Why Don't You Just Kill Yourself?

You don't think life has a purpose. In fact, you think that it is not only not sacred, but rife with suffering, and is often more trouble than it is worth. You even discourage other people from bringing other people into this dangerous world of agony, unfairness, and sorrow. So, why don't you just kill yourself? Answer?

A person can dislike his existence to varying degrees, including up to the
point where he’d just as well end it all; and yet, he might choose to endure out
of fear, like Hamlet. Or out of love for people who depend on him, or out of a
sense of personal responsibility to his friends, his community...whatever. Or
maybe he just can’t bring himself to commit a violent act, even against his own
person (this would be very tough for me, I think). In short, there are a host of
imaginable reasons why a person might not like life, and yet refuse to take that
final step.

In addition to what this article has to say in defense of its author, I also might add that his position, one that is against people conceiving new life, is not equivalent to wanting to kill people, himself included. There is a major difference between dying and never having been born to begin with. Simply not coming into being involves no suffering, no pain, no injustices, and leaves no people behind mourning your departure. Dying can involve suffering, it requires the permanent loss of your consciousness, whether you ever wanted to be conscious to begin with, it is irreversible, it prevents you from being able to continue your now established addiction to existence, and leaves plenty of people who knew you alive to deal with the aftermath of the void that you leave during your departure. They are two very distinct processes, in that one is the undoing of something that already is part of reality, whereas the other is the prevention of every introducing the thing that will inevitably be undone at all. Even if it ultimately results in nonsentience, it should be clear that never being alive at all is far less strenuous, far less painful, and far less potentially destructive, than being alive and suddenly dying, whether by your hand or not.

Anyway, happy thoughts.

He's Baaaaaaaack.

I am almost glad to see that Dinesh is leaving a giant load of verbal feces on our collective cyber doorstep again. Surprise, surprise, he doesn't like Religulous! I would have never guessed that, since D'Souza is so complex, has such a rich sense of humor, and is generally accepting of alternate points of view.

Bill Maher is a very irritating fellow

The irony burns me.

but the truth is that Maher is offensive because he has an offensive personality. He seems chronically unable to wipe the smug arrogant smile off his face, which is especially galling because this arrogance is entirely unsubstantiated by intellectual ability.

Arrrgghhh! Incineration! I now know how spontaneous human combustion occurs...from moronic a-holes like Dinesh calling other people moronic a-holes.

Maher employs his trademark sneer to poke snide, sarcastic fun at people, usually people who are markedly less sophisticated or culturally established or economically well off than he is.

....and?

Sure, the movie does provide some laughs, but as you will see, they are easy laughs that score no real points against Maher’s intended target.

Sure, it doesn't score any "real points", if you mean that you were expecting the film to tear down the entire edifice of religion through argumentation over the course of 90 minutes while still being entertaining. The entire film was just supposed to be "easy laughs", which was supposed to add to underlying premise that religion is a prime source for such "easy laughs", due to being laughable.

Here we get an unsubtle introduction to one of Maher’s central themes: people are going to blow up the world in the name of God.

Tell us why that is not consistent with many religious ideologies, and what would possibly stop the people who think the end is nigh and go to war at a drop of a hat from doing so. Honestly, I am interested in hearing why you think that this isn't at all possible, considering how far our fundie-in-chief has tried to bring us along that path.

Maher, however, cannot find anyone to actually say that.

Yes. Curious that. Inconsistency is a blessed thing.

The best he can do is ambush harmless middle-aged people at tourist sites and force them to confess they think we may be living in the last days.Maher seeks to make the very strained point that these are Christian Bin Ladens who would stop at nothing to usher in the Second Coming of Christ.

If there ever was a strawman argument, in the history of all of mankind, this would be it.

anti-religious bigotry.

I can't help but scoff whenever I hear that phrase.

At times he says he is an agnostic, who simply holds the rational position that he doesn’t know what comes after death. But if you don’t know whether there is an afterlife, and even if you have no reason to believe in one, it hardly makes sense to attack those who hold a different view. After all, you yourself are in the dark and they might very well be right.

Agnostics also know that they don't know whether there is or is not a god, God, or gods, more pertinently. And, Maher states explicitly that the reason why he is "attacking" people for holding beliefs on the subject is because they hold those beliefs with certainty, when he thinks that everyone should have rational doubts about such subjects. He, himself is in the dark, but so is everyone else, and he wants people to realize that this is true, instead of pretending to be able to tell us the color of the wallpaper in an unlit room.

