Jennifer Fulwiler: vacant-eyed, mindless cluelessness personified

I’m getting a clearer picture of Jennifer Fulwiler. She’s very much a Catholic, she thinks she’s an expert on atheists, and she likes things in fives. First it was five misconceptions atheists have about Catholics, and now she’s written five Catholic teachings that make sense to atheists. As if she’d know. She claims to have been an atheist once, but her list of stuff that makes sense indicates that she was an awfully Catholic atheist.

  1. Purgatory. Why? “it made sense to me because it explained how heaven can be a place of perfect love, and God can still be merciful to people who had some work to do in that department when they died.” Does she even realize that including speculation about the nature of God and heaven, especially speculation that ignores the monstrous tyranny described in the Bible, means it automatically makes no sense at all to an atheist?

  2. The Communion of Saints. Why? “I didn’t struggle with this doctrine at all—it struck me as an articulation of a spiritual truth known to the human heart from time immemorial.” The communion of saints is the idea that all Christians have a mystical bond with each other, both alive and dead. Magic ESP restricted to people who believe in the right god (the damned don’t get it) is not exactly a truth. What atheist would hear that and think that was perfectly reasonable?

  3. Veneration of Mary Why? when I heard that Catholics place a huge emphasis on the Mother of God, my reaction was basically to shrug and say, “Yeah. Of course.” She even acknowledges that atheists with a Protestant upbringing might find the Mary worship weird, but then blunders on to simply say it’s obvious that we ought to worship the human being who gave birth to all-powerful cosmic ruler of the universe. Errm, we don’t believe in gods, period; the fanciful story that a Palestinian virgin squirted him out of her vagina two thousand years ago in a stable doesn’t strike us as somehow intuitive or even possible.

  4. Salvation for Non-Catholics and Non-Christians Why? “It struck me as fair and consistent” that you wouldn’t get damned if you never heard of Jesus. This is the idea that if you’re a good person, but you’ve never heard of Christianity, you won’t go to hell. Of course, if you have heard of the gospel because some caterwauling missionary or proselytizer bellows at you, and you reject it because the whole shebang makes no sense at all, you will go to hell. This does not strike me as fair, or even sensible.

  5. Apostolic Authority Why? “this one God-guided Church has final authority on matters of doctrine”. She complains that all those other churches had people struggling to interpret and understand the Bible, and all coming up with different explanations. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, tells you to sit down, shut up, don’t question, here’s the one correct answer…therefore, this should be more appealing to an atheist?

Can you imagine what would happen if some well-meaning, kindly, thoughtful Catholic read Jennifer Fulwiler’s post about what would represent common ground with atheists, and then came to me with charitable intent to discuss our shared ideals? The poor thing…it’d be like they were walking into a woodchipper, thinking they were going to get a cup of tea and a cookie.

Game of Drones

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have dragged myself through George R. R. Martin’s latest, A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in his Game of Thrones series.

I’m done. No more. I’m not reading any of his books any more.

It’s terrible. Martin has taken the concept of the pot-boiler to an extreme — it’s a novel where nothing happens other than continual seething, roiling turmoil. He whipsaws the reader through a dozen different, complex story lines where characters struggle to survive in a world wrecked by civil war — one other problem is that I’d hit a chapter about some minor character from the previous four books, and struggled to remember who the heck this person is, and why I’m supposed to care — and again, nothing is resolved. Well, not quite: major characters are brutally killed, if they’re male, and graphically and degradingly humiliated into irrelevance if they’re female. I guess that’s a resolution, all right — perhaps the last book will be a lovingly detailed description of a graveyard, draped with naked women mourning?

And all the death and destruction accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t further the plot, it doesn’t change any situations.

There is still a mysterious, supernatural menace lurking beyond the great wall to the North; but don’t worry about them, they do absolutely nothing in the entire book. That’s the problem with the undead: inertia. They just kind of lie there.

The expatriate princess with the dragons was supposed to be a great threat, promising invasion. She decides to hole up in one city and dither with palace intrigues for the whole book, while everything falls apart around her. She takes a lot of baths, though, and I felt like her primary role in Martin’s mind is to provide nude scenes for the HBO serialization. The dragons? Pffft. Random SFX carnage.

The dwarf ping-pongs about from place to place, commenting cynically. We’re supposed to care about what imaginary continent he’s on in this chapter, or what city or boat or troop of rapscallions he finds himself in now. I didn’t.

