…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
I’ve already explained to keiths why I choose not to play that game. He claims I made a false accusation against him. It’s his duty to support or retract that claim. Unconditionally.
🙂
I am a fan of jury nullification. Things get dicey when the government finds ways to avoid the jury process.
Did Larry Moran just get banned from UD? There was a “for the last time…” threat, followed rather quickly by a claim that Moran had failed to answer the demand.
Mung,
Your fear of my questions is almost palpable at this point.
Given that you have no confidence in your ability to defend your faith, why not admit that? Why the false bravado, which isn’t fooling anyone?
And given that you can’t rationally justify your Christian beliefs, why do you retain them?
keiths,
Like Sal used to (I hope), I think he gets of on trolling. He’s back in driveby mode. No real arguments, point or trajectory, just throwing rocks.
You are a real funny guy you know. You want to be taken seriously, you seem to crave the approval of people you fundamentally disagree with (although about what you’ve never made clear) and yet you act like a POS over and over to those people.
Once again, get help. You and phoodoo seem to think you are achieving something. you are not, you are wasting the only life you’ll ever have.
OMagain,
I am not entirely convinced that Mung is not a Poe with a deep commitment to the long con. All in good faith, of course.
OMagain,
And so are we, goddammit! To the hills!
No, not interested in your sunken treasure. Anything ‘walto’ publishes is likely damaging to human understanding. He’s a false (not even prophet) pretender. He hates God.
The awkward, uncomfortable, deviant ‘skepticism’ displayed on this site is not ‘offensive’. It is simply sad, pitiable and in the end wrong.
Human beings don’t ‘hate’ like the ‘skeptics’ here do (but they/we do their/our best to argue otherwise). We rise above, rather than falling down in Lizzie-‘inspired’ apostasy.
The angry assholes Lizzie has attracted here at TAMSZ are rather poor and damaged souls (yet aren’t we all in need of elevation?). Not even the ex-Jew philosophist KN or Lizzie’s (still confused) pantheism is in the end worth listening to.
Nothing to fear in your case, at least. As you have none, there’s nothing to be damaged in that vineyard.
And thanks for so frequently displaying a vision that is a foil to the skeptical hate you so despise. I know many will long to have a view of the world that comports with your loving version. If FMM is right that God is love, you must be one of His best spokespersons anywhere.
And bawling like a whiny bitch how he’s always the victim. It’s never his fault, he never instigates, no siree. Just like Joe G. He’s just a poor innocent victim.
As you know, my general attitude towards both you and Adapa is to ignore you.
Only here in the strange world of “The Skeptical Zone” can that be interpreted as both craving your approval and also treating you like a POS.
walto, will reading the abstract rot my brain or do I have to read the whole paper to get that benefit?
Mung,
The abstract is short and simple. The paper itself is long and maybe kind of boring. One of the referees said I was beating a dead horse. But you know how horses are–sometimes they’re just playing dead.
I did get a couple of quotes in from an unpublished Hall manuscript–that’s always kind of a thrill for me. I’m such a crass disciple.
If anyone doubts what a hypocrite Brave Sir Mung is check this out. After spending the better part of a week whining about how uncivil posters here act towards him, how they should be banned, etc. Mung waddles back to UD and drops this turd.
Remember this the next time our resident drama queen starts bawling about how he only wants polite conversation.
He likes the “All Hail the Conquering Hero!” reception he gets there, apparently. It’s kind of disappointing.
Mung’s ego makes him think he’s the smartest guy in the room. Maybe he’s half right – every time he leaves TSZ and scurries to UD he raises the average IQ of both places.
Mung:
That’s a vibe I’ve always picked up vis your weird relationship with TSZ generally, Mung – craving approval. Just sayin’.
I quite liked NewMung. I hope he’s okay
Rich,
Last time I saw him he was sleeping peacefully…
…and OldMung was creeping up from behind with a garrote in his hands.
