Jennifer Fulwiler responds

How fun! Fulwiler noticed that her claim to have five Catholic teachings that make sense to atheists actually didn’t, you know, make sense to any atheists, me included, so she’s now trying hard to rationalize it. She has a new post talking about reasoning with atheists that is even more confused and hilarious than the last. Here’s her first excuse:

I evidently did not make it clear enough that all of my examples were meant only to illustrate the intellectual consistency within Catholicism, and therefore assumed that you would be in a discussion with an atheist who would stipulate belief in God for the sake of argument.

So first, find an atheist who’s willing to pretend that she believes in a god. Then, while she’s pretending with all of her might, maybe her brain will be addled enough to accept the load of swill that follows. Brilliant! I have another suggestion: 1) find an atheist who is tripping balls on ‘shrooms, 2) whack them hard enough on the head to give them a concussion, and 3) proselytize! Jesus wins!

Of course, even if she does find an atheist willing to sit down with her and grant her one premise, that a god exists, the rest of her arguments still don’t work. “OK, you’ve granted that a god exists. Now, shouldn’t you be really impressed with the sinless, perfect, virginal woman who gave birth to him, just like a Catholic?” Uh, no. That’s a whole boatload of weird Catholic dogma you just dumped on me, in addition to the general premise.

Another part of her rationale is to displace the blame. You see, it’s not her fault that she can’t get through to me, it’s mine.

Myers and atheists like him are trapped in a prison of reason.

The title of her post is “reasoning with atheists,” but you see, the whole problem is that when you’re reasoning with atheists, they expect you to use reason. The bastards!

Finally, there’s some of the usual fol-de-rol about Love. God is like Love, you see, and just as you can’t reason someone into understanding love, you can’t reason them into believing in a god. She doesn’t seem to appreciate the difference, though: I can find evidence of love from some people, and evidence of a lack of love from other people. I don’t blindly charge up and announce my love for someone without signs of reciprocation, and any love I might feel for someone will wither in the absence of such signs. If she’s actually raising her kids teaching them that love is just like their faith in a Catholic god, I feel very sorry for them: they’re going to grow up to be disappointed fantasists and stalkerish weirdos.

The next post from Fulwiler is going to have to be something like “Winning hearts for Jesus with ‘shrooms and a ball-peen hammer”, ’cause that’s the only way she’s going to persuade an atheist with the drivel she’s churning out.

Why wasn’t this in the Ten Commandments?

This looks like a really good rule.

Do not allow others to molest children, expose all molesters to authorities, they are the worst garbage to infest any society.

Maybe it was on that set of tablets Moses smashed — it’s certainly a more useful law than the ones about how to cook goats or what kind of clothes to wear or the injunction to do nothing useful on Sunday. But no, that’s from the hobo ethical code.

Isn’t it nice that hobos have a better moral foundation than priests?

Texas cynicism

Anybody know if this story is true or just an amusing joke? I like it either way.

In a small Texas town, (Mt. Vernon ) Drummond’s bar began construction on a new building to increase their business.. The local Baptist church started a campaign to block the bar from opening with petitions and prayers. Work progressed right up till the week before opening when lightning struck the bar and it burned to the ground.

The church folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, until the bar owner sued the church on the grounds that the church was ultimately responsible for the demise of his building, either through direct or indirect actions or means.

The church vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection to the building’s demise in its reply to the court.

As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork. At the hearing he commented, “I don’t know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”

Anti-clerical sentiment in Ireland

Excellent news: the tide is rising against the Vatican in Ireland. More people are speaking out, the newspapers are publishing pictures of the pope labeled “persona non grata”, there’s a simmering resentment everywhere. It’s leading to comments like this one, which sees a secular Ireland coexisting with religious sentiment, but no longer with the long arm of the Vatican meddling with the state.

Such sweeping changes could occur in what was once Catholic Ireland: the state could become as secularist as France, with all allusion to the Almighty officially excised. Yet even in France, the holy days continue, with Pentecost and Ascension and All Saints, and Lourdes attracting millions.

The Church in Ireland will never be what it was, but the faith, at grassroots level, will not disappear. The people will climb the holy mountain of St Patrick, and come in their thousands to the shrine of Our Lady at Knock, and beggar themselves to provide children with first communion regalia; and when there is a tragedy in a small town, the church and parish priest will still be at the centre of the community, offering age-old comforts, not of the Vatican, but of the faith.

I could live with that kind of arrangement. I detest faith and think it’s a poison of the mind, but I’m not going to march into people’s homes and tell them what they must believe. Atheist resentment is over the fact that in countries like mine, religion motivates bad policy and excessive meddling in people’s private lives.

