My favorite bumper sticker from the previous election cycle. These are extremely difficult times. It's impossible to understand why someone would intentionally fly an airplane into a building in order to kill thousands of people at once, and yet it has happened. Why does someone become so angry that he wants to randomly spray bullets into a crowd of innocent bystanders, or people at a music concert? Why would someone rent a truck and deliberately run over pedestrians out for a walk, killing women and children? Has the world gone completely mad? Actually, I believe millions of people have lost their minds, for the most part. The remainder of this article will list the primary reasons I'm making that claim. The more important question is why have so many people become irrationally angry? I've decided to blame three primary sources of manufactured outrage and hate: academia, the media, and politics. Faculty at major colleges and universities are overwhelmingly dominated by liberals who are political activists and literally won't permit conservative thought on campus. As a result, current generations are no longer acquiring useful and relevant knowledge through advanced education. Instead, students are being indoctrinated into liberal groupthink, and most are incapable of logic, reason, or independent thought. The college campus has not only been declared a "gun-free" zone (except for armed robbers there to prey on unarmed students) but free speech has been limited to designated areas. Conservative thought (including logic and reason) has been virtually banned, … [Read more...]
The problem of the married bachelor
Eric Schmidt I must confess that I haven't missed arguing with intellectual lightweights on social media. I especially haven't missed their silly, sophomoric argument about God and logical impossibility that some people actually believe is a clever argument, but in reality it is remarkably stupid: Can a supernatural creator-God create a rock so large that He couldn't lift it? The idea is that the atheist has presented an unresolvable dilemma to the theist by posing this question, because if God can't create such a rock, then He can't be described as omnipotent but then if He actually could create a rock too big to lift, it puts a constraint on His power so either way, God can't be all powerful. When I used to bother responding to these silly arguments I would counter that God can arguably be given credit for not one, but two logical impossibilities: the origin of our universe from nothing, and the animation of dead matter into living organisms. Making a big rock is literally child's play compared to creating a vast universe that contains galaxies, planets, and solar systems. Not only are the creation of the universe and origin of life logically "impossible," they are extraordinarily improbable in statistical terms as well. Another so-called logical impossibility that atheists like to mention during the course of these conversations is the concept of the "married bachelor." Bachelors are single, not married, so the term itself is a conundrum, meaning a logical contradiction. Could God create a married bachelor? Can God make fire cold instead of hot? The point of … [Read more...]
A slight change of plans
It's all good. Well, okay, it's only mostly good. There was that whole yellow jacket incident. The past 72 hours or so have been very interesting. Almost nothing has gone according to plan, but the best explanation for that is that I didn't really have a well-developed plan in the first place, just a convicted thought about needing to improve my productivity. For a guy who spends most of his time writing, I don't get nearly enough real work accomplished. I had the initial impulse to permanently delete my Facebook account primarily because of my own lack of discipline, as far as productive work is concerned. I announced this decision to the general public before discussing it with my wife, which rarely works out for the best because she's not as quick to jump to hasty conclusions. In case you haven't figured it out yet, she's the real brains in our family. Lisa's first concerns were the pictures of the grandkids our daughter posts on Facebook all the time. Didn't I still want to see them? She then asked, what about your high school English teacher and the friends you've made in Australia, and those connections you truly care about? She reminded me the problem with Facebook isn't the people as much as how I've been using the medium. I'll admit that I was more than a little surprised that her reaction wasn't anything but, "Thank God!" Changes had to be made, though, and changes have already occurred. Changes NEEDED to be made because I just can't spend the rest of my life arguing with idiots on Facebook. It doesn't produce income. Liberals and atheists tend to … [Read more...]
A Farewell to Facebook
Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Photo by GERARD JULIEN / AFP) Tomorrow, July 27th, I will be deactivating (or deleting) my Facebook account. If I actually know you in real life, I'm not dead, or even sick. I'm just fed up with Facebook. I'm sick of having Big Brother "fact check" posts with a liberal bias. I'm tired of wondering how in the hell Mark Zuckerberg knows I went to Ireland in 1998 (true) but think I got married to my wife when we became "friends" on Facebook (false). If you are one of my friends on that social media platform, there is a decent chance I'll miss you. Of the thousand-plus connections I'll be severing tomorrow there are a handful of people with whom I communicate on almost a daily basis that have made this decision more difficult than it should be. Some of my favorite connections on Facebook such as Jon, George, Paul, and Remo are people I've never actually met in person, but feel like I've known them forever. Most of the people with whom I'm connected through Facebook are kindred spirits, and I will truly miss them. I would hope that some might decide to continue our connection by subscribing to my website at www.southernprose.com, where I intend to be posting new material and my opinions on a more regular basis. If we lose touch, I will feel a sense of loss and miss them. But I have a lot of work that needs to get done, and when I'm not having a great time joking around with my social media friends or discussing our common interests, I'm wasting valuable time engaged in stupid arguments with complete idiots. I don't necessarily … [Read more...]
An obligation to Al Gore
Chicken Little According to Nathan Rott at NPR, we all owe Al Gore an apology because there has been severe flooding in Arkansas, and of course that must mean catastrophic climate change is true. After all, our intrepid reporter conducted a scientific poll of nearly two dozen people in Oklahoma and Arkansas (that's twenty-four, for those of you living in Alabama, Tennessee, or Rio Linda) and all of them said they agreed the climate is changing, so that makes it unanimous, right? The general gist of the story by Mr. Rott at NPR is that Al Gore has always been right, and anyone who doubted him about the reality of the threat from CO2 to our planet should be ashamed of themselves, and owes Mr. Gore an apology. Fat chance. There's a snowball's chance in hell Mr. Gore would ever get an apology from me for my past criticisms. His ego has surely been stroked by honorary doctorates, an onstage appearance at the Oscars, and even a little slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Yet none of his most dire predictions have come true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXinJIvpPOo There's a problem when a "journalist" tries to reshape facts to fit a certain narrative--other facts must be omitted. In his article, Mr. Rott tried to use emotional reactions and cherrypicked anecdotes instead of facts and statistics as the foundation for his argument. Why has it recently flooded in Arkansas? Could the floods have anything to do with record late snowfall this past spring? No one can look at images of destruction from floods, earthquakes, tornados, or other natural disasters and … [Read more...]
