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Comments by BaronOchs


101. Fox News Discussion on 'The Golden Compass'

Comment #85749 by BaronOchs on November 7, 2007 at 2:31 am

Atheists are targeting 11year olds eh? No matter as the Jesuits say you've got to get them before the age of seven.

That Fr Morris is a member of the Legion of Christ whose founder Marcial Maciel was a paedophile. I think the vatican actually admitted the truth of the fact somewhere buried in a large document.

102. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #85588 by BaronOchs on November 6, 2007 at 9:45 am

LookToWindward, the idea that god can only be experienced as absence has been around for a long time, probably got its best expression in meister eckhart. The fact it sounds obviously ridiculous to you might (arguably) be a sympton of how the difficulty the idea presents to religious orthodoxy has been played down.

For the argument it is subversive and still of relevance see perhaps

"Don Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity".

103. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #85479 by BaronOchs on November 6, 2007 at 1:50 am

M_Roche I read her review of Root of all Evil and was not impressed. I did dig this up when this thread was posted but I got bored:

http://www.womenpriests.org/body/beattie3.asp

104. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #85347 by BaronOchs on November 5, 2007 at 2:22 pm

Corylus enjoy your cakes, and I look forward to your response to the book, with full reference to its relevance within a neo-nietszchean post-paradigm!

:-)

105. Response to Dinesh D'Souza op-ed

Comment #85338 by BaronOchs on November 5, 2007 at 2:01 pm

I appreciate the RRS, and I thought this article was allright but *sticks head and neck above parapet* patchy in places. Like:

the entire basis for belief in any god is faith, the definition of which is the antithesis of reason,


That may be right but it begs the question what definition of faith? or who's definition? What about Kant and the moral postulate, an argument for faith that was -I'd say- entirely unconvincing but not antithetical to reason (just pants).

. . manifests itself in the fanaticism of its adherents


Clearly not all adherents, and fanaticism is not logically the outcome of rejecting reason anyhow, it might just make you stupid or ridiculous, but unfanatical.

Whether you call this invisible and undetectable being Yahweh or Allah is of little consequence


I don't get the meaning or purpose of such a statement, of little consequence to whom? Probably not people who actually believe in yahweh or allah?!

106. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #85228 by BaronOchs on November 5, 2007 at 10:19 am

woops I was unnecessarily pugnacious, well I'm going to hell.

107. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #85226 by BaronOchs on November 5, 2007 at 10:18 am

Who are you debating in Birmingham, Belfast, and Chelmsford? or will you just argue with your reflection in the mirror?

108. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #85214 by BaronOchs on November 5, 2007 at 9:49 am

critique of the methodology and style of the website


Lol is that what it's called

109. Response to Theodore Dalrymple

Comment #85208 by BaronOchs on November 5, 2007 at 9:38 am

I understand why Mr. Harris feels strongly about the way in which I expressed myself, and perhaps I was a little intemperate, in which case I apologize.


Yikes that is considerably tail-between-legsish for Theodore Dalrymple. He should just forget about atheism and stick to what he's good at: roaming the bad places of the world decrying wickedness and declaring the imminent doom of civilisation.

110. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #85181 by BaronOchs on November 5, 2007 at 8:41 am

Calvin Flea you obviously don't get put on the other comment thread because your arguments are too effective, It's because you're needlessly pugnacious, you just jumped in there insulting the site admin and the people who post here. Just so we know gods loves us eh?

111. The Turning of an Atheist

Comment #85145 by BaronOchs on November 5, 2007 at 5:36 am

Cheers windweaver that is a good article. I only wonder whether Schroeder managed to deceive himself with his ridiculous arguments, or just consciusly tried to deceive everyone else?

112. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #85123 by BaronOchs on November 5, 2007 at 3:37 am

Corylus you might be right but are you sure?

Nietszhe was in reasonable fashion unless things have changed without me noticing. My impression is a liberal academic like Tina Beattie will at some point have had to do the work to show she "gets" Nietszche and her work can include or one-up on his ideas.

