Atheism book found in home linked to fire suspect!

Two suspects in a Texas church arson have been arrested. Unfortunately, guess what the most important fact in the presentation of the story is?

Investigators have seized books on demons and atheism as well as rifles and knives from in a home linked to one of the men charged with setting an east Texas church on fire and suspected in a string of similar blazes.

Jason Robert Bourque, 19, and Daniel George McAllister, 21, were arrested Sunday and charged with a single count of felony arson in the torching of the Dover Baptist Church near Tyler about 90 miles east of Dallas.

Right. Because atheists don’t believe in gods, but they do believe in demons. All this tells me is that these are a couple of confused young men…but if they’re setting fires, we already knew that.

Oh, wait…that report left something out. Here’s another one. I’ll just quote the paragraph that was buried near the end.

Jason Bourque’s family home in Lindale was also searched, yielding a small plastic bag of “suspected” marijuana seeds, more Skechers shoes, and three Bibles.

Ooops. One atheist book, one book about demonic possession, and three Bibles. Surely, that must be the most relevant datum, don’t you think?

More faith-based evil

Cults are all about control, and small children must be very hard to control.

The leader of a religious cult was “outraged” when a 1-year-old boy did not say “Amen” before a meal and ordered her followers to deprive him of food and water until he died, a Baltimore prosecutor told jurors Monday.

Another horrifying detail: the mother of the boy went along with the punishment and watched him waste away…all because she wanted to be accepted as a member of the cult.

Francis Collins is up to the same old tricks

Collins has a new book coming out, titled Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith. It’s the same old drivel: CS Lewis, old chestnuts re-roasted on a dying fire, nature and science somehow testifying to the truth of faith, moral law, fine-tuning, the Big Bang, etc. Jerry Coyne says it just right:

Enough is enough.  Collins is director of the NIH, and is using his office to argue publicly that scientific evidence—the Big Bang, the “Moral Law” and so forth—points to the existence of a God.  That is blurring the lines between faith and science: exactly what I hoped he would not do when he took his new job.

And to those who say that he has the right to publish this sort of stuff, well, yes he does.  He has the legal right.  But it’s not judicious to argue publicly, as the most important scientist in the US, that there is scientific evidence for God.  Imagine, for example, the outcry that would ensue if Collins were an atheist and, as NIH director, published a collection of atheistic essays along the lines of Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist, but also arguing that scientific evidence proved that there was no God.  He would, of course, promptly be canned as NIH director.

Or imagine if Collins were a Scientologist, arguing that the evidence pointed to the existence of Xenu and ancient “body-thetans” that still plague humans today. Or a Muslim, arguing that evidence pointed to the existence of Allah, and of Mohamed as his divine prophet.  Or if he published a book showing how scientific evidence pointed to the efficacy of astrology, or witchcraft.  People would think he was nuts.

Collins gets away with this kind of stuff only because, in America, Christianity is a socially sanctioned superstition.  He’s the chief government scientist, but he won’t stop conflating science and faith.  He had his chance, and he blew it.  He should step down.

I note that one of the ways the book is being promoted is by touting the credentials of its editor as “the Director of the National Institutes of Health.” Atheists are often told that they are “harming the cause” by being outspoken with their ideas, that it is impolitic for science educators to be forthright about their godlessness, that we should emphasize the compatibility of science and religion (even when we think it is false) — and we’re also told that this is part of the virtue of scientific objectivity, since we can’t possibly disprove the existence of a god. I should like to see some of those same people and organizations (like, say, the Colgate Twins or the NCSE) to come out and similarly deplore this promotion of medieval nonsense by a supposed scholar of good science.

They won’t. It’s never been about fairness or diplomacy or objectivity. It’s always been about pandering to a delusion held by a majority.

They don’t really care about the children

About 20 clergy, representing the very best of Christian theology, of course, and various Republicans gathered in Virginia to protest the existence of Planned Parenthood—they want all state funding, about $35,000 a year, stopped. They claim that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization because it provides abortions (which I consider a necessary and brave service, given the violence of anti-choice lunatics) and contraceptives, ignoring the fact that they also provide reproductive health care for women. In a just and rational world, Planned Parenthood would be regarded as a heroic organization, helping to make this a better world.

Not in the minds of these pious zealots, though. Bob Marshall voluntarily exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the protest with a few choice words.

The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children.

