Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

What does “atheism” mean? A brief history.

A state power capable of declaring one variety of Muslim illegitimate is precisely the power capable of criminalizing the person who concludes that none of them is true. This is what happens everywhere when people who fervently believe a God exists acquire governmental machinery with which to enforce what they think he wants.

In India, requiring the state to police why somebody changed religion is dangerous territory. Freedom of conscience isn’t freedom of conscience if the state forces the direction of travel.

In Morocco, atheist Betty Lachgar has now spent a year in prison because Allah does not have better enforcement options than the Moroccan penal system. Blasphemy laws always contain the same epistemological absurdity. They don’t protect an omnipotent deity from injury. They protect believers from encountering speech about their deity that they don’t want to hear.

In the UK, PM Andy Burnham makes an accidental argument for disestablishment. But why is he even appointing Anglican bishops at all? At the same time the “Christian patriotic army” is using religious identity to give nationalist intimidation moral authority.

Nothing earth-shattering here. Normality is itself evidence that Atheists meet, raise children, volunteer, form communities, help strangers and then go home without anybody having to supply a supernatural justification.

Is there really a ‘quiet revival’ of religion among Gen Z?

World of Woo: Pete Hegseth.

Environment:  A long-feared feedback loop.

This cave in China just rewrote 120,000 years of Denisovan history.

How 9/11 conspiracy theories are still shaping our world.

Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus. I wonder who would be blamed if 2 Mormons had stopped him on the street?

“Do your own research” often means “do your own searching.” Most people do not know how to do their own ‘scientific research’. What they really do is enter echo chambers and confirm their biases by creating closed epistemic loops.

RFK Jr. mocked vaccinations in Lancaster County. Now two are dead of measles, and Pennsylvania’s outbreak is spreading.

Please upload your passport before you’re allowed to speak anonymously.

I freely choose to believe that my choices were determined. We don’t experience time itself flowing. We experience events, changes, memories and anticipation, and construct the sensation of temporal passage from them. There is no Cartesian executive decision maker in my head saying, “Apparently Reg, you are a compatibilist”.

Sunday Book Club: It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty.

Some photographs taken last week.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil.

Coffee Break Videos: Take Me To Your Leader: A Conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. The Minority Report. Yeah, atheists need your puny god to do good. Fine-Tuning for God is a terrible argument. Could there ever be a viable test for artificial consciousness?

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Have a great week!!

Secularism protects everybody from somebody else’s certainty. RTFF

[Strega]

Thanks Reg!!

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

World of Woo: Pete Hegseth.

Pete Keg’s-Breath and Bobby Brainworm are the kind of idiots who say: “Welp! Ye go to war with the military you have!”

Uh, no! Not if you want to win that war!

During the last war the U.S. won–World War II, it’s been that long–we didn’t fight with the Military we had! We took the Military we had and made it better and kept it better!

To think that Pete Keg’s-Breath and Bobby Brainworm are implementing their policies in the middle of a war with Jihadis who welcome death as a path to “Pie-In-The-Sky-In-The-Sweet-By-And-By” and who are willing to wear either dynamite or deadly spreading pathogens is doubly absurd.

Well, Pete Keg’s-Breath and Bobby Brainworm are just part of a long line who don’t know what we are still. in the middle of after 25 years:

9/11 Never Happened
The fantasy-fed denialism of George Bush’s Freedom Agenda has metastasized into a dangerous suppression of our most basic survival instincts in the face of a foe we can no longer name, but who is sure to attack us again
by
Lee Smith
September 11, 2026
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/911-never-happened

Fortunately, it doesn’t take Testosterone to fly a drone into a terrorist cell, just acknowledgement that they are the enemy and the will to destroy them before they destroy you.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

…..and a 40-year-old female resident of Jefferson County died on Saturday, September 12, 2026, from complications associated with measles.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

…..and a 40-year-old female resident of Jefferson County died on Saturday, September 12, 2026, from complications associated with measles.

I’m doing my small part to see that there are no more victims of fully preventable killers.

I heard there was a flu season coming too, so I decided not to participate this past Labor Day weekend, as always this time of year when I go to my pharmacist for vaccines.

Once the pharmacy calls me to say they’ve got the latest booster, I’ll be having Long Non-COVID-19.

I’m presently in text dialogue with a friend who is in a rabbit hole on vaccines.

