or a crazy lunatic. Why was it ever different long ago in a land far far away? It's the woo-woo soundtrack running in your head isn't it? The special reverence you have for the Holy Land and Biblical Times because of the reverence you have been taught to have for the Bible and the monsterous tribal god of that arrogant foreign nation. Of course the Jews in the there and then here and now (as it were) reacted to Jesus exactly like the majority of modern Americans would to a self-proclaimed son of God from Witchita. Faith kills people. OK, so does fear and hatred but how many times does hatred and fear get an endorsement from a world leader? What other "virtue" kills people by the million? Faith is not a virtue, it is a character flaw, an evolutionary mistake, a weakness to exploit in others while you call it a strength. To a scientist it is gross professional misconduct. It wasn't me that painted so much of America red, it was the US electorate. My own personal experience of Americans is very mixed, they are among the nicest and nastiest people I know. Those who are among the worst remind me a lot of the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, only the Americans have more weapons, more extreme religious views and less excuse to be proud of their ignorance. -- Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/
How many sports injure people who are not playing and don't want to be watching? It is ridiculous to compare a sport where people injure themselves or other willing players with an activity in which passers-by are injured by uninsured louts who tell them they should have been watching where they were going. And yes, it is perfectly OK to judge anybody for anything in a free society. It cuts both ways you know, you can't say you're free to skate and nobody had better comment! This is part of my point in the article, skateboarders want to have things their way at all times: legal protection of their right to skate while the authorities turn a blind eye to drug use, trespass, graffiti and menacing behaviour. Nothing degrades the user experience of a public space faster than it becoming the haunt of skateboarders, or possibly mimes. And the right to say that is far more precious than the "right" to grind the paint off somebody else's handrail provided for the use of the infirm. -- Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/
It's fun and I'm good at it. Why do you skateboard? -- Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/
You can make friends with any form of a common interest, it doesn't follow that the interest is benign and to be encouraged. 
-- Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/
I feel sorry for your lack of imagination and the terrible circumstances that led you into the hole you have created for yourself. Do yourself a favour and go out and explore the world, try going to a civilized country, expand your horizons. There is a another way you can live your life that doesn't involve being a brain-dead Jesus freak or an amoral waste of a skin. Just keep on doing all the good things that you are doing and stop pretending that some Jewish zombie is doing them for you. Try it, keep doing all the smiling, treating people well and the feeling elated stuff just don't call those feelings Jesus and see if it makes any difference. -- Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/
Have you the slightest clue about who I am? What makes you think I have the slightest interest in becoming a Christian or hearing your rather short life story? Believing in God isn't hard, any fool can do it. Read a lot more of my site before you try to send me any more messages, I don't like repeating myself.
Do I look like I have problems that a bit of self-hypnosis and cerebral masturbation could fix? Sorry, dumb question no doubt in your book everybody does. My website is not a cry for help.
That rather proves my point better than it destroys it. He took an enormous risk with his shipping business, laying himself open to be wiped out. That was genuine risk taking. In later years he took bigger risks but with a smaller proportion of his net worth and when one of his largest (billionaire) projects failed he wasn't wiped out personally, which would have been the case if his shipping business (his millionaire business) had come apart at the welded seams. He walked away from the failure with his debts wiped away and with a claim on potential future profits which would have seen him having an income up to the age of 129. That's the billionaire effect! Billionaires never get wiped out and tossed out on the streets even when they fuck up on a massive scale: they either make money, fail to make money or make survivable (if huge) losses. In contrast millionaires do sometimes see it all wiped away because they put it all and more on the line. Billionaires sometimes commit as much as 80% to a project, millionaires often have to start at 120%.
What divine miracles? Just because it stretches the imagination of a Bronze Age goat herder it doesn't follow that the only explanation for it is magic. I will not let somebody else's chronic lack of imagination and a need for an answer to "feel right" get in the way of finding out the truth. I see absolutely no reason whatsoever to expect the truth to feel better than a cute lie. Why do you think a loving god would damn people for all eternity because he is hard to believe in? Give me your best explanation for that. Explain why God allows people to worship false gods for thousands of years if it is so hurtful to him. Explain why a god needs worship at all. Explain how believing in a god helps that god with anything his omnipotence lacks. Explain why believing in a fairy story is more important than living a good and moral life. Explain how helping to free people from a life of superstition and belief in lies is some kind of bad act. Explain why a god needs to rape a woman to give birth to himself in order that he be killed to save himself from having to give people yet unborn the punishment he knows they will deserve.
Very sexy, if you like that kind of thing. Oh, no that's RuPaul. After a brief look at what he stands for I think RuPaul stands a bigger chance of being elected. Ron Paul is a man who values his own consistency too highly. This makes him very scary. It's not that you don't know what he will do it's that you know what he'll want to be seen to do. He has no light and shade, he is a fictional character in his own imagination who asks himself: what would Ron Paul do? His attachment to states is just weird. States have rights? How? They are self-perpetuating historical accidents. If you don't want to live in California you can move but what do you do if you don't want to live in a state at all? My suspicion is he wants to big up the power of states to the point at which they can take up but not be able to effectively use powers he doesn't want to see any form of collective exercise. It isn't that he values states it is that he hates and fears the effective use of collective power in any form and he sees devolving the power down to the level one step below the unit that could effectively use that power as being a good way to thwart the will of the people to ever use collective power. He will always endeavour to ensure that the people are instructed from on high that they have no legitimate right to want to achieve anything through any form of collectivization. If states began using power he would be clamouring to devolve those powers down to counties or townships with a view to ensuring that the people only ever get to express any desire as individuals and never as collectivities of any kind. His foreign policy should ensure he doesn't get elected, as will his age.
I don't think America is ready to become isolationist and non-interventionist.
While some people will support his stance on ending drug prohibition and
stopping the war in Iraq a lot of his other policies will scare them away.
On the other hand those policies on drugs and war will scare the majority
of petty-minded conservatives who might have been interested in some of
his other policies or lack of policies. While there might be a lot of whoopin'
and hollerin' I think he is destined to fail. Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/
I want a world government not an American empire for the rather obvious
reason that I'm not American. But there is no chance of having a world
government because selfish right wing Americans are making pre-emptive
attacks on a movement that does not exist because they don't want a fair
share in saying how the world is run because they are far more comfortable
with their unfair share. For every American in this world there are 21
of us non-Americans and we're a bit pissed off with the idea that you call
all the shots and have a veto on everything. Does it never occur to you
that this is a bit unbalanced and unfair? Martin Willett
Claptrap I'm afraid, typical American fear-inducing claptrap. In this case being afraid of your own government. Vote for the guy who curses government the loudest and put him in, errr, government. Then vote the bastard out! In the name of beating tyranny! It is times like this that I am most glad that I'm not American. I don't expect Ron Paul to win, nobody outside America does, that is why he is ignored. Ask yourself how many non-American politicians of any stripe, in any country, who stand no chance of being elected can you name? What are their policies and why should you care? -- Martin Willett |
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