Terminally Incoherent

Apparently there is a movement amongst the evangelical extremists to bring back the geocentric view of the universe. It seems that it has been around for a while now, but everyone just ignored them as they should. But now couple of those people somehow got themselves elected in Texas and are making a spectacle of themselves passing around memos, and pamphlets.

I’m at a loss of words here. I just feel bad for the kids that grow up in the Christian Reconstrictionist households. You know a kid is going to be fucked up when his father believes that biology, chemistry and physics are some form of evil satanist propaganda connoted by devil worshiping scientists.

You gotta love Foxtrot for asking these deep questions:

click to see the original

This is your homework for today - go home and ponder this.

I typed up this long insightful thing about this question really being a question about the nature of faith, but somehow Firefox managed to eat this post when I accidentally hit Ctrl+R (refresh) instead of Ctrl+T (new tab). Sigh… I’m not retyping that whole thing. It’s probably a topic for a whole other post anyway.

Anyways, here is my take on this. I always said that God cannot have free will because of his omniscience. Complete omniscience (total knowledge of all past, present and future) requires God to know what choices is he going to make in the future before he makes them. All his actions must therefore be preordained, perhaps to his own plan, but fixed nevertheless. Any departure from the preordained sequence of choices God knows about invalidates his omniscience.

The Gnostic Demirug being omnipotent but not omniscient would technically have free will. But the Judeo-Christian God does not. Existence of a omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent being therefore hints at the fact that universe must be preordained. Randomness and omniscience are mutually exclusive.

Thus, Free Will must simply be illusion - an artifact of the way we perceive time and space. We are completely free because to us universe would appear to be completely random whether or not it was subject to the will of some infinite omniscient being…

But then again by virtue of his own decree God grants humans free will. Since God is supposed to be infallible we must assume that all the choices we make are therefore our own. God is merely aware of them (and has been aware of all of them since the beginning of time), but he does not control them.

But that’s just my take on this. What is yours?

I think this cartoon sums it all up:

Really, this whole thing is making a big deal about nothing. This is not the first controversial movie out there and not the last one. Personally I think all Christians should be encouraged to see it as a test of faith. If a 2 hour movie can destroy your faith, and belief in the sanctity of Catholic Church then how religious were you to begin with?

I haven’t seen the movie yet because I don’t really care for it just like I didn’t really care for the book. I have some idea about the story though. Let’s face it - Catholic dogma is not set in stone. If you think it is, I have one word for you - Assumption of Holy Mary (ok, 4 words). That whole thing was dogmatized by Pope Pius XII on November 1, 1950 (google it, I dare you) due to “popular demand”.

So examining and questioning church dogma is not a bad thing in itself. Sometimes it needs to be revised, augmented or tweaked a little bit. That’s the job of the Pope. Now I’m not saying that anything from DaVinci Code is true or anything. I’m just saying that a little of speculative fiction never hurt anyone. The thing about faith is that it is supposed to stand up to scrutiny, questioning and all that stuff.

Those who worry that this movie will portray the Catholic Church in a bad light need a reality check. The church has been in damage control mode ever since that child molestation deal. No amount of fiction can top that little embarrassment.

So, please put down the pitchforks and torches and calm the fuck down. It’s just a movie. Unless of course you are the same people who picket Harry Potter movies, and burn Rowling’s books… You people are a lost cause. Please kindly die and go to hell!

I think this cartoon is briliant! It clearly illustrates how stupid the creationist argument is.

Source: Steve’s Journal

Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican Astronomer is my new hero!

Brother Consolmagno argued that the Christian God was a supernatural one, a belief that had led the clergy in the past to become involved in science to seek natural reasons for phenomena such as thunder and lightning, which had been previously attributed to vengeful gods. “Knowledge is dangerous, but so is ignorance. That’s why science and religion need to talk to each other,” he said.

“Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it’s turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do.” Link

This is what I have been saying all along. The idea that science, and religion are not compatible is contrived, and silly! One deals with physical, and the other deals with metaphysical. There is no overlap.

Creationism is dumb to the point of being idolatory superstition. As the Vatican astronomer eloquently pointed out it is a belief not fully compatible with the Christian dogma. It dumbs down and belittles faith through crude literalism.

Next time some ID sympathizer, or Creationist approaches me, I will tell him that I cannot possibly take is garbage seriously because Catholic church looks down on idolatory pagan belief systems.