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June 03 Lee H. Oswald and Jesus H. ChristI believe that Oswald killed Kennedy and I believe he acted alone. I have every reason to believe scientists who say that evolution is the best possible explanation for the development of life on this planet. I have been convinced through a lot of reading and a lot of thought and 42 years of observing how life seems to work on this planet that the atheists are probably right. Oswald actually lived and died on this planet. So did Kennedy. There is overwhelming proof that they are not figments of my imagination. After reading Case Closed and Reclaiming History and viewing Beyond Conspiracy, I am convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that Oswald was in fact a lone gunman. Anyone who has taken the time to carefully read those two books and view that program with an open mind will come to the same conclusion. Anyone determined to believe in some sort of conspiracy will never be convinced of the truth. Ultimately, people believe whatever they wish to believe, in spite of reason, in spite of evidence, in spite of common sense. Conspiracy nuts will think I am hopelessly naive, that I trust the government, that I reject the idea of conspiracy completely, that I am stupid, that I am too young to understand, that I am paid by the authorities to maintain the fascist line. I am none of these things, but they refuse to believe there isn't something seriously wrong with me. I think there is something seriously wrong with anyone who insists on some sort of conspiracy after 44 years of baloney. I will never convince them, and they will never convince me. God and Jesus, in severe contrast to Oswald and Kennedy, may not exist, and may never have existed. Religions have had several thousand years to prove themselves, to explain the mysteries of life, and to make people happy. I don't think they have succeeded on any lasting level. I think they have caused more harm than good. I believe they provide only a false sense of security to most people who claim to be believers. But I have never been able to convince anyone this is so. I am not equipped to do that, and I wouldn't presume to attack someone's ridiculous faith unless they have attacked my non-belief first. Many people have attempted to convert me; none have succeeded. There was a time when I was only exposed to pro-conspiracy ideas, and so I assumed that there must have been some conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Once I read books exploring Oswald's guilt, I was as passionately converted as a born again Christian reading the gospels for the first time. Most religious people I have met were uninformed, misinformed, ignorant, uneducated, hypocritical, and narrow-minded. If anything, their words and actions convinced me to remain agnostic and even thrust me closer and closer toward atheism. A few religious people I have met were intelligent, educated, and well aware of the many problems presented by their particular faith and belief in general, but they believed anyway. It is my opinion that their faith rests on one thing only: wishful thinking. They believe because they have to believe; the alternative is simply too horrifying. This is an understandably human, irrational, nonsensical emotion. Creationists hate evolution because they cannot endure the thought that life is at least partly random and chaotic, and they cannot stand the notion that humans are not in fact special. The most "brilliant" spokesmen for creationism know full well that intelligent design is nonsense. They write books and go on lecture tours to tell their ignorant supporters what they want to hear. I don't think they are motivated by money, but by the power of propaganda. They will kill any idea that challenges their faith. In the last 500 years, and in the last 50 years in particular, science and reason have systematically (but not necessarily intentionally) destroyed faith and religion. Because some people have to believe, because the alternative is simply too horrifying, they continue to lie to themselves and others in order to make their last fragile stand on faith's moldy jello. No one can prove the existence of god, and no one can prove the rightness of their particular religion. When we die, we may find out the truth, or we may not. god may tell us, or he may not. If god doesn't exist, we will never know. We will just be dead. Even if he does exist, he may keep us in suspense after this life, even as he has kept us in supense in this one. Evolution has proved itself a fact in a mere 150 years. In another 50 years, every remaining question about the evolutionary process may finally