By way of analogy, I don’t believe in unicorns, because there is no evidence for them, but I haven’t written any books called “The Unicorn Delusion” or “Unicorns are Not Great” or made any documentaries denouncing unicorns.

By way of analogy, this analogy would only be significant if there was a sizeable amount of the world around you that did believe in unicorns, believed that this belief was relevant to morality, and that the rules set forth by their unicorn masters should be imposed on the world around them.

Like Christopher Hitchens, he is an “anti-theist” who hates the Christian God. And the main reason seems to be, as Maher himself says at one point, that this God has rules that interfere with Maher’s sex life.

ORLY? I don't remember that part. I wonder what Christians hate about Brahma that make it so that they are unwilling to worship him? I assume it is because it interferes with the ability to eat beef, right? And Christians despise Allah because they don't want to deal with the hassel of worshipping five times a day, and fasting periodically, right? Right?

You get the picture: Maher is in search of weak opponents that he can embarrass.

...and?

On one occasion Maher interviews a Jesus actor at a Holy Land Experience who seems like a carefully selected dummy. But when Maher asks him to explain the Trinity, the actor says it can be understood in the same way that water appears in three quite different forms: in a solid form, as ice; in liquid form, as water; and in the gaseous form of water vapor. Maher is completely stumped by this and rendered speechless.

"Speechless" doesn't necessarily mean that it was a good argument. Just that it was baffling. The comparison is neat, but it necessitates that the Trinity isn't really a trinity, but rather just three different states of the same entity, which cannot exist at the same time. The Father is liquid, solidifies into the Son, or evaporates into the Holy Spirit, but he is still essentially the same thing (God), just in a different form. And as such, any two of the Trinity cannot exist at the same time . So, unless you are willing to suggest that they are not just separate states of the same thing, (and thus, irrelevant distinctions), but separate entities as well, the comparison fails. And, if you do suggest that they are not only separate states, but separate entities too, we go back to the original problems with the Trinity.

At the end of the discussion, just before Maher’s triumphant exit, the truckers hold hands and pray for Maher. This is the sole moving moment in the film, and in a way that Maher doesn’t realize, it raises these simple people entirely above his snide sophistication.

LOLWUT? Yes, it is a moving moment and it portrays the truckers as very kind and sympathetic people. Which Bill himself remarks on (though, in doing so, he takes a jab at Christians in general, who are deemed to not behave in such a respectable and loving fashion). The fact that they couldn't answer his arguments is irrelevant, because they are still good people, and were willing to deal with the doubts that Bill wants people to have. They were supposed to be shown as good people, which they are, rather than just a punching bag (which others resemble more closely).

The only intelligent believers who are interviewed are geneticist Francis Collins and Father George Coyne, former head of the Vatican Observatory. Both of them are given only a few seconds, for fear that they might undermine Maher’s big theme that religious people are suffering from a kind of mental illness.

"Mental illness"? Strawmanning again, are we? The reason why he doesn't dwell on "intelligent believers" is because their beliefs are not representative of what mainstream religion is. That is why Maher jumps back and forth between a wide variety of different believers: so that he can get a lick of all of the different flavors of the absurd.

Actually Maher’s points—that there is no historical evidence for Jesus, that the main themes of Christianity are all derived from other ancient religions, that miracles are impossible, that religion is responsible for the mass murders of history—are all highly debatable. Maher simply ignores the good evidence on the other side.

Provide some evidence then, dammit! I concede that religion is not responsible for all mass murders in history, but aside from that, the historical existence of Jesus in any relevant form is iffy, and the pagan roots of Christianity are undeniable (the degree, however, may be). As for miracles...it is solely dependent on your definition of "miracle". Most of the definitions I've found are damn near irrelevant, however. Get crackin', or quit whinin'.

I would love to debate him on his show, and can easily show that Maher’s self-image as an intellectual is largely bogus.

Funny how the only way that you could be considered an "intellectual" is in a debate format. Pretty much anywhere else, you come off as an obvious nincompoop. I guess it is because a debate is the only time that you can actually "win" by rattling off complete nonsense and half-truths, but doing so convincingly, which seems to be the only talent windbags like yourself possess.

And because he cannot stand up to real opposition, I doubt that Maher has the guts to take me up on this offer.

