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Archive for September, 2002

Quote

September 24th, 2002

Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day.

Give a man religion, and he will starve to death praying for a fish.

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Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day.

Teach a man how to fish, he will eat fish all his life.

Give a man religion, and he will starve to death praying for a fish.

Teach a man how to start a religious cult, he can get some other poor slobs to do all his fishing for him.

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Give a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a day.

Set a man on fire and he’s warm for the rest of his life.

Philosophy/Religion, Quote

Quote

September 24th, 2002

The problem with paradoxes, I think, is that they MEAN something — but we haven’t managed to figure out what they mean yet.
– sandyleelee

Quote

Letters To God From The Dog

September 24th, 2002

Dear God,
How come people love to smell flowers, but seldom,
if ever, smell one another? Where are their priorities?

Dear God,
When we get to Heaven, can we sit on your couch?
Or is it the same old story?

Dear God,
Excuse me, but why are there cars named after the jaguar,
the cougar, the mustang, the colt, the stingray, and the
rabbit, but not one named for a dog? How often do you
see a cougar riding around? We dogs love a nice ride! I
know every breed can’t have its own model, but it would
be easy to rename the Chrysler Eagle the Chrysler Beagle!

Dear God,
If a dog barks his head off in the forest and no human
hears him, does he still get his ass whacked with a newspaper?

Dear God,
Is it true that in Heaven, dining room tables have on-ramps?

Dear God,
If we come back as humans, is that good, or bad?

Dear God,
More meatballs, less spaghetti.

Dear God,
When we get to the Pearly Gates, do we have to do that
stupid shake hands trick to get in?

Dear God,
We dogs can understand human verbal instructions, hand
signals, whistles, horns, clickers, beepers, scent IDs,
electromagnetic energy fields, and Frisbee flight paths.
What do humans understand?

Dear God,
Are there dogs on other planets or are we alone? I have
been howling at the moon and stars for a long time, but all
I ever hear back is the horny beagle across the street.

Dear God,
Are there mailmen in Heaven? If there are, will I have to apologize to them?

Dear God,
Is it true that dogs are not allowed in restaurants
because we can’t make up our minds what NOT to order?
Or is it the accident on the carpet thing, again?

Dear God,
May I have my balls back?

Religion

Quote

September 23rd, 2002

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

Philosophy/Religion, Quote

More Murphy's writings

September 23rd, 2002

Who is the Captains Daughter and how pissed is he about the whole subject?

What gets repeated regularly in bars?

Leadership sounds like work to me.

Sharing and Forgiveness

Where does clean water come from?

What does the bard challenge the audience with?

Why do people fear the blank page? What is there that doesn’t exist in their own minds and souls? It would be nice if truth were there but history has indicated that truth is neither in history books or popular opinion. The pursued belief laughs at it.

Truth is really about deception.

Everyone has someone who they wish were here. Whoever she is is intimately personal. They have names, but that is just the beginning of the emotional history and stories.

Alice is always someone. For every person she is unique and different, but everyone has such a person.

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Fishville - the people in bars know about fishville. There is always someone to blame and it’s your own damn fault.

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Who is the famous artist that everyone knows? (musical)

Gaming, Life

Note to an ex-girlfriend

September 23rd, 2002

So I was partaking of a Guinness in an Irish bar and for some reason the singer did some corrupted version of Brown Eyed Girl. Ultimately that song belongs to you. Whenever they corrupt it, I feel loss. It wasn’t right.

I don’t know that I should tell you.

Between us there have always been songs. To not acknowledge which ones belong to you is to deny what we shared and we were. I don’t mean to intrude on your space and happiness. For you (XXXXXX) is exactly what I would have hoped for you. (True I would have avoided all the pain along the way.)

But none the less you have a song in my head. I don’t know if I still have one in yours. I just thought I’d tell you how much I hate it when they corrupt yours.

Life

Murphy's Napkin

September 23rd, 2002

No he never returned
* Who was he
* Why did he never return
* Who gained by his disappearance
* Why has his fate never been learned

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Why does the black velvet band make her the queen of the land
* hair fell over the shoulder

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(Absolute Truth) and (Exclusivity) = Danger

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Who or what is Hazah?
* How did it become the word/legend?
* Why hasn’t it revealed itself?

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Lupercalia Party?

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Purity of Emotion

Life

Fun things for Non-Christians to do in church…

September 19th, 2002

Pull aside an unruly child in a preschool Sunday School class and say: “If you’re bad in here, you’ll go to Hell.”

Put stray dogs in coat closets.

Un-tune the piano.

Replace the pianist’s sheet music with “Stairway to Heaven”.

Going through all the hymnals, mark song 666.

Find an empty seat, and ask the person next to it: “Is this seat SAVED?”

Toss around a giant beach ball before service, like at Grateful Dead concerts.

Ten minutes before it starts, find a kid in the front rows, hand him a dollar, and tell him to ask the preacher:”Would you rather be stoned or crucified?”

