Buckethead Update

The Buckethead concert was awesome!!! Buckethead is the man!!!

Quote of the Day

"I would uphold the law if for no other reason but to protect myself."

-St. Thomas More

How Is It Possible to Believe in God?

by William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008)

Morning Edition, May 23, 2005 ·

I've always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said grandly to the elderly scholar, "How is it possible to believe in God?" The imperishable answer was, "I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop."

That rhetorical bullet has everything -- wit and profundity. It has more than once reminded me that skepticism about life and nature is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious -- indeed their opiate, to quote a historical cosmologist most profoundly dead. Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief -- how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration -- near infinite -- of natural impulses? Yes, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature's molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?

The skeptics get away with fixing the odds against the believer, mostly by pointing to phenomena which are only explainable -- you see? -- by the belief that there was a cause for them, always deducible. But how can one deduce the cause of Hamlet? Or of St. Matthew's Passion? What is the cause of inspiration?

This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature. As a child, I was struck by the short story. It told of a man at a bar who boasted of his rootlessness, derisively dismissing the jingoistic patrons to his left and to his right. But later in the evening, one man speaks an animadversion on a little principality in the Balkans and is met with the clenched fist of the man without a country, who would not endure this insult to the place where he was born.

So I believe that it is as likely that there should be a man without a country, as a world without a creator.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4656595

Movie Line of the Day

I recently re-watched the movie, Chisum, and heard this great line.

James Pepper: You know, there's an old saying, Miss Sally. There's no law west of Dodge and no God west of the Pecos. Right, Mr. Chisum?

John Wayne: Wrong, Mr. Pepper. Because no matter where people go, sooner or later there's the law. And sooner or later they find God's already been there.

Quote of the Day

A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.

-Tacitus

LBJ Vietnam Speech

One of my friends recited part of this for school. (ya, Trev, that's you!)

It's the best speech by a Democrat I've ever heard. Every person who opposes American involvement in Iraq or intervention in general should read this speech by Lyndon Johnson.

http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650407.asp

Quote of the Day

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."

-Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)