Nothing angers me more than hearing the pathological liar and landover cheerleader, - I mean president conflating 9/11 with the war in Iraq. It is insulting to the intelligence of people who care to read. Islam is a complex beast. There are jihadist elements in both the sunni, and shi'a camps. Those who strike out at American soldiers and interests in Iraq, and not simply jihadists.

There exists a wild and expanding mix of constituencies and groups, - many of whom are opposed to and fiercely reject the jihadist - who are working in very determined ways to kill American's and our soldiers in Iraq for reason that having nothing to do with 9/11, or attacking America, - but have very much to do with forcing a perceived occupation force out of their homeland, and/or revenging their friends and family members slaughtered and maimed in the costly, bloody, noendinsight horrorshow in the land of the two rivers.

Either the fascists in the Bush government are too stupid and so woefully incompetent, that they are incapable of recognizing these complex factbasedrealities, - or - and this is my personal belief - they are ruthlessly intent on purposely deceiving the American people in every possible way to support the unsupportable, defend the indefensible, excuse the inexcusible, and justify, the unjustifiable waste of blood, treasure, credibility and Bush government cronies and cabals wanton profiteering ongoing in Iraq.

Not one word about New Orleans. This fascist leadership is so pathologically invested in it's own singular political and economic gains, - that the American people, American cities, and the future of America are of absolutely NO concern.

Very much on point is this Times (UK) report of an excellent speech by the British Director of Public Prosecutions.

Watching the moron's speech is a lot like visiting somebody who insists on making you sit through their home movies. I'm tired of watching the movie that says Iraq is part of the war on terror, that there is no civil war, that the civil war just started a year ago, that we have enough troops, that we need more troops, that we have a plan and its working, that we have a new plan and it is really going to work. It is pathetic to see the care that is taken to cultivate bizarre talking points that perpetuate an obvious fraud.

It is also disgusting to witness the fatuous politeness of the political class at events like this. Treating a non-human moron like Bush as if he were an exalted personage undermines the dignity and worth of everyone involved. The State of the Union Speech is a crap event with no intrinsic value. A no holds barred interrogation in which the president had to carry his own weight would be a much better measure of the state of the union.

What I found most interesting was when Dubya introduced to the viewers 4 American heroes. Their accomplishments and character made Bush's lack of either all the more glaring.

On the one hand, you had Bush... failed businessman, draft dodger, lousy governor, and failed president whose only accomplishment in life was to be born into a powerful family. On the other, you had a successful entrepreneuer, a young guy who suffered serious wounds after volunteering to sign up in the army, and a man who ignored concerns for his own safety to save the life of another human being. Bush isn't fit to shine their shoes...

Brian

Well Larry your point of view helps to shine light on the truth of the situation. It is helpful to remember Bush was / still isi? a religious nut himself. And that yes we need to take a long hard look in the mirror when we point out the evil deeds other nations / organizations do. And clean up our own act while we are busy cleaning up the acts of those others.

Where I disagree with you is in regards to extremist, terrorist muslims merely "wanting God's rule on Earth." That is incorrect IMO. It seems glaringly obvious to me that they want *their version* of a God's rule on Earth. Otherwise they'd be praising Christians for following God's rule on Earth, and just targeting atheists.

The extremist, terrorist muslims, which I consider brainwashed and essentially gone further than being members of a religion, into the category of being cult members, (one man's brainwash is another man's sunday sermon, so it is all one big spectrum in my opinion based on my experience regarding religious belief,) are indeed insane and dangerous, and we should kill them. They want the entire planet to be ruled by one big Taliban. So depending on the angle you look at it, yes they do want to remove our freedom (since they will settle for nothing but our conversion to taliban style islam.

I think the real SNAFU regarding the President's new Iraq war strategy is in what you shed light on regarding the fact that the Al Queda leaders have not been killed. And Bush's followers continue to be hoodwinked - like lemmings - into the Bush Administration's *diversion* from the war on terror. Yes it is a lie to call the Iraq war a part of the war on terror. It was from the start. Congress bought this lie hook, line and sinker when they voted to wage a pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein.

How could anyone think that a dictator would be bed fellows with taliban-like extremist muslims?

When the Democrats called for "a change in course," they failed to specify what this change in course would be. Which brought nothing but criticism from the other side that "the Democrats don't have a plan." When all we needed to do was proclaim our change in course - our plan - is to get back on track with the real war on terror.

Whether or not the 20,000 troops tips Iraq into success isn't really even the point regarding what our priorities should be. If we merely change our mission from liberating Iraq to killing - if you don't want to use the word terrorist, how about islamic guerrilla armies who are at war with us? -- change our mission to killing islamic guerrilla armies who have declared war on us.

