Hate mail additions to existing pages…

http://normalbobsmith.com/hatemail472_part3.html
Here are two more fun hate mail updates. First, the saga of Wynn continues into a Part 3 with a discussion of where morals come from and me trying to zero in on what exactly I think. As always I’m open to hearing your thoughts. I also am very happy to have more from the hot-n-heavy apocalypse-fetish scene! Micheal Renaldo at the top of the page has emailed me one month later (4 months to the end) with further excitement and celebration.

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12 thoughts on “Hate mail additions to existing pages…”

  1. Hi, Wynn! Here’s my piece(s):

    1) Are you supporting slavery? Oh, that’s right, you follow Christianity. You’re already a slave, so you have to find a roundabout way to justify it by pretending you somehow know the exact intentions of persons having lived thousands of years ago who can’t speak for themselves. When you have an argument that is actually fueled by reason, let us know. Otherwise, you’re just making yourself look like an ass, while trying to seem different and unusual. You’re not different. You’re a Jesus slave. I’m actually sad for you, the way your hating, hypocritical, child-killing, mind-controlling master treats you.

    2) You don’t see the humor in Bob’s dress-up games? Maybe you should click and look somewhere else. It’s really easy.

    3) Others have come before you and tried the morals argument bit. You’re just as bad at it as they were. You also discount personal choices in the subject of morality, thereby assuming that morals must be all-encompassing. There’s this thing called Law. (Thanks, Hammurabi). A set of rules that ensures the minimal comforts of living in a community. Justice. We can’t please everyone. There goes your feel-good argument. You can’t live by morals set in a book, not just because it’s out-dated but also because they can’t blanket us. Let’s not even get started on the obvious hypocrisy therein.

    4) Keep up the good work! Futile attempts like yours, the especially windy long ones that seem to never grasp reality, are the kind of thing I like to read with my morning coffee.

  2. Wynn said: “With all that said, where does a person who only believes in evidence and reason even obtain the notion that slavery is wrong? At least the Bible specifies that a person who is a slave is still a person worthy of fair treatment. ”

    Oh, really, Wynn? Do you think THIS is fair treatment?

    Genesis 16:5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the LORD judge between you and me.”

    6 “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.

    Abraham was supposed to be a good, righteous, upstanding man of God, and his wife is upheld as the perfect example of womanhood by Christians and Jews alike. Yet Sarah was a total cunt who abused poor Hagar until she fled into the wilderness to die rather than endure more torment. When Sarah couldn’t conceive, she sent Hagar to Abraham’s bed. Do you see any place in this story where anyone asks Hagar what SHE wants? No, you do not. That is because nobody gave a shit what SHE wanted. She was a slave and had no more rights than Abe’s cattle and sheep. Was Hagar treated fairly in this story? Was she respected and her opinions valued?

    Let’s look at some more examples of slaves getting “fair treatment.”

    Exodus 11:5 Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the female slave, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well.

    This is an often-overlooked verse in the arguments about biblically-endorsed slavery. God is about to kill all the firstborn humans and animals of the whole of Egypt. Please note that the slaves had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the Hebrews and their situation. That poor slave woman, working at her handmill late in the night to make bread for her owner, would wake up the next morning to find her first-born child dead. What reason did God have to torment this woman? SHE was a slave, too! She was not oppressing any Hebrews. Her baby–who would also be a slave–certainly committed no sin worthy of punishment. I ask you, Wynn: Is THIS, too, an example of God’s fair treatment of slaves? Seems to me that God is being a total asshole in this story.

    Exodus 21:20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”

    Is this fair treatment, Wynn? You can beat your slave nearly to death, but as long as he doesn’t actually die, you’re good to go. After all, he’s your personal possession, on the level of a donkey or a cow. As long as the donkey can work, you keep on using him. If the donkey is stubborn, you beat him with a stick until he obeys. But you don’t want to beat him TOO hard, because you do need him to pull your plow. Slaves were no better off than donkeys.

    Leviticus 25:44 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.”

    Your idea of fair treatment, Wynn, is that it is okay to buy slaves, as long as they come from OTHER nations. Do you think the Hebrews bothered asking those other nations what THEY wanted? Do you think their opinions, lives, customs, and cultures were valued and appreciated? Well, no, of course not. There is no way you can value any human being that you own. It simply cannot be done. When you treat other people as nothing more than objects to be bought, sold, traded, auctioned, used, abused, and even written into your children’s inheritance, then you automatically cease to be concerned about those people as fellow humans worthy of your love and respect. For fairness to exist, there must be a sense that all of the parties involved are equal to one another as fellow human beings. As a slave is in no way equal to the man who owns him, there can be no such thing as “fair treatment” for slaves.

