h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Happy: In order to join, you need a chair, and in order to have a chair, you have to give it a name. Otherwise, you just find yourself sitting on the floor, sitting in whatever Scopes happened to fling there.

If the quality of editing was good across the board, we wouldn't have to worry about who gets our stuff, but I do recall that the Towers were going to make a sincere effort to get articles into the hands of subs who knew a little something about the subject at hand. As such, most of our freethought articles should land in the hands of our FFFF subs. As for my experience, I just wish they would fire that one particular sub... I had problems with that one well before the Atheism article.

If you don't mind my asking, which sub was it? My subs address:

[email protected]

-jb

Thanks for the compliments on my editing ability Twophlag! Uh.. on what do you base this on though? I'm not an editor here on h2g2... maybe I should be?

Since the rejection page was my idea, I should probably be the one that actually does it. Fair Warning now, I can be kind of slow when it comes to on-line tasks .. especially the ones I don't get paid for, but I make up for it usually in fits of inspiration where I get much done in a short time.

I really like the idea of having a special tag on the main page for the entries in the FFFF collection that have been rejected by the h2g2 editorialship. He should also have a "hopelessly mangled" tag for your 'approved' Athiesim article Colonel.

Damnit. Well, you would be. Let me think, who was it that really impressed the hell out of me...

Wow, I blew that one. Looneytunes it was. Hell of an editor. Did a bang-up job on my "God" piece, unfortunately wasting his time in the process.

It's the feedback process that seems to provide the biggest obstacle to getting entries properly edited. I'm not sure if the peer review scheme is much help in that area; what I would really like is if people with pending entries were sent copies of the article in question, along with a note explaining why changes were made.

Or perhaps one could flag an article one is submitting as somehow really important to you. I think we all write some entries that we care more about, or work harder on, than others.

It also might help if the sub-eds were given stricter guidelines concerning making changes to an entry's stylistic properties. I'm happy to have my spelling, grammar, and punctuation checked. I'm not so happy to have my words reformulated to say something I wouldn't ever say, and then attributed to me. It makes me look like a moron, even more so than I usually do.

By the way, CS, mosey over the most recent incarnation of the "God" entry would you? I think you'll enjoy the direction I've decided to take with revisions, and I eagerly await your evil laughter.

Here's another religious entry that's up for peer review... if anyone would care to have a look... :-) http://www.h2g2.com/F48874?thread=70040&post=644946

While we're at it, I wanted to mention that Lucinda and I have gotten into some righteous god-bashing with a couple of annoying christians at the forum thread http://www.h2g2.com/F31980?thread=81570&post=646867 Come along and pitch in!

to be fair, TG's doing it much better than me

And while you're at it, come join me in cornering ddombrow on the lack of morality in the popular dogma... http://www.h2g2.com/F26091?thread=72186 Or perhaps you'd like to discuss the horrors of God and the unreliability of the NIV with these folks? http://www.h2g2.com/F19585?thread=77325

Hmm - sorry, but I feel that entering the "xtians on h2g2" entry and browbeating there is coming way too close to proselytysing, and I want no part of it.
I'm happy to be highly helpful to the ill-informed when they venture out onto h2g2, but in their own entry they should be safe from such things, as we would like to be safe from such things in the FFFF entry.

just my view.

I agree with you about entering forums on the h2g2 Christians page. Let them have their haven away from us. They still have to meet us on fair terms in the general use forums.

Nevertheless, I was very tempted to reply to one question recently posted there, since I am bisexual. Since I won't do it there, I'll bring the debate here.

"First off, a straight question: If gays can't enter the kingdom of god: can bisexuals get in?"

Ignoring the Freudian implication/pun of the fourth word in that sentence, my answer is....

Can bisexuals get in? Sure - about half the the time. (ba dump bump *ching*)

Seriously. If you believe the bit in the Bible about gays, you have a number of problems. First, there is one section where the Bible commands the reader to murder all gay men, saying "the blood is on their (the gay man's) hands." I've seen a couple of gay bashers use this is moral justification, but for everyone else it leaves you wondering exactly what level of disapproval Christians are supposed to offer gays these days.

Also, if you agree with the Bible's commandments about same-gender sex, you must also accept the Bible's other pronouncements about sex. These include:

* All wives committing adultery should be stoned to death, while husbands should not be punished. This is because marriage at the time of the Bible's writing was primarily a contract of ownership whereby the man owned the woman. Hence, the woman was not at liberty to misuse her husband's property (herself), while the man was the property owner and could do what he likes with both himself and his wife. All commandments on "adultery" must be read in this context.