There’s a war going on, you know, and one of the kings in this multi-sided conflict is marching his army off to attack a castle. In a snowstorm. Which leads to the army being mired down and starving. For the entire last half of the book. Those chapters would have benefited greatly if they’d just been left blank and white (blizzard, get it?)

In his afterword, Martin complains about how his last book “was a bitch. This one was three bitches and a bastard.” I can sympathize. Writing over a thousand pages of dull, dragging, incestuously self-referential, soap-opera style narrative in which nothing happens must have been a torment. I understand he’s committed to writing at least two more of these overblown pop fantasy novels, but I don’t think he’s at all committed to bringing anything to a conclusion. George R. R. Martin has successfully penned himself into a lucrative writerly hell of his own creation. I have a recommendation that would spare him some pain: stop now. Roll around happily in your money, and enjoy a prosperous retirement. It’s not as if anyone expects anything to ever be resolved in your fantasy world, so just ending it now is the same as ending it at book #7. Or book #1, for that matter. I’ve reached an end that is as satisfying as anything I expect from this story, which is not satisfying at all.

The Space Shuttle gets a reasonable eulogy at last

It’s so good to see someone take off the rose-colored glasses and tell it like it is: the space shuttle was a flop.

The most important thing to realize about the space shuttle program is that it is objectively a failure. The shuttle was billed as a reusable craft that could frequently, safely, and cheaply bring people and payloads to low Earth orbit. NASA originally said the shuttles could handle 65 launches per year; the most launches it actually did in a year was nine; over the life of the program, it averaged five per year. NASA predicted each shuttle launch would cost $50 million; they actually averaged $450 million. NASA administrators said the risk of catastrophic failure was around one in 100,000; NASA engineers put the number closer to one in a hundred; a more recent report from NASA said the risk on early flights was one in nine. The failure rate was two out of 135 in the tests that matter most.

I first had my doubts after Challenger blew up; it wasn’t the failure of the mission that bothered me — I understood that it was risky — but NASA’s responses in the hearings afterwards. I watched those; it was where Richard Feynman really caught the public eye.

According to reports after the Challenger disaster, the ship exploded because of a faulty joint that included an O-ring hardened by especially cold conditions before launch. More importantly, this was far from an isolated problem, as illustrated by a report by Richard Feynman. Feynman slammed not only the O-ring error but the entire process of building and testing the shuttle, plus the management style and decision-making of NASA, for good measure. When he wrote, “Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality,” and, “They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space,” he meant they were at the time not living in reality, which is generally the place engineers ought to live. NASA’s recent report on shuttle safety found that the chance of making it through first 25 flights (#25 being Challenger’s last flight) was only 6%, and the chance of 88 safe flights between the Challenger and Columbia disasters was just 7%. If the study is accurate, then Challenger and Columbia weren’t freak accidents—the flights before them were freak successes.

I got the impression from those hearings that NASA had become an engineering bureaucracy, dedicated to dogmatic, almost ritualistic redundancy and caution, where following procedure, no matter how flawed, was always the answer. Feynman was fabulous cut through all the nonsense and just asked what worked and what didn’t.

Goodbye, old lemon. Let’s hope the next new model actually comes up to spec.

We need a petition to urge a school to tolerate menstruating girls?

What has the world come to? Valley Park Middle School in Toronto has made a very special provision to make Muslim students happy: they allow them to use the cafeteria for private prayer (to which I have no objection), and then obligingly segregate the boys from the girls, and because it is so very important, also take the young girls who are menstruating and ostracize them in the back of the room, where they are not allowed to participate. OK, not making them join in a prayer is nice, but the implicit public shaming for their physiological state? Outrageous.

There’s a petition. Let’s add more names to it.

Invasion of the Viking women!

The cartoon version of my Scandinavian ancestors has swarms of fiercely bearded men charging off of their longships into monasteries, where they lopped the heads off priests and plundered the gold and silver from the altars. While I admit that I find that imagery quite romantic and appealing, the truth was more complicated: they were also settlers and traders. Also, the beards may have been less common than we thought—an examination of Viking graves in East England, graves that were assumed to have belonged to men because they contained swords and shields, has revealed a surprise. When they examined bones directly to determine sex, almost half of them were female.

Women may have accompanied male Vikings in those early invasions of England, in much greater numbers than scholars earlier supposed, McLeod concludes. Rather than the ravaging rovers of legend, the Vikings arrived as marriage-minded colonists. “Although the results presented here cannot be used to determine the number of female settlers, they do suggest that the ratio of females to males may have been somewhere between a third to roughly equal,” the study concludes.

