It’s kind of like announcing “Free Beatings!” or “Free Abuse!”, but there it is. The terrifying film Jesus Camp has been made freely available by SnagFilms and you can just go to the link and watch the whole thing, if you haven’t already. More nightmares, on the way.
Jennifer Fulwiler is a treasure. She’s a former atheist who doesn’t have a clue about atheism, a naive Catholic convert, and someone who pities us atheists because “we’re trapped in a prison of reason“. She never makes sense, so she never disappoints.
And now she’s done it again. Fulwiler is babbling about the Global Atheist Conference. She’s not making sense again.
She lists a number of ‘first impressions’.
Hemant Mehta ought to worry. She likes him a lot, and is mystified that he’s not going to be at the GAC.
Where’s Hemant Mehta? He must have been busy that weekend. The blogger/author is a major up-and-coming voice in the modern atheist movement. Given the perspective he’s gained from the discussion on his blog, I would think that he would add a lot of value to a conference like this.
Yes, I agree. But you know, there are a lot atheists out there, and we can’t all go to every conference. It’s just weird to pick out one random atheist among many and wonder why they aren’t at one particular conference among many. So? Would you like me to list a few dozen other prominent atheist speakers who weren’t invited or couldn’t make it?
Just look at these headshots! With that number of speakers you’d expect at least a couple unflattering, obviously-take-with-an-iPhone shots, but they’re all gorgeous. Lookin’ good, atheists.
That’s just weird. It’s like she’s baffled that we look human.
Since I’m sure he doesn’t want to say it himself, I’ll say it for him: PZ Myers should have gotten top billing in the ads, and it’s crazy that he wasn’t mentioned at all in the audio spots. When he saw that, he had to be all like, “Do millions of blog pageviews per month count for nothing?!”
Not for nothing, but why would anyone in their right mind think that’s the most important characteristic to promote? The audience either reads my blog and knows who I am and don’t need to advertise me, or they don’t read it and I’m effectively a nobody to them. I have a realistic perspective here; my number one job is as a teacher at UMM, and that’s generally not a huge selling point, sad to say. And Dawkins/Dennett/Harris are a much bigger draw, and to an Australian audience, the local atheist celebrities are going to be much more interesting.
And then Fulwiler gets “clever”, I think…at least clever for someone gullible enough to fall for Catholic bullshit, which isn’t very. Look at this clumsy setup:
I like the part about basing laws on rational thought and evidence. It echoes a sentiment that is a driving force in the atheist community right now, namely the idea that society must develop a set of moral values that is not rooted in any kind of supernatural belief system. I think it could end up being a really good thing that the leaders of modern atheism are coming together to discuss this, because this is an idea that needs a lot more exploration.
She doesn’t believe a word of this. I think it’s quite right that not only do we need to develop a fully secular morality, but that it’s the only kind of morality there is, because her supernatural tyrant doesn’t exist. Catholic morality is not built on the supernatural, but on lies and fear, tools of priests for all time, and a secular morality is built on truth, as near as we can get to it.
How do I know Fulwiler doesn’t believe this? Because she next brings out a great big strawman on strings and dances it around on the stage of the convention.
I imagine that one day someone will get on the stage at one of these conferences, and propose a new moral code in which the the strong exterminate the weak and take all their possessions for themselves, thus ushering in a glorious age where only the most superior genes remain in the gene pool. Everyone in the crowd will gasp and fidget uncomfortably…and then realize that they cannot argue against it without stepping outside of their own atheist-materialist worldview. They’ll find themselves tempted to appeal to the transcendent to make their case, wanting to have blind faith in the fact that love should be prized above all else, believing that self-sacrifice is always better than selfishness, regardless of what the latest scientific studies say.
Riiiight. You all know what would happen if a speaker started promoting a totalitarian tyranny and demanding that we start persecuting the “weak” — they would be ripped apart rhetorically. These are the kinds of arguments that are advanced for a theocratic monarchy, you know, and we’re entirely familiar with them. At the GAC, Sam Harris would rise up and argue for an egalitarian morality without bringing in anything transcendent. Richard Dawkins would dismantle that ridiculous argument for social Darwinism with ease, and it wouldn’t be by claiming that self-sacrifice always trumps altruism.
Morality is an attribute that is only relevant in interactions between individuals. A group of interacting individuals is a community. Morality is defined within that community; the desires of a hypothetical invisible entity have no relevance to the rules that regulate that community…except when parasitic individuals use the carrot and stick of supernatural rewards and punishments to mislead the members of that group.
