Ladies, you need to listen to what Christian guys tell you to wear

They’re Christian, so you can trust them to have your best interests at heart. The Modesty Survey is a bizarre instrument created by asking young Christian women to put together heartfelt questions about their clothing (“Are bikinis immodest?” “Are jeans immodest?”), and then teenaged Christian boys are surveyed to get their opinions. Because, of course, the girls need boys’ advice.

Reading through the questions is weird: they’re phrased in different ways, but one of the most common motifs is the “stumbling block”. The boys are asked to judge whether an item of clothing is something that might cause them to think wicked thoughts…so once again, the women are to blame for inciting men’s behavior by wearing tight jeans or a strapless dress.

They’re also explicit about it:

We’re not telling you what to wear — we’re just telling you what we, as guys, have to guard against. It is God’s Word, your own heart and conscience, and your parents and godly friends who should help you decide what to do about it.

What they have to guard against? They should be plainer. “We’re not telling you what to wear — we’re just listing the stuff that will justify raping you.”

I get a Taliban tingle just reading it. It’s a far more generous document than anything Islam dictates — young Christian men do not want young Christian women to wear burkas — but in principle, it’s the same thing. It’s men declaring ownership of women’s bodies and telling them what to wear, with the the threat of justifiable sexual assault if they do not obey.

It is a little disturbing, though, to see that their logo has a picture of a woman with a veil over her face.

Hey, UK! How do you reconcile these two facts?

This is a rather horrifying article about young girls reading Harry Potter one moment, and then dragged off to get their clitorises chopped off. It’s got these nasty little details like, if you pay extra, you can get the butcher to use a clean knife.

But there’s an odd disjoint here, too. It’s the UK, a modern western nation. They have laws to prohibit mangling children.

The UK Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 makes it an offence to carry out FGM or to aid, abet or procure the service of another person. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, makes it against the law for FGM to be performed anywhere in the world on UK permanent residents of any age and carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment. To date, no prosecutions have been made under UK legislation.

That’s clear: a strict law and strong penalties, but no prosecutions — so it must be an effective law, right?

Wrong.

Some 500 to 2,000 British schoolgirls will be genitally mutilated over the summer holidays. Some will be taken abroad, others will be “cut” or circumcised and sewn closed here in the UK by women already living here or who are flown in and brought to “cutting parties” for a few girls at a time in a cost-saving exercise.

It’s happening right now. It seems to me that there ought to be 500-2000 arrests in the UK this year, maybe more, since they’ve got a 7 year backlog of neglected criminality.

If medical neglect of children can be a prosecutable crime here in benighted America, why isn’t the UK doing something to stop active, vicious mutilation of children?

A cult that kills in Oregon

Alayna Wyland is 7 months old, and she is suffering.

The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye.

There are pictures at the link. It’s not pretty. I know if my babies had a growth that was almost the size of a tennis ball that was destroying their face, I’d have been camped out at the hospital. But not Alayna’s parents! They have a special treatment plan.

The Wylands and their church reject medical care in favor of faith-healing — anointing with oil, laying on of hands, prayer and fasting. The parents testified at a juvenile court hearing last week that they never considered getting medical attention for Alayna.

According to court documents, Rebecca Wyland anointed Alayna with oil each time she changed the girl’s diaper and wiped away the yellow discharge that seeped daily from the baby’s left eye.

There they go with the magic anointing oil again! Does that stuff do anything? If we can waste time with homeopathy, maybe it’s about time someone did some clinical trials with anointing oil and put that crap to rest (not that it would make a bit of difference…).

The Wylands are rather vile, but at least this is taking place in Oregon, where “it is a crime for parents to intentionally and knowingly withhold necessary and adequate medical attention from their children”. Alayna has been placed in state custody for treatment, and both parents have been charged with first degree criminal mistreatment.

But wait, there’s more! The father was previously married.

Wyland’s first wife, Monique, died of breast cancer in 2006. She had not sought or received medical treatment for the condition, said Dr. Christopher Young, a deputy state medical examiner who signed the death certificate.