be resolved, and creationism will seem a quaint folly of yesteryear, but the faithful will find new ways to cling to the tender straw of faith while slowly drowning. In spite of the evidence, in spite of the facts, conspiracy theorists will still be trying to prove Oswald innocent. It makes conspiracy nuts happy to think something terribly sinister is going on in smoke filled rooms. Their paranoia makes them feel important. Yes, the world is sinister, but not quite sinister enough for the paranoid; they have to indulge in fantasies, too. They will remain as rigid as religionists and creationists. The human imagination will persist in all of its perversity and pointless fantasizing, and each new generation will reject the painful truths and hide beneath comforting lies. god is a vague unknowable, unsolvable notion. he means too many different things to too many different people. Evolution is only hard to accept because we humans live such short lives, and it is terribly difficult for us to conceive of geologically slow change. The Kennedy case has been solved beyond any reasonable doubt, but many still cling to the idea of conspiracy. The word smug comes to mind when I think of passionate fanatics on both sides of these three issues. Even C.S. Lewis, in spite of his education, can't help referring to the foolishnes of atheists. Does a man of his stature really have to make himself feel better that way? Is he just as insecure as some ignorant baptist from Alabama? The conspiracy nuts are convinced that I am naive and ignorant, and that I lack common sense. Religious people think I am blind, stupid, or satanic. They are amazed when I tell them that I have read four different translations of the bible, but I still don't have faith. I am amazed that anyone can read that weird, boring, morally dubious, provocative document and still believe in a personal god. I am amazed that some conspiracy nuts can read Case Closed and not be convinced that Oswald acted alone. How can two smug people, both convinced they have the truth on their side, so smugly and passionately and completely disagree? There is either one god, or many gods, or no gods. Evolution is either completely self-determining or begun by god or still controlled by god. Oswald acted alone, or was part of a conspiracy, or was a patsy. There can be very little compromise, only conversion. I don't think there's anything wrong with changing your mind, and converting. I would certainly begin to worship god if I could find a god worth worshiping, and I wouldn't mind accepting conspiracy if conclusive evidence appeared to support it. In the 2004 election, Bush was ludicrously praised for "sticking to his guns", and Kerry ridiculously criticized for seeing the complexity of the issues and occasionally changing his mind. Who on earth decided that changing your mind is a bad thing? Why do they have to call it flip flopping if you have a genuine change of heart? If I accepted jesus as my savior, my friends would be shocked, and they might think I was joking at first. Only my actions would be able to convince them of my sincerity. But if my conversion made me a better happier person, the proof would be in the pudding. I don't think they would fault me for my change of heart. Why are liberals so passionately convinced that conservatives are evil fascists, and why are conservatives so passionately convinced that liberals are foolish traitors? Is there such a thing as truth, or reality, or is everything just a game, an unresolvable conflict over nothing, a neverending Sisyphean struggle? Is everything maya, illusion?
6/28 Until my walk yesterdeay, I always assumed I was completely disinterested about who killed Kennedy. The facts pointed to Oswald, so I accepted them. Hardcore conspiracy morons refuse to face the facts, and most uninformed lay people simply can't stomach the idea that a loser like Oswald could kill a giant like Kennedy. I have always tried to imagine why I feel so passionately about this case, and why I get so infuriated at people who won't face the facts about something that happened before I was ever born. Now I realize that what is so distasteful to other people is somewhat appealing to me. I have a perverse understanding of the fact that a non-entity could bring down the most powerful man in the world. I appreciate the absurd randomness of it. Yes, as I read Bugliosi's mammoth book, I am more convinced than ever that Oswald acted alone, and that all of the conspiracy writers are either delusional, disingenuous, or intentional charlatans, but I honestly have to acknowledge my reluctant sympathy for that poor schmo Oswald who was a failure in everything except murder.
