Loving was the woman who, with her husband, was tried in the 1960s for the crime of interracial marriage; their victory before the Supreme Court led to the striking down of laws banning racially mixed marriages across the country. Here’s part of her account:
Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.
The judge’s comment is particularly interesting. He’s using an unholy mix of rank creationism and Blumenbach’s 19th century taxonomy of human races to justify his decision! For all the finger-pointing at science for promoting racism, though, it’s clear that most of the rationalizations have come from god-fearin’ church folk. Browse the racist web boards (here’s an example; it’s the evil Stormfront, so be warned), and you’ll find an amazing infatuation with biblical authority.
It’s worth noting that the same flavor of argument, thumping the bible to claim god is agin’ it and making up ‘facts’ about the natural world, is also the same strategy used to argue against homosexual marriage. I remember 1967 — that was the year I was grooving to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles — and it’s dismaying to think our country held onto the bigotry that denied people the right to love one another for so long, but it’s even more distressing to see that the same attitudes still prevail in 2008.
Just for optimism’s sake, I like to think of this a proof of how far we’ve come within my own lifetime.
No way! What are the odds?
My son saw this news last night and was a mite startled to learn that he, too, would have been a felon if he’d married forty years earlier (though that would have been tricky fifteen years before he was born.) I was a bit startled that he was unaware of “miscegenation” laws – but I was happy, too. We have progressed some.
It all starts with swearing on the bible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…what a fricken sham!
Most judges wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit them in the ass.
Thank the FSM for good folk like the Lovings who stood up against the evils of their day, making things better for future generations.
We’ve come a long way, that’s for sure. And she helped a lot.
I hope no judge pulls presumptuous God lines in court nowadays…
Christianity has long been a major source of evil on this planet, and when I was in high school and college in the 1960’s, I don’t know how many times I heard Christian preachers wailing about how Gawd Almighty demanded that the races be kept separate.
Christians commonly referred to their Wholly Babble to bolster their claims, although I personally don’t know any Christians who really read more of their Wholly Babble than their apoplectic preachers scream at them.
It’s amazing how the bible can be (and has been) used to justify so much hate, cruelty, murder, intolerance, sexism, racism, etc. and christians still consider the bible-god to be all about love. Ha!
The mind reels in horror at such a decree both in its language and implication as its made from a percieved unquestionable ‘absolute authority’.
Which reminds me:
“When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”
Jacob Bronowski
It always seemed to me that in proceeding thus against a couple named “Loving,” they were defying Irony–a force more powerful than any “god.”
Clearly this is all the fault of Alfred Wegener.
If those continents hadn’t drifted apart all those years ago then the geographic isolation would have made it much less likely that genetic drift and selection of pigmentation alleles would result in the development of groups of people with distinctive physical features and hence there would be no different ‘races’ to speak of. Problem solved!
Time to stop teaching this Godless ‘geography’ that is poisoning our children’s minds.
Hey uh guys… Watch out on the religion bit. She still gave God all the credit for her wedding and supreme court victory. She believed it was his sign that anyone can marry who they wanna.
This is a very good disproof of Stein’s theory about Darwin and Hitler…
Creationism has all mankind neatly divided into races, all created separate by God, with very precise separations. (There is still the sons of Noah theory, but it does not fit with the abovementioned Stormfront post; and anyways, it is a kind of precise separation between races. Also according to this theory, Amerindians do not exist. But I’m digressing).
Modern biology says all mankind is a (very large) family, with a common patriarch^Wancestor. (And it also says that whenever you try to define a race, it will cover either >95% or <5% of humanity, but this is more recent).
This being said, which one could most easily lead to the Holocaust?
I think you should have a post category simply titled “Goddamn”
> Browse the racist web boards . . . and you’ll find an amazing infatuation with biblical authority.
It’s the “low-hanging fruit” principle. Whatever demented program you want to justify, you look first in the Bible KNOWING you can find support there.
This is sad. You judge God based upon the sins of men. Before you blasphame God again, think before you do that. Because you could be wrong about the fact of there being no God.
PZ Meyers was alive in the day when it was agianst the law to mix races. Perhaps it is his fault for what those people did to people in mixed marriages. (see what I am saying?)
For centuries people have used God’s word for their own agenda. Then years later you harshly judge Christians for what some others have done.
Kind of like, when people see teenagers causing trouble. They see them in gangs, they see them commiting crimes, they see them skipping school, they see the graphiti around town. They harshly judge teens as nothing but trouble makers, little twerps that belong in jail. When in fact they are the small part of teenagers. You don’t hardly see the good ones because being good doesn’t stand out. Being bad does. This is very similiar.
Do you judge all Christians (there are over a billion of them in the world) based upon jimmy swagert? hagee? Preachers with an axe to grind? Politicians who used Christians for their own purposes?
Am I responsible for the evils that religeon has brought?
Or are we responsible because we are men and women who are sinners? We are all evil.
The biblical thing is pretty funny considering that it actually says there are three races, based on the sons of Noah, two of whom are white (or all three depending on your interpretation). Another fine example of “absolute literalism”.
“The majority is always sane.”
-Nessus the Puppeteer.
Amazing how often something reminds me of that.
Sorry for the mispelled words. Sometimes I don’t pay attention when I am typing fast.
Good day me amigos!
“…the judge declared: ‘Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.'”
Those sneaky Africans… who let them into North America? And what were those pesky Injuns doing there? God clearly intended it for white men.
Things have progressed, but I wonder how far — in the mid ’80s a friend of mine in college was repeatedly subjected to harassment and abuse by his ROTC buddies about dating a black woman, so much so that, despite the clearly serious nature of the relationship, he broke up with her. (This isn’t the State officially prohibiting interracial relationships, of course, although given that the ROTC is essentially a military organisation, it comes pretty close.)
We are all evil.
Don’t buy into that tired old bullshit, Starbuck. You probably aren’t any more evil than I am – and I cry if I watch Old Yeller.
@Starbuck: God has a pretty darn awful agenda himself. An agenda of prejudice, murder, genocide, destruction, hate. All spawned by HIM. READ THE BIBLE.
@16
Someone’s gotta do it, because it sure doesn’t look like you people are.
Aaargh… I just discovered Stormfront from your post. I did not know of its existence, and Wikipedia tells me that it is Google-censored here in France (by the way, knowing that not only China does this is a kind of a shock, but it’s true that France is one of the democracies that has the most anti-hate restrictions on free speech).
This place really stinks… I’m a bit surprised that it manages to stay within legality (even under First Amendment, there *must* be some things you can not publish, such as a call to murder ?!).
Anyway, I need to be a bit more disciplined and avoid folllowing any link I see, especially those with big warning signs like that, or else I don’t know how in how many government files I will end up… :-/
I actually can see how you could get this out of the story of the Tower of Babel…fucked up divisive, ugly story. Of course, more likely the judge was just taking his own beliefs and applying them to God without much regard to what the Bible does or doesn’t say, but nevertheless, I can’t say that the OT god does a great job separating himself from this kind of prejudicial nonsense either.
Y’all are being a little hard on Starbuck. The point is that Christianity, or any belief in an absolute authority, can and has repeatedly been used to justify unwarranted actions. Because there is only one very jumbled book to look at for guidance, it can be used in a myriad of ways, and pretty much everyone will be right. The Bible is not clear. It can be used to justify too many horrors.
Another good news marriage story today: After suing state agencies, SoCal man takes wife’s surname
Talking to Christians about this is even more surreal than talking to young people who just don’t know (I would also been a criminal if I’d married just thirty years earlier than I did). Christians act as though miscegenation is so far from Christian thought it’s ludicrous, as though it was a notion that could only have held sway hundreds of years ago.
I don’t mind Christians changing their morality over time: I approve of it. It’s just incredibly odd that they persist in pretending it hasn’t actually changed.
When I try to explain my optimism that someday the State will stop presuming that it performs marriages that clerics “sanctify” and retreat to witnessing legal contracts between consenting adults of any gender, I cite Loving. If “miscegenation” appalls no less than gay marriage, I abandon the conversation in search of somebody to talk to who isn’t wearing a pointy bed sheet.
Starbuck, part of the problem is the notion that all men and women are sinners, the specious claim that, “We are all evil.” Speak for yourself. The Bible is a textbook for evil, and I won’t have my children trained in it. People can get pretty severely fucked up, and some I daresay are evil, but it isn’t through any innate property having to do with spooky magicians making people out of mud in 4004 BC. Spare me.
Oh, and PZ, in 1967, you weren’t grooving to The Beatles. Teenyboppers tried to think they were, but they were just being cute. I’m older than you (I’m older than Wilkins!) and in the summer of 1967, when my friend and I first read about teenyboppers in his parents’ copy of Aquarian Oracle, we looked forward to next summer, when we’d be old enough to be teenyboppers. We weren’t grooving.
@#16 —
This seems like a rather weak form of Pascal’s Wager, which is an extremely weak argument to begin with.
No. We aren’t all “evil” by nature. Some people sometimes behave evilly by choice. That’s why we’re responsible. Because we don’t have a fallen, sinful nature. We could behave morally, and when we choose not to, it’s our fault and our fault alone — and there’s no divine being who can save us from it.
Terrible news. Despite not wishing to be too public a person, Mildred made a point of speaking out in favour of gay-marriage. She has my utmost respect and admiration.