After all the good work by Walter Kaufmann and others to rehabilitate Nietszche's reputation I just don't think such a thin reference could be used as an insult like that.

113. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #85058 by BaronOchs on November 4, 2007 at 6:12 pm

Gallstones, W.B.Yeats wrote a poem about people writing books of his back which included the line:

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

From which the usage here derives.

114. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!

Comment #85002 by BaronOchs on November 4, 2007 at 1:18 pm

Crazymalc The guy on the right of the cover is Martin Amis.


Tina Beattie is a catholic feminist, I'm already out of my depth here how does she make that work?

115. The truth in religion

Comment #84796 by BaronOchs on November 3, 2007 at 4:28 pm

ADH the truth is I am not familiar with biblical criticism enough to have a serious debate over it.

It might be good if you want, for you to outline the case for accepting whichever parts of the gospels to someone inclined not to do so. One question to set the ball rolling, it seems the correct conclusion to me that Jesus expected the end of the world within his own lifetime. In which case he could hardly have understood himself to be starting a religious system to stay around long term. I'm hardly sure he was delivering any sort of "system" at all for that matter. What is your view on this?

Anyhow your posts are intelligent and thoughtful enough for me to enjoy reading, the hat is doffed!

116. The truth in religion

Comment #84566 by BaronOchs on November 2, 2007 at 2:20 pm

ADH that is a good response. It is of course ironic in any case that the challenge for the Jews, for the next 2 millenia would not be so much living upto the lovemessage of one of their own radical prophets but surviving massive hate from the non-jewish adherents to that message.

I must have been less than careful in that last post because now I'm tottering over an abyss. Clearly I should not be committed to the fact that Jesus failed to preach a truly radical message, when precisely the point I would make is the strong claims made by orthodox christianity, based sometimes only loosely on the scriptures or "tradition" are unsustainable. We just can't have this kind of certainty about Jesus and this has been the undeniable conclusion of biblical scholarship for a long time now.

I don't recognise the man in the gospels in the cosmic supernatural figure of popular christian imagination. Nor do I recognise the good view of his teachings having any real impact on christian history. To reclaim Jesus would mean rescuing him from popular religion as much as anything else and besides I don't have much hope or enthusiasm for that endeavour.

117. The truth in religion

Comment #84462 by BaronOchs on November 2, 2007 at 5:01 am

Religion does not have access to absolute proof of its beliefs but, on careful analysis, nor does science.


Accepting a scientific theory constructed with full attention to Occam's Razor etcetera that has as its subject experiments which can be repeated indefintely may involves some little kind of jump. You drop a tennis ball 999 times and it hits the ground, how can you infer it will on the 1000th? Difficult and of course famous question. The response certainly should not be "well I can't be 100% sure the sun will rise tommorrow but I still believe that so really anything goes. Someone claims a man in C1st Galilee was born of a virgin, died, rose again, ascended into heaven, although all this wasn't documented until some time after the event in documents that do not entirely agree and were written down by his followers in any case . . .well if I can believe Newton's theory of gravity without absolute proof why not this?

Like Sam Harris says (or something like) Science requires a small epistemological puddle-hop, Religion, a trans-atlantic flight.

118. The truth in religion

Comment #84457 by BaronOchs on November 2, 2007 at 4:40 am

Darwin's angel criticizes Dawkins for a lack of trust in the power of imagination to explore reality, such as we exercise through poetry.


For anyone who believes that I suggest they should read Unweaving the Rainbow, where Dawkins shows both a strong familiarity with and admiration for poetry, and argues that a productive relationship is possible between poetry and science. Due care being taken of course, he distinguishes between good poetic science and bad poetic science.

Statements like the above-quoted are just ad hominem, they usually boil down to nothing more than "I've studied the humanities more than you".

