The Mormon mentality

Ashley Billasano was an 18 year old girl in Texas who claimed to be a victim of sexual abuse by her stepfather and another family member. She poured out her story on twitter and then committed suicide. It’s a tragic and horrible story, but of course there’s always someone around to make it worse, and that someone will use religious morality as a prod.

A demented fuckwit has opined.

I don’t care what did or did not happen to her. First and foremost, I don’t believe rape exists. When there are incidents that are classified as “rape,” or names that are similar, what usually ends up happening is that the “victim” tends to “forget” to mention immodesty, flirty actions, or other conduct on their part that contributed to the matter. A woman who dresses immodestly must accept accountability for her choice of attire.

If, in fact, this girl was being molested or forced into prostitution as the media outlets say her tweets claimed, then it was her fault that it happened, and continued to happen.

The guilt of the stepfather has not been established, but it must be some consolation to him that his actions were irrelevant, no matter what: if he raped his stepdaughter, it was all her fault.

This sounds like the institutionalized misogyny of the Taliban, doesn’t it? You won’t be surprised to learn that the source of this heinous doctrine was the Mormon church.

The prophet Spencer W. Kimball wrote in his book “The Miracle of Forgiveness”:

“In a forced contact such as rape or incest, the injured one is greatly outraged. If she has not cooperated and contributed to the foul deed, she is of course in a more favorable position. There is no condemnation where this is no voluntary participation. It is better to die in defending one’s virtue than to live having lost it without a struggle.”

The bold emphasis is mine. Even though a woman may cry rape or may claim that sex was not consensual, if she doesn’t successfully defend her virtues, and allows the so-called “attack” to take place, then she loses the right to call herself a victim. It is better to die defending one’s virtues!

There may be no “condemnation,” as he says, but notice that that only puts the woman in a “more favorable position,” and that’s assuming that she didn’t “cooperate,” by not defending her virtue or in cases such as this story allowing the “abuse” to go on for years without taking steps to stop it.

I would say that, condemnation or not, she is not completely absolved of accountability unless she successfully defended her virtues or died in the process, or at the very least take steps to stop it. She appears to have not done any of these things, save for the last one, and that was done far too late, which I would say calls her motives into question.

The Mormon leadership claims to be literal prophets — this is the church of latter day saints, after all — and therefore speaks the literal voice of god. Which just means that wretched awful excuses for humanity like Spencer Kimball get to stand up and declare their bigoted opinions to be divine and inarguable. It’s a sweet gig. And the followers get an unlimited excuse for tolerating the intolerable.

Here’s Michael Crook’s Mormon morality.

There are those who would say that her followers should have helped her. Not so! They had no legal obligation to do so. I wouldn’t help someone, whether they cried out on Twitter, or whether I personally witnessed so-called “abuse.” Welcome to real life. The onus is on the so-called “victim” to man up, per at least two General Authorities of the LDS Church.

He’s admitted that if he saw a woman being raped, he’d shrug it off and let her defend herself. It’s all her fault, and church dogma tells him that that’s OK. In fact, there are a lot of things he considers OK that normal people would find repugnant.

Catholicism steals a generation of Spanish children

Another Catholic scandal? Yeah, it’s another one, this time in Spain. Mother Church knew best who should raise children.

Several mothers say they were told their first-born children had died during or soon after they gave birth.

But the women, often young and unmarried, were told they could not see the body of the infant or attend their burial.

In reality, the babies were sold to childless couples whose devout beliefs and financial security meant that they were seen as more appropriate parents.

Official documents were forged so the adoptive parents’ names were on the infants’ birth certificates.

300,000 children. 300,000 heartbroken mothers. 300,000 lies.

Many mothers who gave birth there claim that when they asked to see their child after being told it had died, they were shown a baby’s corpse that appeared to be freezing cold.

The BBC programme shows photographs taken in the Eighties of a dead baby kept in a freezer, allegedly to show grieving mothers.

Who needs ethics and morality when you’ve got god?

Anthony Navarro is an evil scumbag

Be warned. This is a horrific story.

Anthony Navarro Jr. is a righteous fundamentalist who is opposed without reservation to divorce. His brother, Dave Navarro, decided to leave his marriage — so Anthony Jr. stalks and harasses his own brother, threatening him, harasses people associated with him, lies about him, contacts his clients and basically destroys his business, all because he will not tolerate the fact that a man and a woman can decide to dissolve the bonds of matrimony. He has a religious belief in an absolutely insoluble form of marriage, which he insists on imposing on others (Anthony Jr.’s wife is apparently trapped for life).

Anthony Jr. writes a letter to Dave.

Psalms 69:5
O God, you know my folly;
the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you.

Jeremiah 3:25
Let us lie down in our shame, and let our dishonor cover us. For we have sinned against the Lord our God, we and our fathers, from our youth even to this day, and we have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God.”

Brother, no matter how fast you run, you cannot run from your sin, nor its penalty. Come back to the light, come back into the circle of blessing. You need not continue to live like a fugitive… Like a coward.

