I guess you have to hate someone

A new Pew survey has some encouraging results about intermarriage in America: people seem to be more willing to accept it. The numbers show that a majority across the board will readily accept a family member of a different race.

i-fc85dd85fd9507a144503ae80133a638-intermarriage.gif

Although I do have to find a few continuing problems there. Who are the biggest bigots in the poll? White people. There doesn’t seem to be anything said about that unsurprising result.

There are also some kinds of marriages that would be unacceptable. Guess who?

The survey finds that most Americans also are ready to accept intermarriage in their family if the new spouse is Hispanic or Asian. But there is one new spouse that most Americans would have trouble accepting into their families: someone who does not believe in God. Seven-in-ten people who are affiliated with a religion say they either would not accept such as marriage (27%) or be bothered before coming to accept it (42%).

I bet most of you would have guessed gay marriage, but that isn’t even mentioned in the survey. We have to go to the Daily Show for a discussion of that, in the context of the New Jersey senate’s recent rejection of a gay marriage bill.

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The woman at the end is particularly oblivious — she’s so proud of how far she has come as a woman and as an African-American, a person who would have been doubly disenfranchised historically, and now, thank God Almighty, she is free at last to engage in a political process to deny someone else their rights. You aren’t truly free until you can stand proudly next to someone you’ve slapped down.

Oh, God, we are afflicted with a leadership of idiots

Here’s what we get in American government: a room full of morons, eyes squeezed shut, bobbing their heads back and forth as they beg an invisible man in the sky to smite health care reform. Witness this and realize that religion is a pathology, an evil mind-rot that makes the stupid even more stupid.

(via the prayercast on RIght Wing Watch, which is full of examples of this kind of lunacy)

Be afraid

Perhaps you thought Texas’ malign influence was confined to corrupting science teaching in their own state. It’s far, far worse than that.

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

Read the rest and tremble. It’s not just evolution, it’s all of science and history that they want to remake in the image of their vicious, petty god — and they’ve got a team of ideologues who will engage in all kinds of dirty tricks to get their way.

American pious irrationality expands worldwide

I tend to think that most religious people are not interested in flying planes into buildings or making themselves a belt out of dynamite, but that doesn’t excuse them: they still make irrational decisions with evil consequences, they are simply a bit more remote and indirect. The same people who would be horrified at the idea of personally lynching someone for blasphemy have no problem with praying that someone else will do the job for them, as we all saw in the reaction to that little cracker incident last year. One of the most revolting examples of this principle at work is the recent attempts to create a legal justification for imprisoning and killing homosexuals in Uganda, a situation which, as it turns out, was fomented by American evangelical homophobes. This is not to excuse Ugandans, who were apparently primed to commit violence against gays already, but it was our preachers who sparked the flame.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

That’s pretty much standard anti-gay rhetoric here in the US; we’re inured to it, and unless you’re a victim of it, it’s fairly easy to ignore it — which is why the evangelical haters are still allowed to babble on the news. These wretched liars for Jesus have their audience that loves to hear their nonsense about gays as predators on young boys, being evil and hating heterosexual marriage, and all that other dishonest crap, including their bizarre touting of ‘cures’, but at least we in the US also have vocal proponents of equality and civil liberties. We just need more of them.

In Uganda, though, that rhetoric and false assumption of authority led to horrid abuses of civil rights, like the anti-homosexuality bill. At least now, though, we can get specific and name names for the people responsible for inciting hatred of gays in Africa.

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

I’m sure they are trying to get away from the guilt…but the thing is, if you read the anti-gay literature here, that’s the direction they want to go in: the criminalization of sexual acts that they find repugnant, the encouragement of loathing of people who don’t love the people they approve. They want homosexuals to be despised, second-class citizens who don’t have all the rights of good Christian heterosexuals. The only reason they are running from it now is that it happened far faster in Uganda than they expected, and they’re suddenly standing their with a smoking gun and blood on their hands, rather than at a safe remove with the apparatus of the state peeling away the rights from people, one by one.

And look who else is involved, President Obama’s friend:

Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. (Mr. Warren recently condemned the anti-homosexuality bill, seeking to correct what he called “lies and errors and false reports” that he played a role in it.)

First you associate them with evil, then you disenfranchise them, and only when they’re sufficiently dehumanized do you get to kill them. America’s Christian evangelists are on step one, and working hard on step two; Uganda’s problem is that they moved on to step three a little prematurely.

Intelligence is not a requirement for getting elected

These religious conservatives are certifiably nuts.

Rep. Henry Brown of South Carolina and 74 Republican co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives actually wants Congress to pass a resolution condemning people for saying “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.”

Seriously? Yeah, seriously. Brown thinks we’re “diminishing the value of Christmas” by not making it mandatory for everyone to praise it. What next? Shall we declare every Christmas season (beginning the day after Halloween, of course) a required event, with all citizens lining up at the local mall every day to stand in ranks, raise their hands in salute to Santa Claus and WalMart, and chant “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas”?

