Quote of the Day: Robert G. Ingersoll

"In his day Christ was an Infidel, and made himself unpopular by denouncing the church as it then existed. He called them liars, hypocrites, thieves, vipers, whited sepulchres and fools. From the description given of the church in that day, I am afraid that should he come again, he would be provoked into using similar language." --Robert G. Ingersoll

Earthquake Mom Chain Letter Myth Debunked!

You may have seen on your Facebook feed, or elsewhere online, the above picture and following story.

This is a true story of Mother’s Sacrifice during the Japan Earthquake.

After the Earthquake had subsided, when the rescuers reached the ruins of a young woman’s house, they saw her dead body through the cracks. But her pose was somehow strange that she knelt on her knees like a person was worshiping; her body was leaning forward, and her two hands were supporting by an object. The collapsed house had crashed her back and her head.

With so many difficulties, the leader of the rescuer team put his hand through a narrow gap on the wall to reach the woman’s body. He was hoping that this woman could be still alive. However, the cold and stiff body told him that she had passed away for sure.

He and the rest of the team left this house and were going to search the next collapsed building. For some reasons, the team leader was driven by a compelling force to go back to the ruin house of the dead woman. Again, he knelt down and used his had through the narrow cracks to search the little space under the dead body. Suddenly, he screamed with excitement,” A child! There is a child! “

The whole team worked together; carefully they removed the piles of ruined objects around the dead woman. There was a 3 months old little boy wrapped in a flowery blanket under his mother’s dead body. Obviously, the woman had made an ultimate sacrifice for saving her son. When her house was falling, she used her body to make a cover to protect her son. The little boy was still sleeping peacefully when the team leader picked him up.

The medical doctor came quickly to exam the little boy. After he opened the blanket, he saw a cell phone inside the blanket. There was a text message on the screen. It said,” If you can survive, you must remember that I love you.” This cell phone was passing around from one hand to another. Every body that read the message wept. ” If you can survive, you must remember that I love you.” Such is the mother’s love for her child!! 

Sentimental. Yes. Moving. Sure. But true? Not so much. As it happens, it's completely bogus. It's all bunk. 

A shout out to my old college roommate Colin Rennie, a true humanitarian aid worker working in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, with his non-profit organization called the Mud Project. He is doing great things to help the people of Japan in anyway possible--but mainly by digging the mud out of people's homes, helping clean up all the rubble, rebuilding homes--and basically doing all the dirty grunt work, so to speak. Having witnessed the devastating aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami first hand, he has this to say about the chain letter:

This is a true story! Share! Once upon a time in 2008, some Chinese firefighters dug two bodies out of the debris of the earthquake in Sichuan (remember that? 68,000 people died, 4.8 Million were left homeless). Then in 2011 and again in 2012, someone made up a story about a mother dying to save her kid and everyone on the internet had a sentimental moment and shared the made up story with all their friends... then went back to checking their news feed.

There are plenty of REAL touching, heart breaking, inspirational stories here on the east coast of Japan, and in disaster afflicted areas around the world. So go ahead, love your mother, and do something to DIRECTLY help other people. Could be across the world, or they could need help next door.

At the end of the made up story, it said: "Dont forget to click the share button.."
It starts with a Share, but it doesn't end there. Don't forget to DO something.
http://www.greatdreams.com/china-chengdu-earthquake-51208.htm — at INJM Headquarters, ishinomaki, Japan.

There you have it folks, the myth of the Earthquake Mother debunked! Although the fiction is heart wrenching and emotionally touching, it's just completely untrue. Yet it managed to spread like wildfire. If a modern myth can spread so fast, what about ancient ones? 


Myths which people had no means of checking, mostly because they couldn't read, but also because they didn't have the powerful tools that we do today, such as books or the Internet and the ability to fact check. Yeah, I am looking at you Jesus of Nazareth! I am pretty certain that if the Internet existed in the 1st Century, the Jesus Resurrection myth would have been debunked just as quickly as this one was.


At any rate, I found this a good example of how a myth can get mistaken for truth almost overnight. But more importantly, I wanted to recognize the great humanitarian work my friend Colin is doing here in Japan. If you feel so compelled, you can click on the link and head over to the Mud Project page to lean more about what's going on and how you might be able to help. 

Conversations with Christians: All You Need is Faith?