The chest beating has begun. Dinesh, the chickenhawk, the intellectual lightweight with entitlement issues, is once again calling out someone to come debate him, because he desperately needs the validation that comes from someone who is actually known by the general public. I wonder if this challenge is because he got bored of throwing ad hominems at Dawkins for not being willing to deal with his Gish Gallops, or if this is just due to Dinesh being a complete opportunist. Hard to say.

Ultimately he is an intellectual coward who relies on the argumentum ad ignorantium—the argument that relies on the ignorance of the audience.

And spontaneous human combustion strikes again.

Chess Strategy: A Metaphor.

"King me, beyotch" gambit: Tactic used by people who have no idea what the hell they are doing. Not used as a deliberate attempt to set your opponent off balance, but merely due to your complete lack of knowledge of the rules.
The Back-castling ploy: An attempt to apply a rule that does not exist formally (or sometimes, beyond your own mind) to a game while in mid-play. Often done through emotional blackmail, threats of taking your twelve fallen pieces and going home, or outright deception. The reference is to castling which can only be done once per game, based on its conditions, while a person hypothetically attempting this ploy literally would insist that you can continue to castle over and over again, as long as a rook and king are in the right position.
"Thimble to B-7" tactic: Introducing not just an alternate interpretation of an old rule, but an entirely new rule that actually isn't true to the actual premise and spirit of the actual rules. More often than not, this rule has no precedent. Not necessarily a bad thing if agreed upon beforehand. If so, it is merely trying a new take on an old game. If not, it is a combination of back-castling and "king me beyotch".
The "Your Queen was always at D-4" shuffle: A combination of obfuscation and outright cheating, while still seemingly following the rules. More common for people who actually know what the hell they are doing, but still not enough to succeed by playing on equal ground.
Teabagging the Bishop: An overly enthusiastic response to a minor victory, meant entirely to demoralize the opponent and rattle them. Ties into Uber-Pawnage.
Uber-Pawnage:When you attempt to intimidate your opponent without ever presenting an actual strong offensive. It is a strategy based on winning almost entirely based upon putting forward a tremendous ego, or tricking your foe into questioning otherwise effective tactics based upon your presumed strength.
The "I Thought We Were Playing Backgammon" Strategem: Instead of changing the rules, or playing incorrectly, you decide to outright demand to play a different game entirely, which you are more likely to win. Good for the desperate and pitiful.
The "We Were Always Playing Backgammon" Trick: Game switching meeting outright deception. Hard to pull off, but very rewarding when it does.
Flip the Board: Walking away from a game...with vengeance. Often results after an ineffective attempt to introducing new rules, cheating, or changing the game. If more than one player was involved, you may or may not ruin the game for them with your departure. Regardless, you will claim victory regardless of your board position when leaving. A prized tactic for the childish.
A "My Catapault Turtle Launches Dragon Champion Into Your Castle Shattering Your Flotation Ring And Crushing Your Monsters" Checkmate: Goes beyond a "King Me, Beyotch" Gambit. They are so beyond the rules of the game, or even common sense in general, that it would take more effort to explain why they are wrong, thus extending the period of time in which you must suffer with forcing them to follow the rules, then it does to just concede defeat to their bizarre interpretation of the game. Basically, a lost cause.
The "Discourse on the Historical, and Metaphysical Implications of the Representation of the Pawn in Chess's Gameplay Dynamics, and Why This Suggests that Pawns Should be Allowed to Move Backwards" Ploy (Blinding with Bullshit, for short) : An attempt to fatigue your opponent into accepting a back-castling ploy by piling on heaps of rhetorical devices, appeals to irrelevant issues, or just outright deceit. A filibuster of fallacious justification.
The "It's Just A Game" Gambit: Justifying your own manipulation of the rules to your opponent by dismissing the overall game played as insignificant.
The Nihilistic Chessmaster: As the "It's Just A Game", accept that it is done with borderline "Blinding with Bullshit" narrative, and justifies real injustices and exploitations by dismissing the relevance of not just the game being played, but everything in general. A pawn fallen to the diagonal movement of a rook would only have fallen eventually anyway, and his trace in the universe remains just as infinitesimal as it would have been had he survived.
The "Defeat is Victory" Battlecry: When you decide that, after having already finished losing a game, that it was not only irrelevant, but that your loss is a testament to some sort of superiority in your own nature (or that you are superior despite the insignficant loss). Rare, but annoying.