One major caveat: old decayed skeletons that are often fragmentary or broken can be hard to sex. Skulls are subtle and sex differences are variable; pelves are pretty reliable in modern skeletons, but thousand year old bones? All bets are off. What you really want is DNA analysis, which is more expensive and which this study did not do.

But now I’m curious about something. Burying women with swords may have just been a mark of respect or wealth, and not at all indicative of their use in life, but I know some graves have revealed evidence of violent death in battle; were any of those women? I’d be surprised if more than a small minority of Viking women were actually involved in warfare, but there is a mythical and historical tradition of the Germanic and Celtic tribes having women fighting, so it would be interesting to see some verification of that.

Also, I’m married to a purebred Scandinavian woman, so I want to know if there is a possibility of some deep-seated berserkergang genes in her makeup, so I’ll know not to piss her off. Wouldn’t want to forget to take the garbage out, and have some howling Valkyrie chasing me around the house with a sword, you know.

(via Making Light)

A glimpse into the deranged mind of a mass murderer

You can now find a ghastly manifesto, purportedly by Anders Behring Breivik, on the web. The guy was delusional and insane: it’s an incoherent 1500 pages long, and it reads like an obsessively fussed-over set of rules for a nerdy fantasy role-playing game…except, of course, that this lunatic thought it was real and charged off to murder people.

He claims to be a Justiciar Knight, part of a new organization called PCCTS.

Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici – PCCTS (the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon), the Knights Templar was re-founded in London in 2002 by representatives from eight European countries, for the purpose of serving the interests of the free indigenous peoples of Europe and to fight against the ongoing European Jihad (referred to as the “third Jihad”). The Knights Templar was re-founded as a pan-European nationalist military order and a military/criminal tribunal with two primary objectives. The order is to serve as an armed Indigenous Rights Organisation and as a Crusader Movement (anti-Jihad movement).

He also claims to have met with about a dozen anonymous guys to set up this organization — that’s about it, at best a handful of kooks, and who knows how many of them were products of his egotistical imagination. Amusingly enough, after mentioning these stalwart, unnamed few, he goes on in further obsessive detail to describe all the different ranks in his order (more than there are members!) and to list with illustrations the various medals that can be awarded, including campaign ribbons for places all around the world.

I looked to see what he had to say about atheists, and it’s quite a bit. His fantasy order is most definitely Christian, but he allows cultural Christians to be members: you don’t have to believe in Jesus, but you have to respect the traditions and dogma and hierarchy of the Christian church. Jews are OK, but not those awful horrible liberal multiculturalists Jews. He is careful to say that he hates Adolf Hitler, but not for the reasons most of us would give: it’s no big deal that he killed six million Jews, but he betrayed the European cause with his doomed strategies and irrational priorities that led to the downfall of the German empire.

You want a window into the sick mind of this evil fellow? Here are his musings on atheism and his plan for his martyrdom in some grand plan. Bonus mission? This guy thought he was a brave Christian knight playing a video game. Only in this game, the ‘hero’ murders unarmed teenagers with a rifle.

There are no atheists in foxholes

I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie. I’ve always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment. In the past, I remember I used to think;

“Religion is a crutch for weak people. What is the point in believing in a higher power if you have confidence in yourself!? Pathetic.”

Perhaps this is true for many cases. Religion is a crutch for many weak people and many embrace religion for self serving reasons as a source for drawing mental strength (to feed their weak emotional state f example during illness, death, poverty etc.). Since I am not a hypocrite, I’ll say directly that this is my agenda as well. However, I have not yet felt the need to ask God for strength, yet… But I’m pretty sure I will pray to God as I’m rushing through my city, guns blazing, with 100 armed system protectors pursuing me with the intention to stop and/or kill. I know there is a 80%+ chance I am going to die during the operation as I have no intention to surrender to them until I have completed all three primary objectives AND the bonus mission. When I initiate (providing I haven’t been apprehended before then), there is a 70% chance that I will complete the first objective, 40% for the second , 20% for the third and less than 5% chance that I will be able to complete the bonus mission. It is likely that I will pray to God for strength at one point during that operation, as I think most people in that situation would.