[Disclaimer: The following is a reconstruction taken from actual conversations I've had with real Christians. The names have been left out to protect the stupid... egos... of those who would be cast in a bad light. P.S. Feel free to read my part in the sophisticated voice of Brian, the atheist dog from The Family Guy. Believe me when I say, you won't regret it.]

"Just have faith in God," said the Christian. "All you need is faith."

"I thought all we needed was... love?" I replied with a hint of sarcasm. 

Not getting the joke, the Christian continued on in all seriousness, "No, you're missing the point. If you believe in God with all of your heart, he will give you proof of his existence! You will begin to see Him working in your life."

"I don't think that's necessarily true," I replied (the stereotypical atheist). "Job believed in his god but, for his piety, got nothing but suffering, anguish, and turmoil encrusted with his own blood and tears in return."

"That's just it though," retorted the Christian. "Job was a man of faith! He kept his faith through the worst of it. He is the example all believers ought to emulate!"

"Really?" I asked. "Job? He's your role model? He's the one you think all believers should aspire to?"

"Yes! Job's faith never faltered, never failed, it was true faith all the way until the end!"

"First of all, Job was a pawn in Satan's cruel game of chess. Besides this, Job's own so-called loving God threw down the wager of the game, and the two of them toyed with Job as he his life had no intrinsic value or meaning, and they literally ruined him in their little depraved chess game."

"You're just saying that because you're an atheist, and you have it out for God."

"No, I'm saying that because I have read the book of Job, and that's what happens. You'd *know this if you actually read it."

"Oh, I've read it!" said the Christian, somewhat defensively.

"Really?"

"Of course!"

"Well then, I have to admit, I am a little troubled by you trying to pry out a moral from the story of Job. It's total and utter degrading humiliation as a bumbling servant before a cruel master who wants to prove his greatness by showing that his authority has the power to keep even is most wretched subjects in line. A fine myth, but as far as weening morals from a story, there are a thousand better ones to choose from. Any of Hans Christian Anderson or the Brothers Grimm, for example."

"No, you're obviously taking the moral of the story out of context."

"Oh, yeah? How so?"

"Job was the epitome of faithfulness!"

"Yeah, I get that, and that's what you keep saying, but to me that only shows how gullible Job was."

"That's because you're an atheist, and you think all faith is stupid."

"There you go making unfounded accusations again. You don't know whether or not I actually think all faith is stupid. I am pretty okay with Jainism. I admire aspects of secular Buddhism and Taoism. I have no problem with these. It's the retarded beliefs of revealed religion that I have problems with."

"So what are you saying? That the Bible is retarded or that Job is a retarded story?"

"No! To the contrary, I love the story of Job. I just don't read Job for the 'moral' of the story as I used to, when I was a believer like yourself. But I now read it for its historical remnants of early Hebrew myth, when the religion was still a Polytheism."

"What?! The Hebrews believe in the God of Abraham and Moses, they believe in YAHWEH! They were never polytheistic."

"Actually, yeah, they were. If you recall, one of the great problems with the Old Testament is that God's rival is Baal, and he continually chastises the Hebrews for paying undue homage to Baal. Baal was obviously thought of by YAHWEH as a real God."

"But YAHWEH calls Baal a false god! So you see, YAHWEH was merely instructing his people not to worship or follow false gods."

"You may want to look at the context of those Bible verses a little bit closer. Moses states in Deuteronomy that, 'The LORD your God destroyed from among you everyone who followed the Baal of Peor, but all of you who held fast to the LORD your God are still alive today.' Moses, and apparently YAHWEH, do not merely view Baal as a imagined god, but a real threat! A real God with power over the Israelites. Those who choose Baal over the Israelite God must be vanquished. If Baal was just a false god, a pagan myth, then why is YAHWEH so bent on destroying something that doesn't even exist? Instead, in one of his exemplary shows of compassion, YAHWEH puts his own people out of their misery by sentencing them to death for the mere thought crime of believing in Baal! Mind you, this doesn't say anything as to whether or not they ceased believing in YAHWEH during that time, because, remember, they were polytheists! The Bible even says so."

"Yes, but they were worshiping false gods."

"When the early Hebrews, both Israelite and Canaan, worshiped El and Ashera, were they merely paying homage to false gods? Or did they not believe these gods to be real? I find it hard to believe that anybody would worship something they explicitly knew was imaginary. That's just not conceivable. But my point is the Bible isn't making a distinction between imaginary gods or real ones, it is talking about an allegiance to God vs. an allegiance to Baal. For all intents and purposes, the OT views Baal as real, as the opposition to YAHWEH."