She died of untreated breast cancer? That poor woman — that’s a hard death, an agonizing death, and often, an unnecessary death — can that entire wretched cult be indicted for torture-murder? They seem to be leaving quite a pile of dead women and children.

Because even the moderate, liberal Christians think God is more important than a dog

There are now a few more details on the story of the dog given a communion wafer: the dog’s name is Trapper, the majority of the congregation was happy to see him get a cracker, it’s just one person who complained, and now dogs have been officially excommunicated from the church. And this is exactly why I despise the so-called “moderate” Christians.

Peggy Needham, the deputy people’s warden at the church, said that no further action would be taken.

“The backlash is from just one person,” she said.

“Something happened that won’t happen again. Something our interim priest did spontaneously.

“This person went to the top and emailed our bishop to make a fuss and change things. But he misjudged our congregation.”

No, he didn’t. He got exactly what he wanted. Notice that for most people in that church the incident with the dog was heartwarming — it fit well with their charitable vision of Christianity as a welcoming, friendly institution. One person complained, one bitter, dogmatic little man, and you know exactly what arguments he used: it was disrespectful to his imaginary god, it was a departure from church-sanctioned ritual, it gave worth to a mere animal that was reserved for good Anglicans. And the church bought it.

Hundreds of people value the humane, community-centered aspect of their church, and all that gets thrown out for one little pissant who truly believes in the petty, bogus disciplines of his poisonous faith.

I’ll believe he misjudged that congregation when at the next communion, every one of them brings up a loved pet to the rail, and the priest serves every one of them. It won’t happen, though, because the fear of god now compels them to obey.

God hates dogs?

This story is nice and sad at the same time. At an Anglican church in Canada, a parishioner attended with his dog, went up to take communion and his pet followed him, and after giving the man the magic cookie, the priest placed a communion wafer on the dog’s tongue, too. Hey, he was just waiting there with his tongue hanging out, it was the most natural thing to do. Unfortunately, and entirely predictably, some prissy-pants whiner in the congregation didn’t like it.

Days later, the church and diocese received a complaint from one parishioner, who felt the church offended the sacred ritual. The bread and wine are meant to represent the body and blood of Jesus Christ and are only to be given to those who have been baptized.

It’s a cracker. Come on. I’d rather make one dog happy than please all the dogmatists in the world.

And these speculations as rationalizations annoy me.

“In his email, the man’s argument was that Christ wouldn’t have liked it,” said Needham. “But in my opinion, Christ would have thought it was neat. It was just being human. And it made everyone smile.”

Face it, your god is simply a projection of your own personality and beliefs. He isn’t there. If you like dogs, you’ll imagine that your god likes dogs; if you think noisy smelly animals are a nuisance, your god bars the gates of heaven to them.

Mel Gibson is a product of his sick ideology

Christopher Hitchens addresses the latest media meltdown by Mel Gibson. It’s great stuff; people are making all these excuses for him, that he’s not really a racist, he’s not really violent, he’s not really a misogynist, he’s not really a loathsome wackjob…but Hitchens cuts through it all.

This is extraordinary. We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.

And then he follows up with damning examples from Gibson’s father and Gibson’s own actions.

It adds a fresh new perspective to all those fans of Gibson’s labor of love, The Passion, a sadistic piece of bloody anti-semitism. What Gibson rages about in (imagined) private and what he put on the screen in that movie are awfully hard to separate. One of Gibson’s most ardent defenders is right-wing Catholic kook Bill Donohue:

Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it. That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ, and it’s about truth. It’s about the messiah.

And Donohue is still flogging this line against anyone who criticizes Gibson:

[Frank] Rich is particularly angry at anyone who dares to mention the role played by secular Jews in fomenting anti-Catholicism. I am one Catholic who will not run from this charge. It is painfully obvious, that most of the anti-Catholicism that exists today comes from two major sources: ex-Catholics (and those with one foot out the door) and secular Jews.

