God must really hate black people

A family of Minnesotans were involved in a horrific plane crash in the Congo.

Barry and Marybeth Mosier were on their way to visit their son Keith, 24, in Kinsangani, Congo, with two younger children when their plane crashed on takeoff Tuesday in Goma. At least 36 people died as the plane plowed through a market and burned. Most of the people who died were on the ground, according to the U.N. mission in DR Congo.

…Mosier said, he and his wife were carrying their son Andrew, 3, in the shoving “mass of humanity” trying to escape the burning plane. They got out through the opening in the fuselage.

…“Outside the plane, she was wandering around. … It was total chaos,” he said. “People were screaming and yelling because the plane had landed on this market. All of a sudden, out of the blue, all of these people who were just standing there are now dead.

“So there’s parts of bodies and people burning and people screaming and yelling, and she was out there by herself.”

It sounds like a nightmarish event, and I’m glad they survived. I wish a few more people hadn’t died horrible, painful deaths in such a catastrophe, but this was a family of despicable missionaries, so you know what’s coming next.

“We couldn’t believe that our family of four could all escape a plane that was crashed and on fire, but by God’s mercy, we did,” he said.

Mosier said he believes the family made it for a reason.

“I think the Lord has a plan for us, otherwise we wouldn’t have survived,” he said. “He still has work for us to do.”

Their god has no mercy to spare for the innocent people in the market, of course, and their lives must have been totally useless for their god to be able to dispense with them in such a brutal fashion. Or perhaps they were wicked and deserved a flaming extinction with lots of fear and screaming?

In a just theistic world, I think their god would despise such smug, self-satisfied Christians.

God hates Porsches

A doddering old fool who shouldn’t have been driving in the first place cruised into a car dealership in his cheap little Ford Fiesta, and managed to demolish two Porsches outside the showroom. Total damage: £60,000.

So what does the senile twit say afterwards? You guessed it:

It was a miracle I got out alive and I put it down to the power of prayer and God looking after me.

Why was he praying to wreak havoc on expensive German cars?

Not just the Mormons, of course

Here’s the story of a young Yemeni lady filing for divorce from her abusive husband.

“My father beat me and told me that I must marry this man, and if I did not, I would be raped and no law and no sheikh in this country would help me. I refused but I couldn’t stop the marriage,” Nojoud Nasser told the Yemen Times. “I asked and begged my mother, father, and aunt to help me to get divorced. They answered, ‘We can do nothing. If you want you can go to court by yourself.’ So this is what I have done,” she said.

She’s eight years old.

Why are little girls always the target?

Here, let me ruin your morning, just in case you hadn’t already heard the story of this raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

A raid was finally triggered April 3, after a family violence shelter received a hushed phone call from a terrified 16-year-old girl saying her 50-year-old husband had beaten and raped her.

State troopers put into action the plan they had on the shelf to enter the compound, and 416 children, most of them girls, were swept into state custody on suspicions that they were being sexually and physically abused.

Doran said it was not until after the raid began that he learned that the sect was, in fact, marrying off underage girls at the compound and had a bed in its soaring limestone temple where the girls were required to immediately consummate their marriages. Also, investigators said a number of teenage girls there are pregnant.

I think “fundamentalist” has become a synonym for “misogynistic pedophile”.

Islamic schools, Christian schools … same difference

I’ve been getting a lot of email about this putatively Islamic public school in Minnesota, Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy. It’s a wretched situation — this is a school associated with the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, and clearly all the students and families involved are Muslims who want a little bit of cultural isolation, and I suspect there is a lot of religious indoctrination going on behind closed doors — and I think it’s a bad thing that this school is receiving state tax dollars.

I’ve been reluctant to jump on this story, though, for a couple of reasons. The main person fanning the hysteria is a columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Katherine Kersten, who is a far right-wing kook with a history of hypocrisy, and this is just another example. I am actually quite happy to see her and her fellow Christianists tearing their hair out in anxiety over the existence of a culturally Islamic school in our midst — maybe (but I doubt this a bit) they are actually getting a vague idea of what it feels like to be non-Christian in America, and watch as the schools are blithely used as organs of theological propaganda while the administrators claim they are not.

For instance, Kersten is outraged at this report:

Afterward, Getz said, “teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap, who had been at the school all day,” was preparing to lead prayer. Beside him, another man “was prostrating himself in prayer on a carpet as the students entered.”

We are about to go through the various graduation ceremonies out here in Morris. There will probably be a student speaker who will be trotted out to tell everyone how much he or she loves Jesus. We will witness a man dressed all in black with a funny collar who will be given a place of honor in the event, and who will close his eyes, bow his head, clasp his hands, and lead everyone in attendance in prayer to the Christian deity. What’s the difference? One chooses white, the other black? I don’t think Kersten will be going on a rampage to get baccalaureate ceremonies shut down all across the state.

Our local high school had Youth for Christ assemblies on campus, during school hours. This is just as insane and distasteful to non-Christians (as well as many Christians who didn’t care much for an airhead braying about abstinence-only education and how wicked gay people are) as having an imam preach during school hours, but of course it was welcomed by our fundie community. Where was Katherine Kersten then?

