Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

A ‘tsunami’ of church closings is poised to remake America.

“None” is not synonymous with atheist. Combining atheists, agnostics and people who simply don’t belong to a religion can obscure considerably more than it reveals. The dataset has been made publicly available, so I expect some interesting papers to emerge from this.

The Department of Holy War creates an Office of Religious Affairs amid church–state concerns. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is not happy with Pious Petey.

In Ireland the Convention on Education is still ignoring the constitutional and human rights of Irish children. A genuinely secular state school would instead teach about religions and nonreligious worldviews without promoting any of them.

In the UK, Westminster humanists continue pushing reform of religion in schools. But why should a publicly funded education system presume a religious framework in the first place?

World of Woo: When good antibiotic advice goes bad: four myths that refuse to die.

Environment:  Studying this super El Niño could save lives.

AI is far from a perfect resource. But it seems to hallucinate less than Kennedy. Being anti-establishment doesn’t make you independent of vested interests. It can simply create a new establishment with different vested interests.

Quantum mechanics describes our relationship with reality, not reality itself.

What do we mean by intelligence, reason, autonomy and free will before we confidently declare which entities possess them?

Democratic government legitimately determines public policy priorities. It doesn’t follow that political authority determines scientific validity.

If women freely exercising political power threatens your preferred social order, is the problem women’s political power—or your social order? Well Doug, which is it?

This court should not undermine Colorado’s commitment to equality by transforming religious freedom into a doctrine that mandates taxpayer-subsidized discrimination.

What is the hypothesis of Mortality Salience? (see second video).

What is Common Rationality?

Sunday Book Club: Lost in Curiosity.

Some photographs taken last month.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil.

Coffee Break Videos: I enjoy pissing off religious bigots too. The Psychology behind Religion and Death. First nominees for the 2026 Golden Crocoduck. No! They didn’t find Noah’s Ark. Meta’s Pervert Glasses are going to end Privacy. Does Consciousness break the Laws of Physics?

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Have a great week everyone!

“Just because I might post an interesting article does not mean I agree with it. Which side would you like me to argue from?”

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

If women freely exercising political power threatens your preferred social order, is the problem women’s political power—or your social order? Well Doug, which is it?

A Theocracy under Paula White would be no better than under Doug Wilson, just as Sumaru would be no better than Fu-Manchu. If it’s any political order other than a Constitutional Republic, it’s not His, Hers, or Anybody’s* Turn.

*(I add “Anybody’s” in case Dr. Frankenfurter has any plans for world domination with an army of Rocky clones made “in just seven days or one night.”)

From the story on Doug Wilson:

He has said sodomy is “worse than slavery,”

Soooo, Doug, what is the authority or evidence on which you base this assertion, hmmmm? And, no, third person anecdotes do not count! Please tell us, won’t you?
🍑🍆😮🥒

It is also funny how Gabriel Rench responded to the Kerfluffle:

On one hand, the restaurant Saffire is legally a public accommodation and shouldn’t make Christian Nationalists feel unwelcome.

Yet the gathering of Christan Nationalists inside Saffire is private and Saffire shouldn’t provide them with free publicity.

Ah, fun!😁

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Rum Sodomy & the Lash was all the go in London in the 1980’s……..

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

And it was all the go in Sir Winston’s day, since he coined the phrase, just more hush-hush beck then…Which might explain why Laughing Boy Tucker Carlson thinks Sir Winston was the bad guy of World War II, since Ol’Schicklegruber wouldn’t allow “acts of sabotage against the Aryan people” like butt-stuff and sookie-sookie!

Speaking of hush-hush, I don’t want to crank up anything that’s NSFW, but I’ll listen later.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

“Just because I might post an interesting article does not mean I agree with it. Which side would you like me to argue from?”

Potentially, any of it is entertaining. As for whether it is true or good, that is ad hoc and case-by-case. In some cases, some sources get it so consistently wrong, they are best used as cage lining for virtual pets. For instance, The Daily Mail is one of the least reliable for anything scientific and especially palentological. Noah’s Ark has probably been discovered two dozen times in the past decade to read their stories..complete with two Nessie, two Bigfoots, two Jackalopes, two Golems, and a pile of mutilated cattle.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

I enjoy pissing off religious bigots too.

I do too. However–defeating that amalgam of True Scottish Strawmen attacking To the Man by Popularity, Novelty, Antiquity, and Authority, from Mott to Bailey and back in an Equivocating Circle which was a Widening Gyre while riding at a Gish Gallop and pickling Red Herrings in a Pot Calling A Kettle Black Tu Quoque-style–does not require being “woke”, either in the sense of being non-somnambulistic or in the sense of holding to a vague, false dichotomy of “Oppressor vs. Oppressed” that supposedly is behind all things.

I sincerely hope AronRa only means he is the former sense of “woke” because he is a much better thinker than the latter sense of “woke” deserves, though this may be a Wishful Thinking Fallacy on my part, since “Wokeism”. in the latter sense, has seemingly consumed everything and everyone.

