So ever since I moved in with my mom, I don’t have any friends. I have nothing to do. I don’t go to school anymore or anything so not really any chances to meet people. I’m not going to go to college or get a job just yet, but I will soon. Until then, I was thinking I’d join a church.
Now I’m thinking a church with a gym, or a swimming pool would be nice. And although my experiences with church food services in the past have been awful, I think I’m willing to give it a chance. So what I am asking you guys is for your experiences with churches, and what religions would probably be best to hop in with. I know I’ll be able to meet regular people there, because I used to have friends that would get dragged to church. I’m hoping this is going to turn into Gunslinger’s Church dating thread with pictures and everything. And hey, the best thing is if I screw up with one church, I can just find a new one.
Steven Hawking is a useless troll. Have you ever seen what that guy looks like? Besides, he writes Ayn Rand style books with the most pompous and self-important titles imaginable, like ‘A Brief History of Time.’ Are you fucking kidding? Guy’s only famous at all because he’s a creepy, Brian Peppers-looking ma in a chair. He talks about aliens now too, like he’s trying to be the next David Icke. Get a load of this clown.
But to the answer the question. It sounds like you need to make some friends. Go to a gay bar or something like that.
Stephen Hawking is all right by me. Maybe he’s pompous by some standards, but in the realm of popular science, he’s downright humble. See: Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins has made large contributions to his field (evolution), is an eloquent writer, and a better popularizer of science. If he wants to be a little bitchy, that’s fine.
Dawkins is a bit pushy with his views, I find. Granted there are plenty of others who oppose his views and are just as pushy, if not more so. I’d say Hawking is a little more personable, which is saying a lot given his physical handicaps.
"Genes are competing directly with their alleles for survival, since their alleles in the gene pool are rivals for their slot on the chromosomes of future generations. Any gene that behaves in such a way as to increase its own survival chances in the gene pool at the expense of its alleles will, by definition, tautologously, tend to survive. The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.
No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don’t die young!"
Vs.
"I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse."
Joining a church just to make friends is not the proper reason to join a church. It’s supposed to be about spiritual fulfillment. If you don’t actually agree with the main tenets of that religion/denomination, you shouldn’t attend as a member. If you were having religious questions and decided to attend to better learn about the actual religious beliefs, that is fine. If you are trying to find a church for spiritual fulfillment and are testing multiple ones to see if you feel comfortable in the service, that is fine. Attending just to make friends though? That’s just wrong and completely ignores the idea behind attending religious services.
So what do you look like? How long do you think you would have gone without killing yourself if you had whatever the fuck he has? Are you honestly saying that Richard Dawkins, a man who profits off of irony (I can only assume he is being deliberately ironic, or else he is dumber than you), is better than Steven Hawking, who according to the discovery channel has made substantial contributions to his field? What contributions has Dawkins made? What IS is field anyway? Douchebagery? Is that why you have such a hard on for him, you’re in the same field?
Dawkins profits from irony and is therefore bad? I hate to respond to misplaced anger, but you’re the one talking about ironically joining a megachurch to find women. That’s beside the fact that I have little idea how one ‘profits from irony’ nor why irony is something to be frowned upon.
Nor do I see why the statement that Richard Dawkins, who probably has done more for the theory of evolution (!) than any single person since Darwin, should be favorably comparable to Stephen Hawking, who sits around wondering about black holes, is so outrageous as to inspire… sputtering disbelief!
Arac: You want a shitty William Blake poem? There’s probably like 300 pages worth. The way in which Dawkins’s book portrays the rational intellect as a creative rebel seeking its own freedom against millions of years of genetic tyranny, essentially his primary metaphor, is very moving.