Now we can just go after those cult members and let Iraq settle Iraq on their own terms and with their own civil war.

If "Iraq becomes a haven for terrorists," so what. At least we'll finally have a target. Afghanistan was a haven for terrorists and we had actual targets on islamic guerrilla armies who declared war on us, and we were more successful in Afghanistan militarily than in Iraq. Not to mention that Iraq is already a haven for terrorists and has been for a few years now.

I say start drawing down our troops in Iraq on a timetable starting tomorrow, and send 20,000 fresh troops to Kashmir to fight the real war on terror.

The problem is that the American people have still been conditioned by the media into thinking we're just do-gooders and altruists all around, and that a country could only "hate us" if they also hate freedom, apple pie, American Idol and all other things sweet and sappy.

What they don't realize, is that the stationing of US bases in so many countries where the people abhor them-- in effect, the placement of United States military forces on other countries' sovereign territory-- is seen by other peoples as a modern send-up of the same old-fashioned colonialism that the "natives" rebelled so furiously against. These were the wars in Egypt and Aden, Cyprus and elsewhere after WWII where local forces defeated the Briitsh and French and kicked them out, destroyed the British Empire and all its counterparts who were attempting to govern the people's use of their own territory's resources.

IOW, the rest of the world sees the spread of US military forces to so many countries-- designed to control the supply of oil and help US companies to extract more wealth and cheap labor from the people-- as nothing less than naked imperialism.

That's why they hate us, and so long as we have troops in so many places that the people don't want them, the USA and our lapdogs like the United Kingdom will be targets for attack.

I would go one step further and submit that the whole "War on Terror" circus is one big diversion. Thanks to GWOT, we don't have to face issues that are already affecting or will affect far more people than terrorism ever can. Things like global warming, poverty, pandemics, overdependency on fossil fuels.

Why? Because those issues are (unlike GWOT) not Us vs Them and might require sacrifices on the part of every one of us.

Yes, atheists most certainly are people of faith. Given the definition of 'god', there is no way to disprove the existence of a deity.

Besides, have you ever listenet to some of the more vocal atheists? They possess the same self-righteousness that fundies have.

The only ones who are not people of faith are agnostics.

I'm an outspoken atheist and I deny your authority to classify me as self-righteous, or to lump me in with any other fantastical coffee klatch you might dream up in your constricted little dream world.

You have drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid that falsely asserts that atheists believe that there is no god. In fact, we believe no such thing. We simply do not believe there is a god. This may seem to be an equivalent statement to a Bear of Little Mind; but to a person of thought, to which you may someday aspire to become, there is a world of difference.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, in part, to illustrate the fatuity of this argument. The claim that rejecting supernatural explanations for natural phenomenon is a statement of faith is ridiculous. Religious faith is not merely the belief in something in the absence of evidence. It's belief in something ridiculous in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against it. Moreover, the Christians reject Islamic belief, animist belief, Wiccans, and astrology. A large fraction of American Christians, based on their faith, reject well-established, incontrovertible fact.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster illustrates that we can think up an indefinite number of supernatural beings that you cannot prove the non-existence of. Sure, it's absurd, but so is the Christian god in all its different manifestations. That's the point. And, hey, it's a lot less absurd than the Trinity, or some guy in a white beard sitting outside the universe working the levers.

This isn't self-righteousness. It's the recognition that explaining natural phenomena in the universe through supernatural means has been superseded by overwhelming evidence that natural explanations are sufficient, that supernatural explanations are superfluous at best. Dropping supernatural explanations does nothing to weaken our understanding how the universe works.

Now, it is certainly the case that religious communities serve an important, probably vital, human need. The near universality of belief in the supernatural is a pretty strong indication of that. But there are a lot of things that people have believed, and do believe that are simply not so.

When people were living in bands of a couple hundred hunter-gatherers, these belief systems didn't conflict with what people knew, and didn't particularly conflict with those around them. But when we live in a world where we are acutely aware that there is a wide variety of mutually inconsistent belief systems, and that there is very compelling evidence that the supernatural elements of those belief systems are false, well, you're gonna get conflict.

Huh?  This, to you is "faith?"

The OED defines atheism as "the theory or belief that God does not exist". Did the OED get it wrong?

I happen to believe that the moon is not made of green cheese.  I believe that there are no ghosts.  Do either of these "beliefs" qualify as a form of "faith?"

Atheists are a mystery to most people who simply cannot imagine not having a fear of hell-fire.  These same people equate morality with doing what someone else tells you is right so that you don't have to face the devil after you die.