Adultery is the greatest sin addressed in the bible. Realize, Dave, that you are committing adultery… Against your wife, Alison; against your children, and against God. You are guilty of the same sin as our mother and it cost her her life in the end… It cost her her soul. Her selfishness was her downfall. Do not fall into the same trap… The same spiral… The same death… The same eternity.

Why do you not even talk? Are you so ashamed? You can turn back to the right path, and you can be forgiven.

It’s not too late. Yet.

-Anthony

That’s a scary letter. That’s a letter written by a demented fuckwit. But you haven’t heard the worst of it yet.

What happened to Dave and Anthony Jr.’s mother?

Their mother left their father when they were children. Anthony Navarro Sr. hired a hit man to murder her in front of her daughter and mother. Anthony Navarro Sr. was convicted of this crime and is currently serving life in prison.

So Anthony Navarro Jr. is now blaming his mother for her murder by his father, and is now perpetuating the same warped, sanctimonious idea that divorce justifies murder.

So that’s what the Bible means by “sins of the father”.

Our disgrace

I just saw @ThatKevinSmith’s Red State. It was the perfect movie to watch on 9/11: full of violence, sanctimonious religion, and terror in the name of anti-terrorism. It’s such an American movie. If you really want to feel the grim despair of living in God’s own America, this is the movie to see — a painful vision of our nightmare.

That’s really how I feel: we have been marching backwards since 9/11, throwing away our civil liberties, lashing out at the world with violence, as if that will solve anything. For contrast, read this description of what Martin Luther King did for the country. He inspired people to stand up for their rights, and got African Americans to unite and demand respect.

At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech.

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”

Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don’t know what my father was talking about.

But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.

He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

It was a great stride forward for black people. Yet when you look at the last ten years, what do we see? The opposite. The country rushing to embrace fear. There’s nothing to honor today. Americans should see this as a day of shame, not because we were attacked, but for how we responded afterwards — we left courage behind and became a nation of bullies and cowards.

And that’s all I have to say about 9/11.

Archaic religion + modern technology → horror in Bolivia

We think of Mennonites as an extremely conservative Christian sect that is cautious about adopting modern technology. But apparently, with the right incentive, they can innovate, as a group of Bolivian Mennonites demonstrate.

Wall is among 130 women and girls of the Mennonite colony in Manitoba Colony, who claim that from 2005 to ’09, the same cloudy horror visited them. They’re the victims of what is allegedly one of the ugliest sex scandals in the history of the Mennonites, a pacifist Christian Anabaptist denomination founded in Europe in the 1500s, if not Bolivia and South America. In a criminal trial now under way in nearby Santa Cruz, Peter Weiber, 48, a Mennonite veterinarian, is accused of transforming a chemical meant to anesthetize cows into a spray to be used on humans. For four years, Weiber and eight other Mennonite men allegedly sprayed the chemical through bedroom windows in Manitoba at night, sedating entire families and raping the females.

Charming fellows. Old-timey farmers. Quaint horse-drawn buggies. Insular, inbred, arrogant patriarchal monsters.

The accused didn’t just commit horrible acts, but don’t seem to feel guilt or remorse.

The men range in ages from 20 to 48. Four of them, including Weiber, are married. But they don’t seem to take the case too seriously: they often joke with guards or fall asleep during trial proceedings, and during one victim’s testimony the judge had to reprimand them for laughing and making faces. That may be one reason victims rarely go to the courthouse. “My heart was racing and my head hurt,” Susana Banman, 55, tells TIME about her one day at the trial.

Suddenly, I don’t find myself as distressed at the thought of the imminent potential extinction of humanity by ecological disaster as I once was. So that’s a bit of good news.

(via Jen)

The kind of people who elect Michele Bachmann

Scum of the earth. Parts of Michele Bachmann’s district contain the most smug, pious, conservative rat-buggering jerks on the planet (like Marcus Bachmann and his anti-gay “clinic”, for instance). And the symptoms are beginning to show: the Anoka-Hennepin school district, part of Bachmann’s domain, home of the Elmer Gantry-wannabe Bradley Dean, is also the epicenter of an epidemic of teen suicides, 9 in the last two years. These are kids who were bullied for being gay, or suspected of being gay, or not fitting in to the their inbred little community (and who would want to?), and the school district has been acquiescing to pressure from religious groups to maintain a policy of intolerance and even demonization of gays.

As civil rights groups have pushed the Minnesota school district to do more to increase tolerance of LGBT students, conservative religious groups fought to keep them away from public schools. After Samantha’s suicide and several others, students in Anoka-Hennepin schools participated in the Day of Silence. The event, organized by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, encourages kids to remain silent for the day in recognition of the effect of anti-gay bullying and harassment. In response, religious activists took up the “Day of Truth,” an event championed by the “ex-gay ministry” Exodus International that’s usually held the day before the Day of Silence. Students who participated were encouraged to engage their classmates in discussions of homosexuality from a Christian perspective.