I can’t possibly imagine how my state of mind will be during the time of the operation, though. It will be during a steroid cycle and on top of that; during an ephedrine rush, which will increase my aggressiveness, physical performance and mental focus with at least 50-60% but possibly up to 100%. In addition, I will put my iPod on max volume as a tool to suppress fear if needed. I might just put Lux Aeterna by Clint Mansell on repeat as it is an incredibly powerful song. The combination of these factors (when added on top of intense training, simulation, superior armour and weaponry) basically turns you into an extremely focused and deadly force, a one-man-army. At the moment, I do not fear death, but I am very concerned about being afraid on the day of the mission. I’m afraid that the potential fear I might experience during the mission will paralyze me or will result in me “crapping my pants” so to speak. Theoretically, this will not happen, as I have grown to be extremely mentally disciplined and I have undergone numerous hours of training and simulations. Nevertheless, it is impossible to properly simulate a martyrdom operation so I am still somewhat concerned for my mental state during that time.

If praying will act as an additional mental boost/soothing it is the pragmatical thing to do. I guess I will find out… If there is a God I will be allowed to enter heaven as all other martyrs for the Church in the past.

I am pursuing religion for this very reason and everyone else should as well, providing it will give you a mental boost. There is no shame in praying minutes before your death. I highly recommend that you, prior to the operation, visit a Church and perform the Eucharist (Holy Communion/The Lord’s Supper ). As we know, this ritual represents the final meal that Jesus Christ shared with his disciples before his arrest and eventual crucifixion. You should also solve any issues you might have with God and ask for forgiveness for past sins. Finally, ask him to prepare for the arrival of a martyr for the Church. A hardened atheist may think this is silly, but believe me when I say; you will be extremely glad you did as soon as you realise you may actually die after the initiation of your operation.

Sure, many deny God now. But when they’re looking death in the face, when they’re sick or in an accident or staring down the barrel of a gun, they’ll change their mind. They’ll beg for God then. There are no atheists in foxholes.

Breivik also has a section where he discusses well-known atheists and their failures. I’ll just quote the piece about Dawkins, to illustrate how pathetic his scholarship is.

Clinton Richard Dawkins 1941-

Twice divorced, Richard spends his days popularizing the idea that everything, absolutely everything (including his marriage failures) can be explained through purely materialistic means. Raised in the Church of England, he decided that the theory of evolution better explained the universe than his religious understanding. So, in 1976, Mr. Dawkins wrote a book called, The Selfish Gene, to show that we are only selfish creatures at best, and the only reason why we survive so well is because we are actually good at being selfish. Our selfishness is part of our genetic make-up, and it drives almost everything we do.

Richard has since written many more books promoting his interpretation of the mechanics of life, but he has a very clear agenda – to blame God and even the concept of God for all of man’s ills. He seeks to prove that mankind would be so much better off without any moral anchor, and without any moral judge except ourselves.

There’s the Midgley error: Breivik has obviously never actually read the book. He also makes the common Christian error of thinking atheism is all about hating his god. So in addition to being violently insane, this guy is pretentiously stupid.

Oh, and one more thing I stumbled across (I have not read this 1500 page mess, obviously! I jumped through it and every page I leapt to contained outrageous crackpottery). He identifies three main enemies of Western civilization: Islam, Marxism, and feminism. But don’t you worry about feminism! He has a plan to cure it!

1. Limit the distribution of birth-control pills (contraceptive pills): Discourage the use of and prevent liberal distribution of contraceptive pills or equivalent prevention methods. The goal should be to make it considerably more difficult to obtain. This alone should increase the fertility rate by 0,1 points but would degrade women’s rights.

2. Reform sex education: Reform the current sex education in our school institutions. This may involve limiting it or at least delaying sex education to a later age and discourage casual sex. Sex should only be encouraged within the boundaries of marriage. This alone should increase the fertility rate by 0,1 points.

3. Making abortion illegal: A re-introduction of the ban on abortion should result in an increased fertility rate of approximately 0,1-0,2 points but would strip women of basic rights.

4. Women and education: Discourage women in general to strive for full time careers. This will involve certain sexist and discriminating policies but should increase the fertility rate by up to 0,1-0,2 points.

Women should not be encouraged by society/media to take anything above a bachelor’s degree but should not be prevented from taking a master or PhD. Males on the other hand should obviously continue to be encouraged to take higher education – bachelor, master and PhD.

It’s all about fertility, ladies, and if only we keep you ignorant and trapped in the home, you’ll start pooping out babies for us. Isn’t that sweet?

He does briefly describe the dozen people who supposedly met to create the PCCTS. Let’s hope European police are trying to track them down — these guys are dangerous monsters who do not belong on the streets.

Your mission

Jen McCreight is deep into her blogathon day. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go over there and provoke, tittilate, inspire, annoy, or enrage her so she’ll be able to keep churning out posts.

No, this blog will not be self-destructing at all. Relax.