As has become the custom, the first place for initial reactions and the hottest of takes to breaking news is Twitter. And since almost everyone has the capability — right in their hot little hand — of broadcasting their deepest thoughts to the world, the aftermath of a horror like the Mandalay Bay massacre brings out a retroperistalsis of reactions, most notably by Blue Check Mafia members . . .

And yet, somehow, a few more thoughtful, reasoned responses manage to appear as well.

And this gem should be retweeted daily:

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73 COMMENTS

  1. Richard Dawkins should stick to what he’s good at – Evolutionary biology and showing how stupid religion is.

    • I can show you how stupid a godless explanation of the universe is. It requires us to believe that something came from nothing. Thermodynamics anyone?

        • You don’t need an origin story for god, there’s no reason to believe that god hasn’t always existed.

          The hillarity is that atheists would have you believe things just as absurd as the people they decry as “idiots”.

        • Fred, it would be illogical for the Creator of space-time to have or need a beginning. If God truly is God then having a beginning or being “from” anywhere would be an immediate disqualification to the Creator of “time”.

        • Surprising responses. No reason to believe god hasn’t always existed, conveniently negating the need to explain how he came about.

          There is no reason to believe that I am not god. So do you believe that? Do you have any proof that I am not? No. You do not. So do you believe it? If not why not? Have some faith.

          I try not to believe in things without evidence to support my belief. Faith is the opposite. It is belief without evidence. You are entitled to do so, but don’t try to trump it up to be more than it is. Do you believe that 4+4 is 129? If not why not….? No there is no evidence, but why is it needed?

        • Fred, I think you also misunderstand the nature of “Faith”. Faith is holding to what you know regardless of feelings. You may know academically how a parachute works. But, when it’s time to strap it on and jump, do you have enough faith to step out the door and trust it with your life? Faith is not emotion or the absence of evidence. It is the exact opposite of those things.

          You know 2+2=4 by an objective standard regardless of how you feel about it. Congrats, I use the same objective standard. I say objective standards in the material come from an intelligent mind who created laws of logic and rules of reason. I also say when you use your mind to reason logically, you are borrowing God’s air to rage against Him.

      • But it’s somehow less stupid to believe that a god came from said nothing in violation of said thermodynamics?

        • “In the beginning was the WORD, and the word WAS God…”
          So, NO. Not from nothing. From ‘something else’ that was always there… and always will be. What that something is, exactly, is anybody’s guess.

        • That’s funny, being a proud Chicano and all, if thing you’d be catholic. But hey, I suppose communism is enough delusional thinking for anyone.

      • Indeed.

        It’s hard to take a guy seriously when out of one side of his mouth he vehemently opposes an un-caused first cause, but then out of the other side argues for abiogenesis and supports things like the “crystalline ancestry” hypothesis.

      • 2 million thumbs up! (My dad used to use that to discuss metaphysics! ) let’s see.

        1.Something CAN NOT come from nothing.
        2. ENERGY CAN NOT be destroyed. Only converted….

        • There’s a lot of promising hypotheses and ideas out there about how it could happen that are a lot more viable than “the magic man in the sky did it”

        • “Magic man in the sky” is pedantic oversimplification of millennia of theological debate. I think it’s only natural that if there were a higher power in the universe, humans would have a tendency to anthoposize it. Theologicans have been debating the nature of God for millennia with just as much fervor as quantum physicists. Boiling it down to “magical man in the sky” is just as insulting as boiling down quantum physics to terms approachable to the layman. For example, I have yet to see a definition of enthrapy that does not devolve into math most people don’t understand.

          The real bottom line is that atheism starts with an unprovable assertion. The assertion that absence of evidence constitutes evidence of absence.

        • Even if you just did a logic matrix (and you couldn’t, due to the enormous complexity, even with super-computer computing capability) an “intelligent designer” theory is more plausible.

          “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” – Genesis 1 v 1

          Read some thoughtful literature if you’d care to. Roger Penrose (tutor / mentor to Steven Hawkings) author of “The Emperor’s New Mind” said that the probability of life forming in the universe is astronomically SMALL, and that, even if GOD were to single out the set of circumstances that would suffice to support a framework for it, it would be as though GOD would have to use a pin to single out the singular set in the space of the universe. https://www.quora.com/Does-Roger-Penroses-observation-that-the-probability-of-the-occurrence-of-a-universe-in-which-life-can-form-is-10-to-the-power-of-123-to-1-support-the-case-of-those-who-believe-in-God

          GOD believes in you John R., believe it or not. That doesn’t require your belief (on purpose). But I’m sure HE will tell you when he comes back.

        • I posit that the only rational position is agnosticism. Believing a deity because science is incomplete is as unreasonable as positing that there is no god because there is no reliable evidence that there is one.