The bible, that great moral tome, gives specific instructions on how to treat one's slaves (thereby condoning slavery), and also how to kill your wife if you discover on your wedding night that she is not a virgin.

Atheists just don't buy it.  That's all.  Faith is simply believing in something that there is no proof of.  NOT believing in something (like ghosts) is not a form of faith.

Agnostics, on the other hand, are holding out their options, and are waiting to see some proof.  It won't come, but  the term "agnostic" doesn't piss as many people off.

Jan Knaus

Watch it now! Did you mean to insult the Great And Powerful Wizard of OZ?????????????

And, hey, it's a lot less absurd than the Trinity, or some guy in a white beard sitting outside the universe working the levers.

Never mind; it's kinda the same thing, isn't it?

Jan Knaus

Yes, that was intended as visual representation.

But this is where the self-righteousness claims come from. It's very difficult not to make fun of these beliefs. Since some kind of inchoate belief in the Christian god is widespread in this country , as is a much less inchoate belief among evangelical Christians, it's seen as, at best, rude, to point out the silly aspects of the belief system.

It is very difficult to seriously discuss these issues because the gulf is so deep. Ridicule is not polite, but it's hard to avoid. The FSM is a case in point. It is a reductio ad absurdam argument--that anybody should be able to assert a religious belief system and then require its instruction in public schools. But in doing so, it is implicitly labeling all religious belief as absurd.

Now, when you get called on that, what do you say? Oh, I have deep respect for people who believe the Grand Canyon was made by the flood? Who are perfectly fine having a PET scan performed on them, but insist that science is not the only answer?

It's hard to stay polite in any case. But when they make false claims about the nature of atheism, transparently false and even silly claims, then it gets really hard.

I understand why Dawkins ticks them off. He doesn't pull any punches. They want to elevate their supernatural belief systems as equally valid as a means of attaining objective understanding of natural phenomena, and get all pissed off when they get told that it doesn't work that way.

The OED didn't get it wrong. It doesn't say what he said it says.

Atheists are not "people of faith". If you don't understand that you don't understand anything.

Know any Marxists?

Fanatical atheists are no different than fanatical fundamentalists of any stripe in my view. Says nothing particular about atheists in general except they do have a belief that is based on faith rather than reason.

BTW agnostics are also believers. They believe they don't know and you don't either. It's the "you don't either" that makes them people of faith rather than reason.

Though I will agree with you that I know nothing. I don't know as little as Socrates but I do my best.

BTW, I have no no idea what the "Hollywood image" of an atheist is supposed to be.

Buddhist, Buddhist, Buddhist - not atheist.

The Hollywood image of Buddhists is of saintly folk seeking only contemplation, peace and goodness.

The monsters that rule Myanmar suggest something else can be true.

BTW some Buddhists are atheists too.

Best, Terry

It seems like every day, I redouble my personal education on Africa. As I've suggested in the past, unless we run into Fanatic Fundamentalist Penguins in Antarctica, Africa is the last chance we have not to screw up on a continental basis.

While native languages are important, it isn't as essential as in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. I get visible shock from Africans I meet just when I can find their country on a map (especially when it's a question of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, or Equatorial Guinea), and speechlessness if I know cities or local issues. Even for people that, a few minutes before, were speaking anti-American slogans, I get warm hospitality.

I'm very proud to be included as extended family in a clan, now to the second generation, of immigrants from Sierra Leone. Interestingly, it's a blended family of Muslims and Christians, and we are close enough to talk about religion. One of the most fascinating discussion I've ever had is with someone preparing himself for the Hajj, and the family helping him do it.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

To equate atheists with marxists is to equate catholicism with the mafia.

If someone (a marxist) is bad and also doesn't believe in god, there is no causality inherent.

Just as...if someone (a mafiosa) is bad, but believes in god, there is also no causality.

Now, if you want to get really down and dirty, there's always catholocism and the Inquisition....now THERE'S some causality!

Jan Knaus

Howard, your interest and curiousity in learning and understanding things which are foreign to most Americans is admirable. It appears to me that it is difficult for the average American to muster the intellectual curiousity to seek to learn about most anything outside the normal circle of their daily lives. It is ironic that a country born of immigrants seems to have lost the ability to see that there is much to be learned from those with different perspectives and origins. I have had an opportunity over the years to do a bit of travel to different parts of the world and it is truly an eye opener when you have an opportunity to meet and talk with someone whose life situation is so foreign to you that it is difficult to comprehend. Yet, even with the major differences you encounter, whether religious, ethnic or cultural, it is still possible to connect on a human level when a simple effort is made to see them as a brother in the human race.

