I was on this panel at the con yesterday, and while we were all civil and polite, I think my fellow panelists, and a few members of the audience, were left feeling a bit peevish. It was the “What Does God Need With a Starship?” panel, and here’s the description.

From the Christ-like figure of Superman to the metaphysical adventures of the Enterprise, fantasy and science fiction have long explored religious and philosophical questions. What is it about SFF that touches our spirituality?

It was fun. I was the odd person out of the group, I think, because I disagree with everything.

The first question came from the moderator, and it played right into my hands, because it was the first thing I would have asked: what the heck is this “spirituality” thing? We got a couple of answers from the other panelists: one was that spirituality is a container for their “love of all people”, which is a wonderful thing to feel, but I had to point out that that’s humanism. God and the supernatural are redundant there. Another answer was that it was a feeling of “connectedness to all things” — well, great. Except that this universe is the domain of science, not religion.

I also pointed out that religion has a tendency to steal credit: there is a lot of good science fiction that explores philosophy and ethics, and that religious people like to turn around and claim that that is “religion”: nope. It’s philosophy and ethics. That you assume all discussion of morality is grounded in god-belief doesn’t make it so.

The other panelists had their revenge, though, and there was a long bit where they were cooing over those wonderful Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, an author I thoroughly detest, and because I’m obnoxious but not that obnoxious I had to chew on my tongue for a while. I did at least state that the open allusions to Christian mythology were not a feature, they were a bug, and they interfered with my ability to trust anything in the books. Crappy fictional plot holes are not rescued by coupling them to crappy religious plot holes.

One discussion that was unresolved but was interesting was the role of science fiction in demythologizing religion — how it could act as a gateway for people with a religious upbringing to explore new ideas and possibly adopt a less restrictive faith. I then learned that there is a whole genre of Christian science fiction which is supposed to go the other way: it draws in secular people and plants the seeds of faith. I’d never even heard of the latter category — I guess CS Lewis did some of that, but he’s the only one I know of — so I don’t think it was very successful, in my case.

I am not done being annoying, though. My next panel today is “Our Place in Space” at 2:00.

What are the dreams and practicalities of colonizing space? How might humanity reach beyond our planet? We’ll discuss the science of human spaceflight in reality and fiction.

My position is that we humans will not be colonizing space, ever. We might build robots that will, though.

A man had a heart attack on a flight, and one man heroically leapt into action and is being praised in all of the news stories now. That man was Tim Tebow, HERO.

What did he do that was so helpful? He prayed. He organized a group of people to pray for the sick man, heroically.

According to people who were there, flight attendants and passengers tried to help: they did chest compressions. They tried to help the man breathe. They started an IV line. These people are not named. The True HERO was Tim Tebow, who is a famous Christian, and who publicly prayed for the man.

The crew on the plane apparently responded with commendably swift action to help the unconscious man, and did merely material things, like chest compressions, starting an IV, helping breathe life into this man, but then Tim Tebow, HERO, strode up the aisle like a boss and prayed.

I observed a guy walking down the aisle. That guy was Tim Tebow. He met with the family as they cried on his shoulder! I watched Tim pray with the entire section of the plane for this man. He made a stand for God in a difficult situation.

Fuck yeah! Because God was in such a difficult spot here that he needed a cheerleader. And this is the big news, that a pious man stood and did nothing but mumble at an invisible man to come fix a problem. We should all be glad that someone was there to make a stand for a god.

Unfortunately, the sick man died.

The only appropriate thing to do now, of course, is to blame Tim Tebow, FAILURE. He obviously did not pray hard enough. After all, if he was notable enough to get all the attention and credit for doing nothing, he’s notable enough to get all the blame for doing nothing.

“Again?” you ask. “Isn’t he always awful?” Yes. It’s a permanent state for him.

He’s crowing over the defeat of a bill by the NY legislature that would have extended the statute of limitations on child rape crimes, and as we all know, and as Bill is certainly aware, “End Child Abuse” is code for “Destroy The Catholic Church”.

As The New York Daily News reports, Donohue sent out an email to supporters after the defeat of the Child Victims Act, an act that he said was designed “to rape the Catholic Church.” The bill would have extended the timeframe that victims can bring forward cases by five years and would have opened up a six-month period for victims to revive older cases.

“The bill was sold as justice for the victims of sexual abuse, when, in fact, it was a sham,” Donohue wrote in an email obtained by The New York Daily News. “[It was] a vindictive bill pushed by lawyers and activists out to rape the Catholic Church.”

Oh, no. Really? You just called the prosecution of child rape an act of rape? It’s kind of clear that Donohue has no understanding of what constitutes a violent sexual crime.

The FFRF also has a few things to say.

But the Church’s lobbying and Donohue’s obscene victory dance are admissions of guilt. They are conceding that this problem is far bigger than we know and that, though the new pope talks quite a lot about fixing the problem, the church has no intention of actually fixing it. After more than three years as pope, Francis has done nothing to bring genuine justice to the victims or the rapists to account. Nothing but talk.

Let’s not forget that Bill Donohue is just the easily visible painful boil on the face of a church that continues to protect child rapists.

It’s a homophobia problem. It’s a problem of conservative theology that uses gods as an excuse for heinous crimes.

This particular news program goes out of its way to get liberal ministers to oppose the hatemongers, but they’re just as bad: rationalizing your behavior as “this is what my god wants me to do” is just as fallacious when it’s supporting humanist views as when it’s supporting murderous views. How about suggesting that we not kill, because they are fellow human beings, or that we should be tolerant, because human beings have diverse views, and behavior that does not harm others ought to be accepted?

A reporter got into Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar’s compound last year for an interview with him and his “kittens”. It is weirdly creepy. Oktar has surrounded himself with a bevy of young women, all obviously treated with extensive plastic surgery and heavy cosmetics, and while claiming that he’s a feminist and that all of these women are truly liberated, they mostly just sit silently and only speak when he allows them to, and what they do say is stilted and scripted. It’s actually rather scary.

The creepiest bit is that every once in a while Oktar announces that they will have music, and a speaker plays some kind of pop pablum, and all the women smile and bounce and dance in their chairs. Then the music stops and the interview resumes.

Truly gag-a-riffic. Those poor women (and also the smiling PR men around them) are thoroughly enslaved by this cult.