119. The truth in religion

Comment #84454 by BaronOchs on November 2, 2007 at 4:27 am

ADH allow me to begin:

When it asserts that Jesus' call to love our neighbour referred only to relations between Jews (despite this claim being in clear contradiction to the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan)


This claim is not in "clear contradiction" to the Samaritan story as Polkinghorne well knows! Samaritans comprised I think ten of the twelve israelite tribes? The "Real Jews" were members of the tribe of Judah, from which the name comes. (And the final tribe of course is Levi who were not confined to a single local)

So The Samaritan stroy deals with Zenophobia that is nevertheless within the israelite loop, not the more deep divide between Jews and Gentiles.

120. What the New Atheists Don't See

Comment #84445 by BaronOchs on November 2, 2007 at 4:02 am

windweaver Most of Theodore Dalrymple's articles document the social problems facing modern society. Drug abuse, violence, theft, mistreatment of children etc, and his main thesis is these are enabled to grow by social policy that is inspired by erroneous liberal ideas.

I'm not endorsing him necessarily, just saying it's worth reading some of his more typical output to see where he is coming from. i.e. He isn't attacking good working class non-sky fairy worshipping people. It is criminals and people who ignore their social responsibilites that worry him, and the liberals who he argues make excuses for these things.

Hence perhaps his attitude towards Dawkins et al here. From his point of view Dawkins is probably a complacent liberal who thinks things can only get better without religion when religion is not a factor in many social problems of modern day society.

From a better article he wrote on religion:

So I think I know what Marx meant when he wrote that religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, the opium of the people. Of course, he misidentified the oppressor: in present-day England it is not the bloated plutocrat; it is your drug-dealing, rock-music-playing, baseball-bat-wielding neighbor. And inside this Pentecostal church the pastor addresses a large congregation that knows only too well what it is to live in the shadow of lawlessness, where psychopathy rules. He quotes the case of a seven-year-old girl, placed on a table in a pub by her mother and sold to the highest bidder to abuse as he liked for the night—a story I should be inclined to dismiss as apocryphal were I not to hear equivalently dreadful tales every day in my hospital.

121. What the New Atheists Don't See

Comment #84306 by BaronOchs on November 1, 2007 at 5:25 pm

"Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted". . . one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less"


Matt 21:31- . . .Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.


La da duh di dah

122. Italy's Padre Pio 'faked his stigmata with acid'

Comment #83809 by BaronOchs on October 31, 2007 at 11:04 am

brother john! another interesting post, well allow me to attempt an inadequate and provisional layout of how I view these questions.

So Homo Sapiens emerged off the Savannahs however many millenia ago, their mental capacities expanded to an unprecedented level. Unlike any predecessor indeed we can describe them as active creators of ideas. Ideas were/are of essentially two uses to the species:

1. Providing a technical understanding of the world that enables them to control their environment to their advantage. This has reached a very sure footing in modern science and technology with all its good and bad consequences.

2. Understanding, directing and ordering our immediate experience: i.e. finding ways to comprehend love, joy, happiness, despair, boredom and so forth. Or more generally enabling us at least to tackle the questions: Is life of worth, or what in life is of real worth, or what makes for a genuinely worthy life?

Certain ideas gain a remarkable strength and profusion and among these is certainly the idea of God. How to express this idea? Perhaps as the idea of events and phenomena in the world we occupy being supervenient to a power or powers external to it. In high monotheism this takes the form that there is one single absolute and necessary being upon which the existence and nature of all else is derivative. In christianity this is taken even further, not only is all that true but you can somehow relate to this being on an entirely personal level. Let me claim right away that no one fully beliefs or appreciates the claims to gods absoluteness and fully beliefs in gods personalness. Let me also say Christians who claim a personal relationship with god no doubt have various powerful and transformative experiences associated with their faith but they all know themselves at a subliminal level the claim of personal relationship is figurative not literal.

But anyhow I suppose the god idea was seen as relevant to both 1 and 2 although it is now largely exiled from 1 and as for two . .well that is what we are discussing!

