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Dear PrezTexNo1, Please unblock me from on your MySpace account! <3 <3 <3 ReFinahJihad02

In researching the religious opinions of the youth of England, the hoary CoE found that the youth are largely non-religious and don’t seem particularly bothered by the idea of there not being a spiritual life at all.

Their creed could be defined as: “This world, and all life in it, is meaningful as it is,” translated as: “There is no need to posit ultimate significance elsewhere beyond the immediate experience of everyday life.” The goal in life of young people was happiness achieved primarily through the family.

Some quasi-revolutionary thinking in a place where revolutionary thinking is rarely found:

He [Brother Consolmagno] described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it harked back to the days of “nature gods” who were responsible for natural events.

Brother Consolmagno is entirely correct. The human mind has sought to apply reason and narrative to the disorder of our world of experience since the very first humans. First we attributed the creation myths and the “why does X happen” myths to mysterious forces. We then structure those forces to have relationships to one another (The goddess of wisdom erupted whole and unborn outside of the ruler-god, etc.)

Ultimately a revolution happened in Greece a few millennia ago, these paltry explanations were set aside for the love of wisdom: philosophia.

I like to imagine it was the work of Xenophanes that undermined this “story-telling” as explanation of phenomena:

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blockquote>“Mortals fancy that gods are born, and wear clothes, and have voice and form like themselves. Yet if oxen and lions had hands, and could paint and fashion images as men do, they would make the pictures and images of their gods in their own likenesses; horses would make them like horses, oxen like oxen. Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; Thracians give theirs blue eyes and red hair.” (from Diogenes Laertes “Xenophanes,” iii.)

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blockquote>

Christianity, for many years, seemed to be at peace with a transcendent God. Yet the plausability of evolution chafes at them (why should you care, if you have faith, ask I) so they posit this nonsense called Creationism. Creationism goes back to making the Christian God a “maker god” not much different than Zeus. I don’t think that’s progress for the religion.

Why just look at these before and after shots.

If you’re still browsing the Internet with Internet Explorer, I can virtually guarantee you that you’ll enjoy your browsing by one Jovian mass by switching to the Firefox browser. It’s fast, has great pop-up protection, and has a million great extensions. Even if you don’t use extensions, it’s a great browser.

Get it here.

If you do use Firefox and you do develop web pages, here’s a blog entry with a ton of great extensions.

Well I feel like I would be horribly behind on the news of the internet if I didn’t comment on Stephen Colbert calling G.W. Bush “Arsenio” at the White House Correspondents dinner.

Colbert’s vicious use of irony served to show what a chummy, buddy-buddy, insular, self-congratulatory un-virtuous cycle the press’ relationship to the White House has become. He clowned the President, clowned the press, and basically dared say what about two-thirds of the country has come to realize.

Incidentally, it’s a really rough thing to watch. The jaw-dropping from the correspondents and the “is he really saying this?” look from the roastee is priceless; painful, but priceless. I think this may be the real tipping point.

Check out the footage or transcripts here.

Recently I’ve added another web zeitgeist story to my read: reddit. I heard about it at StartupSchool and I’ve really enjoyed it lately. Via the aggregator I found the following story about what happens when you take 50 civilians, dress them up like Best Buy employees, and then send them into the BB store in Union Square, NYC.

Let the mayhem ensue.

As promised earlier, my application

is now available (with source) for download.

MemoryBank.dmg.gz