Not that kind! And we were surrounded by chaperones! And there were lots of people there! I’m going to be in such trouble when the Trophy Wife™ finds out what I was up to this weekend.
Bradley Byrne is apparently the front runner in the Republican race for nomination in the Alabama gubernatorial campaign. His opponents have put up this ad against him.
What horrible things has Byrne done, the mere statement of which is sufficient to horrify Alabamans? “Byrne supported teaching evolution….said the Bible was only partially true”. It’s so open and so much taken for granted that stating truths are violations of conservative principles…it’s just crazy.
I apologize. You might not want to read any of this post if you simply cannot bear the raging stupidity that characterizes Fox News. Fair warning: the clip below features both Bill O’Reilly and Sarah Palin.
I suspect that a lot of you, if you got this far, turned that clip off scant moments into it. The inanity and ignorance is too strong. But here are just a few tidbits. In his opening statement, that fathead O’Reilly says:
The constitution clearly states that the government cannot impose religion on citizens, but setting aside a day to encourage expression of voluntary spirituality is in no way an imposition.
No, here’s what the first amendment actually says.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The US government does not get to establish or favor a particular religion; it is officially excluded from the religion game. The National Day of Prayer is not simply a day of “voluntary spirituality”, but is an open endorsement of sectarian religious belief by the government, in violation of the Constitution. The NDP was made law by religious advocates like Billy Graham and was passed by legislators who specifically invoked the Christian god; it is currently managed by a gang of right-wing religious zealots who send out suggested proclamation texts to the president and state governors that uses Bible quotes…and those texts are frequently used verbatim.
But wait! Can Sarah Palin possibly be even dumber than O’Reilly? You betcha.
…our constitution of course acknowledging that our unalienable rights come from god not man…
Oy.
Here is the first sentence of that thoroughly god-free document, the Constitution of the United States of America.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Yes — the emphasis is in the original.
The babbling goes on from there, with O’Reilly even claiming that the Constitution is based on the Ten Commandments, which is also news to me: I’ve missed the parts that set aside holy days, demand worship of a single god, or outlaws coveting; it doesn’t even make murder and theft illegal! The Constitution is all about laying out the mechanisms of a civil government, the division of powers, specifying what powers each branch has, etc.; the bill of rights lays out specific rights and privileges for citizens. Read it yourself. There’s nothing Biblical in there, absolutely nothing derived from the old or new testaments, and likewise, there is nothing in the Bible that even approximates it in intent or substance.
Jesus, these people are morons.
If you want to cleanse your brain a little bit, here’s another clip from Fox & Friends this past weekend, where the Fox idjit is just as dumb, but in this case, his guest is Dan Barker…who takes him apart.
This is a poster from an Egyptian ad to encourage women to cover themselves to prevent rape.
I don’t know who should feel more offended, the women who are compared to a piece of candy or the men who are compared to flies. I do know who should feel more threatened, though: the women who are seeing men promoted as being unable to resist temptation.
I’m still wrestling with Sam Harris’s and Richard Carrier’s ideas that there can be a scientific foundation for morality. I guess I am concerned with the claim that we can science our way to a moral society; I am more comfortable with the idea that we can develop an objective criterion for judging an act as not moral, or not just, or not contributing to the wellbeing of individuals or cultures. Can I, as a godless humanist, say that this is wrong?
An Islamist rebel administration in Somalia has had a 13-year-old girl stoned to death for adultery after the child’s father reported that she was raped by three men.
Yes, I’m sure I can. It is morally reprehensible, it is not fair or just, it does great harm not just to the victim but to the people who perpetrate such hateful acts, and to the rapists who are granted freedom to destroy more lives. The culture that would tolerate and encourage such behavior is not one I want to be a member of, and not even one that I want to share the planet with.
It is very hard to think about it purely rationally, though, when all you can feel is grief for a lost life and so many minds destroyed by hatred.
Poland has blasphemy laws, too — and they’re applying them to throw a pop star in prison. Dorota Rabczewska (careful there, she has also posed for Playboy) has said something absolutely unforgivably awful:
In a television interview last year, Doda explained that she found it far easier to believe in dinosaurs than the Bible; “it is hard to believe in something written by people who drank too much wine and smoked herbal cigarettes.”
Polish Catholics weren’t too pleased. Under Poland’s draconian blasphemy law, simply offending someone’s religious sensibilities can earn you hefty fines and even imprisonment.
Wait, that’s it? One sentence that suggests that the authors of the Bible had been doped out of their minds, and zoom, off to prison for two years? Touchy little cowards, aren’t they…
This is a good comment, too:
How can Europeans cry foul when Muslims are offended by a cartoon, when they themselves press charges and demand imprisonment over something as simple as a pop star making negative statements about their religion?
Show this video to your mom. Tell her you’re thinking of her. It’s the nice thing to do.
Best wait until after the Sunday brunch you’re treating her to, though.
I’m in Orange County today, and I heard an odd comment that there was a dearth of godless music. I beg to differ: most music is godless, and I would point to rock as a genre that is almost entirely secular. You know, it doesn’t have to be overt and announce that god doesn’t exist to be compatible with freethought.
Anyway, among the vendors at this conference was a band, Galt Aureus — I bought one of their “Arrest the Pope” t-shirts and they were nice enough to give me one of their CDs, which I’ve loaded up unto my iPod Touch for the flight home. And as long as I’ve been unforgivably neglecting the endless thread, I might as well use one of their videos to reset it.
(Current totals: 10,185 entries with 988,253 comments)
