Yet another weird SF fan


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Yet another weird SF fan
 

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Are Nukes Supernatural?

It's common for members of the “reality-based community” to treat nuclear fission as though it were cursed. This is sometimes combined with worship of solar energy. This actually makes sense when you consider that Secular Humanism Release 1.0, otherwise known as Epicurean philosophy, included the theory that all natural phenomena were due to the movement of atoms in the void. According to Democritus, the founder of classical atomic theory:

… color exists by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention, in reality nothing exists but atoms and the void.
The class of natural phenomena might be much broader than rearrangements of atoms, but if the class of natural phenomena can be expanded at will, the claim that a phenomenon is natural becomes empty. All that's left is the idea that reality can be rationally analyzed … and there's no good non-circular reason to think rational analysis precludes religion.

If natural phenomena are only due to rearrangements of atoms, those phenomena due to other causes must be supernatural. In particular, nuclear fission or the sun's luminosity are classed as supernatural. If “black magic” is defined as a supernatural phenomenon summoned by the will of the sorceror then nukes are clearly black magic. Sunlight, on the other hand, is freely given by the Sun so, by the same standards, we have a holy obligation to accept it.

Those leftists who actually are rational could help prove that by coming out in favor of nukes. (Don't give me the excuse that it's politically impossible; that hasn't stopped leftists before. In any case, it's easier to ignore anti-nuke activists than persuade people to give up fossil fuels.) Most anti-leftist stereotypes are incompatible with being pro-nuke.

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