Trying to explain the Koontz is like rasslin’ a Tar Baby. :lol:
Is this anything like the time TEH KOONTZ accused Crypt of supporting the idea that “suburbia is a living hell” when he (DrCrypt) was actually arguing against that very idea?
I agree with your #1 through #4. However…
Atheism has always meant how I define it. Before there was Theism there was no Atheism, despite the fact that some of these people “didn’t hold notion of a god”.
Culturally ignorant humans or those who have “primitive” cultures may have no notion of God, and they are not Atheists, either by self-definition or otherwise. The only people who have ever called themselves Atheists are fully aware of God’s definition.
Secularism and God culture have always opposed each other, and the height of Atheism in the 18th and 19th centuries was accompanied by many anti-God ideas and activities. Also, as God culture decayed and Secularism rose over the last 750 years, even many God-followers degenerated into Deism, metaphorical God-power, and God-irrelevancy.
Its pure nonsense to say the Secularism/God divide is over whether God exists. Its over the value of God… whether God is good or God is bad.
Like Democracy, God is an abstract idea and exists through culture and practice. As Zeus once lived and then died when the idea faded, so does and so will God.
As an atheist, I use the label in order to describe the fact that I do not believe in God and do not consider the question relevant. So asking me what I think of God is like asking me what I think about Malaysian spider species. I just don’t think about it. I suppose there is a sense in which I distrust religious arguments and am against political usage of religious “reasoning”. If that is what you mean, Brian, then I guess you are right. But I don’t go around trying to convince people not to believe in God. I think maybe you are confusing the personal belief, atheism, with the social/political agenda of certain atheists. yes, there are atheists who are very concerned with eliminating everything related to religion, but that doesn’t have anything to do with their religious beliefs per se. It has more to do with what they see as their intellectual/social/political rights.
Let me guess. DrCrypt copiously ejaculated on you and after the semen soaked into your skin you became a Cryptian Zombie. I sense a movie in the works. Fuck vampires and traditional zombies… this is the real way to become a Zombie!
Good pleasure, now lets get down to business. I’m not a big fan of my prior explanation of this event, and I have a better one prepared now.
Lets examine the statement issued by Dr. Crypt that is the basis for my comment…
“I’ll leave alone the already cited fact that About Schmidt portrays suburbia as a hellish apocalypse of surreal Hummels, salmon chaise lounges, infomercials, hot tubs and hicks…”
And then we have my comment that led to Dr.Crypt’s objection…
“I’m not sure what to make of street gang culture influencing high school suburban girls. Perhaps they subscribe to the book of suburbia-as-a-living-hell as espoused by and then railed against by Dr. Crypt.”
To me, About Schmidt does not portray a Hellish Apocalypse of any kind. In fact, Schmidt’s problems are mostly self-inflicted and personal-situation inflicted, they have very little to do with suburbia. Even Schmidt’s life, while a tragedy in some respects, is brave in others. It is Crypt’s very neuroses about the Common Man and the Artist that led to his negatizing of PAYNE’S PORTRAYAL. In other words, the “Hellish Apocalypse” is Crypt’s position, not (necessarily) Payne’s. Now, as Crypt is creating truth he espouses it, and he then proceeds to demonize it.
Also, Schmidt is far more of an artist than Crypt gives him credit for. In fact, that Crypt tried to derail the About Schmidt thread into a side tangent implies (among other things) that he knows he didn’t get the movie right. Schmidt excels at Pathos, which is art of a kind. This Pathos led to his self-loathing which led to his ostensible break from robotic normalcy.
Isn’t Robotic Normalcy itself a Pathos, a Self-Loathing that hates, among other things, normalcy, tradition, habits, mindlessness? Schmidt isn’t normal because he thinks its best… he’s normal because he’s PUNISHING himself for his failure. His failure in the business world, his ultimate world.
In truth, Schmidt never WAS common. He moved from his Dream World of envisioning himself a Fortune 500 millionaire to Fallout from non-realization of the Dream World… a life of self-mutilation… where his family and his own personality pays the price.
A common man learns to live with failure. Schmidt never did, and Ngudu brings him BACK to his Dream World… simply a NEW DREAM.
I doubt you’ll ever see a better description of the movie than that.
That’s some creepy and disgusting shit. Here’s an theological puzzler for you guys: if there is no God - and consequently no afterlife - why is it that Sigmund Freud’s corpse immediately sat bolt upright in his coffin and sarcastically rolled his eyes before exploding into a cloud of millipedes when Koontz clicked the submit button on his post? Because this is the THIRD time in the past couple weeks that a mere mention of my name has caused Koontz to type up a highly substantial number of words on ejaculation, semen, or what it might be like to drink my semen. You don’t have to have even read the syllabus of the community college Intro to Psychoanalysis course that Koontz once attended and consequently became lodged (along with the rest of the building) up his cavernous ass crack to be able to read a creepy homoerotic fixation into that one.
As for his babble concerning About Schmidt, espouse, rail against, whatever. I think Koontz is pretty self-evidently crazy at this point and I’m pretty tired of picking on someone who obviously has a verifiable mental illness, which is why I haven’t been responding to him much lately. Anyway, he’s already been made to look so completely foolish in all of these subjects that there seems to be almost no reason to recap. Here are the original threads:
http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1906&start=0
(In which Koontz spends many paragraphs telling me how faulty my opinion about a film he hasn’t seen is. This would come to be one of Koontz’s main schticks on QT3. Also see the American Splendor thread)
http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3664&highlight=espouse
(In which Koontz first argues that admitting the existence of an idea you disagree with is the same as arguing in favor of that idea)
- Given that athiests believe in the social construct “religion/God”, we should redefine “athiest”, as used by athiests who are angry at God, to mean “those who dislike religion/God”.
