Notes from yesterday's conversation
Alaska Aviation Body Count
According to this ADN graph, 255 people have died in plane accidents in Alaska since 2000 (whole article here).
A note on the lamented John Eshleman, and the plane in question (which had starred in Con Air)...
According to Wikipedia, the name of Destruction Bay comes from "the wind blowing down structures erected by the military during highway construction in 1942-43."
Alaska Highway
Couldn't find the Sea Lord's motorcycle, video, so here's a War Department film on the construction of the Alaska Highway.
The Truth is Out There
- Valentich
- Cash-Landrum WTF? (note involvement of Lloyd Bentsen and John Tower)
- Mothman and Mothman death list - interesting debate here on who would win in a fight, Mothman or the Mongolian Death Worm
By the way, in this morning's Dominion Post (New Zealand):
The truth is out there, and it's humiliating. There's a unifying theme emerging from the 2000-plus pages of top-secret reports into UFO sightings released by the Defence Force last week, and it is this: as far as extra- terrestrial life is concerned, we are a pit-stop on the road to nowhere.Don't get me started on Flight 19 (the search plane blew up?)
Look at the evidence. Other countries get alien abductions by the truckload. But in the more than half a century of contact recorded in the Defence Force X-files, not a single alien has bothered to have any meaningful interaction with us.
Aliens do not want to introduce us to their leader, take us to new civilisations, grill us on the details of our daily lives, or entrust us with grave warnings about the future. They have never given us a ride in their spaceship. They can't even be arsed to mutilate our cattle.
Religion
Perhaps the conversation can be advanced with a little economic analysis?
My problem with Hitchens is what comes afterward if everyone takes his point. If I'd been debating him I'd have insisted that he present his views while flanked by life-sized cardboard cutouts of Mao and Stalin.
(That's odd, I ordered a free, humanistic, enlightened society, and I got this horrific dictatorship.)
Which got me thinking - what was Napoleon's religion? It turns out the answer is not straightforward. Here is Metternich's take.
Napoleon also said (and you'll like this):
"I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation so much as the mystery of the social order. It introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization, which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor."Anyway, everytime I scratch a militant atheist I find a logical positivist underneath. And I hate logical postivists, because they're bad.
posted by The Front at 1:56 PM
7 Comments:
I'd love to know how Destruction Bay figured in the conversation, as it is the site of a plane crash that was very significant to me.
The Laird and FSL were bringing me up to date, and I said: "I wonder why they call it Destruction Bay..."
"My problem with Hitchens is what comes afterward if everyone takes his point. If I'd been debating him I'd have insisted that he present his views while flanked by life-sized cardboard cutouts of Mao and Stalin."
Because atheists become Stalinists and Maoists? You do know some atheists, don't you?
Atheism as a government policy does not have a distinguished track record.
Hitchens wants to eradicate institutions and beliefs that have lasted for millenia, and has no fucking clue what to replace them with.
Stalin decided, around the time you could hear the exhaust pipes of the Panzerkampfwagens from the Kremlin, that maybe religion wasn't such a bad thing after all.
Even a committed atheist should think twice about trying to get rid of religion. It's pervasive in human societies from the dawn of time, politically and socially useful, and there is some probability, however slight in his estimation, that there really is a Supreme Being.
This is, to borrow from the Logical Positivists, "unverifiable", but it is not impossible, as even Ayer acknowledged.
More succinctly: the existence or non-existence of a supreme being (or committee, or whatever) is not verifiable by any scientific standard.
But it is verifiable that religion is pervasive and that it plays a significant role in most human societies. The demand for spiritual guidance is at least as strong as for, say, investment counseling, legal advice, or computer services.
"Atheism as a government policy does not have a distinguished track record."
Is somebody arguing for atheism as a government policy? (Besides this straw man?)
"Hitchens wants to eradicate institutions and beliefs that have lasted for millenia, and has no fucking clue what to replace them with."
Hitchens never says he wants to eradicate institutions or beliefs.
Must a critic stands for its eradication and replacement for his criticism to be valid? Is the same true of capitalism? If there's anything Hichens wants to eradicate is the attitude that religion is above criticism.
"Even a committed atheist should think twice about trying to get rid of religion. It's pervasive in human societies from the dawn of time..."
As is war and venereal disease.
"...politically and socially useful,"
It's doing a bang-up job in Northern Ireland and Israel, at the moment.
"...and there is some probability, however slight in his estimation, that there really is a Supreme Being."
This argument, if I understand it correctly, is that we must not eliminate religion because there might be a Supreme Being, and presumably this Supreme Being cares whether human beings on the planet Earth abide worship said Supreme Being.
(To be continued in next comment.)
Actually, I'll start in a new post.
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