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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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The only time I got bitten by one of my snakes was absolutely my fault. Had been handling his food, decided to change his water before I put his lunch in with him. He was getting ready for a shed so all he had was scent. He struck as soon as he smelled gerbil on my hand. Scared him worse than it did me!
@ CyberLN Re "I Should Have Said"
I should have said that I NEVER keep deadly venomous animals as pets. I may have hunted them, but never kept any as pets. To me that is just stupid. Besides, my nephew is only 11? years old and has never experience any kind of venomous sting/bite. He has only been stung by a wasp once. My little critters I keep in my room to keep him away from them unless I am here. Then again, he stays out of my room because he is terrified of spiders due to his mother. Glad she is gone. As far as I know, she is still in Thailand.
And actually, tarantulas are very gentle. They will only bite you if you intentionally antagonize them. If you leave them alone, they will not bite because you are WAY TOO BIG to be food to them. My nephew won't come any where near me if I have one of my tarantulas out to crawl on my arms for a little while. Kinda funny. Me daughters loved getting mine out for themselves. Hell, they even loved handling the other snakes I had for pets. Yeah, if I had the money, I'd have me own zoo again.
rmfr
@Cyber and Arakish
Ziggy was a ball python I had for several years. Got her when she was about the size of a large earthworm. Every now and then when I would go to the store or other quick errand, I would put her in my upper shirt pocket and take her with me. Funny some of the reactions I got when people would notice a tiny snake head sticking up out of my pocket. lol By the time I had to send her to another home, she had grown to between five and six feet. And she was a sweetie. Very docile. Allowed anybody to handle her.
To avoid the accidental strikes, I kept two seperate tanks. The big one that was her home, and a smaller one I kept below it that was her feed tank. And I always put the mouse in the feed tank FIRST. I never placed her food in the tank with her already in it. That way she never associated my hand entering the tank as being potential food. Never got bit. Miss that little girl sometimes.
@ Tin-Man
Could carry her in your shirt pocket? I ain't never had a snake that small. Except when young. The Boa I had I was told it would never get beyond 6 feet due to captivity. Damn thing got to be 11 feet long. Took the whole garage to keep it. The one I have know is a Yellow Ring-Neck and is about 18 inches. Won't get much longer (about 24-28 max). All my tarantulas are male. Can't find any females so I breed them and sell to the stores. Oh well. At least I a "trading post" that carries fishing/feed crickets.
But that would be cool to have a snake that small. The things I had that small were millipedes and centipedes. Centipedes are wild to watch as they hunt.
I remember me wife asked me why I had such a menagerie. I then explained having watched Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom when I was a kid. I made one. Might be too old for some of you yunguns. Thus, since I had/have the money, I made/make my own Wild Kingdom.
rmfr
@Arakish Re: Ziggy
First off, Check Your PM! (Okay, back to Ziggy...)
She was that small when I first got her. Like I said, not much bigger than a large earthworm. She grew up rather quickly,though, so I was only able to carry her in my pocket for the first few months. Once she got to about three or four feet, however, I would sometimes drape her around my neck and go shopping at a couple of places just for shits and giggles. Some folks would actually approach me wanting to pet and hold her. "Sure. Happy to oblige." Then there were those who would be all the way at the other end of the aisle and take off running while screaming. LOL Good times...
Oh, and I absolutely remember Wild Kingdom. Was one of my favorite shows. If I remember correctly, it was part of our Sunday evening lineup. *chuckle*
Okay, Snake Stories.
I took a group of 6 boys to Big Bear Lake in the middle of winter. We are out there climbing on mountains and jumping off rocks into snow banks. Suddenly 3 of the boys catch my attention. They are squealing like little girls and poking at something with a stick. (When I say stick, I am referring to a tiny little twig that is no more that 8 to 10 inches long)
So I head on over. These fucking idiots are poking at a baby rattle snake that probably crawled onto a rock to sun itself. This snake was pissed and rattlers do not have to coil or rattle to strike. If child abuse was legal I would have tied them down and fed them to the snake.
"I’m afraid of spiders."
