Rural billboards are the worst

I had to make a couple of road trips across the state this past weekend, and while I’m used to those awful Pro-Life Across America and Jesus billboards everywhere, I noticed that some of the Christians were stepping up their game. The fervent fanatics have popped up new billboards all along my route to Minneapolis, and a lot of them are from gospelbillboards.org. They’re insipid and stupid, like this one that’s anti-evolution.

Right. Drawing a big red X on an evolution illustration is convincing evidence. There’s also this common claim:

Babies and DNA! They must have been created. Except…every baby I’ve seen, I’ve got a pretty good idea of how they were made, and it didn’t require spontaneous generation or a magic zap.

This one is my favorite.

I am so tired of religious conservatives calling atheists immoral

Here’s Stephen Moore, a rather prominent conservative chosen by Trump to serve on the Federal Reserve board, a fellow who has strong opinions on the importance of traditional marriage, husband as the breadwinner, wife as the mother and homemaker.

Moore has lamented the steady decline in US marriage numbers, asserting in an October 2014 article that “intact families” were important for the economy and criticising “those who cheer divorce as a form of women’s liberation”.

Concluding the article, he called for a “personal and national commitment to sturdy families” and strong parenting as part of a “culture of virtue” aimed at saving the American economy from what he called a path of decline.

Moore’s 2018 book Trumponomics, co-authored with the veteran economist Arthur Laffer, said many Americans felt “a sense of not being loved (tied to divorce and family breakup)” and argued this was one reason people should be required to work to receive money from government assistance programs.

He has frequently derided the views of the American left on cultural issues, claiming in a 2015 article published by the Christian Broadcasting Network that to liberals “if you support traditional marriage, you are a fascist”.

You would think a guy like that would be a dedicated husband and father, wouldn’t you? Setting an example and all that.

Nope.

The 2010 divorce filing from Moore’s wife said he had destroyed their marriage through adultery, after creating two accounts on the dating website Match.com and beginning an affair with a woman early in 2010.

Moore is said to have discussed the affair “openly and tastelessly” with his then wife, and to have said at one point: “I have two women, and what’s really bad is when they fight over you.” He also left evidence of the relationship around the home, the filing said.

Allison Moore said in the filing she had been a “good and dutiful wife” and quit her job to raise the couple’s three children, only to suffer infidelity and poor treatment from her husband.

There’s more. He has remarkable history of bad ideas.

“The women tennis pros don’t really want equal pay for equal work. They want equal pay for inferior work,” Moore wrote. He went on to claim that the real “injustice” was that female pros were paid, while men playing college tennis who could “beat them handily” were not.

“I’m a radical on this; I’d get rid of a lot of these child labor laws. I want people starting to work at 11, 12,” he said during the debate.

“The biggest problem I see in the economy over the last 25 years is what has happened to male earnings — for black males and white males, as well. They’ve been declining, and that is, I think, a big problem,” he said in a CNBC interview.

“I want everybody’s wages to rise, of course, but you know, people are talking about women’s earnings — they’ve risen,” Moore continued. “The problem, actually, has been the steady decline in male earnings, and I think we should pay attention to that, because I think that has very negative consequences for the economy and for society.”

“Colleges are places for rabble-rousing. For men to lose their boyhood innocence. To do stupid things. To stay out way too late drinking. To chase skirts. (At the University of Illinois, we used to say that the best thing about Sunday nights was sleeping alone.),” Moore wrote. “It’s all a time-tested rite of passage into adulthood. And the women seemed to survive just fine. If they were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights they showed up in droves in tight skirts to the keg parties?”

“The NCAA has been touting this as example of how progressive they are. I see it as an obscenity,” Moore wrote. “Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women? What’s next? Women invited to bachelor parties? Women in combat? (Oh yeah, they’ve done that already.)”