        • I think, of all of the very little that we know, it is ignorant and blasphemous to claim that so much of the incredible is really credible. https://evolutionnews.org/2010/04/roger_penrose_on_cosmic_finetu/

          None of our physics fit together, and we have to make shit up (LITERALLY) to come up with abridging factors (yet none of the things we choose to “make-up” should instead be a firm reliance on GOD?). We have no idea what a photon is, nor can we properly explain their activities,

          When a theoretical physicist gets to the end of a six blackboard computation and arrives, tearfully, at an answer of “infinity” they throw up their hands, and chalk, and claim an “impossibility” and start over. BUT THAT IS JUST GOD SAYING ‘Hi’ (HE doesn’t want to scare you).

          Einstein said that physicists and mathematicians were GOD’s worst students. BUT GOD IS A GOOD GOD, HIS MIGHT DOES NOT OUT-SHINE HIS PATIENCE.

        • Agnosticism never put down in words that it created you, nor did it ever send a son to save you (to ensure that you would understand to whom you belonged). It never claimed that it carved you in the palm of its hand or said that the very hairs on your head were counted such that of all the sand on a beach would disappear if momentarily forgotten, but that it remembers you.

          Anywho, your lack of belief is not something that covers over or wipes out others belief.

        • “The ” magic man in the sky” sent a spirit and pulled me from a flipped truck going under water in a flooded river”

          That’s great! joetast : )

          HE was probably looking down on you (like HE does while watching the crazy X-Games kiddos) and said (while picking you up from your predicament) “that was precious, you get to play-again”. : )

      • Yes, but WHICH god? If there’s one, there’s plenty. And if there’s a he there’s a she. Can’t make more gods without good ‘ole sexual reproduction. QED.

        You can’t pick and choose which bits of science to use.

        But Richard Dawkins is still a dbag of epic proportions. Fanatical athiests are just as tiresome as fanatical make-believers.

        • No.

          There is only ONE GOD, whose Son was named JESUS, and whose SPIRIT is called “HOLY”.

          But you are correct about Dick Dawkins.

      • If you can do that, then you should. You’d win a Nobel Prize and go down as one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time, but of course, both you and I know you can’t do that. You do have a tendency to overstate your talents, mental and otherwise. That’s not to say that there is or isn’t a god, but physics has nothing to say on that matter.

        • The point is that asking someone to believe that a random statistical aberration created the universe is just as absurd as what most religions as you to believe. I’m an engineer, I only place trust in things I can test. Theoretical physics is basically a bunch of people playing with high order math to explain way random noise in their systems. Occasionally, they are right. Most of the time, they are wrong.

          When science tries to pose as philosophy, it becomes neither.

        • The problem with your line of thinking is, of course, that we do have evidence for virtual particles being a thing, and we don’t for any kind of god, much less a particular one. The beauty of science, though is that you aren’t being asked to believe. You are encouraged to doubt and present evidence for an argument. The opposite is true for religion. The fact is that we have plenty of evidence for the big bang, which is what I assume you were referring to, but even that is a misnomer, because the big bang only explains the evolution of the universe, not its origin, if there even is one. The fact is that science does not have an answer from what we know so far, but scientists will gladly say, “we don’t know” and neither does anyone else, especially not the religious community.

        • “The point is that asking someone to believe . . .” in science, is fine if you want to talk about a few pieces here and there. When you begin to talk about ‘everything’ you can’t put it together, nor explain a small portion of the incongruities that still work so perfectly together.

          GOD said that there would be you (it might’ve been a warning, but HE was nice about it). Then Jesus said, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” Mark 4:9.

        • The big bang theory was first postulated by a Catholic priest/astronomer. Rabid atheist scientists decried it as creationist nonsense trying to prove the existence of God. The reason atheist scientists decried the theory is because they believed the theory to be evidence of God.

      • So assuming that the bulk of existence (not just the observable universe but EVERYTHING) was in thermodynamic equilibrium before the big bang and this bulk has existed for an infinite amount of time and will continue for an infinite time, there can be a random quantum mechanical fluctuation that actually produces a small amount of order in the system. Remember, entropy only increases ON AVERAGE in a closed system, there can be small statistical fluctuations within that seem to violate entropy but in reality do not. Ever hear of virtual particles?

        • Ok… would you like to invest in revolutionary new power generation technology? We extract heat from seawater, use it to create electricity, and then throw the ice back in the ocean.

        • Obviously you don’t know wtf you’re talking about and need to go read some hard science books.

        • And yeah, that will work for power generation if you wanna wait the 10^2554333566533566 years for that to happen in the 10^-7643467753 grams of water.

          (Not real numbers, I just started mashing buttons)

        • I hold both mechanical and aerospace engineering degrees. The simple fact is that science and religion are not as incompatible as most militant atheists would have you believe. All you have to do is realize that the [insert religion here] explanation of god is just as tainted by observer bias as any other attempt to understand the universe. The way I see it, physics doesn’t disprove god, it just gives us the tools to understand the universe god created. Religion provides a guess at the moral and philosophical context to that universe. Pretending that science substitutes for philosophy or viceversa is silly. The two go hand in hand. Religion tries to explain the question of why. Science explains the question of how.

        • “…would you like to invest in revolutionary new power generation technology? We extract heat from seawater, use it to create electricity, and then throw the ice back in the ocean.”