I know there are probably more fallacies to string together here, however, attributing Omniscience to acts of finite Natural sapient beings, even if those acts are enormous, is a Divine Fallacy.

*Whew!*

[TheEncogitationer]

Fellow Unbelievers:

Sacré Dieu!. A society of month-long vacations, four-day work weeks, free education, Socialized Medicine, and womb-to-tomb support for all citizens and all who can make it over the borders has not done the French any good:

To answer Ol’ Schickelgruber’s notorious question:
“Yep! Paris is burning! And they’re doing it to themselves!”

The question for today is whether cities in the U.S. will face Paris’ same fate when everything becomes “free” for all our own young skulls full of mush if the Democratic Socialists of America have their way, or if all of Trump’s countless promised checks arrive in the mail?

• This reply was modified 3 weeks ago by TheEncogitationer. Reason: Accent mark

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

[jakelafort]

Tucka rhymes with—and Tucker rhymes with—

His apology of Hitler kinda reminds me of the leftist justification of islamism/terrorism/jihad. Not that it’s an evil ideology independent of circumstances that must be stopped; rather that colonialism caused the ‘resistance’ and as an explicable reaction it is justified. So get on the Hitler train or the Islamic train.

It is like far right and far left in USA. Each wants to destroy the American way of life. Where are the sane ones? Tucker is fine with speaking German there. At least it is a European language. And if the undesirables had to be claeased so much the better. Remit the submit to the Brit.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

As a clarification to O’Brien and Marks, Tucker Carlson no longer supports Trump and MAGA in part because Tucker regards Trump as a puppet of Bibi and Israel.

Tucker’s America First allies also no longer support Trump and MAGA, namely Nick Fuentes, Marjorie Taylor Green, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent.

The equally misnomered America First and MAGA movements are now separate, competing strains of interlaced evil and stupid.

Nevertheless, Jacob Rees-Mogg did absolutely great to school and punk Tucker on both Russia and Nazi Germany.

Tucker engaged in false binary by implying the only options for English-speakers is either German or Arabic/Urdu. Indeed, Nazi Germany attempted to support “national liberation” movements in the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent, so it could have been all of these languages spoken on “England’s mountain’s green” had the Nazis succeeded.

Tucker also set up a Strawman because he could have got everything he got in the Russian supermarket in an Aldi™ store in the United States.

Aldi™ has the same clean, well-stocked stores with fresh bread, meat, and produce and the locked carts released by a Quarter placed in the lock mechanism and redeemed when you relock the cart.

Of course, Aldi™ is a modern German-based store who likes America’s business environment, is Equal Opportunity, and would want nothing to do with Nazism or Putin’s Revanchism.

Tucker Carlson, also called Taqquiah Qatar-lson, might be better as a spokesman for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and pseudobulbar affect (PBA).

The way he laughs out of nowhere is a disturbing trait that might need serious help…perhaps from a kindly Jewish Psychiatrist.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

@ Enco – I sincerely hope AronRa only means he is the former sense of “woke” because he is a much better thinker than the latter sense of “woke” deserves, though this may be a Wishful thinking Fallacy on my part, since “Wokeism”. in the latter sense, has seemingly consumed everything and everyone.

I can confirm that AronRa is “woke” in the best sense of the meaning of the word.  His instinct is to “stay woke” to discrimination and prejudice of any kind. I spend time with him at the World Atheist Convention in 2011 when we did some street debates with what I call “Primate Change Deniers”. He is a great teacher when it comes to topic on Evolution. He considers what he will say before he speaks, and his goal is to educate people to think better. Some years later we “went for a Guinness” after this talk. I have a good war story from that one, which I can recount, if you like.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

October 7, 2023 felt real enough just hearing the description of events on the radio.

Hearing that it was the biggest pogrom of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust was enough to make my heart sink.

Reading that people from 52 other nations were attacked, kidnapped, and murdered made it a possibility for any of us.*

*Cross-Border Impact: Foreign nationalities of October 7th Victims
https://www.civilc.org/silenced-no-more/foreign-nationalities-of-the-victims-map

To read the Civil Commission Web Site and learn of a new concept “Kinocide,” the victimization and extermination of families, is a learning experience no one should have.

And no, none of this is meant as a trivialization or weaponization of the Holocaust as some have said, but an addendum and a modern continuum.

But to see actual faces of victims and to hear of their suffering and the acts of heroism makes it all the more intense.

Thank you for posting that video. We all need to keep that memory alive.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

Some years later we “went for a Guinness” after this talk. I have a good war story from that one, which I can recount, if you like.

Sure. After seeing October 7 victims, a lighter story is very much welcome.

AronRa is a great teacher when he discusses both biblical criticism, biology, and science in general. There’s so much detail in his lessons, you have to pause the video constantly to absorb and write them all.

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