Friday, June 18, 2010

Proof There is No God

Of course I am just being facetious, since everyone knows you cannot prove a negative. Still, the idea of an enormous Jesus statue being zapped by lightning and burning to the ground, strikes me as ... well, it strikes me as something, though I'm not sure what.

Take a look:



That's 62 feet of plastic foam and fiberglass aflame there, leaving behind nothing but the steel frame:


Video here. Nicknamed "Touchdown Jesus" because of the positioning of his outstretched arms, the figure stood in front of Solid Rock Church of Monroe, Ohio (Motto: "Our Church may be built of solid rock, but our Jesus is made of plastic").

This post has nothing whatever to do with living in Korea, so let me correct that now (from Wikipedia):
According to 2005 statistics compiled by the South Korean government, approximately 46.5% of the South Korean population express no religious preference.
Of the religious population, 29.2% are Christian (of which 18.3% (on total) profess to be Protestants and 10.9% to be Catholics), 22.8% are Buddhist, and the rest adheres to various new religious movements including Jeungism, Daesunism, Cheondoism, Taoism, Confucianism and Won Buddhism.

I also wrote a little about religion in Korea in a couple of previous posts, which you can see here.

6 comments:

John from Daejeon said...

It proved to me that "Zeus" still does exist and is pretty accurate with his thunderbolts against usurpers.

조안나 said...

Someone up there did not like this statue... and the funniest thing is... they're planning on rebuliding it... maybe they'll pick something more flattering this time...

Tanner Brown said...

Hahahahhaaa great post.

Anonymous said...

But, you are sure there were still no wmd in Iraq.

Tuttle said...

1) Hi, Anon, how about unmasking yourself, at least to the extent I can recognise you? (Your email addy is not visible to anyone on the blog--not even me!)
2) As I said at the top, you cannot *prove* a negative. Can you reach a reasonable degree of certainty to base your life on? Yes.
For instance: There is a high degree of likelihood the world will not end before breakfast tomorrow--I better set the alarm so I can get up and go to work.
3) WMDs in Iraq? There's a better chance of lightning striking a giant Jesus statue than anyone finding WMDs in Iraq.
https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004/Comp_Report_Key_Findings.pdf
4) "Sure"? Yep, pretty sure. Surer, certainly, than I am that there is no God. After all, "God" is a vague construct, who I might not even recognize if I were to see Him/Her. S/He could be located anywhere in the universe, a space so vast we cannot even comprehend it, much less search it.
WMDs, OTOH, have a distinct set of physical and visual markers, and Iraq is a small, generally 2-dimensional geographic space located entirely within well-known, specifically described, and extensively monitored physical boundaries.
There is really no comparison, beyond the philosophical point--which is valid still--that you cannot prove a negative.
"There is no elephant on my desk." is similarly a negative statement, and therefore cannot be validated.
Anon, they looked harder in Iraq for WMDs than I have for elephants on my desk (I gave it only a cursory check). But both of us got the same answer.
Dammit, who ate my peanuts!?!?1?

Anonymous said...

maybe God allowed it to be destroyed because it was somewhat of a false idol, that called out look at me and missed the whole message of what God and Jesus was about, just a thought.