Does anyone else think that the quote by Jefferson, on Stormfront’s front-page banner, is *exactly* antithetical to what they seem to think it means?
#21 tulse OTOH a friend of mine who was stationed in Berlin in the 80s was teasing one of the “blacker than thou” guys in the company for going out with a white girl and was told: “She’s not white, she’s German.”
Starbuck, PZ isn’t judging “God” based on the sins of men. He doesn’t believe in God at all. He’s judging men based on the evils of men (sin being a theological term, and isn’t it “we are all sinners” not “we are all evil”?).
And most here, likely including PZ, don’t judge all Christians by this. We think all Christians are wrong in some of their beliefs, but you don’t vilify a person just because you think they’re incorrect if it doesn’t affect you.
Christianity does at least concern itself with ethics. Atheism does not. This is part of why atheism is not a belief system, and not a religion, and doesn’t really tell you much about a person overall. People who say “atheism has no morals” are absolutely correct; there’s no moral principle you can derive directly from “there is no god”. Atheists themselves, of course, can have morals, simply not from theistic belief.
Up until the 50’s, Washington D.C. was a segregated city. One of the founders of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun a Turk, would hold concerts in the Turkish Embassy because Washington laws prohibited mixed audience shows.
http://www.pbs.org/previews/am-atlanticrecords/
“Ahmet Ertegun, a young Turk – literally – with an immigrant’s passion for the African-American music he heard in the rigidly segregated Washington, DC, nightclubs of the 1940s, recognized that “all popular music stems from black music, be it jazz or rock ‘n’ roll or rap.” He exported these unique sounds to England, where they merged with the European sensibility, and then imported that fusion back across the ocean. “The Atlantic Sound,” which sprang from the small record label Ertegun co-founded in 1947, was a revolutionary new genre, single-handedly influencing the future direction of contemporary music. Ertegun wrote music, produced music, defined careers and changed lives. “He found Ray Charles, he introduced Eric Clapton to Aretha Franklin, he fell asleep on Mick Jagger,” says Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner in AMERICAN MASTERS “Atlantic Records: The House That Ahmet Built.””
@20
LMAO
That has to be the post of this thread!
We are all evil. – Starbuck
Speak for yourself.
Having married a lovely Hispanic woman, I’ve directly benefited from Mildred and Richard Loving’s accomplishment. someday, (the sooner the better) there will be a case that overturns the homobigots and we’ll be just that much closer to a better society.
No Dennis. Starbucks is in fact letting bigoted fundamentalist demagoguery off the hook by opting to rebuke those who criticize it as well as criticize the “mellow yellow” Christians who choose to ignore that seething vein of hatred and intolerance running right through their own religion. They act like they are scared of their own shadow.
@28 Silmarillion,
Wow, amazing that had to be specifically changed. My wife’s father took his wife’s family name for exactly the same reason. That had to have been over forty years ago. You would think patriarchy would have been considerably stronger back then.
It was also Japan.
Hard to believe that PZ isn’t on Steve Sailer’s blog radar. I’m astonished that with the link to Stormfront he hasn’t made an appearance.
Lucky you,PZ.
Yes… Mildred Loving. We might even be tempted to scoff at a novelist who made up such a name for a person in her situation:
Mildred: An Old English name meaning “gentle strength”.
(Her husband’s name, Richard, means “powerful leader”.)
Another Poe? Starbuck: Do you judge all Christians (there are over a billion of them in the world) based upon jimmy swagert? hagee? Preachers with an axe to grind? Politicians who used Christians for their own purposes?
Am I responsible for the evils that religeon has brought?
Or are we responsible because we are men and women who are sinners? We are all evil.
1) Yes, I judge the ideology by the acts of the leadership. Christians, as a community, are responsible for the acts of Christianity over a two thousand year history. I think at this point we can safely say that almost every version of extant Christianity has been pro-slavery, pro-racism, pro-totalitarianism (we can except the Quakers and the Unitarians, who are generally rejected by most Christians as Christians). When they have rejected those positions, it’s because they were dragged kicking and screaming by folks considered either heretics or non-Christians (atheists was the common slur).
2) “We are all evil, we are all sinners”. Speak for yourself scumbag. That belief right there is one of the greatest evils of Christianity; by believing we are essentially evil beings, Christian ideology excuses and propagates evil. Christianity is evil because it is undergirded by the belief that, essential, earth is a hell – a self-fulfilling prophecy. Any ideology that helps create hell on earth is immoral and monstrous.
Starbuck “Am I responsible for the evils that religeon has brought?
Or are we responsible because we are men and women who are sinners? We are all evil”
The concept good, sure we’ve tried for the last 1500 years and it always comes out a mess, it’s just the people wrong were doing it. The commies argue the same thing LOL
#25, Jerome:
Well, yes, there are things Americans cannot publish, but not many. I have actually been astonished to find how much some European nations prohibit; it seemed to me that it was a real scandal when David Irving was prosecuted for Holocaust denial. Don’t get me wrong. Holocaust denial is weird, wrong, even insane; but a “crime”? That sort of prosecution, in my opinion, should not happen in a country that deems itself “free.” (Yes, yes, Guantanamo and a thousand other things; we are very guilty over here, too. In saying the French are wrong to prosecute such things I’m well aware that the French are not the only violators of basic human rights in the world.)
Our test for advocacy of violence is the Brandenburg standard (from the case of Brandenburg v. Ohio): a state may not prohibit the advocacy of violence “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” So, if I publish in a blog, “left-handed people ought to be driven from our community, and their houses ought to be burned,” that’s legal (albeit, yes, ridiculously stupid and evil). If I go to a rally and tell a crowd of people, “that house on the corner is owned by left-handed people! Let’s burn it right now!” that’s not legal. The “imminence” factor makes it very hard to get into trouble from something you publish; the more likely prosecution scenario involves events unfolding after a speech inciting violence or something like that.
Barry
@ 36,
yes, Ertogrul was a great man. Clapton must have forgotten about his own roots when he made his infamous quote about Britain needing Enoch Powell.
I wonder what all of those nice “white” Christians think about the fact that the only physical description of Jesus that exists, from Josephus, says that he was black?
(we can except the Quakers and the Unitarians, who are generally rejected by most Christians as Christians)
Posted by: frog | May 6, 2008 10:09 AM
Why are Quakers and Unitarians “rejected by most Christians as Christians”? To those who would reject such I’d ask, are Protestants not Christians due to their non-Catholicism? Are Catholics not Christian due to their apostasy?
As greatly as Churchianity hasn’t a clue, to the same extent neither do the professed Atheists.
Yes, there are nearly as many species concepts within Christianity as there are sects.
This is why I support gay rights – because my gay friends deserve to have someone speak out for them, as someone else did for me. Thirty years ago, I might not have been able to marry my husband. We’ve had many a double take, a few harsh interactions, and a wonderful marriage.
“… he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.”
So the Europeans were interfering with their god’s arrangement when they came to the Americas and again when they brought Africans here? Those nasty immoral Europeans! Shame on them — ship them back to Europe where they belong!
Quakers:
http://www.quakerfinder.org/faq.htm
Apparently, many Quakers do not consider themselves Christians, and their beliefs about Christ would seem to put them in a non-Christian camp (unless you want to also count Muslims as Christians, as their views on Christ as a religious teacher seem similar).
Which is interesting, because Christians often bring up that “Christianity stopped slavery” (in the US) because it was a Quaker initiative. So I guess they claim them for that purpose.
The Lovings did their small part to make this world a better place, and will always be remembered for it. Would that we all could say as much. RIP, Mildred.
You judge God based upon the sins of men.
I judge god on his deeds. And, if he existed, I’d have to kick his ass for being worse than the sum total of the worst of the humans he was responsible for creating. We’re talking about the god who invented spina bifida and hell, after all. You should be praying that such a monster does not really exist, and that you’re not eternally enthralled to it.
I wonder what all of those nice “white” Christians think about the fact that the only physical description of Jesus that exists, from Josephus, says that he was black?
What passages gave you that idea? Obviously the whole “white Jesus” trope is ridiculous, but I suspect that if Jesus really existed, he would have looked more Arabian. Then again, Africa is almost right next door to Israel…
I don’t know about Quakers, but in some Unitarian congregations you don’t even have to believe in God, much less the divinity of Jesus. Heck, there is a large contingent of Wiccan Unitarians. Individual Unitarians are definitely not necessarily Christian.
Oh, I’m sure they’re fine with it, as long as he doesn’t try to marry a white woman.
Or another man.
@33
I’m glad I’m not the only one. I re-read it about 10 times to make sure I wasn’t misreading, but Jefferson was definitely saying all men, White and Black, are equal and will eventually participate in this government. Guess the people on the site really are that stupid.
What else can we expect? Intelligent they are not.
Salt: Why are Quakers and Unitarians “rejected by most Christians as Christians”? To those who would reject such I’d ask, are Protestants not Christians due to their non-Catholicism? Are Catholics not Christian due to their apostasy?
As greatly as Churchianity hasn’t a clue, to the same extent neither do the professed Atheists.