  3. This “Doctor” has obviously never studied evoloution (came about by chance?! c’mon how many times do we have to explain this!) or abiogenesis and has clearly never heard of amino acids.
    His morals are clearly all over the place, probably because of the confliction between his cultural morals he’s learnt from the civilisation in which he lives, and the 1500 year old book he gets his other morals from.
    And why does he assume animals dont have morals? Chimps and Gorillas do infact have basic morality, as do Dolphins and most other social animals (to a certain degree), and you can’t tell me your pet pooch never feels guilt or shame when he craps in the house and you come home and find it waiting for you in front of the TV!
    He knows he’s done something wrong and you can tell he knows!
    And i’m pretty sure he doesn’t read the bible!

    Pre-historic man also would’ve had basic morals, if one “caveman” (sorry), hits another “caveman” round the head with a rock, he will obviously be exhiled, or put to death, or at the very least punished by the rest of the tribe, why? because they don’t want him walking around freely hitting people round the head with rocks….and so knowing this, people will know it is a bad idea to hit other people round the head with rocks, because bad things will happen to you if you do!
    Yes……not only is there a (non-religious) Golden rule to morality, but morality is, infact, a little bit selfish! (At the very least socially self-preserving).

    I have to say I love it when Wynn says ” We’re blessed today to live in a time where slavery is not a necessity at all.”

    I don’t think “blessed” is the word to use! It is MAN who abolished slavery DESPITE the teachings of “God”.

  4. @Aaron
    I thought he meant with the “came about by chance” he referred to the fact that the physics of our universe permit life as we know it? In the paragraph before the “chance” statement, he is talking about intermolecular properties. We can imagine universes where some constants like the equation of state parameter (a constant governing the properties of dark matter) are different. Such universe would not have any molecules, and thus no life.

    (Disclaimer: I have no deep knowledge of physics, I just got that information from a wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip, without reading the paper it is based on, http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/kaniol/a360/big-rip-cosmologyPRL71301.pdf)

  5. Clarification:
    Upon rereading, I noticed that I got the specific theory wrong, but that doesn’t change the fact I wanted to highlight – that slight variations in cosmological constants would lead to universes devoid of life. I didn’t at first find a suitable link, I think these two articles better explain where Wynn’s coming from:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe
    One possible answer to this objection is the anthropic principle:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

    Best regards and sorry for the misleading first post,

    Sceptic Watcher

  6. Ooh! @Watcher and Aaron. Dawkins gives a fantastic section of his book, the God Delusion, to that very topic. It’s well-treated and a great read. in fact, that book is all-round a great read if you’re going to comment on this site!

  7. I read the God delusion a few years back, it really is a good book! I do vaugley remember Dawkins touching on this subject, I’m going to have to read the book again, sadly i leant the copy to my girlfriend who is now my ex-girlfriend (not because of the book…though that would have been quite a story!) so going to have to fork out $30 for a new copy *sigh*

  8. FYI to all: You can buy Dawkins’ the God Delusion on Amazon:

    Paperback is $10.85

    Hardcover is $17.82

    They also have electronic editions. Don’t let price stop you! =]

  9. Yeah, morals come from the Bible, sure… I guess that’s why Catholics and Protestants were slaughtering one another in the steets right up to the 16th century, and why we had to wait until the middle of the 18th century for Beccaria, an Italian marquis (hello, pope?), to finally put forward the idea that punishment should be proportionate to the crime committed.

    Indeed, on the one hand, if I am deserving of eternal punishment merely for being an nonbeliever or for not obeying whichever one of God’s commands, what’s preventing me from killing everyone I happen to not like? (assuming I have a way to avoid getting caught by the police, of course) And on the other hand, if I find that I can be forgiven for any crime I could commit, provided that I sincerely ask for it – like a Gilles de Rais, for example (read: for sincere fear of eternal punishment), – what’s preventing me from committing those crimes in the first place and ask for forgiveness later – if not the visceral, almost innate feeling that such or such action is wrong, that is?

  10. Ha, 16th century I said? What about the Irish Troubles? For sure this had no religious underpinnings whatsoever. But no, it did, and it was all so very moral, for both sides were backed up by nothing less than the holiest of holy books, right? Also, anyone remembers that guy who was crucified around 2002 or so? I myself remember feeling so very englightened by the sheer morality of that act. And what about Fred Phelps’ take on biblical morality? He takes it very literally, you know.

  11. Bob, your response on this page is the best yet. Don’t get me wrong, the way you’ve fucked with Jay the Mountain Framer is brilliant work, but this response to Wynn is moving and exciting. It’s the best I’ve seen you write here.

    Religious people seem to assume that an atheist worldview is cold, painful and terrifying. Thank you so much for giving voice to the peace that comes from making your own choices, the joy in learning about the life all around you, the strength that comes from taking responsibility for yourself.

    I tell my 3 year old son that we’re here in this world to help others and have fun. If you’re not helping others or having fun, then what you’re doing is probably not that important. 🙂

  12. Bob,

    Your last reply to Wynn is one of the most comprehensive treatises on the immorality of religion that I have read. Have you ever watched any of Philhelenes videos on Youtube? His video “Why scientists do not fear Hell” struck a lasting chord with me as does your reply to Wynn.

    Well done sir!

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