Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!

 I hope you all had a merry Christmas, despite atheistical attempts to drive God out of business through billboarding. "This Season," runs one snappy slogan, "Celebrate Reason!" which is part of a broader ad campaign called, curiously enough, "Out of the Closet." This hopes to make isolated, lonely, atheists feel that they've got company. 

HO HO HO!

It's news to me that they haven't but that aside, imagine, with "This Season, Celebrate Reason!" ringing in our minds, we could cozily warm our secularist toes by the fire, all the while merrily unwrapping treatises on number theory by Bertrand Russell, and that's before the jolly feast of roast tofu that's basting away in the oven. So much more reasonable than patriarchal superstition about Virgin births, miraculous stars and wandering astrologers; to say nothing of what Marx called the "bourgeois claptrap" of a traditional family—a husband, wife and children gathered around a decorated tree to celebrate God becoming Man. Get rid of this primitive nonsense, say the authors of the oddly named ad campaign and replace it with something sensible, like reason. 

Adoration of the Child, Correggio

You may or may not be pleased to know that Team LSP managed to avoid the heady lure of our godless marketeers and stuck with celebrating the birth of Christ.

Gloria in excelsis Deo!

God bless,

LSP

Hawking an Atheist!!

According to the Telegraph, Stephen Hawking still doesn't believe in God and states in his recent book The Grand Design, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

I suppose I'm being ignorant, but it seems odd that nothing should create something. For that matter, how could a law like gravity exist when there isn't anything existent -- gravity included. Is Hawking saying that something very like nothing existed and out of that came everything else?

Perhaps; Hawking goes on to say, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.” Who did? The "laws of science", which we can call 'God' if we like, but beware, "it wouldn't be a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions."

Fine, but by way of warning, surely it's the case that people come to resemble the various 'gods' they believe in. Given that, what would the impersonal law god of science look like?

Still grounded from gun & horse -- annoying.

LSP