Re: Internet Threat To Israel, Say Rabbis

[Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>]

At 9:02 AM -0800 1/8/00, Lizard wrote:
>
>I think that there is no meaningful distinction between orthodox Jews,
>ultra-conservative Muslims, and Fundemenetalist Christians. They're ALL
>narrow-minded book-burning scum, and the sooner their memes are excised
>from the pool, the better.
>
>(As a data point in support of this conjecture, note that Jodi Hoffman went
>from being an Orthodox Jew to a Fundementalist Christian with no noticeable
>change in lifestyle or temperament.)


Since we're on the topic of religion, let me share some wisdom from 
H.L. Mencken.

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live
is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense
and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful
and his children smart.

If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced
into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.

The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because
it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries--as
a matter of fact it was vastly less reasonable than many of them--but
because it was far more poetical.

Religion, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most
obvious realities.

Religions, like castles, sunsets and women, never reach their maximum
of beauty until they are touched by decay.

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woes, is his stupen-
dous capacity for believing the incredible.

The truth that survives is the lie that it is pleasantest to believe.

Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves
were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in
Hell.

Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil
conscience of their parents.

What I got in Sunday-School... was simply a firm conviction that the
Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God
preposterous... The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems
to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves groveling
before a Being, who, if He really exists, deserves to be denounced
rather than respected.

Morality: The theory that every human act must be either right or
wrong.

Theology: An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms
of the not worth knowing.

I see little evidence in this world of the so-called goodness of God. On
the contrary, it seems to me that, on the strength of His daily acts, He
must be set down a most stupid, cruel and villainous fellow.

       -- [Quoted in Durant, _On the meaning of Life_, p. 34)

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But
there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.

       -- Minority Report, 1956.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

The only way to reconcile science and religion is to create something
which isn't science or something which isn't religion.

Christian theology is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is
opposed to every other form of rational thinking.

MISCELLANEOUS

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know
that you would lie if you were in his place.

_Critical note_.--Of a piece with the absurd pedagogical demand for
so-called constructive criticism is the doctrine that an iconoclast is
a hollow and evil fellow unless he can prove his case. Why, indeed,
should he prove it?  Is he judge, jury, prosecuting officer, hangman?
He proves enough, indeed, when he proves by his blasphemy that this
or that idol is defectively convincing--that at least _one_ visitor to
the shrine is left full of doubts. The fact is enormously significant; it
indicates that instinct has somehow risen superior to the shallowness
of logic, the refuge of fools. The pedant and the priest have always
been the most expert of logicians--and the most diligent disseminators
of nonsense and worse. The liberation of the human mind has never
been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by
gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went
roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that
doubt, after all, was safe--that the god in the sanctuary was finite in
his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand
syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more
intelligent.

       -- The American Mercury. p. 75.


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