The mystery of the disappearing laptop

That priest who flashed gay porn at his audience is being investigated, and something strange has happened: the laptop that he used has vanished completely and somewhat mysteriously. It’s also the only thing stolen from the priest’s home.

Makes you go “hmmm”, doesn’t it.

I’ve got two possible explanations: 1) them evil gays broke into his house to steal his legendary Gay Porn stash, or 2) Jesus teleported the computer to his party room in Heaven. I can’t imagine any other way this could happen.

Oh, OK, a priest could have intentionally destroyed evidence that he had a computer full of dowloaded porn, but that’s so ridiculous and ludicrous that it beggars belief. Priests have vows and a special connection to a beneficent god and know for sure that lying and masturbating to gay porn and using a condom or other such sinful apparatus would send them straight to hell, so they’d never ever do that. Ever.

Rick Warren’s Libertarian Jesus

Have you heard Rick Warren’s Easter message?

Well certainly the Bible says we are to care about the poor….But there’s a fundamental question on the meaning of "fairness." Does fairness mean everybody makes the same amount of money? Or does fairness mean everybody gets the opportunity to make the same amount of money? I do not believe in wealth redistribution, I believe in wealth creation.

The only way to get people out of poverty is J-O-B-S. Create jobs. To create wealth, not to subsidize wealth. When you subsidize people, you create the dependency. You — you rob them of dignity.

So it’s come to this. Modern Christians happily interpret away the egalitarian message of the New Testament — perhaps the one salvageable bit of compassion in the whole Bible — to now denounce charity as robbing the poor of dignity. Even a wicked atheist like myself can see how Warren has completely distorted his own holy book.

On the other hand, though, Warren does believe in giving more to the rich, as you discover in his letter to his congregation, in which he reaches out his hand and begs them to donate a million dollars.

He is right about one thing. Rick Warren has no dignity.

Is that border magical?

What strange transformation occurs within humanity as we trace the population northward, from the United States to Canada? A recent survey of Canadians (especially the Quebecois variety) revealed something:

Buried away in the survey was a single question that caught my eye immediately: Personally, do you consider yourself to be a religious person? A minuscule 22% answered yes. Presumeably, a whopping 78% of Quebecers do not consider themselves religious.

Across the whole of Canada, 36% answered yes, which is a little worse…but still, where has the United States of America gone wrong?

Who needs a $30,000 watch?

The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church was caught on camera wearing a $30,000 Breguet watch. I can think of little that’s more worthless than spending the entirety of a middle-class working person’s yearly salary on an ostentatious geegaw that has no function that isn’t served as well as a $10 throwaway or the ubiquitous cell phone…no function other than showing off that you’re more profligately wealthy than anyone else, that is. You know, if someone gave me something that trivial and that overpriced, I would thank them, quietly sell it, and then find a cause on Foundation Beyond Belief that could make better use of the money than being tied up in flashy bling.

But what do I know. I’m a godless atheist, he’s the moral leader of millions.

But he does have some shame. After the photo appeared, the church quickly whipped out a copy of photoshop and doctored the image to hide the jewelry. Can’t have the peons witnessing the church’s conspicuous consumption!

Remember, moral leader of millions.

Then the Patriarch denied everything.

Patriarch Kirill weighed in, insisting in an interview with a Russian journalist that he had never worn the watch, and that any photos showing him wearing it must have been doctored to put the watch on his wrist.

Remember, moral leader of millions.

Unfortunately for the Patriarch, the evidence was undeniable, and the church was later compelled to admit that yes, the old guy had been wearing the watch, and yes, they’d tried to airbrush it out of existence. They lied, he lied.

Remember, moral leader of millions.

But the patriarch has presented himself as the country’s ethical compass, and has recently embarked on a vocal campaign of public morality, advocating Christian education in public schools and opposing abortion and equal rights for gay people. He called the girl punk band protest at the cathedral “sacrilege.”

Remember, moral leader of millions.

The Patriarch has more important concerns than petty trivialities like his penchant for extravagant jewelry, the corruption of his church, or the ridiculous hypocrisy of a religion founded on claims of the importance of the immaterial spending profligately on toys of the obscenely wealthy.

The Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, a senior church cleric, played down the episode. In a telephone interview, he said that the controversy over the watch was distracting attention from more serious questions, like “the borders of artistic freedom and the meaning of the Gospels today.”

Do not question the moral leader of millions.

Still getting it all wrong

I can sort of sympathize: here’s a Christian pastor who’s trying to be relevant and a little bit progressive, and actually make real life issues, like sex, part of his church. And then, splat, look at this pratfall.

