h a l f b a k e r yYour journey of inspiration and perplexement provides a certain dark frisson.
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CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, as the French will insist on calling it in their over-elaborate, accented manner) has a pretty decent track record. It has nailed the existence of a number of exotic particles, most recently the Higgs boson. In fact, pretty much every particle that
it's looked for, it's found.
Meanwhile, religion seems to have hit a dry patch. It still has a lot of supporters, but fundamentally the problem is that Nobody Knows If It's All Madey-Uppey. In that sense, it's similar to String Theory. So, how to settle the matter? Well, CERN got where it is today by designing experiments to provoke the manifestation of the particles it was looking for. Religion ought to take a leaf from this book.
Most religions seem to place a lot of weight on doing what their god is believed to want. Not killing, not committing adulterous bestiality, that kind of thing. But this is exactly the wrong way to confirm the existence of their respective deity - it's a bit like trying to confirm the existence of police by being law-abiding. Even if gods reward this good behaviour, it's likely to be in some relatively minor way, such as the odd cancer remission, or a particularly good harvest, or finding that Starbucks have charged you 50p less than they should have - nothing that can't be put down to good luck.
MaxCo., after reviewing the situation, has decided to establish CERT (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Theologique). In a large tunnel just outside Stoke Poges, we have assembled representatives of all major religions to perform experiments designed to elicit a definitive divine intervention. We have muslims downing Pina Coladas whilst sketching the prophet; we have a bunch of rabbis who have volunteered to live for a week on pork scratchings and cheeseburgers; a couple of blokes from the C of E have agreed to lie with their brother's wives; and the sikhs are trying new hairstyles on a weekly basis.
All participants are being closely monitored for plagues of boils, death of the firstborn, and other indicators of divine intervention. Smiting detectors are installed throughout the facility, whilst above-ground frog and locust detectors are monitored and all data is archived for later analysis. There are hopes that, if a high enough level of sin can be generated, we will reach the point where the various deities' retributions become unified as a single force.
//ancient aliens// The prevailing theory is that they were aquatic. Erik von Daniken even wrote a book about it - Chariots of the Cods, I believe it was. Incidentally, your aliens would have had to genetically engineer pretty much every living organism, so that evolutionary genomics would give the answer it does.
I'll just leave this here.
https://static1.squ...4517/1404232712557/
[2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jan 26 2017]
[link]
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This was a joy to read [+] |
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Hebrews, Mohammedans, Hindus ... Sikhs ? Bacon sandwiches cover a lot of ground in a single bite. |
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That would cover vegetarians and vegans too, who aren't religious per se, but certainly are a bunch of irritating self-righteous twats to whom a good smiting wouldn't go amis. |
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What religion was the Orange Fuhrer again? |
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//vegetarians and vegans too, who aren't religious per
se,// |
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They are actually a wonderful control group. They share
many common traits, guilt, proselytization, smug self
satisfaction. But without the god bit. |
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Good enough reason to persecute them. |
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// What religion was the Orange Fuhrer again? // |
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Sith, most likely. Then again, "Darth Donald, the fluorescent orange Lord of the Sith" just doesn't seem to work. |
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Princes Leia's line, "Darth Vader. Only you could be so bold." would come out as "Darth Donald. Only you could be so ... bright" ... |
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Somehow, the idiom just doesn't fit. |
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It's an interesting thing, though. If you look at societies
rather than at single people, those societies with
prevailing atheism are prone to decline in numbers. They
have fewer children, they are less inclined to fight for
their country and for freedom, and their philosophies many
times even encourage suicide. |
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It's almost as if there's something inherent in the
evolutionary outcome of nature against free thinking. |
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But wait, I thought we (I'm talking to my fellow
materialists here) all agreed that there is no free thinking.
