Damn It, Ray!

So I've just watched the YouTube rendition of Ray Comfort's ABC debate with a couple atheists. I'll admit I only watched part of it (I got too pissed off to finish the whole thing), but one question struck me pretty quickly: Why are the people we see arguing for Christianity on television always so stupid? I know at least a dozen people who could have done a better job than Mr. Comfort in that debate, and half of them aren't even really Christians. I should mention that I'm not too happy with the atheists either (although I think one of them was at least smarter than Ray), but the burden of proof was not on them, so all they had to do was find out how Ray screwed up... a much easier task.
What really gets me is that I think Ray started out with a good point; the idea that when we see a building, we know there was a builder - when we see a painting, we know there was a painter. And then he does something really stupid. He uses this to say that since we "prove" the existence of a painter from the existence of a painting, we can "prove" the existence of a Creator from the existence of Creation. This is where he pissed me off. The atheist on the other end of the debate made the point that we can call the builder or the painter, while we cannot call the Creator.
Almost a good point, but this doesn't really prove that the builder built this or the painter painted this. Now what Ray could have done is said that it is reasonable to believe that the painter and the builder are not lying to us, and whatever documentation exists is accurate. We therefore take it on faith that the builders and painters we call are not lying to us, and that the documentation was not forged. We cannot prove this; but it is reasonable to believe it. By the same token, you could say that it is reasonable to believe in a Creator. You could say that we take things on faith every day of our lives - why are we so opposed to taking something like the existence of God on faith? But Ray doesn't do that. He continues to pretend that he can prove scientifically the existence of God, when really it is impossible to prove almost anything at all. Scientific proofs are not about what it true anyway, they are about what it is reasonable to assume is true. If people could see this, then they could make much more intelligent arguments.
People like Ray's biggest problem in these debates is the burden of proof; if they would stop thinking of it as proof and start thinking of it as reasonable belief, maybe they'd get somewhere. Or maybe they still couldn't go anywhere with it. I don't know. They might not be smart enough to ever get anywhere. I just wish we could start finding real intellectuals to consider intellectual.

"I wanna dedicate this book to my dick"

Excuse me while I laugh hysterically.

Guilt; the Destroyer of Good Deeds

I've decided that Uriel is right after all. People, by and large, are hedonists. But I don't just mean the prostitutes and tax collectors; I also mean the lady who helps out every week at the homeless shelter, and the boy scout who helps that lady cross the street. Ask somebody who does these "good" deeds why they do them, and you will, nine times out of ten, get a response similar to "I like helping people." People who do good deeds inevitably feel good about doing them; people who do bad deeds inevitably feel guilty about doing them. This does not, of course, prove that these consequences are why people choose to do good deeds and not bad ones, but once we accumulate a certain amount of purely circumstantial evidence, it would be foolish to ignore it.
Now I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. Certainly the homeless person doesn't care why that lady helps them every week, and that lady doesn't care why the boy scout helps her across the street. Our motives do not affect the consequences of our actions upon society. I think it does, however, affect the inherent goodness of those actions. A good deed done out of fear of guilt or out of desire to feel good about doing it is no more a good deed than a criminal sentenced to community service. It has good effects; it is not a good deed. It is, in essence, hedonism. And a hedonistic act that helps society is no less hedonistic because of that.
Through mechanisms such as guilt, we are programmed to do these "good" acts not out of selflessness, but out of our own selfish desires. I'm not arguing that guilt is a bad thing - our society depends upon said mechanisms to remain stable. As the Good Reverend once said, "People without guilt are called 'criminals'." However, it seems to me that only in a world without guilt can any truly selfless act occur.

