Acknowledging True Belief™

Atheist Ireland is handing out a monthly award to the Really, Really True Believer™, and this month it goes to the anti-boobquake gang of Iran. Some Iranian clerics have sicced the vice police on department store mannequins, where they saw off the breasts of the shameless but inert hussies.

Muslim men do have a serious problem (as the clerics tell us) of sinful animal desires that they cannot control, since the purpose of the shapeless trash bag fashions imposed on women is justified as an anti-lust measure. How much more effective it will be if we’re led to think the trash bag is wrapped around some mutilated meat!

Let us count the ways the Catholic church is like the mob

After their recent raid to expose information about child-raping priests, the Belgian police are facing another problem.

Officials say that police are also looking into threats to the lives of some witnesses and magistrates connected to the case.

Jean Marc Meillure, a spokesman for the public prosecutors office, confirmed that an investigation was under way.

“There are some threats against certain people around the case, and the prosecutors office is investigating that,” he told the BBC.

He said the threats had been made against people who gave the authorities information or made a complaint, or against some magistrates.

Nobody rats out the head Ratzi. If the stool pigeons can’t be bought, they can be disappeared.

Jerk of the Day

Why, oh why do I despise Christianity so much? Look to George Berkin to understand why. And if you can’t understand, you’re probably one of those Christians.

He’s got a long article up arguing that God is being good to Christopher Hitchens by afflicting him with a lingering disease, because it will give him a chance to repent. And then it suggests that everyone pray for a deathbed conversion. Hallelujah.

First, Hitchens is not dead. He has cancer. There’s a difference. Learn it, or next time I see you I’m going to point out that you’re aging and start talking about you in the past tense, with lots of pitying looks.

Second, your god is clearly a dick, and so are you. I don’t see why you’re worshipping him, except that dicks seem to like other dicks an awful lot. Fortunately, your god is entirely imaginary, so I can’t get pissed off at him, but you are supposedly a civilized and rational human being, so I do get to regard you with deserved contempt.

Third, I have enough respect for Hitchens’ integrity and personal courage that even if he were on his deathbed, hopefully many, many years from now, I’d expect him to remain true to his principles…unless he were dying of Alzheimer’s disease, or major head trauma. Stop begging him to be weak and cowardly.

Most annoyingly of all, Berkin is addressing Hitchens and writes, “But now, let’s talk, one grownup to another.” Berkin, you condescending twit, someone is excluded from the conversation by that restriction, and it isn’t the guy who refuses to believe in magic wish fulfillment fantasies involving a dead charlatan who’ll poof you into a celestial candyland if you believe in a woman cursing humankind for eternity by eating bad fruit.

God is not great. But his followers are worse.

Praise the water!

It’s strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here’s another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand what the faithful were trying to do with their prayers for the Gulf…and then goes on to do exactly as I said the apologists should stop doing. He ignores the religious part of these prayer events. He says, as if it is refuting anything I say, that prayer reduces stress, has positive physiological effects, brings communities together, etc., etc., etc. It’s utterly clueless, and in a bizarre, twisted way, thoroughly disrespectful of religious thought, which I kind of admire, but doesn’t fit well with his message.

You know why people go off in groups and pray to God to stop the oil spill? Because they really hope that God will miraculously stop the oil spill.

Is that so hard to understand?

Josh babbles on about how people go to church for the daycare or the socializing or the activities, and that their “gatherings are about how the community will survive the crisis they’re facing more than they’re about prayer”. Condescending much, Josh? Do you ever talk to religious people? Because no, many of them are quite sincere in their faith and actually do believe their God does something. If I walked down to the local fundie church and suggested to members of the congregation that they were really there just for the coffee and cake, they’d give me that pitying look and tell me I really don’t understand church.

And do you imagine that atheists don’t believe that community is important? We know it is. We’d like to build communities that don’t rely on superstition and lies to function, though. We’re also honest enough to state that we think believers are wrong without trying to pretend that they don’t really believe.

My detestation of that patronizing attitude was prompted by a link I was sent to another appeal for prayer to help the Gulf. This one is more Newagey than Christian, but it’s the same sentiment: Magic incantations to a supernatural entity will fix everything.

A way for us to help heal the Gulf
Yesterday we received a letter from Dr. Masaru Emoto, who many of you will recognize as the scientist from Japan who has done research and publications about the characteristics of water. Among other things, his research reveals that water physically responds to emotions.

Right now, most of us have the predominantly angry emotion when we consider what is happening in the Gulf. And while certainly we are justified in that emotion, we may be of greater assistance to our planet and its life forms, if we sincerely, powerfully and humbly pray the prayer that Dr. Emoto himself has proposed.

“I send the energy of love and gratitude to the water and all the living creatures in the Gulf of Mexico and its surroundings. To the whales, dolphins, pelicans, fish, shellfish, plankton, coral, algae, and all living creatures . . . I am sorry. Please forgive us. Thank you. I love you. “

We are passing this request to people who we believe might be willing to participate in this prayer, to set an intention of love and healing that is so large, so overwhelming that we can perform a miracle in the Gulf of Mexico.

