They’re flaunting the blasphemy laws again, with another exhibit of blasphemous art at the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art (IMOCA) in Lad Lane, off Baggott Street, Dublin 2. Check out the video of some lovely weird religious obscenity.
People send me stuff via email, and I browse through it all in the early morning, before I go offline and get to work, and that means I often wake up to some of the most disgusting, revolting, horrible messages: death threats, angry letters, and all kinds of interesting insults. But sometimes the worst comes from people who are on my side, like this message that really ruined my breakfast. It’s from a Catholic anti-choice site, full of prim certainties about gods and babies and your reproductive organs, and it has this…this…letter to a young girl, written by Alice von Hildebrand.
Be prepared to hurtle back and forth from hilarity to revulsion.
Let us take off our “secular” eyeglasses, and then we shall be able to see that women, far from being “discriminated” against, are in many ways privileged. And this is the “secret” I wish to share with you. The body of every little girl born into this world is mysteriously sealed by what is properly called the “veil of virginity”. That is to say, a “secret” is entrusted to her body, and a secret is always “veiled”. According to Christian teaching, this veil closes the entrance to a mysterious garden which belongs to God in a special way, and for this reason cannot be entered into except with His express permission, the permission that God grants spouses in the Sacrament of Matrimony. Any little girl aware of this “mystery” will feel that her body is to be modestly clothed, so that its secret will be hidden from lewd looks.
Little girls, of course, grow up. How beautiful when a bride can say to her husband on their wedding night, “I have kept this garden virginal for you, and now, with God’s permission I am giving you its key, knowing that you will enter into it with reverence”.
Moreover, when a wife conceives a few hours after her husband has embraced her, God creates the child’s soul in her body, (as you certainly know, neither husband nor wife can produce the human soul; God alone can create it.) In other words, there is a personal “contact” between God and the woman which, once again, gives to the female body a note of sacredness. Don’t forget that He whom the whole universe cannot contain, was “hidden” in the womb of the Holy Virgin for nine months. Once you realize this, you will be awe-filled for the double mystery that God has confided to you: to conceive a human being made to God’s image and likeness, and to give birth to it in pain and anguish. Do not forget that it was also in pain and anguish that Christ re-opened for us the gates of paradise – which had been shut by sin. To women has been granted the awesome privilege of nobly suffering so that a new human being, made to God’s image and likeness, might come into the world. Meditate upon this for a moment, and you will feel a deep reverence for your body. It belongs to God, and is not a “play thing” that you can dispose of as you please.
Wow. In a few short paragraphs, she’s managed to promote the cult of virginity, insist on magical ensoulment at the instant of conception, belittle the struggle for equality of women, glorify pain, and imply that anyone who doesn’t follow Catholic dogma is throwing away their body…and she does it with a kind of Victorian smugness that alone is rather off-putting.
I think I’ll go take a shower now.
I’m a fan of the Texas Freedom Network — they are fighting the good fight in the heart of one of the craziest states in the country — but they just made a big mistake. They are celebrating their 15th anniversary by bringing in a big-name speaker…Arianna Huffington. Jebus. One of the worst purveyors of pseudo-science, quackery, and New Age clown-noise on the internet. It reminds me a bit of Bill Maher winning an award from AAI…except that in this case, Huffington hasn’t made any contribution to the promotion of science.
Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t endorse that loon.
TFN does good work, though: if you were planning to go, wait until the event is over, and then mail them a $25 donation.
I’m still astounded, though. What were they thinking?
Here is why we need Wikileaks — because when our soldiers carry out Collateral Murder, we should know about it. Good journalism should be exposing this stuff for us.
This is a video shot from an American helicopter gunship in Iraq. It shows real human beings being shot to death. I wish I could unwatch seeing it now, so be advised before you click on that play button…it is horrific.
A couple of Iraqi journalists working for Reuters are slaughtered in the above clip, gunned down from a distance by American troops who claim their cameras are weapons, that they’re walking around with AK-47s and RPGs…which I simply don’t see anywhere in the clip. I see a small group of civilians casually walking down a city street.
Perhaps the killers were merely mistaken, as happens in war. Perhaps they had better views of weaponry than can be seen in this video. But that doesn’t explain what happened next, when a van pulls up to help a wounded man and they open fire again, fully aware of what was going on below them, and fire several bursts into the people and into the van.
Maybe they could see weapons more clearly than I can. But then how did they fail to notice two small faces peering out of the passenger side window of the van? They shot journalists and children, all the while laughing and congratulating themselves on the ‘nice’ pile of bodies they had produced. And when they see soldiers on the ground rushing injured children to aid, they say, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”
I am ashamed. We are the storm troopers, the murderous invaders, the butchers of children, the laughing barbarians. We aren’t in Iraq to help those people, our troops are there to oppress them…when we aren’t gunning them down outright.
Oh, and go ahead, turn on your TV news. The top stories on CNN are the iPad, Jessica Alba planning to adopt a baby, and Tiger Woods. Doesn’t that fill you with confidence?
(via John Cole)
I fear I’m about to stomp a bit hard on another poll — this one has my name on it, and is for Minnesota Blogger of the Year. This is kind of a nice friendly poll, so I feel a bit bad about demolishing it, but I have to stand on principle. Crush it, gang, crush it bad.