"On one side, (we’ll have) what men want or desire: your stripper pole, your video games, your sports," Scruggs said. "The woman’s side (is) orderly, neat. It’s all about love, candy, teddy bears, roses and being wined and dined and cherished."

This is what we call not really getting it. He’s dimly aware of a problem, but thinks the answer involves pushing stereotypes harder.

Oh, I hate it when that happens

You go off to give a talk on hedgehog gene expression in teratomas, or something similarly scientific. You put the memory stick in the auditorium display projector, the A/V guy pushes a button, and all of a sudden, the audience gets a brief glimpse of that unholy quantity of squid close-up photography you keep around for personal reasons. Now it’s never happened to me, personally — I’m competent with a computer, and much more careful — but here’s a story of a man who ‘accidentally’ showed the wrong powerpoint presentation.

In this case, the man was a Catholic priest (oooh, now you know exactly what happened next, right?)

And it wasn’t a zoology exercise on display. It was, as they delicately put it, “indecent images of men”.

I’m confused by one thing. On the one hand, they say the flustered priest quickly removed the memory stick and fled the room; on the other, the parents and children present report quite specifically that there were 16 pictures shown. I’m thinking it must have been a particularly vivid montage. Although the parents found it impressively memorable, the priest, Martin McVeigh, said he had no knowledge of it. Hmmm.

I am a little amused by what happened afterwards.

Twenty minutes later he returned, he continued with the meeting and wrapped up by saying that the children get lots of money for their Holy Communion and should consider giving some of it to the church.

That’s so typical of a Catholic priest: first they waggle a pile of penises at your kids, then they ask you to fill their coffers. Those priests better look like Chippendales dancers, or they shouldn’t get a penny.

I haven’t found any reports on how persuasive the audience found the presentation.

The Stedman paradox

Ah, Chris Stedman. He visited Morris today, and gave a presentation at the Federated Church before sending people off to community activities. He was a very nice guy, and he told some very nice stories, and he was just generally nice. Nice. Lots of niceness. A whole afternoon of nice. So I will restrict myself to entirely constructive criticisms.

  • Why in a church? This was an event organized by Morris Freethinkers, representing their interest in promoting positive community interactions. I would have been more impressed if it were held in a secular venue, if it were made clear that these were atheists doing good, and challenging community Christians to join us. Instead, by putting it immediately under the umbrella of religion, the impression was made that we are following, not leading.

  • I’ve been in churches before, and this talk was indistinguishable from anything that might be said in a liberal Christian church anywhere: be kind, charity is rewarding, it’s good to help your fellow human beings. Aside from saying that he was an atheist a few times, there was nothing to make this talk stand out…absolutely nothing to explain why atheists also find virtue in kindness and charity and goodness. It does not make a case for atheism if you blend into the religious woodwork so thoroughly.

  • It didn’t help that, when describing his background, Stedman talked about being a religious studies major, a seminarian, doing interfaith work, hammering on his associations with the faithful. Oh, and by the way, he’s an atheist. Yeah? This is a guy who’s been neck-deep in Christianity his entire life, hasn’t removed himself from it at all but has made a career of immersing himself ever deeper in Jesus’ pisswater, and occasionally waves a tiny little flag that says “atheist” on it. I’d like to see Stedman actually challenge his audiences and make a real case for rejecting faith, while supporting good works, but I don’t think he could do it.

  • I was entirely sympathetic to the planned community activities (assisting in the art gallery in town, visiting the elderly, doing a highway cleanup), but I couldn’t do them as part of a church group, as a matter of principle. Who was going to get credit for this work? The church, of course. I will not and can not do that; it’s providing support for beliefs I consider contemptible. What would have been better is something to inspire freethinkers to do these works without the framework of a church. We are free of that bogus crap, let’s not promote the illusion that charity is part of religion.

  • Please don’t ask me to participate in anything held in a church again. It felt icky. I really don’t like temples to ignorance, even liberal ignorance.

I know the students mean well. I know the students want to do good for entirely secular reasons. What we need, though, are tools and ideas and inspiration to do so that don’t fall back on the trappings of religion, which simply reinforce the entirely false notion that morality is a function of the church. That’s how we got into this cultural trap in the first place, by perpetually promoting the belief that goodness equals godliness, and Stedman’s approach provides no escape hatch.

Hey, Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio!

What the hell is wrong with you, stupid hospital?

I just got an email from the parent of one of your patients. He reports that there are four bibles in the hospital room, and further, as an organization with a mind so open that the contradictions and conflicts blow breezily by with no actual interference with the substance of your brains, patients can also request copies of the Qur’an, Jewish holy books, or any other religious text they can imagine; further, the wireless internet available in the room allows patients and visitors to visit the Vatican website, or browse Pat Robertson’s pit of misinformation, or watch Kent Hovind’s videos, or cruise on over to Answers in Genesis or the ICR. How nice.

