Enough. David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” killer who wandered the streets of New York in the 1970s, killing people in their cars, has a lot of new friends now: born again Christians. And he has turned into a shill for Jesus.
I think I’m feeling ill.
Molly Norris, the cartoonist who launched “Draw Mohammed Day” (and who later withdrew herself from the event, citing her fear of persecution) has just been put on a hit list, calling for Muslims to murder her.
The man calling for her death is this Yemeni cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, a pleasant looking fellow who also cheerfully encouraged the Fort Hood massacre. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but behind that smiling face is the mind of a hateful monster.
He’s from the US. He claims to have served as an imam in California, Colorado, and Virginia. And now he’s holed up in Yemen, advocating death for cartoons.
I can’t tell what’s going on here. Did Islam turn him into a psychopath? Or do psychopaths just find a happy home in Islam? Either way, Allah is an abomination that poisons people’s minds. It might reassure me of the good intentions and harmlessness of faith if I saw Muslims rioting in cities around the world, protesting the infamy that people like Awlaki bring down on Islam…but I won’t hold my breath waiting for it.
I just noticed — there’s a poll at that link.
Yes. She was making a statement protected under the First Ammendment. That’s her job. 41%
No. She knew Islam forbids drawing the likeness of Mohammed. This is insulting, not fun. 51%
Not sure. 7%
Disillusion me some more, people. A majority thinks the problem here is with a cartoonist drawing a teacup?
That’s some houseguest. The Pope invited himself to visit England, and asked the British government to pay for it — that takes some gall right there — and is now revealing that the bill for his visit will be at least £20 million. They’re dropping all that cash to fête a ringleader for child rapists…it makes no sense. What are people doing over there?
There ought to be a flat declaration that if he wants to visit England, he’s doing so as a private citizen — all costs to be paid by the Catholic church — and that there will also be no protection against being served any legal papers. He’s head of a criminal organization, and that shouldn’t warrant any special privileges.
The Supreme Court recently decided that campus student groups do not have to be subsidized by the university if they discriminate — so, for instance, the campus Christian club can’t refuse to admit gays and also collect university money. Perfectly reasonable, to my mind.
It’s driving flitterbrained conservatives mad, though. They can’t discriminate? Injustice! Perhaps one of the craziest is Mike Adams, who has announced his intention to abuse the ruling at UNC Wilmington.
…when I get back to the secular university in August, I plan to round up the students I know who are most hostile to atheism. Then I’m going to get them to help me find atheist-haters willing to join atheist student groups across the South. I plan to use my young fundamentalist Christian warriors to undermine the mission of every group that disagrees with me on the existence of God.
What a coincidence — I’m hoping to restart the UMM Freethinkers group this August, too. I can’t quite imagine bringing together students interested in atheism/agnosticism/secularism and telling them our plan is for them to join Christian groups instead, and become pests and troublemakers. That plan is just bizarre, and a disservice to the honest discussion of the issues…and a disservice to the students. Mike Adams doesn’t care!
That means an invading group can turn a smaller, weaker group into second class citizens on campus. That’s what I intend to do to those groups who do not believe in God.
This could get really interesting. It’s not just the students who’ll be annoyed; there’s this little thing called ‘collegiality’, where we have to work together with our fellow faculty. And those faculty may be advising some of those other groups. I can just imagine what would happen if I tried to turn freethinkers on campus into militant disruptors of other organizations: their faculty advisors would descend on me in fury. I might even suddenly find myself nominated and elected to serve on some of the more tedious committees on campus.
And here’s the kicker:
I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident.
This guy actually works at a university? Madness.
By the way, if any Christians or Muslims want to join the UMM Freethinkers, they’d be welcome. We like debate. It would make the meetings lively.
…it’s books about how our pets go to heaven.
Author Ptolemy Tompkins tracks the history of the relationship between humans and animals in the new book, “The Divine Life of Animals.” Prompted to write by the death of his pet rabbit, Angus, Tompkins looks to the ancient past for the best models of animal-human interaction.
Och, Angus, ye cain’t be daid!
What of Mr McGregor? Burnin’ in hell where no wee bunny goes, no doubt.
In North Carolina, Christians defaced an atheist billboard. These things happen; there are always a few jerks in any movement who’ll go out and vandalize private property because they’re so sure they’re in the right that the laws don’t apply to them. Normally, the organizations and the sane people behind the movement will repudiate such actions — if it had been a Christian billboard (and there are many of those, I can tell you) that had been defaced (which I have never seen happen), I’d be deploring the action myself.
