11A038 Superstitions by Jim Davies, 2/7/2011     Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily sometimes lays a useful finger on the pulse of important news, and I've cited it here a couple of times this year. More usually, alas, it's just plain bizarre, riddled with superstitions and unlikely conspiracy theories. The visitor there needs a wide-awake critical faculty to spot the difference, and this Blog attempts to show why that's important. Sunday brought an example here. The headline is "Video: Has Revelation's 'Pale Rider' shown up in Egypt?" It's posed as a question - a common journalistic technique - but clearly the Editor thinks it one his readers will urgently consider. That says a lot about his readership, and about WND. The article referred to a video clip of crowds in Cairo, in which a strange light green image moves across the street and vanishes. To me it looks like a large stick figure sitting on the stretched neck of a green bull running backwards, but apply your own Rorschach test! At article's end, WND admits it might be a reflection of light on the camera lens, or a joke inserted by some Photoshopping prankster. Point is, the question was posed seriously. Even if this isn't it, Farah and his readers evidently expect that there really will, one day, be a series of supernatural events as foretold in Revelation. This mindset is absurd, and could slow down the urgently needed progress towards a society rid of the curse of government. That's because at root, government is an irrational myth and ought to be opposed primarily on that basis. Once you bring reason to it, grasping that it ought not to exist is rather easy. However, one must be consistent; if one applies reason to the subject of government, one must also apply it to the subject of religion, and the contrary is also true. One has no business calling on friends to abandon their superstitious, irrational trust in government while oneself holding a superstitious, irrational trust in an imaginary supreme being who cannot be touched, heard, smelled, seen or tasted and for whose existence there is not a shred of proof. Let's list what one would have to believe, in order seriously to consider WND's headline question. that there exists a God; a creator of the Universe who takes a special interest in humans that God reveals his nature in the whole Bible (but not the Q'ran, or Old Testament alone...) that though his nature and attributes stated there flagrantly contradict each other, it doesn't matter that Revelation, an admitted dream notoriously hard to interpret, is to be taken literally Some readers here may find this disturbing. I'll offer them a challenge: before even marshaling arguments and evidence for the existence of "God," go ahead and define what you mean by that term. A crisp, businesslike definition. Write it down, perhaps. Then (if you can do that at all) see if you still believe it. Myths have bound mankind to government for ten thousand years, but now we have a choice: continue to swallow them and stay enslaved, or think clearly and send the lot of them where they belong - to books of fairy tales and horror stories. It's high time we grew up. Your feedback, please! Do you like what you read here? If so, spread the word among your friends! Suggest they check TinyURL.com/ZGBlog daily, or use RSS.