How about if we all end the killing?

deathtoatheists
One point! One demand! Atheists must be hanged!

Half a million Islamists marched in Bangladesh, chanting their desire to murder people who don’t believe in their demented, angry god. I take that personally — they want to kill people like me, for the crime of not thinking as they do. If I’d been there, that mob would have torn me to pieces.

And it’s not just atheists they hate. Women must live in service to the men, they are to have their rights diminished. Education is to be crippled, reduced to rote memorization of their holy books. This is awful, poisonous stuff, and I condemn it without reservation.

But let me remind you, the United States has been carrying out routine drone attacks against Muslims…attacks that kill children.

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So angry mobs threaten and howl and promise to roll their culture back to the Middle Ages. Americans calmly sit in air-conditioned rooms and push buttons and joysticks and send robots through the skies to pour death on civilians. Obama calmly rationalizes the murders and cracks jokes about predator drones.

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The rules outside of the United States are going to be different than the rules inside of the United States.

One side wants to kill people like me, is furious and destructive, and rages passionately about killing the Other; the other side wants to kill people outside our borders, is calm and dispassionate, and marshals machines to execute the Other without risk to ourselves.

I cannot condemn one without condemning the other. Especially since our tactics seem to be so much more effective at butchering people.

Today is the National Day of Reason

We live in an unreasonable country, so I don’t expect that the National Day of Reason will get as much attention as the idiocy of the National Day of Prayer. But apparently we’re not supposed to pray today. Big change for all of you, I know.

But here’s a suggestion: usually we just sit quietly and let the faith-heads get on with their ritual nonsense. Today, though, take another step: if you find yourself in a situation where people are wasting your time babbling at an imaginary man in the sky, don’t hold your tongue. Stand up, say “NO”, and turn your back or leave the room. Let them play their game, but don’t let them continue without knowing that you reject superstition.

Unfortunately, that’s easy for me to say — I’ll be at a university, where I’ve never seen a prayer invocation. I think I’ll keep the television news off, too, or I might be waving my middle finger at the screen a lot.

If you don’t have an opportunity to openly express your contempt for prayer, you can at least sign the petition being sent to Obama.

A Moroccan hero: Imad Iddine Habib

The state religion of Morocco is Islam, so it took real guts to establish a Council of Ex-Muslims in that country Imad Iddine Habib was awesomely courageous to do so.

What followed next was predictable. Under the yoke of Islam, shaking yourself free of superstition is a crime punishable by death. So Morocco’s High Council of Ulemas has issued a fatwa decreeing the death penalty for Moroccans who leave Islam. I wonder who might be subject to that? Imad Iddine Habib, of course.

The state police have come looking for him, but Imad Iddine Habib has gone into hiding. There will be more news to come on this subject, I’m sure…although you know that people will be trying to shush the media on religion-sponsored terrorism, silencing the revelation of the evil committed because it’s all about religion.

How dare you condemn the attempted murder of a man because he does not share your faith? That’s Islamophobia!

What point would a protest have if it didn’t piss someone off?

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This well-written article in The Atlantic remarks on a familiar tactic. It’s about the Femen, the topless jihad, and Amina, and the complaints an annoying number of stodgy critics have made. You know the ones: the people who demand that all arguments be respectful, and insist that there are proper channels for debate, and protests that actually rile the establishment are inappropriate.

With its topless jihad and Femen leader Inna Shevchenko’s subsequent incendiary blog post on the event, Femen was both defending one of its own and upholding a right to freedom of expression (to say nothing of life and liberty) flagrantly violated by Amina’s own family and by an angry, largely Muslim, community from which threats against Amina and Shevchenko continue to emanate. It’s worth pointing out that Femen’s critics, several of whom professed concern for Amina’s well-being, did not speak out in Amina’s defense before the jihad, but only post-factum and in passing, all the while pummeling the group standing up for her with stale, politically correct shibboleths and demands to stay out of what they perceived to be their own business.

We saw this in all the battles over accommodationism: there’s always someone on your side who offended that you have chosen to battle antagonistically or unconventionally against oppression and foolishness. I think their favorite word must be “hush” — don’t upset the status quo, even if it’s the status quo you’re trying to upset. And most importantly, they insist that you have to follow their tactics, and they get to tell everyone how to engage, even if their history is one of largely sitting on their thumbs and getting chummy with the enemy.

Guess what is often at the root of that reluctance to actually confront? Yeah, it’s the same old boogeyman everytime, conservative traditionalism in the guise of religion.