Unfortunately, sane people are in short supply on the side of Christianity. They do have Chrissy Satterfield, though.
Just when I start believing there is no hope for our country I get a little reminder from my God that all is not lost. It was reported June 29 that a billboard sign sponsored by a North Carolina atheist organization had been vandalized. The ad reads, “One Nation Indivisible.” It seems someone didn’t think the sign was an accurate depiction of our Pledge of Allegiance, so the vandals inserted “Under God” with spray paint – and I couldn’t be more relieved. It’s nice to know that I am not alone in my beliefs and that some people are still willing to stand on the right side of truth.
Never would I encourage vandalism, but in this case I think I’ll let it slide. Atheists have been vandalizing my beliefs for years, so it’s about time the shoe was on the other foot. When asked about the vandalism, William Warren, the spokesman for Charlotte Atheists and Agnostics, said, “It was done by one or two people off on their own who decided their only recourse was vandalism rather than having a conversation.” Hmm. That’s interesting, because the Charlotte Atheists and Agnostics felt its only recourse was to deliberately insult those who understand the importance of “Under God.” They probably figured that because the Bible teaches Christians to turn the other cheek, we’ll just take their abuse forever. We will only take so much before we stand up against our oppressors. Besides, I can’t count how many times an atheist and I have had a “conversation.” They’re not as calm and passive as Warren suggests.
Oh. “I’d never encourage vandalism, but <wink, wink> atheists deserve it.”
The brain of Chrissy is a broken and frightening thing. The North Carolina billboard is about as mild as we can get — it’s got a simple and even patriotic message about national union that simply uses a phrase from the pledge of allegiance, pointedly leaving out the 1950s addition of “under god”. Chrissy characterizes this as “abuse”, and that for someone to hold an opinion different from her own is “vandalizing her beliefs”. The atheists have apparently been sticking a spray can nozzle up her nostrils and scrawling graffiti on her brain…which if you think about it, actually explains a lot.
The whole article is a self-righteous exercise in justifying vandalism and encouraging others to continue the practice. It represents a rather worrying escalation of the conflict to the incitement to violent action against property, all wrapped in cowardly weasel words to maintain implausible deniability.
I would like to extend my deepest thanks to the man or woman responsible for this vandalism. I appreciate the action you took. Thank you for reminding me that I’m not alone. It took a lot of guts to do what you did – and the fact that you haven’t stepped forward to take credit makes you a hero. It shows everyone that you are more devoted to the message than you are to the spotlight. I encourage you to keep your cover. Don’t give the secular world a reason to call your name; instead, let them call for our God.
I also need to extend a thank-you to some people in Sacramento and Detroit. In February, 10 atheist billboards were defaced in the Golden State and a slew of atheist bus ads were vandalized in Detroit. My dose of honesty this week: I am not happy that vandalism seems to be the only way to get an atheist’s attention. I’m happy that I can count on other Christians to stand up for themselves and for Christians everywhere. It gives me hope.
We will not reciprocate. Atheists should not be faceless cowards who skulk along and deface private property, and we’re not going to call people who do such things “heroes”. What gives me hope is that atheists will continue to simply stand up, quietly speak the truth, and be good citizens.
We’ll let the Christians take the low road.
Kenneth Howell was an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois. He is not being rehired at the end of his contract, apparently because he has been accused of hate speech against gays by a student. He had written an email to his students defending the Catholic position on homosexuality, and a friend of one of the students wrote to the university and the media accusing the professor of “hate speech”, of “indoctrinating students”, and “limiting the marketplace of ideas”.
I hate to say it, but I think the student was wrong. I read the professor’s email, and I don’t think it is hate speech at all.
It’s stupid speech.
A letter that condemned students, that threatened students if they didn’t agree with his views, that discriminated against a segment of society, or that denied people full participation in the culture for their views or background or private practices…that would be hate speech. This letter, though, is a pedantic and polite explanation of the views of the professor and of the Catholic church and of his interpretation of utilitarianism, and in fact is careful to say that he isn’t condemning any individuals. We can’t endorse using this kind of discussion as an excuse to expel people from academia — we want professors and students to be able to communicate freely with one another, without fear of retaliation. I see no sign that the professor was discussing the matter in a way that disrespects any of his students.
And the student complaining was doing so poorly. The professor’s ideas made him uncomfortable. He disliked what he said. He thought the professor was insensitive.
Those are not good reasons. If a student is never made uncomfortable, that student is not getting an education.