* Women are mere incubators for babies, while children are created by sperm (men's seed) alone. For this reason, male masturbation is abortion and should be punished. It makes no difference if a woman masturbates.

* Women having their period are unclean representations of Eve's original sin, so they should not go out in public. Nor should they allow anyone to see them in such a horrible state. Women should also be severely punished if they engage in sex during their period.

Then there is the argument started up by St. Augustine that all sex which does not result in procreation is evil. In an underpopulated world, I can understand this pronouncement. In an overpopulated world, it makes somewhat less sense.

Augustine was, after all, influenced by the stoics from India and thereabouts that claimed all worldy pleasures separate us from God -- including food, shelter, clothing, and basic companionship. Modern Christians have conveniently forgotten all the other things they are supposed to abstain from besides gay sex, except perhaps for the monks.

If you believe Augustine's line, then it makes no difference whether you are gay or not. Everyone who has engaged in oral sex, anal sex, penetration with birth control, or masturbation has sinned before the eyes of the lord. At least gays have the excuse that they are naturally driven towards non-procreative acts. What excuse do straight people have?

Finally, in order to use the Bible's pronouncements against same-gender sex in a modern context, you must make the theological leap that the Bible's pronouncements directly relate to today's gay population. This is dubious at best, since there was no word meaning "homosexual" or "gay" at the time the Bible was written.

Same-sex relations were only understood at that time in two contexts. The first was the mentor-trainee relationship begun by the Greeks which paired young boys with older (usually married) men for sex among other things. The Bible considered this evil, and we today would probably call it "pedophilia" and ban it as well.

The second context was that of the "temple prostitute" that maintained an active role in many religions alive during the Bible's writing. Both males and females became temple prostitutes, and their duty was to serve anyone who came to them for "aid" regardless of gender. The Bible's writers disliked this practice, as it would tend to give the host church an unfair advantage over other local churches. We, too, might condemn a practice which mixes sex with worship.

There were indeed lifelong couplings between same-sex members, but these went on largely in secret and were neither discussed nor understood by the general population at the time. Later on, many Christian churches held weddings for gay couples. These were stopped when Augustine released his treatices including bans on non-procreative sex.

So to truly believe that the Bible condemns all homosexuals to hell, you must:
1) Either willfully ignore the commandment to kill gay men, or follow it.
2) Ignore all the other commandments about sex, or follow them.
3) Assume that commandments written for pedophiles and prostitutes apply to monogamous modern gays

So will I ever get into heaven? I dunno. I don't claim to have all the answers. I'm agnostic.

Well there are great number of issues here. First of all lumping the entire Bible into a single time-period is a fallacy. There is a lot of history between Genesis and Revelations.

If you are challenging the Fundamentalist beleifs, you gotta remember that the ONLY sin that will keep you out of heaven is not being 'born again'. You can be class-A Homicidal maniac, a bugger of boys, a thief and a cheat at cards and still make it into heaven as long as you have Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Salvation to the fundamentalists is NOT a matter of morality.

Don't buy the big lie that the Christian Heaven & Hell are the only destinations in the afterlife! I've heard it said that the only people in Heaven will be Christians, and the only people that will be in hell are Christians who f****d up.

The afterlife shouldn't have anything to do with morality in my oh so humble opinion.

See you in Tir na nÓg!

I'd like to say hi to everyone. I've been away from this forum for a very long time and have finally returned.

Well... homosexuality... that's a tough one for the church.
I'm atheist so I very much doubt you'll get to heaven, unless you define heaven as nothingness .
I find that X-tians try to argue their way out of anything extreme in the bible by saying it only shows one point of view or that it is only a symbolic event. That isn't true. If the bible was properly followed then firstly, you must not kill, and then you must kill gays. I seem to find their is some sort of paradox between those two concepts but I'm sure you can follow both. Perhaps if you ask someone else to kill them it would help. That way you sort of haven't sinned. But after all, it doesn't matter if you sinned. All you have to do is ask this sandle-wearing fellow for forgiveness and he'll find you a way in to that eternal bliss zone .