Salt, you’re an idiot (arrogant ignorance is in my book idiocy). Unitarianism has evolved out of Christianity, but not being Trinitarians, most Christians denominations would not recognize them as Christians. And Unitarians have returned the favor by evolving away from Christian dogma in general. Trinitarianism has been a hallmark feature of Christianity since the fourth century.
Most Quaker sects are still closer to Christianity – and quite close the woo-woo good-guy self-image of Christianity – they believe in a direct relevatory position that is both at odds with the pre-reformation churches (Catholicism, et. al), and the post-reformation Biblical authority churches (almost everyone else).
And you’ve got to love that Atheists with a capital A, as if atheism was a fixed ideological and community position. What the hell is Churchianity? Some kind of new No-True-Scotsman?
As a counterpoise to #53
The Religious Society of Friends is a Christian organization, in the sense that it is originally based on the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/Quaker-faq/
Marcus: You should be praying that such a monster does not really exist, and that you’re not eternally enthralled to it.
They like it. They really do – it’s not the “heaven” that they love, with it’s angels and choirs, but the hell, with the demons, pitchforks, whips, chains, nipple-piercings, … you get the image, right?
It might get them to admit that Josephus’ account of Jesus, the only “historical” account to explicitly name him, is now known to be a forgery — the (two, three?) other historical documents, which are claimed as evidence of Jesus, refer only to a man claiming to be the Jewish messiah, which could have been any of dozens of nutters.
#28 Silmarilion; that’s interesting. I’m planning on doing the same when I get married (taking on my fiancée’s surname). Hadn’t thought that it may be expensive – I’ll have to seriously look into what’s involved in the UK!
Salt: Lordy, you’re dishonest. Here’s the full paragraph:
” The Religious Society of Friends is a Christian organization,
in the sense that it is originally based on the teachings of
Jesus in the New Testament. You will in general find some
disagreement among Friends about whether there was a Virgin
Birth, whether various miracles were supernatural occurances
or religious embellishments, whether Jesus was The Son of God,
or just one of God’s children etc. You will in general find
agreement that those differences are not important :-).”
This would not fall under Christian according to almost any other Christian organization/ideology. Since the 4th century, not believing in some variety of the Creed has been punishable by everything up to death in most of the Christian world.
Oh, how revolting.
The Stormfront board has an agnosticism/atheism section. You get shit like this (on a thread asking how atheists approach “the issue of race” differently than religious people):
Was anyone else expecting the following?
“the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red,”…adam and eve, not adam and steve…
@Starbuck –
This is sad. You judge God based upon the sins of men. Before you blasphame God again, think before you do that. Because you could be wrong about the fact of there being no God.
Well, right out of the gate I can see that I’m not wrong about you being a disphit.
PZ Meyers was alive in the day when it was agianst the law to mix races. Perhaps it is his fault for what those people did to people in mixed marriages. (see what I am saying?)
No. you’re not making any sense at all. The fact that PZ was alive in a time of racism is not in any way equivalent to actually being a person who promotes a racist agenda. It’s a stupid bullshit analogy, and I’m calling you on it rather than retreating from it.
For centuries people have used God’s word for their own agenda. Then years later you harshly judge Christians for what some others have done.
And?
Kind of like, when people see teenagers causing trouble. They see them in gangs, they see them commiting crimes, they see them skipping school, they see the graphiti around town. They harshly judge teens as nothing but trouble makers, little twerps that belong in jail. When in fact they are the small part of teenagers. You don’t hardly see the good ones because being good doesn’t stand out. Being bad does. This is very similiar.
Actually, it’s not even remotely similar. Teenagers don’t have a deliberately crafted ideological history butressed a Book of Holy Law and maintained by various forms of bureaucracy, legalism, tradition, politics, warfare, and pandering moralism that they themselves create and enforce over centuries through their clergy/preisthood/bought-and-paid-for-politicians. It’s another stupid bullshit analogy.
Do you judge all Christians (there are over a billion of them in the world) based upon jimmy swagert? hagee? Preachers with an axe to grind? Politicians who used Christians for their own purposes?
At the very least, I regard them with healthy caution and skepticism. No Christian has ever given me cause to regret doing so – and as you said, that’s a lot of Christians. And I’m sure as hell not afraid to judge someone based on the things that they themselves say and do. Like now.
Am I responsible for the evils that religeon has brought?
Are you now making apologies and excuses for Christianity? Why, yes, you are. In that case – yes, you do bear a measure of blame.
Or are we responsible because we are men and women who are sinners? We are all evil.
No, and no. At least some of us stand up straight and tell the truth. You could take a lesson from that.
And you’re not Starbuck. Kara Thrace would kick your mealy-mouthed ass.
#28 That’s wierd. I took my sife’s name (in Arizona) when we married in 1996, and had no problems at all. No one even batted an eye at the SS office (my first stop), getting a new drivers license, or passport.
Of course, once I had those three forms of government issued ID, the rest was easy.
The only snag we ran into was some help desk person at the power company thought she was a paralegal or something and insisted that I had to go to court and do a legal name change.
My wife’s response was classic. She said, “I have a passport, driver’s license, and social security card that says his name is, it’s easier for me to prove his name is than it is for you to prove it’s .”
I love that woman. =)
Cheers.
Just wanted to say, in regards to Mildred Loving, that it was a brave thing they did to stand up for their commitment to one another. I talk about that case in my classes. I also get interesting stories from my students, that illustrate how this discomfort with interracial relationships is still with us…
A young woman (white) told of how she had been in a car with her boyfriend (black), on their way back from dinner. They were pulled over near the downtown campus of our university. The officer came around to the passenger side, signaled her to roll down her window, and asked, “Are you alright, miss?” This was last fall, 2007.
The following day, I was out with my in-laws. My brother-in-law is black, has been married to my sister-in-law (white) for about 25 years. I related this story, and he said, “That happened to Becky and me last week, right around the corner from the house.”
My jaw absolutely dropped. Again.
We live in a very racially diverse city of a quarter million… and interracial couples are getting pulled over, and police are checking on the well-being of the white females.
Gaaaah….
Of course, we also live in a very Christian, Dutch Reformed area. Coincidence?
To be fair, Kara is definitely not an atheist. And one could argue that she and her entire culture are racists of a sort (although I suppose they have some cause…).
@ #65
Salt: Lordy, you’re dishonest. Here’s the full paragraph:
[quote]
This would not fall under Christian according to almost any other Christian organization/ideology. Since the 4th century, not believing in some variety of the Creed has been punishable by everything up to death in most of the Christian world.
Posted by: frog | May 6, 2008 11:09 AM
What’s dishonest? Virtually all denominations have some disagreement amongst themselves. My simply pointing to an origin –
“The Religious Society of Friends is a Christian organization, in the sense that it is originally based on the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament” –
as a basis for its being deemed Christian is dishonest?
“Salt, you’re an idiot (arrogant ignorance is in my book idiocy)” –
Who’s the idiot here?
Frog, have you any idea just what you said here? –
“Since the 4th century, not believing in some variety of the Creed has been punishable by everything up to death in most of the Christian world.”
Which brings me to this –
What the hell is Churchianity? Some kind of new No-True-Scotsman?
Posted by: frog | May 6, 2008 10:58 AM
Not at all. Churchianity is an quasi-impostor of Matthew 16:18. And I highly doubt you’ll understand that at all.
Yes she’s not an atheist but she’s definately not a monotheist….remember the monotheists are the genocidal machines(and lately the cultists/deranged groupies of a man who inadvertently colloborated in said genocide), while the polytheists are…well irrational in their own way. But so far I’ve seen more evidence on the show for the Lords of Kobol being real than I have for any other imaginary friend.
Can I recommend the use of broken links, replacing Http with HXXP, when linking to such nasty sites as stormfront. Linking from a respected and well visited site such as this will only push it up the google rankings and give it a respectability it most definitely does not deserve. If people want to see what you have linked they only need to replace the X’s with T’s
@gramomster:”A young woman (white) told of how she had been in a car with her boyfriend (black), on their way back from dinner. They were pulled over near the downtown campus of our university. The officer came around to the passenger side, signaled her to roll down her window, and asked, “Are you alright, miss?” This was last fall, 2007.”
My god, I almost choked when I read that. HOW can this still happen in this day and age?
Following up on Etha Williams’ comment:
Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance is an atheist. Creativity (formerly Church of the Creator) and National Alliance are anti-Abrahamic and not traditionally theistic. American Renaissance-affiliated scientific racists are generally atheistic or agnostic. JP Rushton and Kevin MacDonald (an evolutionary psychologist at UC Long Beach), are frequently cited by contemporary racists. Rushton asserts that he is working within the scientific tradition of Darwin and Galton.
Google search within Stormfront for “Darwin” yields 4,830 results; “Christ” gets 30,300. One of the first few Darwin results is a discussion of Expelled (‘Creationism, evolution, and Nazis. Yes, Nazis..’). One racist complains:
“Sometimes when I am debating the ID/creationist crowd on Stormfront, I feel like that Iraqi scientist in the Youtube video debating his countryman about whether the earth is round or flat.”
Boo hoo.
“and it’s dismaying to think our country held onto the bigotry that denied people the right to love one another for so long, but it’s even more distressing to see that the same attitudes still prevail in 2008.”
Why does you hate Jeebus and the Holy Bibble?!?!?11!
Sad to say, people are a pretty crappy species.