6/29 When pseudo-religionists are backed into an inescapable corner of logic and reason, they inevitably resort to their favorite catch-words, faith and free will. Since they cannot argue with me, they must conclude that I am blind, stupid, ignorant, or deluded by satan. Conspiracy dimwits do the same thing. Since I don't believe a conspiracy killed Kennedy, they automatically and wrongly assume I don't believe in any kind of conspiracy. I believe in Watergate, so there. And guess what? All those guys were found out. Since I believe the Warren Report was fair, accurate, and competent, the conspiracy nuts automatically and wrongly assume that I trust my government no matter what, that I am naive, or that I am a government toady. I know for a fact that governments lie a lot, but in this one case I think they did a good job because they had nothing to hide. Pseudo-religionists still use outdated books like the unholy bible and outdated thinkers like augustine and aquinas to back up their arguments, and they seem blithely unaware of the brilliant atheistic rebuttals to all their nonsense. Conspiracy morons use mark lane and others of his ilk, "writers" who were discredited years ago, to back up their insane theories, and they accuse Posner, Jennings, and Bugliosi of skimming over important details, exactly what lane and his allies do themselves. Doubting Thomas got to witness all of the miracles of jesus and he got to see jesus raise Lazarus from the dead, and he got to stick his finger in the side of jesus after jesus came back from the dead, and we poor suckers only get to hear these stories 2,000 years later, but we have to have faith that they really happened? We have to believe without seeing? That's just not fair. Hundreds of people in Dealey Plaza heard and saw Kennedy get shot just 44 years ago. Many of those witnesses are alive today, and we still can't agree on what really happened that day. Surely, the Warren Commission wouldn't ask us to have faith that Oswald acted alone. No, they investigated for months, and did a pretty damn thorough job, too. In the end, people believe what they want to believe, in spite of reason, in spite of logic, in spite of the truth.
7/9 We humans are irrational beings. We are perversely and paradoxically gullible and suspicious. We passionately believe in things which are self-evidently false, and we are pointlessly sceptical about things which are self-evidently true. December 10 I am an agnostic-atheist...I am an agnostic because of all the things I do not know. I am ignorant about finances, mathematics, nuclear fusion, automotive repair, starvation, pancreatic cancer, the weather in Portugal in the spring, what happened right before the Big Bang, what will happen right after the Big Crunch (if the Big Crunch does happen), and what happened after the Big Crunch 15 billion years ago (if there was a Big Crunch), and if whatever happened created the Big Bang.
I am an agnostic because I recognize the limits of my mortality, my longevity, my sensitivity, and my spirituality, if such a thing really exists. I acknowledge that I could be wrong about almost everything, and I wish I could be around in 50 years to see all of our current misperceptions of the Universe reduced to something as quaint as the Ptolemaic system.
I am an atheist because I see this label as both religious and political. It puts me on the side of reason, science, and sanity, and wholeheartedly opposed to nonsensical dogma, blind faith, and intolerance.
If I am ever diagnosed with an inoperable tumor, and the doctor knows that I have 3 months to live, and neither prayers nor medical treatment will help me in any way, I wish to be told the truth, so I can use those 3 months to face reality and use the time given to me in the most productive possible way. If I am lied to, comforted with false hope, told to pray to a non-existent god, and given useless treatments which do nothing but cause me more pain, then I will have to wreak a horrrible vengeance worthy of old Yahweh himself upon the people who have deceived me.
We are all sentenced to death from the moment we emerge screaming from our mothers' uteri. We are born by chance, and we have a limited number of years to enjoy before that life disintegrates back into the basic elements from which it sprung.
All the time we spend in church or temple, bending our knees in prayer, asking for help or guidance or forgiveness--every moment of this time is time wasted.
If you think that you can only be a good person if you have some kind of faith, then you are deceived, and you are not giving yourself enough credit. With or without religion, with or without the hope of heaven, you have the choice to do right or wrong. Roughly 10% of all humans are thoroughly good, and roughly 10% of all humans are thoroughly evil; the rest of us lean this way and that, noble, nasty, strong, ridiculous, every shade of gray.
Up until last year, I always assumed I would feel uncertain about the conflict between science and religion. I never thought I would have any definite breakthrough. I felt almost alone. Now I feel supported by some of the smartest people who have ever lived, and some of the clearest thinkers living today.
I give to charities regularly; I have even given to faith-based charities, but I will not be playing their games any longer. Some day I hope they send me the following request: "We are desperate in a Godless world. God doesn't exist, or he is evil, or he is powerless, or he doesn't give a flying fuck, and only humans can solve the porblems of this world, so please give us money." To those honest people, I will donate generously.