Bad reasons are given, but I still think UI made the right decision in not renewing this guy’s contract. Kenneth Howell is in ignorant fool who mistakes his religious dogma and his personal prejudices for knowledge.
Here’s an example. Keep in mind that this fellow is a professor, supposedly teaching college students something about philosophy. Here he’s trying to explain why homosexuality is wrong.
But the more significant problem has to do with the fact that the consent criterion is not related in any way to the NATURE of the act itself. This is where Natural Moral Law (NML) objects. NML says that Morality must be a response to REALITY. In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same. How do we know this? By looking at REALITY. Men and women are complementary in their anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Men and women are not interchangeable. So, a moral sexual act has to be between persons that are fitted for that act. Consent is important but there is more than consent needed.
One example applicable to homosexual acts illustrates the problem. To the best of my knowledge, in a sexual relationship between two men, one of them tends to act as the “woman” while the other acts as the “man.” In this scenario, homosexual men have been known to engage in certain types of actions for which their bodies are not fitted. I don’t want to be too graphic so I won’t go into details but a physician has told me that these acts are deleterious to the health of one or possibly both of the men. Yet, if the morality of the act is judged only by mutual consent, then there are clearly homosexual acts which are injurious to their health but which are consented to. Why are they injurious? Because they violate the meaning, structure, and (sometimes) health of the human body.
REALITY, huh?
Here’s reality. A penis fits nicely in the hand, and a hand is usually better at stimulating the clitoris than a penis in the vagina, and our anatomy is such that our arms are of the right length to comfortably reach our genitals. Therefore, masturbation is a moral sexual act. We can extend this to point out that a man’s hand can stimulate a clitoris and a woman’s hand can stimulate a penis, and therefore, mutual masturbation, as is being practiced by tens of thousands of teenagers on this Friday night, is also a rightful act. There is no practical difference in anatomy or physiology between mutual masturbation between a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple, so these acts are also entirely natural.
This reasoning can be extended to a great many sexual acts: oral and anal sex, frottage of various kinds, fantasy play, sadomasochism, etc. There are more aspects of male and female anatomy in which they are alike than in which they differ, and in fact the only act which can be uniquely performed by a male and female couple is penile-vaginal intercourse. So this one act out of many is all that this professor can point to in order to justify heterosexuality as the only proper interaction, but this requires ignoring the majority of human sexual behaviors. I have to wonder if all Catholic teaching permits in the bedroom is genital-genital contact. How sad for them.
Complementarity is also an invalid requirement. Men have lips and a tongue; women have lips and a tongue. It seems to me that a lot of heterosexual couples acquire a great deal of pleasure from kissing, despite the fact that the anatomy of that portion of their bodies is largely interchangeable (in an abstract sense, of course). Is this wrongful? Or are we forced to agree that the equivalent kissing between two men or two women cannot be judged by the nature of the act to be in violation of natural moral law?
I would entirely agree with Howell on one point: complementarity of the psychology of the two sexual partners is an important part of healthy sex. Unfortunately for his premise, psychology is not so strictly sorted with the genitalia; just as there are many women and even more men with whom I would be miserable and stressed to share a bed, there are people who have a great deal of difficulty finding the necessary complementarity of desire in partners of a different sex. This should be the most important criterion in a sexual partner, whether you can find joy together, and it’s often independent of all that meat below the neck. Although that stuff helps. And the brain often finds arousal in surprising places.
Howell’s ideas about homosexual practices are embarrassingly ignorant. He doesn’t know, so why does he profess to know? This myth that homosexuality involves taking the roles of man and woman is one of the oldest and silliest claims around — it’s not usually true (although it can be, since sex seems to throw out all our rules and expectations). Gay men are attracted to men, lesbians are attracted to women, not to clumsy impersonations of the sex they are less interested in.
Homosexuals and heterosexuals do not engage in actions for which their bodies are not fitted. If they don’t fit, they can’t do them. I mean, really.
The health argument is completely wrong. Many homosexuals will engage only in the kinds of activities that heterosexuals would call heavy petting — this obviously isn’t a problem. That good Christian homosexual, George Rekers, reportedly achieved arousal and orgasm from massage and a “long stroke” which did not involve extensive genital contact at all. And most of the sexual activities carried out by gay men are also carried out by heterosexual men with their female partners. You just can’t isolate gay practices as unnatural without also condemning a great many heterosexual practices.
Also, if we’re going to judge the rightness of a sex act by its health consequences, then lesbians are the most natural and moral of us all. They have the least risk of transmission of sexual diseases, do the least physical damage to each other’s delicate tissues, and are not going to get each other pregnant, which has incredibly deleterious effects on a woman’s health. In fact, the worst thing you can do to a woman sexually in terms of her health is for a man to put his penis in her vagina. Talk about violating the structure and health of a human body!