I'm certainly not naive enough to believe you will ever convince everybody in the world to give each other a big group hug and everything will be okay. But I do believe if we as a country and as a people made an effort to learn and understand the core motivations and desires of people on a personal level when we have the opportunity, it would be a lot harder to simply dismiss someone who is "different" or "foreign" as irrelevant.

We as a country have done much over our history to tear apart the fabric that holds us together in order to isolate us from those we fear are different. Maybe we wouldn't be where we are today if we had tried a little harder to reach across our self-created divide.

I also lived in Africa for several years. At first I was amazed at how most of the people I met reflexively equated capitalism with imperialism. Now I'm not so sure they were wrong.

p.s. What I find amusing about atheists is their belief in their own superior intelligence.

When they never get that the trick to faith is to not take it too seriously. Not to buy into religion as truth but as possibility to wear as a jacket simply because it turns you on.

I guess it should be no surprise this is their perspective when you look back over history. And we certainly are not doing anything in the world today which might help assuage this viewpoint.

You can believe in God. You can believe in a big rock. You can even believe in both. But you either have faith in something or you're just not thinking.

So there are only 3 choices? Faith in:
1- A big rock; 2- God; 3- Both

...or I don't think at all?

I respectfully disagree. Why did you say this?

Your posts are always very thoughtful

Jan Knaus

St. Augustine of Hippo is reputed to have said, when asked what God was doing before creating the universe, "devising a Hell for those who had the audacity to ask such questions."

I have several approaches to a range of phenomena, which you might or might not call faith. I will accept, in some situations, that the root cause is neither knowable with the tools at hand, nor particularly useful to know. This occurs more often than one might realize in medicine, where the urgency is treating the manifestations rather than a cause that may never be identified. An excellent world example is the gastroenteritis that killed millions. In the context of treatment, it is not useful to know if the cause is norovirus or cholera. You just keep forcing oral rehydration solution down the mouths of the conscious patients, give IVs to the unconscious, and sterilize the excreta.

In mathematics, useful results derive from unprovable axioms. You may call that "faith", but I find that excessively esoteric. I merely state that from a certain set of axioms, a superset of results may be derived. Further tests will determine if they apply to the physical universe.

I am perfectly happy to accept I don't know where the protomass singularity at the start of the Big Bang came from, and can comfortably go through a scientific career accepting the results deriving from the assumption. To me, it is a very far leap from accepting axioms to assuming a conscious $DEITY.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

More than "fascism", may I suggest that the basis of most, if not all of these, are consistent with the leader and ubermenschen concepts from Hegel and Nietzsche? If you consider Khomeini and his successors the Twelfth Imam, he indeed can fall under the Leader State model.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I know you're trying to smear atheists by associating them with godless commies here. But this is actually an interesting question.

Marx was making when a point that had a great deal of validity when he argued that churches served very effectively as mechanisms to keep people satisfied with their lots. Just as the Saudis use radical islam as a circuit-breaker for widespread public dissatisfaction, European rulers collaborated with church leadership to keep the masses quiet.

Note that when the Bosheviks took over, they flipped this around. Their (correct, imo) view was that the Eastern Church represented a competing power base, and had to be eliminated as completely as possible. They were, if you will, situational atheists. When Stalin, much more like the slavophile tsars than Lenin was came to power, he continued the oppression of the Russian church as a competing power threat.

They failed to eliminate the Church in Poland, and it did, indeed, serve as a source of opposition.

The notion that government philosophies are somehow determined by the religious belief that is most widespread in the country at large is to completely misunderstand the nature of people who acquire political power. People who acquire power use religion. They don't follow its precepts except where it suits their needs for power.

Mikhail's point is something you should give some thought to. There is an American religion, involving the sacred Founding Fathers, and a mythos of America's shining hill that this administration is shamelessly and cynically exploiting to embark on a program of imperialism and destruction of the very principles they are using to obtain and retain power.

When Rumsfeld was dismissed, so was the Neocon strategy of planting democracies.

So I think Bush knows the neocon Iraq move turned out to be a flop. He wants success in Iraq not for the Iraqi's benefit but for the benefit of the Republican Party and for the benefit of GW Bush in the history books.

Neither wants to be branded a failure.

Bush cares not of American lower and middle class casualties. He only cares, narcistically, of Republican, and his own, reputations. Of political casualties within our own borders.

The escalation does buy time. As when november 2008 comes around, there may be the next argument that "we just need a little more time" to win the Iraq war. Rather than november 8 coming around after the Iraq Fiasco has been exposed to all voters for what it really was.