However, you’ve also put nanny filters on the web, and block access to anything in the category “Alternative Spirituality/Belief”, which, apparently, you get to define. The above listed loathsome lairs of liars are OK, but guess who gets blocked? American Atheists, and the entirety of Freethoughtblogs.

I suspect you’ve got some pious goon in your IT department. You might want to slap them around a bit and tell them that they don’t get to impose their religious bigotry on every patient in the hospital. Who are you to tell the patients in your hospital what religious beliefs, or in this case absence thereof, they are allowed to practice?

If you don’t watch out, I’ll have to sic JT or some of the other nearby SSA staff on you. Then you’ll be sorry. They’ll gnaw on you just for fun.

Parasitism pays, as long as the parasite smiles

This is a little bit like confessing to kicking puppies, or thinking flowers stink, or hating rainbows. But I have to be me.

I don’t like the Dalai Lama.

Not one bit. I’ll go further: I find him repulsive and creepy. Sure, he smiles a lot, and he acts like a nice guy…but the same is true of all kinds of con men and used car salesmen and televangelists. They’ll smile and laugh while they pick your pocket and knife your grandmother; just playing the role of the apparent nice guy wins no points with me. What has he actually done?

The Dalai Lama is founder of the Mind & Life institute for research on science and Buddhism. A series of talks he gave at Stanford University led to the creation of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, which brings together scientists and religious scholars.

Not impressive at all. I looked them up: the Mind & Life Institute is full of babble about “the contemplative sciences”. They do things like fund retreats that “advance collaborative research among scientists based on dialogue and collaboration with contemplatives.” They hang out with guys going “ommmm”, in other words. It sounds extremely silly.

What really creeps me out, though, is that everywhere on that site they refer to this old guy as “His Holiness”. With capitalization. It’s very religious, and I don’t say that in a good way.

Then there’s the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research Education. I’m sorry, Stanford, you’ve been snookered; you’re promoting goofy dipsy-doodle New Age nonsense.

What makes it all particularly grating is that this mask of compassion and altruism and sweetness and light is draped over a smiling medieval theocrat, who believes he acquired his position by the magic of reincarnation, and who wants independence for Tibet (good so far), so that it can be re-saddled with patriarchal religious rule that condescends to women and treats homosexuality as an abomination. Ah, but he has great PR for yet another sex-hating celibate priest with delusions of grandeur.

And now he has won the Templeton Prize. They claim this wacky old priest promotes “serious scientific investigative reviews”. Bleh. No he doesn’t. He promotes himself and his bizarre religious views by pretending to be science-friendly.

Guess what? I don’t like the Templetons at all, either. It’s a perfect match of the odious with the devious.

How much worse could it be? The Discovery Institute thinks the Dalai Lama is just ducky, because his grasp of the fundamentals of evolution are about as pathetically bad as theirs. They quote a whole bunch of creationist gibberish from the Tibetan Twit approvingly.

Guess what? I also don’t like the Discovery Institute.

Cuttlefish and Ophelia have more.

I have a new favorite insult!

I shouldn’t be this petty, given the ghastliness of these recently disclosed documents from the National Organization for Marriage. NOM is openly linking up with the Catholic Church, which is providing millions of dollars for campaigns to poison people into hating gays. They’re talking about fomenting hatred: they want to “interrupt the process of assimilation” of Hispanics into the wider culture by making gay marriage a sticking point; they say “The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks – two key Democratic constituencies.”

This is despicable. They’re targeting minorities to train them to find a new reason to hate, an artificial reason that widens the gulf without addressing the real problems of discrimination.

That isn’t funny. Their methods aren’t funny, either: they have lots of money, and they’re throwing it into hate-mongering ads, just like the Mormon church did with Proposition 8. But one of their proposed tactics did tickle my warped sense of humor:

"Hollywood with its cultural biases is far bigger than we can hope to be. We recognize this. But we also recognize the opportunity – the disproportionate potential impact of proactively seeking to gather and connect a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites across national boundaries."

Yeah, they’re going to recruit famous dumbasses who can fall for their lies and toxic message…because don’t you know how effective Victoria Jackson has been as a spokesperson for tea-party insanity? But I do love how they openly admit that they have to recruit stupid people…ahem, I mean “non-cognitive” people… to their cause.

Let’s help NOM out and make a list of non-cognitive elites they can recruit. I’ll start.

Victoria Jackson
Pat Boone
Chuck Norris
…

Yes! Glamor and inanity go so well together!