Moore’s solution? “No more women refs, no more women announcers, no more women beer venders, no women anything.” He did offer one caveat: “Women are permitted to participate, if and only if, they look like (sportscaster) Bonnie Bernstein. The fact that Bonnie knows nothing about basketball is entirely irrelevant.”

I think it’s kind of obvious that he has a deep contempt for women, and that his ideal of traditional roles for women is simply chattel slavery.

Why is Ross Douthat still privileged with a column in the NY Times?

Didn’t I just say one of our priorities has to be burying the Republican party? Case in point of how contemptible conservatives have become, Ross Douthat, who has a counter-proposal to Elizabeth Warren’s idea of free college and debt forgiveness:

I guess the only favored people in Douthat’s America are the Quiverfull and their priests. May your loins be bountiful and your church be wealthy.

Wow! Free Advertising for Jesus!

Fox & Friends (blechh, ick) ran a special feature on the Ark Encounter (puke) last week. Ken Ham is thrilled. Wouldn’t you be, if your cheesy sideshow got a free national promotion on the channel that directly targets your target demographic of yokels and dumbasses?

Answers in Genesis writer and speaker Bodie Hodge was recently interview by Todd Piro from FOX & Friends (on the FOX News channel) down at the Ark Encounter. The resulting 3-minute video on the life-size Ark attraction was phenomenal. Bodie not only explained this world-class attraction but clearly gave its biblical and evangelistic message. How often do you get to hear the gospel on national television?

All the time, Ken, all the time. I’m an American. Evangelical christianity is constant low-level stench that permeates the whole country.

You can watch the whole thing, and the commentary from the low-wattage bulbs sitting on the couch. You learn that Todd Piro is really easily impressed.

This really is life-size of the ark, he says. I don’t know what that means. The Bible gives some rough dimensions, that’s it, so they filled a rectangle of that size with wood and concrete and steel, does that mean it was real? No, it does not. Also, later, when Todd is asked what most impresses him about the ark, he answers that it was the Big Door. It was really big, you know. Therefore, the Bible is true.

Bogus Hodge is asked why the Ark is so successful (is it?) when religion is in decline all across the country, and he gives a dishonest answer: because it’s non-sectarian and appeals to people of all faiths, with even non-believers coming in droves. That is not true. The Ark Encounter is extremely sectarian, building on an extremely narrow subset of Protestant, evangelical Christianity that likes to pretend that it is universal. It isn’t. I can’t speak for people of other faiths, but I know the non-believers are showing up for the spectacle of stupidity, and to laugh at it.

And honestly, how can he claim it’s designed to appeal to all faiths when he flat out declares that the purpose of the “Ark” is to show the message of Jesus Christ is true? That nonsense is only topped by Todd Piro’s assertion that kids visiting the “Ark” will get a sense of history.

Fox is the propaganda channel, and now they’re promoting the state religion. This isn’t good because, unfortunately, Fox is effective at poisoning brains.

One problem is that once someone gets pulled into the Fox News vortex it naturally leads to other scummier enterprises. You might start out signing up for a Fox email list or one from the president then quickly find your email being sold far and wide to increasingly less reputable charlatans. “The thing that makes me maddest about this is that it’s about money,” one correspondent said. His dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year ago. “I guess Mike Huckabee has been selling his email to fucking everybody, including one list I noticed when I was getting his email set up called Beyond Chemo. They are selling him his own anger and a bunch of mushroom pills for all the money he doesn’t have anymore,” he said. “He’s gonna die destitute because of this shit and people belong in prison for seeing this as a business opportunity.”

Religion is already a potent brainwashing agent, seeing it team up with an effective disseminator of lies makes for a chilling combination. I’m beginning to think all the zombie movies and TV shows are reflecting a genuine concern that is in the air.