We are not powerless. We are powerful. Our united energy, speaking this prayer daily … multiple times daily … can literally shift the balance of destruction that is happening. We don’t have to know how, we just have to recognize that the power of love is greater than any power active in the Universe today.

Please join us in often repeating this healing prayer of Dr. Emoto’s. And feel free to copy and send it around the planet. Let’s take charge, and do our own clean up!

David Anselmo

Glenwood Springs

Love is greater than any other power? I don’t think love is even stronger than gravity, which is the weakest of the four fundamental forces. If Mr Anselmo trips, all his love won’t keep him from falling flat on his face.

But, you know, I’m still pretty sure that he earnestly believes the fol-de-rol he’s written down, and that he’s not just scribbling up such absurdities because it helps with his blood pressure. I’ll grant him that much.

Just in case, next time I flush, I’ll have a little chat with the toilet bowl and let the water know I’m rooting for it, before I flush and send it off to the Mississippi and down to the Gulf. It’ll ease my stress even if the waste water is otherwise inattentive. That should make Josh happy.

A suggestion for the Pope

Ol’ Ratzi is quite upset at the Belgian raids on Catholic church offices — he’s calling them “deplorable”, a “moment of sadness”, and is calling in the Belgian ambassador to the Vatican for an angry dressing-down.

He’s doing everything all wrong. Here’s what he should be doing: he should be calling the actions of priestly sex abusers deplorable and wrong, and insisting that the church will do everything in its power to correct the deep problems that have led to these awful acts. Then he should announce that the church will cooperate fully with all legal secular actions — and the Belgian raids were fully authorized by the Belgian state — in getting down to the heart of the matter, and go even further, offering to open up all relevant records to inspection. Then I might be convinced that the church is sincere in its pursuit of justice for all, not just its priests, but also its parishioners.

But then, I’m an atheist. Ignore me. I’m kind of enjoying the spectacle of the Catholic church putting on the indignant act of a guilty criminal caught red-handed and insisting that the police shouldn’t be working so hard to catch them.

How Mormons will conquer the world

There’s a documentary coming out about how the Mormons influenced California’s Proposition 8, and Salon has an interview with the director, Reed Cowan. He makes the point that it wasn’t just that they raised buckets of money, but that they had willing volunteers.

Nobody does it better than the Mormons. Money is one thing. What outsiders don’t understand is the volunteer aspect: the “means and time” trigger language that comes from the temple, and how it literally played to their obedience.

Their greatest asset is the obedience of their people. They had people signed up to go street by street and house by house. They knew who to take with them and were extremely organized.


What is it about those two words, “time and means,” that triggers obedience?

You’re told in the temple that what you are about to do, your eternal salvation hinges on it. God will not be mocked. Then you see a character named Satan who basically threatens to take away your eternal salvation if you don’t live up to covenants you’re making. When they used the trigger language of the temple, most of the Mormon faithful got it. Your salvation and the salvation of humanity depends on it. It’s inferred that you will lose everything if you don’t obey.

If there’s one thing religion is good at, it’s using fear to make people conform and obey. The question is whether uniformity and mass action at the behest of a few authoritarians is good for humanity…and I think not. At least not the kind of humanity I want to live among.

Bravo, Belgium!

The Belgian police have raided offices of the Catholic church in search of evidence of the usual Catholic crime — raping children. (It’s funny: ask someone to name a Catholic crime, and what’s the first thing they think of? It’s the worst PR in the world.)

I’m hoping that they’re just warming up for the big one — I’d like to see a UN raid of the Vatican, with a whole line of shame-faced old men in dresses led out to the paddy wagons like a transvestite Mafia mob.

That’s not a shoehorn, it’s a sledgehammer

The apologetic gang at BioLogos is complaining again — Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins and I didn’t understand their recent piece by Daniel Harrell on Adam and Eve, and oh, it is so hard to be the ones in the middle of all those atheist and creationist extremists.

Note to BioLogos: squatting in between those on the side of reason and evidence and those worshipping superstition and myth is not a better place. It just means you’re halfway to crazy town.

The core of Falk’s article consists of complaining that we didn’t understand what they were talking about, and took their article out of context. Unfortunately, as Falk attempts to restate the original bogus argument, it becomes apparent that the only ones who were clueless and confused were the theistic evolutionists. What they were doing in the original article was distinguishing between two alternatives: #1, Adam and Eve were created literally as the Bible says, and #2, that Adam and Eve were historical figures who were chosen by God out of existing populations that had evolved as science explains. #1 is patently ridiculous, as they admit, and comically, they argue that #2 is eminently reasonable and supportable by science, and assume that therefore all our criticisms must have been made under the misapprehension that we thought BioLogos was endorsing #1. No! We can read, and we could see exactly what they were saying with their goofy dichotomy, and we’re saying the whole effort to reconcile science with the book of Genesis is a misbegotten waste of time — we were addressing #2, not #1. (Although Harrell also argues that #1 could be true, since his god can do anything).

