Clerical collar fails to instill goodness

But I thought religion helped people live a moral life! We’re going to have to really struggle to find an ethical rationale for this pastor’s monstrous behavior.

A Baltimore pastor who worked with developmentally disabled people was charged Friday with befriending a blind and disabled man in his care, then paying a hit man $50,000 in church funds for an execution so he could collect life insurance money.

Police say Kevin Jerome Pushia, 32, who worked for four months as an operations manager for the Arc of Baltimore before abruptly quitting in January, confessed to plotting to kill Lemuel Wallace.

Pushia told police he persuaded Wallace and “numerous” other mentally challenged individuals to list him as a beneficiary on insurance policies.

A terse notation in Pushia’s planning calendar for Feb. 5, the day after Wallace was found dead in a Leakin Park bathroom stall from multiple gunshot wounds to the head and back, reads: “L.W. project completed,” police said.

Errm, Pushia must have wanted the money so he could perform good works, and he was helping Lemuel Wallace to be happier in heaven with Jesus?

Maybe it would be easier to admit that religion is ineffective at imposing any kind of socially useful moral code, but is a handy disguise for the amoral among us.

Atheist calls Christians “non-human”, commits murder

Oh, wait — I got the headline backwards. The real story is that a mentally disturbed, fanatical Christian/creationist and misogynist, went nuts, killed a young woman on a community college campus, and then killed himself. It’s a tragedy, but not at all exceptional, I’m afraid — the man was delusional and depressed, apparently frustrated that women weren’t obedient to him, and he decided to erupt into hateful violence.

The disturbing twist this time, though, is that the killer was a youtuber — and a big fan of VenomFangX, the infamously vapid creationist. You can see some of his pre-suicidal rants preserved for posterity, and they will make you wonder why he wasn’t getting psychiatric help. And yes, the lunatic does literally accuse atheists of being non-human and evil, but that doesn’t seem to have been the trigger for his break from reality…that seems to have stemmed more from his proprietary feelings towards women.

A heartless faith

There was an appalling and tragic plane crash in Montana: 14 people were killed, 7 of them children.

Tom Hagler, a mechanic at the Oroville airport, told The Sacramento Bee that he allowed several children ages 6 to 10 to use the airport bathroom before they boarded the doomed plane.

“There were a lot of kids in the group,” he said, “a lot of really cute kids.”

Nine of them were members of one family. This was a horrifying and genuinely horrible accident; I can’t begin to imagine the grief felt by the survivors, who lost children and grandchildren.

[Read more…]

You aren’t doing it right

Muzzammil Hassan had a great idea: he established a television station to run programming that would counter stereotypes about Muslims. That sounds like a fine plan…but then his wife asked for a divorce, and his response was to murder and decapitate her, which rather confirms a particularly nasty stereotype.

Unless, perhaps, it’s not a stereotype, but simply a fact that Islam is a patriarchal religion of misogyny.

She is “in the condition to have babies”

Italy is experiencing its own version of the Terry Schiavo case. A woman, Eluana Englaro, was in a car crash 17 years ago that caused catastrophic brain damage — she’s been in a vegetative state ever since, and the family has been engaged in a legal fight for many years to pull the plug and allow her to die with a little dignity. They finally won that battle recently, and are easing her off life support and a feeding tube.

Cue the right wing. Silvio Berlusconi, Bush-like Prime Minister of Italy, has rushed to impose an emergency decree blocking the suspension of life support, a decision made after consulting with the Vatican. Here’s a good rule: never consult the priesthood of a death cult before making a life-and-death decision. They always give stupid and evil advice.

Berlusconi’s rationalization is appalling and repugnant. He claims to be “rescuing” Englaro — not true, since she was effectively dead 17 years ago — and in what has to be the most tasteless and disgusting excuse made yet for the actions of these villains of the right, has further justified it by saying that physically she is “in the condition to have babies”. So, what is Berlusconi going to do next in his bizarro Prince Charming act? Fertilize her eggs?

It’s nice to know that the Catholic Church’s criteria for the value of a woman’s life focus on the functionality of her ovaries rather than the existence of her mind.

Here’s one face of evil

This is Samira Jassam. She is not a nice lady.

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She was responsible for sending men out to rape women, so that in their despair and shame she’d be able to recruit them as suicide bombers. She’s a monster. The cowards who would do her bidding and assault innocent women are also creatures of contempt.

