Friday Cephalopod: Gaze into the glowing eyes of your doom
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Religion leads to moral bankruptcy, and can be used to justify anything. What else can you say when crazy theologians argue for murder?
Rabbis Dov Lior and Yacob Yousef had endorsed a highly controversial book, the King’s Torah – written by two lesser-known settler rabbis. It justifies killing non-Jews, including those not involved in violence, under certain circumstances.
The fifth chapter, entitled “Murder of non-Jews in a time of war” has been widely quoted in the Israeli media. The summary states that “you can kill those who are not supporting or encouraging murder in order to save the lives of Jews”.
At one point it suggests that babies can justifiably be killed if it is clear they will grow up to pose a threat.
Oh, wait. This must be more of that sophisticated theology, because I don’t get it.
(via Butterflies & Wheels)
There has been a major explosion at the offices of the prime minister of Norway — it’s very early in the investigation, but news sources are talking about it being caused by a bomb.
I know some good people in Norway, and I’ll be visiting Oslo next month for the World Humanist Congress. It’s shocking that such a civilized, peaceful place would be afflicted with this kind of horror…although, actually, no place deserves bombs going off.
The Campus Crusade for Christ is changing their name. They’ve decided that they aren’t just about “campuses”, which is great; maybe they can quit poisoning our universities then. They’ve also, after a mere 60 years, realized that “crusade” has negative connotations to a lot of people, so they’re dropping that, too. Their new name?
“Cru”.
Cru? Just cru. Cruel crude crucifiers cruisin’ for crumpet crumbs. I don’t know, I guess they’re just trying to be hip and happenin’, or something, when they’re really just a fusty old antiquity dedicated to dogma.
They’re also rather defensive about the fact that they’ve dropped Christ from their name, but they explain it quite well.
We were not trying to eliminate the word Christ from our name. We were looking for a name that would most effectively serve our mission and help us take the gospel to the world. Our mission has not changed. Cru enables us to have discussions about Christ with people who might initially be turned off by a more overtly Christian name. We believe that our interaction and our communication with the world will be what ultimately honors and glorifies Christ.
That’s so charmingly craven of them! They want to be sneaky when proselytizing, and they recognize that Christ is a major PR detriment to them. Now if only we could get the rest of Christianity to jettison Jesus.
It’s a terrible situation. Most of us can practice moderation, posting lightly or not at all, or at worst, pacing ourselves to avoid burnout. But for some students, it’s a nightmare of weekend excess, where the afflicted egg each other on to greater and greater doses until they collapse in exhaustion, red-eyed and addle-brained, so saturated in a blogoholic stupor that they can’t see that they’re destroying themselves.
Help Jen McCreight. We may need to stage an intervention here.
It’s like PZ-bait. I can’t help myself.
“Little girl, would you like some candy?” Somebody didn’t think things through when they decided that this was a good strategy for proselytizing.
An Edmonton mother is outraged after members of a local church approached her daughter on a playground – offering a Bible verse, candy and a promise that if she memorized the passage they would give her more treats.
Kathleen Crowe says her nine-year-old daughter Angeline was playing in MacEwan park last week when she was approached by a couple from the Victory Christian Center who gave her candy and a Bible verse. Angeline was also promised more candy if she memorized the verse.
And if she didn’t memorize the verse, she could burn in hell!
Go give them something to talk about.
Hell yeah!
73.65 %
No! What a farce.
18.00 %
Just cuz I’m afraid not to.
8.35 %
This video may not be to everyone’s taste — it’s pretty awful. This is an octopus dish served in Hakodate, in which the poor raw cephalopod is presumably dead, but when soy sauce is poured over it, it’s triggered to writhe its tentacles.
I do not approve. Either it’s cephalopod torture if it’s still alive, or soy sauce is the secret ingredient for zombie reanimation*. And then…no one eats zombies. That’s just disgusting.
*I am considering adding a new suggestion to my funeral instructions, though.
Now that the Cloyne report is available, the perfidy of the Catholic church is directly measurable. Michael Nugent has tallied up a list of all the documented, unambiguous cases of Irish Catholic officials lying — just blatant, undeniable, flat out lying to investigators. I’m pretty sure that’s against one of their commandments.
If you want to see a Catholic nuisance closer to home, look to Philadelphia. They have a new archbishop, and he’s apparently because he’s overtly political.
“I think that with Chaput you will see a much more politically active archbishop than we saw with Cardinal Rigali,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, former editor of the Jesuit magazine America and author of numerous books on the Catholic hierarchy.
Reese described Chaput as an “in-your-face” leader who is “going to be a real pain in the neck for the Democratic Party.”
…
But he has been even more forceful in articulating what it means to live as a Catholic. He has regularly rebuked the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.
A month after President Obama’s inauguration, Chaput decried what he called a “spirit of adulation bordering on servility” toward Obama by “some . . . Democratic-friendly Catholic writers, scholars, editors and activists. He said, “There’s no way to reinvent his record on abortion and related issues with rosy marketing about unity, hope, and change.”
Oh, boy. Let’s see the Catholic Church find common cause with the teabaggers. Roger Ebert has a nice summary of the ways the GOP is the party of the past; I’m happy to see the church hopping on that same train to oblivion.