The Vatican is not happy with Ireland, which is also cool. The pope’s ambassador to Ireland has been withdrawn — which probably causes about as much regret and despair to the Republic as when the English left.

Godless high school students have people to turn to

Various godless/critical thinking organizations are doing a good thing: they are expanding their sphere of interest into the high schools, and there are now new resources available to students. If you’re interested in learning more about what you can do to be a secular activist in your high school, you can contact JT Eberhard at the Secular Student Alliance, and now a new person, Jessica Ahlquist at the Center for Inquiry.

Which clearly sets up a necessary future event: we must have a steel cage match between JT and Jessica. JT keeps bragging that he’s more eviler than me, so I’m rooting for the tiny little woman to kick his butt.

You can watch Jessica, along with other high school students Harrison Hopkins, Damon Fowler, and Zack Kopplin speak. The future is looking good!

The kind of people who elect Michele Bachmann

Scum of the earth. Parts of Michele Bachmann’s district contain the most smug, pious, conservative rat-buggering jerks on the planet (like Marcus Bachmann and his anti-gay “clinic”, for instance). And the symptoms are beginning to show: the Anoka-Hennepin school district, part of Bachmann’s domain, home of the Elmer Gantry-wannabe Bradley Dean, is also the epicenter of an epidemic of teen suicides, 9 in the last two years. These are kids who were bullied for being gay, or suspected of being gay, or not fitting in to the their inbred little community (and who would want to?), and the school district has been acquiescing to pressure from religious groups to maintain a policy of intolerance and even demonization of gays.

As civil rights groups have pushed the Minnesota school district to do more to increase tolerance of LGBT students, conservative religious groups fought to keep them away from public schools. After Samantha’s suicide and several others, students in Anoka-Hennepin schools participated in the Day of Silence. The event, organized by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, encourages kids to remain silent for the day in recognition of the effect of anti-gay bullying and harassment. In response, religious activists took up the “Day of Truth,” an event championed by the “ex-gay ministry” Exodus International that’s usually held the day before the Day of Silence. Students who participated were encouraged to engage their classmates in discussions of homosexuality from a Christian perspective.

Fifteen-year-old Justin Aaberg appears to have been one of the targets of this initiative. One day last year Justin came home and told his mom, Tammy, that another student had told him he would to go to hell because he was gay. “That did something to his brain,” she says. He hanged himself in his bedroom last summer. Only after his suicide did Tammy learn that the Parents Action League had reportedly worked with area churches to hand out T-shirts promoting the “Day of Truth” to students at his high school (which is also Bachmann’s alma mater). The students were also instructed to “preach to the gay kids,” Aaberg says. (No one from the Parents Action League responded to a request for comment.)

You would think that Christians, who claim to have the moral high ground in everything, would recognize that driving kids to suicide is not ethical behavior. Unfortunately not; it’s part of their agenda. If they can’t convert them to their sanctimonious faith, it’s just as good to have them dead.

Will the school district change its policies? I doubt it. The churches dictate what is allowed.

Pat Buchanan go home

It’s sad. The terrorism in Norway was by a right wing nationalist extremist of the pale-skinned, Christian variety, and it’s like we broke our home-grown right-wingers’ small, feeble, crumbly hearts with that news. But have no fear! They are dogged and single-minded, and they will find a way to blame the desired targets of retribution one way or another! Latest case: Pat Buchanan. He regrets that the terrorist was a cowardly, murdering punk, but we are supposed to recognize that Breivik may be right.

But, awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent.

That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never known mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists.

Europe faces today an authentic and historic crisis.

With her native-born populations aging, shrinking and dying, Europe’s nations have not discovered how to maintain their prosperity without immigrants. Yet the immigrants who have come — from the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia – have been slow to learn the language and have failed to attain the educational and occupational levels of Europeans. And the welfare states of Europe are breaking under the burden.[…]

As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.

Umm, Pat, you draft-dodging, Confederacy-sympathizing old bigot, you can’t whine about other countries failing to assimilate — you’ve been one of the reactionary old guard crusading against immigrants in this country.

He’s also an ahistorical kook. Every wave of immigrants that came ashore in the United States faced generations of discrimination and struggle to assimilate. “NO IRISH NEED APPLY,” you know.

But that doesn’t matter. The fact that Pat Buchanan would find common cause with a psychopathic coward, a vile creature who dressed in a police uniform and promised young people assistance as he gathered them together before gunning them down, is fact enough to discredit him. When will the media wake up and stop paying the fascist bigot to play pundit on TV?