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Comments by Apeseed


1. Does the Pope wear Prada?

Comment #204677 by Apeseed on July 5, 2008 at 1:41 pm

I wouldn't be surprised if Ratzi tried to bring back the Latin mass. That would add to the mystery.

I remember complaining to my Dad about being forced to go to Mass even though I didn't believe in it. When I pointed out that he never went himself he tried to use some excuse along the lines of how he had stopped going when they stopped saying the Mass in Latin. I asked him was that because he realised they were talking bollocks. When he cracked up laughing I knew I had hit the nail on the head.

2. Aliens need Christ's redemption, too

Comment #201605 by Apeseed on June 29, 2008 at 10:27 pm

Perhaps someone knows who wrote a short story about a missionary who preached the gospels to an alien race and after considering it they crucified him. After 3 days when he didn't rise from the dead they all just carried on with what they had been doing.
I remember reading it years ago and it made an impression but I can't recall the author or title.

3. Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

Comment #191444 by Apeseed on June 11, 2008 at 1:35 am

Comment #191377 by huzonfurst

meaning the same thing as 'intelligent,' another German word


Surely intelligent is derived from the Latin 'intelligentia' from 'intelligere' : to understand

4. Court Claim: Chimps Are People, Too

Comment #191134 by Apeseed on June 10, 2008 at 9:23 am

Comment #191092 by Henri Bergson

This whole attempt though is just another example of sentimentalist morality which we should be keen to destroy.


Isn't all morality based on sentiment or feeling?

5. Faith no more as World Youth Day fans flames of disbelief

Comment #189959 by Apeseed on June 8, 2008 at 12:03 am

Comment #189935 by Ascaphus
We base our ethics on what we think is true.

Surely our ethics are based as much in feeling as in thinking. Empathy for others guides my actions. It is because of the value I place on my life and autonomy that I respect others. I have no objection to others actions (or beliefs for that matter) insofar as they don't infringe upon me. I don't see how reason can be divorced from feeling.

6. Group wants Wi-Fi banned from public buildings

Comment #186152 by Apeseed on May 29, 2008 at 6:04 pm

Haven't they tried tinfoil hats. There's the added bonus of shielding you from the C.I.A and alien influence.

7. Jamy Ian Swiss - Skepticism and the Art and Philosophy of Magic

Comment #185725 by Apeseed on May 28, 2008 at 11:23 am

I liked at the end where he likened people categorizing you by your astrological sign to racial stereotyping. I'll have to work on that idea.

8. The Mind-Altering Role of Incense in Religion

Comment #185264 by Apeseed on May 27, 2008 at 9:53 am

Actually I found Sam Harris' take on meditation to mirror my own. 20 years of meditation was directly responsible for exorcising me of belief in god as I gained insight into my mind. After all it was meditation that led the Buddha to declare that all the gods of Hinduism were creations of the mind and the sense of a permanent self was an illusion. People just didn't listen to what he was trying to tell them because they were too busy building a religion up around him.

9. In God's Name

Comment #182877 by Apeseed on May 21, 2008 at 4:51 am

I fled to this country from Ireland at the age of 19 mainly to escape the miasma of religion. It's 22 years later and I watch programmes like this and despair.

10. 'Framing Science' and The Dawkins Effect

Comment #181516 by Apeseed on May 17, 2008 at 10:40 am

Study some history. The Spartans, Vikings, Samurai, Imperial Romans, et al, did not share your sentimentalist morals. They were also evolved humans.


Could it be that one of the reasons Christianity superseded most of these ways of being is because it was evolutionarily more viable?

11. 'Framing Science' and The Dawkins Effect

Comment #180631 by Apeseed on May 15, 2008 at 12:23 pm

Once something is known to be true or to have happened it doesn't make sense to talk about it as a possibility.

12. 'Framing Science' and The Dawkins Effect

Comment #180612 by Apeseed on May 15, 2008 at 10:29 am

Comment #180509 by Henri Bergson on May 15, 2008 at 6:17 am
it is a fact that we may have evolved altruism


You cannot write 'it is a fact' and then follow it with 'that we may have'. A fact is something known to be true. 'we may have evolved' expresses possibility.