In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment Christians would suggest.

He’s lying. There is no evidence that abortion imposes long term risk of any kind on women or their subsequent children. He’s confusing what he wishes were true with what is actually true.

I despise his imaginary, wrathful, poisonous, child-torturing god. This is what these kinds of Christians hold as just: that an omnipotent monster would wreak vengeance on children for a mother’s actions, and furthermore, that a handicapped child is a punishment for the parents. That’s simply twisted. A suffering child is loved no less by a sane parent, and our hearts are wrenched by the troubles of even our healthiest children. Think about what this dumb wretch has said to every child who is less than perfect in this world (which includes all of us, of course): we are his god’s instrument of torture for our parents. God is the psychopathic bastard who forces failings on us to make our mothers suffer a little more.

God must really hate Bob Marshall’s mother, then, to inflict such a demented fuckwit on her.

You can write to Bob and let him know what you think of his deity. And Virginians — I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, conservative or liberal, but could you please stop putting evil, narrow-minded little pissants like Bob Marshall in positions of power? Let him be an affliction to his own family, and leave the rest of us alone.

A few additions:

Angie the anti-theist is getting an abortion — good for her for being bold enough to put a human face to the issue.

And here’s a weird twist. For all their protestations about equality, somehow they think blacks are a different species?

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Showing children God’s love… with a rubber hose!

I know from experience how hard it is to raise kids — they tend to be willful and are always trying to think for themselves, and you know we can’t have that. But now there’s an answer, a book titled To Train Up a Child, which provides all kinds of useful tips on how to bring up children respectful of the word of God, using “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules”.

Doesn’t that line right there sell the technique to you?

It worked for Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, who applied “biblical discipline” to two of their children. Now one is very, very quiet and causes no trouble at all, while the other is positively angelic.

The Schatzes were arrested Saturday morning after their adopted daughter, Lydia, age 7, stopped breathing. She was subsequently pronounced dead.

Her 11-year-old sister, Zariah Schatz, remains in critical condition at a Sacramento children’s hospital, though she is showing some signs of recovery. The two were adopted at the same time with an infant girl, now 3, from the same African orphanage about three years ago.

Prosecutors allege the two victims were subjected to “hours” of corporal punishment by their parents on successive days last Thursday and Friday with a quarter-inch-wide length of rubber or plastic tubing, which police reportedly recovered from the parents’ bedroom.

Police allege that the younger girl was being disciplined for mis-pronouncing a word during a home-school reading lesson the day before she died.

The two young girls reportedly sustained deep bruising and multiple “whip-like” marks on their back, buttocks and legs, which authorities believe resulted in significant muscle tissue breakdown that impaired their kidneys and possibly other vital organs, said Ramsey.

She won’t be mispronouncing any more words, nosiree!

I wish I were a Christian. I think I’d discipline Kevin and Elizabeth with a rubber hose. But I’m not, so I’m going to have to settle for a humane and civilized response, like taking their children away for their own safety, and trying, and I would hope convicting, the two for torture and murder.

I also hope they don’t get a judge like Cherie Blair.

A few novel excuses for priestly child abuse

The Catholic Church is getting desperate. All this evidence is turning up of priests physically and sexually abusing young people in their care, and of the church administration being more concerned with protecting pedophile priests and the reputation of their organization than protecting children, so someone has to be blamed. How about the damn dirty hippies and those pesky reporters?

“The so-called sexual revolution, in which some especially progressive moral critics supported the legalisation of sexual contact between adults and children, is certainly not innocent,” he said, adding that the media was also at fault.

That was the excuse of a Catholic bishop to the ongoing discovery of a history of child abuse in Germany. The similar pattern of child abuse in Ireland prompted the Pope to dig up some excuses…in this case, because priests weren’t devout enough.

The pontiff also noted “the more general crisis of faith affecting the Church,” the statement said, adding Pope Benedict “also pointed to the more general crisis of faith affecting the Church and he linked that to the lack of respect for the human person and how the weakening of faith has been a significant contributing factor in the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors”.

Who knew the whole Catholic church was infested with free-lovin’ hippies and godless agnostics and atheists?

The way he’ll fix the problem is by calling for “a deeper theological reflection” on child buggery. I really don’t think it takes much deep thought to see that causing harm to children trusted to your care is a bad idea.