If I ever meet a person of "faith" who is not in some way blithely or willingly ignorant, hopelessly gullible, hypocritical, or full of baloney, then I will seriously consider becoming agnostic again.
In the mean time, I am an agnostic-atheist. November 20 You may be a moron if...If you were born into a Jewish family, and you go to Temple regularly, and you pray to the Jewish God, you may be a moron. You may be a moron because God hates your guts. He allowed the writers of the New Testament to blame the Jews for the death of Christ. He even had those stupid thoughtless Jews say, "May the sin be on our heads and the heads of our children and our grandchildren." Hooraay for God! Over the next 2,000 years, every anti-Semite all over the world could look back to the Gospel of John and justify any nasty vicious attack on the Jews for being a stiff-necked, stubborn, blind, demonic people who denied the Christ and then killed him. If you know for a fact that the Nazis (who didn't invent persecution, who merely perfected it, made it almost elegant in its evil) gassed and burned six million Jews while much of the world looked on with glee and indifference, and God positively smiled while his Lutheran Nazi children destroyed those evil evil Jews--if you know all this, and you still pray to God for forgiveness on Yom Kippur, you may be a moron. We all know from reading the Bible that the Old Testament God just loves the smell of roasting flesh, so the smoke pouring out of the chimneys of Auschwitz 24 hours a day must have been one heck of a sweet savor to the Lord. And for all you Jews who have so graciously decided to "forgive but never forget," the Nazis never apologized, and neither did God.
If you live in Alabama, and you heard on television that God was sending Hurricane Katrina in your direction, and you prayed to God in church to send Katrina in a different direction, and God sent Katrina toward New Orleans instead, and if you thanked God for sparing you the ravages of the hurricane, you may be a moron.
Let's face it: if you live in Alabama, you are a moron. To be perfectly fair, if you live anywhere in America, there is an 85% chance that you are a complete idiot.
When people ask you if you are religious, and you say that you don't believe in organized religion, but you are very spiritual, you may be a moron. Don't worry if you are going to heaven or hell, because you are already in hell, the hell of your own shallow stupidity. The word spiritual has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. That is what morons say to seem superior to those who have wisely forsaken spirituality for something called reason, intelligence, and sanity. Don't give up the ship, dimwit. All hope is not in fact lost. Abandoning organized religion is the first step. Now all you have to do is stop spouting meaningless phrases like "I am very spiritual," and you will be well on your way to recovery. Rich people don't have to brag about their money; all they have to do is spend it. Smart people don't have to brag about their intelligence; they only have to use it. If there was such a thing as spirituality, and you had it, you wouldn't have to tell people; they would know it by your actions. Gandhi didn't run around India telling everyone about his decency; every word out of his mouth, and his every gesture, proved beyond any reasonable doubt how decent he was.
If you ask people if they believe in evolution, you are a moron for sure. Your absolute stupidity is revealed in the way you phrase the question. You think evolution is a belief system, or an article of faith, or some kind of new-fangled anti-religion. You equate evolution with ESP or alien abduction. Let me explain the situation in words even you can understand, nitwit. Evolution is not a Satanic plot, and it is not something you can chose to believe in if it sits nicely with your spiritual worldview. Evolution is scientific fact. The fossil records prove it. DNA proves it. Biology and geology prove it. You can add God to the equation if you like. You can say that God planned evolution from the start. You can also add tuna fish to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but the tuna won't improve your meal.
If you believe that there may be other civilizations living in galaxies hundreds or thousands of light years away from us, you are definitely not a moron. You are a realist, and a visionary. You have acknowledged the mind-boggling hugeness of our Universe, and you have accepted the unimaginable stretches of time since the Big Bang, and you have humbly admitted that our tiny planet is not in fact anywhere near to being the center of the non-existent God's creation, so you realize we may not be alone. And if you understand that the alien vistitation, when and if it comes some time in the far future, will be nothing short of spectacular, either spectacularly nasty, or spectacularly wonderful, then you do in fact have a brain. But if you think that space aliens have already succeeded in traveling through the space time continuum in order to flash a few lights and stick their probes into the ani of lonely pathetic liars, then you are a thoroughly brainless, and you deserve to be abducted and probed repeatedly by vicious alien rapists when they do come to call.