#1 and #2 are both wrong, and there is also a #3. There was no Adam and Eve. There is no reason to believe there was; the authors of the book of Genesis had no source of information about prehistory, no authority to outline anything but their own recent history, which they were only able to do rather poorly and inaccurately, and the whole story was simply made up. Furthermore, this fable of a few unique individuals founding the whole human race is contradicted by the evidence: we are descended from populations with a pattern of continuous variation, grading over long ages from species to species to species. Not only is it irreconcilable with the Genesis myth, but there is no reason to expect it would be.

What they are attempting to do is shoehorn the evidence into their theological preconceptions. They need to face up to facts: it’s not a shoehorn in this case. When you’re reduced to using a hatchet and a sledgehammer to wedge the divine foot in, the shoe simply doesn’t fit.

Another outing

An infamously anti-gay Lutheran pastor, Tom Brock, has been outed as gay himself. Unfortunately, the outing is ethically compromised by the fact that the writer accomplished it by infiltrating a confidential 12-step program for gay men dealing with “chastity issues”. Basically, he had to violate a promise of confidentiality. This is a tough one; if the program were a sincere effort by these men to deal honestly with their sexual orientation, then this revelation violates trust and reduces the effectiveness of the program, and does actual harm to innocent participants. I can’t condone that.

However, by the account of this reporter, it sounds like the program is more of an exercise in maintaining contempt for gays as a tool to help control their urges. I suppose that’s one way to do it, and an exposé of the program would be appropriate — it seems to be the usual Catholic (Brock is Lutheran, but the program is non-denominationally religious and dominated by Catholics) hypocrisy.

After the first round, conversation continues, ranging from discussions about a particular homosexual rut one of the members was in, to financial worries, criticism of progay political efforts, and defenses of Catholicism. The term “gay” is eschewed in favor of words like “disorder” or “gender disorder.” However, very occasionally, unsquelched comments cropped up about homophobic bigotry, plus even grudging admiration for the tenacity of out gay men facing societal ridicule.

When Brock was in attendance, the conversation inevitably would turn political, focusing on gay and church issues, and beyond–not only during his first round, but also in his sharing time, and before the session commenced.

…

When the topic of same-sex marriage came up, Brock stated, “The world needs [heterosexual] marriage.”

Another person chimed in, calling same-sex marriage “a cult of mutual masturbation”—oblivious to the unintentional humor.

At one point, Brock became very intense in talking about some recent statistics that the percentage of HIV/AIDS cases caused by homosexual contact had increased. He was accurate, which is why safer-sex information should be widely available–something the group certainly would oppose.

Brock also comes across as a nasty piece of work.

When it was Brock’s turn to share, he related that he recently had been on “a preaching mission to Slovakia,” where he met with other clergy.

Then, Brock admitted, “I fell into temptation. I was weak. That place has this really, really weird, demonic energy. I just got weak, and I had been so good for a long time. Things had been going so well for a long time. There’s a lot of gypsies there.”

According to Brock, he confessed the foregoing to someone at Hope Lutheran Church.

Brock clearly was put off by the gypsy presence in Slovakia, continuing with a sense of revulsion in his voice, “They’re toothless, filthy; they smell, stink; and the gypsies are trained in how to pick your pocket.”

In his video series, Brock slams ELCA Bishop Mark Hanson for his call to “combat racism” at a New Orleans youth conference.

He’s also a smug misogynist.

Later in the session, Brock remarked that even though he is “against the ordination of women pastors,” he presented a workshop to female Lutheran pastors in Slovakia. But, in his words, “I didn’t tell these women that I actually don’t believe in women being pastors.” However, he learned that many women pastors there were “assistant pastors to their husband, who was the head pastor,” and that ultimately, “nature takes over, when they have children, and they then assume their role as mother and leave ministry behind.”

That very day, on The Pastor’s Study, in describing the plight of an abused wife, Brock asserted that one “is to suffer for Christ. Her husband was a stinker, but she stuck it out for the sake of Christ.” In the same episode, he also railed against ELCA’s GLBT tolerance.

If I were to be interviewed by John Townsend, the author of the piece, I wouldn’t trust any promise he might make to me, which is one lesson — he has sacrificed his integrity to make this story. I can’t be too irate, though; it sounds like no innocents were harmed by the revelation, and if the effectiveness of the program is diminished, that’s no loss.

And Tom Brock stands exposed as a hypocrite who betrays the principles of his church who should be shunned by his congregation (but probably won’t be—the deeply gullible are rarely discouraged by the dishonesty of their leaders), and who has earned even greater contempt from those who oppose his hateful agenda.

Louisiana gives up on the Gulf

How else to interpret this moronic inaction from the state?

While cleanup crews and technical teams continue efforts to stop crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana lawmakers are proposing a different approach: prayer.

State senators designated Sunday as a day for citizens to ask for God’s help dealing with the oil disaster.

“Thus far efforts made by mortals to try to solve the crisis have been to no avail,” state Sen. Robert Adley said in a statement released after last week’s unanimous vote for the day of prayer. “It is clearly time for a miracle for us.”

Senator Adley! There is no god. Pray all you want, it will avail you nothing. Instead of wasting your effort in making pleas to the nonexistent, go down to the beach with an eyedropper and a thimble, and pluck up a little globule of oil — and you will have accomplished more.