Invade Africa — all of Africa — to punish “woke Twitter” for the Notre Dame fire

Andy Ngo, always a reliable source of hypocrisy, started a Twitter thread to document all the wicked Leftists who expressed joy at the burning of Notre Dame. It’s bizarre, because many of those Leftists are making legitimate points. France led a colonial empire, but we don’t see as much grief for the murdered and exploited peoples. Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque was burning at the same time, and got only a tiny fraction of the attention. Notre Dame is the responsibility of the French state, and there has been bickering for years about the cost of maintenance with the Catholic Church, yet the church still uses it for religious services. Catholicism is an odious cult, yet it gets treated with unwarranted respect (again, Notre Dame’s historical value is preserved by the French Republic, yet this is treated as a loss for Catholicism). Americans demolish Indian lands to build ugly monuments or dig mines, but there’s rarely an outcry about disrespecting their history (well, Indians cry out; we rarely pay any attention).

It’s complicated. I think it’s important to preserve European historical sites, but I feel the same about Native American sacred sites and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and Jagannath Temple and Borobudur and a thousand other places, even when I have little cultural connection to them and may even detest the religion that drove their construction. Human history is full of majestic accomplishments, but they’ve all got warts on them. We’ve got to appreciate the good behind them, but never forget the warts. A tragedy like the Notre Dame fire occurs, and people rush to both deify and demonize the building — let’s try to have some perspective, OK?

I sympathize with the people who feel some schadenfreude at the destruction of one artifact that represents crimes against humanity at the same time that it represents a great human achievement. I don’t mind them reminding us all of the badness that lurks within that monument — I’d do the same. As long as you’re tolerant, no matter how angry you are, and not plotting active destruction yourself, I can respect that.

The interesting thing about Ngo’s thread, though, is that, as you might expect, it’s drawn out the right-wing hypocrites. They’re all deploring how hateful the Left is for expressing a personal dislike of Catholicism, or French imperialism, or thinking it’s only fair that France feel the kind of loss other nations have felt. But they’ve got their own rabid bigotry that they overlook.

There’s the usual call to destroy Islamic holy sites.

You know, Al-Masjid Al-Haram is even older than Notre Dame. If you’re calling for its destruction, you aren’t motivated by an appreciation of history or art, but by simple ideological vengeance. Then you don’t get to complain when people have an ideological contempt for Notre Dame.

Or how about this delusional threat?

He, personally, is going to invade Africa. All of Africa. This vast continent, with a deep history and thousands of complex cultures, is responsible for burning European cathedrals, and he is going to march over there and spank everyone. His reason? To spite people on Twitter he doesn’t like.

Mr Ngo wanted to expose wicked Leftists, but ended up holding a mirror to his own clique.

Doing the Lord’s work

There’s this nifty instagram site, PreachersNSneakers, with a simple premise done well. He looks at photographs of evangelical preachers and then looks up the price of their shoes. Like this:

That’s Pastor John Gray in a really ugly pair of absurdly expensive $5000 tennis shoes. It’s an extreme example, but browsing through the page it’s clear that successful Christians think nothing of dropping $500, $600, $1000 on a pair of shoes that look weird and ostentatious, and also look out of place with the rest of their clothes. There’s just something strange going on here.

Also, I don’t understand the economics of the shoes themselves. These are cheap items built overseas by virtual slave labor, and then given an immense markup in the US. What virtue is being signaled by the existence of these ludicrous status symbols, and what are these preachers saying about themselves?

The further adventures of Phillip Blair, ranting evangelist!

Wow. He gets around. Phillip Blair is the bozo who was preaching on a Sydney subway, but there’s more! Here’s a video of Mr Blair railing at passers-by on the street — everyone is avoiding him. He has a limited repertoire, simply assuring everybody that he loves them at the top of his lungs, telling them about his past as a businessman and marine, yelling at them that they can be saved by Jesus Christ…but this is not a religion, oh no, it’s a personal relationship with god. The low point comes when he chastises a man in a wheelchair, telling him that Jesus could help him, but he’s too bitter to ask.

The funny thing is that it is Blair who is posting these embarrassing videos to his own YouTube channel, where we also learn that he hates evolution.

Does anyone think these obnoxious tactics work?

