Mah very own Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. I loves it and it is mine. My own. My – wait…
I seriously do love my Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. I cackled when it came in the mail, and immediately took pictures of it, then took it out of its clear plastic wrapper and took more pictures, then I took it to bed and promptly began reading. About forty-seven seconds later, I had an almost overwhelming urge to go to church. I want to find the most Bible-believing biblical literalist church possible, and sit there with my big ochre bible, and innocently thumb through it. “Excuse me, Pastor, did you just say God wants us to be saved? But what about here in Second Thessalonians 2:11 and 12, where it says God will make us believe lies so that we’re damned? How does that work?” Cue puzzled but beatific smile. Continue reading “Now I Wanna Go to Church…”→
So here’s a thing that shouldn’t be happening: a young woman posts a picture of herself topless with the slogan “my body belongs to me, and is not the source of anyone’s honour” has been kidnapped “for her own good” and condemned to death by a cleric who thinks boobs and defiance are terrible things to display.
I have to admit I sniggered upon hearing the news that Pope Ratzinger was on his way out the door. I won’t miss him. And I can hardly wait to see what the Catholic Church will inflict upon us next.
In the meantime, I figured we’d do a few quotes from Robert Ingersoll for the blessed occasion of the first retirement of a pope in 600 years. Two in two thousand years retiring rather than dying or being forced out means that Robert’s observation on ecclesiastical power remains pretty much spot-on:
You can hardly expect a bishop to leave his palace, or the pope to vacate the Vatican. As long as people want popes, plenty of hypocrites will be found to take the place. And as long as labor fatigues, there will be found a good many men willing to preach once a week, if other folks will work and give them bread. In other words, while the demand lasts, the supply will never fail.
If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish—if a little more enlightened, religion would perish!
Ah, for that great day….
As for the crimes of Pope Ratzinger, namely the crime of shuffling pedophiliac priests off to new pastures, where people weren’t aware that their spiritual head was all about raping children: if you’re surprised a man o’ god could be so evil, have a dose of reality.
Let it be remembered that the popes have committed every crime of which human nature is capable, and that not one of them was the friend of intellectual liberty—that not one of them ever shed one ray of light.
But this, of all, I believe is my favorite quote. I laugh every time I come across it, and it remains funny because it’s so damned true. Keeping in mind that “capable of” doesn’t mean “is in favor of” when it comes to the intellectual advancement stuff.
The Catholics have a pope. Protestants laugh at them, and yet the pope is capable of intellectual advancement. In addition to this, the pope is mortal, and the church cannot be afflicted with the same idiot forever.
Here’s looking forward to a new idiot as we wave goodbye to the old. Adios, Benny.
Please avail yourself of the nearest exit at the earliest available opportunity, and ensure your egress is not marred by a sharp contact between door and rear. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Some of you will remember Los Links from back in the day when I could spend two days out of every week reading blogs, and then share the linky goodness with you. Life’s been too busy for a while for that, unfortunately. It should have been too busy tonight, but my brain said, “You know what? Fuck you. I’ve been thinking all day.” War at work, y’see: fighting to make things the best they can possibly be at an American megacorporation. It’s fun, and fulfilling, but taxing.
Thankfully, I had posts written (longhand) in advance, but my wrists said, “You know what? Fuck you. We’ve been typing most of the day.” So today ended with me lying about catching up on some freethought reading. If this continues tomorrow, I can bring you a roundup of recent geology posts. I suppose that won’t be so bad, now, will it? And then, on Wednesday, you will be guaranteed an original post of near-epic proportions, because we’re going to talk about why Mount St. Helens melted some bits but not all the bits on the cars. If we’re very fortunate, we’ll end up on Boing Boing again (thank you, Maggie Koerth-Baker!). I say we, because I wouldn’t have written up cars if it hadn’t been for you lot liking things like that, and as it turns out, you’re not the only ones. So, thank you, my darlings!
It’s not all happy fun times, alas. The thing with frequenting the freethought and skeptic blogs that I do is that Things That Are Not Happy get discussed, and if it weren’t for the bloggers and commenters restoring my hope for humanity, I’d have crawled off to a cave and become an official misanthrope by now. Between all of you, though, I am not willing to declare the vast majority of human kind irredeemable arseholes. Only a subset of it. Sigh.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how little things have changed in the last two hundred years.
Mind you, we’ve made enormous advances in science. Since Charles Southwell anonymously published his An Apology for Atheism, nearly every science has seen revolutions: evolution in biology, general relativity and quantum mechanics in physics, plate tectonics in science, to name only a few. And because of those revolutions, our lives have changed enormously.
Yet I can pick up books written by freethinkers written centuries ago and see the same idiotic religious arguments torn apart with the same exasperated patience, over and over again. All that seems to have modernized is the language, and in some cases, not even that. These ideas freethinkers were battling then haven’t stuck around because they’re good or sensible, but because they’re religious. Religion has a bad habit of claiming bad ideas are too sacred to challenge. And it has a terrible problem with evil. Continue reading “Friday Freethought: “A Declaration Which Could Only Be Made By One Whose Humanity Was Extinguished By Divinity””→
I debated with myself for quite awhile before I decided to post this; it’s on the edge of being a little too personal. But it illustrates my own feelings on compromise.
Today I gave a donation to my Catholic high school. Yes, I was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic schools through senior high (though that was more because our local public schools were so bad than because my parents were concerned about my religious education). My high school was/is for girls only. But I haven’t darkened the door of that school since 1976. I’m currently an atheist humanist, and my opinion of the Catholic Church as an institution is so low it can’t be adequately expressed in a family blog. So why give money to a Catholic high school? Continue reading “A Personal Post”→
We here in the United States live in a religion-saturated culture. It’s dreadfully pervasive. And it’s not just the religious right making huge amounts of noise – you can’t wriggle a stick without whacking someone or something religious.
This was brought home to me with a thump when I put the teevee on something other than my usual trio of Doctor Who, Mythbusters, and Castle. Continue reading “You Don't Have to Believe”→
We here in the United States live in a religion-saturated culture. It’s dreadfully pervasive. And it’s not just the religious right making huge amounts of noise – you can’t wriggle a stick without whacking someone or something religious.
This was brought home to me with a thump when I put the teevee on something other than my usual trio of Doctor Who, Mythbusters, and Castle. Continue reading “You Don’t Have to Believe”→
I’ve spent a week trying to process the fact that you voted for Mitt Romney. I still don’t know what those “conservative values” of yours are – you couldn’t tell me, and I can’t figure out what in the Republican Party platform you could agree with. I’m still hoping that you weren’t well-informed and were just voting how the people around you recommended you vote, because if you’d educated yourself on Romney’s values, lies, business practices, actions as a bishop, and history with gay classmates, and still chose him for President, then I don’t know if I ever really knew you. Continue reading “You Voted for Death”→
“She had a heartbeat, too.” Remember that. There is a life carrying that fetus you’re so concerned about. There is a human being you’re condemning to death when you tell her that the failing heartbeat of a person that will never be is more important than her own beating heart.
And if you can look me in the eye and tell me that what happened here was right and just, then I will know religion has stripped all traces of humanity and compassion from you.