"I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to prove here. I know that the early Israelites worshiped Baal, and other gods, and Moses admonished them for it. They were even inventing false idols such as the golden calf. But there is only one true God."

"What I am trying to say is, the belief in one true god is a later invention. But even the book of Job makes reference to Baal! In fact, it has many insights (historically speaking) as to the sorts of beliefs some of the early Hebrews held when they still held the belief in Ashera and the Leviathan as part of their pantheon of worshiped deities. The historian in me just finds it all so fascinating, partly due to the fact that it helps show how the faith has evolved. But most people don't read the story with any knowledge of ancient Hebrew mythology so they can't make the proper connections."

"Are you saying Christians are stupid?"

"No, I'm not saying that. That's merely an assumption Christians make when they feel their knowledge is inadequate when compared to that of someone with superior knowledge. But being smarter doesn't make you better. It just makes you better informed. Christians seem to take it personally because they despise the idea of other people knowing more about their religion and their bible than they do."

"Or, it could be that atheists are just stuck up and think they're better than every one else."

"I am not denying that there are many atheists like that, but then again, many of the atheists I know tend to actually know the Bible fairly well. In fact, many of them are atheist precisely because they know the Bible too well!" 

"They may know some about the Bible, but they always take it too literally. They're just as bad as radical Fundamentalist Christians. Not every Christian takes every verse literally all of the time."

"I hear that a lot, and I understand Christians want to distance themselves from the bad habits and abuses of other Christians, but I don't think it's about making the case for or against Biblical liberalism so much as it is learning to understand which parts of the Bible are being literal and which parts aren't. I would argue that many of the Fundamentalist Christians are staying true to the original meaning of the Bible while more moderate or liberal Christians are going far afield, often times cherry-picking the text to death. There are certainly layers to the text of any story, but Christians often complain we atheists are taking parts out of context when in actuality we aren't. We're reading it according to how it is written, and interpreting it based on that reading alone. What many Christians seem to be doing is prying out other meanings by forcing the Bible stories into different contexts, or else superimposing interpolations onto the story, which suit the Christians need to have the Bible conform to their theological concerns."

"I think we're getting off topic."

"Yes, I was merely following the tangent you started. At any rate, getting back to Job. You may or may not find this interesting. But in ancient Hebrew lore, after YAHWEH defeats his father EL, and takes ASHERA as his wife, he then conquers the Leviathan. Once he tames his pet, according to the Hebrew myth, YAHWEH places the giant serpent in his garden, as a protector...

"If this serpent in the garden myth-theme sounds familiar, it should. The Adam and Eve fable, as a Jewish story, contains the same symbolic serpent. The apparent rivalry between the serpent and God is something due to the Kingly Adam story being grafted onto the myth--or maybe the other way around. I'm not entirely sure...

"At any rate, It's not until thousands of years later that Christians mistakenly superimpose Satan, incorrectly I might add (due to an bizarre interpolation from the book of Revelation--never mind how they managed to get away with it), onto the pre-existing serpent symbolism. I find this relevant, because being fond of the book of Job, you will recall one of Yahweh's admonishments to Job was to ask if Job had the power to defeat the mighty Leviathan? As you can tell, I really do have a deep love and passion for these stories."

"Yeah, I see that. I think I'm gonna go now."

"I'm sorry, I know this conversation has turned into a history lecture. But I think we both learned something."

"You mean, I learned something, right? Because I'm obviously too stupid to know anything. So I'm going now. Goodnight."

"You needn't to take it personally. I'm not attacking your beliefs. I'm just filling you in on some very fascinating information that isn't contained in the Bible, even as there are distinct hints of what I am talking about. If you want to know the truth, you actually have to go outside of the Bible and discover it for yourself!"

"Thanks for the thought. But if you don't get it, just move along. I'm done talking. Goodbye."

[Christian logs off angry.]

See, this is why Christianity hates genuine knowledge. Knowledge brings understanding. If you knew that your religion was predicated on absurd myths, you'd likely get angry too. And if one's religion is absurd, what does that make their faith? 