Wait, wait, wait… There are actual people that admit to being racist? And join racist associations? WTF???
The mind boggles…
BTW, my brother married a nice african-american lady…some of my mother’s friends made VERY interesting comments about how ‘difficult’ their married life would be.
No ‘problems’ so far and the two of them have been married for five years…
“Am I responsible for the evils that religeon has brought?”
Posted by: Starbuck | May 6, 2008 9:23 AM
Yes, next tard question…
Salt: What the hell is Churchianity? Some kind of new No-True-Scotsman?
Posted by: frog | May 6, 2008 10:58 AM
Not at all. Churchianity is an quasi-impostor of Matthew 16:18. And I highly doubt you’ll understand that at all.
So you are an idiot, and a No-True-Scotmanite. The true Christianity is only your version of Christianity, and the Christianities held by 99% of Christians is “Churchianity”, so you don’t have to take responsibility for the implications of your ideology.
What a sham. This is like Marxists who say that “True Marxism” has never been tried. By your reckoning, you could claim that Islam is Christianity too (it too has it’s foundation in Christianity), or even Rabbinical Judaism (which evolved to a large extent as a response to Christianity). How about Santeria?
Your kung-fu is weak.
“And I tell you Peter, your head is like a rock, and on that rock-headed stupidity I will build my church”. Original version, via personal revelation.
@71
They’re not racists, they’re biologists. . . get it?
Sorry, couldn’t help it.
A white supremacist website that is more “scientifically” oriented than Stormfront is Majority Rights, which features crapola on “ethnic genetic interests,” “human bio-diversity” etc.
Which group more sullies the image of evolutionary science: creationists or scientific racists?
@#16 Starbuck —
Well, I don’t really judge *God* since he almost certainly doesn’t exist, but I judge men’s concept of God by the writings of men (the Bible — filled with stories of a God who would commit genocides, favor a certain race, kill babies, punish people for the sins of their fathers, promote a view of mankind that we are all evil people, ask a man to kill his son, scatter people all over the earth and confuse their language to prevent mutual cooperation & in so doing foster prejudice…shall I go on?) and yes, by the acts they commit in the name of that imaginary God.
The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
Wait…wasn’t it evolution that was supposed to be racist? Funny how the fundies have done a complete about turn on this one, isn’t it?
I suggest compiling a whole bunch of stories like this one and sending them to Ken Ham. I wonder what excuses he’d come up with.
You know, their life wouldn’t be all that difficult if racist morons (like your mother’s friends) wouldn’t keep making such a big deal of it.
My folks are like this. There concern is not about interracial couples, oh no. That doesn’t bother them. But they are worried about how they are going to be treated. And what happens if they have a child who is white, but ends up having a black child? Do they want to deal with that?
Of course, my answer is, so what if they have a black child? It only matters to people who care about race, and again, if they would get over themselves, then what is the problem?
I hate how they couch it in terms of how they are all concerned about the couple.
Etha: Well, I don’t really judge *God* since he almost certainly doesn’t exist, but I judge men’s concept of God by the writings of men
Why not? He’s a real imaginary character, so you can go beyond judging the authors, and judge the character too. I do it all the time when reading a novel – that character I like, this other one is a monster, and I feel ambivalent about the third one.
Job and the Lorax are my heroes.
I’m sure Ken Ham will just dismiss it as “that’s just one person’s view and does not represent all christians” (as if none of the police and prosecutors in Virginia were christian, right? The conspiracy grows…)
But ask Ken Ham, was their major outrage from the churches at the time? Or did they just go their merry way?
How dare that crazy, horrible Rev. Wright insinuate that this is a racist culture.
“And I highly doubt you’ll understand that at all. – Salt”
Frog, you didn’t disappoint me. –
So you are an idiot, and a No-True-Scotmanite. The true Christianity is only your version of Christianity, and the Christianities held by 99% of Christians is “Churchianity”, so you don’t have to take responsibility for the implications of your ideology.
Posted by: frog | May 6, 2008 12:17 PM
You are so clueless.
BTW, this is also why the anti-gay marriage crowd is so insistent that gay marriage amendments get done NOW. They know darn well that in 30 years, no one will give a shirt. Anti-gay sentiment is dropping fast, and today’s youth, who are used to homosexuality and see it as no biggie, will look back at this time and wonder what in the world was the problem.
My usual argument to the anti-gay marriage politicians is, what is the rush? Is gay marriage a problem right now? How much is it even happening? Apparently it is going on in Massachussetts, and so far that commonwealth has not dropped into the ocean. I say, if it gets to be a point where gay marriage seems to be causing a problem in society, then let’s do something about it. But why worry about something that isn’t a problem?
They know darn well it’s now or never.
Salt: You are so clueless.
That’s it?
Translation: “Nanny-nanny booo-booo, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you”.
Oh LORD, I say, protect me from improper argumentative structure, poor word choice, mismatched metaphors, sub-par vocabulary and the religious, who so commonly are semiotically challenged.
I can imagine a future where homosexuality has been accepted, but when the history of people suppressing gays and lesbians is told by the religious, those darn “evilutionists” will be blamed.
This is not too far fetched in my opinion. Anyone who saw the Daily Show the other day was reminded of how Nixon had Billy Graham as a spiritual advisor, and how Graham was rather anti-Semitic. Graham talked to Nixon about how, “The Jews were ruining the country,” and so on.
One now must consider how Ben Stein was a speech writer for a president with a spiritual advisor that was anti-semitic, yet Stein cannot see a connection.
To be fair, Kara is definitely not an atheist. And one could argue that she and her entire culture are racists of a sort (although I suppose they have some cause…).
But no one can accuse her of being a mealy-mouthed dipshit.
Not “hard as a king” or something?
It’s actually simple. If you have gone to school in Austria, you cannot genuinely be so ignorant as to be able to deny the Holocaust without lying. It is thus considered proven that, if you deny the Holocaust, you are lying, that you want to “make National Socialism appear harmless” (this is what’s actually forbidden) so you can seize power in its name more easily, and that you then want to immediately abolish the very freedom of speech you hypocritically invoke as your defense, not to mention repeat the Holocaust.
Making Stalinism appear harmless is not illegal in Austria. That’s because there have never been more than, like, three Stalinists in Austria, though.
What?
LOL!!!
Jesus wasn’t black. He was a midget. Haven’t you ever read in the Bible, “and lo he came?”
but I suspect that if Jesus really existed, he would have looked more Arabian. Then again, Africa is almost right next door to Israel…
As somebody else has pointed out the passage in Josephus is probably a later forgery but the text uses the Latin word “niger” which literally means black but can be interpreted as just meaning dark, in this case, given the Semitic background, most probable. The passage also describes him as being of small stature, hunchbacked and as having bushy eyebrows that meet in the middle! The description is a long way from all of the idealised portraits produced by white racist Christians but what one might realistically expect for a building worker in Palestine around the time of Tiberius.
A white supremacist website that is more “scientifically” oriented than Stormfront is Majority Rights, which features crapola on “ethnic genetic interests,” “human bio-diversity” etc.
So they’ve moved from old-fashioned creationist-style racist language to Intelligent Design-style racist language. Yay. Let’s call them “Whitbiodiversitycists”.
Which group more sullies the image of evolutionary science: creationists or scientific racists?
Is there actually a scientific basis for these conceptions of race? If so, someone’s due for a Nobel Prize!
Jesus wasn’t black. He was a midget. Haven’t you ever read in the Bible, “and lo he came?”
That could explain PYGMIES + DWARFS!!!
According to my etymological dictionary, it’s simply “rich” (in the old sense of “powerful”) + “hard”.
Oh yeah. I’ve got a book, Whom Has God Joined Together?, that’s nothing but going through the Bible and picking out verses to prove that interracial marriage is anathema to god. (And guess what–it was written in 1990)
Then there’s Charles Carroll, who ranted about how much he hated the atheistic theory of evolution because it said that blacks were real people, and he believed that they were apes–literally another species.
I could go on and on with this, but I’d just be preachin’ to the choir. So to speak.
Oh, the similarities are even more than that. Hopefully I’ll get around to writing that book about it that I’ve been researching.
Here’s the Jefferson quote in full just so everyone doesn’t need to click on that rather revolting waste of cyberspace to read it:
“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these [the Negro] people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” –Thomas Jefferson
AgnosticTheocrat @#59: The quote does, if you read it carefully, say that blacks and whites can not both have the same rights and live in the same government. “Nor is it less certain” means, “And it is just as certain.” This is not that surprising; pretty much everyone was a racist back then and it is no stain on Jefferson’s other ideas or accomplishments that he had this major flaw. He may even have been implying that while blacks are just as good as whites and deserve equal rights, racism will always keep the two groups from mixing peacefully on the level of equals. However, if that were the case I would have expected him not to have owned slaves himself.
We’re still working on it today, and so far he hasn’t been proven wrong, though we are a lot closer than ever in the past.
#95, David Marjanovic:
Well, in America, if you’ve gone to school and actually listened, you’ve of course learned that the Holocaust actually happened and that evolution actually happened, too. And yet we have denialists of both. I don’t think it is fair to assume that all of these people are “lying,” as you put it. Maybe they disagree. Maybe what they disagree with is to you and me quite obviously incontrovertible, but maybe they disagree anyway. To me, it seems like a basic human right to believe asinine things, and to share your belief in asinine things with others. Every so often (yes, I know this isn’t the case with holocaust denial) something which almost everyone thinks is asinine (e.g., atheism, wholeheartedly rejected by the vast majority of Americans) turns out to be true.
