Daily quotes

[Angrboda]

Learning Chinese is “a work for men with bodies of brass, lungs of steel, heads of oak, hands of springsteel, hearts of apostles, memories of angels, and lives of Methuselah.”

~ William Milne


Chinese characters were “through God's fate introduced by the devil / so he may keep those miserable people ever more entangled in the darkness of idolatry.”

~ 17th-century Protestant theologian Elias Grebniz

[Creed of Heresy]

If Death is the winner of every war
Then it's Death that I must become.
Black on track, through the gloom we soar
The end of their tyranny has become
Arise, mortals, like a flood of vengeance
Become the Leviathan, which nothing can shun
There will be no hindrance once our taskmasters are gone
And that's when justice will be done.

~The Unguided - Inception~

[Angrboda]

The findings of Dunning and Kruger are being reduced to "Stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid." Rather bluntly, Dunning himself said, "The presence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, as it’s been come to be called, is that one should pause to worry about one’s own certainty, not the certainty of others."

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/r...e-awesome/

[Mister Agenda]

He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave.

--William Drummond

[Creed of Heresy]

“And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women - except, of course —those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape ‘kit ‘n’ stuff, But for everybody else, it’s a win-win. Unless you’re a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years - whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know - actually, I take it back. The whole thing’s a disaster.”
― Tina Fey

---

This one struck a chord with me...

“Who are we to say getting incested or abused or violated or any of those things can’t have their positive aspects in the long run? … You have to be careful of taking a knee-jerk attitude. Having a knee-jerk attitude to anything is a mistake, especially in the case of women, where it adds up to this very limited and condescending thing of saying they’re fragile, breakable things that can be destroyed easily. Everybody gets hurt and violated and broken sometimes. Why are women so special? Not that anybody ought to be raped or abused, nobody’s saying that, but that’s what is going on. What about afterwards? All I’m saying is there are certain cases where it can enlarge you or make you more of a complete human being, like Viktor Frankl. Think about the Holocaust. Was the Holocaust a good thing? No way. Does anybody think it was good that it happened? No, of course not. But did you read Viktor Frankl? Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning? It’s a great, great book, but it comes out of his experience. It’s about his experience in the human dark side. Now think about it, if there was no Holocaust, there’d be no Man’s Search for Meaning… . Think about it. Think about being degraded and brought within an inch of your life, for example. No one’s gonna say the sick bastards who did it shouldn’t be put in jail, but let’s put two things into perspective here. One is, afterwards she knows something about herself that she never knew before. What she knows is that the most totally terrible terrifying thing that she could ever have imagined happening to her has now happened, and she survived. She’s still here, and now she knows something. I mean she really, really knows. Look, totally terrible things happen… . Existence in life breaks people in all kinds of awful fucking ways all the time, trust me I know. I’ve been there. And this is the big difference, you and me here, cause this isn’t about politics or feminism or whatever, for you this is just ideas, you’ve never been there. I’m not saying nothing bad has ever happened to you, you’re not bad looking, I’m sure there’s been some sort of degradation or whatever come your way in life, but I’m talking Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning type violation and terror and suffering here. The real dark side. I can tell from just looking at you, you never. You wouldn’t even wear what you’re wearing, trust me.
What if I told you it was my own sister that was raped? What if I told you a little story about a sixteen-year-old girl who went to the wrong party with the wrong guy and four of his buddies that ended up doing to her just about everything four guys could do to you in terms of violation? But if you could ask her if she could go into her head and forget it or like erase the tape of it happening in her memory, what do you think she’d say? Are you so sure what she’d say? What if she said that even after that totally negative as what happened was, at least now she understood it was possible. People can. Can see you as a thing. That people can see you as a thing, do you know what that means? Because if you really can see someone as a thing you can do anything to him. What would it be like to be able to be like that? You see, you think you can imagine it but you can’t. But she can. And now she knows something. I mean she really, really knows.
This is what you wanted to hear, you wanted to hear about four drunk guys who knee-jerk you in the balls and make you bend over that you didn’t even know, that you never saw before, that you never did anything to, that don’t even know your name, they don’t even know your name to find out you have to choose to have a fucking name, you have no fucking idea, and what if I said that happened to ME? Would that make a difference?”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

[Angrboda]

"He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge


... as I ponder the apologetics of William Lane Craig.

