Coincidence: The Video

Open-mindedness

video via You Made Me Say It

Hitler the Christian

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognised these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who-God's truth!-was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple...
-Adolf Hitler

This bombast may have been occasioned by circumstantial expedience. But it is at the least suggestive of identification with a violent, vengeful God, all the more remarkable in its abstraction from the largely irenic context of the Gospels. It is probable that Hitler's imagination of himself as an Aryan Jesus-come with sword to cleanse the world of the money-changers-was not a fugitive state of the man's mind. An identification with a destructive, omnipotent being, its incorporation into his grandiose self, or a reinforcement or sanction by it, may well have played a part in the boundless rage and destructiveness that Hitler unleashed on the world.
-from Against Religion by Tamas Pataki

Corporations, Walmart and the Free Market

Saint Walmart? (here, the question mark is not superfluous)

All libertarians agree that the various non-market policies, subsidies, regulations, as well as penalties and taxes, ought to be abolished. But I honestly have never seen a coherent argument that shows that Walmart would be anything but bigger and even more prosperous in a real free market.-Stephan Kinsella

Ron Paul on North Korea

Watch It

While visiting my parents recently something happened to my watch, or maybe something happened to me, I'm not sure, but the watch disappeared. I immediately suspected my mom (she's always the Prime Suspect in such cases, due to her inability to leave the property of others untouched) figuring it was another example of her neatness obsession, which causes her to remove things from the place you left them and put them instead in place where you'll never think to look for them, i.e, where they're out of view.

Well, unsurprisingly, she denied having anything to do with the mysterious vanishing. I searched in vain for the missing timepiece, looking high and low, but not finding it. With my infant Catholic background (I was baptized but thereafter never did anything with the religion of my birth) I should have perhaps called up St. Anthony for assistance, which would have proved useless, but might have inspired some extra searching on my part, which might have lead to the location of the watch, which could have lead me to attribute the finding to the saint (if, that is, I was still of a superstitious mind).

As it turned out, the watch (a recently purchased one) did not show up and I've been forced to repeatedly look at my cell phone to learn the time, which is inconvenient when I'm on my breaks at work. I prefer just glancing at my wrist to see when I must return to to my self-imposed slavery.

No doubt my watch will turn up after its battery has died, and of course, as is usual, I will not bother replacing the battery. It will join its sister watches in a special drawer dedicated to a special kind of watch, those that are correct only twice a day ( a specialness that they share with certain people, such as Christians, who are only right by accident).

Googlegrad

Here is a comment I wrote in reaction to this post by The Commentator.

Funny you should write this post. I've been thinking the same thing recently. I was even going to write a post titled "Overthrow Google". They are simply getting too powerful.

Also, if Google doesn't like you for some reason, they can manipulate where you end up in their search results. This would be tolerable if Google didn't control 70% or more of the search engine market. With "google" now nearly synonymous with "search", the problem becomes obvious, and so does Google's enormous power.

The same thing is happening with YouTube (owned by Google), and again, when people go looking for videos, it's YouTube, not some other service.

I recommend using Yahoo search and others more frequently now, just to increase the competition somewhat.

I haven't being doing a lot with my blogspot.com blog lately for these same reasons. When you're on Blogger, Google ultimately owns you, which is why I've been thinking of moving my blog and domain name to a self-hosted site using Wordpress as my blog platform. I don't want to ever be under any one's thumb.

I once defended Google, but I'm getting tired of them now. Power corrupts, after all.

As to when (or if) I'll move this blog, even I don't know the answer, but I suspect I will, eventually.

Emergent Information in the Absence of Central Design

The idea of emergent information in the absence of central design is what theists and statists cannot understand, or at least DO not understand. This is a very important principle of the reality that we exist in, and it is a MAJOR stumbling block for most people that prevents them from agreeing with, or even understanding, the atheist and anarchist (and scientific) arguments.

The Power of Individualism

Crackpot In Philosophers' Clothes

The world just makes more sense from the perspective of Christian theism than it does from any other perspective.



Everything that Christians use to criticize their opponents is in fact a flaw of their own belief system.

Are Taxes Payment For "Services"?