Everything is either totally pre-conditioned and pre-
destined by the rules of physics or is governed by the
totally random behavior of the physical world. No? |
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So it seems that a more urgent experiment to simulate at
the CERT labs is one where you add disbelievers into the
equation and see who survives. Not that knowing the
results can change anything... |
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//societies with prevailing atheism are prone to decline in numbers. They have fewer children, // That's because atheism correlates quite strongly with socioeconomic development, GDP and national IQ - all of which drive smaller family sizes. |
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//they are less inclined to fight for their country// Quite so. Remind what religion the Nazis were? They did quite a bit of fighting, if I recall, allegedly for the fatherland. |
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// and their philosophies many times even encourage suicide.// I think you just made that one up. China may be an example (I don't know the religiosity of rural Chinese women, but they have a high suicide rate), but then again rural India would be a counter-example. If you're referring to assisted suicide for terminally ill people, that may correlate with atheism, but then again atheism often correlates with greater personal liberty. |
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// Science wonder somewhere, is waiting something to be
incredible known. // |
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// Science somewhere, something incredible wonder is
waiting to be known. // |
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This is very odd. I could have sworn I had the title simply as "CERT", and now it seems to have expanded. Not that I mind at all - but I wonder if I'm going [more] insane, or whether there has been divine intervention. |
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Or Jutta, which is the same thing. |
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DO NOT listen to The Voices. They are NOT your friends and they will make you do bad things again. |
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religion may be the opiate of the people, but it appears to
be an opiate that we, as a species, are susceptible to. |
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Growing up in the old Soviet Union with an aggressive
atheism, I find it incredible to see how quickly religion
(coinciding with Putin's convenience) re surged in Russia. I
mean we were encouraged to read books about how Jesus
was a re-branding of the Osiris legend, and outward
religiousness was incompatible with any kind of career. |
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//DO NOT listen to The Voices. They are NOT your friends and they will make you do bad things again. // |
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Not only am I mostly harmless, but I am friendly and will admit to doing no such thing. It's all rumors and lies, especially the part about the atomic clock and the Velcro bondage. |
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//a large tunnel just outside Stoke Poges// It appears the
[Buchanan]/Gopher Wars are reaching supernatural proportions. |
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Because, in polytheistic religions (e.g. Hinduism)
the gods are involved with the world, they also have
distinct personalities and they have faults and make
mistakes (but the virtues and faults of one god
complement those of the others). Whereas, in a
monotheistic religion the god is portrayed as being
apart from the world and being perfect in every way.
This portrayal of a deity is simpler and may be more
appealing to those in mental distress. |
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Surely, though, current health and safety regulations discourage lone working? Godding involves a lot of heavy lifting, smiting, and so forth - hardly something to be done single-handed. Moreover, you need to meet diversity requirements, which would require either regular rotation of the job, or a number of co-gods representing, inter alia, the spectrum of ethnic, gender and ability diversity. No no no, a single god is really not going to cut it in 2017. |
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// the [Buchanan]/Gopher Wars are reaching supernatural proportions. // |
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Moles. He's very upset and stressed about moles. It's getting quite serious, what with all the ranting and carpet-biting and screaming .... almost as bad as the one time he ever went into a Post Office, and then discovered that he actually had to queue ... |
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[Max] I agree. Long ago, this would have been
'pantheon' of gods, but this should be brought
up-to-date and renamed a 'committee' or 'working
group' of gods. |
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The problem you'll have is that if some god smites them all, you may not be sure just which god it is. Really, everyone should be eating pork one day, laying in their mother's bed the other, etc. |
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This is all a bit weak, no? The hohoho religions have funny rules part is like having a pop at Piers Morgan for supporting Arsenal when this fault is trivial compared to his other shortcomings. Likewise appending the "lol gods are supposed to smite people lol" line either means that the expectation is that systems of philosophy and control that proceed from an assumption that there is a magic sky being are supposed to be *logically consistent* and that pointing out the lack of logical consistency is a devastating avenue of attack (which given the august intellectual company here, I doubt it the case) or from the entirely erroneous assumption that merely pointing out this inconsistency is itself amusing. It isn't. This inconsistency is older than Jesus and better known. Water is wet, people are venal, religions are based upon superstition and myth and don't hold up to scientific assessment. |
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And yes saying as you ask I am in fact the arbiter of what is and is not funny. |
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That's good to know, we've been worrying about that for a while. |
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Excellent - objective data. |
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//Surely, though, current health and safety regulations discourage lone working?// |
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We're also encouraged to take a break and stretch our legs once in a while, which might explain the lack of presently-observed smitings, until God gets back to his desk in a couple of thousand years or so. |
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"WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE" ... |
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