He was saying the COVID-19 shot wasn’t a vaccine and only relieved symptoms and that it led to myocarditis. He also claimed that Bill Gates sterilized millions of women in Africa with vaccines.

I replied that as a previous victim of food poisoning by undercooked meat who’s been squeezed dry from both ends and kept out of commission for days, even if the shot only relieved symptoms, it would still be worth it. It would still have prevented spread of the virus by nasty bodily fluids and bought time for stronger vaccines to destroy the virus finally. (Which it did in the original strain.)

I also researched myocarditis and found that the risk exists with or without infection or vaccines and is greater without the vaccine. I passed this along too.

I’ve also researched the Bill Gates allegations and will be texting my friend later.

The whole time I’ve taken a friendly approach. I reassured my friend that we’re all afraid of the rustling in the grassy veldt, but that rustling is just Timon and Pumbaa, not Scar.

When dealing with layperson news and opinion consumers, this is how free people handle Misinformation/Disinformation/Malinformation (MDM *Growl!* 🦁). Put Scar to sleep, then file down his teeth and claws!

The originators of MDM require a different approach.

The recent measles deaths effectively make Bobby Brainworm into Alex Jones II, for his denial and erasure of the dead.

And Bobby’s Rasputin in MAHA, Del Bigtree, lives up to his Dickensian name. Del Bigtree is a non-sapient lumbering mass of vegetation with buzzards perched on his branches!

With these originators of MDM, show them for the Midieval ghouls they are!

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

A non-confrontational approach is the only way. Some pointers….

How to Address Vaccine Hesitancy: A Compassionate Approach

https://gillings-projects.unc.edu/cph-articles/how-do-i-talk-about-vaccines

 

[jakelafort]

Leaders of lefty propaganda in re to Palestinianism are scum filth degenerates. Is that too harsh? Too judgmental for the guy always pushing a narrative about how humans are tabula rasa swept off feet by whatever the contemporary rivers no matter how cruel or how stupid?

If ya have not watched Fauda season 5 it is a pretty good watch. And i would be curious to know how the majority of lefty viewers come away from the experience. Apparently it has awakened some viewers as per the linked article.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/culture/article-908480

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Yes, just finished Fauda S5 this evening. All 5 seasons are worth watching. I will watch it again for E7 and E8. I was guessing it would go there but I was still surprised. I will leave my comments at that for now.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

I also thought the casting of Melanie Laurent was clever, given her role in ‘Inglorious Basterds’.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

My discussion with my friend hasn’t turned to weeks yet and he has said that Vaccines are among the greatest boons to mankind, so he may not be too deep in the rabbit hole, but he has indicated in the past a like of listening to Art Bell and Alex Jones. (I have too, but with a very comedic funny bone on my eardrum.)

We’ll see how things go.

So, Reg, since you hail from Erin, do you think Trump will unite both Catholic and Protestant, Black & Tan and Sinn Fein in equal disgust? Will the Orange Emperor be regarded on a par with William of Orange and make the clover wilt with his every diaper change?
🍀😁

[jakelafort]

Didn’t see Inglorious but i thought she played that archetype of a European woman whose beliefs lead her to a man with whom she’d otherwise be horrified. That flat affect much of the time and her ambivalence seeping through at various times was good writing and good acting.

[TheEncogitationer]

Jake and Reg:

I’m going to say something that’s gonna floor you!: I never heard of the series Fauda until now, much less that it had 5 seasons!

Netflix has had problem of affordability since even before Trump. It doubled in price when I had to drop it a few years ago (that’s a 100% rise in price translated to MAGA mathematicians.). The quality didn’t follow the spike in price, so I stick with Xumo, Tubi, Pluto, and other ad-supported streaming services.

That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t watch Fauda though. WWII/Holocaust/Middle East/Cold War movies and shows are always must-see for me.

[jakelafort]

Enco,

Fauda is a good series. Another one in that genre is Lioness. I am really enjoying that one. I think it is just Paramount though with a few episodes on Prime.

[TheEncogitationer]

Jake and Reg:

‘m kind of wondering: Could the fact that I had not heard of this series mean that Netflix is scared to promote it in the present zeitgeist?

Or could it mean that Wokeists/Palestinianists/Islamists/Toadies in the theater/critical journalist realm don’t want to review it?

[Author]

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