My understanding of your position is that we enter this world with the path to full and everlasting life ready and waiting, we have merely to submit to God's plan and live by his commands.

This is exactly what I don't believe for reasons I won't attempt to layout here. I will recall what Christopher Hitchens says though, that our religions all too obviously bear the marks of human creations, not divine ones.

But pause and think at this, if homo sapiens created religion in its entirety then on the one hand humans can't blame anything else for the malign aspects of religion, but on the other we can accept whatever potency and value we found there is only the product of sytems of our own making! Everything we might have lost with the decline of religion can be reclaimed. It won't be any easier the second time that the first, and this time we can't pull the wool over our eyes with regard to facts about the world, and we shouldn't wish to either.

As a final note the idea of some afterlife meeting to "compare notes" as it were is attractive. Being honest however I have to say, I can only faintly recall many thoughts and experiences of even less than a year ago that may have seemed of great significance at the time. hence the problematic nature of the idea, having arrived in the afterlife I would probably be unable to say much that interestingly reflected the journey that led there! Would a better response be to regard the constant fading of energies and memories and the unceasing changes we pass through in life as being equivalent to a gradual and unfrightening death. So we die as we live so to speak. I'd say this works to an extent, of course you may well point out it isn't really consolation for the abrupt and too often sad and painful nature of real physical death.

123. Italy's Padre Pio 'faked his stigmata with acid'

Comment #83725 by BaronOchs on October 31, 2007 at 4:07 am

brother john it was the secrets in particular not the messages in general I reffered to as arcane and macabre. In any case lets forget about Medjugorje since you raise more interesting matters in your post.

i.e.

The what seems to me deepening materialistic emptiness of the West, spreading eastwards.


My personal view: I'd say a closeness and a connection to the natural world that once existed has been lost as modern life has advanced. I'm being neutral here since that closeness was all too often part of a life of great hardship and suffering.

However now we have cocooned ourselves away to the extent even the seasons can seem a triviality, and we have so much unnecessary artificial lighting the night sky has become half orange.

True also that we have done so much damage to the natural world in the past century. I suggest however the residual desire to maintain the beliefs of the past intact is also an obstacle we have to overcome. It has been shown to be a dead end.

124. Italy's Padre Pio 'faked his stigmata with acid'

Comment #83600 by BaronOchs on October 30, 2007 at 3:03 pm

brother john I'm glad you don't get your christianity on the cheap!

As for Medjugorje the fact is I have been presented with rosaries that are turning to gold and claims of spinning suns etc. Has anyone ever tried to verify scientifically that at least one of these rosaries are actually turning to gold?

Anyhow allow me to adopt a christian perspective here to ask you a few questions. You suggest what I attacked as repetetiveness and banality is in fact underlining the simple yet demanding nature of christian life.

I suppose I can see the point but in that case what of "the ten secrets"? Christians are supposed to believe (correct me if wrong) everything of necessity to their salvation was revealed in first century galilee and recorded in the gospels. And that this revelation was remarkable for its simplicity and openness. In which case isn't it somewhat low to think 2000 years hence the mother of the saviour is sharing arcane and macabre secrets with a select circle of bosnians.

Surely it is a distraction and the spirit of we've got a big secret and you don't know it is antithetical to the gospel.

(Answers from a non-christian perspective of course could be suggested at this point!)

125. Italy's Padre Pio 'faked his stigmata with acid'

Comment #83466 by BaronOchs on October 30, 2007 at 5:14 am

"baronOchs . . .if you knew the culture of Italy and Italian Catholicism at the time(and PP's character) you would understand that PP was not cocksucking. He was no sycophant – which you'll see if you read a decent biography of the gent."


Actually brotherjohn I see your point there.

Regarding Cordell's letter [post 23] I thick this conceals an important point. The church is standardly suspicious when an individual or a series of apparitions gains great popular support because these can gather their own momentum and become alternative centers of gravity to the church hierarchy.

