Blogs: Pandammonia 
The world that revolves around Caity Ross.
Archive for the ‘atheism’ tag
A day for atheists.
A day for atheists. How nice. I shall celebrate it by not praying, not fasting, not giving tithes or anything else like that. How nice.
Kindness
On reading this comment on a blog post on Language Log collating posts about languages not having words for this that and the other, I realised there were two meanings one could take from it. Here is the comment:
There isn’t any word in English equivalent to the Hebrew “mitzvah,” “Mitzvah” is sometimes translated as “good deed,” or “righteous action,” and sometimes as “commandment.” In American Jewish circles, it is used to mean “action that conforms to God’s commandment that we do good deeds for others.” This is one of the very few Hebrew words that American Jews who don’t speak Hebrew use regularly, bvecause [sic] there is no equivalent. The absence of such a word in English demonstrates that acts of kindness are alien to the cultures of the English speaking peoples.
The first meaning, which I presume is the intended one, is tongue-in-cheek about how horrible all English speaking peoples are because we don’t have a (single) word for ‘good deed’ (although we can easily say ‘good deed’ with no great hardship).
The second meaning I get is that we don’t need a word for ‘action that conforms to God’s commandment that we do good deeds for others’ because we can do good deeds without being commanded to by a deity.
Why believe in a god?
The slogan on the US atheist bus, ‘Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake’ brings to mind one of my bugbears about religion: I don’t understand why religious people think people can only be good because some deity tells them to be good. And do we especially need the threat of eternal fiery damnation or having to spend our next life as a caterpillar to be good? Why can’t they believe in the milk of human kindness without having a god to put it there? And people say atheism is negative.
[seen on fergycool's twitter]
[Update and an aside: to be fair to OneTooMany, who commented on the original Guardian report, there are adverts on the inside of the buses, as the picture with the caption 'An ad from the American Humanist Association inside a bus in Washington DC' (emphasis added) clearly shows.]