This is from Reddit Atheism, though I haven’t yet tracked down the original piece.
I think this pretty much makes the case for God—or at least Ceiling Cat:
The Argument from Tabbies
October 11, 2012 • 9:44 pm
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Illogical fuckwit says what?
WTF?
OK, Ceiling Cat, I can go with that.
But with no other powers, than being; the Ceiling Cat! (Which is the ultimate powers over certain feline adoring homo sapiens.)
I asked my six tabbies what they thought of this article and they proclaimed it “Hogwash! But then, I just go along with them because they let me live here.
Whoever wrote that qualifies to be labelled an idiot of the first degree!
The level of willful ignorance is scary. I wonder if they believe in the heliocentric solar system – and…why?
“If atheism is true?”
How clueless is this moron? He has it backwards – of course.
You can’t see the beauty of these stripes without Ceiling Cat’s gift of Toxoplasma gondii.
Yeah. This is such a dumb argument.
Let’s categorize some stuff, shall we:
There’s the good/beneficial/beautiful, the bad/deleterious/ugly, and then the neutral. So, assuming the things of this world are evenly distributed among those categories, this omnipotent deity’s creation is only 33% good? That 1/3 of the stuff on this planet is pleasant to look at and/or won’t kill you is supposed to be evidence of a divine creator?
…Duh !!!!!
In trying to identify the source, you might pay attention to the strata it was found in: Chinese takeout menus.
My fave reply!
Anybody knows that blotched tabbies are prettier than striped ones. And spotted kittehs are the prettiest of all.
Right, so the cats that aren’t striped are evidence of satanic influence? Less blessed? And what about the butt-ugly insects? Are they the favorites of the Lord of the Flies?
The obligatory Gerard Manley Hopkins:
You’ve obviously never read any Gerard Not-So-Manley Hopkins. He pretty much lived in mortal fear of everything….
Hitler was a Christian. Just saying.
Another dumbosity, or should we say “ignority”: “it is considered (of course!) scientifically impossible for nothing to create something”.
“Of course”, ignoring the last four decades when, modulo the meaning of “nothing”, it has been a main hypothesis in physics for the emergence of spacetime, or in other words precisely “everything” (else). “Of course”.
Well that’s it. The stripes did it for me. I’m a believer….YEAH RIGHT! Come on! Things are aesthetically please therefore God exists. This person does understand the whole breeding thing that went into the domestic cat’s appearance right? As for insects, get over yourself. They aren’t pretty for humans, they have their own schtick going on. Honestly. Some people and their human-centric world view.
Pleasing* urgh
The cat that lives here is a tortoiseshell.
The quote isn’t from it, but I have a booklet called “The Dishonesty of Atheism”. The group who hand them out are regularly in the city centre. They’re also creationists and are often to be found near a shop called “Evolution”.
1792, Britain against France. Atheist republicans: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portail:R%C3%A9volution_fran%C3%A7aise/Image_du_mois
One of mine is a tortie.
She is the sweetest little thing but has a habit of jumping on me in bed when I’m not expecting it.
Bashing, as fun as it may be, accomplishes naught. A concerted legal effort to bankrupt these god “businesses” is where we should be placing out attention and effort. A recent fund drive by a local catholic church, to save its elementary school, failed, thus closing the school. A victory for catholic apathy, is a victory for a more wholesome godless society. dmr
Looks like a Jehovah’s Witness leaflet to me…
When my Joho neighbour found out I was an atheist he called it the Darwin religion.
I had to laugh at that.
“Why does man feel guilty when he sins?” Tell that to a sociopath or recidivist. Or the likes of Ken Ham when they lie for Jesus, for that matter.
I usually feel rather good when I sin.
I only feel guilty when I do something… Biblical… to somebody. 😉
It is my contention that that is an intentional design feature of religion.
Oddly enough we were talking about this the other day. The native BRitish wildcat (felis silvestris) is tabby; good camouflage in those woods. But GINGER? Domestic cats are descended from felis lybica (African/Arabian) so that would explain that, then! (Ginger being reasonably good camouflage in a desert landxcape) Honestly, how anyone can be so thick is beyond me. If something like this is so obvious to a non-scientist like me…. I despair
I used to have a big tom whose markings were black and white (Google Images has lots under “black and white cat”). You might think this would make him very conspicuous, but in fact when Ta was snoozing in dappled shade, he could be pretty hard to see. Moral: even very odd coat coloring schemes may have some adaptive value.
Hitler was not only a Christian, but explicitly a Creationist.
Hitler’s Table Talk, July 25, l942: ‘From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us, that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today.’
Some occult groups in pre-Nazi Germany actually believed that just the !*Germans*! were the products of “special” creation, and that other races however evolved from apes!!!
For that matter, why do I have pretty stripes all over ME?
Did you get drunk and pass out in the company of mischievous friends?
Have you being playing S&M games?
Would that be the prison uniform, you sinner, you?:)
They’re just stretch marks, eh?
Notice how Margaret Sanger is grouped with Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.
I LOVE the last lines. Nothing can’t create anything… except God? If God has just always been, why couldn’t the universe?
Cats have stripes. Stripes are pretty. You can’t explain that.
-And it’s a positive fact that Satan exists: I mean, where did those awful retarded dogs come from?
I suppose that’s a matter of opinion and, especially, a matter of scale. One of the standard sources of inspiration of Hollywood horror/monster flicks is the “beauty” of insect species made large.
The question arises from certain habits & patterns of thinking that come naturally, but can be outgrown.
A song sung at the humanist summer camp, Camp Quest West. has a song about questions like this to which the chorus goes “It’s merely a miracle, a miracle naturally”.
That screed raises an interesting, legitimate question, but as usual with the xters, manages to get it upside down and backward. To wit, why do we think this or that kitty coloring scheme is beautiful? What is the adaptive value in seeing anything as “beautiful”? Misdirected sexual selection, perhaps.
The large binocular eyes of cats appeal to us because they trigger “ooooh, a baby” instincts. Different issue.
The pamphlet raises questions only to give non-answers. A real explanation, a scientific or philosophical one, will take the thing needing explanation apart and look at how it’s composed, how it got the way it did, method and mechanism and material.
The religious explanations ultimately either just move the question around to look like an answer (“Beautiful things come from Beauty”) or change the subject by explaining who wanted the thing-you-are-trying-to-explain. That explain nothing.