Transcendental Mental Masturbation

People who straddle their primitive belief system with all that science and engineering and logic have put forth have always put up a sort of wall between the reasoning skills that guide them towards acceptance of scientific facts and the shameless elimination of reason that guides them to believe in the supernatural.  Without some sort of barrier, you end up with a sort of universal cognitive dissonance.  Often times, it's the margins of scientific knowledge that give one room to erect a barrier, but this is also the route that creates a lot of dishonesty.  If your god exists in the margins of science, you end up with a need to make those margins appear wide, and whatever inane mental gymnastics you do to convince yourself of that only means you're sabotaging your capacity to think.

So another avenue you've probably all heard is this whole "transcendence" bollocks.  This tries to erect the mental barrier between brilliance and bullshit by creating this alternative context that is largely unexplored by any rational system of thought because it isn't rational in the first place.  This is exemplified by the quote posted here in the G+ Anti-theists community --
https://plus.google.com/118133718239295935706/posts/MYZaL8XTbtg

I should add that the original poster is merely quoting someone else and asking us how we'd respond to a thesis like that.  Below the jump is my response.

Dialogues With Hopeless Delusional Idiots ep. 1 epilogue

Before I continue with the primary content of this little series, I wanted to include some particularly hilarious responses I got from the first one.  Since the Google+ feed of comments/responses is directly visible at the original posting, I'm more or less not including anything from there.  Instead, I'm including some of the direct messages I get here and there (such as on Facebook, where anybody can message anybody).  Some of them are truly amazing, and I feel it is only right to include them so that everybody gets a good laugh.  Note that I'm only including the responses from delusional idiots in order to keep up with the theme of the series. I will say that I got a lot more positive responses than ones from crazed religious morons, but there is clearly a great deal more entertainment value in reveling in the inane stupidity borne of faith the world over.

So without further ado, I submit to you some truly magnificent morons.

Dinesh D'Souza and the Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil, also referred to as the "Problem of Suffering" has been a huge difficulty for theists for quite a few millennia.  It's quite the problem because no one can possibly refute the foundational aspect of the dilemma since no one can possibly claim that there is no such thing as evil or suffering in the world.  As such, it's something that comes from non-believers and it is just as well something that believers themselves have to wrestle with in the throes of doubt.  A lot of times, theists seem to think that atheists use this argument as a strong refutation against their god's existence, which I don't think is the case.  It's really not much of an argument against any god's existence so much as an argument against the extant theology of most current religions.  It shows that the proposition of a benevolent god as is the framework of most modern religions is really not consistent with the nature of reality.  It still leaves room for an uncaring god or a malevolent god.

Dinesh D'Souza seems to think this is a solved problem, so I was curious if he'd uncovered some new mode of apologetic that no one had noticed.  Given that it was Dinesh D'Souza, though, I really shouldn't have expected much.  Indeed, there was nothing new.  It was little more than a series of bald assertions that old arguments made hundreds of years ago and still parroted today are solid proof that there is no problem in the first place.

Seriously?  All those brainless platitudes about God working in mysterious ways or placing the greatest trials on those he loves the most and so on solve the problem of evil & suffering?  Is there a brain in there, Dinesh?

It's Official : Hitch Did Not Convert

Religion has often been a crutch for the hopelessly weak and pathetic.  One of the many claims that I've heard so many people make is that people who were previously not religious declare suddenly the existence of God and convert on their deathbed.  Every creationist at some point or another has claimed that Darwin converted to Christianity on his deathbed...  Something which is known to be untrue.  I've had people claim to me that Einstein converted from Judaism to Christianity on his deathbead, which is funny since Einstein was essentially only a Jew by descent, and anything he said on his deathbed can't possibly be known because he is on record as having said it all in German...  and none of the attending doctors or nurses understood enough German to decipher it.  Richard Dawkins quipped at one point that he would put a tape recorder by his deathbed to ensure that nobody mistakes what he says.

Christopher Hitchens died last night of complications from his esophageal cancer.  He did not convert.  He did not call out for any god's help.  He did not accept anything supernatural right down to the very end.  He laid down his final "Hitchslap" with that.

Ding-Dong, the Witch is Dead.

Ah, I'd almost forgotten to post about the long-awaited death of that sickening old troll, Sathya Sai Baba.  He finally died on the 24th, and I say good riddance.  Well, actually, nothing is likely to happen.  The practitioner of sixth-rate magic tricks has suckered so many millions in India that it's just a matter until the successor to his 11-billion-dollar franchise of fraudulent fleecing and fakery takes the throne as the next holy man and just continues to sucker generations again with cheap trickery a preschooler could perform with greater skill.

It deeply saddens me that in this day and age that we still have people who believe that a man can transform water into diesel fuel, materialize things out of thin air, walk through walls, etc... yet under no circumstance will the same man put these claims to any sort of test.  Not even to the cursory level that say, an Uri Geller was willing to do.  It always gets dodged with a straw man claim about knowledge being intrinsically false or the inadequacy of science to meet up with a reasonable standard of holistic valuation...  what?!??  The best one I've heard, since every single one of his claims and tricks are exposed and/or disproven rather conclusively online or in print, he admonishes his followers not to browse the internet because it is a trash can made only to store lies, and that truth can only be found on the "innernet"...  I need Maalox.

Now, I'd have less problem with this sort of thing if this was just some sort of small-town guru in some backwater hole in the ground with a tiny village of followers.  Don't get me wrong, I'd still have a problem with it, but that's less of a threat to humanity at least.  It's the sort of thing that can be defeated by being squashed under the thumb of knowledge and education, as well it should be.  But Sai Baba's empire has amassed a fortune currently worth just over 11.2 billion US dollars.  Yes, it's worth mentioning that the money that swine has amassed over the decades has gone towards some positive output like schools, hospitals, water infrastructure, etc.  That's a fair point.  What I don't agree with is how this money was attained.  All of it, on the basis of outright lies.  And even if every penny went towards things I would otherwise find agreeable, we can't escape the fact that most of those billions did not come from people who could actually afford to give.  They came from people who were poor and desperate and sought a beacon of hope and got it in the form a disgusting pedophile who pulled out a few simple tricks that are so old and so low-grade that even the most tight-lipped of professional magicians don't mind sharing them with the average Joe.  We have to remember that donations to religious leaders, especially in a poor or developing country, come from the people who seek out and feel the draw to religion the strongest...  and that is a population not made up of people who are well-off.  It is made up of people who struggle the most and need the most comfort, even if entirely imaginary.  Of course, that's precisely why self-styled holy men have such "humble" beginnings, most of which are highly embellished to make them sound much less humble than they actually were.  It's precisely why the poor and suffering make such easy targets to prey upon, and they know it.  And by looking as if you're giving the poor some hope after taking all their money, you come off as a great humanitarian without ever having to help anybody.  So of course, if some spiritual leader comes along and has a following of some 20 or 30 people in a tiny village, it's not enough to make any huge waves....  when he forms an empire worth 11 billion dollars...  now you've got a permanent wart in the future of humanity that will be difficult to wear down without some sort of catastrophic self-destruction on the part of its successors.

Well, if I ever got even the slightest impression that prayer was actually functional in reality in any sense...  that's something I'd pray for.