Of course, later in his silly letter Howell tries to claim that sexual reality is all tied up in procreation and cusses out that great Catholic evil, contraception. Again, he has a blinkered view of sex: some of the best reasons to have it are love and fun. But then, Catholics always seem to forget those.
I think it entirely reasonable to boot Kenneth Howell out of UI because he’s not very bright and doesn’t meet the intellectual standards I expect of UI professors. Of course, part of the reason for his weird shortcomings is the fact that he’s a professor of religion who is spitting up Catholic dogma, and one big problem is that a respected major university is offering courses in Catholicism taught by its adherents as serious philosophy, rather than teaching it as cultural anthropology by someone who can maintain a little distance from its weird precepts. Kick Howell out, but send the Catholic theologians packing right after him.
It’s easy. Bait your hook with stupid.
It’s true, we’re a sucker for that stuff, although it does have a downside. We’ll come up, swallow the bait, follow the line to its source, devour the poor fool holding the pole, and then waddle off, all fat and smug. It’s our nature, we can’t help it.
So, for instance, an Indiana politician who is considered a potential presidential candidate, Mitch Daniels, talks about atheism.
People who reject the idea of a God — who think that we’re just accidental protoplasm — have always been with us. What bothers me is the implications — which not all such folks have thought through — because really, if we are just accidental, if this life is all there is, if there is no eternal standard of right and wrong, then all that matters is power.
And atheism leads to brutality. All the horrific crimes of the last century were committed by atheists — Stalin and Hitler and Mao and so forth — because it flows very naturally from an idea that there is no judgment and there is nothing other than the brief time we spend on this Earth.
You should read the rest of that interview, especially the part where he talks about not being ostentatious with his faith. It’s so precious.
The projection is strong in this one. I don’t know if I’d want a president who thought the world was divided into people who thought the only two possible purposes in life were to glorify God or a brutal drive to power.
Daniels is an example of a Christian considered smart enough to be president. You should see what the brain-damaged masses believe. It’s always fun to be lectured about what I believe by a marginally literate kook. Did you know that atheists believe in these six things?
She even made a video about it!
But wait! You haven’t seen the scariest part! Who is this person?
Jellooo I’m Bev, I’m a health care provider, I work in a hospital and nursing home. I also earn my degree in Bachelor of Science major in Management, I teach academic program to toddlers, children and young adults, I also teach speech to foreign student.
If only she’d move to Indiana, she could run for president someday.
This is a horrific story out of India, and the weird thing is that everyone is condemning the bloody, violent end of the story, but treating the preliminaries as a matter of course. Here’s the outline, as near as I can extract from a scattering of stories, often in poor English.
In March, TJ Joseph, a professor at a private Catholic college in Kerala, gave an exam that apparently offended Muslim students. Here’s the only description of the awful exam question I could find:
The indicted questionnaire however did not include anything that could be construed as against the Muslim religion. The authorities of Newman College, told AsiaNews that in the test, Prof. Joseph tells the story of a fishmonger who, despite hard work, becomes increasingly poor. The monger’s name is Mohammad In his desperation, he spoke to God and also asked his brother why his fortunes were dwindling. His brother told Mohammed: “Why are you calling God, God, God….” Students were asked to specify the punctuation of the narrative.
He was an instructor in Malayalam, one of the many languages of India, so this was an exercise in reading and punctuation. But the Muslim community took offense, for some indecipherable reason, and some bloggers even called the question a “blunder” and “disgraceful”, to my complete bafflement.
It gets worse. He was suspended from his job. He was arrested. One account says his son was also arrested and tortured. He got out on bail, and apparently went into hiding because of the ongoing death threats…so the police put up a wanted poster for his arrest.
This is already insane. Apparently this kind of harrassment is taken for granted in Kerala, and the police are willing to assist in it.
Could it get worse? Of course it can.
In a horrific instance of Talibanism, Muslim fanatics in Kerala on Sunday chopped off the right hand of a college lecturer, accusing him of setting a question paper with a derogatory reference to the Prophet.
Lecturer T J Joseph was returning home from church with his mother and sister around 8.30 am in Muvattupuzha in Ernakulam district when he was accosted by the attackers. “We had just got into our car when a van pulled up in front. Around eight people armed with swords and knives emerged and pulled out Joseph after smashing the windscreen.