But then again, one might get angry enough to go back and really dig into the material, and also search outside of the material, in an attempt to gain a genuine understanding of their faith, rather than a superficial one which consists of nothing more than convictions reinforced by what you were told by others. I know, because that's what happened to me. However, learning something on your own is hard, time consuming work, and it's definitely not easy.

The way I see it, when it comes to learning, understanding, and truth there are two kinds of people in this word. Those who want to discover the truth and those who are too afraid to for fear of what they might find. The only question you need to ask yourself, is which pill do you take? The blue or the red?

Religion In My Facebook Feed! Oh, God, No!

A Christian friend of mine wrote some words of wisdom today for all to see.

"The key to overcoming fear, then, is total and complete trust in God. Trusting God is a refusal to give in to fear. It is a turning to God even in the darkest times and trusting Him to make things right. This trust comes from knowing God and knowing that He is good."

I was left so speechless by these, how shall I put it, profound words, that I could not give a proper response.

Instead, I shall let G.W. Foote, the great English Freethinker, respond for me.

"Why should God help a few of his children and neglect all the others? Explosions happen in mines, and scores of honest industrious men, doing the rough work of the world and winning bread for wife and child, are blown to atoms or hurled into shapeless death. God does not help them, and tears moisten the dry bread of half-starved widows and orphans. Sailors on the mighty deep go down with uplifted hands, or slowly gaze their life away on the merciless heavens. The mother bends over her dying child, the first flower of her wedded love, the sweetest hope of her life. She is rigid with despair, and in her hot tearless eyes there dwells a dumb misery that would touch a heart of stone. But God does not help, the death-curtain falls, and darkness reigns where all was light." (Arrows of Freethought)

But... He is good.

I think, maybe, Christians are confused about what the word "good" actually means.


Granted this post was about fear, not the Problem of Evil. It just seems to me, that the greatest thing any religious person truly has to fear, is the constant and undying negligence, oversight, and indifference of their god.

If I believed, I would be more afraid of a god who simply didn't care, as appears to be the case, than whether or not God could be classified as good.

But... Oh, well.

Quote of the Day: G.W. Foote

"In matters of science, after investigation and discussion, the world comes to an agreement; in matters of theology the world grows more and more at variance... And to our mind the explanation is very simple. In matters of science men deal with facts, while in those other matters they deal with fancies, and the more freedom you give them the greater will be the variety of their preferences." --G.W. Foote (Flowers of Freethought)

Faith vs. Religion (If not the same thing)

Many people do not make a distinction between faith and religion. Millions of Muslims, for example, believe that Faith is the submission to the will of God. In other words, it is obedience to the religion of Islam. Other people to make a distinction. Numerous Christians, for example, claim they dislike organized religion but practice faith.


But for me faith and religion are inseparably wed together.


One might object that I have simply defined faith and religion differently than they have--and all are valid descriptions of the same sort of spiritual experience, more or less. I am going to argue that semantics, although highly important to clarify our subject matter, is besides the point in this case. Allow me to explain.


Logically speaking, faith is the byproduct of religion. It's not a semantics issue so much as a pragmatic issue. Without any religious beliefs there simply could be no faith to be had in these beliefs to begin with.


A reader recently asked me, "Faith is religion enacted? Hmmm.... I've always thought of it as the reverse. Faith is what's in the head, religion is the outward behaviours associated with it, isn't it?"


She's not wrong, mind you, but she is only seeing half of the picture.


I find this to be a really good question, because it highlights the confusion many people have with regard to faith. Lots of people are confusing generic faith, i.e. the faith that I will wake up in the morning, or that the sun will continue to rise, or that the weather forecast will be accurate with the more specialized form of religious faith.


The thing about generic faith is that, on occasion, you can be mistaken. Perhaps you will have a heart attack in your sleep, or you wake up to a rare instance of a solar eclipse, or the weather forecast turns out to be wrong--as it so often does. This sort of faith is *not the kind of Faith religious people are prescribing to when they claim to have faith in some supernatural entity, such as God, or some religious claim. 


For the religious person, Faith is more of a profession of piety, the loyal unquestioning devotional acceptance of a religious proposition, ideology, creed, practice, or tenet. 


Needless to say, religious Faith is not the same as every day mundane faith. I am not implying that's what our reader meant. She merely assumed that faith was the belief (or sum of beliefs) one holds, and religion is the behavior compelled by the total framework of that belief system. I would say, yes, this is accurate. But there is another aspect to faith we can't ignore. Faith based acts are predicated on religious propositions as much as holding the religious beliefs in the first place is predicated on one's willingness to accept them as true.


