Nope.

But Christmas isn't specifically a religious holiday anymore. It's a kind of cultural event that secular people enjoy along with the religious. I'm not going to deny my daughter having a Christmas just because I don't believe in a god.

I think he was making a joke. Like your effort in producing your tree was a great tribute to the Lord.

I thought he might have been, but I haven't participated in any of our famous religious debates in quite a while, so I wasn't sure.

Shall I become a Muslim for a week?

I'm not sure even Christians think Christmas is about them any more.

I wasn't making any jokes.

It's not really becoming anything. It's just a cultural thing. Besides, if atheists are going to be accused of stealing a seasonal holiday, we should really be accused of stealing Saturnalia, since that's what the Christians stole the traditions from.

I sure wouldn't mind celebrating Saturnalia.

I'm still worshipping Ra

I'll worship the universe as sentient, cosmic being with intelligence beyond our comprehension. We're all a synapse in its great brain and it loves us unconditionally. Or something.

Why do we always assume that grand, universal intelligences are always psychologically healthy?

It's....hmm. I dunno.

Maybe it's dead and we're living in its corpse, slowly sucking it of energy. Entropy!

It's likely to be psychologically healthy... for a universe. There's no way you could compare it to human mentalities, though.

I think it'd be sort of like comparing the brain of a woodlouse to a human's. You just can't comprehend how infinitely more powerful it would be.

Broaden your minds to the possibilities, ladies and gentlemen. Power and intelligence do not exclude madness. The greatest being in existence, that knows existence, that is existence, blessed with power, wit, and burbling insanity.

Or depression. Suppose it's misery is also beyond human comprehension. It does not love us, it hates us for its misery. Perhaps it would destroy us for the briefest moment of reprieve, even at the cost of its own existence.

Though that may be preferable. Suppose psychological healthiness for a universe is something we could experience only as malevolence beyond all comprehension. That doesn't even hate us, barely regards us. In which perhaps the best we can hope for is to be destroyed without notice by a being in pursuit of its own unfathomable goals so evil that it makes all of our own cruelties and genocides combined look like nothing more than sweeping of an ant off of one's sandwich. Indeed, perhaps this is preferable to the horrors that would follow should we ever find ourselves the centre of this being's attentions.

Perhaps the truth of existence is a nightmare of such sanity-devouring proportions that to witness the tiniest fraction of its horrific majesty would be to lose your mind, claw your face off, and die in blissful agony. And perhaps it will transpire that those who do are the luckiest of us all.

For when the truth is finally revealed, unfiltered by our perceptions and oh-so valuable ignorance, we may be annihilated by the raw force of revelation, yet in some aspect empowered to endure the horror rather than simply obliterated by it like the supremely fortunate bastards who saw the truth ahead of time. And when every facet of our existence is stripped away except for our awareness of its horror, we may beg for death even as death itself dies, and face an eternity of eternities to which the worst of all imagined hells is infinitely preferable.

So broaden your minds to the imaginable possibilities, ladies and gentlemen. But perhaps not too much. Because if your imagination is as good as some, you might go mad and die. Unless that is the plan. And perhaps it should be.


So here's my Christmas message to you all: eat, drink, and be merry. For before the aeon turns we may be forced to learn that "lucky" and "dead" are the same.

i love BM. he's so cool. and right.

He's missing the point though. There is no pure definition of 'sane' - we define it by what is normal, and we define 'normal' by what's common. If you're the only one of your type in existence, there's no-one to compare you to. You can't be insane because there's no-one else to define sanity for you.

That's how we define IQ, not sanity. "Sanity" is not a synonym of "normal". It is an aspect of mental health, and health is objective, not relative. If that were the case, the whole of the human race could contract smallpox and be considered healthy.

Smallpox isn't healthy?? D:

That's a highly contentious issue that could be its own topic. I would want to argue with you, but I'd find myself arguing against you. It's definitely not as clear cut as that.

If mental health was objective, why does the APA DSM change significantly between each revision?

I know the answer to that one! It's because clinical psychiatry is terminally out of touch with current psychology research.

Doctors and researchers have never been immune to the prejudices of their time, so later work has to undo the damage and find out the truth.


In unrelated news, I can just as easily participate in the ruination of Jewish culture as I can that of Christianity:

I think the Universe loves us really. We've gone a whole 65 million years without a mass extinction event. Well, we kind of are a mass extinction event but still...

I read 'tentacles' as 'testicles'

65 million years is such a small amount of time for a universe, though.

I fucking knew someone would say that, Manco. Well you know what, here's to another 65 million years. Merry Universemas.

Sometimes I'm genuinely curious what things are going to look like a millennium from now but I would never want to live that long even if given the chance and when I reflect really hard on it I'm way more interested in the present than the future.

I think a lot of the people want to see what the future is like because they feel the present is shit. I'm definitely one of those people sometimes because I tend to wish days and weeks of my life away. It's kinda sad really.

But then I remember the Universe loves me and all is well.

Yivo loves us all!

http://theinfosphere.org/images/thum...225px-Yivo.jpg

There were no children in that episode. I wonder why.

Well, this got weird.

Just like an Oddworld Forums Christmas thread should.

Because it wasn't weird at the coca-cola bottle decorated 'Christmas tree' point? :D

Nope! In fact, here's the most recent picture!

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f3...ps8d0fc634.jpg

Why did you top the tree with Varrok

I've always wanted to shove a coke bottle up his ass.

He just puts me on top of everything

K/T was the most recent of the Big Five biotic crises. There have been other, lesser ones. Besides the current anthropogenic one, the most recent was the Pliocene–Pleistocene boundary marine extinction two million years ago. It is thought to have been caused by a local supernova, seriously damaging the ozone layer and seeding the crust with Iron-60.

Feel that love.