"I REALISED I HAD NO REASON TO BELIEVE" ........

..... "but the people around me believed without reason."

 REASON TO BELIEVE - ROD STEWART

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Today I watched an interesting YouTube clip of Simone de Beauvoir talking on existentialism and god.

I'm sure that the many readers, or certainly those with open minds (which might bring the number down to one) will enjoy watching this. Simone de Beauvoir was a very intelligent woman and a leader in French existentialism. She was a philosopher and writer and renowned for essays on ethics, feminism, and politics along with fictional works. She was a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

This is only a few minutes long but full of deep observations and some very worthy quotes including this one:

"I then realised God no longer existed for me - he had evaporated."

EXISTENTIALISM AND GOD - SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Robert and Sue have Covid - so I'm told. I'm sorry to hear that and hope that they get well soon - and isolate properly, taking all precautions including to make sure that the isolation period is long.

Fortunately Robert has access to a greater power than doctors and medication and no doubt he'll be thinking of bringing in the heavy brigade to sort things out. 

GET GONE COVID!

..... AND WE ALL KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TITANIC

 Richard had better watch out .... and I guess I should as well according to this:

FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO MOCKED GOD AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM

Spooky.

THE POLITICS BEHIND RELIGION IN AMERICA

 

RIGHT WING RELIGIOUS NUTTERY

Thom Hartmann, writing in SALON puts forward an interesting insight into the background to American right-wing politics and how its proponents control the American citizens' lives. The article in the link above is well worth a read.

"And what's so astonishing about the entire situation is that we have reached this point not because the American public wants religious doctrine running our law, and not because most religious people agree with an arrogant prick working at Walgreens.
Instead, it's because a small group of right-wing billionaires didn't want to pay their taxes, wanted to get rid of their unions and didn't want regulation of the pollution from their refineries and other operations.
Seriously.
They put billions of dollars over five decades into a project to seize control of the legislatures of a majority of the states, jam up the U.S. Congress and pack the Supreme Court — and it was all about taxes, unions and regulation.
So where did the religious nuttery come from?"  -Thom Hartmann.

Here are some outtakes for readers who have toilets to clean and invasive kikuyu grass to cut or are just too lazy to read:

• Right-wing billionaires didn't want to pay taxes and wanted to ditch their unions and pollute as much as they liked.
• The right-wing billionaires and the corporations and foundations aligned with them knew that most Americans wouldn't happily vote to lower billionaires' taxes, end unions and regulate gun manufacturers, and polluters so the strategy they came up with was to convince Americans that taxes aren't "the cost of a civil society" but, instead, a "burden" that they were unfairly bearing.
• Once Republicans were elected on that tax-cut platform, they'd massively cut the taxes of the morbidly rich while throwing a small bone to the average person.
• They convinced  voters that regulations that protect consumers and the environment are also "burdens" from an out-of-control "nanny state," even though such regulations save lives and benefit Americans far more than they cost.
• They convinced voters that unions aren't "democracy in the workplace" that protect workers' rights but, instead, an elaborate scam by corrupt union bosses to steal the workers' money.
  
• They spent five decades and billions of dollars to subsidise think tanks and policy groups at both the federal and state level, all turning out policy papers and press releases to further their agendas. 
• They sponsored right-wing talk radio and allowed billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Fox News to complement the propaganda campaign. 
• They hooked up with the National Rifle Association (NRA), which helped sponsor the 'Reagan Revolution' and were given laws that forbade the federal government from compiling gun death statistics and gave complete immunity from lawsuits to weapons manufacturers and sellers for the damage their products cause. 
• Reagan cut union membership in America almost in half, dropped the taxes on billionaires from a top 74% bracket down to 27%, and slashed thousands of protective regulations, particularly around guns and the environment.
• Over the 40 years of the 'Reagan revolution', America went from having about the same gun-ownership density as Canada (around 15 guns per 100 people) to the most in the world (over 120 guns per 100 people). 
• The rich Right supported religion and religious nutters to push their agendas of more wealth for the rich. They used arseholes like Jerry Falwell and the televangelists who built  multimillion-dollar empires while taking money via tithing from working class Americans. The message was that Jesus wanted you to get rich — riches, they said, are a sign of God's blessing. The televangelists openly defied Inland Revenue Service (IRS) regulations and preached politics from the pulpit, and millions of mostly non-political churchgoers were suddenly evangelists not just for Jesus but also for the Republican Party.
  