Fulwiler has written a bizarre fantasy that is exceeded in crudity by Chick tracts like Big Daddy. Sure, imagine some absurd caricature of an atheist getting trounced by some clever religious person — but it simply doesn’t have any relationship to reality.
Speaking of fantasy, here’s how she imagines an atheist convention ending…with all the atheists flocking to the church afterwards.
I hope that these events really will provide a forum for questioning assumptions and asking tough questions as much as they claim they will. Because when they do, the nearby churches will be flooded with post-convention crowds.
I don’t think so. Dream on, deluded lady.
Oh, if you all want a real treat, read the comments on that article. I think Fulwiler might just be the intellectual among the Catholic community that reads her drivel.
Whoa! Catholic women are much prettier than atheist women. I feel bad for all the atheist men. =(
I feel unclean now.
This is great: Richard Carrier Blogs totally destroys Bart Ehrman’s argument for the reality of a historical Jesus.
Jesus is a legend, like King Arthur or Robin Hood or Paul Bunyan. There may have been some individual in the past who inspired the stories, but he’s not part of the historical record, and the tall tales built around him almost certainly bear little resemblance to the long-lost reality. It’s simply bad history to invent rationalizations for an undocumented mystery figure from the distant past.
I think we’re getting to Ken Ham. There’s that twitchy eye, the jittery shifting of his feet, the rising blood pressure, the purplish skin tone…and the fact that he’s writing threats like this:
In recent times, various atheists have been blasting AiG (and myself) on the internet and in books for reaching children with the message of the truth of God’s Word beginning in Genesis through speaking programs and books and DVD’s etc. In fact, as I have documented, they accuse us of ‘child abuse’ because we teach children they are created and that God’s Word is true. You see, they want to reach children with their message–that there is no God–that life is meaningless and purposeless–that the universe and all life is the result of totally naturalistic processes. They want to brainwash children with their anti-God religion of millions of years and evolution.
I’m reminded of a verse of Scripture: “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea.”
(Mark 9:42)
Man, that Bible of his has a solution for everything: pray a lot, slaughter a few goats or children, curse people, stone sluts to death, and throw atheists into the ocean with a rock tied around their neck.
It’s a wonder he doesn’t understand why we think his brand of dogma is toxic to children — because he staggers about, poisoned to the gills, acting as such an excellent bad example.
Hooray! You promise? Can I help?
The ever-demented Michael Voris, Real Catholic™ has a new video out in which he identifies unambiguously the first domino that will cause the collapse of Catholic morality: masturbation.
He does look like a world-class expert in wanking, and he must enjoy the subject since he promises to talk about it for hours, but I think that rather than just babbling about it, action is more important. I want you all to make some time this week to “destroy Catholicism”, my new favorite euphemism for jacking/jilling off.
You know, suddenly Bill Donohue’s mad rantings sound extremely filthy.
Horrifying news from the Netherlands: the depravity of the Catholic church reaches a new low. In the 1950s, the church had a cunning tactic for dealing with pedophilia scandals. Rather than just paying off the victims and shipping the offending priest to a new hunting ground, they had a rather Jesuitical solution: the boys who were raped were clearly homosexual — after all, they had sexually gratified a person of the same sex, which is all a homosexual is, right?
And then what do you do with homosexuals? Why, you institutionalize them. Lock them up somewhere where they can’t complain about some man of god raping them.
And then, to make it all absolutely perfect and biblically excessive in its justice, what do you do with institutionalized homosexuals?
At least 10 boys who were abused by Catholic priests were transferred to a Catholic psychiatric hospital in the Netherlands, and then physically castrated.
Two clergymen were convicted of abuse but Mr Heithuis, a victim, was nonetheless transferred by police to a Catholic psychiatric hospital before being admitted to the St. Joseph Hospital in Veghel later that year.
There, court papers confirm, he was castrated “at his own request”, despite no submission of his written consent. Sources told Mr Dohmen that the surgical removal of testicles was regarded as a treatment for homosexuality and also as a punishment for those who accused clergy of sexual abuse.
Furthermore, this was done with the complicity of the government.
Evidence emerged on Monday that government inspectors were aware that minors were being castrated while in Catholic-run psychiatric institutions.
Minutes of meetings held in the 1950s show that inspectors were present when castrations were discussed. The documents also reveal that the Catholic staff did not think parents needed to be involved.