Australia’s got the attytood

When I lived in Philadelphia, one of the miseries of taking the subway was the abusive street preachers who’d board and start haranguing everyone. There was one woman I remember vividly who’d wear a sandwich board covered with an incoherent salad of bible verses and condemnation and fire up with a well-practiced gospel singers vocal chords and tell us all about how we were going to burn in a lake of fire. Philly residents are generally blunt and outspoken, but no sir, we all just shut up, shoved our faces in the Daily News sports page, and hoped no one would say a word, because they would start gabbling and howling even louder if you did. I hated it. I’m kind of an outspoken atheist myself, but I knew that protesting would be futile, and would just alienate the other riders because no one wanted to hear any of this crap at 7am, before the start of a long day, or at 5pm, when we all just wanted to get home.

They have a different response in Australia. An evangelical loudmouth (and an American asshole, too–how embarrassing) boarded a Sydney subway train and started witnessing to the other passengers. He seems a bit nonplussed because no one is respecting his piety.

“Yeah, shut up,” another passenger chimes in. Phillip struggles along for a bit longer, as the pissed off legends who frequent Sydney Trains turn around, block their ears, and ignore everything he’s saying.

“Mate, if you ask for our time, we have the right to say no, we’re not giving it to you,” one passenger points out.

Why are you so triggered, my friend? Phillip asks.

Whoa. That’s a tell-tale phrase only a right-winger would use.

“Why won’t you just shut up?” the passenger responds. “Speak quietly to someone who wants to listen.”

At this point, the train reaches a station, and almost everyone seizes the opportunity to get as far as possible away from this guy. He keeps trying to yell things, but it’s a bit hard to hear him as people shoulder through him to get to the Opal gates.

I’m here because I care about you — one more stop and I’m leaving! he pleads, trying to get a single person to hear him.

“Oh, thank god,” someone responds.

I care about you, he tries again.

“Apparently not about our opinions, because we’d like you to shut up.”

“No one wants to hear it, bro,” another passenger adds.

I’ve been in prisons in El Salvador, I’ve been in the slums of India, I’ve –

“Nobody cares, okay?” the first angry passenger explodes. “I don’t care if you love me. I don’t know you!” Half the carriage is laughing at this stage, and cheering every time someone gets the preacher to shut up.

“You’re the selfish one because you won’t shut up! Can you not see that? You’re forcing your opinion on everyone in this train. We are asking you to shut the fuck up. And do you? No! How selfish is that?”

At this stage, the guy finally, finally shuts up. Salvation is close. Heaven, in the form of a quiet peak hour train carriage, looms. And then another passenger begins to speak. Well, let me give my testimony, he says. I used to be a Buddhist, for 27 years of my life, but I became a Christian, um,

“Oh no,” someone sighs. The guy closest to the ex-Buddhist shakes his head and puts his headphones on. “Nobody asked,” someone else groans. “Shut up, you sound like such a dickhead.”

I learned a few things from that story.

  • It’s worth it to make evangelicals squirm when they inflict their hokey religion on the public.

  • They’ll still keep trying to talk, so you won’t get immediate relief, but maybe they’ll eventually learn appropriate behavior.

  • Australians are like Philadelphians, only more so.

Interesting data…for what it doesn’t say

The Nones have just passed the Catholics in numbers, at least according to one survey. And the Evangelical Protestants may have passed their peak. That’s all good news.

It looks like a lot of the gains among the nominally godless have come from the Mainline Protestants, though — so, basically, the people with a pragmatic, already fairly unsuperstitious perspective have shifted labels, abandoning a specific church affiliation. In that sense it’s not a major transition.

Note also the absence of the label “atheist”. It’s kind of padding the ranks to just lump together all the diverse beliefs ranging from outright denial of all gods and supernatural powers to blissful confidence in a divine creator who is not accurately represented by established religion into one catch-all category, “no religion”. The message isn’t so much that more and more people are adopting rationality as it is that more and more people are finding the spectacle of religious fanatics unsavory. That orange line is an impressive granfalloon.