Andy Birkey points out more Kersten hypocrisy: she has nothing but praise for a “classical curriculum” that contains Christian nonsense and was implemented in a school run on the grounds of a Catholic church in Minneapolis. You could argue, of course, that you can teach religion from a secular perspective and just exposing kids to their historical roots is not in itself a forbidden act by a public school, but the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy may be doing exactly the same thing … just from a minority Islamic perspective rather than a majority Catholic one. Their website is carefully non-sectarian and secular, at any rate, not that I wouldn’t put it past the liars for Jesus or Mohammed to scrub the crazy talk from their public face.

So, yeah, I don’t like any of it, but I find it hard to get irate at a school of 300 students which may be subverting the secular mission of the public school system, when we’ve got over 800,000 students in this same system who take Christianity for granted. Let’s get it all out. The main virtue of this little episode is that we’ll be able to use it to our advantage next time some school administrator tries to infuse Christian values into our schools — we’ll be able to point out that if it’s not OK to peddle Islam in school, then Christianity should be getting equal treatment.

The other good outcome here is that the ACLU is on the case, and has sent a letter demanding explanations and accountability. I like the ACLU; I’ll abide by their findings. What will the wingnuts say, I wonder?

Which religion?

That Willikers fella has a fine post on the differences between science and religion. Even if he obstinately refuses the label of “atheist” I have to go along with him on this:

So, science is universal, while religion is rather local. One relies on an epistemology everyone in the world has access to; the other relies on an epistemology that barely works for that religion. To say of all religions that “each is valid” is to assert an absurdity. If each religion is separately valid, and all religions contradict each other, we are way past postmodernist silliness and out the other side into pure fiction and flights of imagination. It basically causes the very idea of knowledge to be degraded to the point that it no longer has the slightest meaning.

I think he ought to be invited to speak at that Australian creationist conference. If he and I were to show up there, I’m sure they’d hate him far more than me.

Christian Educators!

Did you know that it is assumed that if you are a Christian and a teacher, that you oppose the teaching of evolution and want to introduce creationism into the classroom?

Did you know that people purporting to represent you will be going before state legislatures and telling your representatives that creationism is the Christian perspective?

Did you know that people are collecting stories about getting slapped down for teaching nonsense in science class, and are telling politicians that it’s because they are Christian?

You know, I think Christianity is awfully foolish anyway, but I’m a goddamned atheist. You don’t care what I think. But I would think the concerted and largely successful effort in our culture to equate Christianity with the idiocy of belief in a 6000 year old world or a god who meddles in trivialities or denying the facts of a natural world would piss you off. Unless it’s true, that is, that you don’t mind having your religious beliefs associated with flaming anti-scientific lunacy.

Maybe you should try squawking a little louder. You could start by writing to David Bracklin and letting him know that stupidity isn’t supposed to be a Christian sacrament.

Unless it is, of course. I wouldn’t know. Atheist, remember? All I know is what I see, the stuff the loudest of you bray out in public, and boy, you Christians sure seem to hate good science.

Facebook is a Mecca for sin

What an awful story: a young woman is murdered by her own father for online chatting.

A woman was beaten up and shot dead by her father for talking online with a man she met on the website Facebook.
The case was reported on a Saudi Arabian news site as an example of the “strife” the social networking site is causing in the Islamic nation.

I don’t think it’s a web page causing the strife: I think it’s a hateful cockamamie belief system. Don’t blame our openness for your derangement, or our tolerance for your daughter-slaughtering monsters.

A leading Saudi preacher told Al-Arabiya.net that Facebook was a “door to lust” for women and called for it to be blocked to prevent social “strife”.

Everyone is rushing to sign up for a facebook account right now, aren’t you? Go ahead, I’ll be your friend. Just don’t look at my photo section if you’re afraid of that “door to lust”.

I generally favor the idea of teaching comparative religion…

…but there is a good argument against it: many religions are sickening.

Wow, that set you guys on fire. Just to clarify: I think Wilders is a flaming nutcase; I deplore his racist angle and his desire to exclude and oppress rather than educate.

However, here is the problem: when people ask me if we should keep religion away from kids, I say no: I think comparative religion classes are an excellent idea. Think about this, though. Would such a class show beheadings? How about voluntary crucifixions in the Phillipines? Jim Jones? Suicide bombings? I think we know the answer. Even here, where there is little sympathy for religion, people are horrified at the idea of showing the worst of religion — “oh, that’s not real Islam,” they say, but I have to reply that yes, that’s the reality of faith. Of course not everyone favors violence and it’s only a minority that commit the real atrocities, but the oppression is there.

Anyway, my point was that if we did teach comparative religion, it would be weak tea that favored faith by censoring out the worst of it, or it would be a class tainted with such appalling horror that all of us liberals would be yanking our children out of it.

(But no, Wilders’ film would not be appropriate as educational material either — it’s too dishonest. Some of the elements in it, including some of the most shocking bits, are genuine, though.)

None so blind as those who will not see

This is a tragic story of the malign effects of religious ignorance.

An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday.

Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday.

“She got sicker and sicker until she was dead,” he said.

Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness.

The girl’s parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to “apparently they didn’t have enough faith,” the police chief said.

They believed the key to healing “was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray,” he said.
The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said.

But wait! That isn’t the punchline. Read this and weep.

The girl has three siblings, ranging in age from 13 to 16, the police chief said.

“They are still in the home,” he said. “There is no reason to remove them. There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see.”

Their sister is dead of stupidity and neglect; she died painfully with their dumb-as-rocks parents hovering over her, chanting to their sky fairy. And this brain dead cop sees no sign of abuse? What is it, does calling it religion make it invisible?