By the way, in an interesting side issue, the papal nuncio was asked to appear before an Irish committee on foreign affairs to talk about this problem. He haughtily replied that it was “not the practice of the Holy See that Apostolic Nuncios appear before Parliamentary Commissions”, which is rather interesting. The Vatican has a rather interesting status as a sovereign, independent state with membership in the UN, and pretends to be a participating nation in the world community of states. But apparently they also feel that they are not bound by secular obligations.

The Templeton Foundation plays some more games

It’s just sad. The arguments the apologists for religion make seem to be getting more and more pathetic, and more and more unconvincing. There is going to be a lecture, announced in the Times Higher Education supplement, by someone trying to reconcile science and religion in the history of the Royal Society. How is he going to do it? By arguing that members of the society in 1663 were religious. Woo hoo. They also wore funny powdered wigs, treated syphilis with mercury, and argued that there had to be precisely seven planets because it was a number sacred to geometers, but I doubt that he’ll be resurrecting those old ideas.

While an early memorandum of the Royal Society declared that fellows would avoid “meddling with divinity, metaphysics, morals”, its 1663 charter stated that its activities would be devoted “to the glory of God the creator, and the advantage of the human race”.

Officers were even required to swear an oath on “the holy Gospels of God”.

In reality, Professor Harrison said, “almost without exception, early modern natural philosophers cherished religious convictions, although these were not invariably orthodox. Some – but by no means all – made the point that they were motivated to pursue scientific inquiry on account of these religious commitments.”

Far from being militant atheists, they “believed that the disinterested study of the structures of living things could offer independent support for the truth of the Christian religion, and refute atheism”.

Yes, so? They were wrong.

Believers have been trying for centuries to find objective evidence for the truth of Christian mythology. The fact that they’ve been searching is not in itself evidence for their superstitions. The fact that they have not come up with such evidence, though, and haven’t even made any progress in coming up with a convincing argument, does suggest that they’ve failed. It’s simply meaningless to declare that people 350 years ago felt that their religion motivated their pursuit of science; it does not support the validity of the religious part. They might as well argue that the people who built Stonehenge 5000 years ago were motivated by their pagan beliefs to study astronomy — the astronomy is cool, but animism is not hallowed by its antiquity.

It’s an unpersuasive mess. It’s also tainted by association; the lecture is sponsored by the Faraday Institute, which is just a mouthpiece for the Templeton Foundation. Ho hum. Get some new arguments, guys.

Exorcism is a booming business

Hard to believe, but this medieval nonsense is still going on. Poland has more than 100 professional exorcists, and they recently met in a conference.

Congress participants argued that demonology lessons should be treated more seriously in seminaries and that ordinary people, too, would benefit from knowing more about exorcisms. During the congress, the priests discussed the main causes of possession by demons such as occult, esoteric beliefs like magic, eastern meditation and homeopathy.

Oooh, demonology lessons. Those should be good. Don’t forget to take them seriously when some geezer tells you that your wicked thoughts about Scarlett Johansson are the work of the minor demon Booglebegonzapootie.

I do appreciate that they’re updating the list of demons to include the ones drawn to homeopathy. I wonder if you get rid of them with a fully succussed 100C dilution of holy water?

Allah hates masturbation

You all know that if you masturbate, you will become feeble, blind, and incontinent, right? Well, at least according to folk wisdom shouted at you by grandmas and grandpas (who, I will assure you, masturbated: it’s a nearly universal practice.) As it turns out, a compendium of Islamic thought on masturbation agrees on all points, and adds a few other consequences of the practice I bet you never thought of.

Atta (Rahmatullahi alaihi) says: “Some people will be resurrected in such a condition that their hands will be pregnant, I think they are those who masturbate.” (Tafsir Mazhari, vol 12, pg 94)

I am trying to visualize that, and failing. Fortunately.

Have no fear, though, there is a remedy! Under Islam, you are not allowed to masturbate, but you are encouraged to have sex with your slave girls!

God is the god of death and destruction

I’m home again from Iowa, but there was a moment where I just about turned around. Coming up into Minnesota, there is a nice big billboard with the following message on it.

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I did a double-take and thought about going back around to get a photo of it, but decided it wasn’t worth it, as there really wasn’t any place to pull over safely. That was a rather vile message, but then, this is Christianity we’re talking about, and this was on I-35, which seems to be a focus for religious insanity.