yayyyyyy God

[Kanada Kev]

[M.O.B.E]

looking for a place to jump in here but Im a little to late...so I'll leave it alone.

Edited November 27, 2008 by Guest
some things are better left unsaid

[Birdy]

I say, say it.

So 'wonder' and 'might' exempt culpability from suggesting this same connection in a decade's old meme about a Jewish conspiracy?

I wouldn't say they exempt culpability, because, well, he was made by culpable by others assumptions. I'm just trying to point out the dangers of such assumptions and where they've led us, that's all.

How's the hamster experiment?

[d_rawk]

Couldn't score for the hamsters, unfortunately

So instead I signed on to another message board and asked "I wonder if people would still sign up here if they knew you guys might be total assholes."

They got all pissy with me and made the assumption that I thought they were assholes!

[Birdy]

Hahahaha...

I wish it was Friday.

[SaggyBalls]

My Grand Social Experiment!

I wonder how big your skulls are. Maybe there's a connection between the size of your livers and how you react to the work 'knew' as opposed to the phrase 'might think that' and maybe there's a way to gauge the parts of your brains that react to the thought of being 'tricked'

Glad my name's not Eugene when all of this come around.

YT Said:

I wonder how many people would opt to buy local goods if they knew that part of the money they spent on their food might fund Zionism.

[d_rawk]

Is that the bitter rind and pith of the grapefruit talking, or the sweet and refreshing juice? Or perhaps it is the 'giant beast screaming its life away as its tongue curls to the sky and blood gushes out its neck.'

Listen, I know this has been really frustrating for you, as it has been for me. I understand that you were asking that question with innocuous intent, and my answer is "I believe many do think [not know] that, and that they probably do avoid certain goods and probably harass production companies about it. And yes, I think many more would too. And that might drive them to buy locally."

As I read through the two twisting threads from your perspective, as your perspective and intent has become more apparent, I can fully feel how this was all so frustrating to you and how some of it was certainly unfair. Even on more amiable terms, I have admitted to you that I often have difficultly drilling down to the point that you are trying make - sure, maybe that is my giant liver getting in the way of my comprehension. But I think you have some culpability in it too - you often seem numb to context, or the need to provide it. And your colourful imagery can be distracting, rather than illuminating, to what you are attempting to communicate to anyone who doesn't live entirely inside of your head.

Reading it back over, I still understand too the reason for my, and others, frustration. But there is culpability there too - for my part I will say that I have been entirely too snippy, that I did let frustration over talking past each get the better of me, and that I again succumbed to moral outrage (which is particular weakness of mine).

Those concessions are probably not enough for you, but what I have.

Cheers from my giant liver.

[SaggyBalls]

d_jango - I'm not frustrated and really, I haven't been by anyone here. I pretty much expected all of this...BUT the fact that you were frustrated, with my apologies, was - if anything - part of my 'social experiment'

All these conspiracies and history lessons and the incessant debate has all shown (to me at least) to be a giant distraction...but 'culpability'?

Main Entry:

cul·pa·ble

Pronunciation:

\ˈkəl-pə-bəl\

Function:

adjective

Etymology:

Middle English coupable, from Anglo-French cupable, culpable, from Latin culpabilis, from culpare to blame, from culpa guilt

Date:

14th century

1archaic : guilty , criminal

2: meriting condemnation or blame especially as wrong or harmful

Wrong? Harmful?? This term doesn't really have genuine merit in context.

You didn't seem snippy to me, d. In fact, your 'snippiness' must have only served to upset you and cause you distress...so if there's any guilt to be had in that case it is entirely unfortunate (but pretty appropriate in a thread about religion)

"And your colourful imagery can be distracting, rather than illuminating, to what you are attempting to communicate to anyone who doesn't live entirely inside of your head."

It's stuff like this that entertains me the most, as my life inside my head (some people call it imagination, some people call it feeling, and to others it's an aspect of G-d) is entirely my own and is difficult at best to share in a concise manner.

I guess that's one of the reasons I wind up making off colour remarks about Eugenics and Nazi atrocities. Involving you in the 'inside' jokes or little remarks that make me smirk just boil down to a lot of 'you've gotta be there' so why not get people talking instead of debating.

