“You could have an exciting career as a Computer Support Specialist!”
Keep trying, Kaplan College. Maybe one of these days you’ll find someone that thinks A+ Certification is worth something.
Archive Page 2
The above linked file is a hilarious diversion, submitted for your pleasure. The author of the above invective seems to forget our nation was founded on treason. It is my opinion that he’s the kind of person that pleasures himself to gay porn in private, while invoking Leviticus in practice.
Anti-God is fully American.
-A Lunatic Atheist
I have recently been the lucky recipient of a multitude of spam calls on my cellphone. They’re all a recorded message talking about a warranty on my car, and in a few cases something in spanish I don’t understand. I have decided to list the numbers publicly — if the folks behind the calls don’t respect my privacy, I’ll go out of my way a little bit to disrespect theirs. I’ll even list them in clear text so search engines and spam spiders have an easier time finding them:
410-774-8347 (warranty)
410-774-8323 (warranty)
303-882-4478 (warranty)
206-242-9026 (warranty)
269-768-2354 (warranty)
616-980-2924 (warranty)
231-732-2569 (warranty)
616-980-2900 (warranty)
253-507-9196 (spanish)
More will be added as they (inevitably) call me.
A Convenient vCard of the numbers so far.
“Man: God Ordered Him To Ram Woman At 100 MPH” - an NBC affiliate (www.11alive.com)
“A psychiatric evaluation has been ordered for a man.” Not the man in question apparently. Just a man. Any man.
“All hard drives eventually fail. And you didn’t back up your data, did you?” (link)
MAKE BACKUPS!
Good article.
So it seems that Kentuckians have enlisted an imaginary friend in their retarded stab at a terror policy (link)
From the article: “Government itself, apart from God, cannot close the security gap. The job is too big for government.”
Have fun with that, folks.
In recent days, the tenor of the debate between those who support the rights of gay people and those who do not has reached a fever pitch. It has become blatantly obvious that those who do not support equal treatment of gays have no thoroughgoing philosophy, though they claim the opposite.
Let’s start with a quick refresher. A philosophy is a system of thinking, based on reasoned arguments and principles. A reasoned argument is one which can stand alone and valid outside of contemporary mores and emotional diatribes. A principle is an argument which can be applied to a given situation to test it against the foil of reason.
To call a position which is based on emotional fear and in-group rhetoric a ‘philosophy’ is to do violence to the latter.
Moral Philosophy seeks to understand and define the arguably squishy concept of what is ‘right’.
Moral Philosophy which stems from the opinion of a person who takes his reasoning from a text which has been translated, over the course of about two thousand years by various people with their own lenses and biases (and in some cases specifically to appeal to a king or leader’s personal view), and which was written in tribal times is at best a fallible epistemological system. It is, in fact, a classical fallacy of reasoning — an appeal to an inappropriate authority. If an engineer feels a bridge will collapse due to its weak structure and demonstrably poor construction, your belief that it will collapse (based on his word) is an appeal to an appropriate authority. If your friend Jim the botanist feels it will collapse because it ‘doesn’t look safe’, and you agree with him based on his word, this is an appeal to an inappropriate authority. Unless you are a fluent speaker of Aramaic, or of Hebrew and Greek as they were spoken and understood two thousand years ago, you’re taking a lot of argument and justification on faith.
Faith is a dirty word. Faith means that you can’t justify a belief, so you choose to hold an unsupported opinion or position based on emotionality alone. Take for example the claim that “homosexuality is against God”. Setting aside for the moment the ridiculousness of ‘God’ per se, you must accept that to claim that if you know what God wants, you must have the same understanding as God.
To say, “I personally feel that a being so powerful and all-knowing as God would create entities which he abhors the existence of” forces you into the position of either recognizing that you are wrong (God must necessarily love all that he creates, otherwise as an omnipotent being he is vengeful and arbitrary), or that God is fallible (and cannot control what he creates, thereby sometimes creating something which he abhors). The argument that God creates people with different circumstances and opinions to ‘help them find their path’ equates God with a purveyor of cock-fights, equal parts evil and arbitrary. To disagree that this God created people with whom you disagree is to say that perhaps the gays were created by aliens, or in a lab, or by some other craft than that of God. This then further serves to undermine the power of God. Perhaps you’re thinking, “these gays, they were created by some other power, they’re among us and they look like us!”. Perhaps you watch too much Battlestar Galactica. As far as I understand, gays are not Cylons. Though at least one Model Six was a lesbian…
But I digress.
