Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – a selection of thoughts from the recent news

Just some various thoughts about religion, politics, etc. None were showing promise as a blog post on their own, but I found them interesting enough to gather together.

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No idea what is going on with the Republican party or its candidates. Trump seems to be doing his best to get attention but to have no chance of becoming president and then being required to actually work for a living. The rest? They seem stuck in the fantasy that only white 40+ year old men vote.   They certainly have been doing their best to make it that way by their attempts at restricting voting as much as they can. We have a man of African descent, a woman and two men of Hispanic descent, none who have a snowball’s chance in hell of even winning the nomination much less the general election. Why do they run? Book deals, as some claim? Positions on boards? That’s quite a jaded view, if true.   No idea either on what is going on with people who would vote for somone like Trump. What does it say about people who claim they would vote for a man who is demonstrably ignorant on most subjects, and who is nothing but one more wannabee megalomaniac? Not that people haven’t voted for such men in the past. It’s just sad that they would voluntarily do so again.

Unsuprisingly, one of the questions at the Faux Noise circus was if the candidates hear from their god, taken from a question from Facebook: ‘I want to know if any of them have received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first.’. To paraphrase Sam Harris, it’s okay for a candidate to hear from God, but if you add that he heard from God who was speaking from his vacuum cleaner, then that makes the candidate a lunatic. It’s more amusing that the fellow that asked the question isn’t happy because the candidates weren’t Christian enough for him. I do wonder what he wanted to see exactly. A beam of light coming down and selecting the one true candidate? Or may be all of the candidates standing behind altars and praying really hard to get them to light? Now, *that* I would have watched.

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On one more murder of an atheist blogger by theists. They have to do in a mob what each of them would be too afraid to do on their own.   They are no more than violent ignorant cowards, whose belief is so weak it cannot take the least questioning. Unfortunately, we have just as many here in the US. We even Christian apologists, like William Lane Craig, who say that such things are fine, the only problem is that the Muslims have the wrong god.  Happily, we in the US have a secular government that dissuades such actions more strongly than the useless governments in so many theocratic countries.

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Netflix and Microsoft have decided to offer a year of paid leave if one is having a child.   Now, why isn’t this offered to anyone who makes a choice to do something? I’d like a year to write, why is my choice to do something that I want to do any less worthy than having a child?

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To claim Christianity is a major religion is rather silly since Christians regularly claim that the Christians who don’t agree with them are not Christians at all. This also appears to hold true with other religions. Sects hate each other. This indicates that religion may indeed be a powerful force in the world, but the argument that size equals truthiness fails rather dramatically.

That’s is, just a quick wander through my mind.