As a case in point I was searching some time back for some good critical analysis of the events at Medjugorje, I didn't find that much actually (anyone got a good lead here), but I did find a fair amount of material from ultra-conservative catholics attacking the apparitions. Taking the line if they were genuine they would have stopped as soon as the local bishop condemned them. And on a relevant point the church will verify even pretty much any apparition if the things said are orthodox, but throw out seemingly more convincing cases because they are not!

And as for Medjugorje I can't help wonder why she doesn't think of anything more interesting to say, instead of the same pious mush everyday for 25 years.

126. Face to faith

Comment #83015 by BaronOchs on October 28, 2007 at 2:04 pm

I could do with a better analogy there . . .

127. Face to faith

Comment #83014 by BaronOchs on October 28, 2007 at 2:03 pm

Mr Vernon I daresay Science is not for everyone, but those who can't take it can find better ways to enrich their existence than some phoney supernatural religion.

This cry of "Science can't fill our deepest needs we must flee to the church!" Rather like "The crossings a bit rough so I'll jump into the Atlantic" I think is not uncommon.

If science was inadequate there would still be plenty better ways to enrich our lives than religious lies.

128. The New Atheists on Organized Freethought

Comment #82770 by BaronOchs on October 27, 2007 at 2:07 pm

lol

129. The New Atheists on Organized Freethought

Comment #82758 by BaronOchs on October 27, 2007 at 1:30 pm

Ha, unfortunately for some people you cannot take out a copyright on Gods non-existence.

130. Don't write off religion - it can be the key to a stable family

Comment #82632 by BaronOchs on October 27, 2007 at 3:41 am

"In fact I'm not sure what Richard Dawkins traduces more - religion or families."


Terry Eagleton: "Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this)"


i uhhh he's a very naughty boy!

131. Italy's Padre Pio 'faked his stigmata with acid'

Comment #81329 by BaronOchs on October 24, 2007 at 3:40 pm

Various things are believed about Padre Pio, including that he could be in two places at once, fly (yes) distances of several hundred miles and back in one night, and that he appeared as a giant figure in the sky to WWII bomber pilots.

When Pope Paul VI upheld the church's ban on contraception pio wrote him this letter which is a grotesque masterpiece of cocksucking sycophancy:

http://www.ewtn.com/padrepio/priest/pope.htm

Interestingly he is supposed to have had the stigmata since 1918, a year before he bought the acid, although he revealed this only to his confessor!

132. Christopher Hitchens at AAI 07

Comment #80318 by BaronOchs on October 21, 2007 at 10:28 am

artemisa that is a good definition. I'd say to someone who believed in that that if you extract out all the "external and internal causes" there'd simply be nothing of you left to do any choosing!

133. Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

Comment #78332 by BaronOchs on October 12, 2007 at 12:50 pm

ughh I see Intelligent Design is todays featured article on wikipedia.

134. Fox News Attacks 'Godless' Free Thought Radio

Comment #78276 by BaronOchs on October 12, 2007 at 10:50 am

Hey that religion correspondent plagiarised John Lennox . .about who am I and strychnine in your grandma's tea.

135. Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

Comment #78240 by BaronOchs on October 12, 2007 at 8:29 am

Although epeeist it is a shame whoever started that timeworn example didn't check their ornithology first:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Swan

136. Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

Comment #78056 by BaronOchs on October 11, 2007 at 5:04 pm

devolved that is interesting about the Burlingame canyon. These formations occur when water is moving laterally so as to displace sediment and rock (i.e not a static body of water). To create the Grand Canyon in a year the flood would have had to include enormous currents travelling at thousands of miles per hour, which would tear a mere ark to shreds!

I'd suggest the force needed to hollow out the Grand Canyon would be in excess of 10^10 Newtons. That's no joke, so where are these floodsgates in the sky and springs in the earth where all this water came from?

137. If Muslim doctors are intolerant, let them go

Comment #77725 by BaronOchs on October 10, 2007 at 10:08 am

V you should still visit Cornwall and Yorkshire though, they are two of the nicest places in the world (IMHO)!