I think I’ll work on diminishing the word’s value by being an out-and-proud atheist who cheerfully (and somewhat ironically) says “Merry Christmas” any time I feel like it. Even if it is over now for another year.

I’m so sorry for you, Indiana

But then, you elected this profoundly stupid man to be your governor, so it’s all your own fault. I was reading an interview with Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana that was just embarrassingly bad.

To me, the core of the Christian faith is humility, which starts with recognizing that you’re as fallen as anyone else. And we’re all constantly trying to get better, but… so I’m sure I come up short on way too many occasions.

Our country was founded -this is just an historic fact; some people today may resist this notion but it is absolutely true- it was founded by people of faith. It was founded on principles of faith. The whole idea of equality of men and women [and] of the races all springs from the notion that we’re all children of a just God. It is very important to at least my notion of what America’s about and should be about and I hope it’s reflected most of the time in the choices that we make personally.

The core of Christianity has never been humility, but arrogance. This is a faith that claims its followers have privileged contact with an immortal, omniscient being, that claims that believers are especially loved by the most powerful intelligence in the universe, and that those who believe most devoutly will be rewarded after death with cushy lives in paradise, while the rest of us burn in torment for eternity. Governor Daniels needs to crack a dictionary.

hu•mil•i•ty
noun
a modest or low view of one’s own importance; humbleness.

There is nothing humble in believing one has an inside line to god. Sure, Christians talk about being “fallen” and “sinners”, but what it’s all about is false modesty: we’re all fallen, but Christians get to be saved, and you don’t.

Our country was founded by people of diverse faiths, many of which modern Christians would not recognize as anything like their beliefs; Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine only get to be kept in the fold post mortem because they’re Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, but anyone who says the things now that they said in life is a heretic and apostate.

Equality was not one of those principles held to with any consistency by the founding fathers. Slavery was condoned. Slavery was justified by the Bible; what kind of “just God” orders his people to slaughter whole nations and enslave their women and children? Equality was an ideal of the Enlightenment (implemented poorly, in fits and starts, and with its own share of blood and pain), not Christianity. The Christian ideal was a hierarchy on earth and heaven; a monarchy topped by a god.

Mellinger: Is there part of you that is bothered by the aggressive atheism of a [Sam] Harris, a [Christopher] Hitchens, a [Richard] Dawkins? And what I mean is… this atheism is a little different than atheism has been in the past because it does seek to convert people.

Daniels: I’m not sure it’s all that new. People who reject the idea of a God -who think that we’re just accidental protoplasm- have always been with us. What bothers me is the implications -which not all such folks have thought through- because really, if we are just accidental, if this life is all there is, if there is no eternal standard of right and wrong, then all that matters is power.

And atheism leads to brutality. All the horrific crimes of the last century were committed by atheists -Stalin and Hitler and Mao and so forth- because it flows very naturally from an idea that there is no judgment and there is nothing other than the brief time we spend on this Earth.

Everyone’s certainly entitled in our country to equal treatment regardless of their opinion. But yes, I think that folks who believe they’ve come to that opinion ought to think very carefully, first of all, about how different it is from the American tradition; how it leads to a very different set of outcomes in the real world.

There is no eternal standard of right and wrong. It has changed from generation to generation; what was considered right and wrong in the Biblical Middle East would horrify us with its injustice if implemented in 21st century America, and reciprocally, a Judean priest from the 1st century BC would be calling for the wrath of Jehovah to fall upon those licentious, evil people like Pat Robertson or James Dobson, who lead millions into a life antithetical to ancient Jewish custom.

It is revealing that when Daniels speculates about what matters if there is no god, all he can imagine is the worship of power. That tells you exactly how hollow his morality is at the core; he cannot imagine a good life without a priest telling him what is right and wrong.

I’d answer differently. In the absence of a god-given absolute morality, all that matters is how we treat one another in this one life we have. What flows naturally to me is not brutality, which requires an absence of awareness of the suffering of others, but recognition of the fact that my fellow human beings really are my equals: we’re all going to die, we only have these few brief decades of life, and who am I to deny someone else the same opportunities I’ve been given?

Skipping past the obvious falsehood in his comment — Hitler was not an atheist — it is an absurd non sequitur to declare that awareness of our mortality leads directly to oppression and abuses of power and the selfish acquisition of power at any cost. There are no gods, no objective enforcement of a benign morality on us, and that has a couple of consequences. One is that we ought to reject out of hand any claims to morality based on theocratic morality as false; we should not aspire to build a just society on lies. Another is that we should do as Daniels says but patently does not do, and think very carefully. We should build our morality on reason.