This is where a pathologically religious culture can end up: with parasites like this who exploit the fear and hatred to create more fear and hatred.

There is no religion of peace

I’ve been hiding from the horrible news in the Middle East, but this story induced me to poke my head out of my tortoise shell…so I can puke. A rabbi consulted his holy books to see what God had to say about the vicious violence going on right now, and you can guess what God’s word might be:

Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.

Of course. Did we expect anything else? No moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians. Thank you for the carte blanche, God. How about raping? Is that OK? Baby butchering? Raping butchered babies? I’m sure it’s all good.

Sometimes it is so difficult to be an atheist. I don’t even have the solace of imagining Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu sizzling in hell, right next to Arnaud Armaury.

There are still people like this roaming about

America is kind of a land of thugs, isn’t it? Here’s the latest sordid story: two Ecuadorian brothers are walking down the street, an SUV full of morons mistakes them for a gay couple, and they jump out and beat one of them to death.

[Jose] Sucuzhanay (suh-KOO-chen-eye) and his brother Romel, 38, were walking arm-in-arm after a night out when a sport utility vehicle pulled up near them at a Brooklyn stoplight, police said.

Witnesses said they heard the men in the car shouting anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs at the brothers. The attackers jumped out of the car and smashed a beer bottle over Jose Sucuzhanay’s head, hit him in the head with an aluminum baseball bat and kicked him, police said. Romel Sucuzhanay was able to get away; the attackers drove off after he returned and said he had called police, authorities said.

If anyone wants to talk about civilized behavior, this isn’t it.

God and sex: two potent ideas that never get along well together

Imagine yourself in this situation. A young girl is accused of a heinous crime — use your imagination here, too, and think of the most horrible thing a person can do — and she is trapped in front of you, helpless. You have a rock in your hands. People around you are urging you to kill her; they say that you are justified in taking her life. What would you do?

Let’s say you don’t have a rock, but are just part of the large crowd of spectators, witnessing a small group of men killing this girl. What would you do then?

Be honest now.

I wouldn’t be able to do kill anyone, and I would try to stop the killers. She could be an unrepentant mass murderer, and I couldn’t be an executioner — I wouldn’t want to sink to her level, and I think killing is an easy ‘solution’ that solves nothing. At the same time, it reduces the humanity of the killers, and diminishes the quality of our culture. I may not be the target myself, but such acts harm me.

That makes this story of a 13 year old girl stoned to death for adultery in Somalia incomprehensible to me. I know that people do evil all the time, but this was a mob of a thousand people watching 50 thugs murder someone in a particularly brutal fashion. Couldn’t just a few have raised a voice in protest, couldn’t some small fraction of that thousand intervened? Are the killers so divorced from empathy and morality that they would gladly snuff out the life of someone who can do them no harm?

What’s especially appalling is that the murderers weren’t driven by a fundamental human need — they didn’t kill her because they were defending themselves, or because they were starving, or because she had some real power that could harm them. She was killed because she offended their sense of sexual propriety. Because they perceived her as sexually potent, she challenged their own insecure, mouselike manhood. This is outrageously vile.

And even at that, she was an innocent. She was a 13 year old girl who had been raped by three men, and for this she was dragged out, begging for her life, buried up to her neck, and then stoned to death by weak, blustering men who let their machismo overwhelm their humanity.

And of course, this was driven by Islamist delusions. Religion is excellent at elevating intangible, untestable lies to a higher plane of moral significance than something as real and as simple as the life of a child.

I should also add, before everyone condemns this as simply the act of a primitive society, that the same impulse is at work right here in America. Those people who voted yes on Proposition 8 in California were simply performing a slightly more civilized version of casting a stone at those who offend their moral and religious sense of propriety.

What word is missing in this story?

I’m sure everyone has already heard about the plot to murder Obama and many others:

Two white supremacists allegedly plotted to go on a national killing spree, shooting and decapitating black people and ultimately targeting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, federal authorities said Monday.

In all, the two men whom officials described as neo-Nazi skinheads planned to kill 88 people – 14 by beheading, according to documents unsealed in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn.

It’s a horrible and sordid story of idiots with guns, but in scanning the various news sources, there is a curious but obvious word missing — a word that normally our media and government fling about with unscrupulous abandon.

That word is “terrorism”.

Doesn’t it strike you as peculiar that white homegrown right-wing fascist killers are somehow exempt from being called what they are — terrorists?