[Angrboda]

Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we are to have morality, a society and a law-abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are going to do a little work on this subject, which will enable us to show that these values exist all the same, inscribed in an intelligible heaven although, of course, there is no God. In other words – and this is, I believe, the purport of all that we in France call radicalism – nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself.

Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism

[Angrboda]

From the Way Out In Left Field Society: "The phrase “way out in left field” has evolved to mean an eccentric, odd, misguided or peculiar statement or act. Although the origin of the phrase has been challenged and debated over the years, the most logical and realistic explanation comes from an extinct baseball park called West Side Grounds that the Chicago Cubs called home from 1893 to 1915. As legend has it, a mental hospital called the Neuropsychiatric Institute was located directly behind the left field wall. The Institute housed mental patients who could be heard making strange and bizarre comments within listening distance of players and fans. Thus, if someone said that you were “way out in left field,” the person was questioning your sanity and comparing you with a mental patient"

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

'There is no material safety data sheet for astatine.  If there were, it would just be the word NO written over and over in charred blood.' - Randall Munroe

Boru

[Angrboda]

Other than this, they have been educated to believe in Bible prophecy in the same way that Moslems have been educated to believe in the prophetic talents of Mohammed. Once they have been brainwashed from childhood through adulthood to believe this, they are going to believe it come what may. In the same way, Christians go to church and hear preachers proclaim that the Bible is filled with amazing examples of prophecy, and so they believe it no matter what proof to the contrary may be presented to them. If they had been trained from childhood to believe that the Washington Monument is God Almighty, they would believe that the Washington Monument is God Almighty. In matters of religion, people do not generally think logically.
. . . . . .
A little known Bible story (little known for obvious reasons) also illustrates how that flagrantly false prophecy will not deter man from believing what he has been conditioned to believe. The 19th and 20th chapters of Judges tell the story of a certain Levite who was shamefully mistreated by a band of sodomites during an overnight stay in the village of Gibeah. In the process, his concubine was sexually abused and murdered. The Levite carved her body into twelve parts and sent a piece to each of the tribal divisions of Israel. As a result, the nation rallied to his support and planned a retaliatory attack on Gibeah. First, however, the men of Israel went to Bethel "to inquire of God" (20:18), asking in particular which tribe should go up first in the battle against Gibeah. Yahweh said that Judah should go first. This was done, and in the ensuing battle, the Judeans were routed in a defeat that cost them twenty-two thousand casualties. One would think that such an outcome would have given the Israelites pause in seeking Yahweh's advice again, but such an assumption does not take into account the illogical base of man's religious nature. The very thing they did, in fact, was to seek the counsel of Yahweh again. "Then the children of Israel went up and wept before Yahweh until evening" (20:23) and asked if they should go to battle again. Yahweh said, "Go up against him [the tribe of Benjamin]." So they attacked again the next day and this time suffered a defeat that cost them eighteen thousand swordsmen (v:24).

So what do you think? Had these Israelites had it, so to speak, with the advice of Yahweh? No. To assume so is to think rationally, and one should never expect rational conduct from religiously indoctrinated people. Again the Israelites sought the advice of Yahweh. This time all the people went up to Bethel and wept. They sat before Yahweh, fasted until evening, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings to Yahweh (20:26). They asked if they should go against the city again, and Yahweh told them to go, that he would deliver it into their hands.

A third battle was fought the next day, and this time, through a change of military tactics that led their enemy out of the city and into an ambush, the Israelites did win, according to the story, if indeed it could be called a victory. Twenty-five thousand enemy soldiers were killed, but the "victory" had cost the Israelites forty thousand casualties.

In the case of this story, one might cynically say that the third time must have been charmed. If one seeks the "advice of Yahweh" enough, just through the sheer strength of odds, Yahweh is bound to be right eventually. The important thing about this story, however, is its effective illustration of man's religious naivety. Once people are conditioned through their cultural environment to believe a religious philosophy, they are going to believe it come what may. Inconsistencies and contradictions, absurdities and proven inaccuracies, and, in this case, failed prophecies and broken promises will not deter them from believing what they are determined to believe.

http://infidels.org/library/modern/farre...phecy.html