Cause it's really not about proving I'm not funny, making me feel guilty about my joke, or finding a way for me to accept culpability when the only harmful part of the whole situation is how we've been socialized and taught to feel offended and threatened by vivid and disturbing thoughts and ideas.

If some colourful imagery derails you then you weren't on the tracks to firmly to go around the corner.

So why not talk about it? At least one person publically stated a feeling of uneasiness about saying anything. Why even say anything then?

Just because there's carnage doesn't mean there aren't other aspects of the trainwreck that can be looked into.

So to many people, just being involved in a discussion and subsequent confusion and challenge would be frustrating, but I find it quite liberating at times, because - at the very least, it's good to know if it was human or mechanical error.

This fire of religion, politics, social distress, and aspiration is what drives us to not give up and to feel whole. It's what we long for. It's what fuels crying fits, make up sex, and maybe even the fire in some young girls' eyes. It's our complacency that puts that fire out.

Just because we don't have the answers and don't want to find them for ourselves it doesn't mean that we can't and shouldn't ask. Sometimes it leads uf to better questions and helps us feel more comfortable and stronger in talking about a lot of otherwise difficult issues.

I hope that your giant liver and I can tip a glass of something with at least as much bite as Triumph the Wonder Dog.

[Kanada Kev]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7750842.stm

The Bible, but not as you know it

By Stephen Tomkins

Most people think of the Bible as a densely printed book with no pictures, but a version of the scripture that resembles a glossy coffee table magazine aims to change that. It's part of a wave of radical presentations of the Bible, including a manga version and a Lego gospel. But how do Christians feel about these attempts to spread the word?

It's the kind of magazine you might find in a doctor's waiting room next to Cosmopolitan or Reader's Digest. On the front is a pale face heavy with mascara. A flick through throws up striking images: urban flooding, a Nigerian abattoir, a girl eating noodles, a pooch in a limo.

It's only when and if you get round to reading the text that the incongruity strikes you: "Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven." What kind of problem page is this?

Bible Illuminated is the latest attempt to bring the Bible into the modern world. In the format of a 300-page glossy magazine, it contains the whole text of the New Testament in a popular translation, with no chapter or verse numbers.

The images are by turns beautiful, violent, oblique and provocative - much like the book itself.

The text "She will have a son, and you will name him Jesus" is illustrated with a veiled Muslim. One verse has a photo of a pair of knickers draped over high-heeled shoes, sending you back to the passage to find out what it's really about.

The person behind this remarketing of holy writings is Dag Soederberg, a Swedish businessman. And contrary to expectations, he is not a Christian hoping to convert anyone. "I'm not on a mission from God," he explains. "I'm not particularly religious. I'm not telling anyone they should believe."

What he sees in the Bible is a profitable chance for people to look again at their world. "We are all affected by it," he says. "Morals are based on it, rightly or wrongly, government, laws. I'm saying to people: this is your history, read it.

"It's the most sold book in the world, but the least known. I want to take it off the shelves and put it on the coffee table."

It's the kind of thing that might provoke tuts and headshaking in the pews, one imagines. "Some people will feel it's dumbing down," says David Ashford of the Bible Society, an organisation that exists to "make the Bible heard". "How can it be the Bible when it's got Angelina Jolie in it?"

He, however, welcomes it with open arms. "You have to understand that what we think of as the traditional serious-looking leather-bound Bible is actually a relatively new format. In the Middle Ages, picture books - with people in contemporary dress - were the way most people read the Bible.

"At first the Bible was a collection of scrolls, then illustrated handwritten volumes. When printing was invented they were produced in Latin with pictures. Later they were published in plain closely printed text, in the common language, to get them into as many people's hands as cheaply as possible."

So, ironically, Soederberg's attempt to popularise the Bible by getting away from its traditional format is exactly what the people who created that format were doing.

If you're looking for an alternative way into the Bible, there's no shortage of versions to choose from. Here are some of the more unusual:

1. The Jesus Loves Porn Stars Bible

This arresting title is the work of the XXXChurch, an organisation that on the one hand helps people addicted to porn, while on the other hand taking the gospel into the porn industry. They print this Bible to give out free at porn shows and industry conventions, distributing over 15,000 in 2007.

