Walk km 4401-4409: Smithe/Granville/Drake/seawalk/(skytrain)/8th/Rupert
enough flowers, here's some green stuff
aprox km 4407 8th Avenue
Movie #1277 (#96 this year): The Rebel Rousers(1970, Martin B Cohen)
There's plenty wrong with this picture. First, they add lots of background noise (or music at quiet locations) so that the dialogue is almost impossible to understand. Secondly, after seeing Hell's Angels 69 last night, this motley crew of Hollywood B-actors look nothing like a real motorcycle gang. Inept in every aspect of film making.
Book #291 (#15 this year): The God Delusion (2006, Richard Dawkins)
Excellent book about atheism. Author goes point-by point through a long list of beliefs and disbeliefs. I found myself pretty much in agreement with what is written except:
Why doesn't the author know "why people are religious?". He also wonders why people can be terrorists for religion and he gets that right. Can't a reason that causes people to blow themselves to bits also be capable of getting them to church on Sunday. When I was a kid, I'd listen to the late night evangelists on the radio. They knew the answer! They wouldn't preach very long before they'd ask for money. And the line they used: send me money or you die. Very simple. You wanna go to heaven, you'd better fork over the dough. Now, I figured these guys were professionals. They made their living by doing this stuff. They must know what would motivate people to send in their money. I still figure they had it right.
When he was talking about religious terrorists he mentioned that there were also non-religious terrorists ready to kill themselves. Example: Japanese kamikaze pilots during WWII. However, I have read that the Japanese had trouble recruiting kamikaze pilots. They had to recruit buddhists. Buddhists had a heaven in their religion and so they were the only ones willing to commit suicide. I assume Shinto has no heaven. Of course, you can't always believe what you read.
Then there's the part about abortion. He thought that it's probably OK to abort while the embryo has no feelings but not after. However, I look on murder as theft. It's the theft of a person's memory (made an even worse crime because the thief can't use those memories). Therefore I think that an embryo shouldn't be aborted once it has a memory. When the heck is that?
Then there's the part about the survey done with Israeli children. They gave half the Biblical story of Joshua and half the same story but with all references to people/places changed to Chinese/China. Most of the children agreed that genocide in the Bible was "good" but genocide in China was "bad". The amazing thing is that they knew the reason: if God left any of those people alive they might corrupt the Jews and get them to worship false gods. I read that part of the Bible but I didn't get that idea. Those kids must have got that from their parents. If true, God sure didn't have much faith in his own religion.
Anyway, you get the picture. Oodles of stuff in here to get a person thinking whether you agree or disagree with the author's position.