Okay, so I'm a jerk for pestering them on H2G2 Christians. But I don't know if any of you noticed or not, but we've had some visits here from the Dark Side. They do appreciate our sanctuary in the Business Threads, but there have been some conversations on our page outside of them. The one on their page followed that same sort of protocol. And lastly, in my defense... I didn't start it!

Homosexuality can be a dicey issue anyway, without even considering religion. I think heteros have a difficult time understanding it, and people are generally afraid of what they don't understand. Men have that fear of being overpowered and raped, which is not something that men are prepared to deal with, although women have to deal with that fear constantly. As for how women deal with it... I can't say, because I'm not a heterosexual woman.

So, there are problems in society with it already. Then you throw in a fundamentalist religion that is intolerant of, well, everything, and the problems increase exponentially. I remember when I first started perusing freethought web sites, I was rather astonished to find so much pro-gay material mixed in. One such example is the EvolveFish site... mixed in with their bumper stickers and buttons, you'll find some pro-gay sloganned (is that a word?) material as well. It didn't take me long to figure out the connection, though. Freethinkers and homosexuals, we both have the same enemy, the church. It's got to be hell to be both. At least the gay advancement movement is working... a recent poll showed that an openly gay candidate would not be the most unpopular. More people said that they would instantly dismiss an openly atheist candidate... some 33%.

I had an email from my old friend Bob Jones in Brisbane, Australia. Bob's a bit worried about his mortality. People of his own age, and younger, are dropping like flies. "We are," he wrote, including me in this dire prognosis, "in the death zone." Death is a no-win situation for the atheist if you're right, you don't get to tell anyone; if you're wrong, everyone, including God, gets to tell you. That's the scary bit. There is of course an upside to being right - you don't have to worry about being tormented for eternity by some divine psychopath. The downside is that you are inevitably going to find yourself, like Monty Python's Norwegian Blue: "stone dead, demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, a stiff, bereft of life, snuffed it, up the creek and kicked the bucket, extinct in its entirety, an ex-parrot".

Death is first and foremost an affront to the ego. It's not the fear of eternal damnation that bothers me about dying, not even the terror of the unknown; it's the "no more, ceased to be, extinct in its entirety, ex-parrot" bit that gets up my nose. How dare things go on as usual with me not there! How dare the Earth presume to turn, the sun to rise, the moon to shine, flowers to grow, birds to sing, TV's Judge Judy to smite the wicked! How dare people continue to conduct conversations without seeking my opinion! How dare there be newspapers and magazines and books and radio and television and the Internet and yet-to-be-invented forms of mass communication without my being in or on them! How dare I not exist! "Vanity of vanities," saith the Preacher, "all is vanity." And mark that fellow down for the sin of pride.

There is a view among my religious friends that I will undergo a last-minute Road-to-Damascus-style conversion. I doubt it. If there is a god, I'm sure she's not going to be fooled by a piece of self-interested, panic-induced hypocrisy like that. And anyway, I just couldn't do it. No need for any sophisticated dialects here. Belief in god or an afterlife just doesn't make sense. Homo sapiens have been around for four or five million years. Billions and trillions and zillions of us have been born, lived and died, and there isn't a single verifiable example of survival after death, not a shred, not a scintilla, not a scrap, not an iota, jot or tittle of evidence of the existence of a divine being.

Thank god for that! The versions we've made so far in our own image haven't been too attractive. Still, there could be an argument for hedging your bets, just in case. Trouble is, it's not a two-horse race, not just a simple choice between believing and not-believing, between theism and atheism. It's the Everlasting Cup and there are a stack of runners. Put your money on the wrong nag - Muhammadanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity - and you're a gonner. "You know the odds," says the celestial betting shop, "now beat them!" I prefer to put my money on the nose. Win/lose. No great dividend either way. But whichever horse romps home, I'll still have kept my dignity and self-respect. Imagine for a moment that I'm right, that there is no god. Imagine that every time you get down on your knees to pray, you're actually talking to yourself. Imagine that each time you call on god for help in time of trouble, only the wind hears your entreaties. Imagine that for years you've prostrated yourself before, glorified, worshipped ... no one.

Imagine that the guilt, the self-denial, the adherence to a set of arbitrary, illogical and often punitive tenets have been totally without point or profit. Imagine that the centuries of ecclesiastical ritual, the pomp and circumstance were all mere dressing-up and play-acting. Imagine that the churches, cathedrals, synagogues, temples, mosques are nothing more than monuments to man's despair and delusion. Imagine that all the martyrs to religious belief, all the victims of religious persecution, died in their hundreds of millions for ... nothing. Imagine that everything you were taught, believed, clung to for meaning and comfort is wrong. Imagine that it's all been the most terrible joke, the most cruel hoax conceivable, and you the butt of it.