What is at issue is the ethical treatment of persons under the law. Believe whatever you like, but don’t force it on others, especially through law. Ethical treatment of persons under the law demands that each person is equally subject to and protected by the law as the next person. No rational person in today’s society (unless you’re severely racist, and in which case should probably not mention it to anyone) would agree that black people or short people who commit a crime should have different sentences, different prisons, or be tried in a different court than white or asian or tall people. Likewise definitions of property and interpersonal responsibility and rights should be considered only in terms of ‘persons’, regardless of age, race, sex, gender, orientation, or disability (including faith). The christo-fascist nutjobs* that supported Proposition 8 argued their case very craftily — they managed to get people to believe that their term ‘Marriage’ was the one at issue, not the secular definition ‘marriage’. I, as an atheist, wholly support the right of the church to define ‘Marriage’ however they like — everything else in their justification system is arbitrary, so why can’t one of their words be? The problem is, as it relates to law, ‘marriage’ has had, and should continue to have a different meaning — that contract of reciprocal rights and responsibilities between two persons, over and against the state and each other.
It is reasonable to request that this term ‘marriage’ in law be changed to prevent misunderstanding. This is one area where I cannot support the gay community definition of the word. It’s the word that is problematic. It’s emotional, and misused. If you’re gay and want ‘Marriage’, then you best find yourself a church that believes as you do. Simply to be members of a union of rights and responsibilities is quite different than that arbitrary religious ceremony. But the distinction has been (perhaps quite intentionally) blurred by both sides of the debate.
Much of the debate around the rights withheld from same-sex couples centers around the fact that many such rights are enumerated in law with gendered or otherwise biased terms. “Married couple”, “wife”, “husband”, etc. are terms which lend themselves to so-called ‘traditional Marriage’. Solution? Find. Replace. Save. Print. Yeah, there’s a lot of text to be changed. Might take a reasonably powerful computer a few minutes even.
The changes necessary to guarantee equal treatment under the law for gay persons needs to, I feel, be made at the Federal level. It’s great and such that individual states recognize same-sex marriages, while other’s don’t. But compare this to equal treatment of women and blacks in the nation. There aren’t states that are able to refuse to recognize the voting rights of women, or the legal personhood of black people. It’s absurd to even think about — I forget, is Mississippi a women’s rights state? Or is it Missouri?
It would be so simple to change, one wonders why it hasn’t already happened.
Ah, that’s right. People who claim to have a different ‘philosophy’ that conveniently doesn’t admit people they disagree with into the circle of rights-holders.
Ethical views based on faith, tradition, and transcendent belief are not philosophy, but religion.
If you’re going to push your religious views, at least be intellectually honest enough to call them religion. You’re pushing your religion, not your philosophy, into areas where religion should be absent.
So until the rights of gays are recognized as equal with ‘other people’ (?), I add my voice to the support of those with signs that read, “No More Mr. Nice Gay”. By arms or whatever means necessary.
*I want to be perfectly clear on this point — I think religion is silly. But I (and many others who share my opinion) typically divide religious people into two major camps: the Christianists (christo-fascist nutjobs), who are the most bellicose in their attempts to create some kind of weird christian nation, kill off the jews and gays, convert everyone to their religion, and nuke the hell out of the world until their end of days, and the Christians, who I personally think are still wrong and have a flawed outlook, but against whom I discriminate as I would against someone who likes music I don’t like. Notably rap music. I don’t think anyone should listen to it, and I turn it off whenever possible. The distinction is clear, and is quite important.
Well, Prop 8 passed, which is utterly retarded. Looks like the courts are going to take a look at it though, which is at least a step in the right direction.
In other news, I moved. Nearer to SDSU. Hopefully I’ll get back into going to the ARC… but I need a bike first.
I signed up for gyminee.com, which is some kind of social-network workout tracker. It looks neat. We’ll see how it works.
So much has been made lately of the debate over Prop 8 — if it doesn’t pass, you children will be forced to marry someone of the same gender, and so will you! If it doesn’t pass, kindergarten teachers will be required by law to hand out condoms to their classes, and pre-existing marriages will all be annulled. Oh wait, that’s not right. If Prop 8 passes, all that will have been accomplished will be a limitation on religious and civil rights.
And if it doesn’t pass? Everything will be the same as it is now.
I can tell you, right now it’s crazy out there. All those gays are assaulting people and forcing them into marriages, burning down churches, and abducting children. They’re getting married to scam the insurance system, tear apart straight couples, and spit in the eye of god.
Aren’t they?
There are churches that accept gay couples? Surely not! Has anyone told them that if Prop 8 passes, their beliefs will be not just a minority, but illegal? Oh wait. (”This will set bad precedent for the future when those whose rights we deny today are needed to defend our religious liberty.”)
