Flying witches and Africans

Leo Igwe has an op-ed on an African problem.

Some months ago, the aviation authorities in Swaziland issued a statement which surprised many people around the globe. They warned that high-flying witches would be penalised. High-flying witches? Be penalised?

Swaziland Corporate Affairs Director Sabelo Dlamini actually said, “A witch on a broomstick should not fly above the [150-metre] limit.” Wow!

Of course, on hearing this directive one may think it was something made up by someone bent on discrediting Africa’s last absolute monarchy. Far from it, it was a policy statement from the aviation authorities in Swaziland to regulate ‘witch-flights’ in this 21st century.

He concludes by setting a goal for Africans.

We must break the spell of ignorance that hangs over Africa. Fearful ignorant minds wasting precious resources fighting imaginary witches in winnowing baskets must be replaced with educated, honest people administering the forward progress of an emerging continent with real needs.

Are the authorities in Swaziland and Zimbabwe listening to the future calling?

I hesitated to post this, because it’s all too easy to turn this into a vindication of racist bigotry. But let me remind you that here in mighty America, we have white people claiming to have fought demons, legislators denying global climate change because a god promised not to ever flood us again, and of course, the perennial insistence that we must swear an oath to an invisible boogey man to take public office.

So I have to revise Igwe’s suggestion a little bit: We must break the spell of ignorance that hangs over humanity.

What if you don’t have a pineapple?

Sometimes, the British get very silly in their defense of religion. The Muslim groups got very very offended when the atheists slapped a label on a pineapple calling it “Mohammed”, and now the LSE has outright banned atheist groups, and is harassing them for wearing Jesus & Mo t-shirts.

I don’t have a pineapple, I am sad to say. I was tempted to run out and buy one. But I can do one better.

Meet Mohammed.

MO

As an added bonus, he’ll keep longer than a piece of fruit would.

Do you have a Mohammed at your house? You should get one.

Oh, god, you suck

Another crank is haranguing me on twitter. This one’s conceit is that he’s writing emails from God. They’re bizarre: they’re anti-clerical and pro-god, and from them we learn that God has lousy grammar and spelling, and despite being anti-religion, is still pushing the same old tiresome patriarchal beliefs that religion does. Take, for instance, GOD eMails.info: eMail III, Subject: Women.

My dear women, I made you with pre-existing matters. I created you to honor, nature, share, and preserve life. I made each one of you with your own unique beauty. Nothing that walks on earth is more admirable than you women. Men of wisdom and science would respect you and protect you. And there is nothing men can do to stop him from falling in love with you women.

You noticed that your bodies will experience a change when you become pregnant, and your vagina would go through a painful trauma at the time of giving birth. The pain caused is something you women would never forget after you had experienced it. Its serves as a reminder not to choose as the father of your child any man insisting on you to fallow any organized religion.

Sincerely;

God. Your God.

It’s condescending bullshit that trivializes women by putting them on a pedestal and acting as if their great virtue is being beautiful for “men of wisdom and science.” And then leaps immediately into pregnancy, because after all, that’s what women are for and find most important in their lives.

What? The Genesis crapola about pain in childbirth twisted to be a reminder that you shouldn’t join a church? I’m going to have to have a talk with my wife; she sure put on a good act with all the sweating and straining and grunting and crying, but she couldn’t have felt any pain during labor, since the father of her children was consistently steering the family away from organized religion.

Religious kooks, please note: I despise you. God is now blocked.

The wicked part of this burger is…?

badburger

A burger joint in Chicago is slapping a communion wafer on a burger to honor some heavy metal band from Sweden. I say, “meh” — it’s a flavorless garnish that is just going to add a bit more starch to a meal that’s heavy in fats. But of course some Catholics are annoyed.

Tobias said Kuma’s phones have been ringing off the hook, with some saying that putting a Communion host on a burger is like waving the American flag over a fire.

Jeffrey Young, who runs a podcast and blog called "Catholic Foodie," called the Ghost burger "crass and offensive."

"For us, as Catholics, the Eucharist is the body and blood and soul of divinity itself," said Young. "Although the Communion wafer is not a consecrated host, it’s still symbolic, and symbols are important."

Errm, waving an American flag over a fire is legal. You can also set it on fire, or pee on it, anything you want, as long as you don’t compromise public safety — so that’s kind of a pointless complaint.

“Crass and offensive” is in the eye of the beholder. I find Catholicism itself crass and offensive — well, actually, I find that of all religions — but guess what? Being crass and offensive is also OK.

