Be careful what you wish for

If your family is anything like mine then you are lethargically shuffling around today regretting eating all those quality street and mince pies; fortunately I'm back at work and can feel the normal calorie burning stress permeating my system nicely just in time to deal with all that excess. Anyway to ease back into things I thought I would re-blog this little video from RD.NET. It's for all those apologists out there who think they've found something new in "new atheists" to direct the wrath of their particular "God" at; here is Bertrand Russell in 1959 dealing with the same old "wish thinking" that we hear ad nausea today ("ah but it might be true", bla, bla) , and as can be seen from his responses the answers are still the same, it's not what we WANT that's important it's what the evidence shows us that matters.



On this theme I watched a program on channel 4 the other night about the boxing day tsunami of 2004 called Tsunami: Where was God; from the title it sounded interesting, a genuine challenge to believers in a personal, benevolent deity to explain that day, it wasn't. Pathetic would be more accurate, basically it was some religious bloke wandering around Thailand interviewing a string of ignorant priests, monks and assorted religious parasites who mostly blamed the victims themselves for "sinning". No challenge or rebuttal was offered to this ludicrous point of view, for example the actual scientific explanation and subsequent photographic evidence of the trench on the ocean bed off the coast of Indonesia. Some of the Buddhists monks interviewed put it down to the victims being the reincarnated souls of sinners rather than the actual victims being the sinners themselves, which is obviously a great way of explaining how babies could have been "sinners", ah the theological mind at work. As the program progressed through a sad procession of religious frauds from evangelical Christians exploiting the homeless, Buddhists making a little on the side from burning corpses through to the Westborough Baptists condemning the Swedish nation it became ever more bat shit crazy and depressing.

In the end the religious narrator bloke ended up reaffirming his belief in Christ, surprise, surprise, although it was clear to me that everything in the program pointed in the opposite direction, he just wanted it to be true. I wonder what Bertrand Russell would have said about his logic, actually, I can probably guess.