But I’ll take it. It’s a good step forward. Now if only we could put an end to organized atheism’s embrace of the unsavory, too.

First you struggle, then you get coopted by religion, and then you die

I just learned that the Art Institute of Seattle has closed. This is bad news — I knew people who went there and others who aspired to go there. It seemed like a good place, and the closure is doing deep harm to people.

The Art Institute of Seattle will close abruptly on Friday, leaving about 650 students in the lurch — without classes, professors, or possibly diplomas.

The Washington Student Achievement Council (WSAC), a state regulation agency, announced the end of the school’s 73-year tenure on Wednesday, just over two weeks before the winter quarter was supposed to end.

These are students who’d sunk tens of thousands of dollars into their education, who are probably still carrying daunting amounts of debt, and who’ve now been told they pissed away years of their youth and all of their investment and will get nothing for their trouble. How could this happen? How can the government stand aside and let this happen? This was an accredited institution which, one would think, was an assurance of quality.

One clue is in a few key words in this summary:

The Art Institutes, a group of art colleges nationwide, has struggled with financial troubles for years; the company that owned them went bankrupt in 2017 and Dream Center Foundation, a faith-based nonprofit, bought the schools. Court filings show that since the purchase, the schools have grappled with financial issues.

Oh, here’s another clue: A College Chain Crumbles, and Millions in Student Loan Cash Disappears. Somebody skimmed off a lot of cash in this deal, not just from the Art Institute, but a whole mess of struggling colleges that were snapped up by a religious entity.

The affected schools — Argosy University, South University and the Art Institutes — have about 26,000 students in programs spanning associate degrees in dental hygiene and doctoral programs in law and psychology. Fourteen campuses, mostly Art Institute locations, have a new owner after a hastily arranged transfer involving private equity executives. More than 40 others are under the control of a court-appointed receiver who has accused school officials of trying to keep the doors open by taking millions of dollars earmarked for students.

26,000 students? This is unconscionable. The first problem is that these colleges were bought out by Pentacostal evangelical Christians with no experience in running an educational institution.

Dream Center is connected to Angelus Temple, which was founded by Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist once portrayed by Faye Dunaway in a TV movie, “The Disappearance of Aimee.” It is affiliated with the Foursquare Church, an evangelical denomination with outposts in 146 countries.

Buying a chain of schools “aligns perfectly with our mission, which views education as a primary means of life transformation,” Randall Barton, the foundation’s managing director, said when Dream Center announced its plan.

But Dream Center had never run colleges. It hired a team including Brent Richardson, who worked on the conversion of Grand Canyon University to a nonprofit as its chairman, to lead the schools’ corporate parent, Dream Center Education Holdings. He stepped down in January.

Alarms were ringing from the moment the takeover was proposed. Dream Center’s effort to buy the failing ITT Technical Institutes schools had fallen apart after resistance from the Obama administration. When it asked to buy Education Management’s schools, consumer groups, members of Congress and some regional accreditors raised concerns.

The second problem is more secular: the gang of idiots currently running the country, who are engaged in a thrilling give-away of our assets to line their own pockets.

Led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Education Department has reversed an Obama-era crackdown on troubled vocational and career schools and allowed new and less experienced entrants into the field.

“The industry was on its heels, but they’ve been given new life by the department under DeVos,” said Eileen Connor, the director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

Ms. DeVos, who invested in companies with ties to for-profit colleges before taking office, has made it an agency priority to unfetter for-profit schools by eliminating restrictions on them. She also allowed several for-profit schools to evade even those loosened rules by converting to nonprofits.

That’s what Dream Center wanted to do when it asked to buy the remains of Education Management Corporation.

Schools are just plunder to these people. One has to wonder, though, how the church’s “mission” would have been implemented in these secular schools, if they hadn’t run them straight into the ground.