There is a problem, however. The media has long fostered the view that religion should be de facto exempt from the logical scrutiny applied to other subjects. I am not disputing the right to practice the religion of one’s choice, but rather the prevailing cultural rectitude that puts faith beyond the pale of commonsense review, and (in Amina’s case), characterizes as “Islamophobic” criticism of the criminal mistreatment of a young woman for daring to buck her society’s norms, or of Femen for attacking the forced wearing of the hijab.

We’re seeing a lot of that lately, but it’s been going on for a long, long time. Point out that transubstantiation is ridiculous, and that Catholics don’t get to tell you to honor a cracker, and Bill Donohue raves that you’re an anti-Catholic bigot; stand aghast at ultra-orthodox Jews spitting on little girls for “immodesty” and you’re an anti-semite; critize the deeply rooted misogyny in Islam, a misogyny that harms men and women in the faith, and you’re declared an Islamophobe.

Just because it’s cloaked in the self-declared mystery of religion doesn’t mean it’s exampt from scrutiny and rejection.

The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree

There’s another Hovind! And he’s an idiot, too! I’m no fan of genetic determinism, but man, when every person I know saddled with the name Hovind is a bible-thumping twit, I begin to have doubts.

The new Hovind is Chad. He’s a preacher, of course, and he likes to turn complex subjects into simple-minded Bible verses, of course, and he’s making videos to promote his nonsense, of course. His thing is Godonomics. You guessed it, the Bible tells you everything you need to know about economics. And his god is a free market capitalist, of course.

I watched a couple of his introductory videos. It’s the usual schtick: selective use of Bible verses with his own interpretations that allow him to twist it into his desired conclusion. We’re apparently supposed to recognize that “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn” is a deep insight into modern economics, if only we’d see it.

I was also amused…hey, is he using a felt board to make his arguments? I haven’t seen one of those since Sunday school. Imagine Glenn Beck (who praises “Godonomics”, as does Mike Huckabee) using a felt board to put up his frantic diagrammatic scenarios. That’s this Hovind.

I looked, but I couldn’t see if Chad is fond of the kind of economic advice that put Kent in jail.

Now I understand why the BBC pulled it

The BBC recently broadcast a program for the charity Comic Relief, but yanked one sketch deemed too offensive from their online iPlayer. They’d apparently received thousands of complaints about it, and it was the only sketch on the program found so horribly offensive.

Apparently, regulators are now investigating the BBC, and the ever-charming Daily Mail is blustering that “BBC faces Ofcom probe into Rowan Atkinson’s foul-mouthed Comic Relief archbishop impression”. Rowan Atkinson? Foul-mouthed comic? Did they confuse him with Gilbert Gottfried or something?

So I finally got a look at the ghastly wicked sketch, and now I see why it got people upset. Here it is:

Oh, yeah, that’s some primo religion bashing. “Foul-mouthed” is the wrong word, though: Rowan Atkinson’s sin was being deadly accurate, perfectly portraying the cheerfully vapid fluttery chumminess of a thoroughly liberal Christian. That’s what got people angry: he didn’t just start roaring at religious leaders, he showed the viewers what they looked like through our eyes…and it was also so damned close to how the believers see them, too, that it wasn’t easily dismissed and was a palpable smack in the face.

Excellent work, Rowan Atkinson!

Do you want to be like El Salvador?

El Salvador has an absolute prohibition on all abortions — they can’t even be done to save the life of the mother (it’s a very Catholic country, are you surprised?) Now a situation has made the news that exposes the villainy of that policy.

A young woman named Beatriz is petitioning El Salvador’s supreme court to be allowed to get an abortion. Why? There’s a couple of really good reasons.

The four-month fetus is acephalic — no brain has formed. It’s doomed. It will never be viable. At best, it will be born, live a few days as a vegetable on life support, and die.

The mother is suffering from complications from lupus and kidney disease. The fetus won’t even get to the point of being born — the mother will be killed by this pregnancy first.

The heartless, amoral, religiously-based rules of that society are condemning this woman to death. In addition, if any doctor honors their Hippocratic oath and helps her live, they can be prosecuted and sentenced to long terms in prison for it.

Beatriz has been refused a necessary and simple medical procedure because the demented fuckwits of the Catholic Church have prioritized dogma over human life. She has to beg authorities, right up to the highest levels of government, for the right to live.

All because some old assholes believe god has told them that the dying lump of meat in her belly is more precious than a woman’s life.