I guess I don’t understand how anyone could think that the harm of allowing people to argue for a point of view is greater than the harm of placing the government in the position of deciding what is and isn’t true. Thoughts are free, and if people are going to sympathize with National Socialism, they’re going to do it whether you want them to or not; but if you punish them for their thoughts, you not only make them martyrs but you make yourself, if you deem your society a free one, a hypocrite.
I would love for the advocacy of creationism to stop. But that, to me, is a very different thing from saying that I would like to ban it. I do consider it harmful; I do think that the world would be a better place without it; but I cannot imagine wanting to jail people for it. The majority simply doesn’t have the right to tell people that mere thoughts and words are criminal. The idea of using a totalitarian notion like that to fight totalitarianism strikes me as “burning the village in order to save it.”
And as for Nazi sympathizers using freedom of speech “hypocritically”–well, I think that’s an assumption that the government is not entitled to make. Indeed, it strikes me as the sort of thing that a totalitarian or authoritarian government characteristically says when it wants to put down dissent. It sounds very Chinese to me, and unworthy of free people.
Barry
@#87 frog —
True enough, I suppose, but with a lot of the Bible I have a great deal of difficulty with the whole “willing suspension of disbelief” thing. Some of the books on their own work out ok as literature, but when taken together….
Welcome to the party PZ, thanks for picking up the story. Perhaps we can spend some time acquainting ourselves with the Lovings and the court decision in addition to taking the usual shots at religion. There is an effort afoot to celebrate Jun 12 (the Loving Decision was handed down 6/12/67) as Loving Day. This linked site also has a nifty interactive map to show when each state dropped miscegenation laws but I won’t put anymore filter bait in this comment…
Why do you spew forth hate for a God you say doesn’t exist?
And you call me all sorts of vile names.. sheesh
Oh and so you know.. Starbuck is my moniker. I have used it long before ANY of the battle star galitica shows. I used it long before Starbucks coffee came along. If you don’t like my handle, sorry about that.
Remember, you will be judged as harshly as you judge others. Don’t like it? Too bad, take that up with God.
Oh wait, You don’t believe!
Yeah, here’s how the argument might go: those evilutionists were afraid that by not passing on their genetic material, homosexuals would subvert the process of natural selection. *headdesk* Just trying to make up this stupidity makes me feel like a total moron.
Starbuck,
Your brain isn’t a toy. Stop playing with it and put it away.
Actually, we take it up with the people making those accusations. We don’t “hate” Yahweh. We think that the fictional character “God” in your book acts like a horrendous monster. We say the same thing about Lord Voldemoort. And if your god judges us as harshly as we do other, he is not quite all loving then.
At the 40th anniversary of the decision I wrote about it an posted some links — at various points the issue comes alive somewhere, and I get lots of hits, and a few messages from people thanking me for telling the story. It’s a great story, of the loving Lovings, and how they changed America.
A sign of just how far we’ve come: The Fredericksburg, Virginia, newspaper, the Free Lance-Star, in Caroline County, noted Mildred Loving’s death yesterday, with this headline: “Caroline Heroine Dies.”
Isn’t that wonderful?
Here’s the paper’s URL:
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2008/052008/05052008/376825
Starbuck, the original Battlestar Galactica, with Starbuck as one of the main characters, was on TV in 1979. I’m pretty sure you weren’t using it as an internet screen name before then.
Why do you spew forth hate for a God you say doesn’t exist?
It ain’t your non-existent god, and it’s not even hate; it’s people like you, and it’s honesty about what kind of people you are.
And you call me all sorts of vile names.. sheesh
Shrug. you’ve earned ’em.
Oh and so you know.. Starbuck is my moniker. I have used it long before ANY of the battle star galitica shows. I used it long before Starbucks coffee came along. If you don’t like my handle, sorry about that.
None of which would stop Kara Thrace from kicking your ass.
]:-)
Remember, you will be judged as harshly as you judge others.
Funny that your kind don’t seem to bear that in mind for yourselves…
Don’t like it? Too bad, take that up with God. Oh wait, You don’t believe!
Yawn.
Barry: And as for Nazi sympathizers using freedom of speech “hypocritically”–well, I think that’s an assumption that the government is not entitled to make. Indeed, it strikes me as the sort of thing that a totalitarian or authoritarian government characteristically says when it wants to put down dissent. It sounds very Chinese to me, and unworthy of free people.
It’s not the “government” that is making that judgement. It is people, like me. I will not tolerate people arguing that I should be killed or enslaved, and will use every legal authority to stop them. This kind of naive “tolerance” is just insane. Tolerating (as a moral duty) speech aimed at eliminating all freedom isn’t about being a “worthy free people”; you argue in a very vulgar fashion of a moral duty for suicide.
You can argue that it is impractical to stop the speech, or not efficacious. But you do not have the right (the moral right) to argue that I am required, legally and morally, to tolerate speech directed at eliminating me (or others), or slur me as intolerant or a hypocrite for refusing to make an equivalence between reasonable disagreement and incitement to murder.
I find offensive your analogy between creationism and Nazism. Creationism may be wrong, or deluded, but in generally creationism does not require or necessarily imply that their opponents should have their political rights stripped of them, or that they should be put in camps to be gassed. There is a world of difference between someone saying foolishly “the world is six thousand years old” and someone saying “the jews are a parasitic race”.
If you can’t understand that distinction, and the necessary distinction in response, then I think silence on your part is best.
The atrocities of the Nazis are clear – we can argue on the details, but anyone who questions whether they occurred at all is implicitly making argument that a vast world-wide conspiracy is active, and making an argument for a genocidal response. That isn’t just a disagreement, a misunderstanding of some kind. It is an active attempt to create a nightmare society on the blood of other human beings.
“Why do you spew forth hate for a God you say doesn’t exist?”
If you’d actually read any of the preceding comments, you’d understand.
“Remember, you will be judged as harshly as you judge others. Don’t like it? Too bad, take that up with God.”
As usual, we get the old “My god will kick your ass, ha ha” parting shot. And you wonder why we see so many Christians as mental children.
“Why do you spew forth hate for a God you say doesn’t exist?”
Typical creobot/apologist: You’re missing the bigger picture. Atheism criticizes religion first, and gods by corollary. That hate is spewed for a god is merely a side effect of intellectual contempt for the religion in question itself. After all, Starbuck, you have no means of actually proving and demonstrating the wrath of your god on anyone. He/she/it is a feckless, meaningless idea that has no physical control or sway over anyone or thing because the existence of such has yet to be proven, over millenia of human existence. Where the problem comes in is human belief and willingness to be led by unknown, unwitnessable, non-identifiable things such as gods.
“…Remember, you will be judged as harshly as you judge others. Don’t like it? Too bad, take that up with God.”
Cheap words from an internet poster. How original. No, people are judged not by a god, but by what thy do for the betterment of the species. This country – the united States – is a meritocracy, or at least a country struggling to be one. Within that meritocracy is a marketplace of ideas. This marketplace, much like the economic ones, is intended to weed the crap out and keep the stuff that works. But like all human inventions, it’s not perfect, and the crap – religion in this case – persists out of, largely, non-critical thinking and general ignorance. It doesn’t help anybody, yet it exists. So how’s about you stop contributing to the morass, start thinking, and stop worshipping?
Doctrinally, I’m not sure about Quakers, but Unitarian-Universalists are considered to be “non-Christians” because they reject the trinity and Christ as anything but a man.
Rejecting Christ as “the only pipeline,” they’re “not Christians” buy pretty much any ‘serious’ definition.
But just to make the apostasy worse, they further believe that many religions have valid spiritual beliefs from which to draw. And that atheism is okay. :p Which is why I’m a Unitarian, despite being an atheist.
As for not having a clue, Salt, you are one of the more ignorant players in the land of Trolldom. You have no need to point fingers at anyone. Ever.
It’s because you don’t watch enough TV. If you watched enough TV, you’d know that White Women are important.
A woman goes missing. She’s Hispanic. You don’t know this because it’s not on TV. Since it’s not on TV, we know that Hispanic women are not important.
A woman goes missing. She’s Asian, pick your cuisine of choice. You don’t know this because it’s not on TV. Since it’s not on TV, we know Asian women are not important.
A woman goes missing. She’s black. You don’t know this because it’s not on TV. Since it’s not on TV, we know black women are not important.
A woman goes missing. She’s white. You know this because it’s on TV 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If she’s a white teenager, the press will set up studios on the beach she was last seen and follow her plight for months. Eventually movies will be made.
This tells us that white women are important. And must be protected from all those swarthy, non-white men who may kidnap, rape and/or kill her. Because, really, we all know that’s what “they” want to do…
So what are the police supposed to do? White women are important and must be protected at all time. And not have abortions because they’d be making white babies that might grow up into white women.
Moses,
Too subtle for Salt. I didn’t give it to him, but since you brought it up.
apostasy: a total desertion of or departure from one’s religion, principles, party, cause, etc.
Just too funny. As I said, the rock is a rock.
