On 12/31/2011 2:51 AM, Warp wrote:
>    The explanation seems to be that religious people have this notion that
> "revelations" are as good as the "prophets" that deliver them. If the prophet
> himself is somehow objectionable, then his message is objectionable too.
> Hence if you discredit the prophet, you discredit the message.
>
Yeah, that is pretty much it. That people had worked out some bits 
before, that a lot of people, including some of the worst of them, 
didn't like his version, precisely because there was no hierarchy of 
ascent to it, etc., doesn't matter. That he was wrong about a mess of 
stuff, and had no explanation for some of the other ideas, doesn't 
matter. We say Darwin, so they assume Darwinism, and thus, *he* lies at 
the center of the whole thing. Its kind of like if they objected to 
Newton, so ignored Einstein, because they figured all the stuff they 
don't like about gravity could be solved by attacking only Newton, and 
not *every single person since*, never mind before.

But, I have kind of wondered about the rise of idiocy. It didn't seem to 
exist in my parents generation. Penn pegged it in this video, I think:

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/30/penn-jillette-an-atheists-g.html

Basically, prior to the need for the true nuts of religion to band 
together, they where scared to death of each other. You didn't dare say 
you where a protestant during an election, without risking every 
Catholic, and Baptist, and who knows who ever else, probably throwing 
their vote at someone else instead. So, they took something that never 
really existed, not really even when it was founded, and made Christian 
a magic word. If you are one, it doesn't matter any more what you 
disagree about, even if the disagreement is so serious that you might be 
shooting each other, instead of suggesting shooting gays, or Muslims, 
instead. It only matters that you belong to one of the thousands of 
variations, and the one you are in happens to be part of the 50% willing 
to go along with insane shit, or the 10% that actually believe 
completely contradictory, and mutually exclusive, crazy shit. Against 
the rest of the world, you fall under the magic, never before there, 
tent, called "Christian". They can, in effect, blow each other to shit 
over whether magic underwear, magic crackers, or magic bath water, is 
more important, after they are done shitting on everyone else over the 
"bigger" things.

We where better off where there was mutual fear between them, in some 
respects. In other ways, blatant, and constant, insanity is weakening 
their numbers, and if, as in the 1950, your "denomination" still 
mattered, Atheism would, as Penn says, outnumber the membership of 
*every* individual religious cult out there. Its only their redefinition 
of their magic word, which not one bloody one of them actually thinks 
means the same thing at all, that makes them a majority.

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