BrockLi Soup

A while back, the Friendly Atheist posted 34 Unconvincing Arguments for God. I wanted to re-post the PDF here, and the author, August Berkshire, just gave me the go-ahead:

From Atheist Revolution:

Whenever someone commits a horrible crime and then claims that some god told them to do it, believers and non-believers unite to reject the claim. Non-believers have an easy time rejecting the “god make me do it” defense because we reason that mythical beings cannot influence human behavior. We might accept the possibility that the criminal’s belief contributed to the action, or we might look for mental illness. The believer often has a different path to the same conclusion. For the believer, god did not command them to engage in the despicable act because god would never do such a terrible thing. Of course, one only has to read the Christian bible or listen to Pat Robertson to realize that this is simply not true.

Link

For the second time this week, I’m wreaking havoc on my subscriptions in Google Reader, because ya know what? I don’t need this much news, nor the guilt I feel for never reading it. Even so, I feel just a little guilty every time I removed a blog, even though I don’t know any of the authors and rarely even read their posts.

I’m down to around 130 feeds now. I know that sounds ridiculous, until I tell you that I cut about 60 earlier this week, and 20 more since I started writing this post. A lot of the remaining 130 don’t update regularly - probably 20 are friends that don’t blog much, and another 30 are other low-post feeds. I can’t believe that six months ago, I managed to keep up on so many of them. No wonder I didn’t go out much.

And as long as we’re talking productivity, I FINALLY started reading Getting Things Done this week. I’ve been reading it on the Metro, so I’m only about 50 pages in, but already I’m feeling a lot more relaxed - knowing that I’m at least taking some initiative to sort out this mess has reduced my stress level a fair bit. Cleaning out my feed reader is step one - I know very little about the GTD system at this point, but I think that getting rid of all that unnecessary distraction will help.

And as long as we’re talking books, I also started The God Delusion last week, and I’m liking it a lot more than I thought I would. Richard Dawkins has always seems kind of dry, and…well, BRITISH, so I was worried it would be boring, but he keeps a pretty good pace. It’s another book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time and finally got around to starting.

And as long as we’re talking about God, I feel I should mention that we decided on Friday that “God” shall henceforth be known as “göd” (pronounced sort of like “gurd,” for those of you that don’t speak German). Just so you all know.