It might be nice if you looked at the list of nominees, of course, and the fellow in the lead, Robert Erickson, was very amusing in his confrontation with teabaggers…but it’s an online poll. I cannot resist. It must be pharyngulated.
It wasn’t God, a least. It was Deepak Chopra.
Had a powerful meditation just now – caused an earthquake in Southern California.
Was meditation on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake. Sorry about that
Some people were upset at my remarks re earthquake. Sorry about that. I was actually meditating when it happenned and thougt” Whoaaa!”
What a buffoon.
I think I’ll go eat a burrito and see if I can cause a mudslide in California a little later. Followed by a typhoon. Maybe if I add extra hot sauce I can also trigger some fires.
I’d known for a long time that the term “scientist” had been coined in the early 19th century, but I just ran across a first-hand account of the event by the fellow who came up with it, William Whewell. The context is this: many in the science establishment of the day had been chafing at the premier British institution, the Royal Society, which had grown stodgy and was infested with politicians, bishops, and other such hangers-on, and they formed a new institution, the British Association for the Advancement of Science. As part of the process of establishing their identity, they struggled with coming up with an appropriate noun to describe their membership.
Formerly the ‘learned’ embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as antiquarian speculators. But these days are past… This difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the BAAS at Cambridge last summer. There was no general term by which these gentlemen* could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits.
‘Philosophers’ was felt to be too wide and lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr Coleridge, both in his capacity as a philologer and metaphysician. ‘Savans’ was rather assuming and besides too French; but some ingenious gentleman [Whewell!] proposed that, by analogy with ‘artist’, they might form ‘scientist’ — and added that there could be no scruple to this term since we already have such words as ‘economist’ and ‘atheist’—but this was not generally palatable.
That is so familiar: the deference to a classical scholar, poet, and ‘metaphysician’ (although, actually, Coleridge was no dummy and did provide thoughtful contributions), and the use of French as an insult. I would warm to the analogy with ‘atheist’, but apparently, that comparison almost sank the word. To be tangled with atheism…oh, my. Adam Sedgwick, the geologist and devout Anglican, was in a fury about “scientist”.
Better die of this want [of a term] than bestialize our tongue by such a barbarism!
It was a natural extension of the word, though, and was rapidly adopted — it was in the OED by 1840.
Sedgwick, by the way, was an interesting fellow despite being encumbered with an excess of faith. He was an important contributor to modern geology who named the Devonian and Cambrian. He was also an adamant creationist who vehemently opposed that whole new-fangled theory of evolution when Darwin proposed it…but Darwin was a former student, and they remained friends throughout their dispute. He also made this well known statement about conflicts between science and the Bible, which I rather like for reasons other than Sedgwick’s.
No opinion can be heretical, but that which is not true… Conflicting falsehoods we can comprehend; but truths can never war against each other. I affirm, therefore, that we have nothing to fear from the results of our enquiries, provided they be followed in the laborious but secure road of honest induction. In this way we may rest assured that we shall never arrive at conclusions opposed to any truth, either physical or moral, from whatever source that truth may be derived.
It’s a statement that is simultaneously scientific and anti-scientific. He’s saying that we should follow the evidence whereever it may lead, confident that we will arrive at the honest truth, which is good; however, he’s saying it to reassure himself and the audience that science will never be in conflict with the Bible. He was wrong. His problem was in failing to administer the same standards of truth and robust reason to his holy book that he was applying to science.
He wrote a review of Robert Chambers’ book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, that was a pre-Darwin evolutionary account of the history of life. Sedgwick did not like it, no sir, not one bit.
…If the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts!
I would remind him that “No opinion can be heretical, but that which is not true”, and that if a consequence of the examination of the natural world was a revelation that “religion is a lie,” then so be it. Atheist, scientist, there isn’t necessarily a heck of a lot of difference.
*It was initially set up as a boys’ club. Women were not allowed to be members until 1853; however, about a quarter of the attendees of the early BA meetings were women. They were only allowed to attend special sessions that had been reviewed to determine if they were suitable for women, however.
If I weren’t planning to donate my body to science or be cremated or get dumped into the ocean for the hagfish to eat me, I’d want a funeral at the Ahlgrim Family Funeral Home in Palatine, Illinois. They have a miniature golf course in the basement! You can also play pinball and shuffleboard!
Absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, the article mentions that they don’t serve beer, which means that they are missing one of the essential sacraments of a good funeral.
First, they had their church leaders focus their Easter sermons on how yucky those atheists are. Then one fanatical group decided to show how wonderful Christianity is by staging a crucifixion in public, complete with blood and nails and moaning dying hippie.
I find this hilarious.
Hamlyn Heights mother Louise Bridges slammed the performance, calling it an “absolutely disgusting stunt”.
She said she was “fuming” at the public display and said it would “scare children away from religion”.
But it’s in the Bible, Mrs Bridges!
I’m a bit chagrined, though, that we didn’t do anything as fun and informative up here in the American midwest. The vegan daughter fixed us a nice dinner in which no blood was shed at all, and then we just had a quiet evening with no spectacles.