The main flaw that I see with this idea is that of the martyr; or more specifically, an atheistic one. People like the ancient Christians or the modern suicide bombers do not count, as they believed they would receive their reward in Heaven. After all, what's a crucifixion or two compared to eternal bliss? But a true atheist who sacrifices themselves without any hope of a reward, now there's a problem. By the argument this post presented, the only reason an atheist would give their own life is that they are so afraid of the guilt they'd feel otherwise that they would rather die. Which, of course, is possible, but I don't think it would be provable.
Oh well. It was kind of a depressing idea anyway.

tDoI, Part Two

I'll come right out with it - I have been accused of being a racist. Rather than defend myself against this woeful injustice, I have chosen to respond in a far superior manner - attacking the person who accused me.

As someone who grew up in the age of computers, I spend a decent portion of time "on-line." This necessarily involves some degree of interaction with other people who spend time "on-line," and, of course, when people come together under condition of anonymity, disagreements must necessarily arise (The folks over at Penny Arcade lend their insight to this issue here, if you are interested). During one of these interactions, it seems that I fell victim to Mr. Gabriel's theory and said something that came off the wrong way. Frankly I don't see the offensive quality of my comment - I said "peace niggas!" before going "off-line" one day - and if anyone is really offended by that, they have much bigger problems than my racism to deal with. But anyway, that is actually not my point.

I was later contacted by someone who had heard of the incident. The first thing he asked me - and I laughed about this for quite some time afterwards - was "are u black?" Despite the aforementioned warm blanket of anonymity, I chose to tell this man the truth (if some random blogger is reading this, I'm about as white as it gets), after which he proceeded to chew me out and inform me that I should never say anything like that.

I have been waiting to see this person - who, I'm told, is black himself - again, so that I can ask him this question: "What would you have done if I had lied and said that I was black?"

The Definition of Irony

One of the interesting things about riding the subway or the bus around here is the newspapers people always leave in their chairs. Today, on my ride home, I picked up one of these papers and saw a story about the trial of two men for a shooting four years ago. Apparently, they were aiming for a man on the train, missed, and ended up - accidentally - shooting a pregnant woman in the stomach, killing the unborn baby.

They have both been convicted of first-degree murder and now face life sentences.

I don't think I really need to draw the comparison here, but allow me to quote a statistic from Wikipedia to make it painfully clear what I'm getting at: "According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 854,122 legal induced abortions in the US in 2003." Of the people who - purposefully - performed this near to a million abortions, how many do you suppose are now in prison for life?

Only connect!

I think the subway might just be the saddest place in existence. Nowhere else can you see so many people completely devoid of all emotion. It always amazes me when I look around at all the people who are concentrating so very hard on not looking at anyone. They stare at the advertisements. Listen to their IPod Nanos. Pretend to be sleeping. There are only so many ads on the train, you know - I think I've read them all about 50 times now. They're not really all that interesting. It's just something to look at so you don't have to make eye contact with the person across from you.
It reminds me of the song "Dark Blue," the refrain of which contains the words "have you ever been alone in a crowded room?" It's interesting to see so many humans with so little...humanity.

And that is the whole of my sermon.

"I Gotta Jet"

As you may know, this Thursday was the last episode of the show "The O.C." When I first heard of this program from my roommate last year, I thought it would be retarded and refused to watch even a few moments of it. Then a friend across the hall had a guest who happened to have the first two seasons on DVD. It was one of those situations where it's 2 am and you have nothing better to do, so we decided to watch one episode or another, I don't remember which. Anyway, at the end of the episode, when everyone else decided it was time to go to bed, I took the guy's DVDs and went back to my room, where I proceeded to watch one episode after another until 11:00 the next morning.
When the guest left and took his DVDs with him, I found someone on another floor who had the disks and watched his. When he got annoyed with me having his stuff all the time, I bought my own. For the next week, if I was not eating, sleeping, or in classes, I was watching the O.C. I saw the entire first two seasons in that week.
I was not impressed with the series finale. I actually didn't even watch the whole thing. The last two seasons have been little more than a mockery of the show's former glory. I will admit that I was a little sad on Thursday as I watched the O.C. come to an end, but it was not because I would never see a new episode. Rather, it saddened me to see such a good show in ruins.
So here's to the first two seasons of an amazing show. The candlelight vigil will be on Tuesday.