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News Briefs 31-08-2015

By Gregon

Happy 17th birthday to us! If only I had of known how many posts I’d be making in the next 6200 days….

Thanks @anomalistnews.

Quote of the Day:

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

Oliver Sacks

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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11 Comments

  2. so you’re a virgo…
    Happy B-day TDG! I sadly can’t say I’ve been here is 1998. I didn’t have internet until 2004 and even then it was dial-up (i know… the horror). I still have that PC though and it still works. Anyway, thanks for all the years of interesting shit 😉

    1. Cheers!
      [quote=LastLoup]Happy B-day TDG! I sadly can’t say I’ve been here is 1998. I didn’t have internet until 2004 and even then it was dial-up (i know… the horror). I still have that PC though and it still works. Anyway, thanks for all the years of interesting shit ;)[/quote]

      Thanks! First five years of running the Grail (1998-2003) was all done on a dial-up connection – and before CMSes, was a lot of manual HTML, archiving and FTPing!

      Ah those were the days…

  3. Point of view
    No I don’t think atheists should be anti-religious in the sense they should care what their next-door neighbor Don believes. If you want to be atheist, fine, but don’t go harassing the people that are religious like the 12-year-olds that like to start Youtube comment wars. We should just not care what anyone believes, because when you start judging and call the religious folk stupid – then you are no better than the religious people who use their religion as an excuse for war, genocide, or whatever the crazy Southern Baptists are limping to the barn with this week. It all comes down to judging others and that’s not cool kids. I have met plenty of atheists that aren’t dickheads.

    I also hate it when atheists or the religious like to say certain philosophers in history were atheist because he/she wrote one line in one place so there. No. Teddy Roosevelt called out Voltaire as atheist and he wasn’t. In fact most weren’t but they didn’t like the Church because they could have their heads cut off for speaking their mind (sometimes literally). They were smart enough to realize though that it was the people within the Church speaking for God that was the problem.

    When you get down to it, if we are going to be judging each other and turning one group into the pariah of the other, there really is no difference between them. It’s just stupidity, plain and simple. As a friend of mine used to say, some people would benefit from Saturday morning cartoons.

    I don’t think having a religion or being religious is the problem. Atheists site constantly the idea of ISIL using their religion to behead people and therefore religion is bad. Well I’m sorry but I know many Muslims who don’t like ISIL and don’t think what they are doing represents there religion. I don’t approve of what happened in the Inquisition, but I don’t blame all Catholics and think they are going to torture me for posting on The Daily Grail. If so I better run because my whole family is Italian and Irish.

    We shouldn’t care what people believe or don’t believe. Just be good people. Is that so hard? Hell most of us don’t judge people by the color of their skin. So why can’t we get over religion. Even our politics is now 90% based on what people believe and that’s both sides. When atheists and the religious realize that when you get down to it, you’re all the same whiny little pricks – then there will be some damn problems getting’ figured out.

    1. Harassing believers
      While I would agree with your sentiments about not harassing believers, that is not the same thing as not challenging believers. This is particularly true when they are attempting to foist their Bronze Age or Medieval views on everybody else, either through laws or by trying to inject those beliefs into textbooks, etc. My view is that the world would be a much better place without religion, if for no other reason than that it encourages magical thinking and accepting things on “faith,” rather than on solid evidence and sound argument. But as long as the religious keep their beliefs and practices to themselves I am content to let them believe whatever fairy tales they choose to believe.

      I would also agree that religious believers are not stupid, necessarily, as evidenced by the fact that there are a number of scientists, including some prominent ones, who are believers. I think that most believers, based on my experince with believers, as well as my own experience as a former believer, are simply ignorant of the relevant science and history, as well as much of the truly atrocious stuff that is in the Bible, the Koran, etc. They are also, as I was, subject to childhood indoctrination, which can be very difficult to overcome. As for the more educated believers, especially the actual scientists, I think the only way they can subscribe to religious beliefs is by mentally walling off those beliefs, exempting them from the same scrutiny to which they would subject some other belief. This would, of course, include the religious beliefs of those who subscribe to a different religion.

      As to this last point, it never ceases to amaze me that believers in one religion can so easily point out the absurdities in someone else’s beliefs, while vigorously defending the obvious (to somene not of their faith) absurdities in their own beliefs.

  4. The Grail Quest
    After 17 years we can at least answer the question, “Whom does the Grail NOT serve?”

    By the way, 17 is the number of years Akhenaten ruled. Is it time to make our Exodus toward a Promised Land (or at least wonder around aimlessly for the rest of our lives)?

    1. Thanks!
      [quote=creox]I’ve been a long time lurker and very rarely a poster. Keep on rockin’.[/quote]

      Love hearing from the original gangsters…lots of lurkers around here! Thanks for saying hi.
      🙂

      1. Happy Birthday TDG
        My memory of those very early days was that I visited The Daly Grail for updates and comments on all things do do with alternative archaeology, sacred geometry, Rennes-le-Chateau, etc. They were my interests at the time so I remember TDG as reflecting my interests.

        Since then, those particular themes have taken a back seat and more spiritual matters such as parapsychology, NDE, consciousness and doubts about Darwinism have come to the fore. Again, I see that reflected in the content on show here. Perhaps I’m only seeing what I’m looking for but TDG is still daily for me.

        In a world where headlines are dominated by the fundamentalists, whether religious or materialist/atheist, TDG is an oasis of sanity. Long may it remain so.

  6. Grammatical quibble
    Just fyi, when you say “If only I had of known,” you are adding an unnecessary word, i.e., the word “of.” “If only I had known” is the correct phrasing. Actually the mistake you’re making is the same one people make when they write “I could of done that,” when what they should write is “I could’ve done that,” where “could’ve” is a contraction of “could have.” So what you are essentially saying in your comment is “If only I had’ve known,” or in other words, “If only I had have known.” Here the excess word becomes obvious.

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