If I thought there’s any possibility of Satan’s actual existence, I would say Gregory is prime evidence of it: a supposedly theist personality whose every act goes to show the destruction wreaked by adopting religious beliefs — prime evidence most likely sent by Satan to dissuade people from joining any christian denomination (because we will reasonably assume that any and every denomination hosts persons like Gregory). Uggghh.
Most of us at least partially crave approval when we post on these sorts sites though, don’t we? (Please say yes. Please.)
At any rate, I have to admit that I’m pretty sure that’s mixed in somewhere in my motivation. The day or two I posted at UD, I’m sure I wanted to seem intelligent and open-minded. And I think I may have come back with scars on my butt and complained here that I didn’t think I was treated very well. That was looking for solace among “compatriots” maybe, and it likely included whacking those other bad guys for being such meanies. So “Let him among us blah blah blah” (NB: I’m quoting the aria from Peter Grimes here and nothing else, whoever or whatever Britten may himself have been quoting.)
Anyhow, I think attempting to get approval by being a conquering hero when one returns from a sojourn among the bad guys (let’s call this “big-shotism”) is a particular type that I believe is a little different. Not sure how exactly, but saying “Wow, people are mean there!” seems to me a little different from saying “Wow, people are stupid there!” Maybe it’s because it’s possible that they have good reason to be mean to “outsiders”? I don’t know. But for whatever reason, I think the big-shotism suggested by the remark Adapa reproduces above seems to me to represent something a bit more unpleasant than need for approval.
It’s what you don’t see that hurts you the most. Do you really ‘like’ anger and despair?
These are real people. Most of you ‘skeptics’ don’t see. And simply don’t want to know humans who live like this. You joke as the desperate ignorant.
But as a person potentially you could. Could you? Yeah, you.
Not asshole, despairing atheists shielded by TAMSZ. No respect for such assholes.
And you won’t make a dent in the ‘Thumbs Up’ there with your atheist negativity.
“My help is from You.”
Even (real) Jews (unlike your local philosophist here) understand this.
Fuck your atheism and the Satan you worship. Do you want US to say it nicely, decadently? Get away sub-human.
Lizzie was married in a soup.
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hotshoe_:
Right. I just wrote that most of us post partly for approval on sites like this. But Gregory (if we forget his beloved Erik for a moment), could only be seeking approval from the great hate monger below. Not from people here anyhow, and not from from any God involving love.
You could say he’s above that craven need (as KN says, you could make him Nietzchean on this matter), but because of the actual mean-spiritedness of his posts, “below” seems more apt to me.
Of course! Though I think any kind of attention, even ridicule and opprobrium, is preferable (in the sense of deriving a buzz) to being ignored. Otherwise why are there drive-by trolls?
Gregory,
Thanks for finally taking the mask off, Gregory. Congratulations on finally posting in good faith.
I was reading it more as
alcohol-fuelledlate night, tired and emotional.Alan Fox,
Mel Gibsonianism?
Gregory,
Gregory, have a good, honest friend read that post to you and have them tell you what they think..
Alan Fox,
That would be slightly less worrisome than the idea that Gregory really is ignorant enough to think that atheists worship Satan, but there’s nothing that could make that rant look anything better than disgusting.
I think we should be more concerned about the well-being of someone who writes things like “Lizzie was married in a soup”.
Bad behavior, Gregory.
But you knew that and you did it anyways,
I wish for Elizabeth’s sake that she could see her way clear to banning you.
Or, I could wish that someone would perform an exorcism on you and whatever demon infests you depart, leaving the Gregory we have never met, the one who would be recognized by his family as the sweet child they once knew before he was overtaken by the desire to stalk innocent people.
NewMung is available in certain threads. Others I use for letting off steam.
When Joe indicated he wanted to stick to a specific topic I respected that. Other than an initial comment in the English thread, what have I had to say? (And no, I am not phoodoo.)
