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Easter Humor
sohp writes "The longest running Internet cartoon of all, Dave Farley's Dr. Fun, has this laugher on some tasty case mods for the Easter season." cojoco sends in a webpage covering the secret dangers of bunnies, and we here at Slashdot would like to make a public service announcement that humans have a responsibility to care for their pets even if they chew through computer cords. linuxwrangler writes "It's Easter and the 50th anniversary of the Marshmallow Peep. The fine folks at Peep Research have found them to cooperative test subjects. People with too much time on their hands (tm) have braved copyright complaints to create "Lord of the Peeps, FOTP" and we can't forget NASA's brave peep-o-nauts. Happy easter."
Don't forget baby chicks. Thankfully this isn't as common as it used to be, but somehow parents with no common sense would buy baby chicks for the kids. Sometimes they would have thier feathers dyed. Assuming these hapless creatures survived the first few days of child affection and somewhat less than expert care, it would at some point become evident that the little critter was growing up to be a chicken.
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
On Topic? For millenia easter was a fine spring celebration with bunnies and eggs and stuff. Wholesome good fun. Then you christians come and ruin everything with tales of a man nailed to cross and eating his flesh and drinking his blood.
Let's remember what Easter is all about...Bunnies. It's got nothing to do with God coming to earth in the form of a man to pay the ultimate sacrifice for our sins. Let's dress this holiday up just like we dress up every other Christian holiday and turn something sacred into a great way to sell Cadbury Eggs.
Easter has always been about the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, no matter what you athiests try to say or "prove". You are just a troll.
Right. Sorry, play again:
Historical connotations of Easter
Including the egg imagery that is so prevalent. How do the eggs fit into the resurrection anyway? That's something I never understood.
Sorry to feed a true troll, but someone needs to correct this misconception if it's going to be used to attack people. This has been a fertility holiday and a welcoming of spring for much much longer than Christianity has been around. You're welcome to use it for your own purposes, but quit the nonsense about it being a purely Christian holiday.
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So far, I have not seen any non-religious ethical system that can answer the latter two questions. Humanism tries, but fails: why should I care about the good of humanity? And, in case you haven't noticed lately, the secularization of human services under the banner of government has not given the wonderful results promised. (Go down to the 'hood sometime and see all the parentless children if you don't believe me. They were there before, they are there now. But there may be more now. "The poor will be with you always.")
As a Christian, I can answer these last two questions, but probably not in the way you expect. My answers are as follows:
- What to do? What God tells me to.
- Why? Because I love God, because he is good and just. Yes, I really feel that way. (And yes, I'm familiar with the gazillion old testament examples that you might feel inclined to cite.)
- How? With his power, and with the assurance that if I sacrifice my welfare in this life, I need not worry because I can look forward to something better in the next.
Christian ethics call for a profoundly unworldly viewpoint -- one that says "money doesn't matter, stuff doesn't matter, heaven knows that war on iraq doesn't matter: only God matters" -- and this viewpoint will ALWAYS be unpopular. When Christian ethics becomes trite, as in the formulation you gave in your post, is when it is watered down in an attempt to make it practical for people who *don't* love God more than their own life. Is it really surprising that it fails in such cases?"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
And how much of a humanitarian, to blame the animal for your own fuckup, and dump it on a shelter?
Okay, I know this will probably offend some people, but...what's the deal here? Really and honestly, if you get a chicken or a duck or a rabbit or whatever, there are people running around who are saying that if you aren't sure you can take care of it, you shouldn't get the thing. What do they have to support their argument? What's *wrong* with getting an animal, deciding that you don't like it, and having it put down?
It isn't on "humanitarian" grounds, as jamie's pointing out, since a humanitarian specificaly values *human* welfare.
Some sort of general ban on killing animals? I kill bugs, like the ants that like to get into my room all the time, and don't have the slightest problem with it. Most people don't. What's the mysterious dividing line between rabbits and ants? They both sense pain, etc, etc.
Some sort of pratical issue? We ban murder in most societies because allowing murder produces severe negative social effects on the society. If you allow it, people get desperate and attack other people back, and the society devolves into violence. Killing a rabbit -- there isn't much of a social impact there. Hitchcock's The Birds was a fantasy -- the critters aren't going to be able to do anything back to you.
The only reason I can think of that we have shelters for rabbits, but not for spiders, is that rabbits and fuzzy animals trigger a deep irrational "It's cute!" response -- the same sort of thing that drives PETA. Then we develop a moral system using these basic, irrational reactions as axioms that we then use to *justify* the reactions and our actions. "But it's *wrong* to keep a rabbit and then let it die!" *Why*, I ask?
Finally, if jamie and PETA and friends succeed, and people run out and buy N - M rabbits one year instead of N rabbits...then what? You have M rabbits that don't even have a chance at *life*. Yeah, maybe those rabbits would have ended up spending their last moments working on an electrical cord...but I'm still glad that *I* exist, even if I happen to die next week getting run over by a car.
May we never see th
Possibly. However, I have to say that in part, I am a Christian not because I was indoctrinated from an early age (I wasn't) but because I am not convinced that a sensible ethical code can be formulated without some kind of teleological (that is, losely speaking, goal-centered) foundation.
Not meta enough. Why do you consider a "sensible" ethical code sensible? Why do you *need* an ethical code?
My guess is that you want something that "feels" good because it allows you to justify the majority of your actions? Christianity is pretty much a big book of decent rules of thumb, along with its own agenda. But you can certainly live by Christian rules of thumb ("it tends to pay off to be civil to people, regardles of how they act toward you", etc) without adding in the extra crap associated with Christianity.
I mean, I can say to you "Don't stick your hand into fire. This is because there's a big fire elemental turtle that lives in all fires and wants to bite your hand. You should be sure to give me some money each week to help me, the only person who can control him, from overrunning the world". I've got a decent rule of thumb there, but you're certainly under no obligation to follow any of the other BS I have attached to it.
And Christianity *does* make people do some irrational things, even if it also has some decent rules.
The influence of Christianity has been in free-fall since the Reformation as more and more of the growing intelligentsia class have seen inconsistencies in it and become irritated with some of its doctrine.
May we never see th