If you can read Dutch, there’s much more. As you might guess, this is a major scandal.
It’s also a truth. Catholicism is a horror, a nightmare, a medieval monstrosity that has ruined far too many people’s lives. It’s about time people woke up to it. You can tell me that there are good people who become priests, and I’d agree with you…but when do good people stop colluding with an evil institution, tear off the clerical collar, and refuse to further a cause so tainted with corruption and wrongness?
If the church is the conscience of the nation, as Dennis Terry claim, then what does it say when that church is full of dishonest ranting bigots like this?
When your jaw drops at what Terry is saying, don’t forget to spare a little incredulity for the crowd that is standing and cheering at his words.
(via Right Wing Watch.)
Waaaaaah — some poor Christian is whining, Atheists, please don’t hate us! Unfortunately for his desperately pathetic persecution complex, I don’t hate Christians at all: I just hold their beliefs in deep contempt. And then what what does little KevinKing do? He confirms exactly why I despise them! Look at his argument:
Most Christians, including myself, live according to a set of rules. This set of rules is called “The Ten Commandments”. These commandments include:
“1. Honour your father and mother;
2. You shall not murder;
3. You shall not commit adultery;
4. You shall not steal;
5. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour;
6. You shall not covert your neighbour’s house, wife and assets”Now atheists, ask yourselves, is this a bad thing? I’m really struggling to find a reason why we wouldn’t want more of these people around… And yes, I know that some of you will say “but Christians break these rules all the time!”
Actually, no, that wasn’t the comment I was thinking of at all.
Here’s a good reason to despise Christianity: because it inspires people to think that their religion invented these basic rules for social cooperation, and that they have some unique appreciation of their importance. Seriously, if you think the best reason people ought to like you is your cheery affirmation, “I don’t kill people!” — best said with a little smiley emoticon — then there is something goddamned wrong with you. Outside of death row in a federal penitentiary, there aren’t many communities of people who think mutual plunder, murder, and rapine are ordinary, and that it marks you as special to reassure me that you won’t try to fuck my wife.
But apparently, in Christian communities, it’s noteworthy and wins you a merit badge.
But you know what makes dumb Christians particularly annoying? It’s not just that they think they’re special because they have rules that say they shouldn’t steal my television set; it’s that they’re so patronizingly condescending about it, and go one further and tell us that they know we lack that morality. Really. KevinKing goes on to sanctimoniously smear all atheists for their moral deficiencies…in an article in which he supposedly trying to persuade us to like him.
Yes Christians break the rules (sin) but I can assure you that they are trying a damn lot harder not to break the rules than the average Atheist because for Christians, there is the Almighty, and there is Hell. Atheists have no Almight to hold them accountable and there is not eternal damnation. There is no reason for atheists not to murder, rape and steal other than because the government says so, which is very scary since we are living in a crime ridden country where literally only 10% of violent criminals are caught and convicted. What is then stopping an Atheist from committing these acts?
Oh, you’re trying a damn lot harder than me not to break the rules? OK, that says a lot about you, not me. I’ve never been tempted to murder anyone, or break into their house and steal their stuff. It’s not because I fantasize about it and then think, “Oh, no, I might get in trouble with the government.” It’s because I like my neighbors, like the people in my community, and wish them well — and because I value peaceful, cooperative co-existence. It’s because I have empathy, and can appreciate that other people value their lives as much as I value my own, and could not deprive them of that life without feeling the pain and loss myself.
I don’t need a threat of hell in an afterlife to keep me in line, because I recognize the worth of life in this one.
That’s why Christian stupidity is despised, too: that they think everyone else is plotting to commit crimes, and that there aren’t enough people in jail — in a country with the highest rates of incarceration in the world.
I would ask KevinKing who he thinks is in prison: is it the domain of godless atheists? Or is it full of Christians and Muslims? If we’re living in a crime-ridden country, and as I’m sure he believes, it is a “Christian nation”, how does he reconcile his fantasies of Christians living lives of obedience out of fear to the actual facts on the ground of god-belief flourishing in prisons?
I would also ask KevinKing why he committed the sin of omission. Notice that he listed six of the ten commandments, and that he left out the first four. Why? Is he ashamed of them?
1. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.
2. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My Commandments.
3. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.
4. “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
He should be. Those are stupid. For some reason, his god gave them priority: he thinks the most important rules people should follow, before the rules against murder, theft, adultery, and lying, are that they should serve his vanity, worshiping him exclusively, and dedicate one day in seven to obeisance to this petty cosmic tyrant.