2. The Manga Bible

The British Christian Ajin-bayo Akinsiku, known as Siku, tells the whole story in the form of a graphic novel. Cain says to Abel, "Whassup, bro?" Noah loads animals onto the ark, saying, "That's 11,344 animals? Arggh! I've lost count again. I'm going to have to start from scratch!" Christ strides out of the desert like a Marvel superhero.

It skimps on some of the less bloodthirsty episodes like the sermon on the mount, but Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is a fan, liking the way it conveys "the shock and freshness of the Bible".

3. The Bible in Cockney

The rhyming slang version of the Bible was written by Mike Coles, an RE teacher in Stepney, and started life as stories he told to his classes. In it, Jesus feeds "five thousand geezers" with "five loaves of Uncle Fred and two Lillian Gish". The Lord's Prayer morphs from "For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory" to "You're the Boss, God, and will be for ever, innit?"

This one got the seal of approval of Rowan Williams's predecessor George Carey, who grew up in London's East End, so must have known what he was rabbit and porking about.

4. The Brick Testament

This less-than-reverent online version by Brendan Powell Smith tells stories from the Bible using Lego. It started life in 2001 with stories from Genesis and today contains 391 stories with 4,214 illustrations. Though it is sometimes satirical or tongue-in-cheek, it is often used by churches and Sunday schools, and it's one of the versions that the Bible Society has welcomed as connecting people with the Bible in a new way.

5. Inspired ByÂ… The Bible Experience

And for the iPod generation, you can get the whole thing on your MP3 player, read and performed by a Hollywood cast, including Forest Whitaker as Moses, Cuba Gooding Jr as Jonah, and a possibly typecast Samuel L Jackson as God.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this new wave of Bibles is how sympathetic the church is to people messing about with its sacred scriptures, whether in wording or binding, no doubt reasoning that there can be some good in anything that gets people hearing its stories.

But how successful these versions are at doing that is another question. The makers of the Bible Illuminated claim it has increased sales of Bibles by 50% in Sweden - though we are not told over what timescale. A version that could achieve such figures in the UK would be one of the most surprising Bibles yet.

[d_rawk]

Awesome

I used to have an audio version of Johnny Cash reading the New Testament. Not as boundary stretching as most of the above, but pretty damn cool.

[Kanada Kev]

The Mind of God

http://abstrusegoose.com/85

Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much as master of himself, exposed and subject to offenses of all things; and yet dareth call himself master and emperor of this universe in whose power it is not to know the least part of it, much less to command the same? And the privilege, which he so fondly challengeth, to be the only absolute creature in this huge world’s frame perfectly able to know the absolute beauty and several parts thereof, and that he is only of power to yield the great Architect thereof due thanks for it, and keep account both of the receipts and layings-out of the world! Who hath sealed him this patent? Let him show us his letters of privilege for so noble and so great a charge.

—Michael de Montaigne, An Apology of Raymond Sebond, 1568

Edited December 2, 2008 by Guest

[Kanada Kev]

[phishtaper]

picture of the year, Kev!!

[Kanada Kev]

Here's some video too ... it's in Iceland

[Kanada Kev]

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

[Thorgnor]

Try this guy out...

http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/rel4hell.htm

You Too Can Be A Pope

More serious, or at least more desperate, is the Discordian Society and/or Paratheo-Anametamystikhood of Eris Esoteric (POEE), an anarchistic sect divided deliberately into two opposed groups, each claiming to be (I quote) "the first True Religion." Like the witches, the Discordians worship a female divinity, but say She is crazy. Her name, in fact, is Eris, and the ancient Greeks knew her as the Goddess of Chaos; Discordians claim she is also the Goddess of Confusion, Discord, and Bureaucracy. The Discordian orthodoxy, headed by "Ho Chih Zen" (real name, Kerry Thornly), claims this was revealed by a miraculous talking chimpanzee, who appeared in a bowling alley in Yorba Linda, California, in 1957. The POEE sect flatly rejects this, says it is superstitious nonsense intended to attract the gullible, and proves the existence of Eris by Five Proofs, which are logical monstrosities and reduce actually to One Proof -- namely, "If Eris doesn't exist, who put all the Chaos in this universe, you damned atheist?"

