Archive for the ‘THE LONGEST CON’ Category
A Miracle, A Miracle!
The word “miracle” is actually a synonym for “wonder”, but in Latin: mirare, to wonder, also the root of words like admirable, mirror and so forth. Now, when “wonder” is used to describe an occurrence, as in Signs and Wonders, this is actually an elision for “an event at which people wonder”. It is not […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
Oh Lord, You Are So Absolutely Huge!
Theologians tell us that God has all the perfections, probably because an imperfect God is such a scary prospect that no one wants to think about it. (Unintelligent Design, anyone?) Among His attributes is also placed being “infinite”, despite the fact that this logically excludes His being the Creator. (If God has created a physical […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
A Religious Choice?
One of the commonest Christian rhetorical tricks is to claim that it is essentially a religious choice to posit the non-existence of God. If that is so, then it must be a communistic choice to posit the falsity of Communism.
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
Who Is Angry?
Listen – really listen – to the preacher shouting “The Lord is angry!” then ask yourself how likely it is that he is saying something about the world beyond his own endocrine organs. No, it is all just too transparent. The wires running behind the Wizard’s curtain lie in plain sight. We might as well […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
Slaves To Metaphor
Christianity rests entirely on two overlapping social metaphors, namely salvation and redemption. The former term, which means “rescue”, is more transparent than the latter, which means “repurchase”, e.g. of a slave or an insurance policy. Consequently, evangelicals ask if you are “saved” but not whether you have been “repurchased”. The reply that one “does not […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
The Meaning Bug
Our heads are not tabula rasa, open to considering the world without prejudice; information can only be processed by the brain designs that we actually possess. Natural selection in the human social environment may have produced an organised cognitive system responsible for the illusion of both personal immortality and personal destiny. There is experimental evidence […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Design Fault
The Unimaginability Of Death
When Descartes said that it is logically impossible to doubt that you are thinking, he meant that it was logically impossible to doubt that you are thinking at the same time at the same time as you are thinking. For I can quite easily doubt today that I was thinking yesterday. However, while there may […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
Baldwin And The Cook
The dying King Baldwin I of Jerusalem told his cook, “On this subject, as you love me, or as you used to love me when I was alive and well, so should you keep faith with me when I am dead. Disembowel me with the knife; rub me inside and outside especially with salt; fill […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
Immortality As Syntax Error
The “mind” is not an inhabitant of part of the body, but is one particular way of describing certain behaviours of that body; consciousness is a pattern of standing waves across the entire brain, an emergent function of the complexity of electrical phenomena; emotions are the subjective experience of changes in neurochemistry; and decisions to […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
Letting The Fly Out Of The Fly-Bottle
“Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language,” said Wittgenstein. And again: “The results of philosophy are the discovery of some piece of plain nonsense and the bumps that the understanding has got by running up against the limits of language.” Reading the Philosophical Investigations very late […]
In: Religion And Conceptual Muddle