So yes, I also despise Christianity for its fucked-up priorities, in addition to its sanctimony and ignorance and primitive, fear-based morality. Thanks, KevinKing, for representing those faults so effectively.
I know that Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican astronomer, is a nice guy, and that he supports good science…but he’s also a wackaloon who makes twisted rationalizations for god-belief. In a recent interview, that tendency is on full display.
Despite people often having the “crazy idea” that science and religion conflict, science is “really one of our best principles for getting to know God,” he told CNA.
So now god is a material, natural entity? The kind of thing that science can study? Someday, we’ll get one of these guys to actually define concretely what they mean by “god”. Not this time, though! Consalmagno is just full of squinky evasive fluff in this interview.
During his talk, titled “The Word Became Flesh,” the planetary scientist explained that modern atheists tend to understand God as being merely a force that “fills the gaps” in our understanding of the universe.
No, we don’t. I understand god as the nebulous nonsense that believers try to impose on our understanding of what we do know. Every time we call them on some babble they make about how the world works, though, they willingly and enthusiastically flee into the gaps.
I call the gaps in knowledge “gaps”. I don’t call them “gods”.
“To use God to fill the gaps in our knowledge is theologically treacherous,” Br. Consolmagno said, because it minimizes God to just another force inside the universe rather than recognizing him as the source of creation.
Oooh, “theologically treacherous”. That’s a good thing, right? I’d love to sneak up behind Theology in the dark and stab it in the kidneys.
Those who believe in God should not be afraid of science, but should see it as a an opportunity that God gave humanity to get to know him better.
No god “gave” us science. It is hard work and human effort that enables science — and what we see is a universe with no need for any deity, anthropomorphic or otherwise, and especially no need for the bizarrely quaint and exceedingly silly dogma of Jesus.
Br. Consolmagno said that he believes in God, “not because he is at the end of some logical chain of calculations” but because he “experienced what physics and logic can show me but cannot explain: beauty and reason and love.”
Oh, crap. Isn’t Consolmagno supposed to be one of the smart ones? So why is he trotting out this same stupid bullshit that Joe Doofus splutters every time he encounters an atheist? I experience beauty and love all the time; they are part of my perceptions and experience, are responses of my mind and brain, and are not invoked by some mysterious supernatural force. Dogs know love, and I suspect they recognize beauty (which is very different from our sense of beauty) — are these senses instilled by a god of dogs? I don’t think so.
The primary difference between him and atheistic scientist Stephen Hawking is that he recognizes that God is not another part of the universe that explains the inexplicable, but rather “Logos” and “Reason itself.”
The bullshit is rising. I’m drowning! Help!
If God is reason, then it does not need me to worship it, and certainly has no anthropic perspective, let alone desires or goals. It just is, like gravity or the weak force, and all the rituals and prayers and magical dogmas are irrelevant and a distraction from the reality — it means that god is the principle that atheists, not Catholics, live by, and we can just repurpose the churches as bowling alleys and dinner theaters, recycle all the bibles and print physics and chemistry and biology texts on them, and dismantle the church hierarchies and put the people to work productively. Consolmagno, for instance, could be a full-time astronomer rather than a part-time apologist for stupidity.
He spoke of the faith needed to embrace Christianity and said that although other world religions and philosophies can give us a rational view of the universe, “only the Gospel could tell us that Reason itself became flesh and dwelt among us” in the form of Jesus Christ.
Wait…what happened to that talk of god being “reason”? Now he’s suddenly meat. And sectarian meat at that.
The Incarnation is remarkable because it happened, Br. Consolmagno said, and also due to the way it occurred. In coming into the world as an infant, God “exercised a kind of supernatural restraint” which still respected the laws of nature.
This is the kind of absurd and fundamentally dishonest inconsistency I find so objectionable in religion. One minute their god is “reason” or the “ground state of all being” or some similar vague cosmic principle, and the next they’re telling us that gravity/reason/language turned itself into bare-skinned baby ape (Why? Because it wanted to!), walked around, appointed a pope, told us that women are unclean, hated a few gay people, slaughtered some fig trees and Mycobacterium leprae, violated a few laws of physics (or played some cheap magic tricks), and told us to follow a set of arbitrary parochial rules and obey a child-raping priesthood, and then vanished off to some paradise in the sky.
