Thanks to grumpyoldfart’s comment on Likely to enhance his progressive reputation I checked out Frankie the pope’s encyclical Lumen fidei aka the light of faith. One does wonder why they bother. They can’t color outside the lines, ever, so why not just re-issue the old encyclicals?

But let’s take a look at it anyway, since it’s there.

Faith is light; Jesus brought light; yadda yadda.

But then modernity. People said it’s just a fake light. Faith was associated with darkness.

Faith was thus understood either as a leap in the dark, to be taken in the absence of light, driven by blind emotion, or as a subjective light, capable perhaps of warming the heart and bringing personal consolation, but not something which could be proposed to others as an objective and shared light which points the way. Slowly but surely, however, it would become evident that the light of autonomous reason is not enough to illumine the future; ultimately the future remains shadowy and fraught with fear of the unknown. [Read more…]

I was curious about how long I’ve been reading and publishing and trying to help promote Maryam, so I went into the archives to find out. The answer is since August 2004. Nearly a decade.

I published an International TV Interview with Fariborz Pooya and Bahram Soroush August 15 2004.

Have a sample:

Maryam Namazie: You hear this also from the progressive angle as well. People who like what we say – for example, that we are standing up against political Islam – immediately assume that we are ‘moderate Muslims’. In the interview that you Bahram Soroush gave on the incompatibility of Islam and human rights for example, you clearly said that you were an atheist. But it just doesn’t seem to register, even among progressives. Why is that? I understand the political interests of Western governments, but why do even progressives have that opinion of us? [Read more…]

Brian Earp had a very interesting post a year ago on motivated reasoning and “moral coherence” and how people resolve moral conflicts.

I was thinking “moral coherence” sounded very like dissonance theory, and then Brian went ahead and said as much, so that’s good. I know where I am.

He started with Todd Akin’s interesting take on pregnancy and rape, and how he could have believed that.

what could be going on with Todd Akin’s moral reasoning for him to casually downplay the relevance of rape and incest to the abortion debate while maintaining, as he does, that there should be no exceptions to anti-abortionism even in those cases? Psychologist Brittany Liu uses the notion of “moral coherence” to provide an explanation: [Read more…]

The pope is getting pats on the back and kisses on the bum for patronizing atheists and telling us we’ll be “forgiven” by his imaginary friend as long as we grovel and mewl and puke first.

Not going to happen, Frank. Not interested. It’s your fantasy, not mine, and I don’t give a damn what your pretend boss is imagined to think of me.

In comments likely to enhance his progressive reputation, Pope Francis has written a long, open letter to the founder of La Repubblicanewspaper, Eugenio Scalfari, stating that non-believers would be forgiven by God if they followed their consciences.

That’s progressive? Gee, lower your expectations much? What’s progressive about that? It assumes atheism requires to be “forgiven” and that non-believers give a fuck about god’s “forgiveness” in the first place. That’s the opposite of progressive; it’s backward-looking.

A woman writes to her daughter’s high school programming teacher.

First, a little background. I’ve worked in tech journalism since my daughter was still in diapers, and my daughter had access to computers her entire life. At the ripe old age of 11, my daughter helped review her first tech book, Hackerteen. She’s been a beta tester (and bug finder) for Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalope release), and also used Linux Mint. Instead of asking for a car for her 16th birthday, my daughter asked for a MacBook Pro. (I know, I know … kids today.)

My daughter traveled with me to DrupalCon in Denver for “spring break”, attended the expo at OSCON 2012, and even attended and watched me moderate a panel at the first Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC ’12) conference at USENIX Federated Conferences Week. Thanks to my career, my daughter’s Facebook friends list includes Linux conference organizers, an ARM developer and Linux kernel contributor, open source advocates, and other tech journalists. My daughter is bright, confident, independent, tech saavy, and fearless. In fact, she graduated high school last May — two years early — and is now attending high school in India as her “gap year” before heading off to college.

So what’s the problem? [Read more…]

So the question is, has this guy in China been reading Boccaccio, or did Marco Polo bring this story to Italy?

A MAN who claimed he could use his penis to rid a woman of ghosts that had taken up residence in her vagina, was arrested in China after performing the “sexorcism” for which he charged $3,000.

Huang Jianjun was arrested in the Guangdong Province after he convinced A Xin that he could remove evil spirits from her vagina by having sexual intercourse. A day later, Xin reported the incident to the police, and Jianjun was promptly arrested.

It’s Alibech and Rustico – or Alibech and Rustico were originally A Xin and Huang Jianjun.

He began by eloquently showing how the devil is the enemy of the Lord God, and then gave her to understand that the service most pleasing to God is to put the devil back into hell, to which the Lord God has condemned him. [Read more…]

The BBC will introduce you. There are three of them. They met at karate school.

They are now karate black belts, but because of their particular Christian beliefs, they have also decided to do battle – they say – against evil spirits or demons. They believe that these demons can possess a human being and cause suffering, depression or addiction.

“A demon can’t just come into anybody whenever it chooses to – God doesn’t allow that,” says Brynne. [Read more…]

At the end of August, epidemiologists in Texas traced a measles outbreak to people who attended a particular megachurch, the pastor of which has preached against vaccinations. The pastor has apparently repented that stupid move.

Fortunately, that outbreak was able to be pretty well-contained — after the disease sickened about 21 people, Texas issued a public health alert and quickly found the source of the issue. The megachurch’s pastor was very cooperative and even agreed to host several free clinics to encourage the congregation to get their shots.

That’s good, but a fundamentalist area of the Netherlands isn’t doing so well. [Read more…]

Bad idea department.

An online nursery based in Raleigh, didn’t like the original name of one of the plants they were selling, so they changed the name to Domestic Violence. You know — because they thought the new name was funny.

What is worse, the reason Plant Delights chose that name is because the plant colors are black and blue.

Yes, bad idea is definitely the department you’re looking for.