Enough. David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” killer who wandered the streets of New York in the 1970s, killing people in their cars, has a lot of new friends now: born again Christians. And he has turned into a shill for Jesus.
I think I’m feeling ill.
Molly Norris, the cartoonist who launched “Draw Mohammed Day” (and who later withdrew herself from the event, citing her fear of persecution) has just been put on a hit list, calling for Muslims to murder her.
The man calling for her death is this Yemeni cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, a pleasant looking fellow who also cheerfully encouraged the Fort Hood massacre. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but behind that smiling face is the mind of a hateful monster.
He’s from the US. He claims to have served as an imam in California, Colorado, and Virginia. And now he’s holed up in Yemen, advocating death for cartoons.
I can’t tell what’s going on here. Did Islam turn him into a psychopath? Or do psychopaths just find a happy home in Islam? Either way, Allah is an abomination that poisons people’s minds. It might reassure me of the good intentions and harmlessness of faith if I saw Muslims rioting in cities around the world, protesting the infamy that people like Awlaki bring down on Islam…but I won’t hold my breath waiting for it.
I just noticed — there’s a poll at that link.
Yes. She was making a statement protected under the First Ammendment. That’s her job. 41%
No. She knew Islam forbids drawing the likeness of Mohammed. This is insulting, not fun. 51%
Not sure. 7%
Disillusion me some more, people. A majority thinks the problem here is with a cartoonist drawing a teacup?
At the AAI meeting in Copenhagen, the group formulated a Declaration on Religion in Public Life. It was a nice statement, a bit vague, the product of too little time and preparation, but still a useful expression of godless sentiment. To my amusement, Ken Ham read it and his head exploded. It’s the Atheist Agenda for World Conquest! If ever you want to see the Christian persecution complex on full boil, just poke Ken Ham.
For example, here’s the first statement in the Copenhagen declaration.
We recognize the unlimited right to freedom of conscience, religion and belief, and that freedom to practice one’s religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights of others.
That’s a statement of tolerance. There will be no persecution of believers — everyone has the right to their own thoughts. You can criticize it for being too generous, perhaps, and failing to define limits on the practice of religion in anything but the most general terms, but it reflects the temperament of the group: the atheist police are not going to come pounding on the doors of the synagogue, church, or mosque and tell them to stop that; there will be no godless inquisition.
Not in the mind of Ken Ham, though. He takes that paragraph and rewrites it to say what he thinks it means. It says much more about the mind of Ham than anything at all about atheism.
We recognize the unlimited right (even though we have no objective basis for “rights” in our system) to freedom of conscience, religion, and belief—except for Christians—and that freedom to practice one’s religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights of others (this is the golden rule: “do unto others . . . ” for which we have no logical basis in our way of thinking)—except for Christians, as we reject Christianity totally and must try to eliminate it.
Wow. That’s some paranoia at work. Atheist support freedom of religion, and poor Ham’s rebuttal is to magically insert “except for Christians!” everywhere. That, and he constantly harps on this strange claim that we have no objective reason to be good to our fellow human beings, since we don’t have Jesus telling us to do it with his prod of damnation.
The whole article is like that! He just takes each paragraph of the declaration, sticks in a couple of “except for Christians”, and pretends it is a plan to oppress everyone who believes in Jesus. Here’s another example:
We assert that private conduct, which respects the rights of others should not be the subject of legal sanction or government concern.
It’s another reassuring generality: the government shouldn’t try to regulate beliefs. I can assure you that what the writers were mainly concerned about is attempts by governments to require adherence to a particular faith to be considered a good citizen, as well as patterns of persecution of minority religious groups. Look what Ken Ham does to it, though:
We assert that private conduct—except for Christians—which respects the rights of others—even though we have no basis for determining what “respect” means, nor any logical basis for why people (who are chance conglomerations of chemicals) ought to have “rights”—should not be the subject of legal sanction or government concern—unless it involves Christians, as we have determined they should not be allowed freedom for their religion because they believe in absolutes and have a system of absolute morality.
The man is simply insane. He’s seeing godless boogeymen where there aren’t any, and inventing complete lies to justify paranoia about atheists coming to take their bibles away.
He misses the facts of the declaration. It’s saying that people like Ham will be allowed freedom of religion despite their odious absolutism. Ham wants to impose his tyranny of absolute morality on others; he’s apparently unable to comprehend that others are more tolerant than he is.
The Australian Vaccination Network is an awful little organization that exists to spread fear and disinformation about vaccines, under the pretense of caring about children. They’re getting an official comeuppance, though: the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission has put together a report condemning AVN. They’re announcing that AVN’s claims are inaccurate and misleading, and further, that AVN harasses people. There’s a terrible story at that link of a couple whose child died miserably of whooping cough…and Meryl Dorey, head of AVN, responded by demanding medical records and insisting that the child couldn’t have died of a disease preventable by vaccination.
AVN is a couple of truly rotten people with an office. It’s a shame that the only punishment the HCCC report is doling out to them is a demand that they put a disclaimer on their web site.
An excellent report on ABC:
Oh, crap. This was the first time I’d heard Meryl Dorey — she’s an American! Australia, I have to forgive you for Ken Ham now. You gave us a moron who makes kids stupid; we gave you a moron who kills children. We got the better end of the exchange, sad to say.
Jean Stevens was a lonely old lady with an unpleasant obsession. She dug up her dead twin sister and husband and kept the corpses in her house, dressing them up and offering them tea and talking to them. That’s a little disturbing, but mostly harmless — except that you can’t help but think that she’d be a lot happier with living company.
