Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, September 2, 2010

Is a god necessary?

Commentary By Ron Beasley



Is a god necessary?  Stephen Hawking says no.

God did not create the universe, world-famous physicist Stephen
Hawking argues in a new book that aims to banish a divine creator from
physics.



Hawking says in his book "The Grand Design" that, given
the existence of gravity, "the universe can and will create itself from
nothing," according to an excerpt published Thursday in The Times of
London.



"Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is
something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,"
he writes in the excerpt.



"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the universe going," he writes.



His
book -- as the title suggests -- is an attempt to answer "the Ultimate
Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything," he writes, quoting
Douglas Adams' cult science fiction romp, "The Hitch-hiker's Guide to
the Galaxy."





While the believers may not be able to prove the existence of god(s) we non-believers can't really prove that a god(s) does not exist.  But what is a god?  Modern man has power and power toys that would have made him look like a god to the people as little as 200 years ago.  Although I don't really believe a god is necessary I really have no reason to believe that our current theories of physics and cosmology are correct - in fact I doubt that they are.  Understanding the nature of the Universe may simply be beyond we naked apes.  Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man but probably all of his theories are wrong.  But the Universe, the solar system and the planet we call home were here before man created god and god will officially die along with the last man.

Religion is attractive for at least a three reasons:



  • None of us likes to think that death is really the end. 
    Christianity gained real popularity among meso-Americans because their
    religion did not include eternal life.

  • We all like to think we are special, something the Abrahamic
    religions are really good at.  It�s all about middle eastern tribalism �
    our tribe is the chosen tribe.

  • An attempt to explain that which can�t be explained.



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