          Careful – There are those who want to do something similar.

          Exploit the temperature *differential* of warm seawater at the surface in the tropics with the cold water at the seafloor.

          The efficiencies currently suck a big one, but it *is* doable…

        • @Geoff

          Peltier effect power generation is not a new concept. What I’m talking about is making an enthrapy reversing perpetual motion machine.

    • “Religion’s stupid”? Have you complained about all the stupid crazy shit everyone else is hawking?

      No?

      Didn’t think so.

      • Answering a question that will be different for every respond-er and declaring victory based on your answer for them is stupid. I suspect that most people would have answered “yes” thus nullifying the point you thought you had.

    • Richard Dawkins sucks at ‘showing how stupid religion is’. He’s pretty good at mocking and belittling religious people but you’ll never change anyone’s mind by ridiculing them.

      • I agree its not the best strategy but he very rarely ridicules and Its usually well deserved when he does. For the most part he engages in respectful debate.

    • I’m an atheist and I fucking hate Richard Dawkins. He just stands on his pedestal of self-proclaimed superiority making claims against religion that are founded in his own certainty in himself.

      Yes, science is good and usually right (btw there is nothing more a scientist loves more than proving another scientist wrong) but he’s an arrogant, drunk asshole that is completely unwilling to accept that any of his ideas might be incorrect…… just like religion.

    • I’m an atheist and I fucking hate Richard Dawkins. He just stands on his pedestal of self-proclaimed superiority making claims against religion that are founded in his own certainty in himself.

      Yes, science is good and usually right (btw there is nothing more a scientist loves more than proving another scientist wrong) but he’s an arrogant, drunk asshole that is completely unwilling to accept that any of his ideas might be incorrect…… just like religion.

  3. #notenoughpeopleshotback

    @leastthecopswerecalledquickly

    #howdidtheshootervote

    #fifteenminutesofcrazyrapidfireshootingandmandalaysecurityislastonthescene

    • Shoot back?
      Seriously?
      With what? The infrared scoped rifles people had in their back pockets?

      The dude was 400 feet from the crowd. Try returning fire with a handgun and you’ll be lucky to hit the correct hotel room.

      Let’s get real.

      • My comment was not enough people shot back. It was a sort of tongue-in-cheek comment to mean just what you said. No one was prepared to shoot back. Shooter had his way. People didn’t have it in their heads that this would be enough of a possibility. BUT THEY WILL NEXT TIME.

  4. when a man killed 86 people and wounded 400 more, no one called for truck control. They would have called for gun control, but they already had it cause it was France. My question is, when someone else abuses a first amendment right why does no one call for limiting or repealing the first? Second though is bad because guns. It’s plain old cognitive dissonance.

  5. Well, considering ISIS had claimed responsibility, it looks like both Dawkins and King should starry looking into good Crow recipes.

  6. when a man killed 86 people and wounded 400 more, no one called for truck control. They would have called for gun control for it though, but they already had it because it was France. When someone abuses their first amendment rights, no one calls to repeal or limit the first. Why then do they do it with the second? Cause guns? Cognitive dissonance.

    • But they DO call to restrict first amendment rights. Not when people abuse it, though. When it’s properly used in a very thoughtful way by people like Ben Shapiro. Then he’s a “Nazi” and his “hate speech isn’t protected by the frist amendment!”

      The far left doesn’t believe people have rights. They don’t realize they believe this, but I’m an adherent to the idea that what one does reveals what one really believes, regardless of what one claims to.

  7. Anyone else listen to the gun fire in the videos? Discounting echoes, the sound of the firing was really weird with regard to pace. Sometimes the gunfire almost sounded like it overlapped itself (like more than one weapon being fired?). Very weird staccato (not pure full-auto, not bump-fire, not binary-trigger fire sounding).

  8. Every country has it’s morons, in the US they have Twitter accounts.

    Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to tweet out to the world wide web and prove it to everyone bored enough to pay any attention.

    • “Every country has it’s morons, in the US they have Blackberry’s and invite the world’s jihadi’s to move in without vetting OR keep servers in their bathrooms, sell U.S. secrets and influence for cash”.

  9. Dawkins is right.
    Every country has its psychopaths. In his country, they have PhDs and pontificate on matters unrelated to their training and beat people over their heads with ideology.

  10. If I were given a magic wand and three opportunities to wave it and make anything I want come true with magical executive fiat, one of these wishes would be to remove/eliminate/un-invent and prohibit for all eternity every bit of social media. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, you name it.

    Almost everyone says stupid shit from time to time. In the days before social media, it was usually kept to themselves, or among a small group of close friends, some of whom would have the presence of mind to tell the person: “You’re saying stupid shit. Calm down.”

    Now, social media allows people to say stupid shit to the world, before there’s any trusted friend or intimate person to say “You’re saying stupid shit. Calm down.”

    And you get what we have here.

    • Perhaps only politicians should have social media accounts, since it’s in the public interest to know what stupid shit they’re saying.

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