The High priest of the Head temple (his orthography) of POEE is "Malaclypse the Younger, Omnibenevolent Polyfather of Virginity in Gold" (real name: Gregory Hill), who was, of course, ordained as a minister by the ever-helpful Rev. Hensley. It has its own Bible, by Malaclypse, called Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her After I Found Her, and has cabals -- not churches or groves of covens or even nests -- all over the U.S., in England, in Australia, in Canada and even one in Hong King. Leaders of the cabals, called Episkopi, all have odd names and titles, e.g., Camden Benares (author of Zen Without Zen Masters) heads the Los Angeles cabal of Eris Esoteric, Onrak the Backwards heads the Colorado Encrustation, and the Berkeley cabal is run by Lady L, Fucking Anarchist Bitch -- a title, she explains, given to her by Eldridge Cleaver during a political debate.

Discordians have set out to out-Hensley Hensley by making every man, woman and child on the planet a Pope. They are doing this by mass-distribution of Pope cards and have not, of course, neglected to send one of these to the Anti-Pope in France and to the chap in the Vatican who still thinks he's the only Pope. All employees of the Pentagon are, willy-nilly, Discordian saints whether they want to be or not, since Malaclypse has canonized them and incorporated them into a holy order called "Knights Of The Five-Sided Castle," under the patronage of St. Quixote. The Pentagon itself is a religious shrine, said to embody the perfect balance of Chaos and Bureaucracy. Everybody who opposes Discordianism as blasphemous or absurd is an honorary saint too, of the House of the Rising Hodge, while Discordians are saints of the House of the Rising Podge.

Edited December 6, 2008 by Guest

[d_rawk]

Are the Discordians still around? I fucking loved those guys, but they seem to have tapered off over the years.

- Is Eris true?

(Everything is true)

- Even false things?

(Even false things are true.)

- How can that be?

(I don't know man, I didn't do it.)

Oh, memories. Hail Eris, All hail Discordia.

[Thorgnor]

I'm still here...

All hail Discordia.

Edited December 6, 2008 by Guest
R.A.W. has died, I believe, so the "answers" have likely stopped "flowing"

[Thorgnor]

Skepticism is dangerous. That's exactly its function, in my view. It is the business of skepticism to be dangerous. And that's why there is a great reluctance to teach it in the schools. That's why you don't find a general fluency in skepticism in the media. On the other hand, how will we negotiate a very perilous future if we don't have the elementary intellectual tools to ask searching questions of those nominally in charge, especially in a democracy?

- http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/saganbur.htm

[SaggyBalls]

But Skepticism just to be skeptical is about as annoying as anything can be.

So what's the deal with hundreds of thousands of atheists not really being atheists, but really being agnostic, and vice versa? Will there be a similar 'atheist awakening' when disbelievers everywhere actually examine themselves and find a nonreligious awakening of sorts?

(Atheism is without a specific theistic view or against organized religion, while Agnosticism is in disbelief of a higher power - or Gnosis (a higher power)

When you really look at the terms themselves, it seems to have the ability to lose its clout, being so divided yet not being perceived as such.

Hmmm...isn't this being mirrored so well in Canadian Politics?

Is there a movement to bring agnostics and atheists together in a more public light?

[M.O.B.E]

But Skepticism just to be skeptical is about as annoying as anything can be.

Thats seconded.

Hmmm...isn't this being mirrored so well in Canadian Politics?

Is there a movement to bring agnostics and atheists together in a more public light?

Maybe these guys these guys???

[SaggyBalls]

how is what they're doing and how they're doing it in a public light?

I see where you're coming from, but I also don't see Freemasonry as being atheism and agnosticism at all...it's just non-theistic in its heart as it's a non denominational group...but one must believe in a higher power, no?

I don't see Freemasonry as a movement.

Perhaps this is another example of us only seeing what we want.

[SaggyBalls]

the masonic symbolism in the leaded glass at toronto's Old City Hall is awesome.

[Thorgnor]

http://www.archive.org/details/WilliamCooperWilliamCooperMysteryBabylonSeriesCompleteReedit119wwwgeocitiescomariainvictus

http://www.archive.org/details/WilliamCooperWilliamCooperMysteryBabylonSeriesCompleteReedit2140

[Kanada Kev]