The Pessimist

I have been coming to the conclusion that god is in the brain.

In ancient times, gods lived on Mount Olympus and looked down on us and meddled in our lives. Mostly they liked to get laid and cause trouble thwarting our puny plans. There were also gods in the forest, under the sea, in the storm clouds hurtling lightning bolts, etc.

Then some desert based deep thinkers decided that there was only one true god, and that we were made in his image, and that he lived in heaven. Presumably they had been to the mountain tops and didn’t find heaven there, so they moved it into the sky. Heaven is obviously “up there” because that is where all the artists painted it. And Mohammed flew there on a winged horse and Jesus went there floating on a cloud. At least, a few people told us that’s what they saw, and therefore, that must be the way it happened. Why else would they say that and why wouldn’t we believe them?

Trouble is, we have been above the sky now. We’ve been everywhere on the planet: to the poles, under the sea, deep into the earths crust and into every remote place. No heaven was found. We’ve been to the moon, we’ve sent observation platforms to the very edge of the solar system. No heaven was found.
We’ve made devices that can look at molecules. We’ve broken atoms into their component bits. No god, no heaven. We’ve created optical and radio telescopes to look to the very beginning of time and to the farthest reaches of the universe. No god, no heaven.

Where is that little bugger hiding?

Oh, maybe he is in an alternate universe, or in a different time slightly out of phase with ours. But this seems to fall victim to Occam’s razor. As we increase our experience and capabilities, the only “gaps” left to look in become more and more improbable. Do we really need the explanation that there is a big bearded man who created everything and knows everything and is all powerful. who lives in an alternate universe and really cares about us, individually and personally?

We were made in his image: two hands, two feet, two eyes, air breathing, food eating, testicle swinging bearded know it all/nothing. He’s like us in every way (sorry about that testicle and beard thing women), except that he is invisible and lives somewhere we can not see or go to until we die and then can never come back. Maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t actually exist. That would be the simplest explanation.

The only alternative explanation is he lives in our brain. He is the best possible me. I am made in his image because he is me. But that also means that he is you for you, and she is she for her. That truly does make god infinite. But unfortunately, it doesn’t do much for society as there is nothing that compels us to be or want to be like our inner good.

I obviously don’t see the whole picture because my view is filtered through the media. I get most of my US news from the Daily Show and the CBC.
But the dying days of the campaign have revolved around the Republicans trying to paint Obama as the second-coming of Karl Marx.

Calling Obama a “socialist” is the equivalent of calling

• the Pope an atheist
• Mother Teresa a terrorist
• Sadam Hussein a populist
• Joseph Stalin a humanitarian

Do people actually believe this, or is this just campaign desperation?
Interviews at US rallies (John Oliver of the Daily Show talked to Palin and Obama supporters) invariably show followers of one stripe convinced and terrified that if the other guy gets elected, then the first thing to happen will be the total destruction of the United States.
Come on people … really?

Is this just clever editing? Or is this what people really believe? When Jay Leno does “Jay Walking", he invariably shows people who don’t know:

• who is the current vice president
• what country is on their northern border
• who were US allies in WWII
• who “we” fought in the Civil War
• who is the president of Russia

These segments leave the impression that Americans are morons. Jay hints that some editing goes into the process, but how many average Joes does he talk to before he finds the 5 dolts featured? I hope 95 people got the answers right, but I fear that these really may have been the first 5 people he approached.

Back to the campaign … is it really a choice between my candidate and total annihilation? Isn’t the choice really between two candidates who are both upstanding citizens, patriots, heavily vetted, proven, intelligent, honourable individuals. You may prefer one over the other because of certain policy minutiae, or just personal attributes, but the other candidate should also be perfectly acceptable. Why must the campaigns pretend that one is the only hope and the other is Satan incarnate?

Are Americans so stupid that they are actually manipulated by this hyperbolic rhetoric? I guess tomorrow we’ll find out.

OK, now I’ve seen it all. It’s all over the news: Sara Palin says Obama is a socialist because he wants to take away the money from the rich and give it to everybody. Joe the Plumber is concerned that Obama plans to raise his taxes so that he won’t be able to afford to buy the $250,000 a year business he’s currently employed by.

Un-fucking-believable. As I understand it, Obama has proposed raising the personal tax rate on incomes over $250,000 from 36% to 39% (and no change on rates on income below $250k). If Joe the plumber buys this business and has an income of $260,000 then his taxes will be increased by $300. Woopdy-fucking-doo. I think Joe’s bigger problem is where is he going to borrow the money to buy and run this business, now that the uber-fucking-rich have destroyed the economy and made it impossible for anybody to get credit.