Really? My interpretation of those passes was the endorsement of the perfectly benign hobby of compulsive masturbation to Internet Port. At least as how I’ve been using those passages years…
So, my response is…
DIE HERITIC SCUM!!!!
Salt’s M.O. is to be opaque or cryptic in lieu of presenting – or, at least, elucidating – an actual argument.
The implications of “Churchianity” are clear enough, but it’s not clear where Salt stands on the Christian status of those who follow the teachings of Jesus but do not believe He was divine. It seems that he feels that “following the teachings” is the defining characteristic of a Christian, but Matthew 16 doesn’t appear to support that. Instead, it supports the idea that the unassailable Church is built on the revealed knowledge that Jesus is The Christ and The Son of God. Indeed, one could argue that Churchianity is rooted in this assumption of Christ’s divinity and on the rituals of worship that this assumption demands, rather than in the dedication to following His teachings. I dunno. The connections, as presented, are a little too muddy to be clearly contradictory.
Of course, I could be wrong… I welcome clarification from Mr. Salt.
It’s not just the white Christians. Even the Iranians made him a peroxide blond …
Frog, #112:
So, your people directly make and enforce criminal laws, and the government has nothing to do with it? Unless you live in a small hunter/gatherer band, I don’t believe you. I suspect you’re either joking or using “people” in a very, very figurative sense which equates “people” to “government.” Obviously it is the state, not the people, which makes and enforces laws.
If I had made such an analogy, I suppose your offense might be warranted, depending on the nature of the analogy made. I did not make such an analogy, and accordingly you have nothing at which to take offense. Rather, I noted that both evolution and the Holocaust are the subject of denialism.
Wow. Being told to shut up by someone opposed to general freedom of speech is, I suppose, appropriate enough. It certainly illustrates your point. Wouldn’t it be great if we couldn’t even have this debate because of government censorship?
Look: if it is your view that “the people,” acting through the state, determine what is right and what is wrong, then you should have no problem with the Holocaust. (Indeed, your view of the state as arbiter of right and wrong, acting on behalf of The People to such an extent as to be logically interchangeable therewith, reminds me of nothing so much as the concept of the Folkish State.) The Holocaust was committed by the state with enormous popular support, or at the least, acquiescence. If “the people” make things right by their widespread assent, then that was right; what kind of morality is that? As for myself, I believe that things are right or wrong independent of what the state says, and that the Holocaust was wrong no matter how popular it was. Suppression of the expression of opinion is also wrong, no matter how popular it is.
Employing the tools of totalitarianism, in the form of suppression of free speech, to root out totalitarianism strikes me as a flawed enterprise. To paraphrase from a well-known fictional source, it is like casting out devils with the aid of the devil. Suppression of dissent is what the bad guys do. It should not be what we do.
Barry
Well, my college roommate and his wife would certainly disagree with you. I never figured out what religion they followed, but they claimed to be Christian. Despite that, they never recognized christmas OR easter, or any of the traditional christian holidays, and in fact, paid strict adherence to the rules and practices of the Old Testament (including being kosher, not wearing mixed fibers, and even celebrating the Feast every fall). When I asked why they believed they were christian, they claimed that it was because they believed Jesus was “divine” but to my knowledge, they never based any of their worship on his teachings, and they certainly did not do the “rituals of worship that a belief in his divinity demands.”
Thus, it seems either your assessment of what constitutes a Christian is incorrect, or they were incorrect in calling themselves Christian. Given that there are probably 10 000 different versions of “christianity” in the US alone, all of whom disagree with each other about what it means to be a christian, then the fact that Sect A does not conform to the definition of Sect B doesn’t tell me much.
Thanks Moses for the info on Unitarian-Universalists.
[Unitarians] Rejecting Christ as “the only pipeline,” they’re “not Christians” buy pretty much any ‘serious’ definition.
I agree.
So, are Quakers not Christian simply because they
“- find some disagreement among Friends about whether there was a Virgin Birth, whether various miracles were supernatural occurances or religious embellishments, whether Jesus was The Son of God, or just one of God’s children etc. You will in general find agreement that those differences are not important :-).”
no matter, as Frog implied, that –
” The Religious Society of Friends is a Christian organization, in the sense that it is originally based on the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament” ?
As to the rest, meh!
Just to stir the pot a bit, an overly stringent definition of “Christian” would also exclude followers of Positive Christianity (anti-Pauline, deemphasizes martyrdom, deemphasizes miracles etc.) and hence would exclude much of the Nazi elite.
Maybe a Christian should simply be defined as someone who reveres Christ and does so more than, say, Mohammed or Buddha.
Pablo, I think you need to re-read my comment. I’m not making any claims whatsoever about what I think Christianity is. You have, however, revealed a problem with my statement: I should have said something like, “…on this assumption of Christ’s divinity and on the rituals of worship that this assumption traditionally demands…”
Thanks for clearing that up. ;-)
We keep reading, on this very blog, of cases where teachers in the USA don’t teach evolution for fear of fundy parents or even because they’re cre_ti_nists themselves. This whole phenomenon is absent where I come from.
The vast majority of cdesign proponentsists is simply ignorant. The whole analogy doesn’t work (see comment 112): the closest would be Rushdooney-type theocracy, and that’s still not the same thing.
I entirely agree that creationism shouldn’t be banned. I even think that National Socialism and even Rushdooney worship don’t need to be banned in the USA because they have simply never been popular enough — just like how Stalinism doesn’t need to be banned over here, even though Stalin’s massacres were pretty similar to Hitler’s. In Austria and Germany, National Socialism has once been popular enough to accomplish its goal of abolishing free speech and democracy, and xenophobic hard-right parties have been pretty popular for most of the time since then; and worse yet, we are talking about people who have no qualms about using violence. We must never again underestimate National Socialism — or we shall all be eaten next-to-last, if you understand what I mean. Also ponder the meaning of “all”.
So far it works. Cases where people are accused of “making National Socialism appear harmless” are rare.
No and no, respectively. We vote for parties who then send numbers of deputees proportional to the numbers of votes to parliament. These deputees then make the laws.
“State” here means “parliament”, and “parliament” means people we can hire and fire every 4 years (or more often if they can’t get along with each other). Understood? Fire. “The state” is not some kind of body that’s imposed from the outside. Democracy, man.
It isn’t denialism that’s outlawed. What is outlawed is, I repeat, “making National Socialism appear harmless” (Verharmlosung des Nationalsozialismus).
It is to protect liberal democracy from, lastly, itself.
Hey, capitalism needs to be protected from itself all the time. Aren’t antitrust laws interference by the government into the affairs of the free market? In the absence of antitrust laws, megamergers inevitably happen, trusts inevitably form, and monopolies inevitably emerge, because competition is selected against. Competition has to be constantly protected by an organization that is powerful enough to actually do this — the state. The greatest force for capitalism in the world is the Competition Commissariat of the EU.
Barry: I would love for the advocacy of creationism to stop. But that, to me, is a very different thing from saying that I would like to ban it. I do consider it harmful; I do think that the world would be a better place without it; but I cannot imagine wanting to jail people for it.
Were you not saying that banning Nazi speech is analogical to banning Creationist speech? Or were you just randomly producing patterns on the screen?
So, your people directly make and enforce criminal laws, and the government has nothing to do with it? Unless you live in a small hunter/gatherer band, I don’t believe you. I suspect you’re either joking or using “people” in a very, very figurative sense which equates “people” to “government.” Obviously it is the state, not the people, which makes and enforces laws.
And what is the State composed of? How can the people make laws without the State? This juvenile partitioning of society into the State and the People, as if these abstract concepts were not just heuristics for people acting in different capacities is one of the first signals I had that Libertarianism has the intellectual depth of a college sophomore after his first hit of reefer during a philosophical discussion.
Wow. Being told to shut up by someone opposed to general freedom of speech is, I suppose, appropriate enough. It certainly illustrates your point. Wouldn’t it be great if we couldn’t even have this debate because of government censorship?
Barry, you’re jumping to conclusions. I guess in a simple-minded way, a simpleton could assume that being opposed to others lying about the mass-murder of millions, and implicitly agitating for it’s continuation, could be considered opposition “generally” to freedom of speech. That would require, though, one to 1) erase the distinction between a moral duty to protect that speech and 2) the efficaciousness of doing so, in addition to being incapable of distinguishing between childish absolutism and the nuances of reality.
Really Barry, I wasn’t suggesting that you should be shut up, I was suggesting that you were making a fool of yourself, and it would be in your interest to actually shut up and think a little. I can see where you’re coming from; when I was a kid, I would have agreed with you. But then again, when I was a kid I liked the simplicity of Islam, the axiomatic quality of Rand, and the moral clarity of anarchism.
Look: if it is your view that “the people,” acting through the state, determine what is right and what is wrong, then you should have no problem with the Holocaust.
Nice implication… what can I say to someone who clearly has read some pamphlet somewhere and become enamored? Whose reading comprehension reaches the level of a newspaper?
That the state is not co-terminous with people, but is one of the organs of society with a role to play, is trivial. That it is preferable that violence and the threat of violence be carried out, in general, by a democratic and rational process rather than vendetta should also be trivial.