A short post to the general audience...

I find it distressing how several posters verbally attacked me because I dared express some doubts about atheism. I was accused of believing in 'supernatural monstrosities' and there was some blather about my supposed 'fevered dreams'.

I hinted that atheists might sometimes come across as zealots, a point which K J Liberal amply supported by his posts.

That is depressing. Especially since a careful and rational reader would have noticed that nowhere did I state that I believe in God, gods, or any other supernatural beings. All I was trying to say is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The point was lost in all the venom spitting.

Oh well, atheists can be just as nasty as fundies when someone touches their core beliefs.

For the record, I agree with hcberkowitz that existence or non-existence of god is irrelevant. You atheists shouldn't get your knickers in a bunch over it :-)

I answered your question, whether you have the capabilty to interpret the answer or not. Consider the interpretation to be another exercise.

Although your rating has the same value to me as your religion, let me point out for the sake of the audience that the insults started in your post, not mine. If you don't care to receive insults, don't open a discussion with them. As we atheists like to say, "What goes around, comes around."

I detect exactly one post that could be characterized as "venom spitting."

You made an argument from authority, and misquoted the authority.

And then you turned the discussion into ad hominem argument, instead of addressing the issue--which is, quite simply, that rejection of the supernatural is not a faith-based act. Acceptance of anything supernatural requires faith. Materialism insists on evidence. There's no faith involved.

I do not understand why that gets people of faith all worked up. What's to be nervous about?

Well, in fact, I do think I understand. I think that people want to believe in the supernatural, and also not be regarded as irrational. Well, that's hard position to maintain. When atheists say "Look, there's no need in biology or physics for a supernatural agent, so we discard the hypothesis." that doesn't mean you can't believe in transubstantition or eternal life or the Flying Spaghetti Monster if you want to. But believing in them doesn't make them real, any more that believing in astrology makes it real.

Finally, atheists react strongly when this "Atheism is an act of faith" canard is raised because it is meant to do what that ID people try to do--to insist that all knowledge is faith-based. It's not. There are lots of things that are simply true and don't require faith to believe in. Atheists limit their world view to the domain of natural entities. There's no faith involved in accepting such a view.

In mathematics, useful results derive from unprovable axioms. You may call that "faith", but I find that excessively esoteric. I merely state that from a certain set of axioms, a superset of results may be derived. Further tests will determine if they apply to the physical universe.

So are you a Platonist? If so, how far along the line? I mean, it starts with the "God created the integers, all else is the work of man." and goes on from there. It's odd to think of discovering, say, pi-adic numbers. But there's a disconcerting tendency (for someone like me, who tends to not like Platonist arugments) for seemingly esoteric and useless mathematics turning out to have analogues in the real world.

Was it George Boole (of Boolean algebra) that offered the toast: "Pure mathematics. May it never be of use to anyone."
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

What an appalling question! How can anyone presume to say what someone else personally believes? Even if you said you believed something it would be ridiculous for another person to say, "Yes, I think you believe such-and-such."

It's the kind of exercise that fundamentalists get into when they gleefully announce that only THEY will get into heaven, thereby implicitly saying that what everyone else believes is wrong or insincere.

Anyone who gets a question like yours should just give a Mona Lisa smile and go the other way (fast)!

Jan Knaus

I'm impressed at the power of philosophy of religion as a hot button to raise tempers and hijack the thread. But Larry's post really was worth praising and discussing. Perhaps too late for that now, alas.  

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Have at it. But do notice that there is a religious element to the president's strategy of deception, as described by Larry.

Mikhail's post was on topic, and very well said.

And yes, we do need to confront religious extremism wherever it may be.

Starting here, maybe? I've got a simple proposal--a la carte cable so I can stop sending money to the 700 club every month.

At some level, at least some of these people are indeed 'terrorists,' intent on spreading fear for reasons that boil down to nothing more then an irrational hatred of us that is not so much based on a deep belief in religion as simply fueled by shallow religious propaganda.

Larry's saying this is simply not true. As you say below, terrorism is an act of desperation. It may be the case that the people handling suicide bombers are very effective at indoctrination, but they need a fertile seedbed.

The argument that the US is creating such a seedbed in Iraq calls for rapid withdrawal.

Not every person who commits a terrorist act is a terrorist. (Though at the moment they commit the act, they at least criminals) But at the very least, I think some of those indoctrinators you speak of truly are. I suppose Larry and I simply disagree on it.

And as for the 700 club- you should watch it sometimes. It is often actually pretty darn funny- also, at least for a while, it was a good indicator of what legislation is coming down the pipe. Call it opposition research.