Category: Atheism

Weekend wrap up.

I can’t believe Pukka Orchestra didn’t make this list.

– this list will be food for arguments for the next dozens of years.

The church supper went great – as we are a caravan of faith at the moment, with no settled home (besides the Gathering Place), I now have dishes from the banquet to do. Fortunately I have a dishwasher ;). I also performed The Tapioca Song. The Beacon Home Companion was even better than last year, and that’s saying something. Don Hauka is a genius… There, I said it! And everybody else was wonderful too… Derek’s antics as “The Chalice” (the Unitarian Superhero) were wonderful as always.

Sometime today I will be getting the Quicktime version of the Tapioca Song video, and THEN I’ll post it to Youtube. Stay tuned, as they say. Katie K saw it yesterday and pronounced herself entertained.

Katie has moved back in with Paul and Keith and now is a resident of Planet Bachelor. She has her own bathroom too, the lucky stiff. I suspect she will greatly appreciate her new digs.  Her boyfriend… for such he is, still, alas, has a couple of three inch souvenirs from the cop dogs who took him down last week.  He has sworn to mend his ways.  And I’m going to lose forty pounds by Christmas.  I have seen Katie’s new tattoo, or at least the start of it.  It is a foot long snake wrapped around a heart.  (Fanboys note… it’s modelled after Katchoo’s tat from Strangers in Paradise)
On a happier note…. last night the four of us (me Paul Keith & Kate) did something we hadn’t done in the best part of a year. We watched a movie together! Cats crawled all over us purring happily! It was Les Misérables with Liam Neeson. I had to extend my booking on the car and then *&$^ forgot that I had to put gas in it, and then *&$*&! forgot to get a receipt so had to dash back for it. Didn’t get home until almost two. My weekend has thus far been enlivened by the existence of the progressive lenses perched on my nose. Driving was, as they say, interesting. I suppose I could have extended the booking and driven out to Richmond to participate in filking at VCon but not even the prospect of vixy and Tony performing her stellar “Mal’s Song” could make me want to drive out there. I’ll get a report in the fullness of time from Tom and Peggy.  Vcon of course has been rendered more interesting, at least in terms of GETTING there, by that 82 year old dude flying his plane into a building three blocks from the Con hotel….
My apartment is a disaster but unfortunately, as I was trying to wind down from my yesterday in the wee sma’s this morning, I picked up Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer and, well, like that. I’m not sure how much housework I’ll be doing today. Especially since my laundry’s done. At first the book annoyed the snot out of me, and now I can’t put it down. There’s one of the most succinct arguments for atheism I’ve ever seen in it. Hey, this is fair use, isn’t it?

From Chapter VIII of the Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, 1980. Thecla, a courtesan, speaks:

“One can’t found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past – they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.”

As soon as I hear from the videographer, I’m going to head off to RCH to visit somebody from work who’s in hospital, unless she’s home already, in which case I’ll try to call her.

From Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing Post today.

About sums it up…

For my part, I’m a second-generation atheist. I think that our experience of the numinous is both undeniable and entirely biological: the state of spiritual peace is the result of tickling some evolved center of our brain, a bit of neurology that conferred a survival advantage on our ancestors whose numinous hallucinations of a higher order in the universe drove them to catch more antelopes, eat better, and have more babies. I have no need of, nor interest in a supernatural god or a supernatural universe.

yesterday

For Can Con, and because it’s a great movie, and because after the Heavy Stuff I wanted a comedy, I watched the Barbarian Invasions with Jeff.  It is a great film.  I must see it again.  Also, I desired about ten times to correct the goddamned subtitles, because a couple of the times they lacked nuance and verve.
Hiking with Hunter S Thompson.

We dropped by Gadget House on the way out of Victoria, where I found out that my mother had a rubber glove full of ice in the fridge.  If you have a rubber glove full of water, tied off at the wrist, and you put it on a shelf in the freezer, once frozen it ends up looking like it has joints.  I wanted to take a picture of it, it was extremely disquieting.

Yesterday the dejunking was clothes and shoes.  It went very well; I acquired a really nifty pyjama set which is about as sexy as a hairball, but fits perfectly.

There is a LOLcats version of the Holy Bible. God is referred to throughout as “ceiling cat” (which should make any of you who know who ceiling cat is fall about laughing) and I read the first chapter of the Book of Job, which had me screaming with laughter so loud that Jeff was telling me to shut up because I was scaring the cats.  Or maybe that was another time. I do scream with laughter, it’s one of the many things about me which are childlike.

Good luck with that, Mr. Wisdom

I am sorry to report it, but you HAVE no rights left. 

All you have is the inherent laziness and slowness of bureaucracy to help you now, because your fellow citizens don’t even know what’s on the bill of rights.

In other news, European Parliament takes a cosmic whizz on Creationism.  Chances of this happening in the US and Canada.  Zip, Nada, Nix, Nyet, not a freakin’ chance.  This should be required reading for every goddamned politician on the planet.  The wording is bang on.  Please read it.