Hide copies of Hustler inside the pulpit. Point them out.

Start a wave.

Do cool things with the lighting.

When attendance is taken, sign on fake names like “Hugh G. Rection” and “Oliver Klozoff”.

Wear an ankh or a new-age crystal pendant.

When the choir sings, roll your eyes and grumble: “Oh, Christ! Are they gonna do another SONG?”

Make up your own words to the songs.

Twenty minutes into the service, look at your watch, stand up, and say: “Oh shit. This isn’t the wedding!” Run out quickly.

Eat dry Cap’n Crunch through the entire service.

If there is a crying baby, go over and tell the mother: “IF YOU DON’T SHUT THAT FUCKING THING UP SO HELP ME GOD I’LL KILL IT!!!”

Dress all in black, or in camo.

Pierce the body of a tiny animal with stainless-steel wire. Wear it in your ear as jewelry. If you are male, wear two.

Change sets for the evening service.

If it is an Easter service, wear a pastel jacket, tie, and matching shorts. If you are male, wear a floral-print dress instead.

At a church dinner, scoop up a forkful of mashed potatoes. Announce that you can see an image of Jesus.

Place blocks of dry ice near the air ducts. Take off your shoes and socks.

Hide near the baptismal pool with a block of sodium. At the first mention of “fire and brimstone”, throw it in.

Inflate balloons, then send them off.

Mark places in the Bible or hymnal with religious-themed Far Side cartoons.

Turn in the Bible to the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 3-17). Draw in asterisks and write exceptions at the bottom of the page.

Make the sun reflect off your watch into the preacher’s face.

Make calls to 900 numbers on the phone in the kitchen.

During the service, play with plastic dinosaurs. If someone asks what you’re doing, tell them: “These are dinosaurs. They ruled the earth over 65 million years ago.”

Discreetly position a number of bottle rockets on the floor. Discreetly light them.

Snicker every time the preacher talks about someone being stoned, especially Stephen.

Dip communion wafers in communion wine. Eat it and exaggerate on how good it is.

When they pass around the collection plate, drop in a piece of paper with Pat Robertson’s MasterCard number.

Turn to your neighbor, whisper: “This do in remembrance of me” and lick them.

Fart, and have a friend shout: “Hark! An angel has spoken!”

Blow bubbles.

Fake a possession.

Distribute condoms.

Speak in tongues.

Ask where the nearest ashtray is.

Drool in the collection plate.

Ask someone what they think about the Book of Peleponnesians. After they tell you, inform them that there is no Book of Peleponnesians.

After a Catholic service, stand outside and tell Polish jokes. When someone points out that Pope John Paul II came from Poland, act embarrassed.

Show unusual interest in any reference to the word “Ministry”.

At a church supper, bring a casserole with a ring or piece of a wristwatch embedded inside.

Overnight, have the stained-glass windows replaced with new ones depicting comical, erotic, or death-related imagery. Send the bill to the pastor.

Write on the bathroom wall: “The eyes of the LORD are upon you!!!”

Spread the word that there’ll be a rave party at the address of the church next Saturday at midnight.

Religion

Quote

September 18th, 2002

The philosopher Ronald De Sousa once described philosophical theology as “intellectual tennis without a net,” and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It’s your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: “What you say implies God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That’s not much of a God to worship!” If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply, “Oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves? Either the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug’s game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down.”

Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I’m eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side.

You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice?

I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign arrangement. But we’re seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfucsation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have obviously seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself. (The ball is now in your court.)

-Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

Philosophy/Religion, Quote

Quotes

September 18th, 2002

Benjamin Franklin

“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.”

“The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”

John Adams

“The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of
governments erected on the principles of nature… [In] the formation of the
American governments… it will never be pretended that any persons employed
in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the
influence of heaven… These governments were contrived merely by the use of
reason and the senses.” –A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the
United States of America, 1788

“…The Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the
Christian religion….” –treaty with Tripoli, passed unanimously by the U.S.
Senate and signed by President Adams on June 10, 1797

“The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall
govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it
by fictitious miracles.” –Letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815

“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the
abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved—the Cross.
Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”–Letter to
Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Paine

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish,
appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave
mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” —The Age of Reason, 1794

“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more
derrogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to
reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity.
Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for
practice, it renders the heart torpid and produces only atheists or fanatics.
As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism, and as a means of
wealth, the avarice of priests, but so far as respects the good of man in
general it leads to nothing here or hereafter.”

Thomas Jefferson

“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme
being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable
of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” –Letter to John
Adams, April 11, 1823

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people
maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of
ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always
avail themselves for their own purposes.” –letter to Baron von Humboldt,
December 6, 1813

James Madison

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every
noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.” –letter to William Bradford,
Jr., April 1, 1774

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity
been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride
and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both,
superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” A Memorial and Remonstrance,
addressed to the Virginia General Assembly, 1785

“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these
shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for
centuries.”—1803 letter objecting to the use of government land for
churches.

Philosophy/Religion, Politics, Quote