To be fair that's not an entirely irrational fear, the little buggers can be extremely venomous. There are sound evolutionary reasons why a fear of them would increase your chances of surviving long enough to reproduce.
By comparison fearing that you are not being gullible enough or superstitious enough to qualify for a magic fictional afterlife, bestowed by a fictional deity, is the very definition of irrational.
Sheldon: To be fair that's not an entirely irrational fear
Arachnophobia has nothing to do with the danger of the venom. It's all about the shape, the body structure, the mode of movement, the number of legs, the webs... I caught the fear through early childhood experiences, and it can be very stubborn and deep, even in adulthood.
There are worse things I suppose. There are also people with a total horror of birds.
I don't thing phobias are evolutionary in the sense of learning to avoid natural dangers. Birds are our prey, and even large spiders are on the menu for some hunter-gatherer societies in the Amazon. What's evolutionary is the tendency of children to learn and retain fears however irrational, from adults, and that may be a backdoor for religion.
There was only thing I hated about spiders. I hated walking into the webs at night. Other than that, I love spiders. They are very cool to watch, especially once they have some prey.
rmfr
You should write a book. We will call it, the Newest Testament, Version 1. Hmmm.... now we need some names for some of the books. Let's see if I can get some ideas by rereading some of your posts.
I have some names for a few chapters.
The MDMA Chronicles 1, 2, and 3
Woo Woo Under the Stars
Resurrected Chicken
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooorgasm
Dust Bunnies in Heaven
I Have A headache, Not Tonight Hon.
Re: Book names
* The Sacred Words of D.B. Platypus
* Divine Psalms of FSM (Pasta Be Unto Him)
* Water Water Everywhere But Not A Drop To Drink
* Cheeseburger in Paradise (*Complements of Mr. J Buffett. A true prophet before his time.)
* Sentra's Inferno
How about "Vapid Superstitious Flimflam for beginners"?
Chapter 1
Getting in touch with your inner gullible moron.
Chapter 2
Open your chakras to superstition.
Chapter 3
You don't need objective facts to be happy
Chapter 4
How to ignore cognitive dissonance.
Chapter 5
How to cherry pick science to preserve superstitious myths.
I may write this under a pseudonym, there's no law that says atheists can't cash in on the gullible sheeple's thirst for apologetics.
Sheldon: "I may write this under a pseudonym"
How about Sheldon Breezy?
rmfr
I was thinking Jesus or Mohammed? The names carry a certain amount of kudos among the superstitious, should help sales.
Would Jesus Mohammed be too much?
"God does not take away anything or intervene in our lives in any way, other than to give us signs that God exists."
So it doesn't intervene "in any way", except all the ways it intervenes. It's hard to believe anyone is this stupid, and it is not deliberate sorry.
Why is an infinite regression. I actually wrote a paper about this and Freudian Psychoanalysis with I regard as pure bunk. The truth behind Psychoanalysis is that you get people to talk about their current problems in the past. So the client is talking about themselves while pretending that they are not talking about themselves. Where in the past the therapist targets as the activating event for any pathology is totally random. It's just whatever seems to work. The average psychoanalytic term is 7 years and there is no evidence at all that "insight" leads to change in the psychoanalytic session or that change is a factor of maturity. Still, the question why is one of those unanswerable inquiries. Even if you got to a God, you could still ask WHY?
Why in the sense of purpose is a logical fallacy? How did you arrive at that conclusion exactly?
So far I think the Op and the comments are using why in two different senses. There's the why which inquires about the causal history of something, but then theres the why which inquires about the significance, purpose, or meaning of something.
I think you mean "There's the scientific why which inquires about the causal history of something, but then theres the begging the question fallacy that asks why, which assumes there is any significance, purpose, or meaning of something, despite no objective evidence supporting that assumption."
Clearly theists ask the latter fallacious type of why knowing there is currently no answer so they can use argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacies to insert their chose deity into the gap.
That's the type of why arakish is talking about anyway, unless I've misread him.
@ Why in the sense of purpose is a logical fallacy?