It’s a disorder that isn’t restricted to Catholicism, though; the other recent expression of these anti-semitic views is none other than Glenn Beck.

Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life. He did have a choice. If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would have come back from the dead and made the the Jews pay for what they did.

Any day now they’ll be talking about blood libel. Isn’t it time now to stop pussy-footing around? These people are anti-semitic proto-fascists, their prejudices propped up by truly weird religious beliefs.

Stop the Stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

If you do nothing else. Please take a moment and sign the Petition.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/stop…
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/s…

Contact information for e-mailing the White house.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

And the President of Iran
http://cp.president.ir/en/

His e-mail (possibly)
dr-ahmadinejad@president.ir
http://www.siawi.org/article882.html

And some other details that might help
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/s…
Currently there are only 427 signatures on this site. I am sure there are other Petitions out there. I think making people aware is the most important thing. That and voicing our condemnation of this sentence.

This woman needs to be released.

What is it with the Sacred Lube?

It’s just one of those freakish religious practices I cannot comprehend, this strange “anointing” of heads and objects with oil. Why? Does their god just like his targets greased up? It’s especially inappropriate when a teacher regularly rubs magic lubricants onto her students.

A Norfolk teacher has resigned after it was discovered she was rubbing “holy oil” on students and their desks during school, a Norfolk Public Schools spokesperson said.

How stupid. Everyone knows that, in order to be effective, the proper way to bless the students is to decapitate a chicken at the lectern, and then swing it around your head by its feet to splatter the kiddies. At least the ones who aren’t crying afterwards will be very focused on everything you do.

The Vatican must have some framing experts on staff

They’ve done it again. They’ve declared that the ordination of women is as heinous a crime as raping children, simultaneously minimizing the trauma of child-rape and maximizing the insult to women. I don’t know how they do it. The Catholic church is rich, they’ve got a lot of very smart people suckered into their dogma, and they’ve been the voice of religion in the West for one and half millennia. How can they be so godawful horrible at this?

And then I realized it’s the 21st century, they’ve got lots of money, so they probably have communications experts all over the place. As we all know, the one strategy they all have is to suck up to their audience and never make them uncomfortable with new ideas, so when the Pope or a cardinal consults them on some medieval brain-fart they just had, they encourage him and reassure him and avoid telling him that it’s really stupid, and presto, the poor dumb priests confidently announce it to a skeptical world.

And best of all, the PR experts then get to manage the blowback. It’s a perfect gig.

A glimpse of a theocratic world

Nope, I’m going to call this story debunked. A commenter has pointed out that Jhelum has several established Christian communities and is not the monolithic Islamic city the story implies, so it looks like this is a complete fabrication by Compass Direct News, a Christian propaganda outfit. The only stories here are that Christians lie to feed their martyr complex, and sometimes I’m fooled.

Jamshed Masih is a police officer in Pakistan who also happens to be a Christian. He transferred to a town dominated by the local Muslim cleric, Maulana Mahfooz Khan. In a story that sounds like the beginning of a Western, Khan warned Masih that Jhelum was his place, and he wasn’t going to stand for any filthy Christian scum livin’ in this here town. Local businesses refused to serve his family, there was a lot of tension…if this were a movie, you’d expect the new sheriff in town to be cleaning up the intolerant boss.

This wasn’t a movie, though, and the real world never seems to resolve itself so neatly. Instead, while Masih was away, Khan accused his 11 year old son of blaspheming against Allah, roused up a mob of good devout Muslims, and murdered Masih’s wife and four young children. The only blasphemy described is that neighbors heard the children singing hymns at breakfast time.

Yes. They were slaughtered because they did not practice Khan’s religion of peace. And because children were singing songs Khan did not like.

Masih has filed a legal complaint. The police administrators have refused to accept it or do anything, because Khan is powerful in the area, and because, after all, the children were blaspheming against Islam.

No human being should ever have to live under a theocracy, the most barbarous and inhuman form of government anyone has ever developed.