They then chopped off his right hand and stabbed him in the left thigh,” said Joseph’s sister, Mary Stella, a nun.
Jebus. Karen Armstrong was just complaining that we want to “marginalise religion”. Damned straight we do.
The last time I got a glimpse of the wretched new book from Marilynne Robinson, the review was sufficient to dissuade me from bothering to ever read it. Now we have a positive review from Karen Armstrong, and I am now convinced that if ever I am confronted with this work, the only appropriate response would be to unzip my fly and piss on it, on the spot. Only my deeply ingrained social conditioning would hinder me. Dammit, why can’t I live freely and express my primal impulses without these nagging voices in my head?
Once again, her thesis is that her own twisted version of science, which is always reductionist and ignores the forest for the hadrons, baryons, and mesons that make it up, is a curse upon civilization that destroys all beauty and aspirations. How dare we turn a critical eye upon good ol’ subjective superstition? And besides, science completely ignores the mind and art and strangeness and doesn’t encourage people to ever think long, long thoughts.
How’s your bladder holding up?
This, of course, is entirely copacetic with Karen Armstrong’s views. It isn’t civilized if it isn’t wallowing in the subjective and whining piteously about all those investigators of the real with their bright lights and poking fingers harshing her mellow and demanding that she say something sensible, clear, and objectively verifiable. In order to make her complaints justifiable, though, she has to lie about science. Oh, wait — perhaps I should be more charitable. She is obstinately ignorant of science, so she isn’t exactly lying…she just makes fantastic nonsense up about it.
In the past, the voices that say “there is something more” have always been right. The positivist approach would not only marginalise religion, but also the arts, culture, history, and the classical and humanist traditions. Most prescient of all is Robinson’s contention that “it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.”
I wish she had developed this crucial insight, because it is urgently needed at this moment of crisis in human history. If we are indeed completely in thrall to the selfish gene, why not throw all constraint to the winds and just be selfish — individually and collectively, in our politics, social arrangements, financial and economic dealings?
There’s always something more? What? It seems to me that this belief in something beyond the natural and material world has always been wrong — at least, it’s been in constant retreat for the last half dozen centuries, fading into worship of ever more petty and intangible deities. It takes a truly deluded mind to translate a perennial collapse of a world view into a pattern of unending victory.
I should think she should also realize that we happy ‘positivists’ are also trying to contain the worst impulses of human nature, but those sorry worst include the fuzzy tendency to reify wishful thinking into a collection of demanding gods and indignant priests. They don’t include art and culture and history. We aren’t the philistines. We aren’t the ones mangling a deep-rooted historical endeavor with an enviable record of alleviating human suffering and liberating the human mind, science, in order to justify lotus-eating ignorance.
As for that inane argument that the path to progress is by closing our eyes to an ugly reality and focusing on the best and most beautiful, I offer one counter-example: public health. You can appreciate that cholera, for instance, is an ugly, cruel disease that has destroyed millions in unpleasant ways, ripping through whole families, killing children in their mothers’ arms by making them shit themselves to death. It’s doctors and public health scientists that stared that ugly death in the face and fought it who made progress and reduced its ravages. There is no illusion that because it is natural, because it has plagued us for ages, because we were in thrall to merciless epidemics, that we must therefore surrender to it. We would not have gotten the answers we do have if we’d turned a blind eye to the suffering because it would demean our view of the world, and if we’d chosen instead to simply celebrate the bright, healthy, happy people who had escaped the disease (so far…oh, but please, do not disturb our opium dreams with possible unpleasant futures!)
Those selfish genes are real, but they aren’t quite what Armstrong imagines they are — when her understanding is a millimeter deep, perhaps it’s understandable that she would leap to the silly midgleyesque conclusion that it means that we are ruled by genes for nastiness and spite and evil, when it only refers to a pattern of inheritance and selection for genes that promote their own perpetuation…which can include genes that enhance cooperation and altruism, as well. But even if it were such a grim story of bad genes thriving, it does not imply in any way that scientists are cheering on selfishness, or that they advocate giving up and becoming short-sighted brutes.
On the contrary, only by understanding reality can we deal with it and apply our minds to aspire to that ambitious human world filled with art and culture and science and reason and ethical behavior that Armstrong and Robinson probably want, too. The only way to accomplish that, though, is by working harder at mastering reality, a key part of the formula that they seem to miss as they so busily languish in their dreams.
I’m still not buying their books, not even for pissing upon.
Ophelia Benson has already taken aim at Robinson/Armstrong. I’m gettin’ slow in my old age.
