Posted by farid from customer-148-233-93-58.uninet.net.mx (148.233.93.58) on Monday, August 04, 2003 at 12:55PM :
Look...if you were sitting alone on a hilltop in Mexico, for three months now, making tiny skeletons out of wax, day and night...surrounded by loopy neighbors, crooks, theives, drug traffickers, pasteboard cowboys and menopausal natives...you'd rail against organized religion too whenever you had the chance.
Here's the best I can make of the Christian argument...a Christian says to me that, 2000 years ago, a god became a man and got killed for it...and I'm supposed to do the same, or get as close to getting killed as I can and I'll get to heaven too, even though I never started out a god...which to me is the intellectual, moral and logical equivalent of pigs flying around on Mars 2000 years ago. He says this is the god's honest truth because some Jewish spacemen saw them..."and why would they lie"?
I excuse myself...say I think it's ridiculous, goes contrary to everything we know about Mars and pigs too...and if he doesn't mind, I'll pass.
He says, "EXACTLY...it IS ridiculous...which only underlines its MIRACULOUS nature! Don't you get it"?
I still say I'll pass...that I don't make a practise of believing ridiculous things by re-naming them "spiritual"
"That's a pity", says he, "cause if you did believe it...you could go there too and fly around, FOREVER, when you die", at which I want to kick him. He then begins to warm up to his subject...says it's absolutely true, the Apostles said so and when has a guy who catches fish EVER lied and not only that, but they have temples dedicated to flying Martian pigs and they haven't paid taxes in centuries because they "teach morality" and other good and decent things...brought to us by flying Martian pigs.
I respond that I've been teaching my children morality...to be good and kind too and I get no tax write off for it...and neither did anyone else doing the same thing all those centuries who didn't need flying Martian pigs to do it with either. Besides which, I don't think getting children to believe in flying Martian pigs is a very healthy way to start out in life...kind of unsettles them in a basic sort of way...makes them liable to believe any damn foolishness later on...the sillier the more believeable cause you gotta rely on "faith", not silly old Reason...but the way these boys describe faith...it sounds a lot more like what you're left with after a lobotomy...."ibelieveamenibelieveamenibelieveamen..."
It seems to me that if I come up with the notion that pigs were flyng on Mars 2000 years ago...I should have to provide some proof for it. After all, I'm the one standing Logic and Reason and Nature on their heads. Instead I get..."since you can't prove pigs WEREN'T flying around on Mars 2000 years ago still doesn't negate the fact that they MIGHT have been... so, you see, the idea that they were is JUST AS VALID as your insistence that they couldn't have been."
"Oink"?
If you've been well schooled, drilled and oiled in it...the religious pig argument will work every time for you...why wouldn't it?
Okay...back to work.
-- farid
-- signature .