The Republicans have cut every conceivable tax on the very rich – income tax, capital gains tax, capital tax, death tax. And that was supposed to help the economy grow strong. Because rich people make the economy strong and taxes are just a drain on their hard work ethic and the government is just going to waste it anyway. Well, do you think that it is maybe time for a rethink?

I’ve never understood the American hierarchy of cuss works. In ascending order of offensiveness it’s bastard, fucker, mother-fucker, liberal, socialist, communist. Obama is now reached the penultimate insult category, so I think that means he must be saying something right - something that drives the stupid people crazy. All the stupid poor Americans who keep voting for republicans who keep giving bigger tax-cuts, incentives and now out-right bail-outs to the rich. “Yeah! I’d like to vote against my best interests. I need to vote for the republicans so the democrats don’t ruin the country".

Every Republican since Reagan has cut taxes and continued spending like drunken sailors on shore-leave. Meanwhile, they’ve exported jobs to Mexico and China, and they’ve run up the biggest national debt, and the largest trade deficit and fiscal deficit ever. Solid stewardship of the economic purse.

The government can find a trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street. They can find a trillion dollars to fight a war in Iraq. But they can’t find any money to ensure that their citizens have access to health care. The best republican proposal is to let the private sector handle health care and he’ll give them $5,000 to pay the premium. (I believe the average premium is already considerably more than that, and with tricky deductibles, co-pays and out-right denial of service, privately insured Americans are regularly bankrupted by medical expenses). But Americans will vote for this in large numbers, and may yet elect another republican. How stupid.

I couldn’t believe they elected Ronald Reagan. I thought Bush 2’s election in 2000 was a fluke, but his decisive reelection in 2004 proved it. Americans are stupid.

ThePessimist sees the odds this way:

• McCain victory 50%
• Obama victory 45%
• George Bush cancels the elections due to the severity of the economic crisis and serves a third term 5%

Tell me I’m wrong.

I’ve only recently become an addict of youtube. Occasionally somebody would send me a link to some funny animation or cute animal vid, I’d watch it and that would be it. If I looked around at all, the most popular videos all seemed to be of face-pierced youths crashing their skateboards, getting hoofed in the nuts, or singing or dancing badly. Or sometime all 4 at once.

But I put “atheist” into the search box and fairly quickly came across padcondell.

I watched it, then watched another and another. Pat has been publishing these videos for about a year, and he currently has 45 posted on youtube. I watched 7 or 8 at my first sitting, killing several hours watching them, and some rebuttals and reading the latest comments.

His shtick is to deliver a 4 to 6 minute monologue directly to camera. His voice is conversational, pleasant, humourous and imbued with a plummy London accent. His topics speak against Islamic extremism, reasonable accommodation, political correctness, and religion in general.

The most amazing thing is, after watching about 20 of his 45 vids, he has not uttered a single word that I disagree with. Stated another way, he says exactly what I have been thinking (and saying on this website), only he says it better, with more wit and humour.

If I weren’t an atheist, I’d make him my prophet or even my god. But I am, and I don’t believe in that kinda bullshit, so the best I can do is express my admiration for the man. By putting his face out there, he is taking a not inconsiderable risk that some religious wacko could whack him.

If he were running for political office, I would definitely vote for him. Canada could use a politician like him.

For more patcondell videos, see his youtube index.

That Winnipeg bus incident was a real shocker. What a nasty way to wake up. My sympathy goes out to the victim’s friends and family, and I hope that Mr. Vince Weiguang Li spends the rest of his life in prison.

There’s a lot of commentary already in the blogosphere about this incident. Comments like Canadians are wussies. Why didn’t anybody take this guy out? I’ll never visit Canada again. I’ll never take a bus again.

I’ve commented before on tragedies of this sort (Virginia Tech). I don’t think I can fault the people on the bus for basically running away. Unlike an airplane, a bus can quickly stop and you can bug out. On a plane, you’re basically stuck there and the situation will likely get worse, so the passengers would be expected – post 9/11 – to overwhelm the bad guy. But how do you go about disarming a mad man on a bus. The space is very crowded, it wouldn’t be easy to mount a multi-person defense. Unlike a classroom or office space where a madman could be surrounded and jumped, a bus would be a single file line up to a serial stabbing. The victim was a goner by the time the slumbering bus passengers were aroused. He couldn’t be helped. I do believe the right action was taken. Just get out. Like when a crocodile leaps out of the drinking hole to take a wildebeest, the rest of the herd is best to just run away.

The other comments are an exaggeration in the other direction. Nothing like this has ever happened in Canada before, or on a bus anywhere in North America. Your life is no more endangered today than it was yesterday. This event was totally without precedent, and there is no reason to believe it was anything other than an isolated incident.

But I’m sure, again, that Muslims across Canada breathed easier this morning … praise be to allah that the crazy man was not a muslim, but a crazy Chinese guy.