I guess the way I go about it is by asking the question how, in the first place, could one possibly have faith in something if there were not prior beliefs about that something to believe in? 

In otherwords, what is it one is professing faith in, if not specific beliefs based on the claims of their particular religion? Basically, beliefs about one's religion equate to religious faith. But I do not think we can say that faith is simply believing; it is also doing. 

For example, Christians profess faith in the belief that Jesus is the begotten Son of God, that he came to earth to atone for the sins of mankind, that he was sentenced to death upon the cross, and that three days after his death he rose again in a glorious resurrection. These are the basic beliefs one must prescribe to, and believe as true, in order to accurately call oneself a believer in Christ. 

This helps paint the picture of what Christians are actually professing faith in. They are professing faith in the acceptance of the premise that Jesus is the Son of God, that he died and resurrected, and that through his sacrifice and shedding of blood he washed away the sins of mankind. Moreover, they are accepting the belief that the religion requires them to think, act, and behave in a certain way. In other words, we discover that faith is the unquestioning acceptance of these beliefs.

But then the question becomes, where do we get these beliefs from in the first place? After all, you don't start with faith and then generate beliefs. You first need the belief to have faith in. 

Well, it seems to me these beliefs are found in the tenets, creeds, principles, and practices of religion. Religion is a complex human construct. It involves philosophical ideas, various traditions, and highly ritualized practices which are all inseparably tied to human culture, psychology, and experience. Many people form their very identities based on their religions. Many more choose to live their lives according to their religious beliefs. This is what I call Faith. It is religion followed out in devotional acts of faithful adherence to the aforesaid tenets, creeds, principles, and practices contained within religion.  

Therefore, it stems to reason that the religion is the bedrock for faith. Religion has to exist before it can give rise to faith based beliefs and rituals. Just as you cannot have belief in Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior without the Bible, without the tenets, creeds, and established traditions of Christianity as a guideline of what to believe and what manner to conduct oneself as Christian, so too must faith come out of religion. 

But to call oneself a Christian one must accept certain claims about moral conduct, follow certain practices such as baptism, and must live life according to the teachings of Christ. A person could believe in Christ all they wanted to, but believing alone isn't enough, you have to follow the teachings as well. 

Genuine faith asks you to accept a specific set of beliefs derived from the religious realm. Many of these beliefs are supernatural propositions. That is, in the absence of any evidence to support the religious claim, you have to take it on faith that these supernatural claims are true. 


When a believer prays to God, they are practicing a religious act based on the religious claim that God hears, and occasionally, answers their prayers. If you believed in prayer, however, but never prayed--then could you really say with honesty that you thought prayer was valid? How would you separate your faith from atheism? An atheist doesn't believe in prayer so that's why they refrain from the practice. No, I think it is rather quite clear why people pray. Life sucks. God, according to their religion, promises them a little something better if only they pray hard enough and believe deeply enough. Therefore the believer is called upon to put their religious beliefs, their faith, into practice.


So you see, faith is religion enacted.

Here we discover an important chronological order we must take into consideration when discussing the issue of religious faith. To picture it another way, religion is like a tree, and faith is like a branch on that tree. Many religions spawn numerous faiths, but the faiths might differ slightly in what religious propositions they accept as true and which religious doctrines they emphasize as most important to abide by and obey. A Calvinist believes something slightly different than a Lutheran and a Catholic believes in a slightly different variation of the religion still. But these various branches of faith all sprout from the same tree. 


***


I'd like to note, as an aside, that religion, indeed all religions, are derived from the human tendency to formulate supernatural explanations/beliefs for that which we don't fully understand. 


This is in part due to how human brains are wired and how our basic psychology causes us to be pattern seekers. So to be entirely pedantic, religion requires one to be prone to a certain level of supernatural thinking before religious beliefs can be properly generated and, likewise, faith can come out of the religion. 


As such, I view religious faith as a type of supernatural belief, not a rational or pragmatic one. Many theologians claim that faith can be had rationally, but I do not see how this is possible, unless one relinquishes all faith in supernatural claims in the first place. But if one did this, then religion couldn't arise and there would be no faith. 


