Aim Here

Non-fiction, and a story you think you know, but A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. The opening chapter starts off, as you'd expect a lot of these histories start, with Christopher Columbus setting sail and landing on Hispanola and being welcomed by curious natives. Followed by Columbus contemplating in his journal whether the natives would make good slaves, and then the book goes through a catalogue of genocidal atrocities Columbus carried out against the Arawak people. Both Zinn and Columbus got straight to the point from the outset.

That leads to the (on the face of it) absurd argument that this is already the most moral of all possible worlds, doesn't it? If the world is of such a moral character that not even God can change it for the better then that calls into question God's omnipotence (surely it would be logically possible to have a world without one or other child dying young of a terminal, painful illness?), and even if that's NOT the case, it also calls into question what morality even is. If not even God himself can perform actions that result in a better world, then clearly us mere finite mortals can't change anything for the better either. Most morality tends to revolve around the predictable consequences of one's own actions. The notion that the omnipotent benevolent God already made the best world he could chucks that out the window. If I can't do anything at all good (because we live in the world that's so good that not even an omnipotent, omniscient, being can do anything to improve it) then my actions have no moral consequences. I might as well commit genocide, rape kids, covet my neighbour's oxen, make graven images, you name it. It's ALL as good as it can possibly be. The only way out is to have a completely arbitrary definition of what's moral. 'You must do X because God says 'Do X' with absolutely no rationale beyond that (the consequences of the actions don't matter, it's the act of carrying them out that's what counts). Trouble is that there's no commonly agreed-on idea of what 'X' is (the bible's no help, since the various writings in there contradict each other all the time). You're just left with 'pick some arbitrary code of conduct that you hope the imaginary sky fairy wants you to obey and hope you got it right'.

That's a lame cop-out. The problem of suffering is that it's logically impossible for an omniscient, omnipotent benevolent God to create something evil, and suffering seems to fit that bill. At least one of those supposed properties of God has to go. Christians can't legitimately assert those properties of God without addressing why suffering exists. All the absolutely ridiculous theological machinery of Christianity - grace, original sin, heaven and hell, and whathaveyou - are, when it comes to this argument, mere obfuscation - calling things names that hide the main logical point. The typical response to the problem of evil, for instance - 'God gave man free will' - just indicates either that God is not omnipotent (he can't stop man doing things) or that giving people free will is not benevolent. (Also the 'problem of suffering' isn't even nominally countered by free will, unlike the close relative, the 'problem of evil'). Christians could solve the problem of suffering if they just dropped benevolence (easily done, if you believe the bible) or omnipotence (not even God is capable of making the world better!) or omniscience (God doesn't know *everything*) and you could dig bits out of the bible to support any of these, but they choose not to, and instead absorb a self-contradictory (and therefore completely impossible) doctrine.

You have scottsdad down as 297 points. By my count (and by the tally on your spreadsheet), it should be 307, putting him one point ahead of (sigh) @Aim Here

Division B Table and Fixtures Division B P W D L Pts ChrisC53 14 12 1 1 37 davi3j 16 12 1 3 37 Basedgodsa1nt 13 8 0 5 24 mackieboz 14 7 0 7 21 arabjoe 10 6 0 4 18 markf268 11 5 0 6 15 KenDeans 12 5 0 7 15 Dustysghost 8 2 0 6 6 RBWatson 12 2 0 10 6 N5_Spur 14 2 0 12 6 Round 17 KenDeans vs mackieboz Dustysghost vs arabjoe ChrisC53 vs markf268 N5_Spur vs RBWatson davi3j vs Basedgodsa1nt Round 18 Dustysghost vs KenDeans markf268 vs mackieboz arabjoe vs N5_Spur Basedgodsa1nt vs ChrisC53 RBWatson vs davi3j This is the last set of fixtures for Division B. As of next week, I'll be listing the fixtures whose results haven't come in yet.