• Now that the Supreme Court has struck down Roe v. Wade, however, people are waking up to this unholy alliance between religious grifters in the white evangelical movement, the Supreme Court and the GOP. America is seeing clearly what the Republican coalition has brought it, from mass shootings to medical bankruptcies to student debt to homelessness.

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"I REALLY DON'T LIKE GOD"

This is really worth watching whether you like god or not: WHY RELIGION DOES MORE HARM THAN IT DOES GOOD IN THIS WORLD

Steven Weinberg, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins in a gentle and reasoned manner give a snapshot of this premise. Here are a few outtakes but it's worth watching the video which is only a few minutes long.

Steven Weinberg

Many people do really awful things out of sincere religious beliefs.

Putting god ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.

 Haven't we outgrown this....do we have to listen to this?

Science would be a corrosive to religious beliefs .... and it's a good thing too.

Christoper Hitchens

 

There is no totalitarian solution to these problems ... there is no Big Brother in the sky

This ghastly proposition (god as creator) is founded on a lie.

Richard Dawkins

You don't have to justify what you do, you simply shelter behind the statement "that's my faith and you're not to question that".

Faith is a terrible weapon because it justifies the performance of terrible acts. Don't believe something just because you're told it. Don't believe something because it's your tradition. Don't believe something because it's in a holy book. Look for the evidence and question sceptically.

WAS THE VIRGIN BIRTH A RESULT OF IVF?

 I dreamed this post last night and tried to write it all own today but it seems that I've forgotten most of it including the clever heading.

It was in my mind because yesterday or the day before when I was looking at the Catholic Church's ruling against abortion and contraception I noticed that the Vatican also outlaws In vitro fertilisation (IVF):

In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is a complex series of procedures used to help with fertility or prevent genetic problems and assist with the conception of a child. During IVF , mature eggs are collected (retrieved) from ovaries and fertilised by sperm in a lab.

 This from the not very consistent Catholic Church's head office that won't let women who don't want children use contraception to avoid getting pregnant, won't let women who are pregnant and don't want to be pregnant get an abortion and on the other hand won't let women who want to be pregnant but cannot, take steps to become pregnant.

Confused?

The Catholic Church opposes all kinds of assisted reproductive technology and artificial contraception, on the grounds that they separate the procreative goal of marital sex from the goal of uniting married couples. The Catholic Church permits the use of a small number of reproductive technologies and contraceptive methods such as natural family planning, which involves charting ovulation times, and allows other forms of reproductive technologies that allow conception to take place from normative sexual intercourse, such as a fertility lubricant. Pope Benedict XVI had publicly re-emphasised the Catholic Church's opposition to in vitro fertilisation, saying that it replaces love between a husband and wife.

Oh, thanks.

So, if the Catholic Church opposes in vitro fertilisation, saying that "it replaces love between a husband and wife" how does it explain the The Virgin Mary getting pregnant which seems to be the earliest form of IVF?

The Catholic Church's teachings tell us that the virgin birth of Jesus is the Christian doctrine that Jesus was conceived by his mother, Mary, through the power of the Holy Spirit and without sexual intercourse.  

So what did The Holy Spirit do to get Mary pregnant without disturbing the hymen and, I guess without any form of penetration apart from depositing the sperm inside Mary's uterus and fallopian tubes? It sounds like an IVF procedure to me.

How did The Holy Spirit carry the divine spunk given that it's a bird and doesn't have hands or pockets? 

Whose spunk was it anyway? It wasn't the Holy Spirit's as, being a bird it has a completely different reproductive system to humans whether divine ones or not and it couldn't have been Jesus's as he wasn't born yet. Was it God's? I guess it must have been. How long does God's spunk remain fresh then? Did The Holy Spirit have some kind of sealed container to carry it or was it just a soiled handkerchief? It's kind of mind-boggling to think of old Goddy up there having a wank with The Holy Spirit flying around waiting for him to finish.

There are just so many unanswered questions.