Department Of Confessions Of A Subpar Oregonian
*I don’t like craft beer. [1]
*I don’t drink fancy brews made from artisanal, on-site-roasted coffee beans.
* I don’t see what the big deal is about The Goonies.
* It is difficult to imagine moiself caring less about the University of Oregon and the Oregon State University football teams (respectively, The Ducks and The Beavers).
* I am nice to Californians.
* Yeah, that Goonies, phenom is strange. Have you ever been around a Goonies extremist enthusiast? I just don’t get it. Many Oregonians – and Goonies fans from other states, who make pilgrimages out here to see “the Goonies house,” etc. – absolutely lose their shit over that 1985 movie (which was set in Astoria [2] and filmed in Astoria and nearby Cannon Beach).
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Department Of I Forgive At Least One Tesla Owner
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Department Of Food For Thought
Dateline: one afternoon last week, exercising while the TV is on, watching an old Western movie. During a commercial break, a long [3] fund-raising advertisement came on for Help God‘s people.org, sponsored by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. The ad’s narrator spoke of talking “the urgent need for” food and other supplies by the “… over 100,000 Jews, who have become refugees in their own land.”
And I find moiself thinking, Uh, that’s an interesting choice of words, considering that that is what the Palestinians feel like, as well, and have felt like since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
I was both fascinated and repulsed by the ad, as one can be when a police officer waves you past a bloody multi-car accident and you know you shouldn’t gawk, but you do. [4] Voice-overs accompanied multiple scenes of sad and weeping Israelis (mostly women, children, elderly) while referencing how viewers can and should help out God’s people.
Hmmm. And by hmmm I mean, Oh, puleeeeze. If they – the Israelis – really are God’s People, why the plea for other people to help out – why isn’t their god helping them? Guess being The Chosen Ones ® is worth diddly squat when it comes to being safe and secure in The Promised Land. ® Where is the benefit, the special attachments, that come with the label, God’s people?
I’m not making fun of the hardship of those Israelis, or of any people. Rather, it’s a frustrating situation, considering the very same case can be made for “the other side,” who of course think that *they* (Palestinians; Arabs; Muslims) are *their* god’s chosen people living “in God’s holy land.” That god – anybody’s god – evidently doesn’t think very much of its so-called holy land, seeing as how that god either brings or allows (depending on how you think an omnipotent omniscient god operates), such misery, death, and destruction to the occupants therein.
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Department Of They Left Skidmarks Changing The Subject
I’ve asked (versions of) the nine questions at the end of this article to religious family and friends. Funny, how I’ve never had the questions answered (as in, the subject[s] were changed by the questionees, with almost Olympic-gymnast-quality maneuvering.) [5]
Another Great Article You Must Read ®: author Herb Silverman, founder of the Secular Coalition for America, author of Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the College of Charleston, has participated in many debates over the years with Christian leaders. Read it all (article link at the end), or just enjoy these questions ( my emphases) the next time you want a stress-free holiday dinner with your religious family members.
“Here are some questions I’ve asked opponents during debates
when I had the opportunity:
* How would your behavior toward other people change if you stopped believing in a god who judges your actions?
* Which is more important, belief or behavior?
* What is the purpose of eternal torture?
* Do you believe that the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust just moved from one furnace to another?
* If you have free will in Heaven, can you sin there and go to Hell? If you don’t have free will in Heaven, will it really be you, or a robot?
* If you don’t understand why God acts as he does and if he is so mysterious and beyond human comprehension, how can you make
any claims about him or his existence?
* Does God change his mind because of a prayer based on something he didn’t think of or anticipate?
* If God allowed 50,000 children to die of starvation today,
why should he listen to your prayers?
* There have been countless natural explanations that have replaced supernatural ones. Can you give an example where people once thought something was natural and have now learned that it has a supernatural explanation? “
(Herb Silverman, Free Inquiry, “How to Talk to Christians” )
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Department Of I Feel Lucky
Are you of those people who downplays the role chance plays in your life? If so, why do you have insurance policies – life, health, auto, rental, mortgage – of any kind? [6]
In a recent Clear + Vivid podcast, Mark Rank: As Luck Would Have It, professor and social scientist author Mark Rank, author of The Random Factor: How Chance And Luck Profoundly Shape Out Lives And The World Around Us, spoke with host Alan Alda about the roles luck and chance and random events play in our lives. [7] The podcast was introduced with this teaser:
“Chance events not only change lives, they can change history – as when a Soviet sailor’s briefly stuck foot prevented a potential nuclear catastrophe. You can’t predict when luck, good or bad, will intervene. But you can learn to take advantage of it.”