Division A Table and Fixtures Division A P W D L Pts The_Curmudgeon 12 11 1 0 34 redvtop 11 8 2 1 26 AimHere 9 8 0 1 24 ancientnoise 11 7 1 3 22 invergowrie 13 5 0 8 15 AH13STU 6 4 0 2 12 beef2711 6 3 0 3 9 PnBmathematics 11 3 0 8 9 stewartmathers 9 2 0 7 6 pleslie999 13 1 1 11 4 albinorov 9 0 1 8 1 Round 17 The_Curmudgeon vs AimHere AH13STU vs pleslie999 invergowrie vs beef2711 ancientnoise vs albinorov PnBmathematics vs stewartmathers Round 18 pleslie999 vs redvtop AimHere vs invergowrie albinorov vs AH13STU beef2711 vs PnBmathematics stewartmathers vs ancientnoise As usual, results and calculations are on the spreadsheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o-a5FuwTWOCabJkrlZMk9PqKp3qcm0g7ZY2hwHh1V2s/

The bible doesn't really answer that either. The Genesis creation starts with something like 'When, in the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth, the earth was without form and void'. In other words, there was some chaotic primordial goop that God rearranged into the cosmos and the bible is silent on how that stuff came about. Some bibles have mistranslated Genesis 1:1 as 'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth..' and maybe that's where the standard religious makey-uppey version comes from. Regardless, the honest, scientific, 'We have no data as to what was before the Big Bang so we don't really know' is better than the religious 'We made something up. Now believe it or there will be consequences'.

The only way I can see that individualism is 'Christian' is that the biblical view of salvation morphed from one where God is the national God of the Israelites ("our god is better than the other ones, sacrifice to him, or disaster befalls Israel") to an apocalyptic one ("Mark my words, the day will come when the sinners and hypocrites get smited when the Kingdom of Heaven/Messiah/Son of Man comes along and makes Judea Great Again, so obey the Torah") to Paul's version of 'You have to believe in the resurrected Jesus or God will be angry at you when he comes back in a couple of years time'. Is there really any more 'individualism' than that? During the dark ages, when Europe was primarily Christian, you had feudal and serf societies where people's lives were almost totally dictated by whatever social class they were born into, regardless of their individual merits, and people went to war on the whims of their landlords, or they starved. Pretty much the opposite of the modern economic and political ideas of individualism, which really sprang up around the Industrial, French and American revolutions, pretty much coinciding when Christianity *lost* it's stranglehold on social and political thought. And opting to 'turn the other cheek' rather than practice self-defence is hardly any kind of value practiced, advocated for, or legislated for in any Christian society. It's the preserve of a tiny elite few Christian saints and martyrs (and the decidedly non-Christian Gandhi), but it's certainly not a value of modern Western societies, or, as far as I can tell, any other society. Almost nobody advocates it. And in the bible, it's appears in the gospel of Matthew as a practice to strengthen Torah-obedience - if Matthew is to be believed (and he's a lying b*****d at the best of times), it's a doctrine explicitly aimed at *Judaism*. If Christians ever practiced it, they stopped pretty sharpish.

Which ones, specifically? Outside of a few Christian-specific laws against blasphemy, for instance, can you point to any laws and values that we only get in Christian societies, as opposed to Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist or various flavours of ancient pagan ones? Just because we happen to have been in a Christian society for the last couple of millennia doesn't mean that codes of laws (a decidedly non-Judeo-Christian invention, note) are necessarily Christian. Japan is one of the few countries in the world that weren't invaded by Christian adventurers - Christian interaction with Japan was pretty much limited to Portugal trying to convert Japanese people in the 16th and early 17th century before being given a clip around the ear and sent packing. Yet somehow, it's notion of laws and values isn't completely at odds with ours. A court system and a judiciary and a code of laws not particularly dissimilar to ours. What's specifically Christian about any of our basic moral values or laws?

A biblically accurate Jesus would have a sword in his mouth and be riding two donkeys at the same time and killing the children of adulterers. Be not afraid!

Okay, fixture lists should be fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Maybe those two will cancel out Boyle becoming suddenly useless and Obita committing one of the least VAR-worthy penalties in the history of penalties.

Gah you're right. I went by the fact that I hadn't started games against albinorov or stewartmathers, so figured thise were the new games. I'll sort it later today.

It's this week's fixtures with last week's headings. I'll fix.

Division B Table and Fixtures Division B P W D L Pts ChrisC53 12 10 1 1 31 davi3j 14 10 1 3 31 Basedgodsa1nt 13 8 0 5 24 arabjoe 10 6 0 4 18 mackieboz 11 6 0 5 18 markf268 10 5 0 5 15 KenDeans 11 4 0 7 12 Dustysghost 8 2 0 6 6 N5_Spur 11 2 0 9 6 RBWatson 12 2 0 10 6 Round 15 KenDeans vs ChrisC53 arabjoe vs RBWatson davi3j vs mackieboz Dustysghost vs Basedgodsa1nt N5_Spur vs markf268 Round 16 arabjoe vs KenDeans mackieboz vs ChrisC53 RBWatson vs Dustysghost markf268 vs davi3j Basedgodsa1nt vs N5_Spur