Fifteen-year-old Justin Aaberg appears to have been one of the targets of this initiative. One day last year Justin came home and told his mom, Tammy, that another student had told him he would to go to hell because he was gay. “That did something to his brain,” she says. He hanged himself in his bedroom last summer. Only after his suicide did Tammy learn that the Parents Action League had reportedly worked with area churches to hand out T-shirts promoting the “Day of Truth” to students at his high school (which is also Bachmann’s alma mater). The students were also instructed to “preach to the gay kids,” Aaberg says. (No one from the Parents Action League responded to a request for comment.)

You would think that Christians, who claim to have the moral high ground in everything, would recognize that driving kids to suicide is not ethical behavior. Unfortunately not; it’s part of their agenda. If they can’t convert them to their sanctimonious faith, it’s just as good to have them dead.

Will the school district change its policies? I doubt it. The churches dictate what is allowed.

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.

The International Day against Stoning

I hope this is something we can all agree on. Today is the The International Day against Stoning, a consciousness-raising event organized by Mina Ahadi, Patty Debonitas, and Maryam Namazie to call attention to the fact that some countries still practice public stonings as punishments for petty offenses against propriety. There are people in prison right now, awaiting that day when authorities drag them into the public square and people murder them by battering them with rocks.

As you know Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani is still languishing in prison. The authorities recently mentioned her case saying that no final decision had yet been reached on her stoning sentence and that Sakineh must remain in prison. Falsely accused of murdering her husband, her only crime is that she is a woman in Iran. Her lawyer, Sajjad Houtan Kian, also remains in prison for having had the courage to defend her and other women with stoning sentences in Tabriz prison; he has been sentenced to four years imprisonment, been put under a lot of pressure and lost 20 kilos (44 pounds) as a result.

The campaign to Save Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani has been an important one. It has spoken out in defence of humanity, and against the barbaric punishment of stoning everywhere. It has mobilised immense pressure against and condemnation of the Islamic regime of Iran from millions across the globe. These are accomplishments we must all be proud of.

On 11 July 2011, the International Day against Stoning, let’s once again step up the pressure to demand Sakineh’s immediate release and an end to stoning. Join us by either standing in a city square with a photo or poster of Sakineh, tweeting, or by organising an act of solidarity or a flash mob to raise awareness and attention. On 11 July, in 100 cities worldwide, let us once again raise the banner of humanity against one of the barbarisms of our time.

Follow the link; there are recommendations and addresses for letters of protest. Make it known that the international community regards these barbarous, vile practices as heinous and contemptible.

More sophisticated theology

People keep telling me that I have to read up more on real theology, you know, the stuff where smart old white guys sit around in seminaries and invent rationalizations for whatever the hell they want to believe. Unfortunately, I don’t see any difference in principle (but hopefully, in outcome) between what, for instance, elders of the Mormon church or Catholic bishops say, than the ideas of Peter Lucas Moses, who has his own special interpretation of God’s holy word.

A religious leader in North Carolina shot to death his four-​year old step son because he thought the boy, Jadon Higganbothan, might be gay. The man, Peter Lucas Moses, 27, who also shot to death a 28-​year old woman, may face the death penalty.

Moses, whom police stopped short of calling a cult leader, lived in a one-​room home with nine children and three women. The 28-​year old woman, Antoinetta Yvonne McKoy, Moses killed had been beaten and strangled with an extension cord before Moses murdered her. The day he did, she had escaped to a neighbor’s house and begged her to use her cell phone. The neighbor did not call police because she claims she thought the woman might be mentally disturbed. She witnesses Moses dragging her into the house, and still never called police.

If you lack a rational, empirical rubric for evaluating truth-claims against real world evidence, how can you claim that Catholicism or Scientology or Mormonism or Islam or Lutheranism or Black Hebrews are any more right than anyone else?

There’s a lot of attention being focused on the young child who was murdered for suspicion of being gay, but I find the murder of McKoy just as appalling. What did she do, you might wonder?

She was a failure as a woman, apparently.

McKoy found that she couldn’t have children and wrote dairy entries begging “Lord” not to kill her, prosecutors said.

How primally Abrahamic…how primatological. The purpose of this religious construct is to control the fertility of its members, and again, there’s not much difference between one cult and Catholicism, except for tactics. Catholic leaders tend to avoid shooting women in the head anymore, and instead shackle them to a lifetime of pumping out babies, but its the same miserable need to control women’s lives.

What has happened to Amina?

Amina is the young Syrian woman who was threatened with rape by Islamist thugs. She disappeared a few days ago.

Earlier today, at approximately 6:00 pm Damascus time, Amina was walking in the area of the Abbasid bus station, near Fares al Khouri Street. She had gone to meet a person involved with the Local Coordinating Committee and was accompanied by a friend.

Amina told the friend that she would go ahead and they were separated. Amina had, apparently, identified the person she was to meet. However, while her companion was still close by, Amina was seized by three men in their early 20’s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed. Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father.

One of the men then put his hand over Amina’s mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad. The witness did not get the tag number. She promptly went and found Amina’s father.

The men are assumed to be members of one of the security services or the Baath Party militia. Amina’s present location is unknown and it is unclear if she is in a jail or being held elsewhere in Damascus.

This is the world we live in, that such nightmares can occur. There has been one update, but no encouraging words: keep an eye on her blog for any news.