This is the sort of philosophical argument a crazy person living in his own solipsistic universe would come up with. Boiled down to its essence, what Koontz is claiming is that the only true atheists are the ones who deny that other people believe in God - in other words, the delusionally insane. Because it’s an idiotic argument that could only come from someone who is delusional - for anyone who uses the English language as a tool of communication rather than as a tool to obfuscate the insanity of their own crackpot theories, it is drivel. If Brian had his way, we’d have to redefine most of the labels we apply to various philosophies and world views. Was Lenin a true Communist? He’d be the first person to admit that there actually are people out there who practice Capitalism. Is the Pope a true Catholic? I’m pretty sure he knows there are Buddhists zand Protestants out there.
The word atheist describes people who do not believe in god. End of story. You can’t change the meaning of a word simply because you don’t know what it means (and let me remind everyone - just like the “espouse/rail against” debate, this is all about Koontz trying to cover up the fact that he misused a word). There are tons of atheists out there: I know atheists who don’t believe in God but don’t think there’s anything wrong with religion or the idea of God. They don’t think “God is bad”. Then again, they also don’t deny the existence of religion. So are they atheists, according to Koontz? Apparently not, so I guess that makes them Christians.
And let me remind you that when people use the word “God”, whether atheists or Christians, they are not talking about a social construct. They are talking about an omniscient creator. They are not denying the existence of social constructs. They are denying an actual idea. Only lunatics deny the existence of opposing opinions and the English language isn’t constructed around the delusions of lunatics. Words assume some fucking sanity in the person who use them, which makes every Koontz post a direct affront to the OED.
Not everyone considers Democracy relevant, and some of them don’t live in a world where it truly IS relevant.
You, however, live in a world where both God and Democracy are relevant, so you’re just being blind there, hypocritical to the extent you are not blind.
If someone passes a law based on God’s description and arrests you for breaking the law, God is relevant to you.
If a social more develops based on God’s description which you follow and/or which you respond to in another person, God is relevant to you.
By “believe in God” you mean “honor God”. This is, after all, what the Christians mean when they say they “believe in God”.
You use silly language, and I’m not surprised its falsified your identity.
I mean far more than that.
Not every Christian is a Christian activist, and not every Secularist is a Secular activist. The life each leads, however, is a matter of their identity… what you could even call their religious identity in the case of Secularists.
As you probably know, the modern University is a Secular construct. The desire to know the world, the placement of knowledge ahead of the ego, etc. is a Secular idea. The stupidity is to say God and Secularism are seperate. In fact, they are enemies. This does not mean humans stab each other with knives over the issue (although that occasionally happens). Their “places of worship” are their hearts… churches, schools, mosques, universities, courts of law. Most battles are fought there, within the identities of humans. Both churches and universities brag of their prowess, their value. Both are happy when another human joins them.
The vast power of Secularism today means that many humans (along with you, apparently) don’t even think of themselves as Secularists… they think of themselves as “normal”. If Christianity was vastly powerful Christians would think of themselves as “normal”. More falsifications.
ROFLMAO! ( Really read that in a posh British accent )
So much navel-gazing can’t be good for mental health.
Just the same old small-town guesstimate of big-city philosophy, helped along by that magical Koontzian combination of special-ed and rubber-room logic.
Koontz wins an imaginary argument with a conveniently inarticulate atheist, and therefore all atheists believe what he says they do, and he alone grasps the true meaning of “atheist” (and that of God, incidentally). More-articulate, nonimaginary atheists step forward, but Koontz merely insists that he has already proved their true nature.
Soon he’ll start lamenting that the world hates “secret intelligence” and then disappear, no doubt to excercise “the new paradigm in sexual voyeurism” that he declared last month.
I’m turning your themes back against you. Its fun, and of course it offers much pleasure for you and much despising by me.
Perhaps you can help me out here. Say there’s someone for whom the only form of value is attention given to him and the only form of devalue is the public’s disinterest in him. Say, someone with a God Complex. Lets say I don’t want to encourage the idiotic need for public interest and thus don’t play that game. However, I can’t reference him in any way or he emotionally responds to it in a positive manner, which is fine except when I want him to have a negative emotional reaction such as after he establishes himself as lying often (and playing the public interest game with respect to that).
I suppose the solution here is a bit of satire and parody. Displaying The Mirror in front of the person, reflecting himself back to him.
28 hours of impotent stammering later and The Greatest Thinker on This Forum (By Far) finally has his Eureka! moment. His retort, distilled from Martian Moon Man to English? A recent penchant for homoerotic perversion by way of violently ejaculating whenever my name is mentioned is actually all part of his Master Plan! Is being a creepy imbecile who doesn’t know anything about anything and whose name is analogous to “doofus” across the entire board part of that Master Plan as well, Koontz? Or have you said too much already?
I’d say Koontz’ general theme of ejaculation is in terrible contradiction with the reality of his complete impotence as an intellectual and a forum debater.
When you spend a lengthy post trying to rationalize that no you are not spanked daily by other posters particularly DrCrypt and bwa ha you are actually a mighty puppetmaster who endures these slings and arrows so as to help the narrowminded character assassins grow to become great thinkers like you then its pretty fuckin’ obvious to the rest of the sane world that the internet embodiment of your ego isn’t just flaccid, but is in fact so inverted that it’s technically fucking your OWN ass.
Just sayin’, is all.
I think that the most enjoyable part of Brian’s posts is the Arbitrary Capitalization.
/me ejaculates into Doug Erickson’s face.
It’s good to see my thread about neat innovations in evalengical Christianity turn into round 22 of Brian Koontz vs. The English Language.