The fact that you seem to believe that I should disarm as someone politically agitates to have me killed is shameful. To take on this mantle of moral superiority while denying people the right to defend themselves is disgusting. Of course, counter-argument can be an efficacious defense; but so can a little pre-emptive action against murderous thugs.
I should wait until the Nazis are successful in taking control of a government before employing every tool in my arsenal to defend myself? We should have a bloodbath at the end of the day, when the problem could have been snipped in the bud with a few jail sentences?
It is unworthy of a free people to tolerate people threatening their co-citizens with mass murder. They are complicit when they do so.
You see Barry, there are lots of good arguments for not banning Nazi agitation: that it is inefficacious, that it is too dangerous to make these tools available, that it is unnecessary because in the current climate counter-argument is sufficient. But your juvenile position that free speech is an absolute good is worthless – I can’t value my free speech if I’ve been herded into a camp. Your argument that tolerance morally requires tolerance of the worst kind of intolerance is simply an invitation to surrendering that tolerance.
It’s the equivalent of saying that because I, in general, am against the use of violence, it would somehow be hypocritical or counterproductive for me to use violence against those threatening violence. Those of us who live in the real world realize that there is no violence-free utopia; that we should use the most efficacious means to reduce violence. In the same way, maximizing free speech means not being enthralled to the abstraction of free speech, but actually supporting free speech in the real world. Sometimes, that may require some limits in the short term to guarantee free speech in the long term.
But I guess all those messy realities aren’t as much fun as Calvinist absolutism. It just doesn’t give you a high ground of moral righteousness, and it does give you the advantage of never being responsible for the real world effects of your principles.
Who is being punished for thoughts? The German ban on Nazi “verharmlosung” is the equivalent of banning trolls.
What’s more of a nuisance is the German ban on Nazi symbols which interferes, from what I’ve heard, with attempts to display them in historical and anti-Nazi contexts as well. Luckily the attempt to ban them in all of EU didn’t go through.
“Salt’s M.O. is to be opaque or cryptic in lieu of presenting – or, at least, elucidating – an actual argument.
The implications of “Churchianity” are clear enough,”
Thank you.
“but it’s not clear where Salt stands on the Christian status of those who follow the teachings of Jesus but do not believe He was divine.”
That was never a part of the discussion, my own beliefs. Thus any clarity on such would, naturally, not be found.
“It seems that he feels that “following the teachings” is the defining characteristic of a Christian”
I never stated my my beliefs [he feels that].
“but Matthew 16 doesn’t appear to support that.
I agree.
“Instead, it supports the idea that the unassailable Church is built on the revealed knowledge that Jesus is The Christ and The Son of God. Indeed, one could argue that Churchianity is rooted in this assumption of Christ’s divinity and on the rituals of worship that this assumption demands, rather than in the dedication to following His teachings.”
Of course, I could be wrong… I welcome clarification from Mr. Salt.”
Posted by: Kseniya | May 6, 2008 4:57 PM
“Indeed, one could argue that Churchianity is rooted in this assumption of Christ’s divinity”
~agreed, Churchianity does appear to be rooted as such –
“and on the rituals of worship that this assumption demands,”
Which is why I used the term quasi-
“rather than in the dedication to following His teachings.”
Which so many Churches [denominations] ignore, being non-PC, politically expedient, self serving, whatever.
I love movies. One that comes to mind is not even a good one as movies go, but when the preacher was told he should stop preaching and sell shoes in Oh God! Priceless.
#129-
“being non-PC” should read “being PC”
sorry
Oh? Your claims about who is and is not “clueless” have implications.
one great great grandmother was white & her husband was cherokee ..they werent allowed to stay together overnight in the same house..the other great great grand mother was a mulatto whose son was the slave owners child
my current family consists of even more cultures as we have added pakistani muslims, columbian hispanic catholics, and indian hindus to the mix of (so_called) races and religions
i rather like being a rainbow …it tends to make you open minded
Learn From History.
Generally the measure of whether a church is a “true” Christian church is whether they believe in the Nicene creed, with no major additions (so a brand new Messiah would be out of the question, for example):
Call this “churchianity” if you like, but generally when people talk about Christianity they are discussing the organized religion, and this is the creed that the organized religion is supposed to adhere to.
(BTW, anyone who wants a good laugh at the expense of trinitarian doctrine, the Athanasian Creed is hilariously convoluted.)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Eastern Orthodox church’s did not accept the Nicene creed. In fact, I thought that was the origin of the split. The controversial part is
“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son,”
IIRC, the Eastern Orthodox objected because it implied the HS was separate from the Son and was therefore polytheistic.
I’m working from memory here, so I could be wrong, but if you have a definition of Christianity that excludes Eastern Orthodox, then it is not good.
“Churchianity” might be the appropriate description, as long as you say it is the Church of Rome. But the church of Rome is not the end-all-be-all of Christianity.
Also, re: what is the defining characteristic of a Christian (and Christianity vs Churchianity) — OED’s definition #1a is:
Definition #2a:
How one defines “genuine piety” is a bit of a mystery to me here. In any case, both uses of the word Christian are correct, and it strikes me as a bit dishonest to say that people who are using the first definition are “wrong” and are actually referring to the perjorative Churchianity.
So is it God’s law to push forth with Manifest Destiny or to keep the races separate? I’m SO confused. Or is he bipolar?
[Nicene creed] Call this “churchianity” if you like,…
Posted by: Etha Williams | May 6, 2008 7:40 PM
Well, I, for one, would not. Though it does meet with Kseniya’s “Indeed, one could argue that Churchianity is rooted in this assumption of Christ’s divinity”, the creed does not address either of “…on the rituals of worship that this assumption demands” or “rather than in the dedication to following His teachings”.
I guess I don’t know what “churchianity” means, Etha. My impression was that people are using “churchianity” as a subset of christianity. I would agree that both aspects of the definition are acceptable, but it is those adherents to (1) that are denying (2). Those who are christians by (2) are saying that using only (1) is too narrow of a definition (a view you agree with), one that is too defined by the church. Hence calling it the more narrow “churchianity” and not the more broad “christianity.”
“Churchianity” might be the appropriate description, as long as you say it is the Church of Rome. But the church of Rome is not the end-all-be-all of Christianity.
Posted by: Pablo | May 6, 2008 7:50 PM
The RCC is a part of Churchianity. I’m sure I will stir it up even more, cryptically speaking, by postulating the RCC to be the ~parent of Churchianity.
<lightbulb>
I never thought of it this way, but that’s… spot-on. That’s precisely what it is!
Yep.
They accept all of it — except “and the son”, which word (filioque) seems to be an addition by Charlemagne.
There are, however, churches that reject the whole thing. The Armenian Apostolic Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church for example.
BTW, “pejorative” is from Latin peior, which means “worse” — compare pessimus/-a/-um meaning “worst” — and has nothing whatsoever to do with perjury.
“They accept all of it — except “and the son”, which word (filioque) seems to be an addition by Charlemagne.”
So Etha’s comment that the defining feature is “whether a church is a “true” Christian church is whether they believe in the Nicene creed, with no major additions,” does that apply or not?
If you ask the Eastern Orthodox, they obviously consider the absense of “and the son” to be a very important distinction. Is it a major omission? To them it is.
@#142 Pablo —
Apparently since they still follow the original version of the Nicene creed, this still “counts” as following the Nicene creed. (The filioque clause was added by the Third Council of Toledo, to oppose the Arianist heresy.) But you have a very good point about the EOC not considering it a mere “minor” omission. It seems the more you know about theological politics, the more it makes no sense.
Which is why I gave up worrying about it on the whole. I go back to my statement: there are 10 000 sects or so in the US alone, all with different beliefs about what constitutes the correct religion. That Sect A doesn’t think Sect B counts means nothing to me.
@#138 Pablo —
Actually, I don’t agree with that view — I’m saying that these are two alternate definitions. Neither one is too narrow or too broad; they just mean different things. However, both are in modern use as a meaning of “Christian.” I agree that this double meaning gets confusing, but I’m not sure whether Churchianity, which generally carries a very theologically charged negative meaning, is the best choice for an alternate word.
(Then there’s also the issue — what would the real meaning of def 2 be? Someone who follows The One True message of Christ — this would get difficult since there’s been a lot of [rather bloody] dispute on this matter, and I don’t see how it could really get resolved in a dictionary-definition way. So — maybe someone who follows the true message of Christ, as s/he understands it? This would suffice for me, but might make some True Christians angry. Also, do Meaning 2 Christians also have to follow the teachings in the epistles? Or is it just the Gospel teachings of Christ? Honestly, Meaning 2 seems more problematic than Meaning 1 to me.)
The Nicean Creed is hardly universal.
Pablo,
The controversies between the Orthodox churches, the oriental churches and the Catholic church are all rooted in the second and third century battle with the other Christianities – the primitives, the gnostics, the antinomians and so on…
So really, they amount to nothing today; even the hierarchy doesn’t remember what the original controversies were, since the opponents are long gone, their scriptures mostly destroyed, and the context radically altered.
For example, one of the controversies is whether Mary is “theotokos” or “christokos” – the “bearer of God” or the “bearer of christ”. This mattered a great deal, when there were sects who believed that the body of Jesus and his divine nature were separate – that a ghost entered Jesus and made him Godlike, but was separate from the meaty part. This was theologically “dangerous”, because it implied that Jesus’s magical powers weren’t unique – the gnostic Christians believed you could become one with God-Jesus (and therefore didn’t need to be a sheep). People were ostracised and killed over this.