An excerpt from their discussion:
Alda:
“…to sum up what I’ve learned from (your) book, it seems to me that whatever chance puts in front of you, what you do with that is kind of important. Whether it’s something good that happens or something bad that happens.”
Mark Rank:
“That’s right. And that’s where kind of we get this interaction of, things can happen that are beyond our control, but how do we respond to those things? Do we take advantage of them or do we learn the lessons that that might be there? So again, it’s, it’s, it’s a dynamic quality. And you know, I talk in the book about that we have this random companion with us as we dance through life. It’s our partner and, you know, our partner leads in certain ways and we lead in certain ways….there’s a dynamic interaction that happens between the two partners.”
Alda:
“Yeah. To accept chance as a partner rather than as a sentence.”
Is it arrogance or ignorance which motivates the braggart to protest when words like luck are applied to describe what he views as his successes? I’m not the only person with IQ higher than my shoe size [8] who has wondered why otherwise intelligent people sometimes cannot even acknowledge the *existence* of luck, not only in the universe, but in their personal, professional, and emotional lives?
The genetic contribution of your parents is, still, [9] random, as are the fate-influencing-if-not-determining factors into which you were born, including but not limited to
*your ethnicity
* your gender
* your social and economic class
* your access to good schools and teachers
* geography (was your parents’ house downwind of an EPA toxic superfund site,
or by the shores of a pristine mountain lake?)
“You get Palm Springs, and they get Bakersfield.”
Many people attribute the random twists of circumstance as *fate,* to divine guidance or intervention, using phrases such as, It was meant to be, divinely ordained, etc., completely ignoring the mental gymnastics required to resolve the cognitive dissonance which comes from simply opening their eyes and being aware of the lives of people around them. To wit: If Your husband is on the top story of his friend’s house, helping his friend lay down a new roof, and a violent thunderstorm rolls in, bring with it a tornado, which rapidly approaches the house, then veers off. You attribute your husband’s and his friend’s survival to:
* the intervening hand of the Lord (you started praying for them as soon as you heard the tornado warning sirens)
* or other supernatural beings (“his guardian angel was looking out for him”)
* or the mysteries of the deity (“God had other plans for him”)
If you attribute your husband’s and his friend’s survival to some kind of divine intervention or plan, you have conveniently ignored the fact that after the tornado swung away from your friend’s house it headed across the street and into another neighborhood, flattening one house and causing yet another house’s walls and roof to collapse and kill three of the six people hiding there, in the house’s storm cellar, praying for their loving god’s deliverance (the same god as yours).
Sorry, religious believers, but you can’t have it both ways. If you believe that your loving god is capable of directing the tornado away from your loved one and in fact did so, then you must acknowledge that the same god is also the heartless SOB who directed that tornado toward the loved ones of other people, forever altering (and in some cases, destroying) their lives.
Anyway, the podcast is a good listen on a fascinating, seemingly little discussed or researched subject. Definitely worth two hamster thumbs up.
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [10]
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May you accept chance as your partner in the dance of life;
May you have fun making people uncomfortable with holiday dinner conversations;
May you feel free to love The Goonies (but don’t try to convert me to that cult);
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] Or any beer, really, beyond a sip or two of Guinness or Murphy’s Irish stouts.
[2] I thought it was mildly entertaining (more so, perhaps, if you were a kid) despite having one of the more annoying soundtracks ever penned (music constantly swelling to “NOW YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO FEEL ALARMED/EXCITED/SAD/ASTOUNDED/HEADED FOR GRAND ADVENTURES!!!!!” proportions).
[3] As in, well over the 30 sec or even one minute commercial.
[4] And by you I mean, moiself.
[5] No footnote here. Move along, folks.
[6] except for those required by law; e.g., auto insurance in some states, for some drivers, or home insurance required by your mortgage lender.
[7] Little known, cool – and scary – story expounded upon in the interview.
[8] which seems to be rising as I age – my shoe size, not necessarily my IQ.
[9] we haven’t gotten to DNA designer babies… yet.
[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
