A bit from the Niel Gaiman blog
“I got an enforced day off from blogging yesterday, while little gnomey men with long whiskery beards and hammers and crowbars and serious swiss army knives clambered about behind the scenes here at neilgaiman.com hammering and banging and taking blogger archive URLs apart and inspecting them with pursed lips and shaken heads and the occasional muttered “‘oo put this together then, eh? some cowboy? cor struth. It’s a wonder it’s lasted this long,” before putting them back together again with all their grommets refitted and their wicket-hasps rebored.”
– Niel Gaiman
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2004/05/toad-mating-balls-who-knew.asp
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“If I could now conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution… [E]very man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshiping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.”
(Stokes, supra, p. 495. (Quoting George Washington))
from http://members.tripod.com/~candst/bjcpa1.htm (A Critique of David Barton’s “America’s Godly Heritage”)
Philosophy/Religion, Politics, Quote
I received the following email. This isn’t actually an out of context quote, it is the whole of the email. It came from an invalid email address, so I couldn’t offer a personal response to the author.
“this country was founded on religion so i beleve we can put on our money religous or not.so take your rights and shovem up ur a$$”
This was in regards to my commentary on “In God We Trust” (http://quasisemi.com/ego/money.htm)
Philosophy/Religion, Quote
the oldest surviving artifact that mentions Jesus is a fragment of chapter 18 in John’s Gospel from a manuscript dating to A.D. 125.
– http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/6113655.htm
Philosophy/Religion, Quote
“The fundamental difference between the liberal and the illiberal outlook is that the former regards all questions as open to discussion and all opinions as open to a greater or lesser measure of doubt, while the latter holds in advance that certain opinions are absolutely unquestionable, and that no argument against them must be allowed be heard.
What is curious about this position is the belief that if impartial investigation were permitted it would lead men to the wrong conclusion, and that ignorance is, therefore, the only safeguard against terror.
This point of view cannot be accepted by any man who wishes reason rather than prejudice to govern human action.”
- Bertrand Russell, “Freedom and the Colleges”
Culture, Philosophy/Religion, Politics, Quote
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”
- H.L.Mencken
Philosophy/Religion, Quote
Go ahead, connect the dots on Ashcroft yourself. A cavalier attitude toward civil liberties, an inability to concede mistakes, a refusal to see imperfections in the criminal justice system, a zealously irrational belief in the death penalty — and pretty soon you can read between the lines of that Justice Department report: The attorney general is far more dangerous than any of the immigrants he wrongly detained.
Ashcroft’s Attitude Problem
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, June 10, 2003; Page A21
Politics, Quote
Yes, are you aware of what the Eye of the Needle actually referred to?
I know you weren’t about to spout that gate in Jerusalem BS. Cause you’re not that gullible.
Besides the ethic was clearly cribbed from Plato who is said, “It is impossible fro an exceptionally good man to be exceptionally rich.” (Plato, LAWS, 743A)
We can assume that the phases were understood to have the same meaning at the time based on “Celsus On the True Doctrine” written by Celsus in 178CE, available in the 1987 translation by R. Joseph Hoffman
“Not only do they misunderstand the words of the philosophers; they even stoop to assigning words of the philosophers to their Jesus. For example, we are told that Jesus judged the rich with the saying ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god.’ Yet we know that Plato expressed this very idea in a purer form when he said, ‘It is impossible for an exceptionally good man to be exceptionally rich.’ Is one utterance more inspired than the other?” (94)
I become familiar with with the quotes by reading “The Jesus Mysteries” by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. Only a bit through it but highly recommended.
–Zafkiel
Philosophy/Religion, Quote
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
Politics, Quote
Yes, the faithful are a wonderful bunch. Just yesterday I was standing behind a car with a bumper sticker that said “Honk if you love Jesus”. So I honked. The driver leaned out his window, looked back at me and yelled, “Can’t you see the light is still red, you f%*&ing moron?”
~aj
from http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=18909761&recscode=2
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