Not sure what you are getting at here or how it relates to what I have said. Still I can respond to this question as it stands.
Using Why, in the sense of Purpose, would be a logical fallacy as it assumes purpose. A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning, or "wrong moves in the construction of an argument. "What is the purpose?" would pose the same problem. The questions assume "purpose." These are examples of "Begging the Question." "Was there a purpose?" would be a much better question.
It wasn't addressed to you.
But to respond to your comment, a question is not an answer; to treat the question of why as if it assumed purpose would defeat the purpose of the question. "For no reason" is a valid response to the question of why; as long as that is the case, its wrong to treat the question as if it forced you into one type of answer.
Why is a valid question; what I find fallacious is to assume you know the answer before having asked it: that there is no purpose.
"to treat the question of why as if it assumed purpose would defeat the purpose of the question. "
Exactly, using logic defeats the fallacious assumption in the question, thus the argument for a deity containing the fallacy is negated.
It goes like this...
Theist "Why are you here?"
Atheist "My parents wanted a baby"
Theist " yes but why are humans here at all? "
Atheist " all the scientific evidence indicates we evolved as did all living things"
Theist "Yes but where did life come from?"
Atheist "Well we dont fully understand the cause of abiogenesis"
Theist "aha...gotcha...goddidit"
We've seen untold variation of this argument from ignorance fallacy used to push the why question back until it reaches a gap in our current knowledge that they can insert their deity into.
You use it to ask question about species evolution on here, insisting people not qualified in the subject must give an answer you find satisfactory or you have valid objections to an established scientific fact. As if it's intellectually lazy to point out every expert in science disagrees with you. We know this because a most basic understanding of the method shows there is a consensus and the insurmountable evidence required for such a consensus.
By comparison you won't answer even a few salient questions about your creationist motives.
Your inability to answer the why question, does not make the question fallacious.
"Your inability to answer the whyquestion, does not make the question fallacious."
Correct, what makes it fallacious is the theistic assumption that inability to answer validates their belief on a deity. Which we have seen apologists do again and again.
But again, the conclusions drawn from the inability to answer a question, do not make the question fallacious.
Correct again, and again what makes it fallacious is the theistic assumption that inability to answer validates their belief in a deity. Which we have seen apologists do again and again.
Rather than repeat an assertion I'd already agreed with, which is redundant, try addressing the salient part of my post that explains why the question *IS so often fallacious in religious apologetics.
I'm working on the idea that this is schizophrenic communication. You are not there, your message is not there and they just keep blabbing away. You don't count. Your communication is from Satan and not really from you. Jesus is protecting them from you. Christians are Schizoids.
If I'm correct then your claim is wrong. You can't both agree with what I just said, and insist that it's still fallacious.
So to make it even easier to understand, whatever fallacious thing you think religious apologists are doing when they draw such a conclusion, only makes the conclusion fallacious, not the question.
"If I'm correct then your claim is wrong. You can't both agree with what I just said, and insist that it's still fallacious."
Of course I can, it just requires a basic grasp of English comprehension. I'll dumb it down for you with bullet points.
1) You were correct that being unable to answer the question doesn't make it fallacious.
****HOWEVER****
2) What makes it fallacious is the theistic assumption that an inability to answer the question validates their belief in a deity.
It's called argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy. It's a simple one to grasp as well. You're doing what you always do John and using dishonest word games to try and omit the text that negates your argument. Like when you insisted the bible condemned slavery, but refused to acknowledge any biblical texts that specifically mentioned slavery. It's not clear why you do this absurd little tap dance though, especially when you have been found out.
Let's insert some labels to your claim:
What makes it (THE QUESTION) fallacious is the theistic assumption that an inability to answer the question (THE ANSWER) validates their belief in a deity (THE CONCLUSION).
You are saying that the question becomes fallacious on account of the conclusions drawn from the answer, which you already agreed with me isn't true. You can apply that logic to any other question. To ask where something is, is a fallacious question, because Person 1 can conclude that it doesn't exist when Person 2 said they don't know where it is.
So there we have it. Asking where things are, is a logical fallacy.
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