But the gnostics are no longer a threat, so there is no such meaning attached know. Only the end part of the battle is remembered, where in the fifth century the Nestorian controversy erupted over this, by then, dimly recalled battle which had devolved into whether Mary had given birth to the full Godhood, or whether she was “just” the mother of his body, which was nonetheless unified with the magical part – and that probably had more to do with Nestorius not being a big fan of females.
So basically, they all accept the same theology in essence which is defined in the Nicene creed; some of them still keep to rejecting the creed as some dim memory of the past, but the theology is in all essential respects identical to it.
And to Salt: this is why your Churchianity is so obtuse and misguided. The “original” Christian ideology has been gone since the first century; it was never recorded at all – Paul’s theology is unlikely to have anything to do with it, the Gospels were forged in theological battles of the second century, and we don’t even have the slightest dregs to resurrect it. Only by your personal magical revelation can you “know” what non-orthodox Christianity was, and choose between the endless varieties with completely different theologies we know existed in the first and second centuries.
But go on with your mysterious insight. You and the Pope have your infallible personal connections with the unknown.
“Neither one is too narrow or too broad; they just mean different things. However, both are in modern use as a meaning of “Christian.”
I agree. Modern “christianity” encompasses BOTH definitions. That is the broad view.
The narrow view to which I referred is that, for example, only definition 1 applies. I call this “too narrow” not in the sense that definition 1 is wrong, but that it does not account for the full range of christianity.
Therefore, either 1 or 2 by themselves is too narrow of a view of christianity, or maybe, to better describe it, only includes a subset of christianity. To completely account for christianity requires considering both aspects.
Etha: the solution to definition is ostentative. Christianity is what has evolved from the orthodox councils of the fourth century, and hasn’t rejected the heart of the theology. It’s the historical mainline, in the same way that one would define Islam or Judaism.
Not by theology, but by their continuation in the argumentative and military struggle that has been narrative.
I’ve always thought the preponderance of hair-splitting amongst ‘believers’ – esp. in the blogging world – was more about giving them a firm footing for a ‘No True Scotsman’ argument than about anything else.
What it leads to can be hilarious; I’ve spent hours debating with a Romanian Baptist and a Greek Orthodox about religious matters – and they were much more inclined to argue about the minor differences between their interpretations than they were to ‘gang up’ and take on the unbeliever (me).
Speaking of Christians being nosy judgemental busybodies who want to control how other people love, I found a link on Stray Dog Café to the tale of how a publically funded a href=”http://straydogcafe.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/a-christian-persecuted/”>”Christian” organization in Ontario harrassed a Christian into quitting her job.
Not only is there a similarity in the religious rhetoric, but, in fact, there is a direct link in the legal arguments used to outlaw interracial marriage and those used to prevent gay marriage.
In 2006, the New Jersey Supreme Court heard arguments in a case brought by Lambda Legal seeking marriage for same-sex couples. The state’s lawyer was asked to respond to this quote by Sandra Day O’Connor from Lawrence v. Texas: “… we have never held that moral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest, is a sufficient rationale under the Equal Protection Clause to justify a law that discriminates among groups of persons.”
Patrick DeAlmeida: “But she notes that it was moral disapproval with nothing more. Here, the state is asserting something more. It’s asserting an interest in maintaining marriage as it has been.”
Justice Virginia Long: “Why is that an interest? The interest in maintaining marriage ‘as it has been’?”
DeAlmeida: “Because it is such a fundamental institution in society that it is a reasonable thing that the legislature not change it radically. There are some things that make up our society that are so fundamental that a change in them is something that belongs to the elected representatives of the people.”
Justice Barry T. Albin: “Didn’t Virginia argue that in the Loving case? When they tried to support banning interracial marriage — in fact criminalizing them?”
DeAlmeida: “They did.”
> Unitarianism has evolved out of Christianity, but not
> being Trinitarians, most Christians denominations would
> not recognize them as Christians. And Unitarians have
> returned the favor by evolving away from Christian dogma in
> general. Trinitarianism has been a hallmark feature of
> Christianity since the fourth century.
Well, Arianism, in spite of being antitrinitarian, was generally considered Christian, if heretic. It was also tolerated to a large degree, even by the Byzantines who were usually very intolerant when it came to heresy.
Something similar holds true about the Antitrinitarians of 16th and 17th century eastern Europe: They were invariably considered Christians in general and Calvinists in peculiar. In fact, they were destroyed by the Catholic establishment of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth because they were supposed to collaborate with Protestant Sweden.
My son saw this news last night and was a mite startled to learn that he, too, would have been a felon if he’d married forty years earlier (though that would have been tricky fifteen years before he was born.)
Well, of course he’d have been a felon. He’d have been under age…
OTOH a friend of mine who was stationed in Berlin in the 80s was teasing one of the “blacker than thou” guys in the company for going out with a white girl and was told: “She’s not white, she’s German.”
As the English used to say in the old days – “wogs begin at Calais”.
This country – the united States – is a meritocracy, or at least a country struggling to be one. – BlueIndependent
ROTFL!
This is a question I always ask the anti-gay marriage crowd. Doesn’t it bother you, just a little, that you are using the same arguments that were used against interracial marriage? I realize they aren’t using them against IR marriage, but the arguments are the same (“sanctity of the tradition of marriage” etc). I have to admit, that would make me very uncomfortable to know that I was arguing on the same bases as the racists.
Wasn’t that just because angering the Goths is generally bad for your health?
To Wowbagger 152:
It is possible that you think the differences between Orthodox and Baptists “small” because you in fact are willing to dismiss both beliefs in the first place. From the Orthodox perspective heresy (the small difference you speak of) is exactly what leads to apostasy (the big differences you have with Christianity in general). So, in fact, your ability to see Orthodoxy as silly at all comes from the original heresy of so many years ago. This applies to all faith systems, including the faith system of rationalists. There is lots of rational thinking going on in Expelled, it just starts from a “heretical” premise. For the untrained, the differences between a bogus scientist preaching creationism is minimal when compared to a “real” scientist arguing for evolution. It seems to me that deciphering the difference is exactly why this website exists in the first place: To distinguish the dumb rationalists, or anti-rationalists, from the true believers. Nope, human beings are human beings, and I think that means they start first with a faith statement, something that is impossible to “prove” but entirely reasonable (material reality from immaterial beginnings, or perhaps more clearly, something from something yet unknown). And then from this reasonable (or unreasonable) assertion they begin the process of making sense of the world. But the premise is never questioned, and where it is, there you have the beginning of something heretical, or off-track. I know people will make fun of the use of the word heretical on this site, but that will be sad. I’ve seen so much “science’ skewered on this site because it is not the right science. I’d call it heresy, but perhaps you’d just call it stupid. What’s the difference? In the end, you and I are both placing our faith… we are just placing it in different “deities” if you will. Your good is not mine, but your good is to be fought for, defended, changed if necessary but never forgotten or discarded. No follower of the scientific method will ever become a follower of the ascetic method without being trashed by those left behind. If they were heralded there would be no enemy to fight, no bad to denounce, no right to your righteousness. I think this is obvious, and leaves the fun part to us for debate… What is truth?
RE: Barry Trask
I was wondering if you could e-mail me at mjspear@gmail.com (a pity we have no profiles) to get some more thoughts from you on your conversation with “frog”.
To David M.:
I don’t believe the Ethiopian Church rejects the Nicene Creed. Do mean to say that they do not use it in their liturgy? Or that they did not enter into the debate over the filoque?
And now, in Michigan, you can’t even get domestic partner health insurance if you work for the state.
To John J (comment 160)
I don’t believe I used the word ‘silly’ at all. In fact, I can look through my post and see that it isn’t there. So much for ‘truth’.
Please don’t put words in my mouth.
Do you argue that that two Christians of different sects would not (or, at least, should not) have more in common than either of them would with an atheist? I don’t believe in any god; they believe in different permutations (for want of a better word) of the same god.
My amusement came from the fact that saw fit to focus on their differences and not their similarities.
>> It was also tolerated to a large degree, even by the Byzantines
>> who were usually very intolerant when it came to heresy.
> Wasn’t that just because angering the Goths is generally bad
> for your health?
This is partially true. Some courtiers of Goth or Alan origin were incredible rich and powerful. Theoderich Strabo’s yearly income was higher than the tribute send to the Sassanian empire, in other words, this single man’s earnings were larger than the sum needed to bribe a superpower. Still, pagan Neoplatonism was a rich man’s religion, too, and not without connections to warrior peoples like the Franks and Allemanni in Europe or the Beja/Blemmye in Africa, but it was most definitely not tolerated – just remember what happened to Hyapathia.
I don’t believe the Ethiopian Church rejects the Nicene Creed. – john j
I think john j is right here. The Coptic Church only split from the Catholic+Orthodox at the Council of Chalcedon in C.E. 451, and the Ethiopian Church is linked to the Coptic. They are Monophysites – a truly dreadful heresy, which holds that the Second Person of the Trinity has only one nature – i.e., his divine and human bits are completely fused. They are, of course, consigned to eternal damnation for advancing a view of such appalling wickedness.