Doesn't bear thinking about, does it? Which is why so many people don't. On the other hand, I could be wrong. God may not be non-existent, he may merely be painfully shy. And if he does exist, there's just the possibility that he may be assisted by a devil with all the wit and style of Rowan Atkinson's "Toby", as he welcomes the latest batch of newcomers to Hell - murderers, looters, pillagers, thieves, bank-managers, adulterers, Americans, sodomites, Christians ("I'm afraid the Jews were right."), everyone who saw Monty Python's Life of Brian ("He can't take a joke after all.") and atheists ("You must be feeling a right lot of charlies! "). Well, that would be embarrassing, I admit. But I'm betting it's never going to happen. I'm betting that god doesn't exist. And have you never had a moment of doubt, Loonytunes? Oh yes - as a 25-year-old drunk, standing under a tree outside a beer-tent during a thunderstorm in Munich with lightning strafing the rain-sodden pavement less than a metre from my feet. I did have a moment of doubt then. We atheists hate lightning.

Actually, the view of death I've been trying on for size recently sorts out this problem of permanence, somewhat...

The idea, simply, is that losing any cell in your body or brain won't kill you, so why should losing all of them. We exist, if we exist at all, in our thoughts, ideas, diaries, the things we make that bear our stamp. And these don't just dissappear after we die. They just slowly dissipate, like ripples in a pond. Some last longer than others, and many never vanish - just move backwards and forwards across the surface, giving drips of inspiration here and there.

When your body dies, your consciousness fragments - but you don't stop affecting the world...

It's been thought before.

It isn´t pestering christians that is bad. Believing you could change a single jota of their oppinion could be bad for your own health, as that is Don Quixote all over. Think of the windmills.

I would have been on the other side of that kind of discussion 10 years ago. I would have loved to knock around in this forum and spread the word. And as I have stated before, there would be this lovely depressing feeling of "the world not wanting to hear but having done the work of the lord!"

I had a short look at one of the threads. Now I get realy depressed, because thinking of talking to someone like that chap Peregrin would be so futile. If you´re stuck in the system, there is no way out other than beeing utterly disapointed by your fellow-christians and starting the search for real truths (or not-truths) outside of Sundaymorning services. Get divorced, start falling in love with a non-christian, suddenly notice that there is a biggot speacking to you from the front and mix it up with a number of nonsolved questions you would like God to answer, and there is a chance you can get a grip to sense.
(AND REMEMBER, the whole thing can backfire.)

That´s life!

Nature does not know extinction. Everything turns into something else. We die, we rot away / become dust, we nourish the soil and the rest of the environment thus helping other life to grow and prosper, and so it goes on.

I read somewhere (I think it was Dawkin's book The Selfish Gene), that molecules can survive for millions of years. The individual organism ceases to exist, but the molecules that form it fragment (nice word, RedDice) and join other molecules to reform differently elsewhere. Or something like that - I'm afraid I'm not a scientist.

But anyway, why worry about death? From the point of view I'm putting forward here, there really is no such thing...

Gooday Loony,

As ever, cobber, a brilliant piece. I perhaps enjoyed this one best of all your mini-masterpieces. I don't have your bottle though, no win-only bet for me; no, I'll continue to swear there ain't no heaven and to pray there ain't no hell. Take care,

Walter.

I don't understand why people have a need to fear death. I just see it as an end. Maybe I'm just not so arrogant to think the world needs me. I can also see that, while I truly enjoy life and work to get the most out of it I can, I won't always feel that way. Little aches and pains that are mere annoyances right now will eventually multiply in frequency and intensity, and my life will eventually become a burden to me and the people around me. If I manage to survive long enough to where I feel I can no longer do any of the things that make life worth living to me, I will be all to happy to bring it to an end. In other words, right now, I have every reason to live. When that is no longer the case, I will embrace death as a release. And hopefully, somewhere between the time I arrived and the time I departed, I will have affected things just a bit for the better.

That's not to say I don't fear death... I don't, but only as long as it doesn't hurt too much. And it doesn't mind waiting for me to make up my mind.