Worse than crass and offensive, I consider this nonsense about magic divinity to be stupid. But again, as long as you’re not harming anyone, you’re allowed to be stupid.

So why is this news? I don’t know.

Oh, wait, I know. Because serving up big greasy slabs of cow, rather than a bit of cardboard-flavored styrofoam, harms the environment and is ethically suspect? That’s the only part of that meal I’d consider a newsworthy source of argument.

Some people find it easy to lie

People like Hamza Tzortzis, for instance. Here he is confronted with a statement he made claiming that Muslims reject the whole idea of freedom, and he promptly denies that he ever said it. Unfortunately for him, his statement was recorded on video, and here that earlier video is spliced in right after his lie.

The other weird thing here: note how the audience cheers and claps at his denial. Like the creationists, Islamic fundamentalists also make the effort to pack the venue’s seats with their mindless followers. I’ve been in similar situations; it’s like trying to talk to an auditorium full of zombies.

How can we be better than the fundamentalists?

Fellow atheists! We have truth on our side, and science as a powerful tool. The other side is full of lunatic ideas and stupidity; they cripple our country with their corruption of education and denialism. We are unstoppable. We shall be eventually be victorious.

So, wait, if their ideas are so plainly bogus and repressive, why do people still join fundie churches and throw money at charismatic con artists? Are they crazy or stupid? No, maybe not — maybe it’s because atheists aren’t recognizing some important aspects of the human condition.

A few years ago one of my friends had a birthday party, and he invited all the homeschool families he knew to his party. It may seem odd to an outsider to have young children at his 20th birthday party, but it was not the least bit weird to me (parties with my family are the same way; there were as many kids under 13 at my 18th birthday party as there were teens). But after an entire evening of playing board games with people of all ages, washing dishes together, and praying for each other, one of my public school friends (the only person who had attended public school at the party) said to me, “That was so much fun. I never experienced this in my life.” She explained that she never had an evening playing board games with children of all ages. In fact, she never went to someone’s house and had them pray for her either. It was foreign to her, but she liked it.

Fundamentalism offers that kind of community. Yes, the community creates pain and breaks sometimes, but it’s still community that often attracts people to fundamentalism.  I was looking through photos of my teen years earlier this week, and every photo of me has a child in the picture. Our community valued children.

The other end of fundamentalism has been a lot of pain: a lot of guilt over purity culture, a lot of culture shock, a lot of shame from never living up to expectations. The purity culture and anti-feminist culture let me down. It didn’t keep its promise. In the end, it didn’t make us closer together as a family, and it didn’t make us better than secular families. I’m not defending fundamentalism, except to say this.

Quit saying fundies are just crazy-no-brainers while secularists are enlightened and free thinkers.

Fundamentalist ideas are crazy-no-brainers, but sane, intelligent, ordinary people sign up for them all the time. Maybe we ought to pay a little more attention to the rational reasons people follow irrational ideas.

That bit about every photo from her teen years including children in it struck me as significant…and you don’t have to be fundamentalist to have that. I grew up in a great big messy extended family with swarms of cousins and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and grandparents, and religion hardly ever came up (except maybe with some eyerolling at a couple of wacky branches of the family that went Mormon and John Birch), so it can be a secular experience. But my own kids got far less of that, constantly getting ripped up and moved to strange distant cities at the commands of the peripatetic academic life style.

We’d like to believe that the triumph of secularism is inevitable — how can we fail when we’re going up against such nutty ideas? — but maybe it isn’t, if we neglect social and community and family ideals and pander only to nerdy asocial guys in tech.

We really need to wake up to the reasons normal people find value in weird religions.

“You people”

You can hardly blame Hobby Lobby for refusing to serve Christ-killers on Christmas, now can you?

Beginning your shopping list for Hanukkah gifts and decorations? If so, make sure to avoid Hobby Lobby, a swiftly growing U.S. crafts store with 561 stores, which sells zero Hanukkah merchandise, and hires Jewish intolerant employees.

On September 27th, Ken Berwitz took to his blog to explain what happened when a friend of his entered Hobby Lobby seeking Hanukkah goods. To the customer’s surprise, a sales associate callously replied, “We don’t cater to you people.”

Understandably, Mr. Berwitz had to hear this supposed truth for himself, and quickly made a call to Corporate to ask why Hobby Lobby didn’t put Hanukkah goods on their item list this year.

The response: ”Because Mr. Green is the owner of the company, he’s a Christian, and those are his values.”

My values involve never setting foot inside a Hobby Lobby store.