I think it’s obvious, actually, even if it is a non-trivial problem. I can at least say that my ideal society would not be led by an autocrat who thought power was a sufficient justification for his actions, the conclusion Daniels thinks is natural for atheists, nor do I think that a culture built around obedience to tradition, as interpreted by a tribunal of priests, is my idea of a desirable society. And I’m an atheist. Why would a mindless ratbag politician like Daniels think that my dream world would be led by a dictator? I get so tired of being told by the ignorant that my goal is to put a Stalin in power, when they dream of a Palin.

I hope you do better in your next election, Indiana. Try to find someone who doesn’t confuse faith with justice next time, OK?

Aww, someone didn’t like what I said. Timothy Stone just had to write to me to argue that he wasn’t really being ignorant…while telling me I’m going to hell for not believing in his god. These guys have no sense of irony (also, the formatting of the email was even more mangled than what I show here. I have no idea why he decided the last half looked better in blue.)

The core of Christianity has never been humility, but arrogance. This is a faith that claims its followers have privileged contact with an immortal,
omniscient being, that claims that believers are especially loved by the most powerful intelligence in the universe, and that those who believe
most devoutly will be rewarded after death with cushy lives in paradise, while the rest of us burn in torment for eternity.

This is an example of someone who really does not get Christianity at all. With all of the doctorate degrees that you have and all of the power that you have, you simply
have failed to understand what God is all about and what humanity is all about. You could not get it more wrong.

The entire point here is that there are two types of people in the world, people who accept God and those who don’t. There is nothing arrogant about that.
It is, what it is. I can’t judge you personally, but I would believe that if a person did reject God and they died that person would end up in Hell.

See you don’t believe any of this, but belief does not matter. It is all real no matter how you try to hide or not. All of the events of all of our lives are being recorded.
You can say you don’t believe all you want. None of this matters. I know you think everything is a myth with the exception of science and the scientific method, but
that is simply not true. That is a lie that you keep telling yourself because you don’t want to accept God. No matter what proof is given, you will never ever believe in
things beyond the this natural world.

What if you tried to give a scientist the facts that Atoms existed and what if he never believed the scientific method, what if he believed his own methods.
My point being that some people have agendas and no matter how much proof or what kind of proof you give them, they still won’t understand.

Heaven and Hell are real. Hell is not meant for people, it is meant for other spirit forms that you don’t believe in.
However, there are some people in there because they just outright rejected God and then they died and it was too late.

I know how you work, you will call me a loon and then brand people like me a moron for what we believe because you think that everything that isn’t scientific
in nature is just myths and fairy tales. You do this every blog post and you beat the same horse over and over again with nothing really new.

Anyway, the only way to make you really understand all of this is when you die. However, it will simply be too late.
My hope is that you turn your life around before you die at least. I may not like what you say, but I would not want you to go to Hell.

At least one of my votes still makes me happy

Obama has been a disappointment (but still better than the alternative!), but one candidate continues to make me happy: Al Franken. He recently tacked a praiseworthy amendment to a defense bill: there will be no defense contracts to companies that “restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” I’m rather appalled that such rules exist in some companies, and it’s about time that someone shut that kind of criminal behavior down.

The weird thing, though, is that 30 male Republicans lined up to oppose that bit of legislation. What’s the matter with those cretins? What possible reason would anyone have to defend the right of corporations to protect rapists?

Spotting the black hats among the climate change denialists

Jim Lippard has put up an excellent post identifying the major institutions behind climate change denial. They are almost uniformly conservative and populated with old and unqualified cranks, although Jim is too genteel to put it that way. It’s useful information if you need a scorecard to keep track of the players.

It’s also amusing. Lippard makes this passing mention of a certain notorious crank in a discussion of the denialists with the best academic credentials:

The top-cited scientist, Lubos Motl, has 150 citations for his fourth-most-cited paper, but he’s a theoretical physicist with no publications containing the word “climate.”

Lubos Motl replies!

Commie,

I urge you to instantly remove the libels and lies from this blog, otherwise I will start to work on the legal liquidation of the criminal that you are.

These things may be common among the green trash in which you seem to live but I won’t tolerate it against myself.

Wow. “Legal liquidation.” I’m impressed. Although…did anyone spot any lies or libels against Motl? Does he have 151 citations for that paper, or what?

If you hadn’t realized that Motl is a freakish little sociopath before, that comment may just persuade you.

Prayer works!

Tom Coburn, the odious Republican from Oklahoma, is one of the America-hating pseudopatriots opposing even the lame and neutered health care bill sludgily working its way through the senate, and he recently sent out a call to his teabaggin’* electorate and fellow travelers to pray that “somebody can’t make the vote”, so the Democrats wouldn’t be able to break any filibuster. They responded by prayin’ their little hearts out, and one group even proudly admitted to praying for the death of Democrats.

And it worked! No, nobody died, but someone didn’t make it to the vote.

One catch: the no-show was James Inhofe, the other Republican dimbulb from Oklahoma who opposes health care.

Keep praying! Maybe soon all of the Republicans will go away. Or even better, Holy Joe Lieberman will be ascended into heaven.

*I still snicker over the fact that they actually call themselves that.