Sunday, March 23, 2008

Oy, religion

Today is zombie Jebus with chocolate flavored horny rabbits who lay eggs Day, apparently. (Aka the day Christianity celebrates the vernal equinox.)
Tho Megan observes Lent so she can brag about it, she claims not to be religious. Or rather

Being an agnotheist I have no deep theological insights to offer.
Yes, agnotheist. Megan took a word a poet created for the title of a poem and gave it a nice, bullshit definition.
It's an agnostic who puts a very, very low--yet non-zero!--value on P(God).
I doubt Megan actually knows what she meant by this, either. Does P stand for probability? I assume so, but then she's simply an agnostic, and lord knows Megan wouldn't needlessly complicate an issue with an attempt to create new jargon based on misapplied jargon. P must mean something else, in which case Megan is an agnostic who believes in God, multiplied by whatever P is. Power or popularity, maybe. There must be a way to make sense of it. Megan wouldn't be incoherent.

For the record, in case it's not glaringly obvious, I'm an atheist, tho I don't like that word. Atheist kinda sorta implies theist is the norm, and it's not normal to believe in invisible sky fairies. You gotta be taught that shit, when you're young enough to swallow it. So yeah, happy Easter, you necrophiliacs.

9 comments:

NutellaonToast said...

Nope, P() is the probability function. She is just stupid.

Wow, I can't believe it took me this long to figure that out.

spencer said...

Again, if there's one thing Megan is good at, it's aping the linguistic stylings of real economists. I immediately knew exactly what she meant with that whole "P(God)" thing. It made me wince. Ugh.

To be fair, though, there probably are at least a couple of other things she's good at; however, I think it's safe to say that writing, economic analysis, humo(u)r and rationalization on behalf of corporations are not on that list.

Anonymous said...

Agnotheist:
A person who can claim a small amount of "spirituality" so they can decorate their lofts and apartments with trendy knick-knacks and feel okay about it, but still won't have to bear the judgement of their sophisticated dinner party friends who lump them in with Bible thumpers for being superstitiously "religious." Or make any actual effort to invest time into their claims that they put any value at all on P (God).

I.e. a complete fucking idiot.

M. Bouffant said...

Personally, I'm an anti-theist. I managed to un-brainwash myself, or the indoctrination never fully took. Funny how Megan can become a glibertarian just because she thought/discovered that PIRG in Philadelphia was a mailing list scam, but can't set aside some of her other beliefs & assumptions. Not much of a critical thinker.

Or, as NoT & Clever P. said: "stupid complete fucking idiot."

Anonymous said...

The P(God) thing is ridiculous.
God either exists, or he doesn't, so (according to Megan), agnostics have to assign equal weight to the probabilities of existence and non-existence: 50%/50%. This reasoning is a major part of the flaw in Pascal's wager, so in her defense, it's not like she's the first to espouse it.

I wonder how she deals with weather reports. There are two possibilities, it will rain tomorrow, or it won't, so I guess the chance of rain in Las Vegas tomorrow is 50%.

If I look out my window, I may or may not see in my yard:
1. A vicious tiger
2. A full-grown T-Rex
3. A horde of zombies
4. An army of Martian invaders.

With a 50% probability of each of the 4 dangers above been present, there is a 1-(.5*.5*.5*.5)=94% chance that 1 or more of the 4 is present and waiting to kill me. I'll never leave the house again.

NutellaonToast said...

Then again, there is a 94% chance you'll get either a pot of gold, a super hot model that ones to bone you, a brand new car, or a snickers bar. I'll play those odds.

Anonymous said...

That's a good point. I'm pretty pessimistic, but heck, a snickers bar would be pretty tasty.

I'm feeling a little guilty about being too hard on Megan above. To her credit, she doesn't think God has a 50% of existing. To her immense discredit, she's too stupid to recognize the fallacy in that line of reasoning, so she throws out a useful term like "agnostic" (which is what she is).

brad said...

Or you might be giving Megan too much credit. There' two terms in the equation, who's to say she didn't mean the probability is 1 but God only exists as a fraction of what Christians pretend he is.

NutellaonToast said...

How did I write "ones" instead of "wants?" A Megan moment, to be sure.