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RE: Atheism: Don't Become a Tree After Death
May 5, 2010 at 2:24 pm
I didn't find it funny - but it wasn't offensive or anything, it just wasn't funny.
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RE: Atheism: Don't Become a Tree After Death
May 5, 2010 at 9:04 pm
You've read Strangely Like War Shell B?
I thought I was the only person here extreme enough to read Jensen, although that one is slightly more fluffy than some of his other works.
I'm impressed. Did you read any others? Language Older than Words, or gasp! the anarcho-primitivist Endgame series?
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RE: Atheism: Don't Become a Tree After Death
May 6, 2010 at 7:56 am
Horribly sad yes. I never found another author that can write a book that punches you in the gut. You could start reading any of his works out loud at a cocktail party and people would be throwing up and attempting suicide...
I'm honestly impressed, I quite like Jensen. He's radical, but his heart is in the right place. I joined his very excloosive web forum, I don't go much anymore. It really brings the books home when you get to chat with him about them.
That is my brand of environmentalism. Not so far as "stop walking, stop breathing, don't touch anything" anarcho-primitivism (also a religion called Jainism), but I'm on board.
He could be a disinformation agent, more of a provocateur, but I doubt it. The whole second Endgame (the series about why we need to stop human civilization at any cost right now, and you guys were worried about the Religious. It's the tree huggers that will end this world on purpose. On a Porpoise?) And the whole book is summed up as 'why are you still holding this book, put it down and go blow up a dam or a cell phone tower... Have you blown anything up yet? You're failing!' But don't let me take away from it. Certainly a very heavy book, and worth the read...
That's Derrick Jensen. I'll be here all week.
And an aside, I would love nothing more than to become a tree after death. I don't think that is how it works, but we can dream.
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RE: Atheism: Don't Become a Tree After Death
May 6, 2010 at 8:54 am
My wife likes Dane Cook, so I get to watch Dane Cook standup a lot sadly. He has his moments, but I think if he ever actually watched himself perform, he would get better. He sets the joke up way too heavily so the punchline normally feels lacking, like the tree/athiest joke.
"In our youth, we lacked the maturity, the decency to create gods better than ourselves so that we might have something to aspire to. Instead we are left with a host of deities who were violent, narcissistic, vengeful bullies who reflected our own values. Our gods could have been anything we could imagine, and all we were capable of manifesting were gods who shared the worst of our natures."-Me
"Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men." – Francis Bacon