I seem to recall something in that book the Christians seem to like so much about “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (“Ἀπόδοτε οὖν τὰ Καίσαρος Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ τῷ Θεῷ”) (Matthew 22:21). Legal rights and responsibilities are clearly of “Caesar”, and whatever religious rite you practice in your faith community is clearly of “god”.
Now, my position is that the state should not endow any marriage or religious union with legal rights and responsibilities, any more than a church should be forced to recognize within their rites the legal union of people with whom they disagree. For a gay or lesbian couple to walk into a Mormon church and demand that they be able to participate in the Mormon wedding ritual would be ludicrous — equally as ludicrous as a couple married in a religious ceremony to walk up to a Justice of the Peace and demand that they hold certain legal rights and responsibilities simply because a group of people in a building and their imaginary friend say they’re ‘married’.
As a thing of god, ‘marriage’ should not be legislated by ‘Caesar’ and any Christian who has opened a Bible should recognize this. Unless you’re a Christian who is trying to force your religion on others. And as I recall, there’s a couple things about that in the Bible as well.
Add to this that there were recently Christians worshipping a golden calf and it’s pretty safe to say that so many of these in-your-face Christo-fascists (help me spread the term!) really have no idea what their religion is actually about. Folks, if you’re going to do anything, at least do it right.
“Marriage” as such is a fundamentally religious concept.
The problem, as I see it, surrounding Proposition 8 is one of meaning.
The religious community appears to be using the term “marriage” to refer to their concept of the sacred union in the eyes of their deity. They take the word to be concomitant with their interpretation of their sacred text which stipulates the genders of entrants into the rite of marriage.
The gay community appears to be using the term “marriage” to mean “that package of rights and responsibilities enjoyed by two persons whom have committed to help in supporting each other” in terms of property rights, hospital visitation, etc. This is perhaps an over-reaching on the part of the gay community, albeit one that allows their goal, vis-á-vis equal recognition under the law, to be more easily known. It is rather time-consuming to express in any other words what the gay community seeks — “that package of rights and responsibilities shared by two persons as they relate to property rights, visitation rights, and sundry other items that presently are enjoyed by persons recognized as ‘married’ in the eyes of their church and/or faith community”. So, as a verbal shorthand, it is represented by “marriage”.
Perhaps there are gay and lesbian couples that wish to have their union recognized by their faith community, thereby strengthening their usage of the term and, obviously, there is significant overlap between the religious community and the gay community (and many churches, etc. have opened their doors to the gay faithful), but for the sake of discussing the problem of meaning, let’s ignore them for now. As far as I know, there’s no crusading militant group of gays seeking to force all churches in the state to recognize their same-sex unions, opinions to the contrary be damned. Though they would cut an interesting figure, running through the streets in simply fabulous uniforms with Gucci and Prada print AK47’s *to* *die* *for* (matching combat boots for the lesbians).
To legally enshrine the term “marriage” in law as “the union of a man and a woman” is really to do a disservice to religion. To legislate a definition of a religious concept is government involvement in church affairs. The state does not recognize the baptism, the bris, the bar mitzvah, etc. To legally stipulate that to be capable of forming a contract, and to own property, one must have a bar mitzvah is ludicrous and would probably not see any sort of acceptance, either from the religious or secular world. To be legally defined as a person only after being baptized is equally as insane. Each of these rites represents a change in recognition within a faith community, and no further. Marriage should be no different. Enough of a farce has been made of the supposedly sacred rite of marriage by the alleged believers in it — the nationwide divorce rate should be proof enough of this. “Turns out I don’t really like you, I know we promised before our deity and our friends and families to share an eternal bond, but I just really don’t like how you drive, and how you spend money, and the background image on your computer.”
My solution would be to abolish all legal definitions of the term “marriage” and to allow the state to only offer a contract of civil union. This union would encompass the rights and responsibilities presently enjoyed by millions of straight couples and, in recent times, gay and lesbian married couples. In the interest of preserving the existing rights-contracts between married couples, they must be ‘grandfathered’ in, with the same rights and responsibilities. Then, going forward, the people interested in being part of this contract of rights and responsibilities would be granted them by the state. Those interested in being recognized by their faith communities would participate in those rites which would allow them to be so. Churches and the like would be able to retain control of their word and interpretation of “marriage”, and the people who don’t see a need to do this (gay and straight alike) would simply not. There would be no pushing of definition onto faith communities. Heterosexual atheist couples would not have to endure a farcical church wedding simply to share the rights and responsibilities which they seek.
Let me put it this way: if Prop 8 passes, some people will be denied basic rights which are enjoyed by many others. If Prop 8 fails, everyone will be allowed to enjoy certain basic rights AND nobody will lose any rights.
Doesn’t take a logician to figure that one out.
VOTE NO ON PROP 8!