13. The Dissent Of Darwin - The World Of Richard Dawkins

Comment #180465 by Apeseed on May 15, 2008 at 2:55 am

Even if the testes were inside we would still be having this argument about the penis. What good is the semen factory without the mechanism to deliver the product. In the absence of a fully retractable penis there can't be much greater cost to having the testes outside also.

14. A natural selection

Comment #180227 by Apeseed on May 14, 2008 at 12:02 pm

Comment #180045 by Johnny O on May 14, 2008 at 6:21 am
Maybe in Britain, but not in other European countries. Especially France. They don't even let Muslim children wear headscarfs at school.


Actually in reaction to the headscarves debacle Islamic schools are now being opened in France.

PARIS â€" A fourth private Islamic school in France is to be inaugurated next week to meet the growing needs of the Muslim minority amid a boom in faith-based schools in the strictly secular European country.


And

There had been a strong desire among French Muslims, estimated at six to seven million, to have private Islamic schools after Paris banned hijab and religious symbols in state schools four years ago.


http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1203757659745&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout

15. A natural selection

Comment #179961 by Apeseed on May 14, 2008 at 3:18 am

The British government is funding more than 100 Islamic faith schools where they are teaching the Quranic version of creation. I read that the government weren't enforcing the teaching of evolution in the curriculum for fear of coming off as anti-Islamic. There was also the case two years ago of the Muslim medical students handing out leaflets denying evolution. Islam might turn out to be a greater danger for the teaching of evolution in Europe than Evangelical Christianity which is still pretty marginal.

16. A natural selection

Comment #179919 by Apeseed on May 14, 2008 at 1:54 am

It is very depressing though that in a world where corporations have no problem doing business with states who have abysmal human rights records Darwin and evolution were "too hot to handle."

17. The Stupidity of Dignity

Comment #179281 by Apeseed on May 13, 2008 at 2:59 am

Comment #179151 by Bobby G on May 12, 2008 at 7:33 pm
If you think religious people are irrational but you also believe that rationality is what separates us from most (if not all) animals, do you therefore think that religious people are not human?

I have never seen an atheist claim that because someone is irrational that means they aren't human. However I have seen religious people claim that those who don't believe in and worship a god are animalistic.

18. The Stupidity of Dignity

Comment #179053 by Apeseed on May 12, 2008 at 1:07 pm

Doesn't this lend some more weight to the argument made most clearly by Hitch and Dawkins I think that embedded in much of Christian theology is a tendency to totalitarian ideology?


Not to mention Islam. Aren't they just emulating their god who is the ultimate dictator. It always seemed to me that when the religious talk about the kingdom of god they betray what they are really hankering after. A return to the good old days when we all grovelled before the throne of an all powerful ruler who suffered us to exist.

19. The Stupidity of Dignity

Comment #179035 by Apeseed on May 12, 2008 at 12:24 pm

If medicine can keep us healthier and in control of our faculties for longer during old age I'm all for it. What could be more undignified than relying on your kids to change your diaper and clean up after you in your last years of life.

20. Religion a figment of human imagination

Comment #171720 by Apeseed on April 28, 2008 at 6:12 pm

Studies have shown that brown Capuchin monkeys have a sense of fairness.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-09/euhs-yrf091503.php

The likeliest scenario must be that the basis of our morality comes from our evolution as social animals. Then our imagination comes up with "Just So" stories to account for why we have the sense of good and bad, fair and unfair.
Perhaps someone who understands better could explain why Chris Frith says "theory of mind" might be as important as the evolution of imagination. I had always assumed "theory of mind" was an act of imagination.

21. Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Comment #166334 by Apeseed on April 23, 2008 at 6:46 am

One aspect of Pascal's wager that often seems to be overlooked is the fact that not only are you betting on the existence of god but on an ethnocentric view that it's the Judeo-Christian god. Where are the caveats like if the Hindus are right, your actions determine your future reincarnation and if the Sumerians were
right we all finish in the underworld eating mud and if the Greeks were right we end up twittering shades in Hades and so on. We might as well start worrying that H.P.Lovecraft was really a prophet and we should all have been worshipping the blind idiot god Azathoth or Yog-Sothoth. Would it really be any less absurd?