Main Point of the Last Presidential Debate

"Joe the Plumber" wants the government built from the ground up in order to specifically cater to his needs. And taxes are his enemy. Socialists...


P.S. Obama, at very least, did very well at refuting the Ayers association and the "infanticide" crap about his voting record on abortion (which, prophetically, I wrote about yesterday). Unfortunately, that was probably the only area where progress was made...forcible attempts to get rid of ill-founded Republican talking points. Of course, didn't stop McCain...who simultaneously accused Obama of having too many negative ads. Nice...

Conservapedia: A less funny Uncyclopedia?

LOLMUSLIM.

Pure, Unbridled Awesome.

The entire article is gold, but the ending takes the cake:

At the end of the debate, each candidate is given time to make a "closing statement." I could give each candidate specific advice about what to say, but let's face facts. There's only ONE WAY for this year's candidates to do the impossible—which is win the debate AND win the election. Here's how in eight easy steps:
1. Listen quietly and respectfully as your opponent lists his qualifications for the job.
2. When he is finished, pick up the box sitting at your feet and carry it to the center of the stage.
3. Open the box.
4. Pull out the severed, still-dripping head of Osama bin Laden.
5. Close the box.
6. Walk directly to the White House, because you've already got the job.
7. Raise your arms in victory.
8. Not you, John McCain... you can't raise your arms.

Heartwarmingly Sad

A wonderful article. Snippets:

"She was no stranger to hospitals over the last few years. She'd wake up to find that her breathing was more difficult, or that some new infection was exploiting her weakened immune system, or that some new debilitating side effect from the powerful drugs that were keeping her alive had emerged. My stepfather would rush her to a hospital, and she would come home a few days later having accepted some previously feared development—being hooked up to an oxygen tank, having to use a walker—as her 'new normal'"

"It wasn't going to be pretty. Her lungs were gradually filling with scar tissue. She would, when her time came, slowly and painfully suffocate to death over a period of hours or days. But eight weeks before she wound up in a sprawling, dung-colored hospital in sprawling, dung-colored Tucson, my mother's doctors had given her two to five years to live. "

"Don't we all want that kind of death? Wouldn't it be wonderful if each of us could enjoy a Hallmark death? Wouldn't it be ideal if each of us passed from this life into the next—aka "the void"—enveloped in the love of good caregivers and under the care of competent "pain management" professionals? But not everyone is so lucky. Some of us have to endure deaths that are gruesome and protracted and excruciatingly painful, deaths that involve pain that cannot be "managed," deaths that our loving caregivers can only stand helplessly by and witness."

"That's what the debate about I-1000 is really all about: your body, your death, your choice. The passage of I-1000 doesn't impose anything on terminally ill people who reject physician-assisted suicide for religious reasons. But the rejection of I-1000 imposes the values of others on terminally ill people who would like to make that choice for themselves, who should have a right to make that choice for themselves."

"And, I'm sorry, but there'snothing about physician-assisted suicide—or, as it should be called, end-of-lifepain management—that precludes the presence of loving caregivers. You can besurrounded by love and have access to the best medical care available and stillconclude—reasonably and rationally—that you would rather not spend the last fewmoments of your life in blinding pain or gasping for breath or pumped full ofjust enough morphine to (hopefully) deaden your pain without deadening you."

"We somehow managed to hold it together, me and my stepfather. We didn't have the luxury of breaking down."

"So it fell to me to walk back into my mother's room, tell her she was going to die, and lay out her rather limited options. She could be put under and put on machines and live for a day or two in a coma, long enough for her other two children to get down to Tucson and say their good-byes, which she wouldn't be able to hear. Or she could live for maybe another six hours if she
continued to wear an oxygen mask that forced air into her lungs with so much force it made her whole body convulse. Or she could take the mask off and suffocate to death. Slowly, painfully, over an hour or two."

"We said our good-byes—doesn't that sound dignified? But her mask was still on and her body still convulsing. Good-byes reduced my affable stepfather to wracking sobs; good-byes sent me and my sister falling to the floor beside our mother's deathbed. We held a phone up to my mother's ear so she could hear one of my brothers shout his good-bye over the whir and thump of the oxygen machine, while we tried desperately to get my other brother on the phone."

"It was a staggering blow, this sudden and unwelcome reminder that tomorrow was coming and my mother wouldn't be part of it,"

"...we sat there, traumatized, waiting for her heart to stop, waiting for the very first sound that I had ever heard—my mother's heart beating—to go silent."