Desperately seeking approval,
Mung
Alan Fox,
Hunter Thompson could have made that work.
hotshoe_,
Interesting thought. Gregory, try reading this to yourself:
Sáncte Míchael Archángele, defénde nos in proélio, cóntra nequítiam et insídias diáboli ésto præsídium. Ímperet ílli Déus, súpplices deprecámur: tuque, prínceps milítiæ cæléstis, Sátanam aliósque spíritus malígnos, qui ad perditiónem animárum pervagántur in múndo, divína virtúte, in inférnum detrúde. Ámen
walto,
Of course you’re right about wanting approval (me too), but from whom? To the extent I experienced (or mostly imagined) approval while posting at UD, I sought that from those sympathetic to my position. I never expected to kick back as one of the guys over there.
Tangentially related: I heaped my share of ridicule upon specific persons at UD when I was a frequent poster at AtBC, but found later when interacting directly with them that I could no longer do so. I find that direct interaction reduces the depersonalization that otherwise characterizes this venue.
In fact, I’ve helped UB out a couple times, most recently tipping him off to the fact that the back panel of his PJs was wide open. A whois of his website disclosed his RL name, email address and indirectly his place of employment. He buttoned up the next day.
(Not that he thanked me or anything.)
Reciprocating Bill,
The funny thing is the two camps only interact in ths one dimension where we’re polar opposites, our interactions are only about one thing. If we shared beers around the fire I think we’d be able to get at our shared humanity much more easily. I suspect Phoodoo and JoeG would be tools in real life, though.
Patrick,
The trouble is Gregory comes across as so confused, I’m not sure who he’s a bad advert for..
I blame dormant backwards high jump butthurt.
Hmmm…
So much for Alan’s theory about Gregory and alcohol.
Mung,
You’d be alright to have a beer with I suspect.
Just a personal observation. I frequently find myself at family gatherings that include religious people. I find that the conversation almost invariably turns to topics where it is best for me to keep my mouth shut.
On occasions where I ventured an opinion, the conversation turned hostile. I simply don’t enjoy the company of people with whom I have to suppress my thoughts and opinions.
I find it really quite fascinating that Gregory writes as if he is fully justified in dehumanizing atheists because of his belief that atheism is dehumanizing.
It’s actually not easy to see what has gone wrong here.
It’s easy to say that Gregory is simply mistaken in his belief that atheism is dehumanizing. That would be the case only if the moral value of human persons depended on having a specific conception of the source of that value. But no one has successfully argued for this assumption. (Theists simply take it for granted.)
The more interesting aspect of Gregory’s thinking here is the following conditional at work in everything he writes here: if atheism is dehumanizing, then atheists should be dehumanized.
Suppose one were to point out that the Nazis dehumanized their victims. Does this mean that the Nazis deserve to be dehumanized in turn? To some extent of course we do that when we call the Nazis “monsters”, or claim that there is a limit to depravity beyond which one has lost the right to live.
On the other hand, if dehumanization is always morally wrong, then dehumanizing those who dehumanize is as morally wrong as any other kind of dehumanization.
Kantian Naturalist,
I know you were just giving an extreme example (“Even THEY shouldn’t be dehumanized!!”) but FWIW, I don’t like so much being classified with Nazis. The idea that atheism is somehow “dehumanizing”–when it’s actually more like the opposite–is ridiculous from the get-go. Human beings simply don’t need to be created in the image of Odin to have value, and, in fact, it’s not clear that any additional worth would be magically created by being Odin-like.
I’m a barrel of laughs. Always looking for approval from others. I’d be drinking something other than beer though. Never did like beer.
You obviously think that impression is incorrect–so how do you explain the remark that Adapa posted and your meltdown comment? What do you take to be the actual purpose of your “big-shotism” if not that?
Surely, you have better things to do with your precious time here on Earth.
Newsflash:
At least 120 people killed by non-atheists in France today because they were (possibly) insufficiently theist or the wrong kind of theist.
Of course. The idea that atheism is dehumanizing is absurd both on its face and on close inspection.
I was only pointing to the internal tensions of Gregory’s implicit position, as based on my reconstruction of his behavior (i.e. what would someone have to believe in order to think that saying what he says is anywhere near to morally acceptable?)
Can you get any lower walto? Any lower at all?
walto,
So what are you saying, the Christians must be right, there is only one true religion?