138. Der Digitale Planet (lecture)

Comment #77675 by BaronOchs on October 10, 2007 at 5:55 am

Did anyone take RD up on his Quantum computer game suggestion? That might be good if someone could make one?!

139. If Muslim doctors are intolerant, let them go

Comment #77660 by BaronOchs on October 10, 2007 at 3:22 am

V England certainly is overcrowded now as you can tell from the multitude of new housing estates going up everywhere. Although the majority of Britains asian population arrived to fill a deficit in the labour force after the World War II. The industries they came to work in have now to a great extent collapsed with negative social consequences.

Also when the Natinal Health Service started a significant number of doctors were recruited from India (mainly) to staff it. At the moment we have a shortage of doctors but some doctors at a more junior level are struggling to find posts! (don't ask how we have managed that!)

But in many cases immigrants have integrated well, and it's fair to say those that haven't have been muslims, and it's islam causing most of the difficulties now.

140. If Muslim doctors are intolerant, let them go

Comment #77556 by BaronOchs on October 9, 2007 at 4:41 pm

This problem has surfaced in the news before. The actual number of muslim students making these objections may be small but he is right, if they have a problem with the job they should leave and find something else to do. Simple.

141. The Future Forum Presents: Christopher Hitchens and Marvin Olasky

Comment #76983 by BaronOchs on October 8, 2007 at 2:47 am

Hitler was an Amalekite?!

142. Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

Comment #76981 by BaronOchs on October 8, 2007 at 2:39 am

devolved

You might like to consider that the Grand Canyon was carved out after the flood.


Has anyone worked out precisely what force would be required to carve out the Grand Canyon in just one flood, and what quantity of water this would require? And also how 40 days of indiscriminate rainfall manage to produce so precise a result?

And where is this water supposed to have come from? And how long would it take to evaporate?

143. The Squirrel Wars

Comment #76885 by BaronOchs on October 7, 2007 at 3:21 pm

V well I'm sure your fighting the good fight, though I expect in britain we'd have put some highly paid committee together just to find a more pc name for wandering jew!

144. The Squirrel Wars

Comment #76872 by BaronOchs on October 7, 2007 at 2:17 pm

A more worrying problem than squirrels is the plague of "Himalayan Balsam" now afflicting Britain. Which may in time wipe out the lovely site of a Bluebell carpet, as well as several other species of plant.

Though V I expect all this may be slight compared with the damage done to Australia's ecology?

145. Scandal brewing at Oral Roberts U.

Comment #76662 by BaronOchs on October 6, 2007 at 3:54 pm

There's another one of these men (can't recall his name) who is languishing in gaol because he defrauded the IRS of tens of thousands of tax dollars.


Kent Hovind?

146. I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer

Comment #76634 by BaronOchs on October 6, 2007 at 2:05 pm

BAEOZ perhaps Angelo Vescovia deliberately played down the result for the Vatican Radio audience?

147. I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer

Comment #76622 by BaronOchs on October 6, 2007 at 1:05 pm

BAEOZ that's interesting, does catholic teaching actually insist the creation of a new organism must be impossible?

148. Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

Comment #76613 by BaronOchs on October 6, 2007 at 12:39 pm

Blackhaw wrote

Dr. Dawkins,

" I had never heard of John Lennox when the organizer, Larry Taunton, proposed him to me."

Maybe I am just ignorant in this regard but you did not even know who he was and he is at Oxford? Seems a little strange to me.


You think the entire faculty of a place that big would all know who all the others are?

149. Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

Comment #76596 by BaronOchs on October 6, 2007 at 11:55 am

socratzsche yes, well perhaps I slightly misread your intention in posting that passage!

150. Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

Comment #76587 by BaronOchs on October 6, 2007 at 11:29 am

socratzsche so the fact these teachings sound foolish only goes to show how true they are?

how convennnieeeennnntttttttt.....

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