Frank - Thanks for offering up Anne La Mott's clever words here. Whether she can match FriAM's pedantic dives into obscure (and to some trivial or irrelevant?) topics is up for question, but she certainly has a much more humorous delivery than most of us and can be nicely pithy.
Glen - Your question demonstrates that you are a more careful/thorough reader than I. I somehow skimmed over the Maher/Graham allusion and even had to Google Graham to find out what HE was about. I've only recently "discovered" Bill Maher... and after listening to him semi-regularly for several months was still surprised to find out that he calls down the wrath of some on the left. Once again, maybe I wasn't *listening* close enough, or maybe I was guilty of letting some of his more egregious statements roll over me out of my infatuation with the general thrust (and boldly wry style) of his message, similar to the way Trumpists seem to do for/with him (though their sins of omission seem much larger in quantity and quality?). I *have* heard him go off on *all religion* and once alerted to it (and read some quotes from his screeds against Islam) recognize he has a special place in his heart filled with fear (and judgement?) of their (extremists?) religion. I am personally a strong Athiest in the sense that I have few if any doubts that the anthropomorphising of whatever the mystery of existence and beauty might be is a projection... (wo)Man making God(dess) in his/her own image. I find the stories of afterlife or repeated lives to be at best interesting metaphors for how the meaning of the lives we live might be tied to human history and future. I find the anthropomorphised God(desse)s of Western (and many others) culture to be a potentially useful way to tap into archetypicals understanding of ourselves. I also see that a great deal of horrific activity has been executed in the name of various religions, but also suspect that those horrors were not *caused* by religion so much as possibly "excused" by it. I suspect many of the folks involved in those "horrors" were both malnourished in some way (even the "wealthy") as children and even adults and quite possibly *suffered* their own "horrors" whilst growing up (I've been watching GOT and might be conflating *that world* with our own real metal-age feudal history. - Steve On 4/15/19 8:33 AM, glen∈ℂ wrote: > On 4/14/19 7:06 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote: >> 11. God; Goodnesss, Love energy, the Divine, a loving animating >> intelligence, the Cosmic Muffin. You will worship and serve >> something, so >> like St. Bob said, you gotta choose. You can play on our side, or Bill >> Maher's and Franklin Graham's. > Would anyone care to explain the "our side" versus that of Bill Maher > and Franklin Graham? My guess is that she sees Bill Maher as a > fundamentalist, too, albeit an atheist fundamentalist? Or perhaps > both Graham and Maher are Islamaphobes; so the "them" would be those > who use religion to stoke fear? > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
