Today’s news and commentary:
- Sourcing Quotes the Pilger Way
- “What Israeli security could teach the US”
- “Pollard writes to captive soldiers' families”
- “Democracy isn't just about free elections”
- “Farmers believe cows 'moo' with an accent”
- “Mexican park turns border crossing into sport”
- “Ancient biblical waterworks found in Israel”
- “Company Touts Stem-Cell Breakthrough” (It must be noted that people are using the term “ethical” incorrectly. When one is speaking of whether something is actually right or wrong, the term to use is “moral”, not “ethical”, which also needs to be distinguished from “legal”, which is used when dealing with what a system of laws (which need not be moral or ethical) permit or prohibit. Ethics are the rules people make up in order to avoid moral and legal violations. Saying that taking a cell or two from an embryo in a way that does not harm it is “gravely unethical” means that doing this is allegedly an egregious violation of a rule meant to avoid a moral or legal violation. Since stem cell researchers are not prohibited from doing so in any code of ethics (if there were, these researchers would be disciplined or fired), what they are doing is not unethical. What is intended is that what they are doing is “gravely immoral”. This itself is a major question. If anyone has any evidence that an early embryo has a legal status as a person (fully sentient being, not “human” or “alive”, sentient) in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament or that doing something harmless to an embryo is considered in these texts to be prohibited unconditionally, please tell me, because I can’t see it. One might not like doing things to embryos, but that does not make it automatically wrong.)
- “BREAKING NEWS: Pluto Demoted, No Longer a Planet ”
Special addition: I’m currently finding myself trying to find a decent title for my book-in-progress on religious fallacies and misinformation (see “Weird thing of the day: December 2005” and “Weird thing of the day: January 2006”). What I’m aiming for is something that will attract a lot of attention and give people the heebeejeebees. Unable to decide, I am including below the current list. Please, take a little time, read over the list, and E-mail me your favorite. (Comments on this post are also OK.) Thank you.
A Book Concerning the Dead
A Simpleton Will Believe Anything
A Study of the Dead
All Religions Are the Same and Other Religious Misinformation
Almost Everything You Think You Know About Religion Is Wrong
Apocalypse Yesterday
Azathoth and Other Horrors
Cults of Ghouls
Everyone is a Hindu and a Wiccan and Other Bad Religious Thinking
For They Bow Down to Vanity and Emptiness and Pray to a God Who Does Not Save
Gideon’s Threshing-Floor
In His House at R’lyeh Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming
Incinerate This Book
On the Sending Out of the Soul
Read This Book at Your Own Peril
Required Reading for Occultists
Satan Made Me Write This
Something Worse Than the Necronomicon
The Azhar Necronomicon
The Black Tome of Alsophocus
The Book of Azathoth
The Book of Dead Laws
The Book of Gods Who Do Not Save
The Book of Good Intentions
The Book of Night
The Book of Radiant Darkness
The Book of Rebels
The Book of the Deluded Skeletons
The Book of the Demonic Hippopotamus
The Book of the Evil Inclination
The Book of Those Who Ignored Moses’s Last Speech
The Book of Ultimate Blasphemy
The Book of Unwritten Rules
The Book of Vanity and Emptiness
The Celaeno Fragments
The Chronicles of Nath
The Demonic Hippopotamus Necronomicon
The Derby
The Dhol Chants
The Divine Misconception
The Ecumenical Necronomicon
The Eltdown Shards
The End is Near (Really!)
The Forbidden Book of Arcane Secrets
The Grids of Discord
The G’harne Fragments
The Ilarnek Papyri
The Image of the Law of the Dead
The Koranjiyana Zenchristian Necronomicon
The Meta-Necronomicon
The Necronomicon of All Religions
The Omnist Necronomicon
The Orange Catholic Heresy
The Orange Catholic Necronomicon
The Parchments of Pnom
The Pnakotic Manuscripts
The Ponape Scripture
The Real-Life Necronomicon
The Revelations of Glaaki
The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan
The Testament of Carnamagos
The Universal Necronomicon
The Worship of Fictional Gods and Other Bad Religious Thinking
The Zanthu Tablets
The Zenchristian Navakoranecronomicon
They Say...
Things in the Water
Aaron, owner of a few (purchased, not downloaded) albums by Weird Al Yankovic
3 comments:
Ha ha, lots of Dune references. You need to explain the following:
A Book Concerning the Dead
A Study of the Dead
Azathoth and Other Horrors
Cults of Ghouls
In His House at R’lyeh Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming
On the Sending Out of the Soul
The Azhar Necronomicon
The Black Tome of Alsophocus
The Book of Azathoth
The Book of Radiant Darkness
The Book of the Deluded Skeletons
The Celaeno Fragments
The Chronicles of Nath
The Derby
The Dhol Chants
The Eltdown Shards
The Grids of Discord
The G’harne Fragments
The Ilarnek Papyri
The Image of the Law of the Dead
The Parchments of Pnom
The Pnakotic Manuscripts
The Ponape Scripture
The Revelations of Glaaki
The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan
The Testament of Carnamagos
The Zanthu Tablets
Things in the Water
Additionally, many of your titles are unnecessarily insulting or stupid. (Who cares about demonic hippos?) How about something like This Book's Author Is a Dork or Everyone but Me Is Stupid?
Your title should be: The Gospel Truth... MY ASS!
There are two reasons for having a Cthulhu Mythos reference is 1) I want a title that gets people's attention and 2) this book is meant to be dangerous. The fictional Necronomicon is a book which can be used to wake Cthulhu, a monster that many people want to keep asleep and away from humanity. My book is meant to "wake" issues in religion which many people want to keep away from human minds as much as possible. Cthulhu, if wakened, has the potential to wreak havoc on Earth; the "sleeping" issues also have potential to wreak havoc, only in this case with people's belief systems. Cthulhu is considered evil, and (remarkably) many the issues I raise (particularly applications of reason to religion) to be evil or wrong. Thus I deem some variation on Necronomicon, including a plausible translation of the term (e.g., A Book Concerning the Dead) or the name of a likewise dangerous book from the Cthulhu Mythos, to be appropriate.
Combining that with a reference to the Orange Catholic Bible/Zenchristian Navakoran/Koranjiyana Zenchristian Scriptures or Azhar Book would indicate these dangerous ideas are meant to apply to all religions.
The Grids of Discord is a reference to an image of relativistic truth from the Principia Discordia:
We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids
(concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group
of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and
relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is
in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle.
Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one
grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one
that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened
westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the
ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more
beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be
more True than any other.
DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed through some
particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like
female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of
female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically
arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.
The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow
wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the
ERISTIC ILLUSION.
The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition
relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T)
Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid,
and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick
another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and
disordered.
Reality is the original Rorschach.
The Book of Radiant Darkness is an image I found in a book on meditation.
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