But here’s the annoying part. They just had to interview a psychiatrist about it (that’s actually a good idea), but then they got a singularly cluelless one.
Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a psychiatry professor at UCLA who researches how the elderly view death and dying, said people who aren’t particularly spiritual or religious often have a difficult time with death because they fear that death is truly the end.
For them, “death doesn’t exist,” she said. “They deny death.”
Say what? That makes no sense. Everyone has a difficult time with death, no matter what they think of religion. And good grief, atheists don’t deny death. This is a woman who seems to have never spoken to one.
And what makes it even more annoying, is that this opinion is completely irrelevant. From the rest of the story, Jean Stevens is not an atheist. She talks about a creator god and worries about what happens after death.
Jeremy Messersmith gives the post con wrap-up of Convergence, the recent sf convention in Minneapolis. These things are wonderfully fun, you should go sometime!
There is a picture of me in the article, but I think he just threw it in to reassure the readers that not all the attendees were freaky weird geeks. Yes, I AM THE NORMAL ONE.
Let that sink in for a while.
But the part where he gets in a sloppy threesome with the hydrogen twins is too racy!
We have such a reputation for destroying polls that this survey may not survive contact with us, but give it a shot anyway. It’s asking what people know about other people’s religious beliefs.
1) Which of the following best classifies your beliefs?
Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hundu, Jainist, Buddhist, Scientologist, Polytheist, Deist, Atheist, Other2) How many atheists do you know?
None, 1-5, 6-10, 11-20, More than 203) Please indicate which of the following concepts you think atheists believe:
Choices for each are: Believe, Don’t believe, Irrelevant, I don’t know
– God
– Demons
– Spiritualism
– Voodoo
– Ghosts
– Afterlife
– Heaven/Hell
– Reincarnation
– Destiny
– Science4) Do atheists believe there is no god? (Yes/No)
5) Do you think atheists are spiritual? (Yes/No)
6) Do you think atheists value morality? (Yes/No)
It repeats with similar questions about Muslims and Christians. Try it…although I think atheists are about to be heavily overrepresented in the data set.
Harvey Pekar would have fit right into the undendingly discursive thread, and now it’ll never happen.
Just think what he would have said about PepsiCo.
(Current totals: 10,597 entries with 1,053,074 comments.)
So don’t call her Dr McKeith. She hasn’t earned it. Also, it irks her something fierce when you question her title.
If you’re an American, you have something you can take real pride in: you’ve probably never heard of Gillian McKeith. I hadn’t. Apparently, she’s a prominent woo-peddler in the UK, with her face and various encomiums plastered on magic chlorophyll pills and dong-distenders and ingredients for superfoods that will make your hair grow and your liver do backflips. She also writes popular books that make outrageously silly claims about medicine and science. She also claims to have a Ph.D., a bit of fraud that she was told to stop making because it is a lie — she seems to have bought some pieces of paper from quacky diploma mills.
If you contact the Australasian College of Health Sciences (Portland, US) where McKeith has a “pending diploma in herbal medicine”, they say they can’t tell you anything about their students. When you contact Clayton College of Natural Health to ask where you can read her PhD, they say you can’t. What kind of organisations are these? If I said I had a PhD from Cambridge, US or UK (I have neither), it would only take you a day to find it.
She’s one of the citizens of the evil empire we bravely and patriotically broke free of 221 years ago (good thing, too — I hear their queen is a baby-eating reptoid). We don’t have to worry too much about her here in the ex-colonies. Note, though, where she got her fake degrees: here in the USA. That contributes to a recent twist.
Rachel Moody made a casual comment about McKeith not having a Ph.D. on Twitter, which really annoyed the quack. She fired back, and what’s weird is she is now arguing that questioning her degree is a sign of anti-Americanism. Say what? I didn’t know all the foreigners were also expected to be patriotic pro-Americans! This will make Glenn Beck so happy.
So you believe if you tell a lie enough times it becomes fact. It doesn’t honey! Your anti-American bigotry is too glaring. gx
6:43 PM Jul 8th via web in reply to rachelemoody
Miss Anti-American: How sad a life to enjoy reading lies about another by an ass who makes money from pharmaceutical giants
6:22 PM Jul 8th via web in reply to rachelemoody
Sad thing Rachel that your excitement comes from negativity. Think about it. U can shift yourself when you decide
5:57 PM Jul 8th via web in reply to rachelemoody
Is it that you don’t like my Doctorate (PhD) because it’s from America and you’re discriminatory? USA knows how to educate too
5:56 PM Jul 8th via web in reply to rachelemoody
I’m a little creeped out. It’s annoying enough when our pundits wrap themselves in the American flag and announce their loyalty, but really…a citizen of the UK groveling over a colonial affiliation? Don’t they take people like that out and have them keelhauled or put in stocks or flogged around the fleet anymore?
I would agree with McKeith that the US does have very good universities where you can get a good doctorate-level education. McKeith did not attend any of them. Also, for every Stanford and Harvard we have our share of diploma mills and fake, unaccredited pseudo-universities. Case in point: Kent Hovind, creationist jailbird, has a “Ph.D.” from Patriot “University”, a ranch-style house and fundamentalist church in Colorado. If McKeith would like to add to her woo credentials, she could also pick up a degree in astrology from Kepler College.
We are a nation rich in crackpots. Just saying your degree was bought in America is not a guarantee of quality.