I know reason, Mr Consolmagno, and I think your vision of reason constitutes an extreme act of disrespect to the principle, and shows that you don’t have the slightest clue about what you’re discussing.
I like a good horror story, but sometimes I get so terrified I want to crawl under the covers and not emerge for a good long while. The books that terrify me, though, aren’t the one ones by Stephen King or Clive Barker — supernatural horror just makes me laugh — it’s the real-world scary stuff that makes me tremble. For a long time, my standard for nightmare fuel has been Jeff Sharlet’s The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. That’s a book that makes you aware of a kind of malevolent insanity gripping a significant chunk of the leadership of our country, a malignancy that goes unquestioned and even with approval. There really are monsters at the top.
But move over, Sharlet, here’s a new book that’s even scarier: The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, by Katherine Stewart. The monsters aren’t off in Washington DC, they’re right next door, and they’re coming for your children.
Stewart first notices these odd little happy Christian clubs popping up in her child’s schools, and then she digs deeper: she talks to their representatives. She attends their conventions. She takes their training courses. She sees precisely what they’re doing, and gets the words straight from their mouths: they’re out to convert every child in the world to their hateful, narrow, “Bible-believing” dogma, even while in public they claim to be ecumenical and kind and loving.
Who is “they”, you ask. It’s the Child Evangelism Fellowship, and just the name ought to chill you: this is an organized, well-funded group of people dedicated to proselytizing specifically to 4 to 14 year old children, the prime age for conversion.
They also have other goals, among them the total obliteration of public education. It’s ironic: they often take advantage of our institutions, leasing our public school buildings for church services and Sunday schools (They’re cheap! Professional, well-maintained buildings available at minimal cost), trading on the credibility of the schools (They try mightily to produce the illusion that their efforts are sanctioned by and part of the official school curriculum), yet privately they detest the whole principle of universal education, and their goal is to subvert the whole endeavor and turn education into Christian indoctrination.
They found something called “Good News Clubs” at schools, led by community volunteers, which superficially promote a kind of generic moral religiosity which often wins over culturally diverse communities — you know the ones I’m talking about, the kind where they might detest gay-hatin’, science-despisin’, Pat Robertson-style fundamentalism, but nod in happy agreement at the importance of faith, and blandly accept that religion in general is good and virtuous and that we should encourage our children to adopt a faith tradition…for their moral upbringing in an environment of conscience, don’t you know. What they don’t realize is that the Good News Clubs stealthily promote that gay-hatin’, science-despisin’, Pat Robertson-style fundamentalism directly to their children, while asking them not to talk about it to Mommy and Daddy. They will cheerfully take in the children of Catholics and Jews, so that they can tell those children that Catholics and Jews will burn in Hell.
These people are just plain evil. Sure, they’re kindly old grandmas and sincerely pious ordinary joes, but they’ve also got it in their heads that they must inject their poisonous beliefs into everyone’s children. And they are dedicated: they will make time and invest money in their cause. Fear them. They lie and fight dirty and will use your own liberal and progressive values to undermine those same values in gullible children.
These Good News Clubs are springing up all over the place, so the first thing I did when I finished the book was to look to see if there were any Good News Clubs in the Morris area schools. I found plenty in other schools — often in cheerfully bland announcements in PTA newsletters or school websites — but nothing about Morris. I breathed a sigh of relief, and thought that was one nightmare I’d dodged…and then…and then…
Capture a city for Christ! That’s the battle cry of over a hundred workers from across America who join together to “jump start” a Gospel outreach to children in a target city.
This coming summer, CEF workers will gather in the Twin Cities of Minnesota where volunteers from local churches will be trained to reach children in their area for Jesus. These same churches will continue ministry in the fall by sponsoring Good News Clubs in the public elementary schools nearby.
It’s like the monster jumping out of the grave at the very end of the horror movie! They’re coming to get us!
Listen, Minnesotans, this is your only chance. Read The Good News Club now, before it’s too late. These people will be making proposals to your schools to install a fifth column of radical evangelical Christians into privileged positions, all in order to snare the local children into a hell-and-damnation, sulfur-and-brimstone, Satan-is-out-to-get-you, boogety boo version of hateful Christianity. Your local mega-church pastors and conservative wackjobs will be encouraging this because it’s what they believe anyway; your gentle-souled namby-pamby neighbors who see nothing wrong with faith will go along because they are ignorant and unaware.
Sound the warning. They’re here already! You’re next!
Or perhaps, more accurately, the Child Catchers are coming to town.