Ex-Muslims of North America

While I was in Washington DC a while back, I got to talk with Sarah Haider for a bit. She’s one of the leaders of the Ex-Muslims of North America, and they are trying to build up a greater profile — slowly and cautiously, though, because as she explained to me, there are a lot of non-ex-Muslims who want to infiltrate their group and expose their membership for apostasy. So if you’re an ex-Muslim who is in the closet about it, and you’re looking for a group that takes sensible precautions to protect their membership, you might want to reach out to EXMNA. I was very impressed with their professionalism and thoroughness.

I also wanted to mention this other aspect of their work. Sure, there are Muslim fanatics they have to be on the guard against, but also they’re imbedded in an unfortunately xenophobic culture that has turned all Muslims, even the ex kind, into boogeymen; and then there are the apologists who go too far the other way and pretend that hard-line Islam is benign and must be sheltered.

These days, there is a stark polarity that exists in media, academia and public life when it comes to discussions about Islam and Muslims. There are those who propagate racist, bigoted and xenophobic ideas against Muslims, against anyone who comes from a Muslim background, and even against people who are not Muslim at all (e.g. Sikhs). These types of people (the bigots) tend to treat all Muslims (or all those perceived to be Muslim) as a monolith, a horde without internal differences or dissent. On the other hand, there are those who react to the bigoted, xenophobic types by trying to justify the violent parts of Islam and the harsh actions of some Muslims. This second type (the apologists) often shields Islam and Muslims from any and all critique and scrutiny, even the kinds of critique and scrutiny they themselves apply to other ideologies like Christianity, Capitalism, Communism, and others.

I don’t envy them the narrow tightrope they have to walk, but these are people doing it as well as possible. Check out Ex-Muslims of North America. Don’t expect them to embrace you immediately, though — they’re understandably wary.

The inconsistency of Hamza Tzortzis

This is an interesting clip of Tzortzis first rebuking Lawrence Krauss for his lack of an objective morality in admitting that there are certain conditions under which he could not condemn incest, and then, in a different debate, Tzortzis defending sex with children and rationalizing the lack of a taboo in the Qu’ran against it.

It’s so hypocritical, and so lacking in a rational morality. Krauss’s argument has a clear foundation in mutual consent and a lack of harm; we should not prohibit private actions of consenting adults that do not cause harm to others.

Tzortzis tries to claim that the Qu’ran uses similar principles in accommodating sex with children, by claiming that it should only be done when the child is physically and emotionally ready. But he ignores the concept of consent, and in fact flouts it when one of his points in favor of some cases of child marriage is that the father was willing to give away the child. And of course he doesn’t bother to mention the disturbing fact that he’s not discussing cases of kids exploring their sexuality together (I suspect he’d be dead set against that), but of grasping old men taking ownership of little girls and using them as sex toys.

The Catholics are still pulling this stunt

The lesson is never learned. MPR is running a local story on a St Paul parish which was afflicted with another of those perambulating pedophile priests. Curtis Wehmeyer was a known sexual predator to the Catholic church, and they sent him to St Paul and didn’t tell any of the locals.

Curtis Wehmeyer kept his white 2006 camper parked outside Blessed Sacrament Church in St. Paul where he served for six years, three of them as pastor.

With the shades drawn, Wehmeyer could avoid the obligations of priestly life. He got drunk, smoked pot and looked at child pornography. He also lured to the camper two boys whose mother worked at the parish, plied them with alcohol, turned on pornography and told them to touch themselves. Several times, he touched one of the boys, according to police records.

The family trusted "Father Curt." As a priest, he had special powers. He could anoint the sick and baptize the young. Maybe, the mother hoped, he could inspire one of her sons to become a priest.

Why would anyone want their child to become a priest?

The St Paul/Minneapolis archdiocese had a “delegate for a safe environment” who actually wrote a letter concluding that he would “recommend against any disclosure in his workplace” — apparently, “safe environment” means safe for priests, because they did a remarkably good job covering for a nasty man who was exploiting the children of his parish. The coverup has been unambiguously documented in a memo posted at the link.

Thomas Doyle, a Dominican priest who was one of the earliest national whistleblowers on clergy sex abuse in the 1980s, said the memo shows that parents cannot trust the archdiocese to protect their children.

“Celibate clergy who aren’t trained in psychology are in no position to make that kind of a judgment call over someone like Wehmeyer,” he said.

Yet they all assume that their training in theology, or perhaps it is their imaginary direct line to a god, gives them the expertise to be counselors, psychologists, and therapists. It does not. These people are quacks and frauds who let a child molester have access to children for a decade — and even now they’re unapologetic about it.