no.193

"Think about it, the conditions are perfect. You have the attention of millions of people, you have your liberal, atheist opponent in front of you, and your goal is to make them all rage, while making your oafish, unimaginative supporters hoot and holler behind you. Bill O’Reilly unleashed the perfect storm of internet trolldom. He didn’t just invoke the god of the gaps. He won it. He won God of the Gaps. Don’t ask me how. You can’t explain that."

Maki, refering to a interview of David Silverman by Bill O'Reilly.

Go to the page, read the comic, watch the video the quote is about.

But really, if you've ever watched much Bill O'Reilly, you know exactly what he's talking about

no. 192

"If a universe formed in the forest, and its conditions weren’t right to create a self-important monkey, did it ever exist at all?"

Maki

no. 191

“And what comedian designer configured the region between our legs - an entertainment complex built around a sewage system?”

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

no. 190

Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leach down your trousers and pray. Whatever you “believe,” this is not as effective as medicine. Again you can say, “It works for me,” but so do placebos. My point being, I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.

Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.”

Ricky Gervais


via

no. 189

"I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativism is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it."

Kurt Vonnegut

via Gerry Canavan, the source of much goodness.

no. 188

"Oh, my son, if I teach you nothing else, let it be this: There's always someone, somewhere you can resent."

Davan, in Randy Milholland's Something Positive.

no.187

"The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is."

Stephen Fry

via

no. 186

"I said never apologize for how you feel. No one can control how they feel. The sun doesn’t apologize for being the sun. The rain doesn’t say sorry for falling. Feelings just are."

Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

via

no. 185

"Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime; time takes time. The only way to fail at life is to abstain."

Johanna de Silentio

via

no. 184

"The various races are a result of thousands of years of isolated xenophobes fucking their cousins.

Keep this in mind the next time you’re going to make fun of the shape of someone’s eyes, you inbred hillbilly."

The Virgin Prince

no. 183

no. 182

"So to punish the Devil for trying to overthrow him - which wouldn’t have happened anyway because HE’S GOD and he could just will him out of existence - God decides to throw him out of heaven, but just let him have total freedom otherwise. So the Devil can run around completely fucking up everything God tries to do from then on, meaning that millions of souls will be tortured in hell for all eternity.

This is like if you threw a wad a paper at your Dad, and he “punished” you by signing the house over to you and not doing anything as you set fire to the lawn.

Come on. Zeus turned into a cow to have sex with married women, and even his plans were more rational than this.

And before you guys say “GOD’S MIND IS SO GREAT WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND HIS WAYS,” I just want to point out that God intentionally made us too stupid to understand him, and yet, even in that state, the stuff he does looks to us like arbitrary, short-sighted, nonsensical bullshit.

Which demonstrates a larger point. He made us idiots, and then set the Devil loose on us. And the only salvation we get from this is after we die a miserable death, he won’t torture us forever.

I don’t believe in God, so to me, this is all just goofy Iron Age mythology. But to those of you who do believe in him…what, do you just not think about all this?"

Fat, Angry, Godless Freak. via The Virgin Prince

no. 181

"I don’t understand why the GOP is so hard on Obama.

In the 80s Reagan got the unemployment rate down to 8% from a starting high of like 11%, while billionaires got richer at the expense of the middle class, and they just let the banks go back to doing whatever they wanted, and they thought it was GREAT."

The Virgin Prince

no. 180

"I know some classes at the school had to read A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye AND The Great Gatsby.

There’s your problem, America. It’s not video games or the Internet that is making your white kids grow up into amoral, self-important whiners who expect to get away with everything. It’s making them read books about jaded assholes and then telling them it’s great literature.

And hell, some schools throw in Ayn Rand’s garbage on top of it! No wonder Youtube comments look like they do. It’s fucking evil.

At the same time, I was reading Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau and Gulliver’s Travels. And what did those books teach me? That white people who think they’re smarter and better than everyone else usually wind up trapped in a hell of their own making, and while they can eventually cut their way out of it, it will probably drive them insane, or at least otherwise ruin their lives. I think that’s a far better lesson."

The Virgin Prince

no. 179

White Liberals: “Charity first…after personal wealth and power.”

Because how are you going to tell everyone how we should help Africa if you can’t fly on a private jet to get to the 4-star resort / convention center?

At least when Republicans charge $5,000 a plate, they look you right in the eye and tell you it’s because they just really like money.

I’ll take callous assholes over callous assholes who fucking lie to me about it.

Oh, and while I’m on the topic: if the head of your “international charity” makes as much as a vice president of Wal-Mart, I’m not giving you any money. I make $400 a week. At least funding the Wal-Mart exec’s salary nets me a “Who Farted?” trucker cap and an industrial-sized can of Cheez Balls. If the only way your charity can find a qualified individual to run it is to bribe someone who otherwise wouldn’t do it, it’s not a charity. It’s that asshole’s ticket to a nicer house. And I’m not funding that.

Besides, in 2011, Wal-Mart gave almost a billion dollars to charitable causes around the world. Sure, they funded it with Chinese serf labor. But again, they’re fairly up-front about it.

The Virgin Prince

no. 178

You’re not going to curb the outsized influence of lobbyists and their wealthy masters as long as every American dreams of becoming a powerful aristocrat.

We reward the worst behavior because we all want to to win by behaving badly. Until you fix that social problem, you aren’t going to fix the political problem.


The Virgin Prince