"I know what my mother would say: The same church leaders who can't
manage to keep priests from raping children aren't entitled to micromanage the final moments of our lives."

"Don't approve of abortion? Don't have one. Don't approve of gay marriage? Don't have one. Don't approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ's sake, don't have one. But don't tell me I can't have one—each one—because it offends your God.
Fuck your God."

"I also know that, if my mother needed my help, I would've held a glass of water to her lips, so that she could swallow the pills that would've spared her those two hours of agony."

Couldn't agree with his argument more, and his story about his mother is really tearjerking, and thought provoking.

Radical

The spin will never stop, will it? Along with it being popular to bring up the fact that Obama served on a board with "terrorist"-turned-college professor William Ayers, some have decided to bitch about his positions on abortion.

Weeks before going to the polling booth, Americans do not know Barack Obama.

Guess whose damn fault that is? He's been in the public eye for two years now as a potential candidate, and has published two books about his life for crying out loud. He's not being particularly clandestine.

I then went through Obama's radical record on abortion. The jolt came after I finished speaking, when one by one, people told me they had no idea Obama was so radical.

Well, you've got my interest. Go on.

Obama has stood on the floor of the Illinois statehouse and argued that a baby born alive due to a botched abortion should not have the same rights as a child carried to term. That, in and of itself -- his opposition to Illinois' Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which sought to mandate safeguards for such unwanted children -- is a heavy obstacle to overcome for those Obama fans concerned about the future and dignity of human life. He defended infanticide.

He opposed a bill that forced doctors to treat aborted fetuses that still showed feeble signs of life, but were still likely to die anyway. They already have to treat them if they have a good prognosis, apparently, due to laws already on the book. Besides, this isn't infanticide, as much as euthanasia, considering the grim outlook for the survivors.

Barack Obama has condemned the Supreme Court's Gonzales v. Carhart ruling, which affirmed the federal partial-birth abortion ban.

...because it didn't protect the rights of the mother during cases in which her health is at risk...

Barack Obama supports federal funding of abortion

Uh-oh. Infanticide and socialism too. He's a naughty boy.

Barack Obama called pregnancy "punishment."

...when it is unintended, occurs early on in the teenage years, and the pregnant girl is not allowed any option aside from bearing the child due to her parents' beliefs....

Barack Obama believes that the right to have an abortion is a matter of equal
rights for women.

Not "equal rights" per se. Just rights. Pregnancy isn't something that people should be forced into. It is a very taxing affair. Dying when you are a non-sentient clump of cells, even if you are of proto-human form, is comparably less taxing, and consequently eases the burden on the mother as well.

Barack Obama does not support the Pregnant Women Support Act, a project of Democrats for Life, meant to reduce abortions by strengthening the social safety net.

Much of this act looks pretty good. Except for the parts that sound like you basically forcing doctors to hand out anti-abortion literature to everyone. Honestly, though, I do like the basic ideas behind this bill (as it appears on wikipedia) but you can never tell when these types of things are just false fronts.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- a Catholic who developed her own theology to justify her abortion support --

"Developed her own theology"? Says a person who is among the ranks of people who conflate Christianity with conservative politics. Irony ensues.

"The election of Barack Obama would endanger the lives of thousands of unborn children"

Oh no! Not the unborn!! We must saves them!! Those other children though, in other countries can be slaughtered willfully. And screw the poor children in our country too. Screw the adults of all stripes. What do you think bootstraps are for? Those people can fend for themselves. It's only the unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring, and undeveloped fetuses that we need to worry about in order to make this world whole again.

but in a country where black women have abortions at five times the rate of white women, he is a profile in cowardice. In a land where we have devoted ourselves to the pursuit of life, this is unacceptable.

What does the relative of number of abortions for different ethnic groups have to do with "cowardice"? And "pursuit of life"? I guess that we don't have a death penalty, aren't fighting two wars simultaneously, are not the biggest military spender in the world, in addition to the country with the highest number of murders each year. I guess we aren't a country filled with people pining for the Rapture, and watching people drop like flies all around us from diseases that our "love of life" obliges us to not search for the cure for, if it involves a four-celled embryo being used in the process. Every sperm may not be sacred, but as soon as it touches an ovum, it suddenly is, apparently. The Cult of the Fetus lives on...