...is my favorite line from the movie, "Face Off". I'm just saying. I had one too many cappuccinos, and this little ditty did materialize in my insane brizain. It may not mean anything, but seems rife with possibilities for deconstruction. Piper's Prize Pete Piper Packed an Uzi, Squeezed the trigger,…
Published here, you can read the ongoing lively debate between Sam Harris and Dennis Prager, who hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show.
Here’s how Harris responded to the common claim that atheists are arrogant believers that everything “just happened”:
Atheism does not assert that “it is all made by chance.” No one knows why the universe came into being. Most scientists readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not. One of the extraordinary ironies of religious discourse can be seen in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while condemning scientists and other nonbelievers for their intellectual arrogance. You have done a fine job of this above. And yet, there is no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: The Creator of the Universe takes an active interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell…
An average believer has achieved a level of arrogance that is simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.
Prager argues here that God’s existence is proved by the alleged lack of moral fiber found in secular societies.
…My argument is that unlike Judeo-Christian America, secular societies—generally meaning those of Western Europe—lose their will to survive (by not reproducing), and
It doesn't get any simpler than this. Almost as satisfying as the real thing. And no . . . I don't know the phone number of the "Fresh Sheet" woman.
While going through some family memorabilia that I inherited, I discovered an address book that my grandfather had dated 1923. In it, he had typed several creative compositions, which I suppose he had read someplace and wanted to preserve for future reference. They are reproduced below, to provide a glimpse of American bachelorhood from 80 years ago.
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Don’t use big words.
In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or in articulating superficial sentimentalities and philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversation possess a clarified conciseness, compact comprehensiveness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibilty and veracious vivacity without rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllable profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent rapidity. Shun double-entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant and apparent. In other words, talk plainly, naturally, sensibly, truthfully and purely.…
When we were teenagers, my sister and I used to discuss how the people around you affect how you look. She was very short, and a little 'plump' and seemed to have girlfriends that were tall and skinny. I pointed out (just being argumentative, I was the older sister by a…