A Log Fit For Burning

Yesterday I gave the finger to a school bus full of children. It made them all do the “oooooh, I’m telling” noise.

Today I started balancing upside-down on my hands for no apparent reason.

I guess that’s about it. Maybe the next 24 will provide something worthwhile.

This is not new technology. At the beginning of the 20th century the Otto company was running Diesel engines on vegetable oil.

Whenever I tell people that I run my car on biodiesel and am planning to convert it to run on unadulterated vegetable oil they, without fail, become the first person ever to say, “Your car is going to smell like french fries!”

I’ve come up with what I think is a fair response. “And your car is still going to smell like something people leave running in a closed garage when they want to commit suicide!”

Did I actually say that the god debate was the most interesting original content on YouTube?

I apologize, I must have been on crack.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trolling the comments section on YouTube. I’m growing sort of bored with it, so I figured I’d write about it. There’s a big atheist / theist (mainly Christian) debate going on there, probably the most interesting original content on YouTube. Of course it should be pointed out that the true beauty of YouTube is the wealth of old music videos like this :

And funny clips like this one :

Anyway, in all these arguments on the existence of God (which would be silly if people hadn’t destroyed the World Trade Center and all the people in it in the name of god), I hear this sort of argument put forth fairly often : “Atheism is as much of a religion as Christianity. Just as the theist says, ‘I know there is a god’, so the atheist says, ‘I have absolute knowledge that there is no god.” The person putting forth the argument easily knocks down the straw man : “How can any person have absolute knowledge of the universe? Has he gone to every point in space-time looking for a god? Surely the atheist is absurd”. I heard this fallacy from the pulpit on a regular basis in my younger years.

Many of the people putting forth this argument often go on to say something like, ” Agnosticism is the only honest position”. I personally think that the term “agnostic” applies to every single person living on earth and therefore is a fairly useless term. An agnostic is someone who doesn’t know (literally “without knowledge”). There is not a person on this pale blue dot who knows whether or not there is a god. There are people who think they know, there are those who pretend to know. Nobody knows.

Atheism isn’t an assertion. It’s a lack of belief. Lack of belief is the default position. We were all born atheists. We were all born with no belief in anything. We didn’t believe in god, we didn’t believe in democracy, we didn’t believe in capitalism, we didn’t believe that the cup would hit the floor EVERY TIME we knocked it off the table. As we realize that things fall down and not up (unless you’re me going up the stairs), we come to believe in the effects of gravity. We form our beliefs (or, usually more accurately, have our minds molded into a belief system) as we go. We don’t believe in something until it is presented to us and we accept it. It’s pretty much that simple. Before you believe in something, you don’t believe in it. Lack of belief in X is not equal to an assertion that X does not exist.

To clarify, I’ll use my life as an example. I was born without belief in god. An atheist (a=’without’). My parents taught me about the Judeo-Christian god, taught me to believe it as truth. I believed it until I read the book of Exodus as an adult. It became clear to me that this book was the work of men who lived a long time ago and not the perfect word of the lord. When I became unable to accept this idea of god I was once again an atheist. I didn’t adopt a new belief, I just lost one. I am under no obligation to replace my old beliefs in god with anything else.

Now, some YouTubes arguments on theism.
The guy who started this argument disabled embedding and I’m too lazy right now to download his video and put it up on a sock puppet account just to put it up here