Rational inquiry and skepticism seem to kill off the tendency we have to take supernatural claims for granted--because it asks us to be critical of anything that is lacking in evidence or doesn't line up with the facts. Since religion relies on the supernatural, so too faith. A supernatural claim cannot be entertained rationally apart from any valid support to establish the belief as reliable. This usually requires evidence, and supernatural claims usually fail to support themselves with evidence. So faith, in my opinion, will always suffer from a certain level of irrationality which is built into it due to its reliance on supernatural religious propositions which ask you to believe minus any trustworthy empirical understanding.

I only mention this as an aside, since it goes a long way to help explain why so many religious beliefs and practices are bat-shit insane. If religion relies on the supernatural, and the supernatural cannot be completely rational, then faith is bound to be irrational more often than not. Thus all the practices and customs derived from religious faith risk suffering from the same sort of irrationality.


It's was makes people entertain the absurd notion that God cares whether or not they masturbate, whether or not they take birth control, whether or not they eat pork, whether or not women may attend religious service when they are menstruation, whether or not one covers their head or takes of their shoes in church, whether or not one prays kneeling toward the East or with palms pressed together and heads bowed slightly, it is what makes people think Holy Communion is real and that circumcision is a good idea. It is why so many believers write horribly stupid things on Facebook--such as the endless thanks and praise of God for, you know, curing their cancer, or not getting cancer, or getting an A on a report card, or scoring the winning touch down. 


Yet all of these religious practices and beliefs prove to be entirely irrational in response to events which can all be understood rationally. There is not a single shred of evidence, apart from the sheer willingness to accept these fantastic religious claims unconditionally, that they constitute any sort of supernatural intervention on the believer's behalf.  They are merely the peculiar, irrational, religious beliefs leading to peculiar, often irrational, demonstrations of faith.


Although people aren't fully rational all of the time, I think the case can be made that religion often asks highly rational people to be less than rational in favor of slightly irrational supernatural propositions. 

God Hates Figs

I found this picture floating around the Inter-Webs and it made me lough out loud.

Also, it shows the different side of the Son of God which Christians so love to adore and worship. Christ literally did condemn a fig tree to be ever lastingly barren. In fact, he used his almighty powers to see it so. The questions Christians need to ask themselves, in light of this evidence, is why am I worshiping a bona fide lunatic?


Ironically enough, these little yellow marshmallow bunnies are not intolerant of figs, mind you. They are merely practicing their religion according to the faith. That is, they are following their faith to the letter. They may be zealot bunnies, but there is one thing you can damn well bet on, and that is every single one of them believes they are going to the big marshmallow upstairs when they die--to become one with the gooey creator.


Christians often seem to dismiss the fact that their faith is somehow part of a larger religious body. They claim to hate organized religion, but then turn around and practice their religion forgetting that faith is not mutually separate from religion--faith is the belief in the spurious religious tenets, doctrines, and principles. Belief that the religion is true. Indeed, they usually demonstrate their faith via either evangelical, fundamentalist, or dogmatic orthodox adherence to the belief in religious ideologies. I am sorry to burst their bubble of denial, but FAITH is RELIGION enacted. 


The bunnies have faith that God really does hate figs, and therefore they practice this faith by following the religious creed not to suffer a fig to live, for the Lord said unto the fig tree, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again. 

[Meanwhile, the atheistic pink marshmallow bunnies continually remind the religious yellow bunnies that the very existence of Fig Newtons today proves their God is either non-existent or impotent. Ignoring the evidence of a proliferation of Fig Newtons everywhere, the yellow bunnies claim the pink ones are merely hedonists who want to live a life of gorging themselves on Fig Netwons, to which the pink atheist bunnies remind their zealot yellow little friends that this is besides the point. If their God really didn't want anyone to ever eat figs again, and having the power to do so, then the very fact that figs exist disproves their God. The yellows then claim that the pinks have merely taken the verse out of context and misinterpreted it. Obviously, the verse only refers to that one fig tree, not all the fig trees. The pinks then fire back, stating that the yellows are then practicing a fraudulent faith, for the very admission renders their beliefs erroneous and that even if the fig tree did exist historically--it no longer does. Therefore there are not fig trees today that can possibly be expected to suffer the curse of but one fig tree. Thus their legalistic adherence to scripture is not only a patently absurd, since it unjustly continues to punish all figs for the so-called crimes of one fig, but it is also harmful to society by needlessly causing fig lovers grief, and harming innocent figs. To which the pious yellows tell the infidel pinks to go to hell.]