Atheism as glorious ignorance
• Skeptics & Atheists
"Belief is being ignorant and denying it; agnosticism is being ignorant and respectfully admitting it; atheism is being ignorant and glorying in it." Isn't that a fantastic aphorism?
New Zealand is having its own battle over public prayer.
When Matt Robson challenged the prayer with which Parliament opens proceedings on the grounds of our diversity of cultures and religions, he made a valid point which was at least worth intelligent discussion.
But then Logan decided that Robson had ipso facto "created a moral imperative with four related demands - an end to all inherited traditions (will the national anthem be next? It mentions God); that present wisdom is invariably superior; that all cultures and faiths must be equivalent; and that the state itself can create its own traditions."
First of all, no he didn't do any such thing. Secondly, it's a shabby, pathetic trick to claim someone said something he didn't say and then attack him for it.
"The common law," Logan says, with no evidence, just his unquestioning belief, "is based on a contract whereby authority is granted to those who exercise it according to a higher law which they cannot challenge. This is the secret of our freedom." It sure is a secret that seems to have been kept from everyone but him. He might not have noticed that Muslim fanatics invoke a similar unchallengeable higher authority. ...
The defenders of the first higher law were subdued by people who decided the tradition of mayhem and death for unbelievers was unfair. Then, having toppled the enemy, the new believers in a new form of higher law killed as mercilessly as their predecessors. This murderous quid pro quo stopped and what freedom we have today was wrested from the defenders of their higher law only when religion and state were separated. ...
Boykin previously claimed that his victory over a Muslim warlord in Somalia who had boasted Allah would protect him from capture was because "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real god and his was an idol."
So how does this scary general explain the gunning down of other American soldiers by Somali warlords? Was it his god's day off?
And has God been taking his annual holidays while Saddam Hussein goes free and those young Americans die so sadly, so far from home, in Iraq?
Gordon McLauchlan, New Zealand Herald: 'Higher law' has nasty track record