If you believe that psychics are honest and sincere, and you don't wonder why no psychic has ever won 236 million dollars in the lottery and kept half and given the rest to cancer research, and you don't worry about the fact that not one of the 5,000 psychics on the planet predicted 9/11 or the Holocaust or Katrina or the tsunami, if you believe that psychics can feel vibrations and hear voices and communicate with the dead but in spite of these "gifts" have never done anything to help anybody ever except give them false hope and steal their cash, then you may be a moron. And when I say you may be, I mean you are. By the way, if any of you psychics out there are actually the real deal, and you did know about 9/11 beforehand, and you did nothing to stop it, then you are as guilty as God and His devout hijackers.
If you belong to a Christian heavy metal band, you are a moron.
If you listen to Christian heavy metal, you are a moron.
If you have ever been in a mosh pit, you are a moron.
If you speak in tongues, you are a moron.
If you handle snakes, you are a moron.
If you verbally attack someone, and they defend themselves, and you tell them not to get so defensive, you are a moron. You are also an asshole.
If you think you are better than someone who flips burgers at Mickey D's, just remember, the same worms that devour his corpse will be feasting on yours someday, too.
If you are a 15 year old girl, and your boyfriend tells you that he loves you, and you ask him if he is just saying that to get into your pants, and he says that he really cares about you, and you believe him, you are a moron.
If you are a 34 year old woman, and you ask your husband if this bikini makes you look fat, when you know very well it is your fat that makes you look fat, and he says that you are as beautiful as the day he met you, and you believe him, you are a moron.
If you are a 27 year old man, and the woman you just met asks you what you do for a living, and you believe that she is just making conversation, you are a moron.
If you are a redneck, you may be a moron.
If you are a Mormon, you may be a moron.
If you believe in everlasting love, you may be a moron.
If you believe that you can avoid dying alone if you get married, you may be a moron.
When you tie the knot, you can hope that your wife is slightly less of a yunt than all of the other women you've managed to con into your bed, and you can hope that your husband is slightly less of a schmoe than all the other men you slept with while drunk, but prepare yourself for a grave disappointment.
If you believe that your religion is the one true religion, you are a moron. Do you know how many people have lived and died on this planet in the last 50,000 years, and how many of them believed theirs was the one true religion? Do you know how many of those religions have disappeared into the abyss of history? Don't you understand that you were born by chance, into a certain culture by chance, into a certain religion by chance? One billion Catholics pretend to ingest the actual body and blood of Christ every Sunday. That number doesn't impress me; it appalls me. There have been one million UFO sightings since 1947. Not one of those sightings has resulted in the gathering of one single piece of material evidence. Every day, somewhere in the world, some loser sees the image of Jesus in a fig leaf and some other loser sees a statue of the Virgin Mary weeping. With all of the real suffering in the world, and all of the real work that could be done to alleviate that suffering, please explain to me why Jesus and Mary don't have better things to do with their time.
If you are a racist, you are a moron. Everyone on this planet, everyone who has ever lived on this planet, all of us are connected. We are all related by genetics, by DNA. We are all brothers, sisters, and distant cousins. Our brave ancestors were short hairy black East Africans. Even if you are the palest blondest Swede or the yellowest most inscutable Asian, we are all niggas, too. 3.5 billion years ago we were bacteria, and now here we are, blogging about our roots and our heritage and reveling in our many stupidities, 3.5 billion years later. Isn't that miracle enough?
Samuel Beckett said, "Birth was the death of him."
Jean-Paul Sartre said, "Hell is other people."
Albert Camus said, "Man dies, and he is unhappy."
William Shakespeare said, "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Carl Sagan said, "We are all star stuff."
We can learn a lot from these guys. They were the very opposite of moronic.
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